Joe didn’t remember much about the rest of that day. They went to one of Maso’s speaks behind a veterinarian on the corner of Fifteenth and Nebraska. Esteban arranged to have a case of dark rum aged in cherry casks sent over, and word got around to everyone involved in the heist. Soon Pescatore gunsels mingled with Esteban’s revolutionaries. Then the women arrived in their silk dresses and sequined hats. A band took the stage. In no time, the joint was hopping enough to crack the masonry.
Dion danced with three women simultaneously, swinging them behind his broad back and under his stubby legs with surprising dexterity. When it came to dance, however, Esteban proved to be the artist of the group. He moved on his feet as lightly as a cat on a high branch, but with a command so total that the band soon began to fashion songs to his tempo, not the other way around. He reminded Joe of Valentino in that flicker where he played a bullfighter—it was that degree of masculine grace. Soon half the women in the speak were trying to match his steps or land him for the night.
“I never saw a guy move like that,” Joe said to Graciela.
She was sitting in the corner of a booth, while he sat on the floor in front of it. She leaned over to speak in his ear. “It’s what he did when he first came here.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was his job,” she said. “He was a taxi dancer downtown.”
“You’re putting me on.” He tilted his head, looked up at her. “What doesn’t this guy do well?”
She said, “He was a professional dancer in Havana. Very good. Never the lead in any productions but always in high demand. It’s how he supported himself during law school.”
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.”