“I’m trying.”
“It’s Graciela then.”
“Yes.”
“What about her?”
They’d decided not to tell anyone until she started to show. This morning, before she left for work, she pointed at the small cannonball protruding from under her dress and told him she was pretty sure the secret was going to get out today, one way or the other.
So it was with a surprisingly large relinquishing of a hidden weight that he said to Esteban, “She’s pregnant.”
Esteban’s eyes filled and he clapped his hands together and then came around the desk and hugged Joe. He slapped Joe’s back several times and much harder than Joe would have guessed he could.
“Now,” he said, “you are a man.”
“Oh,” Joe said, “that’s what it takes?”
“Not always, but in your case…” Esteban made a back-and-forth gesture with his hand and Joe threw a mock punch at him and Esteban stepped inside it and hugged him again. “I’m very happy for you, my friend.”
“Thank you.”
“Is she glowing?”
“You know what? She is. It’s strange. I can’t describe it. But, yeah, this energy comes off her in a different way.”
They drank a toast to fatherhood, an Ybor Friday night kicking up outside Esteban’s shutters, past his lush green garden and tree lights and stone wall.
“Do you like it here?”
“What?” Joe said.
“When you arrived, you were so pale. You had that terrible prison haircut, and you talked so fast.”
Joe laughed, and Esteban laughed with him.
“Do you miss Boston?”
“I do,” Joe said because sometimes he missed it terribly.
“But this is your home now.”
Joe nodded, even though it surprised him to realize it. “I think so.”
“I know how you feel. I do not know the rest of Tampa. Even after all these years. But I know Ybor like I know Habana, and I’m not sure what I would do if I had to choose.”
“You think Machado will—?”
“Machado’s done. It may take some time. But he is finished. The Communists think they can replace him, but America would never allow it. My friends and I have a wonderful solution, a very moderate man, but I’m not sure anyone’s ready for moderation these days.” He made a face. “Makes them think too much. Gives them headaches. People like sides, not subtleties.”
He lay the picture glass on the frame and placed the cork square on the back and applied more glue. He wiped off the excess with a small towel and stepped back to appraise his work. When he was satisfied, he took their empty glasses over to the bar and poured them each another drink.
He brought Joe his glass. “You heard about Loretta Figgis.”
Joe took the glass. “Someone see her walking on the Hillsborough River?”
Esteban stared at him, his head very still. “She killed herself.”
That stopped the drink halfway to Joe’s mouth. “When?”
“Last night.”
“How?”
Esteban shook his head several times and moved behind his desk.
“Esteban, how?”
He looked out at his garden. “We have to assume she had returned to using heroin.”
“Okay…”
“Else, it would have been impossible.”
“Esteban,” Joe said.
“She cut off her genitalia, Joseph. Then—”
“Fuck,” Joe said. “Fuck no.”
“Then she cut her own windpipe.”
Joe put his face in his hands. He could see her in the coffee shop a month ago, could see her as a girl walking up the stairs of police headquarters in her plaid skirt and her little white socks and her saddle shoes, books under her arm. And then the one he only imagined but which was twice as vivid—mutilating herself as a bathtub filled with her blood, her mouth open in a permanent scream.
“Was it a bathtub?”
Esteban gave him a curious frown. “Was what a bathtub?”
“Where she killed herself.”
“No.” He shook his head. “She did it in bed. Her father’s bed.”
Joe put his hands over his face again and kept them there.
“Please tell me you’re not blaming yourself,” Esteban said after a while.
Joe said nothing.
“Joseph, look at me.”
Joe lowered his hands and exhaled a long breath.
“She went west, and like so many girls who do that, she was preyed upon. You didn’t prey on her.”
“But men in our profession did.” Joe placed his drink on the corner of the desk and paced the length of the rug and back again, trying to find the words. “Each compartment in this thing we do? Feeds the other compartments. The booze profits pay for the girls and the girls pay for the narcotics needed to hook other girls into fucking strangers for our profit. Those girls try to get off the shit or forget how to be docile? They get beaten, Esteban, you know that. They try to get clean, then they make themselves vulnerable to a smart cop. So someone cuts their throats and throws them in a river. And we’ve spent the last ten years raining bullets on the competition and on one another. And for what? For fucking money.”
“This is the ugly side of living life outside the law.”
“Aw, shit,” Joe said. “We’re not outlaws. We’re gangsters.”
Esteban held his gaze for a bit and then said, “There’s no talking to you when you’re like this.” He flipped the framed photo over on his desk and gazed at it. “We’re not our brother’s keeper, Joseph. In fact, it’s an insult to our brother to presume he can’t take care of himself.”
Loretta, Joe thought. Loretta, Loretta. We took and took from you and expected you to somehow soldier on without the parts we stole.
Esteban was pointing at the photograph. “Look at these people. They are dancing and drinking and living. Because they could be dead tomorrow. We could be dead tomorrow, you and I. If one of these revelers, say this man—”
Esteban pointed at a bulldog-faced gent in a white dinner jacket, a group of women arrayed behind him, like they were about to lift the chunky bastard onto their shoulders, the women all aglitter in sequins and lamé.
“—were to die on his drive home because he was too drunk on Suarez Reserve to see straight, is that our fault?”
Joe looked past the bulldog man to all those lovely women, most of them Cuban with hair and eyes the color of Graciela’s.