Demise

The Panuzio Home, East Lake Monday, 19 September, 5:47 a.m.-4

“Yeah. Thanks for coming by.”

“Ah, no biggie.” Johnny chuckled, added, “You can’t do it all by yourself and neither can I.”

Mitch smiled. “And neither can I,” he repeated. It had been their tie, their mantra, their permanent bond for decades. “You’d think,” Mitch said, “Vern’d be able to keep one car running. He got me just before I left. Asked if he could drive me home and use the car for the weekend. I said, ‘Vern, where’s you car?’ He says, ‘You don’t need one when you live in the city. It’s a liability.’ That’s his way of saying it’s out of gas or’s got a flat he hasn’t fixed. Or maybe’s been towed.”

“So what did he need yours for?”

“He wanted to take Elisse to the Indian casino for their anniversary.”

“Heartwood?”

“Yeah.”

They meandered back toward the highway, stopped at the Shell station to gas up, grab coffee and a Lakeport Ledger, and so Johnny could get his daily five Lotto tickets. They continued on, driving to work in a tired, rainy Monday-morning funk, talking intermittently about family, friends, the town—everything except the situation at Continental General Chemical— ContGenChem. Blankly Johnny eyed the surrounding traffic. Mitch skimmed the paper.

Route 86 curved to the southwest, skirted the Village of South Lake. Between elegant homes Johnny caught glimpses of the lake, the posh shoreline restaurants with their private beaches and marinas, the few remaining unexpanded cottages.

“See it?” Mitch asked.

“Ah…not yet.”

Mitch turned the page, snapped the paper to flatten it, continued reading. Johnny, as was his habit, squinted to find his Uncle John and Aunt Fran’s old home, to see…to…

“She was another one,” Mama says.

Johnny-panni doesn’t understand.

“Well,” Mama says, “they were the first to leave Lakeport. They moved onto that little street with those expensive shops. That was in forty-six or forty-seven. Just before you were born. So now—” Mama’s tone imitates a grande dame “—they are ‘Villagers.’” Mama pushes up the tip of her nose with her index finger. “Particularly Francesca,” she says. “Of course, they were the oldest and that justified those superior airs. But Fran, she looked down on everybody. Especially your father.” Mama flutters her hand as if she is shooing away a fly. “Old World,” she says. “You know, a cafone. Rough. Crude.” She pronounces it cah-voh’nn. “And then because your father was an infantryman in the war. And because he became a contractor. How that hurt your father. You know, to her we were low class. Uncle John knew how she was. He was aloof too, but he always respected his brothers. All of his brothers. Just like you do Nicky. John respected them and he protected them and he was kind to them. Especially after Il Padrone—Nonno—after he died. But John always loved you. You were named after him. He always made sure Ricky and Louis loved you, too. You were their favorite. You were John’s first godson. Maybe his only godson. I don’t know.”

“Mama!” How can you not know!”

Between glances at the roadway, Johnny squinted harder, deeper into the mist. No matter that the day was raw and overcast, to him the lake was inviting. He thought of cars he’d owned before he’d become a successful corporate officer, cars in which the windows would all be open and he’d feel the wind and smell the lake, instead of the perfectly controlled climate within the passenger cell of this Infiniti.

“There.” Johnny gestured. He’d spied his uncle’s old home; caught a glimpse of a woman descending the porch stairs with a child in hand. A smile came to his face. He thought of a time when he was five or six and he’d spent three nights with cousins Ricky and Louis in their bedroom, and he’d first learned the word cugino, cousin. They’d called him cuginino, their own word (they could make up their own words!) for little cousin. On the following days they’d collected frogs and turtles, and swum in the lake—three boys together without adults.

Johnny searched the water. The lake was 15 miles long, five miles at its widest point. For years, decades, it had insulated, if not isolated, the Town of East Lake and the Village of South Lake from the urban sprawl and the less desirable elements of the opposite shore. If it were clearer…Johnny thought. He did not think in words but sensed, imagined, the far side, The City of Lakeport, the six-lane interstate, the tower of National Solvents and Chemicals (NSC) where he’d worked for twelve years. NSC was the region’s last major industry, its biggest employer. Rumors had flitted for years that the parent corporation, Bowen and Company, was in financial trouble, but nothing had changed until mid-August. Then in quick succession, Saudi-based Contentinal General Chemical had offered to and then did purchase NSC from Bowen. On Thursday, only five days earlier, the Ledger headline story read:

700 of 4,000 to Lose Jobs

Continental General Chemical leaked its plans, late last night, to consolidate manufacturing operations in plants in Atlanta, Georgia, and Mexico City. Industry analysts expect the announcement to be made formally later today by ContGenChem’s CEO, Nelson Tripps.

If the plan goes into effect, ContGenChem will close part of its Lakeport manufacturing division and move much of its administrative and marketing departments.

News of the “restructuring for increased profitability” sent ContGenChem’s stock soaring, as company officials estimated the consolidation will save $47 million per year…

Friday morning, Brad Tripps, sitting, as was his habit, on the corner of Johnny Panuzio’s desk, had told Panuzio, who had risen to be NSC’s director of marketing, to prepare his staff for personnel cuts. At lunch Johnny and Mitch had talked themselves hoarse but to no conclusion. ContGenChem had yet to make an assault on Mitch’s engineering department.

Johnny and Mitch continued their drive in. Thoughts, images tumbled in Johnny’s mind. They spoke sporadically. Johnny talked about the city, about their old Misty Bottom neighborhood. When he and Mitch had been boys, Lakeport had been a proud industrial city; and East Lake and South Lake Village were just beginning the transition from summer retreats for factory workers and their bosses to year-around exurban living. The term suburbia was seldom used—North Lakeport and South Lakeport were outskirts. Images flashed. They talked about the old—now defunct many years—tassel-topped summer ferry which made the cross-lake run four times daily, more on Independence Day; the hot, itchy sensations of riding to “the country” in Rocco’s old Ford, dust and wind and heat saturating the backseat, the unpaved roads bouncing them until they were queasy and quiet and praying they’d reach whatever the destination might be before they became overtly sick in the backseat while Rocco sang quietly or talked about the smell of the pines and the purity of the water and of the times when he was a Boy Scout and he’d camped on the beaches, which were now private property.

“You know,” Johnny’s voice erupted. Mitch closed the paper, glanced over. “I just thought about that Thanksgiving.”

Mitch chuckled. “Still bothers ya, huh?”

“It was my grandfather’s funeral…”

“I know.”

“My father made the decision. I would’ve played.”

“I know.”

“Or maybe Uncle John. He probably told Rocco. I mean, after Ricky was killed, they were pretty sensitive.”

“Still bothers ya,” Mitch repeated.

“Not bothers me,” Johnny said. “I just flashed on it. Like what would be different? You know, would we be in this mess with Tripps if…?”

“Yeah. Different roads go to different places,” Mitch said. Then he added, “Still, sometimes different roads lead to the same place.”

“Umm.” Johnny paused, then asked, “Forgive me?”

“No.” Mitch smiled. “Not in a million years. Nor would my old man. He’d leveraged a hundred dollars into a thousand-dollar bet. He was sure we couldn’t lose. That’s why I never gamble more than’s in my pocket. Usually not even that.”

“How bout for not going…you know…?”

Mitch guffawed, let Johnny squirm. “Not for that, either,” he said. “You should’ve been there.”

“Maybe.” Johnny was serious. “Sometimes I think I missed something. If I’d been drafted…”

Mitch chuckled, gestured, a flick of his hand—don’t mean nothin’. Again they rode in silence. Amid heavier traffic they crossed the dam that created Lake Wampahwaug, entered South Lakeport—now virtually a borough of the city with combined fire, snow, and highway departments, and with established student exchange, magnet school and distant learning programs hammered out while the state courts still wrestled with mandated regional solutions. On the left they passed the first high-rise overlooking Route 86 where it merged with the interstate. A minute farther, on the right below the roadway, appeared the puddled, tarred roofs of the first project. A quarter mile farther, a single beam of sunlight split the clouds, glistened on wet concrete, brick and glass.

Johnny scanned the city buildings, the projects, the highway ramp circling the Clara Barton Soup Kitchen, the burned-out and boarded-up homes, entire blocks. He nodded toward the old ferry terminal, vacant, covered with grafitti, the piers dilapidated, the pilings askew. “My grandfather,” Johnny said self-consciously—he’d said it to Mitch many times before—“worked there as a shovel man for a dollar ten a day.” Johnny shook his head. He thought about the old neighborhood, about its vitality, its mixed-ethnic energy, about it today, mostly black and Hispanic, on the front page of the Lakeport Ledger virtually every day of the year. They can’t do it all, he thought. Then he thought about the vibrance and the vitality that he did not feel in his tidy Queen Anne on Lake Shore Drive in serene—insulated if not isolated—East Lake; in his chosen middle-class enclave separated from this landscape of slums, of violence, drugs, crime, hopelessness, despair.

Johnny eased off the gas as a semi squeezed in from the right. Mitch turned up the volume on the radio. Dr. Dave McNichols was yapping about taxes being so high that dollars taken from families had forced both husbands and wives to work outside the home, which in turn had fostered a community of unsupervised kids, which required more tax dollars and more government because the system was failing. “Now they’re escalating it again,” McNichols blurted. “Telling us only more tax dollars will make it all work!”

Mitch laughed.

“And they’re telling us,” McNichols scoffed, “the problem is, we don’t have enough government! The governor and the courts want to control the racial balance of the entire region. One more socialized master plan drawn up by the elite, by the people who believe they know better than anyone else what’s right and what’s wrong—then shoved down our throats by their police-state tactics. Hey, I’m sorry! Tell the governor…tell the state courts…maybe there are inequities. No doubt about it. There ARE imbalances. That’s a given. And they DO need correction. That’s a given. But governmental tyranny is not the solution. Everything they touch turns to…”

Johnny sighed. Traffic slowed, slowed, stopped. Lightly he tapped his wedding ring against the padded steering wheel. “I told Nicky we were buying Lotto tickets,” Johnny said.

“You mean you’re buyin’.”

“Yeah. He says, ‘Ciuc! Ciuco faccia! You’re nuts!’ I said, ‘Yeah. Maybe.’ He says, ‘They don’t even have a fifty-percent payout. Play the numbers. It’s eighty percent.’ ”

“Is it really?”

“Well, according to Nick. He calls the state Lotto ‘legal organized crime.’”

“Seems right to me,” Mitch said. “If you or I did it, we’d be thrown in jail. They do make it easy, though, don’t they?”

“Yeah. Too easy. I gotta stop doin this. I gave Nick that five hundred because I owed him from the casino last month. And I think from one of the card games. You know, Julia spends every penny she makes. Except she throws in a lot for Todd’s tuition. But the household bills come out of my salary.”

“Sometimes Laurie pisses me off,” Mitch said. “You know how frugal she is. But when something like this reorganization hits, I know I’m a lucky man. She always says, ‘Don’t get us overextended. We don’t want to be overextended in unsettled times.’”