Yellow Mama E zine

At The Closest Possible Range

 

Ben Hastie

 

 

            Another night was falling as Giuseppe waited for a young killer behind the derelict church in Avalon; by the time they had travelled beyond Star City, it had collapsed completely.

The ageing hitman lit himself a Lucky Strike on the Uffington Bridge, gazing down into the faecal recoil floating back towards Pittsburgh before offering a smoke to the young killer, who stole a quick glance at the pack before he focused his furrowed monobrow back on the headlights that were gliding along the blacktop as bonfires raged in upland clearings, on both sides of the BMW.

          “How old are you?” Giuseppe asked, as he opened the dashboard ashtray.    

        “Twenty-one,” said the young killer, striving for a scowl. “The same age as Billy the Kid.”

        “The same age as Billy the Kid when he did what?” Giuseppe asked, before inhaling deep.

        “When he got famous,” said the young killer, eventually, as they crossed the Tygart Valley River on the Benton Ferry Bridges, oblivious to all the Adena morgues and Hopewell lunar observatories in the surrounding darkness, contaminated forever by Fike Sodium and Nitro Dioxin.

         

       Rain started streaking across the windscreen as the young killer followed Interstate 79 down through Harrison County, and as the ageing hitman pretended to swig from a fifth of Jim Beam a silhouette of a Snowshoe Hare flickered momentarily on a Red Spruce horizon before vanishing inside the foolish fire of Lost Creek Jack-o’-Lanterns.

         “That ain’t too professional,” said the young killer, who had become increasingly nervous as mountains replaced the tenements that were the usual limits of his every direction, despite his attempt at a derisory sneer in Roanoke, where Giuseppe had used the oncoming headlights of a military convoy to illuminate the rancid gums and prison-built dentures of his nightmare smile.

 

        There had always been a bad taste in his mouth, but his gums hadn’t really started to burn until he was sent to Morganza, where Giuseppe had been too scared to brush his teeth at night and there was always sticky brown sludge all over his pillow in the morning.

       His father, Salvatore Gabbiadini, was beaten to death in the Hill District by a patriotic mob during the second world war; luckily there were plenty of silver fillings and surrogate parental figures inside the penal system.

          After his release, Giuseppe killed; with an ice pick in Red Hook and with a piano wire garrotte in San Jose as his new family consolidated control of Local 1058 and expanded into Cuba and Ohio.  He paid cash for a blood red Ford Mustang and a big white house in Mount Lebanon and was washing down rich cuisine with Hennessey Cognac at the Holiday House in Monroeville every single night of the week until the hit on Bob Duggan, when everything started to unravel.

         Acid leaked through an eroded oesophageal sphincter until the subconscious visualisation of his physical decay damned the flow of his dreams and he would come round every morning angry and exhausted, soiling the daylight with an increasingly ferocious deployment of the family business; when he was finally sent up to Graterford, however, it was all on account of some unrelated frustration.

         One afternoon, after his gums bled badly in public, Giuseppe had returned home to find his next-door-neighbour’s station wagon blocking access to his driveway and had kicked down Stanley Stankowski’s front door before shooting him in the back with a sawed-off shotgun.

A petrified family, who had arrived on the scene to attend a nearby BBQ, testified that the wise guy was waving his weapon around on his front lawn in the immediate aftermath of the shooting while shouting at the top of his extremely hoarse voice, “He won’t be parking that piece of shit anywhere now, will he? That fat Polack son-of-a-bitch!”

         

         Yellow pus seeped from inflamed infections until bits of his teeth started breaking off and windows of bone appeared all over his gums; other prisoners turned away from the stench of decay but the Department of Corrections policy on dentistry was brutal extraction so Giuseppe ended up in the prison hospital with severe nerve damage. 

         They removed the leftover brown stumps and sliced out all the tiny shards of infected bone before sending him to the Restricted Housing Unit; his face aged horribly, but his sentence diminished.

 

        Chucky Porter had roared with laughter outside his used car lot in Verona when Beppe Gums had asked him about going back to work. 

       “You’re a bit long in the tooth, if you pardon the expression, to be riding around on the back of Pagan Harleys and chucking pineapples through roadhouse windows,” Chucky Porter had said, puffing away on a large cigar.  “You’d be better off laying low for a while.”

        The ageing hitman’s family stashed him inside a room in one of their run-down hotels and provided pay stubs for his parole officer from the Daily Juice Bottling Company.

Giuseppe was too embarrassed to go shopping during the day so he lived on the beer and Lucky Strikes and Beenee Weenees that he bought from the liquor store across the street from the hotel by night, spending several months doubled over on a grim bed that came down from a threadbare wall or on the dirty toilet that was separated from the rest of the room by a mouldy curtain while he waited to hear from his cousin Vinny, who worked at the electroplating plant in Glenshaw. 

          Jimmy Goodnight had been in the news while Giuseppe had been in the prison hospital, but just as the potassium cyanide was dissolving inside the fifth of whiskey his family arrived with a story about one of their accountants, dropping dime and hiding out in the wooded hills of West Virginia. 

         Chucky Porter had even slapped Beppe Gums on the back as he assured him that the fresh air would do him some good.

 

       A dense fog started to swirl around the wheels of the BMW as the young killer left the interstate at Clendenin before turning slowly and carefully onto a much smaller road that led to the church at Three Mile; by the time they had travelled beyond the cemetery at Coco, this dense fog had enveloped them completely.   

           The young killer had pulled over and mumbled something about taking a leak but was obviously trying to use his headlights to read a map as Beppe Gums backed slowly away from the car and let the fog swallow him whole.

         “Hey!” yelled the young killer, clinging desperately to his plastic and steel as a colony of Heavenly Hellbenders glided through all the acid rock drainage that damned the flow of Elklick Creek.  “Mr Porter don’t want no delays!”

            Giuseppe heard the rapid-fire whine of a coyote as he opened the passenger door and by the time he’d shut the dashboard ashtray it was obvious that they were heading back towards the cemetery at Coco; he almost laughed out loud when the young killer hurled his map at the windscreen before repeatedly punching the steering wheel after his headlights hit the tombstones. 

          Beppe Gums picked up the map.

         “I don’t need no fuckin’ navigator!” yelled the young killer.

         “I’ll drive then,” the ageing hitman said carefully, before offering the Jim Beam.  The young killer hesitated momentarily before grabbing the bottle and taking a great big swig of poisoned whiskey; then it was nightmare smile-time as Beppe Gums turned on the courtesy light and watched the young killer die.

 

         A sparkle of fireflies mocked the headlights as Beppe Gums drove towards the neon blue luciferin that glistened inside the dead wood at the end of a flood-warped track, where the dense fog rescinded to reveal a sinister shack.

He found a flashlight and a Beretta Cheetah in the trunk of the car before dragging the body inside as black widow spiders scurried across the scarlet foliage and timber rattlesnakes stirred from brumation.  

       The ageing hitman swapped clothes with the corpse before carefully placing his prison-built dentures into its mouth and driving away from the scene of the crime in a young killer’s BMW, Accursio Lombardo’s wallet and gun in the glove compartment with his map as Giuseppe Gabbiadini headed through War on his way inside Virginia.

​

      Ben Hastie is 46 years old and lives in Sheffield, a city in the north of England.  After studying Film Production at university, he got involved with DIY publishing, way back in the print days, editing zines and running poetry workshops with marginalized groups. He has worked as a reporter in local news, a communications officer for a community development charity in Sheffield, and as an events photographer for several locally based promoters.  He has three daughters and has created sporadic mayhem as a graffiti bandit named Horace. . . .

​

      Luke Lester is an artist and writer from Victoria, Canada. He has recently been published in Absolute Underground, Black Petals, Flash Fiction North, Paragraph Planet, Ultramarine Literary Review, and Yellow Mama. More of his art and writing can be found on his blog: The Other Place.