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.
Dion seemed spent suddenly. His arms drooped, his hips sagged.
After a while, they started walking again.
“You think we’ll see our friends in the next life? All be back together?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “I hope so.”
“I think we will.” Dion glanced up at the sky again. “I think . . .”
The breeze shifted and small rags of smoke floated past them from the west.
“Charlotte,” Joe said.
“What?”
A terrier bolted across their path—startling Joe because it came from the left, not the right, where he’d heard it a couple times on their walk. It leaped into the cane, snarling. They heard its prey squeak. Just once.
“It came back to me. That was the girl’s name. The previous owner’s daughter.”
“Charlotte.” Dion smiled firmly. “That’s a good name.”
From somewhere over the hills came the faintest rumble of thunder, though the air didn’t smell of anything but burning sugar leaves and moist earth.
“It’s pretty,” Dion said.
“What?”
“The yellow house.”
They were about fifty yards away.
“Yeah,” Joe said. “It is.”
He pulled the trigger. He closed his eyes at the last moment but the bullet still left the gun with a sharp crack and Dion fell to all fours in the earth. Joe stood over his friend as the blood spilled out of the hole in the back of his head. It coated his hair and dripped off the left side of his head, down his neck, into the soft ground. Joe could see brain but Dion continued to breathe, a desperate huffing, an unquenchable greed for air. He sucked in a watery breath and turned his face toward Joe, one glassy eye finding him, the knowledge already beginning to rush out of it—knowledge of who he was and how he’d come to be here on his hands and knees, knowledge of a life lived, the names of so many simple things already vanished. His lips moved, but no words left them.
Joe fired the second bullet into his temple and Dion’s head snapped hard to the right and he sprawled on the ground and made no sound.
Joe stood in the row of cane and his gaze fell on the small yellow house.
He hoped souls were real and Dion’s was now rising through the blue and orange sky. He hoped the little girl who’d played in the little yellow house
was somewhere safe. He prayed for her soul and prayed for his own soul even though he knew it was damned.
He looked out at the fields, at the breadth of them, and he could see the full breadth of Cuba beyond, but it wasn’t Cuba. Everywhere he lived, everywhere he traveled, everywhere he walked from now on was the land of Nod.
I am damned. And alone.
Or am I? he wondered. Or is there a path I can’t see yet? A way out. A road that inclines.
The voice that replied was weary and cold:
Look at the body at your feet. Look at him. Your friend. Your brother. Now ask that question again.
He turned to head back—disposal of the corpse had already been arranged—and froze. There, about thirty yards up the row, Tomas knelt in the soft earth, mouth open, face wet. Bewildered. Broken. Lost to him forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Orphans
A WEEK LATER, as they were packing up the apartment in Havana, Manuel told Joe an American woman was asking for him downstairs.
As he left the apartment, Joe passed Tomas sitting on his bed, all packed. He caught his eye and gave him a nod, but Tomas looked away.
Joe stood in the doorway. “Son.”
Tomas looked at the wall.
“Son, look at me.”
Tomas eventually obeyed the order, stared at him with the same look he’d worn for a week. It wasn’t enraged—Joe had been hoping for the sadness to turn into rage; rage he could work with. But instead, Tomas’s face was a map of despair.
“It will get better,” Joe told him for maybe the fiftieth time since the cane field. “The hurt will pass.”
Tomas’s mouth opened. The muscles worked under his skin.
Joe waited. Hoping.
Tomas said, “Can I look away now?”
JOE WALKED DOWNSTAIRS. He passed the guards in the foyer and then the two outside the front door.
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