The Family Hightower (5 page)

The conviction, though, is the end of Petey's formal education. The school's expelled him, and his family ships him off to a facility in Cincinnati, close enough that they can check on him whenever they want, too far away for him to bother trying to get out. There's nowhere for him to go. Petey's surprised by this; he's still a teenager, and not big on the personal responsibility thing in any case. He assumes that since he's going to rehab, his family will treat him a little bit like he's sick, like he's suffering from impulses beyond his control. Part of him wants to wail like a small child; he has the balls to feel like he's the victim of something, even if it's himself. It all just got away from him. In hindsight, he can see the moments it happened, the thousand ways he got sloppy. The way he started selling to people he didn't know as well. The things he sometimes just left out for everyone to see. He wants to be able to convince his parents that maybe he's a little crazy, that he needs a lot of help.
Don't you see? I don't know what I'm doing.
His mother could be convinced, he knows, if he could divide her from Terry, but he has no idea how to do that. And Terry's having none of it, makes arguments impossible right from the start. In the car on the way home from the trial, Petey says one word—
Dad—
and the man cuts him off.

“I can't believe you think you have anything to say, Pete,” Terry says. “Why do you think I'd believe one word of it?”

The words hurt, though it takes Petey months to settle on how to feel about it. One half wants to become a model of upright citizenship. Get a haircut, buy a new blazer and three ties. Finish school with the best grades, volunteer at nursing homes and soup kitchens. Go back to being the kind of kid who shares his dessert with a great uncle. The other half wants to tell his father and the rest of his family to go fuck themselves. The second half wins.

He gets out of rehab at the end of
1986
, just in time to turn eighteen and walk into his inheritance, the money from his grandfather Muriel set aside before he was born and gave to Henry to invest because she never imagined she'd have a son like Petey. He skulks around the house, not bothering to pretend to care about the possibility of finishing school or looking for a job. Terry doesn't know what to do; being the kind of man he is, his love for his son pulls him in opposite directions. One wanting to hand him a job, give him something, anything to do. He could just call a friend for a position in a mailroom, on a construction site.
Thanks. I owe you one.
It's still possible, Terry thinks, for a man to make himself. Eighty years ago, everyone did. Some of the rail barons around here didn't have any schooling; they were just smart, creative, ruthless when they needed to be. They hopped from sales to real estate to railroads, put it all together to build the city as we know it while they laid out estates for themselves outside of it, mansions of plaster and dark woodwork, horse stables, wide fields, deluxe versions of the farms they'd bought up and converted to suburbs and apartment complexes. You could still do that around here, still do it anywhere. Once a man has the money and has made himself, the father thinks, no one cares what else he has. But Terry doesn't want to hand Petey that kind of life. There are alarms in his head when he thinks of doing it, warning him that Petey would just squander it, squander whatever he has, and ruin Terry, too, if he were too involved. So Terry's stuck, and it makes him irritable, because he's not willing to face the guilt for having given up on his boy. He gets too impatient with Petey, too verbal about it, and at last there's a fight that starts with screaming and moves to a broken window, a sign that maybe they should all back down, but they don't. Instead, they have it all the way out.

“You aren't even my real father anyway,” Petey says, because he knows how much it hurts Terry when he says it. He's expecting, then, the usual script.
But I've raised you as if you were. How could you be so ungrateful when I love you so much.
But this fight is different, because they've all reached the ends of their ropes.

“You're absolutely right,” Terry says. “I'm not. I'm Andrew and Julia's father, and look at them. Such good kids. Those are mine. Your father ran off before you were born, and we haven't heard from him since, have we? He doesn't give a shit about you, just like you don't seem to give a shit about us. You're nothing like us, and do you know what? I'm glad. I'm glad, because it means I don't have to live with the idea that the fuckup that you are is part of me.”

Muriel cringes, like she's been hit.

“What did you say?” Petey says.

Terry's shocked. He can't believe he let himself say something so hateful, and his shame smothers his anger.

“I'm sorry, son,” he says.

“Don't use that word,” Petey says. “You don't get to take back what you said.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

Now Petey's just shaking his head. He wants to cry like a small boy, so that maybe his parents will comfort him, but he's too proud to do it.

“I'm never coming back here,” he says. “Never.” They watch him leave from the window, and something in the way the son's walking makes Terry believe Petey was telling the truth.

“Oh God,” Terry says. “What did I just do?”

Petey calls home every few weeks, even though half the conversations end in arguments. He lies about where he's living. Says he's in Cincinnati with a few of the guys he met in rehab. Says he's in Pittsburgh, working as a security guard. Says he's thinking of moving to New York, and Terry can understand this. He's been on the interstate through Youngstown, seen the highway signs pointing to New York already, even though it's almost four hundred miles away. Go east, and it's the next big city; the way the highway has it, it seems sometimes like New York's the only big city, though Terry knows that isn't true. Hong Kong and Tokyo can make New York seem bucolic, and he hasn't been to Mexico City, Beijing, São Paulo, has only heard what they're like. Then there's the rest of the world, the big cities of Africa—and this is the late
1980
s, when there are still more rural people than urban. That's going to change in a matter of a couple decades, it's all only going to get crazier. When the satellite images of the world at night come out, we'll all be able to see just how we light up the planet, like one big city, and quite a few places burn brighter than America does.

“Want to party?” Petey says to Curly. It's
1989
, in the neighborhood of Ohio City, on the corner of Bridge Avenue and West
28
th Street, Cleveland. The prostitutes are out and trying to reel in customers, but there's that charge in the air that happens when men are more in the mood for fighting than fucking. It's already a bit loud on the corner; the dealers are having a good night so far, but it's going to turn bad, end in sirens and screaming, a couple people going to the hospital and one going to the morgue, all because a man can't help himself.

“You paying?” Curly says. “I don't have the bread for that.” Remember, Curly's there for crack, Petey for cocaine.

“Sure, I'm paying,” Petey says. He shoves his hand in his jacket pocket, pulls out a thick wad of bills. Counts out twenty fifty-dollar bills, 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.

“What's up,” Petey says.

“That's a lot of coke you just bought,” Curly says.

“They 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.

“You live right here?” Curly says.

“Sure. Why not?” Petey says.

“You just don't seem like the kind of guy who lives around here.”

“And what do you mean by that?”

“Sorry,” 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.

“I'm Petey,” Petey says.

“Curly.”

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.

“You coming?” Petey says.

“Yeah. 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 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.

“Did 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.