sense of shame that I was unable to follow my father’s instructions, not from Ettore’s desperate need to displace me and elevate his place in my family, not from his sheer nerve to pistol-whip me, to point the barrel of a gun in my direction. This moment clarified all that mattered to me, what would come to be the focus of my life. Ettore should never have made an attempt on Melody’s life, should never have been willing to eliminate that kind of innocence.
I walked to the rear of the Impala, opened the trunk, slid all the bags and boxes aside, and pulled out the tire iron. I slowly limped my way to my cousin, who stood facing the open expanse of land, raising his fist to some greater power that had failed him.
I trudged through the muddy field, my shoes filling with brown muck and slowing me even more. I approached Ettore, tightened my grip on the tire iron, and watched him writhe in the anguish of inefficacy.
In agony, I managed to mumble, “Turn around.”
I gave him the time he needed to understand what was coming, to know what I was about to deliver, that I would be changing the way he looked, the way he walked, and the way he would swallow for the rest of his life, that all of this was brought about by my hands.
“Johnny!” he yelled.
It should be noted he never pronounced my name the same way again; it forever sounded like this: “Shonny.”
I swung against his face with all my strength, leveled him. If it might be possible to propel the soul out of a human being by sheer force, I came close to doing it here. His body twisted in nearly a full circle, a drunken ballerina, falling into the mud facedown. I left him gurgling there for a moment, then reached down, grabbed him, and flipped him over.
“Get up.”
Both hands to his face, he shouted, “Shonny!”
“Up.”
And when he finally stumbled to his feet, I swung again and cracked his right knee. Ettore was brought into this world bowlegged, but he would spend the rest of his life knock-kneed.
I let Ettore scream it out for a minute, then stumbled over him, knelt on his chest, grabbed the tire iron by both ends and pushed the center down over his neck. The look in his eyes was pleading, for he could carry none of the grace the McCartneys did when mercy showed them no sign of arrival. His choking and gagging could only be interpreted as some form of begging.
I leaned over him, and as the rain and my blood and my spit dripped onto his mud-covered face, I said, “Yeah, this is happening.”
Ettore whimpered.
Then I unleashed. “Now listen to me. You never go near the girl. For the rest of your life you never go near her. You don’t think about her. You don’t even mention her name. Don’t ever use the word melody again, capice? You like a song? Call it a tune or jingle, ’cause if I hear you say her name, I will destroy you, you understand me? And don’t think what you witnessed back at the grocery was my inability to kill, ’cause you ever go near Melody I’ll blow a hole in your chest big enough to thread with this tire iron.”
Ettore made a feeble attempt to raise me off of him, like he was trying to bench-press an engine block. I pushed down on the tire iron and he coughed up a dark mixture of fluids.
And here is where I may have become a true Bovaro, for I played the card: “You’re a loser, Ettore. You’re nothing in this family. I’m Tony Bovaro’s son, and we both know all I have to do is mention what you did to me today and they’ll end you. What you fail to realize is that I outrank you, and I always will. You matter as much as that Beretta. Even your mother had to have known what a loser you’d be, couldn’t even name you after a saint.” Then with one last final push: “So, here’s how it’s going down. I didn’t touch you and you didn’t touch me. This never happened. When we get back to New York, you don’t mention the girl. You can take all the credit for the killings and be the hero. As for our wounds, I don’t care what you say, but that’s it, you understand? Not another word about the girl. I