The Family Hightower by Brian Francis Slattery Page A

licking his thumb as he does it. Curly doesn’t know if he looks more like a gangster or an accountant. Petey approaches one of the dealers, who seems to know him. They shake hands like old men, and Petey nods, hands him the money. Gets a big bag that he slides into his coat pocket. Walks back over to Curly, tilts his head.
    â€œWhat’s up,” Petey says.
    â€œThat’s a lot of coke you just bought,” Curly says.
    â€œThey cut you a break if you do it that way.”
    Curly’s looking for Petey’s car, is already imagining what kind of ride a man like this must have. He’s surprised to see him heading straight for the glass door of the apartment building on the corner.
    â€œYou live right here?” Curly says.
    â€œSure. Why not?” Petey says.
    â€œYou just don’t seem like the kind of guy who lives around here.”
    â€œAnd what do you mean by that?”
    â€œSorry,” Curly says. “Nothing.”
    Petey gives him a look that Curly can’t read, and for a second Curly thinks he’s blown it. But he hasn’t.
    â€œI’m Petey,” Petey says.
    â€œCurly.”
    They shake hands, each one not sure why he trusts the other so much, though they do. Curly takes another look at the cracked parking lot of the supermarket across the street, the wooden houses around him. A third of them are abandoned, and Curly imagines someone’s already stripped the copper out of them. He hears that people steal the busts from the Cultural Garden on the east side now, and he always imagines the conversation at the scrapyard being awkward. How do people say they managed to come across a three-foot-high statue of Chopin? I just found this in my backyard. It used to be my grandmother’s. The scrap dealer must be a master of deadpan. I’ll give you fifty bucks for that, he says, knowing they’ll take it and be grateful that he’s not asking any more questions.
    â€œYou coming?” Petey says.
    â€œYeah. Yeah,” Curly says.
    You could say that this is the conversation that kills Curly, though it’s a lot more complicated than that; by 1995 , so much binds Curly and Petey together that it’s too late for Curly to get out. But in 1989 , it isn’t. In some other version of the story, the one that isn’t the truth, Curly isn’t there to call Granada and warn the wrong man, and so drag the entire Hightower family back into the world some of them thought they’d left behind a generation ago. In that story, Curly lives a lot longer, and Petey dies a lot sooner. So you could say that Curly makes a trade, gives away the rest of his years for his friend’s. The question of whether Petey deserves them isn’t for us to judge.
    So. By 1989 , Petey’s a small-time crook. Not as big as that roll of bills he pulls out of his pocket makes Curly think he is; some of that is his inheritance talking. He hasn’t blown through it—he’s smarter than that. But he’s still just a middleman, connecting a few of the young and wealthy of Cleveland to the drugs they want. Sometimes he doesn’t see the people involved, isn’t sure what’s passing between them. It’s just a series of phone calls, a few lines of jargon mixed with ambiguous phrases that sound like come-ons in soul songs. I got what you need. Your ship just came in. All the time, though, he’s thinking about how to move up in the world he’s in. How to turn the cash he’s sitting on and his willingness to break the law into the kind of life you only read about in books, or see in the movies. A private island somewhere. A mansion, a yacht. A helicopter pad—why the hell not? Dinners and parties, long hours in the sun. He always pictures someone with him, too, a woman, though he can’t say for sure what she looks like, or how much she knows about what he does.
    Curly’s hanging from an even lower rung on the chain. He