The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

She laughed and tossed an elbow in my ribs and said, ‘That’s my boy. You’ll never get a stomach ulcer with that attitude. Now let’s get some sleep.’ Which we did, waking up around ten the next day and starting to medicate our hangovers along about noon with Muddy Rudders. I didn’t worry as much about Ma as the doc did; I figured she was havin too much fun to die. As it happened, she outlived Doc Stone, who got killed one night by a drunk driver on Pigeon Bridge. You could call that irony or tragedy or just the way life goes. Me, I ain’t no philosopher. I was just glad the doc didn’t have his family with him. And I hope his insurance was paid up.

All right, that’s the background. Here’s where we get down to business.

The Massimos. And that fuckin trumpet, pardon my francais.

I call it the Fourth of July Arms Race, and although it didn’t really get up and runnin until twenty-thirteen, it really started the year before. The Massimos had the place directly across from us, a big white house with pillars and a lawn runnin down to their beach, which was pure white sand instead of gravel like ours. That place must have had a dozen rooms. Twenty or more if you count in the guest cottage. They called it Twelve Pines Camp, on account of the fir trees that was around the main house and kind of closed it in.

A camp! Sonny Jesus, that place was a mansion. And yes, they had a tennis court. Also badminton and a place on the side for throwin hoss-shoes. They’d come out near the end of June, and stay until Labor Day, and then close the sonofabitch up. A place that size, and they let it stand empty nine months out of every twelve. I couldn’t believe it. Ma could, though. She said we were ‘accident rich,’ but the Massimos were real rich.

‘Only those are ill-gotten gains, Alden,’ she said, ‘and I’m not talking about no quarter-acre pot patch, either. Everyone knows Paul Massimo is CONNECTED.’ She always said it just like that, in big capital letters.

Supposedly the money came from Massimo Construction. I looked it up on the Internet, and it appeared as legal as could be, but they were Italian, and Massimo Construction was based in Providence, Rhode Island, and you’re cops, you can connect the dots. As Ma always used to say, when you put two and two together, you never get five.

They used all of the rooms in the big white house when they were there, I’ll say that much. And the ones in the ‘guest cottage,’ as well. Ma used to look across the water and toast them with her Sombrero or Muddy Rudder and say Massimos came cheaper by the dozen.

They knew how to have fun, I’ll give em that. There were cookouts, and water tag, and teenage kids drivin those Jet Skis around – they must have had half a dozen of those babies, in colors so bright they’d burn your eyes if you looked at em too long. In the evenins they’d play touch football, usually enough Massimos to make two regulation teams of eleven each, and then, when it got too dark to see the ball, they’d sing. You could tell by the way they yelled out their songs, often in Italian, that they enjoyed a drink or three themselves.

One of em had a trumpet, and he’d blow it along with the songs, just wah-wah-wah, enough to make your eyes water. ‘Dizzy Gillespie he ain’t,’ Ma said. ‘Someone ought to dip that trumpet in olive oil and stick it up his ass. He could fart out “God Bless America.”’

Along about eleven, he’d blow ‘Taps,’ and that’d be it for the night. Not sure any of the neighbors would have complained even if the singing and that trumpet had gone on until three in the morning, not when most folks on our side of the lake believed he was the real-life Tony Soprano.

Come the Fourth of July that year – this is oh-twelve I’m talkin about – I had some sparklers, two or three packets of Black Cat firecrackers, and a couple of cherry bombs. I bought em from Pop Anderson at Anderson’s Cheery Flea Mart on the road to Oxford. That ain’t tattlin, neither. Not unless you’re bone-stupid, and I know neither of you is. Hell, everyone knew you could get firecrackers at the Cheery Flea. But little stuff was all Johnny’d sell, because back then fireworks was against the law.

Anyway, all those Massimos was runnin around across the lake, playin football and tennis and givin each other swimsuit wedgies, the little ones paddlin around the shore, the bigger ones divin off their float. Me n Ma was out at the end of the dock in our lawn chairs, feelin no pain, with our patriotic supplies laid out beside us. As dusk came down, I give her a sparkler, lit it, then lit mine off’n hers. We waved them around in the gloamin, and pretty soon the little ones over there on the other side seen em and started clamorin for their own. The two older Massimo boys handed em out, and they waved em back at us. Their sparklers was bigger n longer-lastin than ours, and the heads had been treated with some sort of chemical that made them go all different colors, while ours was only yellow-white.