Live by Night

“You want mine?” Dion said.

“No,” Joe said. “I’m fine.”

“Because I can give you mine.”

“No,” Joe said, thinking that being the boss was going to take some getting used to. “I’ll just need one soon.”

“End of the day,” Dion said. “No later, I promise.”

Traffic moved as slow as everything else down here. Dion drove them into Ybor City. Here the sky lost its hard white and picked up a bronze smear from the factory smoke. Cigars, Dion explained, had built this neighborhood. He pointed at brick buildings and their tall smokestacks and the smaller buildings — some just shotgun shacks with front and back doors open — where workers sat hunched over tables rolling cigars.

He rattled off the names — El Reloj and Cuesta-Rey, Bustillo, Celestino Vega, El Paraiso, La Pila, La Trocha, El Naranjal, Perfecto Garcia. He told Joe the most esteemed position in any factory was that of the reader, a man who sat in a chair in the center of the work floor and read aloud from great novels as the workers toiled. He explained that a cigar maker was called a tabaquero, the small factories were chinchals or buckeyes, and the food he might be smelling through the smoke stench was probably bolos or empanadas.

“Listen to you.” Joe whistled. “Speaking the language like the king of Spain.”

“You have to around here,” Dion said. “Italian too. You better brush up.”

“You speak Italian, my brother did, but I never picked it up.”

“Well, I hope you’re still as quick a learner as you used to be. Reason we get to do our business here in Ybor is because the rest of the city just leaves us alone. Far as they’re concerned, we’re just dirty spics and dirty wops and as long as we don’t make too much noise or the cigar workers don’t go on strike again, make the owners call in the cops and the head breakers, then we’re left to do what we do.” He turned onto Seventh Avenue, apparently a main drag, people bustling along the clapboard sidewalks under two-story buildings with wide balconies and wrought iron trellises and brick or stucco facades that reminded Joe of the lost weekend he’d had in New Orleans a couple years ago. Tracks ran down the center of the avenue and Joe saw a trolley coming their way from several blocks off, its nose disappearing, then reappearing behind waves of heat.

“You’d think we’d all get along,” Dion said, “but it doesn’t always work out that way. The Italians and the Cubans keep to themselves. But the black Cubans hate the white Cubans, and the white Cubans look at the nigger Cubans like they’re niggers, and they both high-hat everyone else. All Cubans hate the Spaniards. Spaniards think the Cubans are uppity coons who forgot their place since the US of A freed them back in ’98. Then the Cubans and the Spanish look down on the Puerto Ricans, and everyone shits on the Dominicans. The Italians only respect you if you came off the boat from the Boot, and the Americanos actually think someone gives a shit what they think sometimes.”

“Did you actually call us Americanos?”

“I’m Italian,” Dion said, turning left and running them down another wide avenue, although this one wasn’t paved. “And around here? Proud of it.”

Joe saw the blue of the Gulf and the ships in port and the high cranes. He could smell salt, oil slicks, low tide.

“Port of Tampa,” Dion said with a flourish of his hand as he drove them along redbrick streets where men crossed their path in forklifts that burped diesel smoke and the cranes swung two-ton pallets high over their heads, the shadows of the netting crisscrossing the windshield. A steam whistle blew.

Dion pulled over by a cargo pit and they got out, watched the men below take apart a bale of burlap sacks stamped ESCUINTIA, GUATEMALA. From the smell, Joe could tell some of the sacks held coffee and others chocolate. The half-dozen men off-loaded them in no time, and the crane swung the netting and the empty pallet back up, and the men in the hold disappeared through a doorway down there.

Dion led Joe to the ladder and descended.

“Where we going?”

“You’ll see.”

At the bottom of the hold, the men had closed the door behind them. He and Dion stood on a dirt floor that smelled of everything ever off-loaded in the Tampa sun — bananas and pineapple and grain. Oil and potatoes and gas and vinegar. Gunpowder. Spoiled fruit and fresh coffee, the grounds crunching underfoot. Dion placed the flat of his hand to the cement wall opposite the ladder and moved his hand to the right and the wall went with it — just popped up and out of a seam Joe couldn’t see from two feet away. Dion revealed a door and rapped on it twice, then waited, his lips moving as he counted. Then he rapped it another four times and a voice on the other side said, “Who’s it?”

“Fireplace,” Dion said, and the door opened.