Sugar Pop Moon (25 page)

The champ's lying on his back, moaning. He's clutching his left thigh with gloved hands that are doused in blood. A deep red circle stains the snow under his leg. The machine gun is still spitting bullets but now it's targeting Johalis.

Yanking off my sling, I grab the champ under his shoulders, and pull him toward a tree. A stabbing pang erupts in my right forearm and I can feel the stitches popping under the white gauze. I drop the champ, grit my teeth, reach down, and yank him again. This time my arm feels like it's exploding, as if a knife is slicing its way past my jaw and up into my right eye. I get the champ under a tree and drop him there.

“You okay?” I say, pulling his collar up to keep his head warm.

“I'll live,” he says, but not with any conviction.

Johalis crawls on his belly to reach us. “I don't think they can see us if we stay low.”

He reaches into my father's pocket and pulls out the keys to the Auburn. “I'll get the car,” he says. Then he asks me, “Can you carry him to the road?”

“Yep,” I say, my teeth chattering. I pull the glove off my left hand and grab my revolver. “Go, go, go.”

Johalis makes a run for it and I take a couple of shots at the cabin to cover him. It's little help. The triggerman starts up again, showering the trees around Johalis with bullets.

I help the champ up and drape his arm over my right shoulder, keeping my left hand free to shoot. We run as best we can with only three good legs and arms between us.

The machine gun is on us and it's got company—now two of them are firing. They're each shooting in quick bursts and sound like dueling typewriters. We're being bombarded. Shards of bark and splintered wood fly off the trees and hit me in the neck and mouth.

I spot a car's headlights pulling onto the shoulder of the road. It's Johalis in the Auburn. We can't be more than thirty yards away and he's throwing the passenger door open for us. My father is leaning on me as we jostle our way through a row of trees. The triggermen keep shooting and I'm wondering if they'll ever run out of bullets.

A burst of pain rips through my right shoulder and I feel as if a gasoline bomb went off inside of my chest. I fall face-first into a snowdrift—my gun flies out of my hand and the champ lands ten feet away from me.

“Jersey!” he rasps. He scrambles toward me, his left leg dragging behind him like a tail. His round eyes are bulging under his fedora and his meaty lower lip is shivering. He's panicking, scanning my legs and arms to see how many times I've been hit.

“I'm okay,” I tell him. “Get to the car, I'll follow you.”

“You ain't okay, you're bleedin' right through your coat.” He points at my left hand, which is clutching the exit wound below my neck.

“Can you walk?” he asks me.

“I think so,” I say, getting to my feet. I feel woozy.

He hobbles a couple of steps toward the road and picks up my revolver. Then he leans back against a tree, the snow from its upper boughs raining down on his head like confetti, and he fires in the direction of the cabin.

“Go!” he yells to me.

I don't want to leave him but I know he won't listen to me. I run to the Auburn, the pain radiating to my forehead every time my right foot hits the ground. Johalis has the driver's door open—he's using the car as a shield and is shooting toward the cabin. I fall into the back seat, clenching the hole in my shoulder.

My father comes hobbling after me.

Johalis squeezes off a few final shots as the champ drops himself into the front seat and swings his leg into the car. Johalis gets behind the wheel and makes a U-turn away from the cabin. As we gain ground, the clacking of the gunfire peters out, but we've still got to pass the store.

Just as we're rolling by it, I inch my head to the window and see Frank and Freddy running out the front door, each holding a machine gun. They pepper the Auburn with metal—the hailstorm hitting the back of the car sounds like a blizzard of nickels pelting a trashcan. The rear windshield shatters in two places and I hear a taillight explode. I roll myself down under the rear seat as Johalis keeps driving. My father's down low in the front; he must be trying to cover the hole in his thigh with his hands because he's cursing that he can't stop the bleeding. I'm clutching my right shoulder, which feels like it just lost a bar fight to Hector's cleaver. Eventually, the machine gun patter fades in the distance.

“Can you make it to the doc's?” I ask my father from behind the seat.

“Yeah,” he grunts out. “Can you?”

My vision is blurring, I'm seeing two of everything. “Don't think so,” I say. “Maybe he'll meet us at the cabin.”

No longer caring where I bleed, I lay my head down on the seat and close my eyes. A year ago today, December 22, 1929, I laughed my way into the holidays. Now, I'll be using the time to eulogize the people I've lost. Assuming I'm not one of them.

I'm looking up at Doc Anders. His horn-rims sit low on his nose as he clucks his tongue and tapes up my chest and shoulder. I recognize the water-stained tiles on the ceiling behind him and the brown cloth shade on the lamp next to me. We're back in cabin 11 at the Cozy Cottages, but I don't remember getting here.

Johalis is peering at me from behind the doc's shoulder.

“Welcome back,” he says.

I'm groggy and I've got to piss. “What time is it?”

My words drag, I sound like I'm sloshed on moon. I've got a pounding headache—my right temple feels as if it's getting slammed by the butt end of a shotgun.

My father answers from the couch. “Tuesday, seven in the morning.” He's out of my line of vision, but I remember how badly his leg was bleeding.

“Is he okay?” I ask the doc. I have to space my words to get them out clearly.

“The bullet lodged next to his kneecap,” the doc says. “The one that hit you nearly pierced the upper lobe of your right lung. You're two lucky sons of bitches.”

I don't feel lucky, but I don't tell him that.

He rips a six-inch piece of tape off of his roll and presses it over the bandage on my shoulder. Then he wipes the sweat off his forehead with his wrist and palms back the side of his frizzy white hair. “I hope you know what you're doing.”

Again I ignore him. It's clear I have no idea what I'm doing.

“Santi's funeral,” I say.

Old Man Santiago told me he'd be skipping the wake and burying Santi today because he couldn't bear to have the funeral on Christmas Eve. If I'm to pay my respects, I need to do it this morning. The services are scheduled at Trinity Church Cemetery at nine. That gives me two hours.

“You can't go,” Johalis says. “It's too dangerous, Denny Gazzara is sure to be waiting there.”

The doc nods. “You shouldn't get out of bed the next few days,” he says. “And that's optimistic.”

I picture Pearl at Old Man Santiago's side, helping him stay on his feet as they throw dirt onto Santi's coffin. Then I picture a pair of machine guns behind her.

“I'm going,” I say. The second I raise my head off the pillow, a wave of nausea charges up my throat and I fall back onto the bed.

“Hero,” the doc mutters.

My father shouts out from the couch but I'm too woozy to move my head to look at him. “I'm comin' with you,” he says.

“We'll stay out of sight,” I tell Johalis, my head pinned to the pillow.

“You're a goddamned albino with a bullet hole in your shoulder,” Johalis says. “You can't stay out of sight.” He fumbles for his cigarettes and calms down after lighting one.

He has a point—I don't have a face for undercover work. But I do know the cemetery. It's in a valley east of Riverside Drive. I used to pick up shipments of moon from Jimmy's truckers behind the mausoleum. If we stay to the west of the graveyard, we could watch the funeral from the edge of the roadway.

“I'm going anyway,” I say. “We'll stay on the hill. If things get hairy, we'll be out of there in seconds.”

“Goddamn it,” Johalis says, his lips curling downward. “I can't let the two of you go alone.”

I can tell he wishes he never got sucked into this mess, but I guess he's going to see this through until it ends, one way or the other. I give him credit for living up to his word. He's more like the champ than I thought.

“We won't even get out of the car,” my father says, before letting out a yelp of pain. He must have tried to move his leg.

The doc looks at my father and then at me. He doesn't say anything, but by the way he's muttering under his breath, it's obvious that he doesn't like where this is heading.

An hour later, I'm in the Auburn with my father and Johalis. We're on the hill above Riverside Drive, looking down on Santi's funeral. An elderly priest in his all-black getup is delivering a sermon to a small crowd gathered in front of an open grave. I can see a wooden coffin resting on a metal stand and long-stem red roses lying on its lid. Pearl is exactly where I'd pictured her: standing behind Old Man Santiago and his wife. I've never seen the old man in a suit, but he's in a black one today. His gray overcoat is unbuttoned and he seems oblivious to the cold that's needling my skin. His wife is draped in black with a dark blue hat.

I can't hear the priest, so I get out of the car, leaving Johalis behind the wheel and my father in the front passenger seat. Grabbing the branches of a frozen bush with my left hand, I make my way around the car to get a better vantage point. My boots slip on the snow and I land in a frozen drift at the trunk of an oak about twelve feet from the Auburn. My overcoat is barely protecting my rump from the chill of the frosty ground and the white landscape is stinging my eyes. My shoulder feels as if the doc stitched me up with a knitting needle.

The priest circles the coffin and shakes a tin canister of incense. I still can't pick up any voices, but the clinking metal of the incense chain echoes all the way up the hill as it rings its final good-byes to Santi.

I spot a light blue necktie and a head of shiny, waxed hair behind Pearl. It's Jimmy. He's standing next to Diego, holding his white hat in his hands and looking around as if he's admiring the scenery. I know better. Jimmy's not stupid; he figures I'm here somewhere. I'm hoping the tree is camouflaging me and making me look like some kind of yellow-haired weed, but Jimmy keeps on gawking. Then he fixes his stare in my direction and our eyes lock. He's onto me for sure. I'm ready to crawl back into the Auburn, but Jimmy doesn't react. He turns and looks back to the priest. This is why I was able to work for Jimmy: he may be a crook but he respects the few people he cares about—and he loved Santi. We've got a truce until after the burial.

A black Nash glides to the gravesite from the east side of the cemetery. It comes up the main drag and then loops around the mausoleum. I can see it's Gazzara's boys, Frank and Freddy, and my guess is they've got a couple of machine guns with them. They must want me pretty bad if they've driven all the way up here. They get out of the car and circle the mourners, no doubt looking for the yellowy-green eyes of a zebra-nigger-lackey-coon, but finding, instead, the murderous glare of Jimmy McCullough.

“Uh oh,” Johalis says, leaning out of the car window.

“They got some nerve,” my father says from the passenger seat. He's right, but he doesn't realize that Jimmy will handle this for us. Jimmy's got more venom than the three of us put together. I just hope things don't get so far out of hand that Old Man Santiago can't put his son to rest without a torrent of bullets raining down on his family.

Jimmy walks with Gazzara's boys to the back of the Nash. Diego follows them, unbuttoning his overcoat. When they're a good distance from the priest, Jimmy starts barking, his cheeks turning crimson as he pokes his finger in Frank's face. I have no idea what he's saying, but I'll bet it involves their lives and the speed with which Jimmy will take them. Jimmy opens the door of the Nash and pushes Frank in, slamming the door shut and nearly clipping Frank's ankle in the process. Freddy gets behind the wheel and drives off, back toward the mausoleum. I can't deny that I'm delighted to see Jimmy throw his weight around. If I weren't in his doghouse, I'd pour him a shot of moon the minute I started my next shift.