Page 10 of Iron Heart

Maybe I’m imagining that. Hell, I probably am — after all, I don’t even know the guy. It’s probably just wishful thinking. Which makes no sense, because he’s nothing to me. And more than likely, I’ll never see him again.

A cloud passes above us, momentarily covering the sun. The brief chill makes me hug my arms to my chest.

When Jake is finished taking photos, I say goodbye to Mildred and Eddie after answering their many questions about when the paper will run their story. Jake and I drove here separately, and I tell him I’ll meet him back at the office later.

As I pull away, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that I never managed to get a quote from the dark stranger for the feature. Not because I needed it for the story.

But because I never got the quote, I never learned his name.

In spite of myself, I glance back one last time at the house he disappeared into.

My dud of a heart does a little hop-skip in response — its extra beat mirroring the flutter of desire in the pit of my stomach.

I know, I tell it silently.I know.

5

Dante

Dom is still crashed out in my spare bedroom when I get back to the house. I bang around for a while, trying to wake my brother up. But he’s out like a light.

The fucker has always been this way. I know there are people who claim they can sleep through anything, but in Dom’s case it’s actually true. Once when we were kids, there was a water leak in the pipes to the upstairs bathroom. This was after we moved to Ironwood, so it was just Ma and us boys. Ma didn’t know anything about plumbing, and she didn’t notice anything was wrong until the leak got so bad underneath the flooring that the old clawfoot bathtub went crashing through to the bedroom below in the middle of the night. Dom was in bed, not ten feet from where the bathtub landed downstairs.

He slept through the whole fuckin’ thing.

I can’t help but laugh at myself for my shitty attempts at trying to wake him. I should know there’s no way — short of shooting him in the leg or something — that he’s gonna open his eyes before he’s good and ready. He’s the most stubborn motherfucker I know.

Even unconscious, Dom has always had a special talent for pissing me off. The youngest of the five of us boys, he was always hanging around me since I was the closest to him in age. Antony, five years older than me, and the twins Marco and Matteo, a year behind Antony, always had other, more grown-up shit going on. So I was stuck with an unwanted tag-along — a year younger than me, and at least twice as irritating.

Dominic knew I hated it when he attached himself to me like a barnacle. But he also knew I couldn’t do much about it, because our ma had decided I was his designated babysitter whenever our parents weren’t on the scene. “Look after your brother, Dante!” was the constant refrain she would yell from the kitchen, whenever I tried to escape the house on my own.

So yeah. Look after him I did. As the only Italian family in Ironwood — hell, probably one of the only Italian families in southern Ohio — it was true that us brothers had to stick together. And Ma was bound and determined to make sure we did.

After all, she was the one who moved us here in the first place, from Cleveland. It happened six months after our father was killed. I was five, and Dom had just turned four. Ma never told us what happened exactly. Who killed our dad, or why. But in a way, she didn’t have to. As we got older, the reason we left Cleveland became clear. Ma didn’t want us growing up around what took our father from us. She didn’t want it to engulf her young boys as well.

The Cleveland crime family. The mob. Or what was left of it, anyway.

When my brothers and I were born, organized crime in Cleveland, Ohio was already past its heyday. At its peak, Cleveland was third only after New York and Chicago in terms of mafia presence and influence. The crime syndicates founded by the Lonardo and Porrello families grew up into major organizations in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. The syndicates that split into factions organized around different mob bosses up to and through the seventies, were already in decline in the eighties — before being torn to pieces by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. By the time my brothers and I came into the world, there were only a few made men left out on the street.

But the mafia started to slowly rebuild in the nineties and into the 2000s. It’s less visible now, sure. But it’s still there. For boys and young men who are long on ambition and short on morals, there are still opportunities to be had in organized crime — and a dream that someday, the Cleveland crime family will rise again. A phoenix of violence and crime, emerging from the ashes.

Which is why Ma got us out. She never told us any of this, of course. But as we grew older, we eventually pieced it together, from snatches of stories we heard about our Great Uncle Nunzio — and from the occasional trips we took back up to Cleveland in the summers to visit family, where talk of the glory days was the subject of late-night, alcohol-fueled conversations among the old-timers.

Ma brought us five boys to the wilds of southern Ohio as a young widow and mother to get us away from what she saw as the near-inevitable destiny that would await us if we stayed put. She did her best to put all us boys on the straight and narrow.

And in exchange, as we got older, we did our best to keep her in the dark about our more unsavory activities.

Ma’s not around anymore to see the shit we get into. Since she died, there’s no one left to hide it from.

She never knew that Antony isn’t really in real estate.

She never knew that Marco and Matteo’s construction company ain’t all about construction.

She never knew I’m in an outlaw MC.

And even though Dominic disappointed her again and again, she never found out he wasn’t a traveling salesman like he told her. Or that the kind of trouble he has a knack for getting himself into means he never sticks around one place for long.

It’s always been hard to keep track of my youngest brother. Half the time, he’s got a new phone number or something, so you can’t get hold of him even if you want to. When Ma got sick years ago, Dom was AWOL. We couldn’t find him for months, and none of the past contacts any of us had for him could tell us a damn thing about where he might be.

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