Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

Joe almost spit up his drink. “He’s a lawyer?”

“In Havana, yes.”

“He told me he grew up on a farm.”

“He did. My family worked for his. We were, uh—” She looked at him.

“Migrant farmers?”

“Is that the word?” She scrunched her face at him, at least as drunk as he was. “No, no, we were tenant farmers.”

“Your father rented land from his father and paid his rent in crops?”

“No.”

“That’s tenant farming. It’s what my grandfather did in Ireland.” He tried to appear sober, learned, but it was work under the circumstances. “Migrant farming is when you go from farm to farm with the seasons, depending on the crop.”

“Ah,” she said, unhappy with the clarification. “So smart, Joseph. You know everything .”

“You asked, chica .”

“Did you just call me ‘chica’ ?”

“I believe I did.”

“Your accent is horrible.”

“So’s your Gaelic.”

“What?”

He waved it off. “I’m a work in progress.”

“His father was a great man.” Her eyes shone. “He took me into the home, gave me my own bedroom with clean sheets. I learned English from a private tutor. Me, a village girl.”

“And his father asked for what in return?”

She read his eyes. “You’re disgusting.”

“It’s a fair question.”

“He asked nothing. Maybe his head, it swelled a bit for all he did for this little village girl, but that was all.”

He held up a hand. “Sorry, sorry.”

“You see the worst in the best of people,” she said, shaking her head, “and the best in the worst of people.”

He couldn’t think of a reply to that, so he shrugged and let the silence and the liquor return the mood to a softer place.

“Come.” She slid out of the booth. “Dance.” She pulled at his hands.

“I don’t dance.”

“Tonight,” she said, “everyone dances.”

He allowed her to pull him to his feet even though it was a fucking abomination to share the same dance floor as Esteban or, to a lesser extent, Dion, and call what he did the same thing.

Sure enough, Dion laughed openly at him, but he was too drunk to care. He let Graciela lead and he followed and soon he found a beat he could keep a kind of pace with. They stayed out on the floor for quite some time, passing a bottle of Suarez dark rum back and forth. At one point he found himself lost in cross-images of her; in one she ran through the cypress swamp like desperate prey and in the other she danced a few feet away from him, hips twitching, shoulders and head swaying as she tipped the bottle to her lips.

He’d killed for this woman. Killed for himself too. But if there was one question he hadn’t been able to answer all day, it was why he’d shot the sailor in the face. You didn’t do that to a man unless you were angry. You shot him in the chest. But Joe had blown his face up. That was personal. And that, he realized as he lost himself in the sway of her, was because he’d seen clearly in the sailor’s eyes that the man held Graciela in contempt. Because she was brown, raping her wasn’t a sin; it was just indulging in the spoils of war. Whether she’d been alive or dead when he did it would have made little difference to Cyrus.

Graciela raised her arms above her head, the bottle up there with her, her wrists crossing, forearms snaking around each other, crooked smile on her bruised face, eyes at half-mast.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“About today.”

“What about today?” she asked but then saw it in his eyes. She lowered her arms and handed him the bottle and they moved out of the center and stood by the table again and drank the rum.

“I don’t care about him,” Joe said. “I guess I just wish there had been another way.”

“There wasn’t.”

He nodded. “Which is why I don’t regret what I did. I just regret that it happened.”

She took the bottle from him. “How do you thank the man who saved your life after he dangered it?”

“Dangered it?”

She wiped at her mouth with her knuckles. “Yes. How?”

He cocked his head at her.

She read his eyes and laughed. “Some other way, chico .”

“You just say thanks.” He took the bottle from her and had a sip.

“Thanks.”

He gave her a flourish and a bow and fell into her. She shrieked and swatted at his head and helped him right himself. They were both laughing and out of breath when they staggered to a table.

“We will never be lovers,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“We love other people.”

“Well, mine’s dead.”

“Mine may as well be.”

“Oh.”

She shook her head several times, a reaction to the alcohol. “So we love ghosts.”

“Yes.”

“Which makes us ghosts.”

“You’re drunk,” he said.

She laughed and pointed across the table. “ You’re drunk.”

“No argument.”

“We will not be lovers.”

“You said that.”

The first time they made love in her room above the café it was like a car crash. They mashed each other’s bones and fell off the bed and toppled a chair and when he entered her, she sank her teeth into his shoulder so hard she drew blood. It was over in the time it took to dry a dish.

The second time, half an hour later, she poured rum onto his chest and licked it off and he returned the favor and they took their time and learned each other’s rhythms. She had said no kissing, but that went the way of their not being lovers in the first place. They tested slow ones and hard ones, kisses with nips of the lips, kisses in which only their tongues touched.

What surprised him was how much fun they had. Joe had had sex with seven women in his life, but he’d only made love, as he understood the definition, with Emma. And while their sex had been reckless and occasionally inspired, Emma had always held a part of herself in reserve. He would catch her watching them have sex while they were having it. And afterward, she always withdrew even further into the locked box of herself.

Graciela reserved nothing. This left a high likelihood for injury—she pulled at his hair, she gripped his neck so hard with her cigar roller hands he half-worried she was going to snap it, she sank her teeth into skin and muscle and bone. But it was all part of her enveloping him, pushing the act to the edge of something that, to Joe, resembled vanishing, as if he’d wake up in the morning alone with her dissolved into his body or vice versa.

When he did wake that morning, he smiled at the foolishness of the notion. She slept on her side, with her back to him, her hair gone wild and overflowing on the pillow and headboard. He wondered if he should slide out of bed, grab his clothes, and get gone before the inevitable discussion of too much alcohol and muddy thinking. Before the regret cemented. Instead, he kissed her shoulder very lightly, and she rolled his way in a rush. She covered him. And regret, he decided, would have to wait for another day.

It will be a professional arrangement,” she explained to him over breakfast in the café downstairs.

“How’s that?” He ate a piece of toast. He couldn’t stop smiling like an idiot.

“We will fill this”—she was smiling too as she searched for the word—“need for each other until such time as—”

“‘Such time’?” he said. “That tutor taught you well.”

She leaned back in her chair. “My English is very good.”

“I agree, I agree. Outside of using dangered when you meant endangered, it’s pretty flawless.”

She grew an inch in her chair. “Thank you.”

He continued to smile like an idiot. “My pleasure. So we fill each other’s, um, need until when?”