Paul Levine - Mortal Sin

Nicky saw it, too.

The gun was directly in the path between the machine and us. If we both dived for it, we’d be struggling there when the harvester chomped everything in its path. If one of us dived for the gun, he’d likely get it and roll out of the way.

One could live.

Or both could die.

I didn’t like the odds. But then I wasn’t a god.

I backed up, stumbling over severed stalks of cane. Nicky Florio dived into the row, sprawling headfirst in the mud. He speared the gun by the butt on the first try. He made his own rules and his own luck.

Ten feet away, the harvester boomed like pealing thunder, the tracks clinking, the blades clop-clopping through the wood-like stalks.

Florio had timed it just right, but with no room to spare. Gun in one hand, he braced himself with the other and tried to stand. His leather-soled loafers slipped in the mud, his legs churned, and his feet slid out from under him. He fell headfirst, both hands in front of him. He wriggled backward, his body moving, snakelike, getting his torso and head out of the path of the swinging steel blades.

Twisting like a corkscrew.

Backing out of harm’s way.

Making it.

Everything but his hands.

Nicky Florio’s hands were caught in the path of the V-shaped snout. He tried to pull back, but the steel held fast, yanking him higher toward the blades, dragging his body through the mud.

Clop-whomp-clop.

I never heard him scream.

On the conveyor belt, amid stalks and leaves, were two bloody hands, severed just above their knobby wrists. One hand still gripped a. 38 revolver. The conveyor carried the hands higher, where they disappeared into the chopper drum. A whirring sound like wood through a sawmill; then, along with billets of sugarcane, bite-sized pieces of his fingers were ejected into the following trailer.

Nicky Florio lay facedown in the mud, his body twitching. He tucked both stumps under his armpits, trying futilely to stanch the blood flow.

He said something to me, but the words were drowned out in the noise of the harvester as it continued down the row. I leaned down next to him with the ear that could still hear. His face was in a puddle, his nose and mouth barely above the water.

“Tourniquet,” he pleaded. His eyes were glazing over. “Bleeding to death.”

I straightened and looked down at him on the soggy ground. “No, you’re not. You’re going to drown first, Nicky. The water level’s been increasing ever since we got here. It’s your water, Nicky. Enjoy it. Lick it up. Savor it as you would the finest French Bordeaux 1961.”

“Stupid fuck,” he said, his voice dying. “You could have been my partner. You could have been my friend.”

He tried to stand, but he didn’t have the strength. The effort sank him deeper into the puddle, and water began filling his nose. Blood pooled out from under him in the mud. He exhaled sharply, tried to hold his breath, then after a long moment, inhaled and choked, spitting out water colored with his own blood.

“Help me,” he sputtered.

Again he swallowed water. The arms came out from underneath, the stumps spurting blood, and he struggled, trying vainly to flop onto his back. His face sank into water again, and his body went into convulsions.

I didn’t help him.

I just watched him die.

I couldn’t have saved him anyway. That’s what I planned to tell myself later when I would ask the tough questions. Like what was I really feeling then? Joy? Relief? I would try to convince myself it didn’t make me happy-it didn’t make me anything-to see his blood stain the brown earth. But beneath the glib reply was something else, another question I couldn’t answer. What was I really feeling then? Was it that I was safe from harm? Was it that Nicky Florio deserved to die? Or did it have something to do with Gina? Just what was it that made me want to see Nicky Florio die, and die hard?

I let Charlie Riggs do the driving. For the past three weeks, I let him do everything. He had patched up my shoulder, front and rear, changed the dressings, shot me full of antibiotics, and slapped a patch on my ear. He had cleaned the wound in my gut and stitched it closed with needle and thread given to him by Betsy Ross. As far as I can tell, I’m his only patient who lived.

Charlie tossed some fishing gear into the back of his pickup, and we headed down Useless I to the Keys. First stop, Granny Lassiter’s old house with faded yellow shutters and hard pine floors on the Gulf side of Islamorada. Granny

crouched on the back porch hosing down a mess of grouper she’d caught just after sun-up. She wore khaki shorts with six pockets and a T-shirt emblazoned IF IT HAS TITS OR TIRES, YOU’RE GONNA HAVE TROUBLE WITH IT.

Granny was suntanned the color of mahogany bark. She hadn’t worn makeup or a dress in thirty years. She smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank a fifth of her own moonshine a week. Without looking up from her filleting knife, she announced how damned fortunate that two strong men had arrived just when she needed some fresh coconut milk for a fish sauce. When neither Charlie nor I moved, Granny gestured at me with the head of a two-pound grouper. “Tree’s right out yonder, Jake, in case you forgot where you once fell and broke your collarbone.”

“I remember,” I told her. “I was nine years old.”

“Gave the boy a dose of my likker and set the bone myself,” Granny said proudly, “and he don’t seem no worse for wear.”

For some reason, I wasn’t in the mood to climb a tree. “I came here expecting tea and sympathy, and you want me to pick coconuts.”

“Such a crybaby,” she said, turning to Charlie. “I remember the first time he got his nose broke playing junior high football. Caterwauled like a newborn can’t find the teat.”

“As I recall it, I stuffed cotton up my nose and played the second half. I always played with pain.”

“That night,” Granny said, staring off into space, “I had to give him a pint of the home brew to get him to sleep, he was whimpering so much.”

“I said I always played with pain, not that I didn’t complain about it.”

Granny snorted her disapproval. “Jes’ look at you now. Face scratched up like you spent a night with a she cat, arm in a sling, tummy bandaged, and here you come, lookin’ for pity. What you need is some honest labor, ‘stead of pushing paper and telling lies, which is what I figure lawyering’s all about.” She studied me a moment. “So climb that tree, boy, unless you’re still afraid of heights.”

Granny always taught me to confront my demons. “I’ve never been afraid of heights. It’s falling that scares me.”

Charlie harrumphed and told us to bicker all we wanted, he was going to sit in a rocker on the front porch and rest his bones. Granny went back to cleaning the fish, so I did what I was told. I wandered into her sandy front yard and took a look at the coconut palm, a healthy Jamaica Tall. The husks were tawny yellow, the nuts thirty feet off the ground.

I started shimmying up the coconut tree using one arm and both feet. Halfway there, I heard Granny yelling from the back porch. “Machete’s in the tool shed, Jake. You remember how to use a machete, don’t you?”

I remembered.

Charlie was snoring in the rocking chair when I set about making the coconut milk. I didn’t use the watery liquid found inside the nut. That I just drank straight from the cracked shell. Then I dug out the white meat, poured hot water over it, and squashed the mixture into a thick cream. By this time, Granny was marinating the fish in a mixture of lime juice, pepper, chopped onion, and crushed garlic. When Granny was mixing the graham cracker crust for the Key lime pie, I made the fish sauce by heating the coconut milk with flour, butter, salt, and pepper. Then I sat down at the kitchen table with a coffee cup filled with Granny’s white lightning. It singed the throat on the way down.