Cadillac Payback

by AJ Elmore

  Maria had argued that it was too soon to take me. She tried to spare me from the responsibility, but events had played anyway that left only the two of us to make the essential run. Charlie couldn't roll out of civilization without someone to cover his back, it was against our business ethics, even if it was to visit family.

  He had been all too eager to introduce me to his grandmother, which I understood when Maria explained that the old woman rarely liked, trusted, or accepted anyone. If she had disliked me enough, she could say the word and I'd be off the job and probably dead for what I had seen. Maria had readied me as best she could, but the fact remained that Abuela would dispose of anyone who failed her, even her grandchildren.

  Charlie had hoped his kin would affirm his indecision about me. Instead she took to me almost immediately when I addressed her in extremely proper and polite Spanish. It was so abrupt that I could see his surprise when she gently touched my cheek. He later said he'd never seen that reaction from her to an outsider, especially a white boy. My theory had been that she recognized the same hardness in me that the game requires from successful players. She had inherently felt my history, realized that I had come out of a real and deadly gutter.

  It was the same sentiment that motivated Charlie with me that kept Joshua away for the year and a half that he's been around. Charlie was fond of Josh from the moment he met him. Maria, however, will not show such mercy, even to the golden boy Joshua, especially now that she has fully conquered his heart. She needs a solid, infallible team.

  I wanly wonder if she gave him the same guidance she granted to me. I almost feel bad for the fool. He'll probably never realize that her heart won't be captured or bridled. She can't settle down, settle for just him. It's in her blood to run too hard. She's like me.

  The thought makes me glance at him again. He's like bewildered and fallen royalty, a lucky kid who found compassion in a world of malice. He's a romantic at heart, and that's not good when you work at the bottom. It's too bad, really, he's a damn fine diplomat - when he's not thinking with his dick. And he's going into this encounter at a disadvantage.

  Abuela is grieving the loss of her favorite grandchild.

  Chapter 16 Sharks

  Maria

  The yard around my grandmother's old plantation house is filled with an eerie sort of tranquility, like an alternate reality that's buffered by the crush of swamp vegetation. Even the flow of muted workers, mostly illegal Mexicans, in the midst of their labor feels peaceful.

  I watch them file through the tall grass with boxes of product on its way to be sorted. I watch them sweat, even in the falling dark. If you live in the deep south long enough, you start to believe you've earned immunity to the heavy humidity. But really, that's just a parlor trick of the mind. This far into the heart of Louisiana, there is no relief. Everything comes down to whether or not you can withstand the oppression. Most people break.

  We wait for Abuela on the back side of the wraparound porch, sipping water from which the ice melted almost instantly. My gaze drifts lazily to the condensation on my glass as it seeps toward the tabletop to join the pool forming on the surface.

  No one but me has spoken since we arrived, and that was in Spanish and to the guards. Maybe the magic of the setting compels my little army to silence. Maybe it's fear. For Joshua, I know it is.

  I can feel it radiating from him as the sleeve of his cotton t-shirt brushes my bare arm. My body reacts despite the false calm I've projected. Thrill bumps string along my skin and I wonder if he can feel the jolt within me. I swear he glances at me, but I won't meet his eyes, so I can't say for sure.

  His hair has become a mass of crazy curls, reacting to the sticky sweet atmosphere, and his lightly tanned skin is damp and glowing in the fading light. Rampant memories crawl over me, thoughts of my destruction of his resolve and the conviction in his adoration. Since then I've banished those thoughts, but his tense proximity brings everything about that morning screaming back to reality.

  The probability that Abuela will hate him drives home the fact that his touch comforted me in the bleakest of moments, a fact that I despise. Suddenly I'm sure I can smell him, a mixture of some light cologne and his pheromones.

  For all the credit I never give Joshua, I know better. I know he can feel my eyes creeping over him and I know he's not quite the happy-go-lucky little boy he acts like. His experience feels tame and almost minuscule to the rest of us. Maybe he didn't grow up fighting to eat, or come of age into a life of hard crime and harder drugs, but he knows real pain. Sure, he suffered differently from us, but he's suffered or he wouldn't be here. He endured such that he'd rather ride dangerously with a bunch of roughnecks than live back in that white-collar hell. Yeah, I saw that in his eyes when I met him, when his blazing blue gaze was so alive with excitement.

  It all seemed so glamorous then, to both of us. Charlie was the outermost layer of a complex shield system that kept most people from discovering the depths from which my resolve can draw. He was one of the few who had been through nearly every step of my descent right beside me, one of the few who had seen my worst moments, and who knew better than to be fooled by my wiles. Now that he's gone, I'm facing parts of myself that I've never had to confront, and all in quick succession. You gotta learn fast if you live fast.

  The movement of Isaiah putting out a cigarette catches my attention, prevents the eye contact between me and Josh that will happen if I don't look away. The workers in the yard have stilled. They're looking toward the driveway. A shiny black car is crawling through the grass toward the backyard.

  Abuela has arrived. She, too, rides in a Cadillac.

  The workers remove their hats. What may seem like an action of subservience to people who grew up like Izzy and Josh is actually a show of respect. Though my grandmother is a hard-ass, she is also kind. Her charity is strictly earned, never freely given. She's a woman who has seen unbelievable tragedy and overcome years of daunting obstacles. She has earned her steel reputation.

  Frederick understands. He stands at the same time I do. The other two are a few beats behind us. All three men wait for me to move first. They follow just as the driver hurries around the car and opens its back door. We slowly take the stairs and wait, the boys staying a few feet behind me in an orderly row: Joshua to the left, then Frederick, and Isaiah to the right, my dramatic posse, my gang. The guards confiscated their weapons upon our arrival, so they are as good as naked before Abuela. I have only Charlie's gun.

  The shiny Caddy's tinted window catches dramatic glints of the fading daylight. Soon the night bugs will begin their assault. Soon the workers will go to their quarters, eat with their families, get drunk by the summer moon. Soon I will do the same, in a sense.

  Abuela emerges and the hush thickens. As if by some cosmic cue, a few lightning bugs make themselves known around the car's tires. She's a tiny woman, just over five feet tall and quite thin. She wears a long dress made of white linen and a shawl of intricate crochet work. A wide-brimmed sun hat covers her long, gray hair, which is pulled high and under the hat. Large, dark sunglasses hide her eyes. For a woman in her early sixties, she's in excellent shape. Her skin is brown and vibrant in the long shadows.

  She studies us as a lioness might, shrewd and cold and fast. She owns the moment so that no one who doesn't know her would ever believe that she has lived as a poor woman. In the same thought, no one would ever doubt that she has killed.

  She turns, nods to her workers and thanks her driver. They carry on with their duties when she turns away from them. Her expression is impossible to read without a glimpse at her eyes. I have no idea whether she will reprimand me for my retribution against the Reaps, or blame me for my brother's death. I can't know if she's happy to see me, or if my face might only remind her of the parts of our family that we've lost.

  I'll never fool her with my façade, I learned so much of it from her, but I present it anyway as every step she takes seems to drain the oxygen from the
already repressive dusk. Every inch of ground that she covers is like my blood, dripping into the dirt, like Charlie's blood smeared all over our home and my hands. Of all the things to which she's been a witness, I wonder if she ever found her sibling in a puddle of his own life, already dead without the chance of a last word. Of course, she buried her son, my dad.

  She comes to rest several steps before me, and for a long time she just stares from behind the black lenses of her glasses. Her expression is at a level of unreadability that I can only dream of achieving. Charlie was always much closer to her than I was. He always said it was because Abuela and I were too much the same.

  I don't feel close to adequate now. My blood runs cold in the torrid heat around us, under the weight of her attention. Even the swamp things have hushed, as if the whole world has stopped in anticipation of how she will react. Friction mounts in my gut. My hands are shaking so I press them to my sides in hopes of steadying them. I have no place for fear in my life, so I push it back down into the depths of my emotions, swallow the knot in my chest, and seal the gate from which pain rises. It tastes like death and feels like smoldering coals within me.

  “You shot the messenger?” she asks, chin held high in a way I can't mirror, her accent sharp and proud.

  This is the closest to a greeting that I'll receive. She sounds neither pleased nor angry, and the wait continues.

  Of course she would already know about my theatrics from last night. I want to look away, to stall for time in order to consider the wisdom in my answer. I can't look away and I can't think straight, so I say, “It was Gram's messenger. I did.”

  I keep my shoulders squared back, the sum of my confidence.

  “Like you have no manners, no protocol, like you have big cojones,” she says, pulling off her enormous shades and pinning me with a deadpan look that bears no sympathy. She adds, “Like a stupid girl.”

  Self-defense rises in my throat, goads me to plead some kind of case, but there's no vindication for actions that have passed. There's no salvation from my brash reaction no matter how I dress my motive now. I can feel the tension rolling from the boys behind me, the anticipation so thick it nearly chokes me.

  All I can say is, “Si.”

  Her lips press together in a straight line – I’ve seen her disapproval before. I watch her shrewd gaze sweep past me and over my cohorts, over all those who constitute what's left of my underground family. Her eyes linger on Joshua for seconds longer than the others, and I can only hope he has the wits to look away, or to show some sign of submission. All too soon, her weighted regard falls back to me.

  “Did they really kill him?” she asks in her pointed accent, and I'm certain I can see moisture gathering in the bottom rims of her eyes.

  I've been permitted to see her emotion for just a flash, and I feel like my next breath is the first I've taken since Abuela arrived. I am not off the hook, I know I have incurred the debt that Charlie carried for our crew. But I believe she has obliged to pull that hook out slowly, and possibly throw me back into the midst of the sharks with a gaping wound. All I have to do is tell the truth.

  “It was his last word,” I answer, somehow banishing the tears that make a claim for my eyes. I bite down on the inside of my lip. I know the expression that results is some mixture of grief and hatred.

  “Then they had the balls to propose a ceasefire,” I add, my words edged with anger.

  The brim of her hat divides her face into the last light of the day and the coming shadow of nighttime in a dramatic diagonal line. Her lips are prominent red, full even in her older age. The color accentuates her displeasure. Her eyes are shaded, flashing here and there with tiny bits of light that makes its way through the weave of her hat. Those eyes are brown and fierce, just like mine. Her face doesn't move, but a single tear slips down her right cheek.

  She says, “You are responsible for the fire in Biloxi?”

  Again my insides wrench just a little farther than before, and I want to let my own tears surface. Again I bite down on the agony, and say, “Si.”

  She swiftly bridges the space between us. Every instinct in me says to flinch, but experience keeps me still. I defiantly stare forward and resolve to take whatever is coming to me. She gets so close that we're almost touching, so that I'm looking down a few inches to keep the eye contact. Despite the height difference, I am terrified again. My breath hangs in my chest, but then I realize that I can see the sadness creeping into her eyes.

  “Now that you have acted outside of revenge, you must finish it.”

  My response system lulls. I can't think to answer. Finish it? She could only mean…

  “You must cut off the head.”

  “Gram?” I gasp, finally losing my battle with my composure.

  I hadn't meant to speak at all. I hear Josh suck in a sharp breath as well and hope that Abuela has found more interest in my reaction than his. Stupid boy. Visible aversion to that name skitters across her features, and she nods. At least I hope it was the name. How can I tell her that I had already resolved to rid the streets of that vile stain?

  I find myself answering in her native tongue, “Yes, I understand.”

  She raises a pointer finger between us, presses it to my lips. I am paralyzed by the intense gravity of her gaze.

  She says, “No te voy a ayudar a hacer esto. Si fracasas, te repudiaré antes de que respires por última vez, y deshonrarás el nombre de tu hermano. No quiero perder a mi única nieta, pero no tengo otra opción.”

  Then she draws away, back a step.

  “If you succeed, I commend you, and then you may return to my ranks.”

  She switches to English so fluently, but I hardly notice under the press of the judgment she has handed me.

  “Thank you,” I whisper, hardly able to force even that and completely unable to look her in the eye any longer.

  I find solace in the dirt at my feet. I still feel like I've taken a shot to the chest. She would disown me? Yes, of course. She can't have my actions marking her reputation. Rather than cry, I let the misery drown me from the inside.

  “One more thing,” she says. I can't help the tiny wince, but I'm not looking at her, so it makes it easier to deal with. “Do you know that your house was burned early this morning?”

  My eyes fly to her. I didn't know and she knows it because I can feel the color draining from my face. I feel sick. I knew it was coming, but it still hits me hard enough to almost knock me to the ground. It's my fault that so many possessions – and most of Charlie's blood – are now lost.

  Chapter 17 True Gods

  Frederick

  Abuela's last words are like a kick in the spine. I'm paralyzed, blood buzzing in my ears. In my periphery, I see Izzy's hands ball into fists. I glance at his face, see his brow deeply furrowed. I don't think I've ever seen wrath on him.

  I dip my head and cut my eyes to Josh, whose hands are slack and whose eyes are wide and vacant. Now maybe he knows what it's like to lose everything. Hell, I can relate. The news leaves a hollow feeling straight through my middle.

  And just like that, the business that brought us here has been shut down, postponed until one man is dead. I understand the stakes that Abuela has made. If Maria expects to be welcomed back into the top rungs of her grandmother's network, she has to earn it.

  She won't be accepted until she has ended the war that began with Charlie in the backyard, where he was supposed to be lighting the grill and ended up dead. The same war she has perpetuated by sending Derrik away with his tail between his legs, howling like the swine that he is.

  Josh and Izzy don't speak Spanish. They don't know the whole of what the old woman said, but I do. I'm not going to help you do this. If you fail, I will disown you before you take your last breath, and you will dishonor your brother's name. I don't want to lose my only granddaughter, but I have no choice.

  I try my best to pretend I heard nothing of the conversation as Abuela sidesteps Maria
to study her haggard guests. I lower my chin, and with a quick glance to each side, affirm that the others are doing the same.

  She ambles first toward Izzy, who has miraculously recovered from his open emotion moments ago. He seems much more comfortable than Josh and, admittedly, I do. Of course, he gained her approval a long time ago, he's been through the nerves of her presence far more times than either of us younger guys. For once, he isn't smoking.

  He says, “Sorry for your loss, Abuela,” as she approaches him.

  The weight of the conversation she just had seems to have evaporated from her gait. She has said what she needs to on the subject and now its traces are gone. She's a mysterious being, many more times so than Maria, and I understand much more about the latter in this instant. Abuela allows Izzy to kiss her cheeks, then she nods her thanks.

  He adds, “You are more beautiful than ever.”

  I catch a glimpse of the curve that takes her lips and, suddenly, I feel like a kid. I could never say such a thing to her, wouldn't dare. He wields his familiarity so easily.

  I hear her say, “Like good tequila, yes?” in a softly coy tone.

  It takes all of my self-control not to let my eyebrows raise, not to show my surprise on my face at their banter. Regardless of her age, Abuela possesses a stirring sensuality. And who knew Izzy had it in him? After two years, I don't think I really know him at all.

  I don't want to seem too interested in said sensuality, so I divert my attention to Maria, who has not turned to watch this exchange. I can feel the pieces of her heart crumbling away from where I stand, and all I really want to do is to take her under my arm as the fireflies dance around her ankles. She's not crying, but I know she wants to. The handle of Charlie's gun peeks out from the back of her jeans shorts. I can't do anything and it makes me feel sick. Maybe I'm getting too soft. But then, maybe it's just the heat.