Firesale
Louis Forgione
January 18th, 1987, a cold Chicago evening. As they were exiting the theater, sixteen-year-old Mikey and his father were still reflecting on the 7 PM showing of the war film they had watched and the psychological implications of taking another life. It was a horror Mikey’s father would not allow him to experience, as Mr. Macrillo knew well enough how it had affected his own father, over forty years prior. A blast of frigid air struck the two as the theater doors swung open.
“Dad, you ever kill anyone in Nam?” Mikey’s question stunk of naivety and youthful bluntness to his father, but he felt the need to ask, if only to keep his teeth from chattering any more on the way to the parking lot.
“Tank division, son. Nobody I could see, I can tell you that much.” The father and son shared a chuckle as the former went to reach for his lighter and pack of cigarettes.
“Think my smokes are in the car. Let’s get a move on.” Their ride home was at the end of a long lot, off in the distance but visible. The cold air began to cut into their coats as their fingers began to stiffen and experience an occasional twitch. With each plop of his winter boots onto the asphalt, Mikey thought of the history test he had tomorrow.
“You think Mr. Ericsson was in Vietnam?” Mikey’s continued prodding wasn’t unfounded, for as boring as he found his history teacher’s voice, he found the subject matter interesting in equal measure: slicing through jungle and overgrown vines, flushing out hidden tunnels and waterways of what Mr. Ericsson described as baddies sounded like, at the very least, good television. The humor Mikey derived from it, of course, was a gross oversimplification of one side in favor of the other. ‘Baddies’? We serious? he thought.
“As far as I’m concerned, he might as well have not been there at all. You’ve told me what he’s called those people. Can’t fault ‘em really, though. When the only point of view you’ve got to work with is the tube in your living room, you’re not gonna get the whole story. What matters is that your dad was there, and he came back with half-a mind not to call goat farmers just trying to live their lives ‘baddies’.” Mikey sensed his father could go on for hours about the dangers of mischaracterization. It was personal to him after he’d returned home to Chicago, Mikey could tell, though he had no firsthand knowledge of the pre-war version of his father.
As far as Mikey had known, the introspective, reserved Richard Macrillo—Dad— was all that ever existed. When pressed about his past and the late sixties, in particular, he would give an anecdote about how he met Mikey’s mother or how Hugo burnt a pizza a congressman had ordered because he didn’t like the implications his last piece of legislation had on people ‘whose last name ended in a vowel.’
That was as far as the two of them would get that night when a four-door sedan that neither father nor son could parse the make of screeched and drifted in front of them, leaving harsh skid marks on the pavement. The purring engine began to calm itself down as the car was set in park.
Two men in pressed white suits and black ski masks stepped out of the black Lincoln Town Car adjacent to Mr. Macrillo’s vehicle. The larger of the two men looked to his partner and motioned with his head to Mikey’s father. Both pairs stopped in their tracks.
“You missed your last three payments, Richie. You wanna explain that to the man himself?” The thinner and shorter man stepped up to Mikey’s father. He maintained an air of intimidation with his broad shoulders, as what he could not bring to the table in height he made up with in width. The two men were face-to-face, the skeevy, clean-shaven—at least based on what the ski mask didn’t cover—gangster contrasted with the hard-working, bearded father. Mikey could tell his father was masking fear as he gazed upon his father’s hands that were no longer twitching from the cold but from anger. More than a few times Mr. Macrillo attempted to ball fists, but each time his fingers came close to curling in unison rage, he fought off the urge. Mikey could surmise that his father was in deep, and to make a movement that had the remote chance of making him seem belligerent would do Richie no favors.
“Goddamn animals. In front of my son, no less,” Mr. Macrillo muttered angrily, then raising his voice declared, “you’re not getting the money. I told you.”
“You wanna get smart, now?” the chilling enforcer said with threatening eyes and an unnerving grin visible through his ski mask.
“You wanna bleed someone else dry? Dime-a-dozen—” Mr. Macrillo was interrupted with a merciless backhand to the face by the enforcer. The size of the man gave a false impression of how much force he could put behind an abrupt strike. The taller man stepped forth.
“Get him in the back with Frank, and make sure he doesn’t pull anything. I don’t want it done here.” He glared at the terrified Mikey and chuckled. He forgot the name as soon as he heard it. What did a name matter while his father was being shaken down for all he’s worth?
“You piece of—” before Mikey could act, he was met with a swift yet overwhelming shove to the chest by the larger man, pushing him away from helping his father, as another fist connected with Mr. Macrillo’s stomach.
“Don’t be stupid, kid. As you’re soon to find out, that could cost you.” Mikey couldn’t make out the accent. Chicago? He had to be concealing it, or the depth his voice reached had wiped away the Midwest inflection for a moment.
Mikey stood threatened and helpless, his eyes lowered to see his father, restrained by a third enforcer who’d eluded his sight, ready to haul him into the Town Car. This third figure baffled Mikey. The fact that this hulking individual could elude his sight in such a tense situation made his blood run even colder. A moment later, his eyes met his father’s.
Richard Macrillo fixed his contorted face for his son to see for just a moment. Looking upon his father’s brave veneer, Mikey wondered for a second—that could have been an eternity—if his father knew something he did not. Perhaps the visual was meant to be a memento, stored in the deepest recesses of the boy’s mind. For a moment the assailants let up—an opportunity Mr. Macrillo took advantage of.
“Michael. Get in the car and go home, now.” The red-suited giant gave a chuckle and fished the keys out of Mr. Macrillo’s coat pocket and chucked them at Mikey. Throwing his right arm up into the air, he managed to catch the far-flung lanyard with just his index and middle fingers.
The man then let out a belly laugh before exclaiming,”Yeah, you do that, kid. Head on home…” He then threw the protective father into the backseat of the Town Car. The two accomplices followed his lead after a bit of bickering over who would do it. What it was could not be deciphered by Mikey at the time, dazed as he was, though he knew he had heard the larger, commanding man bark orders over Mr. Macrillo’s groans as he clutched his side.
“He personally disrespected me. No halfsies on this one, this moron’s mine.” With that, they ducked into their vehicle, but not before shooting Mikey their respective glares one last time. The sound of burning rubber could be heard, the screech sounding even more abrasive in the middle of winter. They’d left in a blur, the same way they’d arrived.
The lot was empty now. Mikey, now in the driver seat of his father’s car, turned the key in the ignition. With a pit in his stomach, he looked around the vehicle from behind the steering wheel, as if a rite of passage had come all too soon. It was a blue 1970 Camaro, bought by his father to take a then-newborn Mikey and his mother home to their apartment in West Loop. The family would make a similar trip ten years later when Mikey met his newborn sister, Julia. He had hoped to discuss with his father the familial history behind the car one day. He was a month away from obtaining his license, a seminal event in the city he lived in.
With one last look at the worn passenger seat he’d sat in on the way there, Mikey took off for his family’s apartment from the theater lot with a contorted expression teetering between tears and raucous cries of simmering anger. He looked upon a cassette sitting on the center console, one that was fashioned by his mother months earlier, outside of the port from which it would play the likes of The Whispers and Four Tops. Mrs. Macrillo always loved funk music. Mikey’s driving stabilized from frantic twitching at the wheel to a firm grip as he remembered Grandpa Pete watching him while his mother and father went to see a Detroit Spinners concert, almost ten years ago at that point.
His hands shaking on the steering wheel as he navigated the frozen city streets, Mikey found his mind racing through numerous scenarios, and each one shared a commonality: he’d never see his father again. His thoughts weaving in and out of preemptive grief, he had also considered what the gargantuan enforcer had told him about going home. Too analytical for his own good, Mikey was paying the price by numbing his mind with repetitious worry.
Tomorrow he had a full day of tests: history, math, physics—the subject taking his full attention being Mr. Ericsson’s class. John F. Kennedy’s presidency seemed worlds away from the real, pressing situation in Mikey’s life, so why did he have to take a test and write an essay on him? Real. Mikey thought on what real was for his teachers: Hey, my dad’s gone missing! You think I could get an extension on that paper? It sounded ridiculous, to be honest to the point of being looked at funny by those controlled by a neurotic sense of individualism. The Soviets are in some desert bombing brown people, what would it look like to ask for help from the outside? Gripped by the same individualism for which he was nursing contempt, Mikey gave a deep sigh of respite, remembering the penitent worldview a Catholic upbringing had gifted him.
Feeling more than a few wrinkles in his forehead forming, Mikey gave his head a violent horizontal shake to rid himself of it as he turned onto his street, East Randolph. His expression turning from fear to horror, he began to realize seeing a movie with his father on a school night would be the least of his troubles come tomorrow.
Neighbor and common passerby alike were standing in the street, terrified but unable to look away from the work perpetrated by either the same men Mikey had come face-to-face with earlier, or friends of theirs. As he parked much further away than normal from his apartment, Mikey had stepped out of the vehicle to find his mother and sister in the crowd. If he could find them.
“Mom? Mom?! Mom, it’s Mikey! Where are you?” His voice shook with the first call for his mother, as if the events of the night had both forced him to grow up and revert back to a state of infantile helplessness. Pushing through the crowd of what had to be over thirty people, Mikey happened upon his family, fractured by Mr. Macrillo’s unexpected absence.
“Mikey!” His sister wrapped her arms around his waist. The orange reflection within the six-year-old’s eyes was a surreal sight to her brother, but he managed to turn his attention to his mother after accepting Julia’s embrace.
“Oh my God, Michael! You’re alright! Wait, where’s your father? Where is he?” A pause. Mikey could hear a pin drop in spite of the crowd’s uproar. Saying I don’t know wouldn’t do.
“Some guys jumped us while we were leaving the theater.” He began to feel lightheaded. “There were…three? Four? It was a blur. They were well-dressed…suits. Very good suits. Suits you don’t…” He broke off.
“What? What about them? Michael, please!” Mrs. Macrillo was desperate now. This wasn’t a mother or a wife speaking. This was Marie pleading with Mikey. He took a gulp of cold air, his fear morphing into an anger that had been waiting to surface for half an hour.
“Suits you don’t wear to beat the life out of a grown man who made the mistake of working for a goddamn living!” Michael barked through gritted teeth, inheriting his father’s harsh cadence. Julia tensed up, surprised at hearing her brother so enraged. Stuck in a limbo of childish petulance and tempered rage characteristic of the adults in his life, Mikey balled up and squeezed both fists, complemented with a snarl on his face and nostrils flaring. A moment later he sighed, his anger converting to determination, difficult as the situation was.
“I know, honey. They’re bullies, evil people.” Her subsequent sigh carried a defeatist tone that revealed her resignation, as if she knew her husband’s troubles could only end this one, fixed way. Marie Macrillo went on, “The fire department was called five minutes ago. It’ll be an uphill battle with insurance, but they’re not as bad as the people that did this.”
“They’re still leeches,” Mikey remarked with indignation. “Remember when we had that broken water main a year ago? We lost two whole weeks! That one pizza we did make was the worst I’d ever tasted.” He let out an inaudible chuckle, finding any solace he could.
“I liked it!” Julia attempted to mitigate the tension at the scene of the inferno that engulfed what was once the site of the Macrillo family pizzeria and home. The truth of this night couldn’t be explained to her any time soon, as far as her mother was concerned.
“Jewels, did Rock get his flea bath before all this?” Mikey asked his sister as he had just remembered his family owned a dog in the midst of the terror his neighborhood now faced. He attempted to stay in the moment, to grasp at any shred of normalcy that remained in his life. The Border Collie wrapped around Julia’s leg in a protective stance had turned four last month and had favored the girl ever since Mr. and Mrs. Macrillo purchased him from a breeder friend in Milwaukee who was visiting Marie’s parents. Mikey was with Grandpa and Grandma Battaglia when the deal was made but had listened to the story of how his two-year-old sister picked the puppy out herself with a wide smile plastered on his face.
“I…I wanna sit down. Where’d you park the car, Michael?” His mother a wreck, Mikey brought all of them to the Camaro. As if by instinct, Rock hopped into the driver-side back seat as Julia let go of his leash at Mikey’s suggestion.
“Mom, after you.” Michael maneuvered into the passenger seat from the driver’s side without thinking, awkward movements landing him in a spot from which he needed to adjust. Julia had an easier time by virtue of being smaller and having to move over the center console to her own spot behind her brother. The four remained silent for a time, not even Rock whimpered.
Though Mikey hadn’t spoken it aloud, Mr. Macrillo’s absence was a silent, unsettling dirge within the vacuum of their family. Marie knew it, and he knew it. A few moments later the fire department had arrived, and not far behind them, the police followed.
Louis Forgione is currently a third-year student (undergrad class of 2024) with sights set on the five-year Ed. M program offered by the Rutgers Graduate School of Education.