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Dante's Fire Chapter Forty Four: Big Jack
BIG JACKAs a child, Jackie was a small bundle of soft. Dimpled fists and fat legs were her lot, and she had a nest of hair that remained untamed despite her mother's best efforts. You picked her in your arms and she formed a knot from her hands which she wound around your neck, her grip vice-like. She held on to things like a child who had been greatly deprived of good things in her early life, like a castaway. That was how her mother described it. She would have known better than anyone else. They both did. They were castaway children, you see. She had lived at an orphanage for a long time, perhaps most of her childhood, or at best, as long as she could remember, and if anyone could tell you the truth of it, she could: orphanages were no place for a child without any parents. It had been frightfully easy for him to connect with her and more so for them to become an item, a steady thing. Big Jack— who back then was just Jack—knew what yearning was and knew how to sustain it without
Dante's Fire Chapter Forty Five: Jackie
JACKIEIn the summer, the cemetery where her mother was buried was a place of stone and manicured grass—although there were small thickets of undergrowth here and there—a place of beloved and, sometimes, forgotten people. Now, a layer of weighty, white blankness that befitted the place's purpose and mood had covered the field.Jackie ambled through the flaky snow. Headstones made of hard, indestructible concrete grew from the soft ground, jutting from the floor like hands of stone. Hands, reaching for something, perhaps the sky. Always reaching but never touching it. A forlornness pervaded the atmosphere here even though the place was obviously tended to almost as well as some museums were, even though there were always people around, weaving between the reaching stone hands, wiping dust off them affectionately, whispering to long dead parents and nieces, weeping softly too, sometimes.The groundskeeper asked Jackie if she needed help finding someone, but she told the woman that she di
Dante's Fire Chapter Forty Six: Jackie
JACKIE Her father was still as tall as she remembered him to be, perhaps even taller than she remembered, thick as a tree truck and just as unyielding. He was more than seven feet away, yet the distance did nothing to diminish his stature. The years had not been kind to him though, she could see. A new tiredness had flooded his eyes and poured out over his entire being, soaking the furnace he once was. It showed. At a glance, it showed. His skin was beginning to gnarl and wrinkle. 'Jackie,' her father said. One word, and she heard his voice break a hundred times over inside the syllables. That too—his voice—was as she recalled. Heavy with timbre. Sonorous as music. The man was not meant for the life he was involved in. She had wanted to say that to him so many times, but had never worked up the courage. In another life, her father could have been something. Could have amassed his wealth cleaner.'Dad,' Jackie answered carefully. She did not trust her voice not to break, too.'You are
Dante's Fire Chapter Forty Seven: Dante
DANTE Trouble, like a thundercloud, is often heavy with pregnancy. This Dante found soon enough. He had thought the greater majority of his problems had been solved when he won the polls, but it turned out that they were only just beginning. For him, they began with the courier.The driver was hunched over and she held a hand to her stomach, clutching her ribs tightly. She limped, leaning on her left leg just slightly. It was nearly imperceptible, but she still had to be helped to the chair. Dante sat at the other side of the table, across from her, while Imani, his ever-present, ever-irritable hulk of a bodyguard sat a table behind him, her hand in the slash pockets of her denim jacket, probably palming her gun for all he knew. Imani was his second as much as she was his bodyguard. She handled small affairs by herself and had proved herself adept at the job only a few days in. The woman kept on a stoic demeanor that could have passed for a serial killer's, but once, he had seen he
Dante's Fire Chapter Forty Eight: Big Jack
BIG JACKAt the flora shop, Big Jack bought a wide bouquet of chrysanthemums—they were Elle's favourite; all things flora were. The inside of the shop smelt like plants and crumbly earth and Big Jack had never felt closer to his wife than in a place that felt like this.He was not leaving the city for good, he told himself. He would probably die here, he told himself, never too far from the bright lights that were New York. To leave this stretch of land would be, for him, to cease to exist. And when he went to the flora shop for a bouquet of chrysanthemums, he assured himself that they were not a parting gift. Goodbyes did not always have to be creatures of permanence.Few shops were open during periods of festivity, especially at this time of the year. Those that were were often in a hurry to close for the day. Most people had families and wanted to be with them when the New Year rolled in. Must be nice, thought Big Jack. Must be nice to have a family, whole, waiting for you to retur
Dante's Fire Chapter Forty Nine: Andre
ANDRE Mole.Snitch.Informant.Tattletale.Turncoat.There were many names for the thing Andre had become. Many, many names. Snitch was the one that resonated most in these streets. It was the one that hounded him wherever he went.It was a whisper in his ear. It was the running of water from the shower. It was the crunch of his tyres on the driveway gravel. Snitch, snitch, snitch. Sometimes it was Trent's voice; other times, he could swear that when he heard the word and turned around, for an instant, a split second, he caught sight of Molly, hair like dirty straw, one eye gone. He was trailing ghosts now. But Molly's ghost was easiest to accommodate. Time had made it easier to carry the weight of her passing, and when she skirted at the periphery of his mind, he did not recoil. Instead he looked out for her. When he caught glimpses in the rearview mirror, he parked the car. When he saw her in the shopping mall's mirror, he checked. These sightings were what drove him, what kept him
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty: Jackie
JACKIE Neil was shady after her father left town. He would not pick her calls, would not show up to any meeting that she proposed. Jackie had the distinct feeling her father had something to do with his newfound reticence. She had rented a car, and even though she could easily have afforded a car with the funds at her disposal, buying a car seemed too lavish a thing to do. Living as she had in school, basically out of a suitcase, working at a bar on weekends, just so she would not have to rely in her father's money, she had grown accustomed to being economical.It was one of the things Joaquin disliked the most about her. He lamented her attitude quite often. 'Why have all that fucking money if you are not going to use it, huh?''It is blood money. Isn't mine.' She would always tell him. And Joaquin would always shake his head in disbelief. Now even those memories were tainted. She drove the rental to her former house, which they had once thought of as theirs. Where her mother died
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty One: Jackie
JACKIE ‘You think she will pull through?’ A man's voice asked. This was years before, five to be precise. Jackie was at the top of the stairs. She was seated on the floor just outside her mother's room, slouched against the steel handrail, close enough to hear her mother call for her if she needed her. The nurse was there, but Jackie had gotten into the habit of staying close by, never straying too far. She had been listening to a Valerie June song on her walkman, with headphones, and the thrum of the guitar and the drum beats had swallowed up all the sound in the world. When Big Jack and Raymond Bianchi walked into the house, she saw them come from above, but in the place of footsteps and the click of the door opening and closing, there was thin silence and heavy music. She slid the headphones down and all the sounds of reality came rushing back. Raymond was the one speaking, asking if 'she' would survive. Jackie knew who he was referring to: the woman in the room that she sat faci
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