He couldn’t think of anything to say to that so he just watched her cross the room and pull the dress she’d worn in the swamp off the screen. She handed it to him as they left the room.
“Burn that, will you?”
The guns were bound for the Pinar del Río province, west of Havana. They left St. Petersburg on five grouper boats out of Boca Ciega Bay at three in the afternoon. Dion, Joe, Esteban, and Graciela saw them off. Joe had changed from the suit he’d ruined in the swamp to the lightest one he owned. Graciela had watched as he’d burned it along with her dress, but she was fading now from her time as prey in a cypress swamp. She kept nodding off on the bench that sat under the dock lamp yet refused all offers to sit in one of the cars or let someone drive her back to Ybor.
When the last of the grouper captains had shaken their hands and shoved off, they stood looking at one another. Joe realized they had no idea what to do next. How could you top the last two days? The sky had grown red. Somewhere down the jagged shoreline, past a clump of mangroves, a canvas sail or tarp fluttered in the hot breeze. Joe looked at Esteban. He looked at Graciela, who leaned against the lamppost with her eyes closed. He looked at Dion. A pelican swooped over his head, its bill bigger than its belly. Joe looked at the boats, way out there now, the size of dunce caps from this distance, and he started laughing. He couldn’t help himself. Dion and Esteban were right behind him, all three of them roaring in no time. Graciela covered her face for a moment and then she started laughing too, laughing and crying actually, Joe noticed, peeking out from between her fingers like a small girl until she dropped her hands entirely. She laughed and cried and ran both hands through her hair repeatedly and then wiped her face with the collar of her blouse. They walked to the edge of the dock and the laughs became chuckles and then echoes of chuckles and they looked out at the water as it grew purple under the red sky. The boats found the horizon and slipped past it, one by one.
Joe didn’t remember much about the rest of that day. They went to one of Maso’s speaks behind a veterinarian on the corner of Fifteenth and Nebraska. Esteban arranged to have a case of dark rum aged in cherry casks sent over, and word got around to everyone involved in the heist. Soon Pescatore gunsels mingled with Esteban’s revolutionaries. Then the women arrived in their silk dresses and sequined hats. A band took the stage. In no time, the joint was hopping enough to crack the masonry.
Dion danced with three women simultaneously, swinging them behind his broad back and under his stubby legs with surprising dexterity. When it came to dance, however, Esteban proved to be the artist of the group. He moved on his feet as lightly as a cat on a high branch, but with a command so total that the band soon began to fashion songs to his tempo, not the other way around. He reminded Joe of Valentino in that flicker where he played a bullfighter—it was that degree of masculine grace. Soon half the women in the speak were trying to match his steps or land him for the night.
“I never saw a guy move like that,” Joe said to Graciela.
She was sitting in the corner of a booth, while he sat on the floor in front of it. She leaned over to speak in his ear. “It’s what he did when he first came here.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was his job,” she said. “He was a taxi dancer downtown.”
“You’re putting me on.” He tilted his head, looked up at her. “What doesn’t this guy do well?”
She said, “He was a professional dancer in Havana. Very good. Never the lead in any productions but always in high demand. It’s how he supported himself during law school.”
Joe almost spit up his drink. “He’s a lawyer?”
“In Havana, yes.”
“He told me he grew up on a farm.”
“He did. My family worked for his. We were, uh—” She looked at him.
“Migrant farmers?”
“Is that the word?” She scrunched her face at him, at least as drunk as he was. “No, no, we were tenant farmers.”
“Your father rented land from his father and paid his rent in crops?”
“No.”
“That’s tenant farming. It’s what my grandfather did in Ireland.” He tried to appear sober, learned, but it was work under the circumstances. “Migrant farming is when you go from farm to farm with the seasons, depending on the crop.”
“Ah,” she said, unhappy with the clarification. “So smart, Joseph. You know everything.”
“You asked, chica.”
“Did you just call me ‘chica’?”
“I believe I did.”
“Your accent is horrible.”
“So’s your Gaelic.”
“What?”
He waved it off. “I’m a work in progress.”
“His father was a great man.” Her eyes shone. “He took me into the home, gave me my own bedroom with clean sheets. I learned English from a private tutor. Me, a village girl.”
“And his father asked for what in return?”
She read his eyes. “You’re disgusting.”
“It’s a fair question.”
“He asked nothing. Maybe his head, it swelled a bit for all he did for this little village girl, but that was all.”
He held up a hand. “Sorry, sorry.”
“You see the worst in the best of people,” she said, shaking her head, “and the best in the worst of people.”
He couldn’t think of a reply to that, so he shrugged and let the silence and the liquor return the mood to a softer place.
“Come.” She slid out of the booth. “Dance.” She pulled at his hands.
“I don’t dance.”
“Tonight,” she said, “everyone dances.”
He allowed her to pull him to his feet even though it was a fucking abomination to share the same dance floor as Esteban or, to a lesser extent, Dion, and call what he did the same thing.
Sure enough, Dion laughed openly at him, but he was too drunk to care. He let Graciela lead and he followed and soon he found a beat he could keep a kind of pace with. They stayed out on the floor for quite some time, passing a bottle of Suarez dark rum back and forth. At one point he found himself lost in cross-images of her; in one she ran through the cypress swamp like desperate prey and in the other she danced a few feet away from him, hips twitching, shoulders and head swaying as she tipped the bottle to her lips.
He’d killed for this woman. Killed for himself too. But if there was one question he hadn’t been able to answer all day, it was why he’d shot the sailor in the face. You didn’t do that to a man unless you were angry. You shot him in the chest. But Joe had blown his face up. That was personal. And that, he realized as he lost himself in the sway of her, was because he’d seen clearly in the sailor’s eyes that the man held Graciela in contempt. Because she was brown, raping her wasn’t a sin; it was just indulging in the spoils of war. Whether she’d been alive or dead when he did it would have made little difference to Cyrus.
Graciela raised her arms above her head, the bottle up there with her, her wrists crossing, forearms snaking around each other, crooked smile on her bruised face, eyes at half-mast.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
“About today.”
“What about today?” she asked but then saw it in his eyes. She lowered her arms and handed him the bottle and they moved out of the center and stood by the table again and drank the rum.
“I don’t care about him,” Joe said. “I guess I just wish there had been another way.”
“There wasn’t.”
He nodded. “Which is why I don’t regret what I did. I just regret that it happened.”
She took the bottle from him. “How do you thank the man who saved your life after he dangered it?”
“Dangered it?”
She wiped at her mouth with her knuckles. “Yes. How?”
He cocked his head
at her.
She read his eyes and laughed. “Some other way, chico.”
“You just say thanks.” He took the bottle from her and had a sip.
“Thanks.”
He gave her a flourish and a bow and fell into her. She shrieked and swatted at his head and helped him right himself. They were both laughing and out of breath when they staggered to a table.
“We will never be lovers,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“We love other people.”
“Well, mine’s dead.”
“Mine may as well be.”
“Oh.”
She shook her head several times, a reaction to the alcohol. “So we love ghosts.”
“Yes.”
“Which makes us ghosts.”
“You’re drunk,” he said.
She laughed and pointed across the table. “You’re drunk.”
“No argument.”
“We will not be lovers.”
“You said that.”
The first time they made love in her room above the café it was like a car crash. They mashed each other’s bones and fell off the bed and toppled a chair and when he entered her, she sank her teeth into his shoulder so hard she drew blood. It was over in the time it took to dry a dish.
The second time, half an hour later, she poured rum onto his chest and licked it off and he returned the favor and they took their time and learned each other’s rhythms. She had said no kissing, but that went the way of their not being lovers in the first place. They tested slow ones and hard ones, kisses with nips of the lips, kisses in which only their tongues touched.
What surprised him was how much fun they had. Joe had had sex with seven women in his life, but he’d only made love, as he understood the definition, with Emma. And while their sex had been reckless and occasionally inspired, Emma had always held a part of herself in reserve. He would catch her watching them have sex while they were having it. And afterward, she always withdrew even further into the locked box of herself.
Graciela reserved nothing. This left a high likelihood for injury—she pulled at his hair, she gripped his neck so hard with her cigar roller hands he half-worried she was going to snap it, she sank her teeth into skin and muscle and bone. But it was all part of her enveloping him, pushing the act to the edge of something that, to Joe, resembled vanishing, as if he’d wake up in the morning alone with her dissolved into his body or vice versa.
When he did wake that morning, he smiled at the foolishness of the notion. She slept on her side, with her back to him, her hair gone wild and overflowing on the pillow and headboard. He wondered if he should slide out of bed, grab his clothes, and get gone before the inevitable discussion of too much alcohol and muddy thinking. Before the regret cemented. Instead, he kissed her shoulder very lightly, and she rolled his way in a rush. She covered him. And regret, he decided, would have to wait for another day.
It will be a professional arrangement,” she explained to him over breakfast in the café downstairs.
“How’s that?” He ate a piece of toast. He couldn’t stop smiling like an idiot.
“We will fill this”—she was smiling too as she searched for the word—“need for each other until such time as—”
“ ‘Such time’?” he said. “That tutor taught you well.”
She leaned back in her chair. “My English is very good.”
“I agree, I agree. Outside of using dangered when you meant endangered, it’s pretty flawless.”
She grew an inch in her chair. “Thank you.”
He continued to smile like an idiot. “My pleasure. So we fill each other’s, um, need until when?”
“Until I return to Cuba to be with my husband.”
“And me?”
“You?” She speared a piece of fried egg.
“Yeah. You get to return to a husband. What do I get?”
“You get to become king of Tampa.”
“Prince,” he said.
“Prince Joseph,” she said. “It’s not bad, but I’m afraid it doesn’t quite fit you. And shouldn’t a prince be benevolent?”
“As opposed to?”
“A gangster who is only out for himself.”
“And his gang.”
“And his gang.”
“Which is a type of benevolence.”
She gave him a look somewhere between frustration and disgust. “Are you a prince or a gangster?”
“I don’t know. I like to think of myself as an outlaw, but I’m not sure that’s any more than a fantasy now.”
“Well, you be my outlaw prince until I return home. How is that?”
“I would love to be your outlaw prince. What are my duties?”
“You must give back.”
“Okay.” She could have asked for his pancreas at this point and he would have said, “Fine.” He looked across the table at her. “Where do we start?”
“Manny.” She held him in dark eyes that were suddenly serious.
“He had a family,” Joe said. “Wife and three daughters.”
“You remember.”
“Of course I remember.”
“You said you didn’t care whether he lived or died.”
“I was exaggerating a little bit.”
“Will you take care of his family?”
“For how long?”
“For life,” she said, as if it were a perfectly logical answer. “He gave his life for you.”
He shook his head. “With all due respect, he gave his life for you. You and your cause.”
“So . . .” She held a piece of toast just below her chin.
“So,” he said, “on behalf of your cause, I would be happy to send a bag of money over to the Bustamente family just as soon as I have a bag of money. Does that please you?”
She smiled at him as she bit into her toast. “It pleases me.”
“Then consider it done. By the way, anyone ever call you anything but Graciela?”
“What would they call me?”
“I dunno. Gracie?”
She made a face like she’d sat on a hot coal.
“Grazi?”
Another face.
“Ella?” he tried.
“Why would anyone do such a thing? Graciela is the name my parents gave me.”
“My parents gave me a name too.”
“But you cut it in half.”
“It’s Joe,” he said. “Like José.”
“I know what it means,” she said as she finished her meal. “But José means Joseph. It does not mean Joe. You should be called Joseph.”
“You sound like my father. He would only call me Joseph.”
“Because that’s your name,” she said. “You eat very slowly, like a bird.”
“I’ve heard that.”
Her eyes rose at something behind him and he turned in his chair to see Albert White walk through the back door. He hadn’t aged a day, though he was softer than Joe remembered, a banker’s paunch beginning to form over his belt. He still favored white suits and white hats and white spats. Still had that saunter that suggested the world was a playground built to amuse him. He walked in with Bones and Brenny Loomis and picked up a chair as he came. His boys followed suit, and they put the chairs down at Joe’s table and sat in them—Albert beside Joe, Loomis and Bones flanking Graciela, their impassive faces fixed on Joe.
“What’s it been?” Albert said. “A little over two years?”
“Two and a half,” Joe said and sipped his coffee.
“If you say so,” Albert said. “You’re the one who went to prison, and if there’s one thing I know about convicts it’s that they count days real keen.” He reached over Joe’s arm and plucked a sausage off his plate, started eating it like it was a chicken leg. “W
hy didn’t you go for your heater?”
“Maybe I’m not carrying.”
Albert said, “No, truly.”
“I figure you’re a businessman, Albert, and this place is a bit public for a gunfight.”
“I disagree.” Albert gave the place the once-over. “Looks perfectly acceptable to me. Good lighting, nice sight lines, not too much clutter.”
The café owner, a nervous Cuban woman in her fifties, looked even more nervous. She could read the energy between the men and she wanted that energy to leave through the windows or leave through the door but leave soon. An older couple sat at the counter by her and they were oblivious, arguing over whether to see a flicker tonight at Tampa Theatre or catch Tito Broca’s set at the Tropicale.
Otherwise, the place was empty.
Joe checked on Graciela. Her eyes were a fair bit wider than usual, and a vein he’d never seen before had appeared, throbbing, in the center of her throat, but otherwise she seemed calm, hands as steady as her breathing.
Albert took another bite of sausage and leaned toward her. “What’s your name, hon’?”
“Graciela.”
“You a light nigger or a dark spic? I can’t tell.”
She smiled at him. “I’m from Austria. Isn’t it obvious?”
Albert roared. He slapped his thigh and slapped the table and even the oblivious old couple looked over.
“Oh, that’s a good one.” He said to Loomis and Bones, “Austria.”
They didn’t get it.
“Austria!” he said, thrusting both hands out at them, the sausage still dangling from one. He sighed. “Forget it.” He turned back. “So Graciela from Austria, what’s your full name?”
“Graciela Dominga Maela Corrales.”
Albert whistled. “That’s quite a mouthful, but I bet you have plenty of experience with mouthfuls, don’t you, hon’?”
“Don’t,” Joe said. “Just . . . Albert? Don’t. Leave her out of this.”
Albert turned back to Joe as he chewed the last of the sausage. “Past experience would suggest I’m not good at that, Joe.”
Joe nodded. “What do you want here?”
Live by Night Page 25
