Referee of greed—that's what his job really came down to. Keeping the larceny within sustainable limits. Now he picked up the phone to cajole a certain supermarket boss to give more space to a certain brand of chickens.
"I thought the chicken man was on our shit list," said the supermarket man.
"He's playing ball," Vincente said. "He's using our trucks. "You'll ease up on 'im."
"The butchers don't like he don't use union butchers."
Vincente didn't answer right away; he was distracted by a just-noticed dripping in the bathroom down the hall. "One thing at a time," he said at last.
"The meat cutters," stressed the supermarket man, "they have big cleavers. I don't like to see 'em unhappy."
Vincente heard another drip. It seemed suddenly more pressing than chickens. "The union thing," he said. "I'll look into it."
He hung up the phone, went down the hall. Sure enough, the faucet in the bathroom sink was leaking, a bulbous drop just then growing at the end of it as at the tip of an old man's nose. For a moment the Godfather watched the drop, confirmed that it would fall. When it did, a secret joy suffused him, the quiet joy of simple purpose. He was alone in his son's house. He felt he'd been a burden, a bother, a taker. Suddenly there was some small thing he could offer in return, an honest useful project a man could do with his hands.
In a gesture almost worshipful, he fell to his knees in front of the sink. He opened the cabinet, took out towels, toilet paper, scouring powder. He arrayed things neatly around him on the cool tiles of the floor, then looked in past the drainpipe, which swooped down and up again like a saxophone, to the oval handles of the intake valves. He'd close them; then he'd get tools to take apart the faucet. He'd remove the bum washer, keep it to show to Joey. They'd go to the hardware store together to get a new one. That would be nice: a father and a son together in the hardware store.
Vincente leaned in under the sink. His neck ached as he craned it; the floor tiles were hard and cold against his knees. It was an awkward reach toward the handle of the valve, his shoulder complained at the angle of it. But finally the thing was in his hand. He tried to turn it but it would not turn.
He shifted his knees, dropped into a lower crouch, and tried again. That was when the throbbing in his head began. It started as a warm and not unpleasant pulsing at the top of his neck, then crawled upward to the bony place behind his ears, the place that still remembered the childhood pain of German measles. He wrestled harder with the unmoving valve handle, small grunts escaping past his teeth. The throbbing crept up both sides of his head, moved up almost soothingly, like hot fingers on his scalp. The light was bad under the sink, Vincente couldn't see the red rust and green corrosion that glutted the valve's old threads. He only knew that it was meant to turn, that a man was meant to be able to turn it.
He was sweating now, his legs were cramping. He began to be dizzy. He pulled back for a moment to summon strength, blinked around the tiled bathroom, but saw only a shrinking tube of brightness. He hunkered down again, stretched his neck, seized the handle like the windpipe of a deadly enemy. The throbbing crested at the top of his head and now was pushing outward from behind his eyes. He gave a final twist and a whimper of frustration, then, he didn't quite know how, his hands had lost their grip and he had gone from kneeling to lying backward on the tile floor. The floor sucked warmth away from his flank. He saw a white glare smeared with acid yellow; it was ugly, and he was grateful when his eyes fell closed.
Confusion lingered for a moment, but it passed, and then the Godfather felt weirdly, deadly happy. He was floating, empty, on a brief vacation so splendid as to undo his life. Behind his eyelids, different colors scudded past; he tried them on like ties. He saw a color he especially loved and locked it into place. It was a reddish purple streaked with black; he recognized it instantly as the color of the pressed grapes when his father made wine in the basement sixty years before. He smelled the mash—musky, woody, more like wine than the finished wine itself—and then he smiled, or thought he did, when he remembered what was done with the squeezed-out fruit. They had a fig tree in the backyard, a fig tree that bore figs in Queens. It was a thousand miles out of place, this tree, but it would live the winter if you took care of it, if you decked it out. So the pressed grapes would be spread around the tree, would ripen again into a gorgeous reddish-purple mat of stems and skins and mold. Tarpaper, ashes, old linoleum held down with tires—everything was blanketed around the tree, built up in a cone that sometimes gave off steam. And in the summer there'd be figs, their skins sticky with oozing juice, their insides warm as thighs. And basil, huge bouquets of it, and tomatoes, red as fire engines even at the core. . . .