Oh What a Paradise It Seems Read Online Free PDF Page A

attributes. The place had passed from one branch of the family to another and had changed its name and its specialties again and again. It had been Emilio’s and Giovanni’s; it had had topless dancers and black singers and at one time it had even advertised Chinese cooking. When Maria came into the place that night a stranger in a dirty tuxedo asked her what she wanted and when she said that she wanted to see Luigi he said Luigi was unavailable. She pushed past him and opened a door beyond the bar, where she found Luigi watching a news show on television.
    “Oh Lou, Lou,” she said, and she was crying. “I know I’m not Italian and none of you think I can cook and most of the family treat me like a stranger but now you’ve got to try and help. Like about twenty minutes ago he took the dog out in the backyard and shot him where everybody could see. It’s just that we don’t have any money. We don’t need very much. We don’t need much at all. He doesn’t have nobody but the family. He won’t even join the volunteer fire department. I’m too old to work in fast-food places and I can’t sew fast enough for that sweatshop in Lansville. You’ve got to help us.”
    “Sam’s not sick?”
    “No, he’s not sick, he’s not even sick in the head, he’s just worried sick that’s all.”
    “You live near the pond she’s a called Beasley’s?” Luigi asked.
    “Yes. We live on Hitching Post Lane. It’s about half a mile away.”
    “You tell him he comes here tomorrow afternoon.”
    The chain of energy in the Salazzo organization was exactingly familial and traditional. Their home in southern Italy had been along the sea before the Mediterranean had been bankrupted but they had none of the attributes of a maritime people with the exception of pirates. Nor were they like a mountain people. Perhaps all one could say was that they were a people who had been very poor. The exalted members of the family asked the governor to their weddings and two of them had had dinner in the White House. Sam knew this rank of the Salazzos mostly from what he read in the papers. He was one of a large numberof barbers, gas pumpers and masons who made up the Salazzo proletariat. All of this was true until the night he shot the dog. The next night a large black car stopped by the house and a young man—not a member of the family—invited Sam to be vice-chairman of the governor’s committee for the impartial uses of Beasley’s Pond. He would be paid a salary three times what he made on a good day in the barbershop. He was to avoid any sort of show—he was not, for example, to buy a new car—but the organization would help him to profitably invest his savings. His only duties were to collect cash payment for the dumping of fill in Beasley’s Pond.
    Three days later Sam put a FOR RENT sign in the barbershop window and at seven one morning went out to Beasley’s Pond where a five-axle, eighteen-wheel dump truck was waiting. The rate was eighty dollars a load and on his first day Sam took in close to six thousand dollars. He kept a ledger to record the dumping and had been given a leather bag for the cash. He knew enough to be scrupulously honest, and while the reputation of southern Italians as murderers was highly exaggerated, he had no disposition to steal. Each night at seven with some punctuality, two men in a large black car stopped at his house to collect the cash.
    The collectors were not particularly sinister. The older of them was one of those small, old Italians who always wear their hats tipped forward over their brows as if they were, even in the rain, enduring the glare of an equinoctial sun. These same old men walk with their knees quite high in the air as if they were forever climbing those hills on the summits of which so much of Italy stands. The youngerman had a mustache and smiled a great deal. They both refused wine and coffee—they refused to sit down—and on Fridays they paid Sam his salary. It was a great