World Gone By: A Novel (25 page)
Read World Gone By: A Novel Online
Authors: Dennis Lehane
Dion seemed spent suddenly. His arms drooped, his hips sagged.
After a while, they started walking again.
“You think we’ll see our friends in the next life? All be back together?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “I hope so.”
“I think we will.” Dion glanced up at the sky again. “I think . . .”
The breeze shifted and small rags of smoke floated past them from the west.
“Charlotte,” Joe said.
“What?”
A terrier bolted across their path—startling Joe because it came from the left, not the right, where he’d heard it a couple times on their walk. It leaped into the cane, snarling. They heard its prey squeak. Just once.
“It came back to me. That was the girl’s name. The previous owner’s daughter.”
“Charlotte.” Dion smiled firmly. “That’s a good name.”
From somewhere over the hills came the faintest rumble of thunder, though the air didn’t smell of anything but burning sugar leaves and moist earth.
“It’s pretty,” Dion said.
“What?”
“The yellow house.”
They were about fifty yards away.
“Yeah,” Joe said. “It is.”
He pulled the trigger. He closed his eyes at the last moment but the bullet still left the gun with a sharp crack and Dion fell to all fours in the earth. Joe stood over his friend as the blood spilled out of the hole in the back of his head. It coated his hair and dripped off the left side of his head, down his neck, into the soft ground. Joe could see brain but Dion continued to breathe, a desperate huffing, an unquenchable greed for air. He sucked in a watery breath and turned his face toward Joe, one glassy eye finding him, the knowledge already beginning to rush out of it—knowledge of who he was and how he’d come to be here on his hands and knees, knowledge of a life lived, the names of so many simple things already vanished. His lips moved, but no words left them.
Joe fired the second bullet into his temple and Dion’s head snapped hard to the right and he sprawled on the ground and made no sound.
Joe stood in the row of cane and his gaze fell on the small yellow house.
He hoped souls were real and Dion’s was now rising through the blue and orange sky. He hoped the little girl who’d played in the little yellow house was somewhere safe. He prayed for her soul and prayed for his own soul even though he knew it was damned.
He looked out at the fields, at the breadth of them, and he could see the full breadth of Cuba beyond, but it wasn’t Cuba. Everywhere he lived, everywhere he traveled, everywhere he walked from now on was the land of Nod.
I am damned. And alone.
Or am I? he wondered. Or is there a path I can’t see yet? A way out. A road that inclines.
The voice that replied was weary and cold:
Look at the body at your feet. Look at him. Your friend. Your brother. Now ask that question again.
He turned to head back—disposal of the corpse had already been arranged—and froze. There, about thirty yards up the row, Tomas knelt in the soft earth, mouth open, face wet. Bewildered. Broken. Lost to him forever.
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
SIX
Orphans
A WEEK LATER, as they were packing up the apartment in Havana, Manuel told Joe an American woman was asking for him downstairs.
As he left the apartment, Joe passed Tomas sitting on his bed, all packed. He caught his eye and gave him a nod, but Tomas looked away.
Joe stood in the doorway. “Son.”
Tomas looked at the wall.
“Son, look at me.”
Tomas eventually obeyed the order, stared at him with the same look he’d worn for a week. It wasn’t enraged—Joe had been hoping for the sadness to turn into rage; rage he could work with. But instead, Tomas’s face was a map of despair.
“It will get better,” Joe told him for maybe the fiftieth time since the cane field. “The hurt will pass.”
Tomas’s mouth opened. The muscles worked under his skin.
Joe waited. Hoping.
Tomas said, “Can I look away now?”
JOE WALKED DOWNSTAIRS. He passed the guards in the foyer and then the two outside the front door.
She stood in the street, just short of the curb, the lazy afternoon traffic kicking up dust behind her. She wore a pale yellow dress and her red-black hair was tied back in a bun. She held a small suitcase in each hand and seemed to cling to her prim and proper posture, as if to relax a muscle would cause the whole lie of herself to crumble.
“You were right,” she said.
“About what?”
“Everything.”
“Come off the street.”
“You’re always right. How does that feel?”
He thought of Dion lying in soft soil splattered black with his blood.
“Awful,” he said.
“My husband threw me out, of course.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My parents said I was a whore. Said if I showed my face in Atlanta, they’d slap it in public and never look at me again.”
Joe said, “Please step off the street.”
She did. She placed her suitcases on the sidewalk in front of him. “I have nothing.”
“You have me.”
“Won’t you wonder if I came because I love you or because I’d exhausted my options?”
“I might.” He took her hands. “But not enough to keep me up nights.”
That elicited a small, black laugh, and then she took a step back, still holding his hands but holding them by the fingertips. “You’re different.”
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “You’re missing something.” She searched his face. “No, no. Wait. You’ve
lost
something. What is it?”
Just my soul, if you believe in that sort of thing.
“Nothing I’ll miss,” he said and lifted her bags off the sidewalk and led her inside.
“Joseph!”
He put Vanessa’s bags down on the floor of the vestibule and turned toward the sound of the voice because whoever had called him had sounded a lot like his late wife.
Not a lot like her, actually. Exactly like her.
She was at the next corner, walking with the oversize hat she’d favored in summer and a pale orange parasol. She wore a simple white dress, a peasant dress, and she looked over her shoulder once at him, and turned the corner.
Joe stepped out on the sidewalk.
From the vestibule, Vanessa said, “Joe?” but he continued walking toward the street.
The blond boy stood on the far sidewalk in between the apartment building and the movie theater. Once again he wore an outfit that was at least twenty to twenty-five years out of date, a gray serge knickerbocker suit with matching golf cap, but this time his features were clear—blue eyes sunk back a little bit into their sockets, thin nose, sharp cheekbones, hard jawline, medium height for his age.
Even before he smiled, Joe knew who he was. He’d known it
the last time he’d seen him, though it hadn’t made any sense. Still didn’t.
The boy matched the smile with a wave, but all Joe could see was the Cumberland Gap where his two front teeth should have been.
His father and mother passed by on the curb. They were younger and they held hands. Their clothes were Victorian and of poorer quality than they’d worn by the time he’d been born. They didn’t look at him, and even though they held hands, they didn’t look particularly happy.
Sal Urso, dead ten years, propped his foot on a hydrant and tied his shoelace. Dion and his brother, Paulo, played craps against the wall of the apartment house. He saw people from Boston who’d died in the flu pandemic of ’19 and a nun from Gate of Heaven School who he hadn’t known was dead. All around him were the nonliving—men who’d died at Charlestown Prison, men who’d died in the streets of Tampa, those he’d killed personally and those he’d ordered killed. He saw some women he didn’t know, suicides judging by the wrists of one or the ligature ring around the neck of another. Down the end of the block, Montooth Dix beat the shit out of Rico DiGiacomo, while Emma Gould, a woman he had loved once but hadn’t thought of in years, staggered down the sidewalk with a bottle of vodka in her bluing hand, her hair and dress soaking wet.
All his dead. They filled the street and clogged the sidewalks.
He lowered his head in the middle of the busy street in Old Havana. Lowered his head and closed his eyes.
I wish you well,
he told his dead.
I wish you good things.
But I will not apologize.
When he looked up again, he saw Hector, one of his bodyguards, walking in the wrong direction, disappearing around the same corner where he’d last seen Graciela.
All his ghosts, though, were gone.
Except the boy. The boy cocked his head at Joe, as if surprised he was coming closer.
Joe said, “You’re
me
?”
The boy seemed confused by the question.
Because he wasn’t the boy anymore. He was Vivian Ignatius Brennan. Saint Viv. The Gatekeeper. The Undertaker.
“There were just too many mistakes,” Saint Viv said kindly. “Too late to go back and fix them all. Too late.”
Joe didn’t even see the gun in his hand until Vivian fired the bullet into his heart. Didn’t make much noise, just a soft pop.
The impact swept Joe’s legs out from under him, and he fell in the street. He put one hand to the cobblestone and tried to stand, but his heels wouldn’t grip the stone. Blood left the hole in the center of his chest and spilled onto his lap. His lungs whistled through the hole.
The getaway car pulled up behind Vivian and a woman screamed hopelessly from somewhere close by.
Tomas, if you’re seeing this, for Christ’s sake, look away.
Vivian pointed the pistol at Joe’s forehead.
Joe placed the heels of both hands to the cobblestone and tried to put some fire in his eyes.
But he was afraid. So afraid.
And he wanted to say what they all said:
Wait
.
But he didn’t.
The flash that left the muzzle looked like a shower of falling stars.
When he opened his eyes, he was sitting on a beach. It was night. All around him was darkness except for the white of the surf and the white of the sand.
He stood and walked toward the water.
He walked and walked.
But no matter how much he walked, he never got any closer. He couldn’t see the water itself, just the impact of the waves when they broke up in the black wall before him.
After a while, he sat down again.
He waited for others to come. He hoped they would. He hoped there was more to this than a dark night, an empty beach, and waves that never quite reached the shore.
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY GABY GERSTER/DIOGENES, ZURICH
DENNIS LEHANE
is the author of eleven previous novels—including the
New York Times
bestsellers
Live by Night; Moonlight Mile; Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; The Given Day;
and
The Drop
—as well as
Coronado,
a collection of short stories and a play.
Lehane’s first novel,
A Drink Before the War,
won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel.
Mystic River
was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, as well as the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction given by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
Live by Night
won the 2013 Edgar Award for Best Novel of the Year.
Lehane’s work has been translated into twenty-two languages. Born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts, he holds an MFA from Florida International University. Before becoming a full-time writer, Lehane worked as a counselor with mentally handicapped and abused children, waited tables, parked cars, drove limos, worked in bookstores, and loaded tractor-trailers. He and his wife, Angie, currently live in California with their children.
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COVER DESIGN BY MARY SCHUCK
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BY ARCANGEL
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from “Stolen Car” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1980 Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
WORLD GONE BY
. Copyright © 2015 by Dennis Lehane. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-000490-3
EPub Edition MARCH 2015 ISBN 9780062200303
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