Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

Joe didn’t say anything. A swamp lay off to their left through the pines. Cypress and sweet gum trees and plants Joe couldn’t begin to identify raced by on either side of them, blurring until the greens and yellows were the greens and yellows of a painting.

“Her family were migrant farmers. You should see the village she called ‘home’ a few months every year. America has not seen poverty until it’s seen that village. My father realized how bright she was and asked her family if he could hire her as a maid-in-training, yes? What he was really doing was hiring me a friend. I had none, just the horses and the cattle.”

Another bump in the road.

“Strange time to be telling me this,” Joe said.

“I loved her,” Esteban said, speaking loudly over the engine. “Now, I love somebody else, but for many years, I thought I was in love with Graciela.”

He turned to look at Joe and Joe shook his head and pointed. “Eyes on the road, Esteban.”

Another bump, this one lifting them both out of their seats and then back down again.

“She says she’s doing all this for her husband?” Talking helped put the fear in a manageable place, made Joe feel less helpless.

“Ach,” Esteban said. “He’s no husband. He’s no man.”

“I thought he was a revolutionary?”

This time Esteban spat. “He is a thief, a… a… estafador. You call them con men. Yes? He dresses the part of the revolutionary, he recites the poetry, and she fell for him. She lost everything for this man—her family, all her money and she never had much, most of her friends but me.” He shook his head. “She doesn’t even know where he is.”

“I thought he was in jail.”

“He’s been out for two years.”

Another bump. This time they went sideways and the rear quarter panel on Joe’s side slapped a pine sapling before they bounced back into the road.

“But she still pays his family.”

“They lie to her. They tell her he escaped, that he’s hiding in the hills and a gang of los chacales from Nieves Morejón prison are hunting him and Machado’s men are hunting him. They tell her she cannot return to Cuba to see him or they will both be in danger. No one, Joseph, is hunting this man, except for those he owes money. But you cannot tell Graciela that; she does not hear when it comes to him.”

“Why? She’s a smart woman.”

He gave Joe a quick glance and shrugged. “We all believe lies that bring us more comfort than the truth. She’s no different. Her lie is just bigger.”

They missed the turnoff, but Joe caught it out of the corner of his eye and told Esteban to stop. He braked and they slid twenty yards before they finally stopped. He backed up and they turned onto the road.

“How many men have you killed?” Esteban asked.

“None,” Joe said.

“But you’re a gangster.”

Joe didn’t see the point in arguing the distinction between gangster and outlaw because he wasn’t sure there was one anymore. “Not all gangsters kill people.”

“But you must be willing to.”

Joe nodded. “Just like you.”

“I’m a businessman. I provide a product people want. I kill no one.”

“You’re arming Cuban revolutionaries.”

“That’s a cause.”

“In which people will die.”

“There’s a difference,” Esteban said. “I kill for something.”

“What? A fucking ideal?” Joe said.

“Exactly.”

“And what ideal is that, Esteban?”

“That no man should rule another’s life.”

“Funny,” Joe said, “outlaws kill for the same reason.”

She wasn’t there.

They came out of the pine forest and approached Route 41, and there was no sign of Graciela or the sailor who’d been left behind to hunt her. Nothing but the heat and the hum of dragonflies and the white road.

They drove down the road half a mile and then back up to the dirt road and then north another half mile. When they drove back again, Joe heard something he thought was a crow or a hawk.

“Kill the engine, kill the engine.”

Esteban did, and they both stood in the scout car and looked out at the road and the pines and the cypress swamp beyond and the hard white sky that matched the road.

Nothing. Nothing but the dragonfly buzz Joe now suspected never stopped—morning, noon, or night, like living with your ear to a train track just after the train had passed over it.

Esteban sat back down and Joe went to but stopped.

He thought he saw something just to the east, back the way they’d come, something that—

“There.” He pointed, and as he did she ran out from behind a stand of pines. She didn’t run in their direction and Joe realized she was too smart for that. If she had, she would have been running full out for fifty yards through low palmettos and pine saplings.

Esteban gunned the engine and they dropped down the shoulder and through a ditch and then back out again, Joe holding on to the top of the windshield and hearing the shots now—hard cracks strangely muted even out here with nothing around them. From his vantage point, he still couldn’t see the shooter, but he could see the swamp and he knew she was headed for it. He nudged Esteban with his foot and waved his arm to the left, a little farther southwest than the line they were on.

Esteban turned the wheel and Joe got a sudden glimpse of dark blue, just a flash of it, and saw the man’s head and heard his rifle. Up ahead, Graciela fell to her knees in the swamp and Joe couldn’t tell whether she’d fallen because she’d tripped or because she’d been shot. They ran out of firm land, the shooter just off to their right. Esteban slowed as he entered the swamp and Joe jumped out of the scout.

It was like jumping out onto the moon if the moon was green. The bald cypress rose like great eggs from the milky green water, and prehistoric banyan trees with a dozen or more trunks stood watch like palace guards. Esteban drove to his right just as Joe saw Graciela dart between two of the bald cypress trees to his left. Something uncomfortably heavy crawled over his feet just as he heard a rifle report, the shot much closer now. The bullet tore a chunk from the cypress tree where Graciela was hiding.

The young seaman stepped out from behind a cypress ten feet away. He was about Joe’s height and build, his hair quite red, his face very lean. His Springfield was raised to his shoulder, the sight raised to his eye, the barrel pointed at the cypress. Joe extended his .32 automatic and exhaled a long breath as he shot the man from ten feet. The rifle jerked and spun in the air so erratically Joe assumed it was all he’d hit. But as it fell to the tea-colored water, the young man fell with it, and the blood spilled from under his left armpit and darkened the water as he landed with a splash.