Live by Night (29 page)

“Found out we were always fucked. Always killing each other and raping and stealing and laying waste. It's who we are, RD. Ain't no Used to Be. Ain't no better days.”

RD said, “Uh-huh.”

“You know what this place could be?” Joe said. “You realize what we could do with this spot?”

“I do not.”

“Build the biggest casino in the United States.”

“Ain't nobody going to allow gambling.”

“Gotta disagree with you, RD. Whole country's in the tank, banks going under, cities going bankrupt, people out of work.”

“ 'Cause we got us a Communist for a president.”

“No,” Joe said, “not even close, actually. But I'm not here to debate politics with you, RD. I'm here to tell you that the reason Prohibition will end is because—”

“Prohibition ain't gonna end in a God-fearing country.”

“Yes, it will. Because the country needs all the millions it didn't get the past ten years on tariffs and import taxes and distribution taxes and interstate transport levies and, shit, you name it—could be billions they gave away. And they're going to ask me and people like me—you, for example—to make millions of dollars selling legal booze so we can save the country for them. And that's exactly why, in the spirit of the moment, they'll allow this state to legalize gambling. Long as we buy off the right county commissioners, the right city councillors and state senators. We could do that. And you could be part of it, RD.”

“I don't want to be part of nothing with you.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To tell you to your face, mister, that you're a cancer. You're the pestilence that gonna bring this country to its knees. You and your nigger whore girlfriend and your dirty spic friends and your dirty dago friends. I'm a take the Parisian. Not sixty percent—the whole place. Then? I'm a
take
all your clubs. I'm a take everything you got. Might even go by your fancy house and tear me off a piece that nigger girl 'fore I cut her throat.” He looked back at his boys and laughed. He turned to Joe again. “You ain't got this yet, but you leaving town, boy. You just forgot to pack your bags.”

Joe looked into RD's bright, mean eyes. Stared deep into them until he got all the way past anything bright and was left with nothing but the mean. It was like staring into the eyes of a dog beat so much and starved so much and uglied so much that all it had to give back to the world was its teeth.

In that moment, he pitied him.

RD Pruitt saw that pity in Joe's eyes. And what surged up in his own was a howl of outrage. And a knife. Joe saw the knife coming in his eyes and by the time he glanced down at RD's hand, he'd already buried it in Joe's abdomen.

Joe gripped RD's wrist, gripped it fiercely, so RD couldn't move that knife right, left, up, or down. Joe's own knife clattered to the floor. RD struggled against Joe's grip, both their teeth gritted now.

“I got you,” RD said. “I got you.”

Joe removed his hands from RD's wrist and punched the heels of his palms into the center of RD and chucked him back. The knife slid back out and Joe fell on the floor and RD laughed and the two boys with him laughed.

“Got you!” RD said and walked toward Joe.

Joe watched his own blood drip from the blade. He held up a hand. “Wait.”

RD stopped. “That's what everyone says.”

“I wasn't talking to you.” Joe looked up into the darkness, saw the stars on the dome above the rotunda. “Okay. Now.”

“Then who you talking to?” RD said, a step too slow, always a step too slow, which was probably what made him so ass-dumb mean.

Dion and Sal Urso turned on the searchlights they'd lugged up to the rotunda this afternoon. It was like a harvest moon popping out from behind a bank of storm clouds. The ballroom turned white.

When the bullets rained down, RD Pruitt, his cousin, Carver, and Carver's cousin, Harold, did the bone-yard foxtrot, like they were having terrible coughing fits while running across hot coals. Dion, of late, had turned into an artist with the Thompson, and he stitched an
X
up one side and down the other of RD Pruitt's body. By the time they stopped firing, scraps of the three men were flung all over the ballroom.

Joe heard their footsteps on the stairs as they ran down to him.

Dion called to Sal when they entered the ballroom, “Get the doc', get the doc'.”

Sal's footsteps ran the other way as Dion ran over to Joe and ripped open his shirt.

“Oooh, Nellie.”

“What? Bad?”

Dion shrugged off his coat and then tore off his own shirt. He wadded it up and pressed it to the wound. “Hold it there.”

“Bad?” Joe repeated.

“Ain't good,” Dion said. “How do you feel?”

“Feet are cold. Stomach's on fire. I want to scream actually.”

“Scream, then,” Dion said. “Ain't no one else around.”

Joe did. The force of it shocked him. It echoed all over the hotel.

“Feel better?”

“You know what?” Joe said. “No.”

“Then don't do it again. Well, he's on his way. The doc'.”

“You bring him with you?”

Dion nodded. “He's on the boat. Sal's already hit the signal light by now. He'll be motoring up to the dock lickety-split.”

“That's good.”

“Why didn't you make some kind of noise when he put it in? We couldn't fucking see you up there. We just kept waiting for the signal.”

“I don't know,” Joe said. “It seemed important not to give him the satisfaction. Oh, Jesus, this hurts.”

Dion gave him his hand and Joe clenched it.

“Why'd you let him get so close if you weren't going to stab him?”

“So what?”

“So close? With the knife? You were supposed to stab
him
.”

“I shouldn't have shown him those pictures, D.”

“You showed him pictures?”

“No. What? No. I mean Figgis. I shouldn't have done it.”

“Christ. That's what we had to do to put this fucking mad dog down.”

“It's not the right price.”

“But it's the price. You don't go letting this piece of shit stab you because the price is the price.”

“Okay.”

“Hey. Stay awake.”

“Stop slapping my face.”

“Stop closing your eyes.”

“It's going to make a nice casino.”

“What?”

“Trust me,” Joe said.

Chapter Twenty

Mi Gran Amor

F
ive weeks.

That's how long he spent in a hospital bed. First in the Gonzalez Clinic on Fourteenth, just up the block from the Circulo Cubano, and then, under the alias Rodriguo Martinez, at the Centro Asturiano Hospital twelve blocks east. The Cubans might have fought with the Spaniards and the southern Spaniards might have fought with the northern Spaniards, and all of them had their beefs with the Italians and the American Negroes, but when it came to medical care, Ybor was a mutual aid collective. Everyone down there knew that no one in white Tampa would lift a finger to stop up a hole in their hearts if there was a Caucasian nearby who needed treatment for a fucking hangnail.

Joe was worked on by a team that Graciela and Esteban assembled—a Cuban surgeon who performed the original laparotomy, a Spanish specialist in thoracic medicine who oversaw the abdominal wall reconstruction during the second, third, and fourth surgeries, and an American doctor on the forefront of pharmacology who had access to the tetanus toxoid vaccine and regulated the administering of the morphine.

All the initial work done on Joe—the irrigation, cleansing, exploration, debridement, and suturing—had been done at the Gonzalez Clinic, but word slipped out he was there. Midnight riders of the KKK showed up the second night, galloping their horses up and down Ninth, the oily stench of their torches climbing through the window grates. Joe wasn't awake for any of this—he would never have more than scant recollection of the first two weeks after the stabbing—but Graciela would tell him all about it during the months of his recovery.

When the riders departed, thundering out of Ybor along Seventh and firing their rifles in the air, Dion sent men to follow them—two men per horse. Just before dawn, unknown assailants entered the homes of eight local men across the Greater Tampa/St. Petersburg area and beat those men nearly to death, some in front of their families. When a wife intervened in Temple Terrace, they broke her arms with a bat. When a son in Egypt Lake tried to impede them, they tied the boy to a tree and let the ants and mosquitoes have at him. The most prominent of the victims, the dentist Victor Toll, was rumored to have replaced Kelvin Beauregard as the head of the town Klavern. Dr. Toll was tied to the hood of his car. He was forced to lie there in a soup of his blood and smell his own house burn to the ground.

This effectively ended the power of the Ku Klux Klan in Tampa for three years, but the Pescatore Family and the Coughlin-Suarez Gang had no way of knowing that, so they took no chances and moved Joe to the Centro Asturiano Hospital. There a surgical drain was inserted to offset the internal bleeding, the source of which mystified the original doctor, which is why they sent for the second doctor, a gentle Spaniard with the most beautiful fingers Graciela had ever seen.

By this point, Joe was mostly out of danger for hemorrhagic shock, the main killer of abdominal knifing victims. Second to that was liver damage, and his liver had been given a clean bill of health. This, the doctors told him much later, was thanks to his father's watch, which bore a new scrape on the dust cover. The point of the knife had glanced off the cover first, altering its path, however slightly.

The first doctor had done his best to check for damage to the duodenum, the rectum, the colon, the gallbladder, the spleen, and the terminal ileum, but the conditions had not been ideal. Joe had been stabilized on the dirty floor of an abandoned building and then moved across the bay on a boat. By the time they got him into an operating room, more than an hour had passed.

The second doctor who examined Joe suspected, due to the angle the blade had traveled during its peritoneal penetration, that there was damage to the spleen, and they cut Joe open again. The Spanish doctor was on the money. He repaired the nick in Joe's spleen and removed the toxic bile that had begun to ulcerate his abdominal wall, though some damage was already done. Joe would require two more surgeries before the month was out.

After the second surgery, he woke to someone sitting at the foot of his bed. His vision was blurred to the point that it turned the air to gauze. But he could make out a thick head and a long jaw. And a tail. The tail thumped against the sheet over his leg and the panther came into focus. It stared at him with its hungry yellow eyes. Joe's throat constricted and the flesh that covered it was slick with sweat.

The panther licked its upper lip and nose.

It yawned, and Joe wanted to close his eyes in the face of those magnificent teeth, the white of every bone they'd ever cracked in half and torn the meat from.

The mouth closed and the yellow eyes found him again and the cat placed its front paws on his stomach and walked up his body to his head.

Graciela said, “What cat?”

He stared up into her face, blinking at the sweat. It was morning; the air coming through the windows was cool and bore the scent of camellias.

After the surgeries, he was also prohibited from having sex for three months. Alcohol, Cuban food, shellfish, nuts, and corn were forbidden. If he feared that the lack of lovemaking would drive him and Graciela apart (and he did; so did she), it actually had the opposite effect. By the second month, he learned a different way to satisfy her, using his mouth, a way he'd stumbled upon by accident a few times over the years, but which now became his sole method of giving her pleasure. Kneeling before her, her ass cupped in his hands, his mouth covering the gateway to her womb, a gateway he'd come to think of as sacred and sinful and luxuriously slippery all at the same time, he felt he'd finally found something worth taking a knee for. If surrendering all preconceived notions of what a man was expected to give and receive from a woman was what it took to feel as pure and useful as he felt with his head between Graciela's thighs, then he wished he'd lost those notions years ago. Her initial protestations—
no, you can't; a man does not do that; I must bathe; you cannot possibly like the taste
—gave way to something bordering on addiction. For the final month before she could return the favor, Joe realized they were averaging five acts of oral gratification a day.

When the doctors finally cleared him, he and Graciela closed the shutters of their home on Ninth and filled the icebox on the second floor with food and champagne and confined themselves to the canopy bed or the claw-foot tub for two days. Near the end of the second day, lying in the red dusk, the shutters reopened to the street, the ceiling fan drying their bodies, Graciela said, “There will never be another.”

“What's that?”

“Man.” She ran her palm over his patchwork abdomen. “You are my man until death.”

“Yeah?”

She pressed her open mouth to his neck and exhaled. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“What about Adan?”

For the first time he saw contempt enter her eyes at the mention of her husband.

“Adan is no man. You,
mi gran amor,
are a man.”

“You're certainly all woman,” he said. “Christ, I get so lost in you.”

“I get lost in you.”

“Well, then . . .” He looked around the room. He'd waited so long for this day, he wasn't sure how to treat it now that it had arrived. “You'll never get a divorce in Cuba, right?”

She shook her head. “Even if I could return under my own name, the Church does not allow it.”

“So you'll always be married to him.”

“In name,” she said.

“But what's a name?” he said.

She laughed. “Agreed.”

He moved her on top of him and looked up her brown body into her brown eyes.
“Tú eres mi esposa.”

She wiped at her eyes with both hands, a small wet laugh escaping her. “And you are my husband.”

“Para siempre.”

She placed her warm palms on his chest and nodded. “Forever.”