Live by Night

“Well, I’m the same way. I had me a fine daddy. Only beat me hard when I had it coming and never when he’d taken to drink. Mostly, he’d just whack my head when I snored. I’m a champeen in the snoring, sir, and my daddy just couldn’t abide it when he was dog tired. Other than that, he was the finest of men. And a son wants his father to be able to look down and see his teachings took root. Right about now, Daddy’s watching me and saying, ‘Turner John, I ain’t raised you to pay tribute to another man didn’t get down in the muck with you to earn his keep.’ ” He showed Joe his big scarred palms. “You want my money, Mr. Coughlin? Well then you best set to working with me and my boys on the mash and helping us work our farm, till the soil, rotate the crops, milk the cows. You follow?”

“I follow.”

“Else, ain’t nothing to discuss.”

Joe looked at Turner John, then up at the ceiling. “You really think he’s looking?”

Turner John revealed a mouth full of silver teeth. “Mister, I know he is.”

Joe unzipped his fly and withdrew the derringer he’d taken off Manny Bustamente a few years ago. He pointed it at Turner John’s chest.

Turner John unleashed a long, slow breath.

Joe said, “Man sets to a job, he’s supposed to complete it. Right?”

Turner John licked his lower lip and never took his eyes off the gun.

“You know what kind of gun this is?” Joe asked.

“It’s a woman’s derringer.”

“No,” Joe said, “it’s a What Coulda Been.” He stood. “You do whatever you want out here in Palmetto. You get me?”

Turner John blinked an affirmative.

“But don’t you let me see your label or taste your product in Hillsborough or Pinellas County. Or Sarasota neither, Turner John. We clear on that?”

Turner John blinked again.

“I need to hear you say it,” Joe said.

“We clear,” Turner John said. “You have my word.”

Joe nodded. “What’s your father thinking now?”

Turner John stared past the gun barrel, up Joe’s arm and into his eyes. “Thinking he came a damn sight close to having to put up with my snoring again.”

As Joe maneuvered to legalize gambling and buy the hotel, Graciela opened lodging of her own. Whereas Joe was after the Waldorf salad crowd, Graciela built accommodations for the fatherless and the husbandless. It was a national shame that men these days were leaving their families like armies during wartime. They left Hoovervilles and tenement apartments or, in the case of Tampa, the shotgun shacks locals called casitas, went up the road to get milk or cadge a cigarette or because they’d heard a rumor of work, and they never came back. Without men to protect them, the women were sometimes victims of rape or forced into the basement levels of prostitution. The children, suddenly fatherless and possibly motherless, entered the streets and the back roads, and the news that returned of them was rarely good.

Graciela came to Joe one night as he sat in the tub. She brought them two cups of coffee laced with rum. She removed her clothes and slipped under the water across from him and asked him if she could take his name.

“You want to marry me?”

“Not in the Church. I can’t.”

“Okay…”

“But we are married, are we not?”

“Yes.”

“So I would like to call myself by your surname.”

“Graciela Dominga Maela Rosario Maria Concetta Corrales Coughlin?”

She slapped his arm. “I don’t have that many names.”

He leaned in for a kiss, then leaned back. “Graciela Coughlin?”

“Sí.”

He said, “I’d be honored.”

“Ah,” she said, “good. I’ve bought some buildings.”

“You’ve bought some buildings?”

She looked at him, those brown eyes as innocent as a deer’s. “Three. That, um, cluster? Yes. That cluster by the old Perez factory?”

“On Palm?”

She nodded. “And I would like to give shelter there to abandoned wives and their children.”

Joe wasn’t surprised. Lately Graciela had talked about little else but these women.

“What happened to Latin American politics for a cause?”

“I fell in love with you.”

“So?”

“So you restrict my mobility.”

He laughed. “I do, huh?”

“Terribly.” She smiled. “It can work. Maybe someday we could even profit from it and it could stand as a model for the rest of the world.”

Graciela dreamed of land reform and farmers’ rights and a fair distribution of wealth. She believed in fairness, essentially, a concept Joe was certain had left the earth about the time the earth left diapers.

“I don’t know about a model for the rest of the world.”

“Why can’t it work?” she said to him. “A just world.” She splashed bubbles at him to show she was only half serious, but there was no “half” about it really.

“You mean one where everyone lives on what they need and sits around singing songs and, shit, smiling all the time?”

She flicked suds into his face. “You know what I mean. A good world. Why can’t it be so?”

“Greed,” he said. He raised his arms to their bathroom. “Look how we live.”

“But you give back. You gave a quarter of our money last year to the Gonzalez Clinic.”

“They saved my life.”

“The year before you built the library.”

“So they’d get books I like to read.”

“But all the books are in Spanish.”