The Family Hightower by Brian Francis Slattery Page B

delivers packages, runs errands. Sometimes stands outside a door and watches the street for the cops. He never sees anything. He drives a van from Youngstown to Parma, doesn’t know what’s in the back. But it’s all with the Ukrainians. Those are his people, that’s his strength, and all of it makes the small crimes he commits part of a much larger thing. Curly spent every Sunday morning in the pews at St. Josaphat as a kid, knows how to make the food, sing the songs. He can speak the language that he doesn’t know is a dialect until the fourth wave of immigration starts in 1991 , and people from Kiev and Odessa arrive to tell them they’re using a lot of Polish and English in their Ukrainian. There are words in Ukrainian for all that stuff, you know, the Ukrainians say. Well, teach them to us, the Ukrainian-Americans say. The speed that Ukrainians pulled English into their spoken language— ice cream, ambulance, bootlegger, like hell, shut up, you bet, have a good time— is just one sign of how fast they adapted, but also how much they kept. How much they’ve hung onto, over the decades, so that when the fourth wave shows up, it’s like a meeting of long-lost cousins. A shared history, a shared understanding of the world. The same urge to spit whenever someone mentions Stalin. The same tired shrug at how hard life is. Of course it is. As if a hundred years were a day, though it’s been a big day.
    Taken apart, Petey and Curly aren’t much. One’s got a pile of money and no real connections. The other’s got connections everywhere he turns, but no money. Together, though, they’re an interesting pair. A little too interesting, Kosookyy thinks. He’s the current big man on Cleveland’s local version of a Ukrainian organized racket, the guy who’s been employing Curly for years at a couple dozen different jobs of varying degrees of legitimacy. He loves Curly, you understand. About Petey, he’s not so sure.
    â€œDid you know I knew your grandfather, Petey?” Kosookyy says. Peers at them both through thick glasses that make his eyes look bigger than they already are. The hair on his head’s almost gone, just a few stray strands around his ears, the back of his head. “I used to see him when he visited his brother in Tremont. I was just a kid, then, but even then I could tell,” squinting his eyes, wagging a finger, “that he was someone who did things. A lot of things. I remember he was the kind of guy who could put on an accent, like an actor. He could speak that waspy English like the newscasters speak. And he could talk like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. But the Ukrainian his mother taught him stayed perfect, all those years. He was that kind of guy. Though I’m sure you remember that, too.”
    Kosookyy’s trying to play up the Ukrainian connection between their families, to get Petey to feel something toward him; to feel something for Petey himself. But Petey’s two generations removed from that, Kosookyy reminds himself. Two generations and too much money. Give a guy too much, and he can forget where he came from, forget who he is.
    â€œHe died before I was born,” Petey says.
    Kosookyy’s mouth shuts tight, and he nods. Somebody didn’t raise this kid right, he thinks. If they did, he would understand what I’m trying to do. They throw away their culture because they think they have so much money, they don’t need it anymore. They never stop to think about whether their kids’ll need it later, when they’re out of the picture. “I see,” he says. “Still. There’s a lot you can do for us. The White Lady says I shouldn’t get you involved,” he says, assuming Petey knows who the White Lady is. Petey doesn’t. Kosookyy goes on. “But I’m not listening to her right now. What can we do for you?” Petey just smiles at them, and Kosookyy knows