Page 105 of Shadow Ticket
“Your lucky day, Dips, if we ever double-dated I don’t recall none of that and seein I’m the only witness you get a full pardon, OK? I’m not giving you the jitters, here am I?”
“Me? Cool like thegiadrul. How about you?”
“Keep lookin like you’re just about to say somethin, then you change the subject.”
“There might be one small news item, somebody should of passed it on to you, but if I do it then you’ll blame me, so maybe I better not.”
“M’waukee, everything there’s all right?” Along the payline of Hicks’s uneasiness, reel by reel, full-color fruit images have begun to click into place.
Dippy C. shrugs, Hicks shrugs him right back. “I’m supposed to guess?”
“Everybody else would’ve by now.”
“C’mon, Chazz, for a pal?”
“That’s right, muscle it outa me, hired torpedoes, it’s all y’z ever know how to do, ain’t it. Swell,” less a snort than an articulate release of Toscano smoke. “You asked for it,” reaching under the cracked ice for a gold-headed sea bream and speaking into it like a microphone, talk about a fish in the face, “Bulletin just being handed to me, dateline Kenosha, hot off the society page, is that sometime later this summer local songstress April Randazzo and ‘Ndrangheta kingpin Don Peppino Infernacci are expecting a blessed event, and we don’t mean no audience with the Pope, all right?” After watching Hicks just sit there idiotized awhile, DC, nervously, “Your thoughts on this, Mr. McTaggart, if any.”
Hicks lights up a local Croatian cigarette, inhales and exhales a couple times. “Sure snaps a silencer onto the conversation, don’t it.”
“Didn’t expect you’d be so calm about it—me, hey, I’d be eaten alive by jealousy.”
“Thanks, Chazz, I knew you’d understand.”
“Yeah, I’d be on the next liner back to the U.S.A., stow away if I had to, so what if it’s that whole outfit down there in Li’l Cosenza, even if you could beat the morning line on that, both o’ yiz somehow making it out of Wisconsin alive, on the run forever…Even with no baby in the picture—”
“All right, all right. See if I’ve got this straight now…”
“Kidding aside, it’s no place you want to go tap-dancin into, even by accident, I can name you a dozen reckless youths who have met with grievous fates for so much as even once maybe twitching an eyeball at somegoomaraof Don Peppino’s as she went gliding by.”
“Gotcha. Reading my mind, Chazzy, and excuse me for wondering, but what’s it to you?”
“Just want to be sure you’re not mistaking this for the usual evening at the opera, some elderly basso trying to keep the leash on a soprano that’s in the mood to get out and scramble, see, instead of which you got April here, married to and pregnant by the exact type who normally she’d’ve only been out kidding around with…”
“Tryin to tell me—”
“Got enough to worry about already without some comedian from her past shows up with romance on the brain…”
“Me?”
“You, and you’re only thepicciotu, don’t expect much sympathy, old flames are a dime a dozen, West Madison of the labor market of love, sad, desperate, and cheap.”
“I’m supposed to just—”
“Wake-up time fa yiz, Hicksie, time to be up off of the linoleum and don’t look too forlorn, you’re out of a bad situation, nobody’s here to endanger a hair on your head, speakin of which yours could use some attention,” producing a pocket comb and advancing on Hicks.
“Don’t,” dodging away, “much go for folks bein all in my hair’s the thing, Dippy C., ’f that’s OK.”
Comb disappearing, empty hands spread in innocence, “Take the tip, is all, it’s over for you in M’waukee, Hicks, Chicago too, not many old pals you can count on anymore. Not even ol’ Lino the Dump Truck, gone too respectable these days to be seen with mugs like you, sorry to say. Believe me, I’m an expert, what’s happened is, is you’ve been deported, same as me.”
“What now, this is somebody’s sendingmeto Sicily?”
“You should be so lucky. Just better not count on gettin back to the States anytime soon. Best thing for you’d be change your name and get into some other racket, like international intrigue.”
“Sounds like government work, anything like what you’re doin, fat chance.”
“Long as you don’t start believin none of the propaganda they all keep throwin at you, remember to trust your own judgment,” picking up a concertina, “…and like the great Luigi Pirandello always reminds us, ooh—”
“Co…sì è,
