World Gone By: A Novel (24 page)

Dion said, “I would never have turned on you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You
know
that.”

“I do, uh?”

Joe reached over and dumped the stale cake out onto Dion’s lap.

“The fuck you doing?”

“Ssshhh.” Joe removed the envelope he’d found under the cake last night. He threw it up the bed, where it hit Dion in the chin. “Open it.”

Dion’s fingers trembled as he did. He pulled out the sheaf of bills—two thousand in hundreds—and the slip of paper below it. He opened the piece of paper and closed his eyes.

“Show it to me, D. Show me the name on it.”

“Just because they were asking, doesn’t mean I would have given it to them. Plenty of times, I don’t.”

“Show me the name. Show me who their next target was.”

Dion turned the piece of paper outward:

Coughlin.

“I never would have—”

“How many lies you want me to believe? How long you want this dance to go on? You keep saying you wouldn’t this, you’d never that, you couldn’t the other thing. What do you want me to do—fucking agree with you? Okay, fine, I agree with you. You’re a man of principle pretending to be a man without honor. Me, I’m just the sap who lost everything—my home, my standing, could still lose my life—to protect a rat.”

“You were protecting a friend.”

“My son was in the car. You took my son to your contact point with federal fucking cops. My son.”

“Who I love like a—”

Joe came forward in a rush, put the needle under Dion’s left eye. “Don’t you say the word
love
again. Not in this room.”

Dion breathed heavily through his nostrils but said nothing.

“I think you rat on people because it’s your nature. Gives you a thrill. I can’t say for sure, but that’s my guess. And if you do a thing enough times, you are that thing. All your other characteristics are just bullshit.”

“Joe, listen. Just listen.”

Joe was humiliated when he saw a warm tear hit Dion’s face and realized it had come from his own eye. “What am I supposed to believe in now? Huh? What’s left?”

Dion didn’t answer.

Joe sucked a wet breath through his nostrils. “There’s a sugar plantation a few minutes’ walk from here.”

Dion blinked. “I know. You and Esteban showed it to me about five years ago.”

“Angel Balimente is going to meet us there in a couple hours. I’ll hand you off to him and he’ll lead you out of the province to a boat. You’ll be off the island by tonight. I ever hear from you again or I ever hear of you popping your head up somewhere, I’ll put you down. Like a fucking goat with a foaming mouth. We clear?”

“Listen—”

Joe spit in his face.

Dion scrunched his eyes and now he was weeping too, his chest heaving.

“I said are we clear?”

Dion kept his eyes closed and waved his arm at the air above his face. “Clear.”

Joe got off the bed, walked to the door. “Do what you need to do. Pack, say good-bye to Tomas, have a meal, whatever. If you’re
seen outside the house before I come back for you, the guards have orders to shoot you on sight.”

He left the room.

OUT ON THE STONE PORCH, Tomas was bewildered. “When will I see you again?”

“Oh,” Dion said, “soon enough. You know.”

“I don’t know. I don’t.”

Dion knelt by him. It took some effort, would probably take more to get back up. “You know what business your father and me are in.”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Illegal.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s more than that. We call it our thing because that’s what it is—a few guys like me and your father involved in a, whatta ya call it—enterprise. And it’s just ours. We don’t bother nobody outside it, we don’t invade your country or steal your land because our eyes are bigger than our plates. We make money. And we protect other people who are trying to make money the same way for a fee. And if we get in trouble, we can’t cry to the police or the mayor. We’re on our own, like men. And sometimes that’s a tough pill to swallow. So, yeah, now I gotta go away. Because you saw what happened back in Tampa. You saw how it can get when we have a disagreement in our thing. It can get a little serious, right?”

He laughed and Tomas laughed too.

“Very serious, right?”

“Yes,” Tomas said.

“But that’s okay—the serious stuff is what makes life worthwhile.
The other stuff—the dames, the laughs, the silly games and lazy days—it’s all fun, but it doesn’t stick. The serious stuff—that sticks, makes you feel alive. So it’s pretty serious right now, and your father he’s got a way to get me out but I gotta go now, and I might have to go forever.”

“No.”

“Yeah. Listen to me. Look, look at me.” He gripped Tomas’s shoulders, locked their gazes. “Someday you’re going to get a postcard. Ain’t going to be anything written on it. Just the card. And the place on that card? That won’t be where I am, but it will be where I
was
. And you’ll know your uncle Dion is living the life somewhere. He’s getting by.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“Your old man and me, Tomas, we don’t believe in kings or princes or presidents. We believe we’re all kings and princes and presidents. We’re all whatever we decide to be and no one tells us different. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t ever take a knee for nobody.”

“You’re on your knee now.”

“That’s because you’re family.” He chuckled. “Now help me up, would ya, kid? Shit.”

“How can I help you up?”

“Just keep your head right there and don’t move it.”

He clamped his big paw on top of Tomas’s head and pushed up.

“Ouch.”

“Stop your bellyaching and be a man, for Christ’s sake.” He said to Joe, “Gotta toughen this kid up.” He pinched Tomas’s biceps. “Right? Right?”

Tomas swatted at his hand.

“Bye, kid.”

“Bye, Uncle Dion.”

He watched his father lift Dion’s suitcase off the stone porch and then watched them walk out of the yard toward the slope that led down to the plantation, and he hoped this wasn’t what life was—a series of departures.

But he suspected it was.

JOE AND DION WALKED DOWN A ROW that cut through the center of the plantation. The workers called the row Little House Lane; at the end of it stood a small yellow house the previous owner had built as a playhouse for his daughter. It was no bigger than a toolshed but had been constructed to look like a Victorian. The owner had sold the plantation to Suarez Sugar Ltd., Joe’s and Esteban’s company, back in the early 1930s, during the boom years of rum-running, when sugar was at a premium. The owner’s daughter had long since grown up and left the island, and the little house she’d left behind had been used as storage and occasionally as sleeping quarters for smaller men. One year, they’d removed the window in the west wall and fixed a shelf below it and turned the house into a cantina with a few small wooden tables placed out front. It proved an ill-fated act of benevolence, however, when the drunken workers became
prone to fighting, and the experiment ended for good when two got in a machete battle that left both men maimed and unemployable.

Joe carried Dion’s suitcase for him. There wasn’t much in it—a few shirts and pairs of pants, socks and underwear, one pair of shoes, two bottles of cologne, a toothbrush—but Dion was still too weak to carry it the length of a sugarcane field in the late afternoon heat.

The cane stood seven to eight feet tall. The rows were spaced about two and a half feet apart. Off to the west, workers burned a field. The fire consumed the leaves but not the stalks and their precious sugar juice, which would be transported up to the mill. Luckily the warm breeze crossed the plantation from the east and kept the smoke from covering the rest of the fields. Some days, it worked the opposite—you’d think the sky had been stripped from the world and replaced with a ceiling of roiling clouds as big as airships and dark as cast iron. Today, however, the sky was bold and blue, though hints of orange were beginning to encroach on the edges.

“So that’s the plan?” Dion said. “Angel, he takes me out through those hills?”

“Yup.”

“Where’s the boat?”

“I assume it’s on the other side of the hills. All I know for sure is it’ll take you to Isla de Pinos. You stay there for a bit. Then someone will pick you up again, take you to Kingston or Belize.”

“You don’t know which.”

“Nope. And I don’t want to.”

“I’ll take Kingston. They speak English there.”

“You speak Spanish. What difference does it make?”

“I’m tired of speaking Spanish.”

They walked in silence for a while, the soft soil making everything
cant. The mill sat on the highest hill before them, overlooking the ten-thousand-hectare plantation like a stern parent. On the next highest hill was the housing for the managers—colonial-era villas with verandas stretching the length of the second stories. The field supervisors lived in similar structures a little farther down the hill, but theirs had been sectioned off to house six to eight units. Ringing the field edges were the tin-roof shacks of the workers. Dirt floors mostly, a few with running water, most without. Outhouses spaced behind every fifth shack.

Dion cleared his throat. “So, let’s say I’m lucky, I end up walking around Jamaica, then what? What am I supposed to do after that?”

“Disappear.”

“How am I supposed to disappear without money?”

“You’ve got two grand. A hard-earned two grand.”

“That won’t last long on the lam.”

“Hey, you know what? That’s not my fucking problem, D.”

“Seems like it is, though.”

“How you see that?”

“If I don’t have money, I’ll stick out more. I’ll be more desperate too. Probably more inclined toward rash behavior. Plus—Jamaica? How much business did we do down there in the 1920s and 1930s? You don’t think I’ll be recognized at some point?”

“Maybe. I’d have to give it some more—”

“No, no. You would have figured on that. The Joe I know would have stashed bricks of money in a bag for me along with a few passports. He’d have people waiting to change my hair color, maybe give me a fake beard, that sorta thing.”

“The Joe You Know doesn’t have time for that. The Joe You Know needs to get you the fuck out of this region.”

“The Joe I know would have already figured out how he was going to get funds to me in Isla del Pinto.”

“Isla de Pinos.”

“Stupid name.”

“It’s Spanish.”

“I know it’s Spanish. I just said it’s a fucking stupid name. You understand me? It’s fucking stupid.”

“What’s stupid about Isle of Pines?”

Dion shook his head several times and said nothing.

The next row over, something brushed against the cane stalks. A dog surely, tracking its prey. They moved constantly along the perimeter and down the rows—dun-colored terriers that killed rats with their razor teeth and gleaming dark eyes. The dogs were sometimes so adept at their job, they’d attack workers in packs if they smelled rat on them. One, a mottle-flank bitch named Luz, was such a legend—she’d killed 273 rodents in one day—that she’d been allowed to sleep in the Little House for a month.

Armed men watched the fields, ostensibly to protect the plants from thieves, but really to keep the workers in line or the ones with debt from running off. And all the workers carried debt. This isn’t a farm, Joe thought the first time he and Esteban walked around it, it’s a prison. I own shares in a prison. Which is why Joe had no need to fear the guards; they all feared him.

“I was speaking Spanish,” Dion said, “two years before you were. Remember when I told you it was the only way you could survive in Ybor? And you said, ‘But this is America. I want to speak my own damn language.’”

Joe had never said that, but he nodded just the same as Dion looked back over his shoulder at him. He heard the dog again off to their right, its flank brushing cane.

“I was your guide there back in ’29. ’Member? You’re off the train from Boston with your chalk skin and your prison haircut.
You wouldn’t have been able to find your ass with two hands and both heels if it wasn’t for me.”

Joe watched him look up past the tall stalks at the orange and blue sky. It was such an odd mix of colors—the blue of the day trying so hard to hang on as the orange blush of evening began its march toward bloodred dusk.

“The colors down here don’t make sense. Too many of ’em. Same in Tampa. In Boston, what’d we have? We had blue, we had gray, we had some yellow if the sun was out. Trees were green. Grass was green and didn’t grow ten fucking feet tall. Things made sense.”

“Yeah.” Joe suspected Dion needed to hear the sound of his voice.

The yellow house was about a quarter mile off now, a five-minute walk on a dry road. Ten minutes in the soft earth, though.

“He built that for his daughter, uh?”

“That’s the story.”

“What was her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you not know?”

“Easy—I simply don’t know.”

“You never heard it?”

“I might have. I dunno. Maybe when we bought the place and heard the story for the first time. His name was Carlos, the previous owner, but the daughter? Why the fuck would I know her name?”

“It just seems wrong, you know.” He raised an arm to the fields and the hills. “I mean, she was here. Played here, ran here, drank water here, ate.” He shrugged. “Seems like she should have a name.” He looked back over his shoulder at Joe. “Whatever happened to her? You know that much?”

“She grew up.”

Dion turned forward again. “Well, no shit. But what
happened
to her? She live a long life? She book passage on the
Lusitania
? What?”

Joe removed the gun from his pocket, let it hang down by his right leg. He still carried Dion’s suitcase with his left hand, the ivory handle growing slick in the heat. In the movies, when Cagney or Edward G shot a man, the victim grimaced and then politely folded over and died. Even if they shot them in the stomach, a wound Joe knew made a man claw the air, kick the ground, and scream for his mother, his father, and his god. But what he didn’t do was die right away.

“I don’t know anything about her life,” Joe said. “Don’t know if she’s alive or dead or how old she’d be. I just know she left the island.”

The yellow house grew closer.

“You?”

“What?”

“Gonna leave the island someday?”

A man shot in the center of the chest didn’t automatically die right away either. It often took time for bullets to do their work. A slug might bounce off a bone and nick the heart instead of entering it. And the victim didn’t lose consciousness during that process. He moaned or writhed like he’d been dropped in a tub of boiling water.

“Not sure there’s anyplace I can go right now,” Joe said. “This is the closest there is to safe for me and Tomas.”

“Christ, I miss Boston.”

Joe had seen guys with head shots walk around scratching the wound before the body began to shut down and the legs finally gave way. “I miss Boston too.”

“We weren’t meant for this.”

“Meant for what?”

“All these hot wet climates. Mush your brain, get you all turned around.”

“That’s why you betrayed me—humidity?”

The only sure kill shot was if you placed the muzzle directly to the back of the skull at the base of brain. Otherwise, bullets could wander quirky paths.

“I never betrayed you.”

“You betrayed us. You betrayed our thing. That’s the same.”

“No, it’s not.” Dion looked back at Joe, his eyes noting the gun in his hand without surprise. “Before there was our thing, there was
our
thing.” He pointed from his chest to Joe’s. “Me, you, and my poor, dumb brother, Paulo, God rest him. Then we became—we became what, Joe?”

“Part of something bigger,” Joe said. “And, Dion, for eight years, you ran the company store in Tampa, so don’t start playing violins about the old days, getting all sappy about a three-story walkup on Dot Ave with no icebox and a toilet on the second floor that didn’t work.”

Dion turned his head forward and continued walking. “What’s the word for when you
know
one thing but you still
believe
the opposite?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said. “A paradox?”

Dion’s shoulders rose and fell. “That’ll have to do. So, yes, Joseph—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“—I know I just spent eight years running the company store and ten years before that climbing the company ladder. And maybe if I had a chance to do it all over, I’d do the exact same thing. But the para . . .” He looked back at Joe.

“Dox,” Joe said. “Paradox.”

“The paradox is that I really wish you and me were still sticking
up payroll rooms and casing out-of-town banks.” He looked back with a sad smile. “I wish we were still outlaws.”

“But we’re not,” Joe said. “We’re gangsters.”

“I never would have given you up.”

“What else are you going to say?”

Dion looked up at the hills ahead of them and the words came out of him like a moan. “Oh, shit.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just shit. Aww shit. It’s all shit.”

“It’s not all shit. There’s good in this world.” Joe dropped Dion’s suitcase to the earth.

“If there is, we ain’t part of it.”

“No.” Joe extended his arm behind Dion and watched his shadow do the same in front of him.

Dion saw it too. His shoulders hunched and his next step was a stutter step, but he kept walking.

“I don’t think you can do this,” he said.

Joe didn’t think he could either. The twitches had already begun rippling the skin around his wrist and thumb.

“I’ve killed before,” Joe said. “Only lost sleep over it once.”

“Killed, yeah,” Dion said. “But this is murder.”

“You’ve never had trouble with murder.” Joe found it harder to talk with the beats of his heart punching up against the base of his throat.

“I know. But this ain’t about me.
You
don’t have to do this.”

“I think I do,” Joe said.

“You could let me run.”

“To where? Through the jungle? You’ll have a price on your head big enough for any man in these fields to buy his own sugar plantation. And I’ll be dead in a ditch half an hour after you.”

“So it’s about your life.”

“It’s about you being a rat. It’s about you threatening everything we built.”

“We’ve been friends over twenty years.”

“You ratted on us.” Joe’s voice was even shakier than his hand. “You lied to my face every day and it almost got my son killed.”

“You were my brother.” Dion’s voice was shaking now too.

“You don’t lie to your brother.”

Dion stopped. “But you can kill him, huh?”

Joe stopped too, lowered the gun, closed his eyes. When he opened them, Dion was holding his right index finger aloft. There was a scar there, a pink so faint you had to be standing in direct sunlight to see it.

“You still got yours?” he asked.

When they were kids, they’d cut their right index fingertips with a razor blade in an abandoned livery stable in South Boston and pressed the fingertips together. A silly ritual. A laughable blood oath.

Joe shook his head. “Mine faded away.”

“Funny,” Dion said. “Mine didn’t.”

Joe said, “You wouldn’t get half a mile.”

“I know it,” Dion whispered. “I know.”

Joe pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face with it. He looked past the worker shacks and the plantation homes and the mill itself to the dark green hills beyond. “Not half a mile.”

“So why didn’t you just kill me back at the house?”

“Tomas,” Joe said.

“Ah.” Dion nodded and scuffed at the soft earth with his shoe. “You think it’s already written, like under a rock somewhere?”

“What’s that?”

“How we end up?” Dion’s eyes had gone hungry now as they tried to consume everything—drink the sky, eat the fields, inhale the hills. “From the moment the doc pulls us out of our old lady’s womb, you think maybe somewhere it’s written ‘You will burn in a fire, you will fall off a boat, you will die in a foreign field’?”

Joe said, “Jesus,” and nothing more.