ELECTRIC CITY
Angelo knew there was trouble from the frantic gait of Franny’s walk, how she shoved open the glass doors of the Ritz and scanned the lobby not with familiarity, but with panic. She locked eyes with him standing behind the concession stand in his red bowtie and marched in his direction, her flats squeaking across the polished floors. Little Jimmy made for the register, but Angelo told him, “I got it.” They’d already started the late show on both screens—Jaws 2 and Capricorn One—and the Ritz was dead even for a Thursday night. Hooper one-sheets hung throughout the lobby, and Angelo felt watched by Burt Reynolds, his oversized pupils drilling into him unlike anything he’d ever felt before.
“Angelo.” Franny set her enormous black purse on the counter. “It’s Frankie. He’s in trouble.”
Angelo told Little Jimmy to go mop the bathrooms. Then he retrieved his toothpick from behind his ear and set it over his lower lip, between two chalky molars. He’d been best friends with Frankie and Franny ever since they were kids, had marched up the aisle of St. Anthony’s with them to receive their first communions. They were 23 years old now, and most of their friends had long ago retreated into backbreaking jobs at Tobyhanna or Scranton Lace. Franny served up soda pop at Abe’s Jewish round the corner. Frankie ran the numbers. Angelo worked here.
“What happened?” he asked.
“He won’t tell me exactly, but he says it’s bad, real bad. He’s holed up at the Silver Trolley. Refuses to see me. Says he needs to see you. I think it’s…” She paused and glanced around to make sure Little Jimmy was gone. “I think it’s you know who.”
Angelo opened the popcorn machine and grabbed a handful of perfectly popped kernels—he’d long ago perfected how to chew popcorn in one side of his mouth while maintaining his toothpick in the other. He hadn’t seen Frankie since last Sunday, when they bumped into each other at Whiskey Dick’s and watched the Phils surrender four runs to Atlanta. One thing led to another, and Angelo almost had to call out of work the next afternoon.
“You know who,” he repeated. “So what? He wants me to come see him after work?”
Franny shook her head, and again Angelo’s eyes drifted to the Hooper one-sheet and its smirking Burt Reynolds watching them from some great beyond. “No. I just talked with him. He needs to see you now. Right now.”
It was a quarter to ten. The Silver Trolley was on the other side of downtown, near the Lackawanna River and the bus station. If Angelo timed it right, he could be back in time to chase the winos out during the credits of Capricorn One.
Angelo placed his hand over Franny’s and looked into her red eyes, the eyes of someone who had obviously been crying. He remembered in eighth grade how they danced together at the year-end celebration, a rinky-dink affair in the auditorium of a nunnery, how Sister Lucy shoved a ruler between their bodies and shouted, “Leave space for the Holy Ghost!” He squeezed her hand now and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll help him.”
#
The Silver Trolley was the kind of dump you rented by the hour, a fleabag high-rise that had been a tenement a hundred years earlier when Italians and Irish and Polish flocked en masse to Scranton looking for work in the rich vein of anthracite that had all but dried up by the time Angelo was born. He’d never entered the Silver Trolley before, but walked in with as much faux confidence as he could muster. The inside was a narrow alcove, staircase on your left, a little office behind bulletproof glass on your right. Angelo rang the bell and noted the dirty glass, all those fingerprints, how different it looked from the snack counter at the Ritz, how Mr. Sabato would turn red-faced if you forgot to wipe it down every other hour.
A shirtless goon wandered into frame, his drawers held up by threadbare suspenders. He looked more like clay than a human being, and the folds around his bald head reminded Angelo of Frankie’s long dead pug Dominic, a dog they played with along the spoil tips of coal in the woods.
The man who looked like Dominic chomped the end of his stogie. “Yeah?”
Angelo choked down his humiliation and gave the fake name Franny had insisted on. “I’m looking for Deano Sinatra.”
Dominic gave him the side eye. “So?”
Angelo slid a Lincoln through the gap of the bulletproof glass.
“Room 307.”
He climbed three flights of stairs, rolling his sleeves as he did so. It was June, and the first rash of summer heat had settled into the valley, shocking Angelo like it did every year, sweat pooling in the small of his back and under his armpits. He heard muffled TVs and moaning through the paper-thin walls, and Angelo felt grateful that he’d left his bow tie and paper hat at the Ritz, a completely different world.
At room 307 he knocked once, twice, waited five seconds, then knocked again—just like Franny instructed. The cheap door didn’t budge, but he heard Frankie’s voice on the other side. “Who’s it?” he barked in a too deep baritone, a put on if he’d ever heard one.
“You made me leave work, now let me in,” Angelo shouted back.
The door cracked open revealing a sweltering room lit by the blinking neon of the nearby bus station. Three empty boxes of Buona Pizza on the gummy carpet. Two nearly empty bottles of Jack lined up like little soldiers on the nightstand. And then of course Frankie himself in white underwear and undershirt, sweat stained, his dark hair matted to his face. So different from how he usually presented in leather jacket, hair slicked back, always smelling of cologne, a playful smile on his lips. Frankie was always the beautiful one, the prettiest of their trio, the smoothest, and it was this contrast with lanky Franny—everybody’s little sister—that transformed them from two separate people into the legendary “Frankie and Franny” with two capital Fs. Angelo remembered exactly when his friends became a couple, after the three of them saw Paint Your Wagon in ninth grade and the antics of Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood excited Frankie so much that he kissed Franny right on the lips as the credits rolled. His two friends had been on again off again ever since, and although Frankie cheated on her occasionally, Franny remained true, singing the many praises of the beautiful boy from the east side who deep down was the sweetest guy this side of Appalachia. They were one of those couples, famous throughout the valley.
Frankie grabbed Angelo by the collar and yanked him inside the motel room, resetting the deadbolt in one practiced motion. “I knew I could count on you, ol’ buddy.” He gestured to the bed like he’d been hosting people here for years. “Sit down. Get comfy. Let me make you something.”
He grabbed the Jack and two Styrofoam cups from Buona, but Angelo waved him off. “Don’t. You know I’m assistant manager now. I should get back before the late show lets out.”
Frankie poured two huge drinks anyway. “We’re not finishing before the late show. Here. Salute.”
Angelo drank a small sip of the whiskey—just enough to be polite—and watched Frankie swallow his in one long gulp. “You look like shit,” he told him.
“Thanks, pal.” He sat next to Angelo on the bed, reeking of alcohol and sweat. He looked like he actually might cry, something Angelo hadn’t seen him do since Dominic got loose and was run over by a Buick when they were kids.
“Mind explaining what the hell’s going on?”
Frankie refilled his drink. “I maybe owe a substantial sum of money.”
Angelo reinserted his toothpick and stared up at the ceiling. There was a brown water stain in the far-left corner that kind of looked like Paul Newman if you squinted right. If Frankie owed the bookies less than two hundred bucks—a common occurrence during baseball season—then he could still get back in time to close the Ritz with Little Jimmy. “How much?”
“50k.”
Angelo stood up and mindlessly drifted closer to the Paul Newman water stain. 50k was completely unfathomable, more money than either of their fathers—former coal miners reduced to schlubs manning cash registers like all the old timers—had ever seen in their lives. Angelo hid a stogie box under his bed where he kept all his savings from the Ritz. Six years of mopping floors, passing out tickets, sweeping his flashlight over young couples fondling each other while Roger Moore foiled the villains time and again had amounted to a little under two grand. When he started squirreling away money as a teenager, Angelo told himself he was saving up to move to Philly, Pittsburgh, maybe even New York City or California. But now, he didn’t know what purpose the old stogie box served. Every day was a rerun of the day before, and he had no idea how to break the cycle or even if he still wanted to. He was the second Delrosso born in the valley, and he felt a kind of gravity tethering him to its streets, this soil, the Ritz.
“How could you possibly owe 50k?”
This was purely rhetorical because Angelo already understood. After high school, Frankie fell in with the bookies, the wannabe toughs who considered themselves mobsters even though they’d never even robbed a gas station. But Angelo knew there was at least some form of organized crime in Scranton because Frankie ran the numbers, an unofficial lotto steered by what passed for the local mob. Angelo had even gone with Frankie a few times, traveling from storefront to storefront downtown, recording people’s guesses, collecting their cash. And these trips never ended without a celebratory drink at Classico where Frankie would sidle up next to Joe the Bookie and place enormous bets using other people’s money on the Phils, the Steelers, once even a JV volleyball squad. But Frankie just winked at Angelo whenever he lost. No need to worry because he always had a back-up plan. Just go double or nothing to get whole. And if that failed, go double or nothing again and again until you finally broke even. With that strategy, it was only a matter of time before he racked up some outrageous debt that would cause even the good-natured Joe the Bookie to balk.
“What are you gonna do?” Angelo asked.
Frankie lay on the bed and crossed his boots. “I need to leave town.”
“Come on.” Neither of them had ever left for more than two or three nights at the Jersey shore—Ocean City as kids, Atlantic City much later. “You think these guys are gonna kill you or something? This isn’t Philly.”
“I heard they got guys waiting for me at the bus station and Avoca. My old man said a Caddy’s been parked outside our house for two days. Franny’s too.” He opened the nightstand and slowly, ever so slowly, showed Angelo a gun, holding it above his head like the priest and the Eucharist in church. Gleaming steel. Outside of the movies, Angelo had never seen a gun in his life and watched helplessly as Frankie balanced it over his wrist and pointed in his direction.
“Are you crazy?” He moved away from the gun and opened the window. Downtown was dead aside from the lit-up bars. Neither of them owned a car, and they couldn’t just walk out of Scranton. It was bumblefuck in every direction. “So you’re just gonna bail on Franny?” he asked.
The only sounds came through the open window, the whooshing of cars and trucks along the newly built highway connecting Scranton to Wilkes-Barre, Hazelton, Harrisburg, Altoona, and the many places beyond. Frankie hid the gun in his waistband. “She’s better off without me.”
“You have a plan then?” Angelo asked.
“Sure, but I need your help.”
#
No one could agree on the exact boundaries of downtown, but Angelo figured it was the five-block stretch running from Lackawanna Avenue to the hills along Vine Street. This modest collection of buildings and streets contained so much of his young life. From the marquee of the Ritz to the courthouse in the center, downtown was crisscrossed by bars and pizza places, boarded-up buildings and abandoned storefronts. Overlooking everything was the dead neon sign which once blinked out THE ELECTRIC CITY in their grandparents’ heyday, before the mines dried up, when Scranton housed the first electric trolley system in America. That sign malfunctioned two decades earlier, and still no one had fixed it. Angelo stared at it now, Frankie close by in a leather jacket with the collar pulled up, Italian horn dangling above his chest, looking every which way for any sign of danger, gun hidden behind his back.
They entered Whiskey Dick’s, the kind of hole-in-the-wall bar frequented by beer-and-shot regulars all over the valley. No sign out front. A long rectangular bar occupied by a half dozen middle-aged men in Carhartts and shit kickers, a pile of dollars and coins in front of each of them, a dented Wurlitzer in back between two broken slots and a Winston cigarette machine. Angelo nodded at the bartender, a clever girl they went to school with. Gloria. Played the lead in Hello, Dolly! senior year and signed every year book with a kiss and “CYA IN NEW YORK CITY!” written in big floppy cursive. Frankie hung back as Angelo ponied up for two drafts of lager, the two of them scanning the room for marks. Angelo handed Frankie his beer and knew they didn’t even have to discuss the target, that they both selected ‘Cuso the Wop the second they saw him.
‘Cuso the Wop sat in back by one of the wooden pillars, a draft in front of him along with his customary tin bucket with “IA2I” painted down the side in neat, childlike print. Frankie walked over first, sitting two stools down, while Angelo hovered nearby, pretending to study the dart board. Two winters past, he’d waltzed in from the snow with Frankie and Franny after dragging them all to see Rocky at the Ritz. Franny rarely accompanied them to bars and preferred the kind of red checkered tablecloth joints she’d enjoyed as a kid—Arcaro’s, Colarusso’s, Cooper’s,—and had only come because she’d been so moved by the many struggles of Sylvester Stallone. Her older brother installed a dart board in Franny’s basement years earlier, and Angelo watched delighted as she decimated the disbelieving crowd of drunks at Whiskey Dick’s, landing bullseye after bullseye until the men were laying bets and coughing up ten or even twenty bucks a game. Franny never cleaned her glasses—they contained as many fingerprints as the clerk’s bulletproof partition at the Silver Trolley—and she always struck Angelo as a little lanky and kind of nerdy. That her hands possessed that level of grace and coordination affected him deeply.
“Hey, ‘Cus,” Frankie said, all friendly. “How’s the collection coming?”
Cuso picked up his bucket and shook it, jingling the coins inside like its own kind of music. Angelo knew from his rosy cheeks and mellow expression that ‘Cuso was already drunk and felt a terrible guilt deep down in his stomach, like cussing as a child in those precious hours after holy confession. Angelo had known ‘Cuso the Wop his whole life. Just about everyone in Scranton did from the way he drove up and down those hilly streets in his enormous jalopy of a Chrysler, how he’d park near busy corners and rattle his bucket and collect change, how he only gave it up late at night when he settled in for a long drink at Whiskey Dick’s or the Glass Onion. Angelo’s father claimed he hadn’t always been like this, that he’d actually been a reliable halfback for the Dunmore Bucks maybe fifteen years earlier, but then he went to Vietnam and returned obsessed with his collection. “Hamburger Hill,” Angelo’s father confided over a pitcher at Jenny’s Inn, and Angelo nodded like he had any idea what that meant. Angelo had only missed the draft by a few months and was extremely cognizant of that fact.
Frankie peeked inside ‘Cuso the Wop’s bucket. “Damn, that’s a lot of scratch.”
“You boys feel like donating?” ‘Cuso sniffed before running a black plastic comb through his long dark hair. He was never unkempt and always wore flannel shirts and corduroy pants no matter the weather, a bulge in his chest pocket revealing just a slice of a box of smokes.
Frankie glanced over at Angelo and said, “Hmm. How about we donate to the cause, then share a little Jack?”
“Who’s buying?” ‘Cuso the Wop narrowed his eyes.
“I think Angelo here can cover us, isn’t that right?” Frankie dropped some coins and a dollar bill into ‘Cuso’s bucket.
Angelo chewed his toothpick and said, “Fine.” Jaws 2 was about to let out, and he found himself missing all those tiny rituals, the moment when the Ritz emptied and finally became his. He glanced at smiling Frankie and couldn’t reconcile that this was really his life, that Angelo’s adult form had somehow emerged from that ancient boy obsessed with movies, that this Frankie was in any way connected to the child who played baseball on the playground, that even this incarnation of ‘Cuso had sprung from a boy stomping puddles in this here valley. What, if anything, connected any of them beyond habit and inertia, a calcification meant to stand in for the childish bonds that had all but slipped away? And how much longer would this dull facsimile continue? How long would he wake up, make the coffee, eat breakfast, open the Ritz, close the Ritz? He felt in that moment like something had malfunctioned in his body, like he was a record skipping for all time, comfortable in its broken groove.
Frankie moved a stool closer to ‘Cuso and ordered them all shots. Then he asked if ‘Cus could explain the purpose behind his collection one more time.
“Sure,” ‘Cuso said, turning the bucket so the “IA2I” more properly faced them. “This here stands for ‘Italian Americans 2 Italy.’ Look, I’m sure I’m only telling you what you already know. We don’t belong here, boys. None of us. Our parents and grandparents only left Italy to come here for work. But what happened? The mines went and dried up. What do you do, kid? For a living, I mean?”
“I run numbers.”
‘Cuso pointed at Angelo. “And you, kid?”
Angelo collected the three stiff pours of Jack on the rocks. “I’m over at the Ritz.”
“Bullshit.” ‘Cuso the Wop spat on the ground. “Those are bullshit jobs. We don’t belong here.”
“So what’s the collection for then?” Frankie asked.
They’d both heard it all before, had listened to ‘Cuso’s spiel while shooting pool at Stalter’s, while walking to the Convenient for smokes and Turkey Hill, while leaving high school and trying to sneak past him to their cars. Everyone in town knew the purpose of the bucket.
“This here,” ‘Cuso said, “is a collection to repatriate every last Italian American back to Italy. We’re finally going home.”
“How much more do you need?” Frankie asked.
A wino in an Eagles cap creased down the middle wandered to the jukebox. He fed in a dime, and the mechanical hand lifted a 45 and brought it to the center of the machine. A moment later, “Hey, Western Union Man” by Jerry Butler warbled out, his syrupy voice raising the dead bar back to life.
‘Cuso scratched his chin. “Don’t worry about the money, kid. Don’t you worry about that one bit. I’d say we’re about 90% of the way there. This time next summer you’ll be kicking up beachside in Palermo, and everyone will call you signore. We’ll be kings.”
Frankie held up his glass. “Cheers to that.”
‘Cuso raised his in kind. “Salute.”
#
Before long, ‘Cuso the Wop was cataclysmically drunk, holding the bar for support, swaying ever so slightly like a wobbly bowling pin. Whiskey Dick’s had emptied out this close to last call on a Thursday, and Frankie insisted that ‘Cuso couldn’t drive himself home, that it was their responsibility to return him safely to his doorstep. But ‘Cuso told them, no, no, he could definitively prove that he wasn’t drunk, that he was as sober as “a babe before holy baptism,” and they watched as he rose from his stool and shambled to the semi-enclosed phone booth in back, how he whispered into the receiver something soft and beautiful like a prayer. When he returned, he explained he’d just ordered an omelet from the Glider Diner, that it would be waiting for him in no time flat, that purchasing eggs and bacon and toast proved he wasn’t drunk. Gloria the bartender flipped on the house lights and snapped her fingers at ‘Cuso the Wop. “You’re shitfaced, ‘Cus. Let these nice boys drive you home. I know them. We went to school together. They won’t hurt you.”
Outside, Angelo and Frankie followed ‘Cuso the Wop round the corner where he’d parked his jalopy of a rusted beige Chrysler in the handicapped spot by St. Luke’s. The windshield was covered with salmon parking tickets, and ‘Cuso just brushed them off like snow after a beautiful dusting. The Ritz stood down the block, and Angelo stared at its dimmed marquee. Without that neon, the entire downtown felt dead, a foggy graveyard where any manner of evil might be possible. “Come on, ‘Cus,” Frankie said, getting closer to him now. “Listen to Gloria and hand over the keys.”
Angelo watched his best friend reach around his back to the gun hidden under his jacket in the waistband of his jeans. The jacket rode up on his back, and his fingers snaked over the handle, gripping it now, pulling it ever so slightly from its hiding place. A gust of wind howled down the avenue, and then, miraculously, ‘Cuso the Wop cursed and handed Frankie a rabbit foot attached to his dangling car keys. “Just remember this when we return to Italy,” he said. “You both owe me an amaro. You’ll call me signore!”
They laid ‘Cuso across the backseat and listened to his mumbled directions, driving out of Scranton up into the lid of the valley where ‘Cuso lived in a nice-looking duplex across from a playground with a basketball court. Angelo walked ‘Cuso to his door, whispering, “We’ll park the car in back for you, ok? I’ll leave it in back.”
When he returned, Frankie was all smiles, pounding the shredding interior roof of the Chrysler with his fist. “We fucking did it, pal. I told ya we could do it.”
“Yeah, sure,” Angelo said, staring out the window at the playground. “So now I drop you off at the bus station in Wilkes-Barre and bring the car back here?”
Frankie squeezed the steering wheel and studied the tiny neighborhood, the lone streetlight swaying in the summer wind, blinking an SOS to no one. “You mind indulging me first?”
#
Weiner Shack 2 sat a few miles east of ‘Cuso the Wop’s, up Route 6 by the state game lands in a lot that overlooked downtown, swaddled low in the valley by the twisting Lackawanna River on one side and train tracks on the other. They used to come here all the time in high school, would hitch a ride with some senior and eat chili dogs and French fries out of paper bags all night long. It wasn’t the food that made Weiner Shack 2 such a hit, but that it stayed open all night and afforded such an incredible view. Angelo and Frankie sat in the empty parking lot now, sharing fries like in the old days, staring into the heart of the city that had raised them. From there, they could make out all the individual lights of the houses, all those sorry souls still awake, and Angelo thought it resembled a tapestry of stars, like the cosmos brought low to earth. Frankie had explained that Angelo would never see him again, but he didn’t really believe it and was surprised by how he felt. He wasn’t sad, because even that required you to still care. All Angelo felt was numb, a hollowed-out nothing where something important was supposed to sit. He remembered coming here a few weeks before graduation, how Angelo and Frankie had wasted an hour describing all the adult adventures they would surely now go on, how Angelo would learn the movie business in Hollywood and Frankie would travel east, maybe New York or Boston, saying he’d always wanted to wear a pea coat and work on the docks. When they asked Franny where she wanted to go, she turned very quiet and pushed her glasses up the ridge of her nose. “Nowhere,” she told them, sounding surprised and even a little hurt that they had to ask. “I’m not a child anymore. I gave all that thinking up.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “This place is my home.”
Angelo turned to Frankie now as they finished their fries and tossed the waste down into the valley. “There’s no fifty-thousand-dollar debt, is there?”
“You figured it out, huh?” He lay back against the dirty windshield of ‘Cuso’s Chrysler. “Even I’m not fucking dumb enough to rack up 50k of gambling debt.”
The wind howled. “So Franny’s pregnant then?”
Frankie stared up into the heavens, while Angelo looked down into the bowl of the valley. “Yeah,” he finally admitted.
“You needed all this to look real so I wouldn’t figure it out and tell her the truth?”
“Yeah,” he repeated. “I also wanted to see you one last time.”
Angelo didn’t turn to look at him and instead located the big dipper in the night sky, just like his mother showed him when he was still a child, when the world felt large and impossible and free. He didn’t realize then that’s as big as it would ever get, that each year it would shrink smaller and smaller until the scope of his life was reduced to an ever-narrowing strip of land, nowhere to go but the miles of empty coal mines coiled beneath his feet. “Go back to Franny,” he told his friend.
“I can’t be a father, man. I can’t.”
They listened to two more songs on the radio until “Sing” by the Carpenters came on. This, Angelo thought, was particularly cruel. He hated that stupid song and how constantly it played five years ago, when they finished high school with all those banal rituals—graduation mass, prom, parties—as Karen Carpenter’s upbeat voice commanded them to “sing of good things not bad/sing of happy not sad” while meanwhile he felt adrift and paralyzed. Karen Carpenter, he thought. Karen Carpenter.
Angelo hopped off the Chrysler and reached through the driver’s side window to kill the radio. “We better get moving,” he said.
Frankie swung his legs over the hood and stared at his friend. “You promise you won’t tell her?”
Angelo put the key into the ignition and turned, the engine stuttering to life, the headlights erasing the valley below. “I promise.” Then he drove Frankie to the bus station in Wilkes-Barre, and they never spoke again.
Salvatore Pane is the author of two novels, a book of nonfiction, and a short-story
collection, The Neorealist in Winter, forthcoming in October 2023. He is the winner
of the 2022 Autumn House Fiction Prize, and his short work has appeared or is
forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, and
other venues. He is an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas and can
be reached at http://www.salvatore-pane.com.