The Saga of George

The career of the famed mob boss gets off to a bad start when he kills a man who might have been his father. The dead man has a twin brother who wants revenge. George can save himself by marrying a girl picked for him. Unfortunately, he falls in love. BUY NOW or BUY AUDIOBOOK

George stared at the pretty girl at the adjacent picnic table. She sat with her family, all of them blond and perfect, the men in boots and starched jeans, the women in western skirts. In contrast, he sat with his family, eleven Greeks, enough for a football team. They wore their ethnic uniforms—floral dresses for the women and khaki work pants for the men. The only variation was One-Eye, his great grandmother, who always dressed in black.

The girl stared back.

He tried not to get excited, assuming she was looking at something behind or beyond, and he only thought she was staring at him. That was how life worked. You got all stirred up by the proximity of all that beauty and interpreted events from your own pathetic bias and escalated from staring to gawking to outright ogling only to realize she was looking at the big, strapping high school fullback who happened to be standing behind you.

There was no one else around, though. She laughed like she knew what he was thinking,

A breeze gusted off the bay and rippled through her hair, which was wild and free, not like the coiffed helmet hair of the other women at her table. She wasn’t dressed like the others either. She wore faded jeans and a white muslin cotton blouse that rustled in the breeze along with her hair. She looked like—a hippie.

He sat fused between Mother and Uncle Nick. The Holy Trinity they were. Nick checked his Rolex, and Mother checked her Lady Seiko. While the white people had better clothes, the Greeks had better watches. Nick swapped marijuana for them, and everyone had a good one, even One-Eye, who could barely see and was too senile to tell time.

George looked at his, a Timex chronograph with dials, a stopwatch, and a display of the phases of the moon. It was almost time to meet the courier, so he ratcheted up the flirtation, leaning toward the girl and smiling big.

She smiled too.

Mother noticed the drama and raised an eyebrow. When Nick saw what was happening, he shuddered. In their Pantheon, skinny blondes were right up there with demons, and they did not want George tempted. He, The One with the Precocious Vocabulary, would be needed in the inevitable battle with their sworn enemy, Lazarus.

Bold action was needed if he were to get her phone number. Rising from the cement bench, extricating himself from the suffocating embrace of family, he unfurled himself to his full five foot seven inches and fixed a steely, manly gaze on her.

She looked him up and down, and he started toward her.

She stood too!

Everyone at both tables froze, their mouths in mid-chew, forks in mid-air. It looked like a tableau on the Parthenon. Only One-Eye didn’t know what was happening. Her empty socket, permanently shut from glaucoma surgery, faced the girl, so she didn’t see a thing, and she kept yakking in Greek about some dispute over olive groves back in her village when she was a girl. Finally, even she realized there was a problem, and she turned and focused her good eye on George and then at the temptress. When she realized the girl was a xenia, a stranger, her mouth dropped open in shock.

An older man, had to be the girl’s father, stood and grabbed her wrist to keep her in place, and a young man jumped up and stood in front of George. About George’s age, but a full head taller, he wore fancy snake-skin cowboy boots and a bright blue shirt with pearl snaps. What a caricature of a cowboy. He had a square jaw that jutted forward; his pearl snaps glistened in the sunlight. He leaned forward and scowled. Was he her boyfriend? That square jaw beckoned, and George was about to punch it, knowing the guy wasn’t expecting it. How surprised would he be when his head got knocked back? His eyes would roll up in their sockets, and his body would crumble and fall to the ground.

Merriment reigned in the rest of the park. People sang happy birthday at one table, men drank beer and turned steaks on a grill at another, teenagers threw a softball in an open field, children played tag, squealing with delight.

But that was all far away. All that existed was that jaw. And the girl. What would be the outcome of that blow? A race riot? Would the others in the park be drawn into the melee, choosing sides based on skin color? Would the hostilities escalate into the looting of nearby stores? Would it rival the Detroit race riot of the previous long hot summer? Would it be called the Greek vs. Cowboy Fourth of July Barbecue Riot?

“George,” the voice of reason called. It was Mother, standing behind him, talking in his right ear, putting herself at risk if the punches flew. “What are you doing?”

What was he doing? Fighting over a white girl he didn’t even know? The laws of the cosmos were immutable, set in concrete, etched on stone tablets. White people stayed with white people. Brown people stayed with brown people. Blacks stayed with blacks. And Greeks remained with Greeks. He would be a fool to chuck two thousand five hundred years of collective Greek history into the wastebasket to chase after a white girl.

He stormed past everyone and headed toward the bay.

But when he looked back, she was looking at him. Framed by the green grass and blue sky, she hadn’t moved.

That made him stop.

Who said everything was preordained? It was 1968, for God’s sake. The world was going crazy. Boys were letting their hair grow long, and girls were burning their bras. Kids were smoking pot and listening to rock and roll records and fucking people they barely knew in the back seats of their parents’ cars. Why couldn’t he have a girlfriend who wasn’t Greek?

Her father had a firm grip on her wrist, though. She squirmed, but he wouldn’t let go.

Lest he turn into a pillar of salt, George turned and kept walking, lust bubbling inside him like he was a cauldron.

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The fragrant salt air and sea breeze calmed him. He walked past the jetty to the crowded pier where fishermen hawked their wares. One fisherman, big and burly, stood in front of his boat. His face was sunburned and peeling, one of those pale faces that probably never tanned but went straight from white to red. He had a gap between his two front teeth. A younger man, barely older than George, stood behind him and scowled to reveal an identical gap between his front teeth. Had to be father and son.

“Help a good ol’ Texas boy out,” Gap-Tooth the Father called out to a young couple strolling the pier. “Buy a few fish from me. When I fill out my income tax, I can’t put that my occupation is a lady’s man. I’ve got to make at least a few sales to stay legitimate.”

The couple laughed and gave him money. The Father wrapped the fish in newspaper, but they didn’t like the smell and shoved them back. They let him keep the money, though. What a sweet deal. Gap-Tooth could report the cash or not report it. He could eat the fish or resell them. There was no way for anyone to know if there had been any fish at all.

Was this something his family might apply to their own business?

Pondering this, he hiked back. Mother and Nick waited at the picnic table, pacing like they were outside a hospital emergency room, both obsessively checking their watches. As soon as they saw him, they waved frantically. “Time to go,” Nick yelled.

Only fossils of the girl remained. Half-eaten platters of barbecue, a Styrofoam cup with lipstick on the rim, crumpled-up napkins.

Nick owned a Greek-blue 1958 Olds. George settled into the back seat and waited for them to say something about the girl. Any second, like predators, they would pounce. They never yelled, never hit. They relied on shame. A head shake and a disapproving glance punctuated by the word for shame—dropeé— hurt more than a punch.

Mother turned to him. Her face was grim. He braced himself.

“Lazarus’s brother got out of Joliet prison today. We got word right before the picnic.”

This wasn’t what he expected. He knew Lazarus had a brother, but he’d been in prison forever. They rarely talked about him.

“His name is Joey, right? And Lazarus and Joey are identical twins, right?”

“Yes,” she said.

He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. And she never said anything about the girl, either.

They stored the marijuana at Nick’s house, a massive two-story Victorian on a tree-lined boulevard of meticulously maintained mansions in The Land That Time Forgot. Once the homes and second homes of oil millionaires and rice farmers, this one had fallen into Nick’s hands. George didn’t know what he’d done to get it, but you didn’t get big houses for selling watches and marijuana.

It had grown steadily more dilapidated over the years. The porch sagged, weeds choked the yard, and most of the gingerbread and spindle decorations had fallen from the roofline. Desperate to hang onto their village roots, they maintained a chicken coop alongside the house, unfazed by the fact that the neighbors would have nothing to do with them and never even said hello.

Nick ran inside, carefully stepping over a loose board in the steps, and emerged a minute later with a burlap bag slung Santa-clause style across his back. The next-door neighbor, a perky young woman, peeked out her blinds of them.

George sank into the upholstery. The world was a dangerous place. The neighbors were suspicious of them; he was lusting after a xenia; Joey was out of prison.

George and Mother lived a few miles away in a modest, two-story wood-frame house on a narrow lot between two bungalows. Its best feature, and the reason they’d bought the place, was its detached garage, which sat at the end of the driveway, and was barely visible from the street.

There was a padlock made of case-hardened steel on the side door to the garage. The neighborhood might burn down or get knocked all to hell by a hurricane, but that lock would survive.

George unlocked it and put it in his pocket, then helped them stack the marijuana bricks in the storage cabinets at the back of the garage. When the car with Illinois plates arrived, Nick raised the overhead garage door. George went into the house and watched from a window to ensure no one disturbed them. The hillbilly neighbors on one side weren’t home. Their hound dog napped on the porch. The childless couple who lived on the other side wasn’t home either. No one walked the street.

Time passed. Five minutes. Ten minutes. The padlock weighed down his jeans. He took it out and played with it, locking and unlocking it, and then accidentally dropped it. It hit his big toe. Boy, did that hurt, even though he wore tennis shoes. You could bash someone’s skull in with that.

The side door opened abruptly, and Nick tromped out scowling and raised the overhead door. He looked at George and shook his head. The courier drove away, a smirk on his mouth. Mother, also scowling, came out with two brown paper sacks with the outline of a box inside each one. Way too big for watches. They came into the house, and she set them on the kitchen table.

“Cameras,” she said. She might as well have been talking about lumps of coal. “They sent cameras instead of watches. No one up there in Chicago said anything about cameras.”

She slid a sack across to George, and he pulled the box out and set it on the table. It was a Nikon camera. He spun it around to examine each side. Maybe, if one didn’t sell, he’d get it. “Wow, this is neat. I bet it’s expensive.”

“That’s the problem,” Nick moaned. “Watches are one thing. Everyone wants a watch or jewelry, and we sell them so cheap compared to the stores that we can sell as many as we get. But these are expensive cameras. Who’s going to spend a lot of money on a camera? Maybe if we got a load of Brownies or Polaroids. You pay a few bucks for one of those, more for the Polaroid. You take them out of the box, and you get good pictures. But these cameras, Nikons, you got to pay a lot for these, and who the hell knows how to use them. Boy, Chicago got the better end of the deal on this one. They must have gotten them and didn’t know what to do with them, so they dumped them on us.”

Mother and Nick looked at each other.

“Lazarus,” they said simultaneously.

“He is behind it all,” she said. “He fixed it so this delivery would be on the same day we heard about Joey.”

The afternoon shadows grew long and melded with their gloom. One ray of light fell across the table and highlighted his skin. He was a shade lighter than everyone else in the family. That coloration had to have come from his father. He’d been told his father’s name was Mike, but he’d never met him, didn’t know if he was alive or dead, never seen a picture. He was an ancient myth. Mike came down from the heavens with wings on his cap and sandals, got Mother the Beautiful pregnant, and flew back up into the clouds.

He looked at his skin and then their darker skin.

“Lazarus is blond-headed and light-skinned, right? So I guess his twin brother is too.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Why was Joey in prison?”

“Murder,” she said.

“What happened?”

She hesitated. “We were all involved. Lazarus, me, Nick, Joey. Joey took the fall. He and Lazarus blame us. It’s how Nick got the big house. It’s why we moved down here.”

“And the murder happened right about the time I was born?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any pictures of Lazarus or Joey?”

“We left Chicago with barely the clothes on our back,” she said. “There are no pictures.” She paused. “Look, George, there might be a fight with Joey out of prison.”

“Is there any way to avoid a fight?” George asked. “Maybe we could talk to them and negotiate.”

“You can’t trust Lazarus,” she said. “Even if he says he’s with us, he’ll stab us in the back.”

“Maybe there’s something new we could offer them to make peace,” George said. “It’s 1968. Time for change. Every day on the radio, it’s the same message. Times are changing. We have to change with them. The Beatles and The Doors and the other groups are the new prophets.”

Nick crossed himself. “God, save us! What’s wrong with the old prophets? Moses and Noah and all those guys? What kind of crazy stuff are you talking about?” He looked at his Rolex. “We’re late, we’re late,” he said like the White Rabbit. “They’re waiting for watches at The Silver Bar, and we’ve got to try to sell cameras. Come on, George.”

They’d never allowed him to go to The Silver Bar. “But I’m underage.”

Nick chuckled. “Like you said, it’s time for change. It’s time for you to go to The Silver Bar.”

As the rough beast slouching to Bethlehem, George was coming of age..  BUY NOW

Crack, crack, crack.

His wife and his petherá were cracking pecans.

They scowled when he entered the kitchen. Had some old flame surfaced and made false accusations—or worse, true ones?

“What?” he asked in English.

They kept cracking, their movements synchronized as if they were different appendages of the same being. Dressed in black, obviously mother and daughter, dark-haired and large-breasted, they looked like they belonged in a village with the donkeys braying outside and a church bell tolling in the distance.

“It’s going to be five years,” Maria said in Greek.

George stuck to English. “Five years?”

They cracked hard like they were smashing his nuts and waited for him to figure out what they wanted. It was like a game show, and he didn’t have the answer, not even a fucking clue. Their air-conditioner, a top-of-the-line unit, pumped quiet, steady air; coffee perked on the stove; something, chicken, he thought, baked in the oven. Outside, in the withering heat, their gardener roared past on their John Deere riding mower, leaving a wake of grass blades on the acre of manicured lawn.

When the sound of the mower faded, his petherá hissed like a rattlesnake. “Five years since my husband died."

It was a punch in the gut. Old dead Manoli had to be venerated on the five-year anniversary, and George—the mobster for a new age—should have remembered.

“Of course, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” he said, sliding into his seat at the head of the table, acting like he hadn't forgotten. “This is an important event,” he said in formal Greek, not the conversational Greek they usually spoke, trying hard to show respect to the old bag.

The petherá —the mother-in-law—had her place in the universe along with the serpents and mosquitoes and cockroaches and the various assorted plagues and calamities. George accepted God’s plan even though he did not understand it, and he continued in his conciliatory tone. “You’re making baklavá for the five-year memorial.”

Maria barely waited for the words to get out of his mouth. “We talked to the priest. We will have it this Sunday. Our daughters will come into town. We’ll have a meal here.”

Few people deserved less fanfare than Manoli. Even his demise, a heart attack after gorging himself on lamb at a wedding and then dancing a fast Kalamatianó, left little to admire. “Of course, of course. I’ll be back from Chicago by Friday, and I don’t have anything to do this weekend. It will work fine. Just tell me what you need.”

They knew he’d be back Friday, knew he had nothing to do over the weekend, knew how many times he’d take a crap and how many sheets of toilet paper he’d use. Why were they having this discussion? He popped a pecan into his mouth and waited for their next move.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

Maria went in for the kill. “We want a big celebration. Dinner and a party at the Zeus and Hera on Saturday night. We’ll get Jimmy and the Corinthians to play all the old songs. You know how my father loved them. Then, the memorial at the church on Sunday and a meal here. We want to invite some of the Chicago relatives. My aunts and my brothers and the two Marias. And my koumbára. And her family, including her sisters. And if we invite them, then we have to invite Pano, and if we invite him—”

He smashed his fist on the table; pecans bounced into the air. “No. It gives me a headache thinking about it. They’ll camp out here for days, smoke cigarettes, drink all my whiskey, clog our toilets. And if you invite Pano, you have to invite—” The pecan caught in his throat, and he almost choked. “—Lazarus. He tried to have me killed. Have you forgotten? I will not allow him in this house.”

“There’s been peace for so long. He won’t cause trouble.” Her voice hardened. “It is the five-year memorial. How many more times will my father be dead for five years?” She paused. “We invited your mother. We called her at her ranch and told her she could bring her boyfriend.”

They were pulling out all the stops.

“We invited your Uncle Nick too, but, you know, he can’t come.”

Nick had fled to Greece one step ahead of the Feds, leaving George the caretaker of the house and businesses, but they pretended he was just off for an extended vacation and always invited him to the big events.

Maria and his petherá laid their nutcrackers on the table and awaited his answer. He looked at the large icon of Christ Pantocrator on one wall and then at an equally large framed photo of Pano on the opposite wall. There could be no simmering family discord before the Panayías holiday, nothing to upset Nick or Pano. And most of all, there could be nothing to pique the interest of Lazarus, the scumbag convert. The anger pulsed in his temples.

“Sure, sure, go ahead. But not Lazarus. I will not allow him in our house.”

“Anything you say.”

Maria and her mother picked up their nutcrackers and started cracking. Angry at being outmaneuvered, George jumped to his feet and snatched the attaché case with the bribe money from the cabinet under the sink where he had left it.

“If you’re worried about Lazarus, you need a bodyguard to go around with you,” Maria said. “I always tell you to get one, and you never listen. And stop meeting Beto at the mall. Everybody knows about your art gallery there. People think you’re getting soft.”

His petherá tapped her head with her middle finger. “Your brains are soft like yogurt.”

He hurried toward the door.

“I’m cooking chicken and potatoes tonight,” Maria yelled after him. “Don’t be late. It’ll be ready at five. And I need you to pick up a tub of feta at the Zeus and Hera on your way home.”

The suffocating, humid air, redolent with the smell of the nearby refineries, clubbed him as soon as he stepped outside. There was no breeze. The tyrannical yellow sun hovered over the spires of the house. Moss hung straight down off the live oaks. Sweat gushed from his body, and God’s plan became clear. He had sent his family to dwell in Houston because it was a foretaste of Hell, the place he was sure to spend all eternity.

The gardener rounded the house at full speed, looking like an Indy race car driver. Not wanting to kill the famed mob boss, he veered sharply, and a gust of wind, probably the only gust during the whole fucking day, caught the clippings and showered them on George. It was hard to look suave with grass blades fluttering about you, but he never faltered in his practiced nonchalance and escaped up I-45 to the mall, weaving through traffic in his long, lean black Jag, the air conditioner on high, all the vents pointed at his face.