the non-political death of james albatross

by Albert Rodríguez

It happened almost eight months ago, but the details were not sufficient for the public.  I’ll give you nothing but the facts. People said it was another flare-up in the so-called culture wars, which is a phrase that manages, with peculiar efficiency, to obscure more than it reveals.

Two-thirds of the Board of Aldermen had persuaded themselves that the semi-industrial city of Port Jervis required a new kind of stewardship. It was beginning to glint with money and capital, with expansion and amenities; and that promise, all that development, the arguments went, needed to be administered by proper experts. By people with credentials and schematics. By individuals who knew not only how to build, but what to be built.

“We do this for our children,” was one of their favorite lines.

But the remaining third of the Board, smaller in number but louder in practice, were a noisier bunch, quicker to take offense, and they were the folks that believed in the right to bear arms.

They interpreted these schematics and proposals of stewardship as ideological incursions. “Socialism by blueprint,” one of them scoffed in a town hall. “Next they are going to want to tax our porch swings.” It was an unfair line of argument that always won over a few undecided voters, so it kept rolling around like a fashion trend.

James Albatross, as everyone knew in Port Jervis, was a political operative, and a darn good one. But even though he was political, he wasn’t ideological. He worked both sides of the aisle with the same passion. He was basically a political mercenary. But he would tell you himself that despite his reputation, privately he believed in character over image, he believed in the individual over the collective, and he believed, supposedly, in the preeminence of the tribe over the state; but the man also was extremely good at politics. He  had the temperament for it, so he made a side hustle of it, built an operation—buying votes, selling votes, connecting people that could make things happen. In his mind votes were not so much bought or sold as redirected, though the distinction, in practice, was academic.

It proved to be extraordinarily lucrative. Both sides of the aisle reached out to him as a particular kind of trouble shooter. He didn’t really need the money either. It was a labour of love. He was already successful in real estate, and he owned a car dealership off the interstate, but politics made him feel alive.

And then James Albatross was killed, in his own home of all places. Stabbed to death in his own woods, fifty yards from his lower terrace. Given the tenor of the moment, it was almost impossible not to interpret the act politically. Even the editor of The Port Jervis Express thought that James Albatross had finally gotten caught in his own net.

“He got caught in the crossfire,” his brother in law said at his packed out funeral.

Everyone thought it had to do with the current disagreement at the townhall. But this wasn’t the truth. Not the truth with capital T—the one the Pontious Pilate inquired after—but the truth of the circumstances. It wasn't it.  In fact this is how it went down. There was a correlation but not a causation.

At a town hall meeting, Alderman number five of twelve, an attorney prone to casual slips, let it slip that the zoning laws along the southern river sector, a sector of Port Jervis that was already booming, were about to be revised. By evening, the clever-minded and the well-capitalized, knowing that there was an opportunity at hand, were already circling and making plans.

That same weekend Popeye, from Shohola, announced his retirement in a private party. It seemed to be a cosmic coincidence, however, if you looked at things through the lens of supply and demand. Popeye was the main cement baron of the region—the sole proprietor of the region’s biggest concrete mixing plant. His facility was a hulking rust-streaked encampment squatted down by the river, like an artifact from a more muscular century.

Now it was to be sold.

His son, it was understood, had no interest in continuing the enterprise; he just wanted his portion of the proceeds. As for Popeye, he also  wanted to cash-in and get to Key West as soon as possible. He had had enough of long, harsh winters and the backbreaking work.

Anyone with even a passing instinct for leverage could see what was forming. It was a massive opportunity, one of those quiet inflection points. Whoever ended up controlling Popeyes concrete  mixing facility wouldn’t just stand to make a fortune, they would hold the terms by which a city would continue to be built.

Marcelo Melchior’s name was in the mix. He was an American-Portuguese that had served in a handful of wars, including in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion. He believed, perhaps a little arrogantly, that the plant was already his by way of association. He knew Popeye. He was friends with Poepeye. He had worked alongside him, in the broad fraternity of men who dealt in weight and volume, in the stubborn realities of the industry. And perhaps more importantly, out of all the captains of industry in the area, Marcelo Melchior was the only one with net-worth big enough to even make an offer.

Marcelo did not, strictly speaking, know concrete. His expertise lay elsewhere—in structural work, in the grammars of load and stress—but this distinction, which might have discouraged a more cautious man, seemed only to clarify his desire. He had already given himself over to the love of concrete. But, after the town hall meeting—after the attorney’s ill-timed disclosure, which spread through the city with the quick, dry rustle of paper catching flame—the situation began to accelerate. Someone elsewhere connected the dots: the zoning revisions, the river sector, the impending sale. That person came to James Albatross first, because he was, by virtue of all his activities, well known. The man had legions of friends, confidants, connections everywhere in the city,  and he valued information almost as much as he valued people.

“Isn’t that a niche industry?” James Arbatross asked when he heard about this opportunity. It was a habitual maneuver of his, this adoption of skepticism, a way of testing the tensile strength of what he was being told.

“Hardly,” the advisor corrected him. “Concrete touches everything. Own the plant and in time you’ll own the city itself.”

That revelation hit him like rain on parched earth, Albatross was sold. His first move was to probe the competition. While Marcelo Melchior was a stranger to him, Albatross ensured that wouldn't last, commissioning his trusted investigators to draft a deep-dive profile on Melchior’s assets and psyche.

“So, he's a blue-collar man,” Albatross said, turning a page of the dossier with the slow assurance of someone accustomed to conclusions arriving on schedule. “He must be low IQ.”

Who, after all, was this Marcelo Melchior to imagine himself the owner of such a lucrative and singular prize?

James Albatross offered 3% above asking, a gesture that, in that market, qualified as bold. It signaled not only interest but capacity, the willingness to convert intention into action without delay.

When Marcelo, who was counting on a steep discount, heard the news that there was another motivated buyer he was devastated. That night he lay for half the night, stressed and half naked, outside on his wooden deck, his body giving off the heat of agitation, until it started raining outside. Then he came inside and let out a middle of the night shriek that woke everybody up in the house.

This meant he would have to form an alliance with one of his competitors, just to get over this financial hump. They got together, nevertheless, and arrived at the healthy figure of 5% over the asking price. They thought this was an insurmountable position, but it was not. James Albatross quickly offered 7% over asking price—a sum large enough to change hearts and minds.

Marcelo Melchior pulled out his hair.

The sentimentality of his friendship with Popeye had totally vanished. Money speaks in its own language after all. And with this extra amount Popeye could get a bigger boat in Key West. You couldn’t blame the man. But Marcelo Melchior wouldn’t give up that easily. He went to his wife. They had been sweethearts since High School. He put the matter before her.

“I need you to take a big risk with me,” he told her over a home cooked meal that he had made with his own callous hands.

“I took a big risk when I married you,” she said.

They would sell the house, move into a rental—compress their lives into something a lot smaller in the service of an expansion that remained, for now, hypothetical. She agreed not because she believed in the outcome, necessarily, but because she believed in the man. She knew that Marcelo Melchior was a fighter, and he was willing to get his hands dirty, until he got the job done.

Eventually they came up with an unprecedented amount—12% over the asking price.

The whole thing had become a heated auction, the price spiraling upwards until people were losing sleep. For a brief interval they allowed themselves to think they had it in the bag. But then again, James Albatross had connections that could foil anybody’s plans in Port Jervis, and he made those resources count. He called the regional manager of the bank, which he knew personally, and suddenly all of Marcelo’s efforts got entangled in the technicality of the bank’s paperwork.

Marcelo waited, then he punched a wall and broke it. In the meantime, the auction was over. The plant was expeditiously sold at the rate of 13% over asking price. Champagne was spilled in certain rooms with art work and crown moulding.

At the end of it, there was, unexpectedly, a species of relief. The thought that he had failed while giving himself completely to the task was enough for him. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. It wasn’t meant to be. He was ready to go on with his life. But there are things in life that sometimes align a certain way in order to facilitate judgement. Word got back to Marcelo that there might have been foul play involved in the transaction.

Marclo was so angry he punched another wall and broke it. Thank God he was a contractor. He found out where James Albatross lived. He drove up to that hilltop and pressed his bell. He just wanted to talk to him and question him—face to face and man to man. But James Albatross saw him through the window and was shocked by the silhouette. He  called his security detail immediately. An SUV roared up the hill at full speed. Four guys that looked like football in suits came out of the SUV. They surrounded Marcelo.

They told him to “get off the lawn.”

Then they order him back into his pickup.

“Ok, ok.” Marcelo said.

“And don’t come back here, if you know what’s good for you.”

It might have ended there, with the humiliation of being outsmarted and outpowered. As angry as he was again, Marcelo was ready to move on. But, James Albatross, who sometimes liked to  demean his opponents, overplayed his hand.

They came again, the same four men in their dark suits, as if repetition itself were a strategy. They delivered their message in much the same terms as before, though now with a certain elaboration, as if to ensure that nothing had been misunderstood. Marcelo took it like a champ, with a composure that surprised even him. In front of his crew, he chose restraint; he listened, nodded once or twice, allowed the moment to pass through him without visible resistance. It was, in its way, an act of discipline.

They were already turning away when one of them, perhaps out of impulse, kicked over a wheelbarrow filled with wet concrete. That’s when a rugby match broke out. It was Marcelo who stopped it. He told the four to get going before they got a beatdown with rebars. One might have expected that to be the end of it. But that afternoon they had the gall to show up at Marcelo’s house.

They idled their SUV with tinted windows until Marcelo’s wife was terrified. They were sending a message. That’s when Marcelo Melchior saw red. They had crossed a line. That's when Marcelo decided not to take a chance. He didn’t really know what these people were about. He had to do something about it.

Later, he would describe it in his own terms: that he had decided to “cut the head of the rattlesnake.”

A few days later, Marcelo went fishing. But before heading to the river he stopped by the local bar. He played a few games of pool. I was there that evening. I saw him sink a few amazing shots. He showed his friends his new fishing gear with a boyish, almost tender pride, as if the implements themselves contained the promise of a simpler life. Then he took off towards the river when it was getting dark. Porch cameras later confirmed that he was driving northeast towards the river, instead of southwest towards the home of Mr. Albatross.

That season, the Lackawaxen River was thick with salmon. Marcelo caught a few. He photographed them against the dying light, but he wasn’t there for the fish. He understood how his phone’s metadata worked. He smeared his face with mud—like a frogman—like he had done in Ukraine. He left his gear by a stand of bushes, and then entered the thicket. It was a punishing roundabout through the worst brush— just the kind of route a Pennsylvania juror might later find implausible.

James Albatross was in his garden, alone, which is to say he was exactly as Marcelo needed him to be. When Marcelo saw him he thought it was either destiny, or he was just a lucky man.

A single verse came to his mind: “for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” 

The mansion carried a vague Asian inflection. Its terraces stepped downward in measured succession, each holding its own discreet illumination, so that by night the place seemed to hover in tiers of light. The house itself sat high above the city, as if it was a castle above a medieval town. James Albatross was pruning with a private conviction. Perhaps the act was a metaphor for the kind of order he believed civilization required. 

Marcelo emerged from beyond the koi pond. The family poodle was nearby, a lap-born creature, genetically inert, bred into softness. It didn’t know when to bark. Marcelo caught James Albatross by the neck and dragged him to the woods.

Under the widowmakers there weren’t any words. Just terrified looks. A sift of moonlight caught the military blade. James Albatross thought of his childhood, his most joyful years, back when he thought of himself as the underdog.

Photo of Albert Rodríguez

BIO: Albert Rodríguez is an emerging writer based in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including Litro Magazine USA, Five on the Fifth, White Wall Review, Platform Review, Mr. BULL BULL, Turn & Work, Modern Literature, Discretionary Love, Across the Margin, and Farewell Transmission.