White Shadow (37 page)

JOHNNY RIVERA had fucked plenty of ugly women before, but the piece of work sitting next to him in his ’52 Super 88 Olds was something else altogether. Big in the ass and small on top, she was redheaded and freckled, with yellowish eyes and buckteeth. But he’d been fucking her now off and on for two years, and she always provided him with the best service at Southern Bell. If there was a wiretap by the boys in Vice, he knew about it. If the Feds made a court order for telephone toll tickets, he knew it, too.

And when he had called a number two hundred fucking times with no answer, she could help with that, too.

Johnny leaned over and whispered in the woman’s ear, and she giggled just as they passed the big courthouse downtown. He waved to a couple deputies he knew. And then they turned and cut up on Jackson Avenue, and the woman smiled in her stiff plaid dress and little white gloves smelling like mothballs and took out her bubblegum and stuck it on the dash.

Rivera whipped around the port, past the Banana Docks, as the woman upzipped his fly and pulled out his dick, taking the whole damned thing in her mouth. Rivera leaned back into his two-tone, black-and-white seats with the wind whipping his long, oiled black hair in his eyes. He had the radio off and the sun was shining its last rays, and he decided to cut up to Broadway as the woman worked him with her hand and mouth.

“Baby,” Rivera said. “Don’t bite it.”

He had one arm cocked out the window, and he reached for the dash for his sunglasses as the streets got bright on Broadway late in the day, and he gave a cool wave to a couple guys he knew painting the outside of the Cuban Club, and Miranda, who sold deviled crabs from an umbrella cart. He waved to them all with a smile on his face in kind of this twenty-mile-per-hour parade. The woman was breathing hard in and out of her nose, and Rivera kept her working it like that, knocking back a quick drink from the pint tucked between the driver’s seat and the door.

He drove leaned back and with one hand.

They rolled, and he cut down on Twenty-first over to Palmetto Beach, the woman running out of breath and stopping for a moment and rolling her head in his lap and looking up at him with those dog-yellow eyes and saying: “You love me, Johnny, don’t you?”

“Sure thing,” Rivera said, and she traced his cheek over the scar. They rolled to the little park, where kids played on jungle gyms and swings—maybe two hundred yards from where they parked—and he saw the long empty beach and a Cuban girl, maybe sixteen, in a black bathing suit combing her hair, the sun a deep orange dropping over the lip of the bay and making the girl seem like a loose, curvy shadow in that last light.

He watched the girl combing her hair and stretching and arching her back and he came into the woman’s mouth, her gagging a bit, but him holding a good chunk of her hair by the skull and making sure she finished what she’d started.

When he finished, he pushed her away and downed another sip of the whiskey.

The woman looked like a clown with her makeup and lipstick all wild on her face. He handed her the unfinished pint, maybe a sip left, and a handkerchief.

“Fix your face,” he said. He leaned back in the leather seats and watched the light fade and the sun go down. They sat there for a while until the woman nudged him and he looked at her. It was hard looking at her.

“Aren’t you going to take me back?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

She fixed her face in the visor’s mirror and put away her makeup in the little purse. But before snapping it closed, she handed Johnny a business card with an address written on the back. “It’s just a pay phone,” she said. “A gas station in Gibsonton. Do you know where that is?”

He nodded.

“I’ve heard it’s a crazy place. They say that’s where all the old carnies live, and that there is a woman over there that looks just like a monkey. Is it far?”

“No,” he said, smiling and cranking the car. “It’s not far at all.”

He roared off from the crushed-shell lot, spewing a whitish dirt cloud as he cut back to Ybor City.

HIS DAUGHTER had always eyed him with suspicion. Dodge knew his wife’s subtle glances and rolled eyes and biting comments had done this, and it was just something he accepted. She rarely smiled at him, and when she did, she’d catch herself as if doing something wrong and return with that same blank face. It was late afternoon, and his boy was in back of the unmarked unit where Dodge kept the prisoners, playing with the floorboard that had been fitted to hold leg shackles. His daughter was beside him and didn’t seem to care when he’d met them at the front door, the bus dropping them close by.

He said he could take them for ice cream.

She didn’t want to go.

But he hustled them both outside and into his car and soon they were rolling down Bayshore Boulevard with the windows down and curving down by Gandy and finally into that part of the road—deep into the peninsula—where the old oaks made a tunnel and shaded you from the heat and you had to slow your car over the bumpy bricks that had been laid fifty years ago.

Dodge found a tree to park under at Ballast Point and bought his kids an ice-cream cone. Both wanted vanilla. They found a beaten picnic bench to sit on near the rock jetty, and watched the small skyline of Tampa.

His boy smiled and finished half the ice-cream cone before throwing it away and poking at dead fish on the small, sandy shore. His daughter sat on the far corner of the bench, finished her ice-cream cone as she’d been told, folded the used napkin, and threw it into a trash can fashioned from an old oil drum.

Some kids Dodge had seen the other day when he was interviewing a drunk named Eddie McLeod drove up in that big black convertible. The boys were in tight T-shirts, with pegged jeans and greasy hair, and he watched his daughter’s face as it brightened and she listened to their music, some loud guitar song, and tapped her foot.

“Where’s Mom?” she asked.

“Sick,” Dodge said.

“She’s very sick,” his daughter said, more to herself than anyone.

Dodge tried to take her hand, but his daughter pulled away and walked back to the car.

LUCREZIA SAT on the front porch of a cabin she’d just cleaned at Giant’s Fish Camp and watched Al Tomaini wipe down a shotgun with a rag and some oil. He smiled as he worked, breaking down the gun and running a wire into the barrels. The cloth at the end of the wire came out black and dirty, and he cleaned them again until the cloth came out clean. He whistled a little bit, music that she didn’t know but figured was just American tunes that she hadn’t heard.

His hands could easily swallow her head if he wanted. Even seated on his rear, he still loomed over her.

His legs and cowboy boots lingered over the edge of the porch. But instead of hanging over in midair, they hit the ground and lay out flat for several feet on the gravel lot. He wore his white cowboy hat, and his boots showed intricate patterns of lassos and bucking horses where his pants had ridden up.

He put down the wire and got a clean cloth that he soaked in oil and ran it over the long barrels, holding on to the steady wood stock. He held the gun the way a gentle man holds a woman, and Lucrezia became fascinated with that, the way the gun became an extension of the man.

He kept the big tin star on his chest, and he would take short breaks to sip some sweetened tea that Jeanie had made.

When he finished, he looked down at Lucrezia and narrowed his eyes. “You want to hold it, don’t you?”

She nodded.

He placed the gun in her hand, and she liked the heft and weight of it. Without realizing what she was doing, she snapped the shotgun together and it was completed in a resounding clack.

Al smiled.

“You sure you’ve never held one of these?”

Lucrezia shook her head.

It was late in the day, shortly before seven, and she watched as Al stood from his seat at the cabin in the little motor court, the red neon sign just buzzing to life. He looked out into the bay, far to the west, and stood there at his full height looking at the horizon.

“Big storm,” he said.

Lucrezia couldn’t see anything. But five minutes later, she saw the long unending line of blackness that was moving toward the sun. The coal black clouds began to cover the whole sky like ink polluting a glass of water.

JOHNNY RIVERA heard the thunder as he began to dress and pulled out two new guns he’d bought from a bolita banker named Pepe. A .45 and a .38 that he placed on his belt and in the crook of his back. He hiked his leg on top of his dresser and tucked a switchblade in his nylon sock and pulled down his pant leg. He had a blackjack he kept hidden out in his garage, and he tucked the heavy leather sap into his front pocket. Rivera walked in front of a full-length mirror and studied himself in the black silk shirt and black pleated pants. He combed his hair for a few minutes, adding a bit of fresh Vitalis, and then slid into his lightweight coat to conceal the guns. He heard more thunder and then that little splay of rain that sounded like small feet dancing on his roof.

He felt heavy as he walked to the door of his casita and locked up.

Johnny Rivera turned on the radio to a station that played country music and caught the middle of “Sixteen Tons.”

He played it loud as he cut out of Ybor City and slipped onto the back highways of Hillsborough County, back to the country where giants and freaks lived, to go find the girl. The night wind felt good on his face, and he felt strong outrunning the storm.

If he had cared to look back, he would’ve noticed three figures in a car behind him with Pasco County plates.

But that night, Johnny just listened to Tennessee Ernie Ford and thought about Charlie Wall’s money and how it was all going to make him a rich son of a bitch finally. After living through the thirties and the Shotgun Wars with that dead bastard, he sure as hell deserved it.

He soon turned onto another highway and saw the big sign welcoming folks to GIBSONTON. SHOWTOWN USA.

He looked at the address that the ugly woman had given him, and moments later, the storm catching up and turning the sky black, he saw the mechanical waving clown and the empty phone booth by the highway.

There was a light on in the gas station garage, and he saw the feet of some grease monkey working under a piece-of-shit Packard.

Johnny got out of his car and walked to the garage just as the first bits of rain hit his face and the dry, crushed shells of the path.