World Gone By: A Novel (20 page)

JOE HELD HIS SON and surveyed the carnage around him on Seventh Avenue. Tomas shook in his arms and wept like he hadn’t wept since he’d suffered a dual ear infection when he was six months old. Joe’s car—the one he’d used to run over Anthony Bianco and Jerry Tucci—was totaled. Not from the crash with the light pole but from Sal Romano running up and unloading a full drum of Thompson rounds into it. Joe had come around the trunk of a car two spaces back and shot Romano in the hip while he was reloading. He could still hear him moaning in the middle of the street. Romano had played quarterback for his high school back in Jersey. Still lifted weights and did five hundred push-ups a day, or so he claimed. Joe had blown his left hip into the next block, though, so future push-ups were looking iffy.

As he’d crossed the street, Joe had shot a guy in a capeskin jacket.
The guy had been firing a shotgun into the bakery, so Joe had popped a round into his back and kept walking. He could hear him too—screaming from the sidewalk about fifteen yards back, asking for a doctor, asking for a priest. Sounded like Dave Imbruglia, actually. Looked like him from the back too. Joe couldn’t see his face.

His son had stopped wailing, was trying to get his breath back.

“Ssshh.” Joe stroked Tomas’s hair. “It’s okay. I’m here now. I’m not letting go.”

“You . . .”

“What?”

Tomas leaned back in Joe’s arms and looked down at Freddy DiGiacomo’s corpse. “You shot him,” he whispered.

“Yup.”

“Why?”

“A lot of reasons, but mostly because I didn’t like how he looked at you.” Joe looked deep into his son’s brown eyes, into his late wife’s eyes. “You understand?”

Tomas started to nod, then shook his head slowly.

“You’re my son,” Joe said. “That means nobody fucks with you. Ever.”

Tomas blinked, and Joe knew he was seeing something in his father he’d never seen before—the arctic fury Joe had spent his life learning to hide. His father’s fury, his brothers’, the Coughlin male’s birthright.

“We gotta find Uncle Dion and get out of here. Can you walk?”

“Yeah.”

“You see your uncle?”

Tomas pointed.

Dion was sitting on the windowsill of the women’s hat shop, the glass blown out in the gunfire, staring at them. He was white as new ash, shirt covered in blood, breathing heavily.

Joe put Tomas down and they walked over, the glass crunching under their feet.

“Where you hit?”

“My right tit,” Dion said. “Went through, though. I fucking felt it exit. Believe that?”

“Your arm too,” Joe said. “Shit.”

“What?”

“Your arm, your arm.” Joe pulled off his tie. “That’s an artery, D.”

The blood was spitting straight out of the hole in the inside of Dion’s right arm. Joe tied his tie off just above the wound.

“Can you walk?”

“Barely breathe.”

“I can hear that. Can you walk, though?”

“Not far.”

“We’re not going far.”

Joe slung an arm under Dion’s left arm and pulled him off the window. “Tomas, open the back door again. Okay?”

Tomas ran to Dion’s car. He froze, though, when he reached Freddy’s corpse, as if it might wake up and lunge for him.

“Tomas!”

Tomas opened the door.

“Good boy. Hop up front.”

Joe sat Dion on the seat. “Lie back.”

He did.

“Pull up your legs.”

He pulled his legs onto the seat and Joe shut the door.

As he came around to the driver’s side, he saw Sal Romano across the street. Sal was up on his feet. Well, one foot. The other dangled as he leaned against what had been Joe’s car, breathing heavy. Hissing actually. Joe kept his gun on him.

“You killed Rico’s brother.” Sal winced.

“Sure did.” Joe opened the driver’s door.

“We didn’t know your kid was in the car.”

“Yeah, well,” Joe said, “he was.”

“Won’t save you. Rico’s going to cut off your head and light it on fire.”

“Sorry about the hip, Sal.” Joe shrugged, nothing left to say, and got in the car. He backed out of the space and then backed down the street, hearing the sirens now, the sound coming from the west and the north.

“Where we going?” Tomas asked.

“Just a couple blocks,” Joe said. “We have to get this car off the street. How you doing, D?”

“World’s my oyster.” Dion let slip a soft groan.

“Hang in there.” Joe backed around the corner onto Twenty-Fourth Street and put the car into first, headed south.

“Surprised you showed up,” Dion said. “You always hated getting your hands dirty.”

“Ain’t about my hands,” Joe said. “It’s my hair. Look at it. And I’m all out of Brylcreem.”

“Such a nance.” Dion closed his eyes with a soft smile.

Tomas had never known fear like this. It turned his tongue and the roof of his mouth to dust. A ball of it pulsed in his throat. And his father was making
jokes.

“Dad,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Are you a bad guy?”

“No, son.” Joe noticed specks of vomit on Tomas’s shirt. “I’m just not a particularly good one.”

HE DROVE THEM to a Negro veterinarian on a dinged-up stretch of Fourth in Brown Town. In an alley out back, the veterinarian had a carport that easily got lost in the cowls of rusted Cyclone fencing and razor wire the vet shared with his neighbors, an auto salvage yard and a pest exterminator. Joe told Tomas to stay with Dion, and before his son could reply, he ran up the back walk and let himself in through a white door warped by the heat.

Tomas looked into the backseat. Uncle Dion was sitting up, but his eyes were half closed, his breathing very shallow. Tomas looked at the door where his father had gone, then out at the alley, where two stray dogs loped along the fence line, snarling at each other whenever one got too close.

Tomas leaned over the seat. “I’m really scared.”

“Be a fool not to be,” Dion said. “We ain’t out of this.”

“Why’d those men want to kill you?”

Dion chuckled softly. “In our thing, kid, you don’t get fired.”

“Our thing,” Tomas repeated carefully, his voice still shaky. “Are you and Father gangsters?”

Another soft chuckle. “Well, we were.”

Joe and a colored man in a white smock came back out through the door pushing a gurney. It was a short gurney, maybe only as long as Tomas, but Joe and the colored man got Dion out of the car and onto it. His legs dangled off the end as they pushed him up the walk and inside.

The veterinarian was Dr. Carl Blake, and he’d been a practicing physician at a colored clinic in Jacksonville before he’d lost his license and arrived in Tampa to work for Montooth Dix. He patched up Montooth’s men and kept his whores healthy and clean, and Montooth had paid him in the opium he’d lost his license over in the first place.

Dr. Blake smacked his lips a lot and moved with a strange
stilted grace, like a dancer trying not to knock over the furniture. Tomas noticed that his father always called him Doctor, while Dion, before they knocked him out, called him Blake.

After Dion passed out, Joe said, “I’m going to need a lot of morphine. Probably clean you out, Doctor.”

Dr. Blake nodded and poured water over the gash in Dion’s arm. “Nicked his brachial. Man should be dead. Is that your tie?”

Joe nodded.

“Well, you saved his life with it.”

Joe said, “I’m going to need something stronger than sulfur.”

Dr. Blake looked across Dion at him. “With the war? Son, good luck.”

“Come on. What can you give me?”

“Prontosil’s all I got.”

“Then Prontosil will have to do. Thank you, Doctor.”

“Hold that light right there, would you?”

Joe moved the lamp over the exam table so the doctor could get a closer look at Dion’s arm.

“Boy going to be okay?”

Joe looked over at Tomas. “You want to go in another room?”

Tomas shook his head.

“You’re sure? This could make you sick.”

“I won’t get sick.”

“No?”

Tomas shook his head again, thinking,
I’m your son.

Dr. Blake poked around inside Dion’s arm until he said, “It’s a clean cut. Nothing foreign in there. Let’s put this artery back together.”

They worked for a while in silence, Joe handing the doctor instruments as he asked for them or adjusting the lamp or wiping the doctor’s forehead with a cloth when the doctor requested it.

Tomas grew certain of one thing—he would never be as calm under strain as his father. He flashed on his father’s face as he’d backed the bullet-riddled car out onto Twenty-Fourth Street, the sirens growing louder in the background, Dion groaning in the backseat, and his father squinting at the nearest street sign like a man out for a Sunday drive who found himself slightly turned around.

“Did you hear about Montooth?” Dr. Blake asked Joe.

“No,” Joe said lightly. “What about him?”

“Took out Little Lamar and three guns. Didn’t get a scratch.”

Joe laughed. “He
what
?”

“Not a scratch. Maybe that voodoo shit’s true.” Dr. Blake finished sewing up Dion’s arm.

“What’d you say?” Joe asked sharply.

“Huh? Oh, you know, all those rumors over the years that Montooth practices voodoo in a special room somewhere in that fortress of his, puts hexes on his enemies, all that. Man walks into that barbershop and walks back out the only survivor, maybe there’s some truth to it.”

A curious look passed over Joe’s face. “Can I use your phone?”

“Sure. Right over there.”

Joe removed the plastic gloves he’d been wearing and made his phone call as Dr. Blake moved on to the wounds in Uncle Dion’s chest. Tomas heard his father say, “You get over here in fifteen, okay?”

He hung up, put on a fresh pair of gloves, and rejoined the doctor.

Dr. Blake asked, “How much time you think you have?”

Joe’s face grew dark. “A couple of hours at best.”

The door to the exam room opened and another colored man dressed in dungaree overalls stuck his head in. “All set.”

“Thank you, Marlo.”

“Sure thing, Doctor.”

“Thank you, Marlo,” Joe said.

When he was gone, Joe turned to Tomas. “There’s some pants and underpants for you in the car. Why don’t you go get them?”

“Where?”

“In the car,” Joe said.

Tomas left the exam room and went back down the hall where the caged dogs barked at his scent. He opened the back door onto the white day and walked back up the path to where they’d left the car. It was still in the same place but it wasn’t the same car. It was a Plymouth four-door sedan from the late ’30s, no paint, just primer, as forgettable as a car got. On the front seat, Tomas found a pair of black trousers in his size and a pair of underpants and he remembered only now that he’d wet himself just before his father shot the man with the foul breath and the milky eyes. He wondered how he could have forgotten because he could smell himself suddenly, and he could feel the cold stickiness of his own urine turning his thighs raw. But he’d sat in it for over an hour without realizing it.

When he exited the car, he saw his father speaking to a very small man in the alley. The man was nodding over and over as his father talked. As Tomas neared them he heard his father say, “You still related to Boch?”

“Ernie?” The little man nodded. “Married my older sister, divorced her, and married my younger sister. They’re happy.”

“He still a master?”

“There’s a Monet been hanging in the Tate in London since ’35 that Ernie painted in a weekend.”

“Well, you’re gonna need him on this. I’m paying premium.”

“You don’t pay me anything. Just don’t call that witch doctor.”

“I’m
not
paying you, but I am paying your brother-in-law. He doesn’t owe me shit. So you make sure he knows, he’s getting full market value. But this is a rush order.”

“Got it. That your boy?”

They turned and looked at Tomas, and something sad passed through his father’s eyes, a leaden regret. “Yeah. Don’t worry. He’s seen the world today. Tomas, say hi to Bobo.”

“Hi, Bobo.”

“Hey, kid.”

“I gotta change,” Tomas said.

His father nodded. “Go on then.”

He changed into the clothes in a bathroom at the back of the clinic. He wet the lower leg of his old pants in the sink and cleaned his thighs as best he could. He rolled up the piss-stained pants and underpants and brought them back into the exam room with him, found his father pressing a stack of bills into Dr. Blake’s hands.

“Just throw them away,” his father said when he saw the old clothes. Tomas found the barrel in the corner of the room, tossed the clothes in with the bloody gauze and scraps of Dion’s bloody shirt.

He heard Dr. Blake tell his father that Dion had a collapsed lung and that his arm should remain immobile for at least a week.

“By immobile you mean he shouldn’t move?”

“He can move, but I wouldn’t want him bouncing around much.”

“What if I can’t control how much bouncing he does in the next few hours?”

“Then the suture in the artery could tear.”

“And he could die.”

“No.”

“No?”

Dr. Blake shook his head. “He will die.”

Dion was still out when they put him in the backseat and filled the foot wells with old dog blankets so he couldn’t roll off and hurt
himself. They kept the windows rolled down, but even so the car smelled like dog hair and dog piss and sick dog.

Tomas said, “Where are we going?”

“Airport.”

“We’re going home?”

“We’re going to try to get to Cuba, yeah.”

“And the men will stop trying to hurt you?”

“I don’t know about that,” Joe said. “But they won’t have any reason to hurt you.”

“Are you afraid?”

Joe smiled at his son. “Little bit.”

“How come you don’t show it?”

“Because this is one of those times when thinking is more important than feeling.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we’ve got to get out of the country. And I’m thinking the man who tried to hurt us, he embarrassed himself. He tried to kill Uncle Dion and he failed. He planned to kill another friend of mine, but that friend got the advantage over him too. And the police are going to be very angry about what happened at the bakery today. The mayor and the chamber of commerce too. I’m thinking if I can get us to Cuba, this man might be willing to negotiate a peace.”