C HAPTER T HIRTEEN

Jake stops pacing and sits beside me, gazing at me in total disbelief. In the past twenty-four hours he’s seen his father go from embittered tabloid journalist to unemployed loser to confessed murderer. Could I be telling the truth? For the first time all weekend, my son seems frightened.

“Dad. Come on.”

“You heard me.”

“What’d you do, shoot her? Stab her?”

“Nothing that obvious.”

“Poison?”

“Nope.”

“Jesus, Dad, what the hell are you saying?”

“I’m saying I have to tell this story my own way, and it’s probably going to take me a little while because I’ve never told it before, ever, to anybody, so you just sit there and don’t interrupt and maybe, just maybe I can do this thing.”

Jake sits as quietly as a bird watcher. Overhead, a mockingbird sings in the branches of a silver oak tree. I let him go through his repertoire of imitations before clearing my throat and beginning the tale of something I’ve kept buried for more than thirty years to a boy who’s only been alive for seventeen years. It is a story of death that is dying to be told, and once I start telling it, I cannot stop.

Mary DiFrancesco Sullivan was a quiet person, a somewhat stout woman who just wanted to be a wife and a mother—or, looking back on it, maybe just a mother.

Then again, maybe she just wanted to be a saint. And if you want to be a saint, it’s going to mean trouble for any mere mortals who happen to live with you.

The funny thing is she didn’t like trouble. She hated conflict, hated shouting and loudness of any kind. That’s one reason she didn’t like going to the movies, because they were always so loud—the screaming, the booming music, the explosions. The only movie I ever remember her admiring was The Song of Bernadette, which tells the story of the young girl who discovered the magical healing waters at Lourdes.

We actually had a bottle of water from Lourdes in the house. My mother dabbed it on my forehead whenever I had a fever. My father said it was tap water, and that he wished he’d thought of a scam that sweet.

Ahhh, my father.

Danny Sullivan was one of the loudest and most confrontational people in the world. Nobody could understand how he and my mother ever hooked up. In my mind I always figured that he must have repeatedly hollered out his proposal, and she agreed to marry him if he would promise to lower his voice.

That’s a cartoony version of what might have happened, but even cartoons contain a germ of truth. She was a sheltered Italian girl who’d never been far from home, while my old man had seen quite a bit of the planet’s watery surface during his two hitches in the navy.

He made his living as a subway motorman, but my old man never really left the navy. Around the house he was always using terms like “shipshape” and “swab the deck,” and the fact that I was never in any branch of the armed services probably galled him. If I’d been drafted and killed in Vietnam he would have cherished my memory, but the war ended before I turned eighteen and he was stuck with the reality of a living, breathing, moody teenager instead of a corpse that could not disappoint him.

One Sunday afternoon when I was about five years old my father fell asleep watching a football game on TV. He looked so comical lying there on the couch—hair askew, socks halfway off his feet, hairy belly exposed—that I couldn’t help giggling at the sight of him. Just then my mother appeared with his usual Sunday lunch on a tray—a longneck bottle of Budweiser, and a tuna salad sandwich on Wonder Bread. She was a wonderful cook, but this was the sort of food he preferred to eat. She looked at him, turned to me and said, “Sure gets quiet around here when he’s asleep, doesn’t it?”

We both covered our mouths to muffle our laughter. Nobody had to say a word about it, but in that moment, we became secret allies against the head of the house, a man we both suspected was a bit of a buffoon.

When it came to everyday life, just about everything went his way—where we went on vacation, what colors the rooms were painted—until it was time for me to attend school. That’s when my father found out that his wife not only contained a spine—she contained a spine that did not bend a millimeter on issues that mattered to her.

The old man wanted me to attend public school, free of charge, but my mother insisted that I attend a Catholic school. Personally I was indifferent to the issue but fascinated by the way she calmly and quietly stood her ground while he ranted and raved about what a waste of money Catholic school would be. He’d go on and on about it, and when he’d pause for breath she’d all but whisper matter-of-factly, “He’s going to Catholic school.” She almost sounded bored when she said it, and he didn’t know how to handle that.

All those years he’d thought he was in charge. Now he knew that he wasn’t. It was just that up until this point, his decisions hadn’t interfered with her passions. She didn’t mind conflict when one of her passions was at stake.

To make matters worse for my father, he was faced with an opponent who refused to behave as if a conflict was even going on. It drove him crazy. He literally pulled at his hair in frustration. The night it all came to a head I hid at the top of the stairs, a terrified five-year-old whose future was the subject of a raging battle going on downstairs.

“What the hell do you want him to be?” my father roared. “A priest?”

“No,” she said. “I just know that Catholic school will be better for his soul.”

“His soul!”

“You heard me.”

“What’s the real reason, Mary? Come on.”

“I just told you the real reason. Also, he won’t have to face a negative element in Catholic school.”

“Oh, you mean niggers?”

“Danny! That’s a horrible word.”

“Really? What’s worse, Mary, saying a word like ‘niggers’ or taking your kid out of a perfectly good school system to avoid them?”

“We are not having this conversation.”

“Oh yes, we are. Listen to me. This is the world, woman. People are people. They flood in and out of my subway cars every day and let me tell you, you might as well get to know them all, especially the black ones, because he will be dealing with them, one way or another. They are not exactly an endangered species.”

“Oh God, Danny, the way you speak!”

“I speak plainly, free of bullshit. You should try it some time. You’re sheltered, Mary. You sing in the choir and you bring food to sick parishoners because you think it buys you points in heaven—”

“I do these things because I like doing them!”

“Fine. Great. But I notice that all the people you help are white Catholics who believe in the same hocus-pocus as you.”

“My faith is not hocus-pocus!!”

“Your answer to our son’s education certainly is! Abracadabra, hocus-pocus! Stick him in Catholic school, and nothing bad can happen to him!”

“Do you want bad things to happen to him?”

“I want life to happen to him! I don’t want somebody telling him to say a prayer and light a candle when he should be figuring out ways to solve his own problems!”

They were silent down there for a few heartbeats, and then my mother cleared her throat and said, “Hear what I say, Danny. Sammy is going to St. Aloysius School in the fall.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“We certainly will.”

I had to run to my room because my mother was coming up the stairs to go to bed, while my father slammed the front door on his way to Charlie’s Bar. When he came in that night, he slept in the spare bedroom for the first time. It wouldn’t be the last time.

She was a true believer, my mother, attending the eleven o’clock Mass each Sunday and the seven o’clock Mass every morning during Lent. I went with her on Sundays, but she was on her own during Lent.

My father never went to church at all. She never even tried to get him to go. All her willpower was focused on one issue, the school issue, and at last he caved in. It was the first marital battle he’d ever lost.

The night before I was due to enroll at St. Aloysius, he did a strange thing. He’d been spending his spare time scraping the outside walls of the house to prepare it for a paint job. Now, at the dinner table, he announced that he was ready to start painting, and he wanted my mother to pick a color.

He was giving her a choice! Nothing like this had ever happened before!

My mother was both stunned and suspicious as she thought it over. He even gave her the sample sheets provided by Benjamin Moore, so she could study the little circles of paint before making up her mind.

She pored over the sheets for an hour. At last she decided she’d like the house to be painted robin’s egg blue. The previous color had been yellow.

“You sure that’s what you want, Mary?”

“Yes, Danny. Anything but that terrible yellow.”

“You got it, girl.”

He stayed behind the next day when we went to St. Aloysius. The enrollment process took most of the morning, and when we got home he was up on a ladder with a bucket, painting our little clapboard house. We stood and watched him, stunned at the sight. Suddenly his once-in-a-marriage offer made sense.

“How do you like that, Sammy?” my mother said. “Your father got even.”

He certainly had, and it was a master stroke, both literally and figuratively.

There he stood on the ladder, almost gleefully spreading bright yellow paint on the clapboard walls. He’d put a couple of empty cans in the curbside garbage pail, and I could read the labels: canary yellow. It was probably the brightest shade they made.

My mother looked at our rapidly yellowing house, took a deep breath, and began walking toward the ladder. My father glanced over his shoulder at us, but didn’t miss a stroke. I was so anxious that my heart felt as if it might pound right out of my chest. Would he pour the paint on her head? Would she pull the ladder away from the wall and make him fall?

This was it. They were going to kill each other, and I was going to be an orphan!

God, I had so much to learn about marital conflict. Sometimes you blow up on the spot, other times you let things marinate. My mother, I was learning, could marinate with the best of them. All she did when she got to the base of the ladder was ask my father if he needed any help.

“From who, you?” he asked, not taking his eyes off his work. “Forget it. You’d paint the Stations of the Cross all over the house. We’d have people genuflecting as they passed by.”

“Whatever you say, Danny,” she said pleasantly. She turned to me and winked. War had officially been declared at the Sullivan household, and it was us against him.

I didn’t like that. I didn’t like it at all. For the first time, I wished I had a brother, or a sister—somebody to be a true ally in this house where the uneasy peace we’d always known was gone for good.

I had to wear a green blazer with the school insignia on a patch over my breast pocket, and whenever my father saw me wearing it he’d throw me a mock salute.

“Closest thing you’ll ever get to a uniform!” he’d say.

The school cost about five hundred bucks a year, and he loved reminding my mother about how many times he had to make the subway trip from South Ferry to The Bronx to make five hundred bucks. It was actually a bullshit complaint, because by this time she’d taken a job as a receptionist at a medical center and was paying the tuition out of her own pocket.

The years passed. I graduated from St. Aloysius and moved on to Holy Cross High School. By this time I was working after school and weekends to make my own money, so I could pay for my books and my lunches. Everything seemed to be going pretty well, except that I was going to burn in hell for masturbating so much.

Yes, indeed. The catechism we studied in religion class said it was “seriously sinful, when deliberately indulged in.”

A great bit of information, eh? The sort of thing I never would have been taught, had I attended public school. And I believed it. I believed I was indulging in something that was seriously sinful.

That didn’t stop me from doing it, every chance I had. I wasn’t trying to be evil. On top of my raging hormones I just needed a little something to help me cut the tension in the house, and nothing worked better than masturbation. I was losing my soul, and there wasn’t even anybody I could talk to about it.

I kept going to Sunday Mass with my mother, but I stopped receiving Holy Communion, because I knew I was not in a “state of grace.” While everyone around me got up to take the magical wafer on their tongues I sat there alone among the pews, like a leper. My mother wanted to know what was wrong. Then she demanded to know what was wrong.

I would not say. I was shy to the point of mortification, and for the first time ever my mother and I were butting heads.

It was killing me. By this time conflict with the old man was a living state, like arthritis—I barely even noticed it anymore. But all it took was one sad-eyed look from my mother, and I was on the floor.

We grew further and further apart. She upped her own dosage of church, going every weekday morning to the seven o’clock Mass, Lent or no Lent. I still went with her on Sunday mornings, but one Sunday morning in September of my senior year I decided that routine was about to change.

I was nervous about what I had to do, so nervous that I’d jerked myself off both the night before and on the morning of my big announcement, and during the morning session I actually heard the church bells pealing for the ten o’clock Mass. I was both drained and nervous when my mother appeared at the door to my bedroom half an hour later to tell me to get ready for “the eleven.”

She was already dressed, a vision in black. The dress was snug on her because she’d been gaining a lot of weight, but it was still her favorite going-to-church dress. It made her look like a widow. Wishful thinking, I guess.

“You want to start getting ready,” she said. It was what she’d said to me on a hundred Sunday mornings, but not until now did I realize what a strange sentence it was. She was telling me what I wanted to do. How can anyone, even your mother, tell you what you want to do?

She couldn’t—not anymore. I pulled the covers to my throat, took a deep breath, and let it fly. “Mom. I’m not going.”

She stood her ground, stunned but undeterred. I hoped she’d go away, but she didn’t.

She stared at me. “Are you sick?”

“No.”

“Then why aren’t you going?”

“Because it’s all bullshit.”

She let out a cry I can still hear in nightmares, an inhuman sound, the wail of an animal caught in a steel-jawed trap. Down the hall, I could hear my father snoring. He went out drinking every Saturday night just so he could stick it to my my mother by sleeping late and nursing a hangover well into Sunday afternoon.

My mother stared at me in wide-eyed disbelief, as if I’d morphed into someone else, an absolute stranger, or maybe something even worse than a stranger…her husband.

She put a hand on the wall for support. “What exactly is bullshit?”

It was stunning to hear her use the word, even in this context.

“All of it,” I replied.

“Church?”

“Yes.”

“Prayer?”

“Absolutely.”

“God?”

“There is no God.”

She turned the color of cement. I hadn’t really meant what I’d said about God, but it was too late. The harpoon had found its mark, right through her heart. She even put her hands to her chest, as if she meant to grab the wooden shaft and yank it out, but instead she let her hands fall to her sides and gave me a smile both sad and pitying.

“I’m very sorry to hear you say that,” she said calmly, and I could see that her strength was returning. It was remarkable, almost scary that someone who’d been jarred so thoroughly could rally so fast. She was looking at me in a way she’d never looked at me before.

She was looking at me the way she looked at my father.

“Oh, Samuel,” she said in a voice that was soft but not gentle, “I’ve done all I could, but now my worst nightmare has come true. You have become your father.”

My scalp tingled. “Hey, Mom—”

“I fought it as hard as I could, but I can’t fight it anymore. Go ahead and be what he is. Forget the church. It’s too difficult a life, isn’t it? The time it takes, the discipline…” She sighed deeply. “I just wanted you to have a rich life. I didn’t think it was too much to ask, or expect.”

“All right, all right, I’m coming with you.”

“Why? So you can sit there and sulk? Sit there like a stone, refusing to receive Holy Communion? What’s the point?”

“Let me get dressed—”

“No.” She held up a hand. “You don’t understand. I don’t want you there. I forbid you to come with me.”

I could not believe what I’d just heard. Blood pounded in my temples. The world was collapsing all around me, as I stared at this stranger who used to be my mother.

“Mommy?”

“Go back to sleep for a few more hours. I guess that’s all you’re good for, anyway.” She patted my foot, like a doctor comforting an invalid. “Sure, take the easy way. Be like your father. Don’t respect anything. Make fun of the things people believe in. Lie in bed all day and pleasure yourself with your hand. You seem to be good at that.”

She knew. She knew! My faced was burning. I wanted to pull the blanket up over my head, but I felt paralyzed. All I could do was lie there in bed while my best friend in the world became my mortal enemy.

She patted my foot. “I’m taking you out of Holy Cross. No point attending a school you don’t believe in, is there?”

“Mom! I’m sorry!”

“No, you’re not. What a waste of time it’s been, trying to guide you. I should have realized it was hopeless long ago. Well, you know what they say—better late than never.” She looked at her watch, forced a chilling smile. “Speaking of late, I’d better get going.” She leaned over and pressed cold lips to my forehead in what was unmistakably a farewell kiss.

“I’m ashamed of you, Samuel. I never thought I could be, but I am.”

She turned and left the room. I was trembling. I got out of bed and began pacing around in my underwear, thinking I could walk off the trembles, but this was a rumble that came all the way from the core of my being. It felt as if my head was going to burst. I heard her footsteps going downstairs. In another few seconds she’d be gone. My bedroom window overlooked our front path. I opened it, leaned on the windowsill, and waited for her to appear.

There she was, directly below me. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I had to say something. All the rage and frustrations of my seventeen years had become twisted into one hard, ugly knot, which fit rather neatly into the slingshot of my mind. It was time to let it fly.

“Hey, Mom. Up here.”

She stopped, turned, looked up at me with what appeared to be mild curiosity. I could have spit on her from there, but that’s not what I did. If only that was what I’d done!

What I did was to clear my throat and say, slowly and clearly, “I wish you were dead.”

I was jolted by the sound of my own voice, but there was no way to unsay what I said, no way to pretend I didn’t mean it. At that moment, I meant every word of it. My mother’s eyes widened, and then she was smiling at me in a horrible, knowing way.

“I’m sure you do, Samuel,” she replied. “Shame you don’t believe in God anymore. You could pray for me to die.”

She winked at me, kissed her fingertips, and blew me a kiss before turning to resume her walk to church. Anyone watching this scene from across the street would have thought it was a mother and son exchanging loving words on a Sunday morning. I watched her go until she reached the end of the block and turned the corner, and then I knew exactly what I had to do.

I started packing to get out of that madhouse, once and for all.

I had no idea of where I was going, but I had to be out before my hungover father woke up and before my fanatical mother returned. I had maybe an hour.

Where could I go? I’d never been anywhere. I had a little over five hundred dollars in the house, saved up from all my odd jobs, and I figured that would be enough to take me someplace far from Flushing.

Plans raced through my head, like desperate ghosts chasing each other. I’ll rent an apartment (where?)…I’ll get a job (doing what?)…I didn’t know. How could I know? I was seventeen years old. All I could do was focus on the job at hand, which was to get all my stuff together and hit the road, any road, in any direction. The mission was all about motion, not destination.

I had to get a suitcase from the spare bedroom where my father slumbered. The curtains were closed. It was dark and hot, reeking of his sour beer breath. He continued his openmouthed snoring while I yanked the biggest suitcase I could find out of the closet, causing a minor avalanche of clothes and shoes that did not wake him.

I packed rapidly, taking only what I considered to be the essentials, but I still had to sit on the suitcase so I could get it closed. I hefted the thing—it was heavy, but I figured I could carry it to the bus stop if I got it up on my shoulder. I rolled all but twenty dollars of my money into a bankroll, stuck it in a sock, tied a knot in the end of it, and shoved it into the zipper pocket of my Windbreaker. Then I slipped the twenty dollar bill into my pocket, and made sure I had exact change for the bus. At last, I was ready to go.

My father was still snoring. Mass was still in session. I was going to make it, going to do this thing. I hefted the suitcase and started for the stairs. It was going to be a brand-new life for me, away from the two of them. I’d call them later today, or maybe tomorrow, or maybe never. The main thing was, I’d be out of it. Never again would I be stuck in the middle of the madness.

I got down the stairs and already I was breathing hard from the weight of the suitcase. I figured maybe I should open it up and leave some of my stuff behind, lighten up.

No, I decided—no more delays. Catch your breath, pick up the bag, and go.

And that’s what I meant to do, with every fiber of my being, except the phone started ringing as if it meant to jump off the hook. On the fifth ring I heard my father answer the upstairs phone in his gruff-sleepy voice, which I knew very well, followed by a cry of despair I didn’t think could possibly come from a man like him.

My mother dropped dead on the way to the communion rail that morning, less than an hour after I told her that I wished she was dead. She was not yet forty years old, but she was overweight and her heart had had enough.

That’s what everybody said, anyway. I was the only one who knew better.

A doctor standing behind her on the communion line did his best to revive her, but he was a podiatrist, and apparently anything north of the ankles was unexplored terrain for him. He probably couldn’t have done anything anyway. She was, as the priest distributing communion wafers put it, “dead before she hit the floor.”

More than that, she was dead before the final communion wafer could be placed on her tongue, and there were more than a few whispered laments in and about the church over this. Not that my mother hadn’t died in a state of grace—if there was a perfect parishoner, she was it. But that last wafer on her tongue would have been the cherry on the sundae, the golden pass to fling the Pearly Gates wide open for her arrival. Another ten or fifteen heartbeats, and she might have made it.

The phone call to our house had come from the pastor, who told my father that his wife had collapsed on the way to communion. He grabbed me and the two of us literally ran to church. He’d pulled on last night’s clothes and reeked of dead cigarette smoke, and he was literally whimpering as we burst into the church. I’d been there the Sunday before, of course, but this was probably my father’s first time inside a church since his wedding day.

My mother was stretched out on her back, right where she’d fallen. Somebody had placed a pillow beneath her head, and a priest’s vestment was draped over her body. There was an odd grin on her face, as if God had whispered the all-time joke into her ear just before stopping her heart. Her eyes were open, gazing straight up at the ceiling, through it, beyond it.

“Oh, Mary. Ohhh, Mary, what happened?”

Tears began to flow from my father’s eyes, but not mine. Everybody thought I was in a state of shock, but that wasn’t it. I was a murderer, and murderers don’t cry.

And through the shattering, stunning, beyond-belief grief I couldn’t help marveling at the power of this woman. In the last moments of her life, my mother had managed to defy all odds and get both me and my father to go to church.

An ambulance took the body away. My father and I went home to get ready to do all the things you do when a member of your family dies. My father was so completely out of it that he never even asked about the giant suitcase I’d packed, even though he practically tripped over it on his way up the stairs.

From then on, it was all a blur—the arrangements with the funeral parlor, the burial out on Long Island, the visits from casserole-carrying neighbors…How strange it was to be on the receiving end of sympathy casseroles! Through it all, I never told my father the fatal words I’d spoken to her before she went to church that final day. I never told anybody, until now.

Jake stares at me as I reach the end of the story, the way people look at a priest after a truly heartfelt sermon.

“Jesus, Dad. That’s pretty…operatic.”

“Let me say it now, if I’ve failed to mention it before, Jake—masturbation is not a sin.”

“Never thought it was.”

“In fact, it’s probably the leading prevention of violent crimes.”

Jake grins, shakes his head. “You okay?”

“Pretty good, considering that I killed my mother.”

“You didn’t kill her!”

“Were you listening to me? Did you hear what I said to her? I told her I wished she was dead. Minutes later, she died.”

“I say shocking shit to Mom all the time, and she’s still alive.”

“What kind of shit?”

“Like, ‘I refuse to take any more fucking cello lessons.’ Things like that. I may even have told her to drop dead once or twice.”

“That’s different. ‘Drop dead’ is an expression, something you say when you’re angry. What I said was mean and cruel and…deliberate.”

“She said some pretty nasty things to you, too.”

“Not as bad as what I said.”

“Dad. You’re wrong. You’re blaming yourself for no reason.”

“I think there’s a reason.”

“Is that why you dropped out of school?”

“I dropped out because none of it made any sense to me anymore.”

“I can relate to that.”

“My father had no problem with it. He thought I was going to enroll at the local public school. He got the tuition back and left it all to me.”

And as I speak those words, I remember claiming my own tuition refund from Peter Plymouth, just yesterday. My God. History repeats itself yet again in the Sullivan family.

“Hang on, hang on,” Jake says. “Your father left it up to you to find a new school and enroll there?”

“Correct.”

“So you just didn’t bother enrolling?”

“That’s about the size of it. By the time he found out what I’d done, I was a copyboy at the New York Star. Got a taste of ink, and that was that. Had my first byline when I was eighteen, and two years later I was a full-time reporter. No way I was ever going to sit in a classroom again.”

“How’d you get the job at the Star?”

“I…sort of knew somebody there.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter. Point is, I went and did it.”

Jake slumps back on the bench, awed by what he’s heard. “The balls on you, Dad!”

I have to admit, it’s a good thing to hear. “Yeah, I guess it did take balls. It was also a stupid thing to do.”

“Why?”

“Because my life could have been different. It could have been better.”

“You think?”

“Sure. With the right education, I could have gone another way, instead of wasting my life cranking out crap for the New York Star.”

“Yeah, but I never would have been born.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’d never have been a newspaperman, and you’d never have gone to that movie premiere, and you’d never have met Mom.”

This kid of mine, and the things he comes out with.

“I guess you’re right about that.”

I’m actually feeling a little better. It feels good to unload my secret, the kind of good you feel when nausea finally passes and a light, cooling sweat breaks out all over your skin.

Jake pats my shoulder. “Everything happens for a reason, Dad.”

“Is that so? Maybe I’ll understand it better when I’m your age.”

“I’m not just saying this stuff because I’m your son. You’ve been beating yourself up for a long time, and you should stop.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But you deserve a break.”

My face is wet. Tears are rolling down my cheeks. I cannot believe how hard my son is working to make me feel better. He actually wipes my tears with the back of his hand.

“You’re quite a guy, Dad. You did amazing things with your life, when you were just a kid. A kid without a high school diploma!”

“Hey. That doesn’t mean you don’t need one.”

“I know, I know.”

“I do have an eighth grade diploma from St. Aloysius. And I won the English medal, if memory serves. Even then I could serve up the bullshit pretty good.”

“Pretty well.”

“Yes, that’s correct. I was just testing you. Glad to see they taught you some useful things at that school.”

I smile at Jake, who shakes his head in wonder.

“Your father must have been pretty impressed with you.”

“Nah, he barely knew what was going on in my life. We pretty much just coexisted in the house after my mother died. We ate in front of the TV to break the silence. I’m sure he was relieved when I moved out.”

“Why?”

I sigh, shrug, rub my eyes. “He probably suspected that I’d upset her badly just before she died.”

“No way!”

“Deep down, I think he blamed me for what happened.”

“You should have told him what you told me! He’d have understood. It’s too bad you didn’t clear the air before he died.”

My hands are shaking. I squeeze them together to calm them. Another bus stops and the driver opens the door for us and waits, until Jake waves him away.

“Thing of it is, Jake, the guy’s still alive, as far as I know.”