Read Online Island of Divine Music by John Addiego - Free Book Online Page A

hand, and she started, as if awakened from a dream. She walked like a somnambulist, tugged by her child toward the dugout silo more than a mile away, the huge grave where the apples of the earth were stored. They could hear the voices of demons warped by a bullhorn among the shrieks of sirens. The mound at the end of the beet field became a formless sweep of black, an emptiness at the edge of the starry sky.
    They entered the place of utter darkness where the
pommes de terre, manzanas de la tierra,
were heaped, and felt their way until theywere hidden, half buried among them. To the mother the close darkness, the musty earth odor, and the lumpy, cold potatoes were a taste of the necropolis in God’s plans, a city where the corpses of sinners would soon be stacked by the millions. But for the child the tubers were whimsically shaped apples from another world. He knew a hidden orchard lay somewhere farther back, deep within the earth. He knew trees of golden fruit gleamed in a light not of this world.

THE MAGIC BREECHES
    Narciso
    N arciso Verbicaro, the eldest child of Giuseppe and Rosari, was slow-witted. He was also, from his youth until his last breath, elegantly slender in a charcoal double-breasted coat and wide pleated trousers. A childhood spent in the egg candler’s and two leather tanneries led to an adolescence hauling debris from the buildings his father demolished. Narciso would run from the rubble to the trailer all day, back and forth, his skinny arms filled with broken boards and bricks, a cigarette nearly touching the brim of his fedora, while Giuseppe swung his hammer and cursed at the things he hit. The wheelbarrow was too complicated for Narciso, all the loading and balancing and preparing a path over ditches and bumps, so he carried everything, all day, in his arms.
    In those days old Moe Blumenfeld, the racetrack owner who paid the local Italians to clear his lots, liked to park his Duesenberg and watch. He’d see the old man attack a house like an ax murderer and he’d smile; he’d see the little mountains of planks and stone, propelled by the skinny legs of a boy hidden beneath the rubble, fly across the yard, and he’d laugh.
    They called Narciso by the last part of his name, pronounced
cheese-o,
or they called him Lucky Pants because of the Italian folktale of the magic breeches which filled with an endless supply of gold coins. Narciso had deep pockets filled with keys and pocket knives and lighters and candy and, later in life, money. He always seemed to have whatever was needed right there in his pants. The family thought an angel or the devil himself followed him around, filled his pockets, yanked his collar a second before a truck might squish him. To them he seemed a man living in a dream, charmed and free of worries, but asleep at the wheel.
    In fact, behind the wheel was his favorite place. Narciso learned to drive his father’s Model T when he was twelve because Giuseppe had no patience for a machine and beat it with his hands and feet whenever it confounded him. By contrast, Narciso was as gentle with a machine as he was with dogs and mules and nanny goats; he coaxed the Tin Lizzy into gear, talked it around sharp turns with a loaded trailer in back, sang it through busy intersections. He was a hazard, to be sure, because his mind was a tabula rasa, and he drove as if on an empty road while others screeched and swerved around him. He laid the windshield down and set the looking glass so he could watch himself drive, watch his hair sweep back with the wind and see his handsome face beam in the shadow breaks of passing trees and buildings and trucks, his young life there before him, filled with adventure and beauty and charm.
    Women adored him. Powerful men confided in him. He gave money away, once a twenty to a bootlegger at a speakeasy because the man had just lost his shirt at poker and Ciso had just gotten paid.Two weeks later the racketeer gave Narciso a shiny black Packard. The