Long Island Noir Read Online Free PDF

of line?” I asked. “Or wants to just run an honest business?”
    He snorted. My family was full of snorters. My mother was the champion, but Dad was a top contender. “Honest business? Good luck. Look at Wall Street. And anyway, you weren’t complaining about ethics when I paid your college tuition; when you were able to gallivant around the country without a penny of debt thanks to me.”
    “What about the government? What about the law?”
    “Listen, if the government cared, they’d just municipalize garbage collection and put us all out of business. We’re more efficient than they are, even with the occasional present we have to buy, or a labor action here and there. You think garbage men could afford to live out here if Suffolk County paid them? Pfft.”
    “That doesn’t mean what you’re doing isn’t illegal. The law, the American way—”
    He laughed. He had a great laugh, my father. “You sound like Kerouac now. He was a real Republican near the end, all that beatnik business aside. He hated hippies, hated liberals. Let me tell you, what does the government do? It organizes property rights just like I do. And yes, it threatens violence when it has to. The difference is that the government doesn’t care about the people—they’re a violence monopoly, they don’t have to. We have to watch out for ourselves; we can’t just go crazy and invade the next town over for no reason, not like the Bushes invading Iraq whenever they want to feel tough.” George W. Bush was rattling the saber just then for what would be the 2003 invasion, just like his own father had back when I was in college.
    “It’s not the same, it’s just not the same.” I was tired, itching for a fight. “The government …” What? I thought to myself. The government doesn’t bully people? Doesn’t tax the hell out of them? Doesn’t dump toxic waste out in Aztakea Woods and pollute water tables and give nice suburban mothers breast cancer? The rest of my sentence hung in the air like steam from my mouth. Dad knew where we could take the conversation if I wanted, and so did I. It was nowhere good. I went outside to smoke a cigarette and stare up at the Long Island sky. The stars were pinpricks in the woolen blanket of the night here, but not in the metropolises of America, where you never dare look up. I wrote that down, and put it in an (unpublished) poem.
    I don’t know exactly what happened; it surely wasn’t our arguments. But the following summer my dad went to the DA and turned rat. He wasn’t offered a deal or pressured. He just showed up with a zip drive full of evidence and an eagerness to explain where “all the bodies are buried”—as it read on the front page of Newsday— right after he buried my mother. It was the breast cancer that killed her, like so many ladies from Long Island. No cancer cluster on LI, my prostate! Listen to that. Here I am, turning into Uncle Peter, who was coming tonight to kill my father, his own brother. Uncle Peter was always a kidder, always ready with a joke or a smart remark. But he took his oath seriously, more seriously than marriage or blood. Not like my dad, not like me.
    I was waiting outside, on the porch. I didn’t smoke anymore, but I smoked that night to keep my lungs warm. The sky was brighter than when I was a kid, thanks to the big-box stores and strip malls dotting the highway. My father didn’t rate any police protection—though it took a few months, the government got all they wanted out of him, and the local uniforms could be bought off with grocery money. He was inside, drinking his best wine, the stuff he used to kid he was saving for my wedding, and waiting to join his Maria. Uncle Peter’s giant boat of a Caddy, still all polished and gleaming, drove up the curve of the driveway. My mother always loved this house.
    “Hey kid,” he said conversationally. “When’d you get in? Haven’t seen you since your poor mother, bless her in heaven, passed.” Uncle