World Gone By: A Novel (6 page)

“Ask me?”

She could tell he was enjoying this and it brought a slight curl to the left side of her mouth before she fixed her electric blue eyes on him. “You’re aware of my foundation?”

“Of course,” Joe said.

“Like most charitable foundations during a war, it’s fallen on hard times, I don’t mind telling you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yours seem to flourish, however.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Come, Mr. Coughlin, your charities here in Tampa. I see you just built a new Corrales Shelter for Women in Lutz.”

“That’s a direct result
of
the war,” Joe said. “Even more women are finding themselves without husbands or means to support their children. Even more children are losing their fathers.”

“Well, sure,” Jonathan Belgrave said, “there’s a lot of truth to that theory, Joe. But even so, any charity not benefiting the war effort has taken a massive hit to its coffers. Yet yours seem to keep chugging along. Why, that party you threw just before Christmas, I bet that raised a pretty penny.”

Joe chuckled as he lit a cigarette. “So what do you want—my donor lists?”

“Actually,” Vanessa said, “that’s exactly what I’d like.”

Joe coughed as he exhaled. “You’re serious?”

“Well, it’s hardly as gauche as asking you to hand me the list right here. I’d like to offer you a position on the board of the Sloane Benevolence Foundation.”

Vanessa Belgrave was born Vanessa Sloane, and grew up the only child of Arthur and Eleanor Sloane of Atlanta. The Sloane family—of lumber, of banking, of textiles, of summers on Jekyll Island, of two semiannual galas that set the high-water mark for all other gatherings in southern society each season—could claim generals in both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. The Sloanes were as close to royalty as Georgia got.

“There’s an open spot?”

The mayor nodded. “Jeb Toschen passed away.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He was ninety-two,” the mayor said.

Joe looked into Vanessa’s bright eyes. This was clearly killing her. But it was true that all the other local charities were drowning, while Joe’s organizations were, if not thriving, certainly solid. This was partially due to Joe’s gifts as a fund-raiser, but mostly to how much lower a fella could keep his overhead if he’d fleeced half his supplies and building materials.

“Have someone contact my girl,” he said eventually.

“Is that a yes?” Vanessa asked.

“It’s close enough, dear.” Her husband smiled at Joe. “We’re still working on the part where she realizes the absence of a negative is always a positive.”

Vanessa smiled. “Actually, we’re just working on the part where I like to hear ‘yes.’”

Joe held out his hand. She shook it.

“Have someone call my girl in the morning. We’ll give it our due attention.”

Her grip tightened around his and he wouldn’t have been surprised if his bones or her teeth cracked with a loud splintering.

“I will,” she said. “And thank you for your consideration.”

“My pleasure, Mrs. Belgrave.”

FREDDY DIGIACOMO caught up with Wyatt Pettigrue in the maternity ward of St. Joseph’s Hospital, Wyatt holding his newborn daughter in both hands while his cigarette smoldered in the ashtray by his knee. His daughter’s name was still undecided, although his wife, Mae, was leaning toward Velma, which had been her grandmother’s name. Wyatt had lobbied for Greta, but Mae had cooled to it ever since she’d found Wyatt leafing too slowly through a copy of
Photoplay
that had Greta Garbo on the cover.

When Sister Mary Theodore came and took his daughter back from him, Wyatt watched them go, his pride at having brought life into the world doing battle with his relief that he didn’t have to hold her anymore while she squealed like a piglet that had fallen down a well. The whole time she’d been in his hands he’d been sure he’d drop her. He also got the feeling she didn’t like him; she didn’t look
at him—she didn’t look at anything really—but he sensed she could smell him and wasn’t fond of his odor. He had no idea what he was supposed to do now, how he was supposed to reorder his life and his expectations to accommodate this tiny, unreasonable creature’s existence. Her arrival, he was certain, meant Mae would have even less room in her heart for him.

Christ, he thought, and she wants three more.

Freddy DiGiacomo said, “She’s a beautiful girl, Wyatt. A heartbreaker, that one. You can see it.”

“Thanks.”

“You must be very proud.”

“I am.”

Freddy clapped his back. “Where are the cigars? Huh?”

Wyatt found them in the pocket of his sport coat. He snipped off the end of one and lit it for Freddy, who puffed until the coal glowed red.

“I need you to do that thing for me now, Wyatt.”

“Now?”

“By tonight’ll be fine.”

Mae’s entire family was either crammed into the hospital room with her or waiting for him back home. The ones back home would expect him to fill the icebox they’d cleaned out last night. The ones in the hospital room would expect him to tend to his wife, who’d had a difficult labor, or at least stand around while they tended to her. There was no winning to it. The whole family—five brothers, four sisters, the angry-silent mother, and the angry-loud father—had judged Wyatt inferior a long time ago. Now, on the rare occasions they did pay him attention, they did so only long enough to reconfirm their initial impression.

Wyatt said to Freddy, “I have no idea how I’d tell her I’ve got to go to work.”

Freddy smiled, his eyes kind. “Know what I’ve discovered? It’s a lot easier to ask a woman’s forgiveness than her permission.” He took his raincoat off the back of his chair. “You coming?”

WYATT PETTIGRUE HAD SPENT the last few weeks shadowing Montooth Dix around the Negro section of Ybor City. Most days, this would have been an impossible task for a white man, but Wyatt’s only distinguishing characteristic, since he was a child, was his ability to go unnoticed. In school, teachers had not only never called on him, on two occasions they’d forgotten to give him grades. Team buses left without him, coworkers usually called him by the wrong name (“William,” “Wesley,” or, for some reason, “Lloyd”), even his own father had been known to snap his fingers several times before he dredged up his son’s name. For the past three weeks, Wyatt Pettigrue had driven into Ybor City every day, crossed the white/colored border at Eleventh Avenue, and driven down streets where the only pale men the inhabitants had seen in five years were milkmen, icemen, firemen, policemen, and the occasional landlord.

He’d tailed Montooth Dix from the series of apartments the big Negro occupied above a pool hall to the coffee shop on Tenth Street, the laundry on Eighth Avenue, the drugstore on Nebraska, the chicken joint on Meridian, and the tiny but tidy cemetery on Ninth Street. Except for the cemetery, where, Wyatt had learned, Montooth Dix’s father, mother, two aunts, and an uncle were buried, all the other establishments either paid Montooth for protection, collected bets on policy numbers for him, or fronted for his illegal distilleries, which were still big business for anyone who sold liquor to people who didn’t give a shit whether their booze came bearing a federal tax stamp or
not. Montooth Dix’s customers did not. Montooth Dix’s customers were the only people more invisible than Wyatt Pettigrue. In Ybor City, an already amputated community, the Afro-Cubans and Afro-Americans were further cut off by that extra shade of darkness that separated black skin from toffee.

Montooth Dix was their mayor, their governor, their king. He exacted a tax for his services, but he provided those services. When they went on strike, he protected them from the goon squads, left food on their back stoops when they were sick, even wrote off a few debts when, during the last decade’s years of strife and starvation, the men took off and never came back. Most of his people loved him, even the ones who owed him money.

Which, of late, was more people than had owed him in some time, at least since the Turnaround had begun in ’38. For the second time this month, several of the debtors on the weekly payment program had cried poor, so Montooth decided to personally see to the accounts. Kincaid, the fruit man on Ninth, gave it up as soon as Montooth walked through his door. Montooth, at six foot two and in the habit of wearing hats that made him appear three inches taller, cut an imposing figure, and Kincaid was the first of three debtors who miraculously found the money they owed and right quick.

Which allowed Montooth, who’d been feeling tired lately—and not sick-tired, but sick-of-all-this-shit-tired, sick of what it took to keep a firm hand on a shifting pulse—to duck the responsibility of asking
why
the debtors had been so remiss in forking over the cash the previous two weeks. Montooth was exactly as old as the century, but he felt older lately. Growing older seemed only to teach you that new crops of people kept coming up behind you doing the same stupid shit the previous crop had done. Nobody learned nothing. Nobody evolved.

Christ. Montooth missed the days when everything just
hummed along, everyone happy to make their money, spend their money, and get up the next day and do it the fuck over again. Those days when Joe Coughlin had run everything, Montooth had long since realized, had been the golden age. Now, at least until this war stopped scooping up their best muscle and their best customers, they were in a holding pattern. Nothing wrong with holding patterns, at least not on the surface, but they did tend to make everyone antsy, braid them up tighter than barbed wire.

It was only at the end of his night, when he dropped in on Pearl Eyes Milton, the haberdasher on Tenth Street, and Pearl Eyes told him he couldn’t pay him, “least not this week and probably not the next,” that Montooth asked the question he didn’t want to know the answer to.

“Why you doing me like this, Pearl?”

“Ain’t trying to do you any which way, Mr. Dix, you know that.”

“I don’t.”

“But I ain’t got it.”

Montooth pulled a silk tie from the rack beside him, let that imported silk slide across the palm of his hand. Lord. Since the war started, he’d forgotten how soft silk felt. “Why ain’t you got it?”

Pearl Eyes, a kindly old man and grandfather to nine, said, “I just ain’t. Times been tough.”

Montooth looked down at the floor on his side of the counter. “But you leave a ten-dollar bill just lying around on the floor.”

“A what?”

“A ten-dollar bill, Negro.” Montooth pointed down and stepped back.

Pearl Eyes put his elbows on the counter and craned his head over the edge. Montooth looped the silk tie around his neck and set to strangling the old coot. He got in close and spoke into Pearl Eyes’s bushy, pink ear.

“Who you paying if you not paying me? Who?”

“No one. I just—”

Montooth pulled hard on both ends of the tie and yanked Pearl Eyes over the counter and onto the floor. He let go of the tie. The old man bounced off the floor and lay there groaning and moaning for a spell.

Montooth dusted the floor with a handkerchief he found in another rack. He sat across from Pearl Eyes.

“What you sell here, old man?”

“What?” This between a lot of coughs and sputtering. “What?”

“Tell me what you sell.”

Pearl Eyes pulled at the tie around his throat like it was alive. Yanked it off and threw it to the floor. “Clothes.”

“Clothes is what you stock.” Montooth shook his head and clucked. “What you sell is class. Brothers come through this door they expect elegance. They expect the refined touch. I mean, look at that suit you wearing. How much that cost retail?”

Another cough, but dryer. “ ’Bout eighty dollars.”

“Eighty dollars. Whoo.” Montooth whistled. “Most brothers I know don’t make that in a month, but you wearing it and telling me you can’t pay your debt.”

“I . . .” Pearl Eyes looked down at the floor.

Montooth said, “Who’s taking my money out your pocket before you can give it to me?”

Pearl Eyes said, “No one.”

“Okay.” Montooth stood. “Okay.”

He headed for the door.

“Okay?” Pearl Eyes said.

Montooth stopped by a table covered in white shirts, looked back. “One of my boys will be by, maybe tonight to your house, maybe back here in the morning, but soon. I’d do it myself, but
blood gets on the clothes no matter how hard you try avoiding it and I got me a date tonight with my middle wife at the Gin Gin Club.”

“Blood?”

Montooth nodded. “Gonna cut up your face, Pearl. Carve it up like a chicken ’fore a picnic. See how much class and elegance you be selling then. Good night.”

As he reached for the door, he saw a gray Plymouth heading north on the far side of the street, something about the car that Montooth didn’t like, but he couldn’t put his finger on what immediately, because Pearl Eyes piped up from back at the counter with:

“Little Lamar.”

Montooth watched the man get to his feet.

Pearl Eyes rubbed his throat. “Little Lamar say he taking over. Say your time is done. Say a new boss runs this here town.”

Montooth smiled. “When I push him back off this block and into his grave, what you say then?”

“Little Lamar say he got backing.”

“I got backing.”

“Son,” the old man said with a weary pity that shook Montooth to his core, “word going around is the only backing you got anymore is your own damn spine. Whatever you had in the white world is done gone by.”

Montooth watched the old man shuffle across the floor to him. Pearl Eyes Milton shot his cuffs as he neared, revealing a pair of antique diamond cuff links he always wore, ones supposedly went back a century or more to some white man in Philadelphia who’d once been deputy mayor. Pearl Eyes removed the cuff links and held them out to Montooth.

“They worth at least a month of what I owe you. Take ’em. They all I got.”

Montooth opened his palm and Pearl Eyes dropped them into it.

“I’ll deal with Lamar,” Montooth said. “What you hearing is just wind.”

“Wind of change maybe,” Pearl Eyes said softly. “I’m old enough to know it when I feel it in my hair.”

Montooth smiled. “You ain’t got much hair left.”

“That’s ’cause the wind took it,” Pearl Eyes said and turned his back on Montooth, headed back into his shop.

AS SOON AS MONTOOTH STEPPED OUT of the haberdashery, the gray Plymouth P4 appeared out of the soft night. Heading south this time, right in front of him. The rear window was already rolled down so Montooth didn’t wait to see the muzzle of whatever gun was perched there. He just dropped to his knees behind the nearest parked car and started scrabbling.

The steel jackets smacked the other side of the car like someone had hurled a bucketful of lug nuts at it. The shots hit the building behind him too, sent sparks shooting off the brick. The windows popped out of the cars up and down the street, and Montooth stayed low and made his way down the sidewalk toward the alley. He’d been shot at by a machine gun before, back in the war, but that had been near twenty years ago, and this kind of noise, this hail of death, those fucking bullets ricocheting all over the fucking place—
ping ping ping
—could make a man lose his thoughts. Lord, for a moment there, he forgot why he was on this street, forgot his name.

But nothing could keep him from moving. He understood the way a baby knows how to cry to say it’s hungry that he needed to keep crawling, keep scrabbling, keep clawing his way across the pavement. He reached the last car before the alley. As he did, it buckled and sagged; the asshole with the tommy gun had blown out its tires on the passenger side.

The shooting stopped.

Possibility #1: Motherfucker was reloading. Possibility #2: Motherfucker knew Montooth’s general location and was drawing a bead on the mouth of the alley, waiting for old Montooth to stick his head out. Montooth drew one of his own guns—the long-nosed .44 his uncle Romeo had given him back in ’23. Truest gun he owned.

There was a third possibility: The gunner knew exactly where Montooth was hiding and was fixing to get out of the car right now and finish this.

That was the worst of the scenarios. If the gunner got out of that car, he could take three long strides and be standing over Montooth’s black ass. With a machine gun. End of fucking discussion. The echoes of the gunfire that had filled his ears subsided and he could hear the engine of the Plymouth idling and then the unmistakable snap of a fresh drum being slapped into the receiver of the Thompson.

Motherfucker had stopped to reload.

Well, Lord, Montooth thought as he looked up at the black sky and its low gray clouds, I guess hindsight
is
twenty-twenty, ain’t she?

Montooth pocketed his pistol, placed the heels of his hands to the sidewalk, and shot off the pavement like a runner from his blocks, went straight for the alley and had reached the mouth when he heard the two white boys shouting. He didn’t need to hear the words, though, because the gist became clear when the night opened up again with that jackhammer roar.

Montooth ran with the bullets chucking brick chips and dust into his face, ran like he hadn’t run since the trenches in France, ran like he was young again, like his lungs could never burn and his heart could never seize.
Where were you, boy
, he wanted to ask the gunner,
in the days when I was young? Live ten lifetimes, you’ll never have half the fine pussy as I’ve had, never know half as much joy, live half as much life. You ain’t nothing, hear? I’m Montooth Dix, ruler of Black Ybor, and you ain’t shit.