It wasn’t just the sun, which hung high and white in a sky swept so clear of clouds it was as if clouds had never existed (and maybe they didn’t down here; Joe had no idea), it was the jungle humidity, like he was wrapped inside a ball of steel wool someone had dropped into a pot of oil. And every minute or so, the burner got turned up another notch.
The other men who’d exited the train had, like Joe, removed their suit jackets; some had removed their vests and ties and rolled up their sleeves. Some had donned their hats; others had removed them and waved them in front of their faces. The women travelers wore wide-brimmed velvet hats, felt cloches, or poke bonnets. Some poor souls had elected for even heavier material and ear treatments. They wore crepe dresses and silk scarves, but they didn’t look very happy about it, their faces red, their carefully tended hair sprouting splits and curls, the chignons unraveling at the napes of a few necks.
You could tell the locals easily—the men wore skimmers, short-sleeved shirts, and gabardine trousers. Their shoes were two-toned like most men’s these days but more brightly colored than those of the train passengers. If the women wore headgear, they wore straw gigolo hats. They wore very simple dresses, lots of white, like the one on the gal passing him now, absolutely nothing special about her white skirt and matching blouse and both a little threadbare. But, Jesus, Joe thought, the body under it—moving under the thin fabric like something outlawed that was hoping to slip out of town before the Puritans got word. Paradise, Joe thought, is dusky and lush and covers limbs that move like water.
The heat must have made him slower than usual because the woman caught him looking, something he’d never been nabbed for back home. But the woman—a mulatto or maybe even a Negress of some kind, he couldn’t tell, but definitely dark, copper dark—gave him a damning flick of her eyes and kept walking. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the two years in prison, but Joe couldn’t stop watching her move beneath the thin dress. Her hips rose and fell in the same languid motion as her ass, a music to it all as the bones and muscles in her back rose and fell in a concert of the body. Jesus, he thought, I have been in prison too long. Her dark wiry hair was tied into a chignon at the back of her head, but a single strand fell down her neck. She turned back to shoot him a glare. He looked down before it reached him, feeling like a nine-year-old who’d been caught pulling a girl’s pigtails in the schoolyard. And then he wondered what he had to be ashamed of. She’d looked back, hadn’t she?
When he looked up again, she was lost to the crowd down the other end of the platform. You have nothing to fear from me, he wanted to tell her. You’ll never break my heart and I’ll never break yours. I’m out of the heartbreak business.
Joe had spent the last two years accepting not only that Emma was dead but that, for him, there’d never be another love. Someday, he might marry, but it would be a sensible arrangement, certain to raise him up in his profession and give him heirs. He loved the idea of that word—heirs. (Working-class men had sons. Successful men had heirs.) In the meantime, he’d go to whores. Maybe the woman who’d shot him the dirty look was a whore playing the “chaste” tip. If she was, he’d definitely try her out—a beautiful mulatto whore fit for a criminal prince.
When the porter deposited Joe’s bags in front of him, Joe tipped him with bills grown as damp as everything else. He’d been told someone would meet his train, but he’d never thought to ask how they’d pick him out of the crowd. He turned in a slow pivot, looking for a man who appeared sufficiently disreputable, but instead he saw the mulatto woman walking back down the platform toward him. Another strand of hair fell from along her temple and she brushed it back off her cheekbone with her free hand. Her other arm was wrapped in the arm of a Latin guy in a straw skimmer and tan silk trousers with long, sharp pleats and a white collarless shirt buttoned to the top. In this heat, the man’s face was dry, as was his shirt, even at the top, where the button was cinched tight below his Adam’s apple. He moved with the same gentle sway as the woman; it was in his calves and his ankles, even as the steps themselves were so sharp his feet snapped off the platform.
They passed Joe speaking Spanish, the words coming fast and light, and the woman gave Joe the quickest of glances, so quick he might have imagined it, though he doubted it. The man pointed at something down the platform and said something in his rapid Spanish, and they both chuckled, and then they were past him.
He was turning to take another look for whoever was picking him up, when someone did just that—lifted him off the hot platform like he weighed no more than a sack of laundry. He looked down at the two beefy arms wrapped around his midsection and smelled a familiar reek of raw onions and Arabian Sheik cologne.
He was dropped back onto the platform and spun around and he faced his old friend for the first time since that awful day in Pittsfield.
“Dion,” he said.
Dion had traded chubbiness for corpulence. He wore a champagne-colored four-button suit, chalk-striped. His lavender shirt had a high white contrasting collar over a bloodred tie with black stripes. His black and white speculator shoes were laced up above the ankles. If you asked an old man gone poor of sight to identify the gangster on the platform from a hundred yards away, he’d point his shaking finger at Dion.
“Joseph,” he said with a starchy formality. Then his round face collapsed around a wide smile and he lifted Joe off the ground again, this time from the front and hugged him so tight Joe feared for his spine.
“Sorry about your father,” he whispered.
“Sorry about your brother.”
“Thank you,” Dion said with a strange brightness. “All for canned ham.” He let Joe down and smiled. “I would have bought him his own pigs.”
They walked down the platform in the heat.
Dion took one of Joe’s suitcases from him. “When Lefty Downer found me in Montreal and told me the Pescatores wanted me to come work for them, I thought it was a right bamboozle, I don’t mind telling you. But then they said you were jailing with the old man and I thought, ‘If anyone could charm the devil himself, it’s my old partner.’ ” He slapped a thick arm against Joe’s shoulders. “It’s just swell to have you back.”
Joe said, “Good to be out in free air.”
“Was Charlestown…?”
Joe nodded. “Maybe worse than they say. But I figured out a way to make it livable.”
“Bet you did.”
The heat was even whiter in the parking lot. It bounced up off the crushed shell lot and off the cars, and Joe placed a hand above his eyebrows but it didn’t help much.
“Christ,” he said to Dion, “and you’re wearing a three-piece.”
“Here’s the secret,” Dion said as they reached a Marmon 34 and he dropped Joe’s suitcase to the crushed shell pavement. “Next time you’re in a department store, clip every shirt in your size. I wear four in a day.”
Joe looked at his lavender shirt. “You found four in that color?”
“Found eight.” He opened the back door of the car and put Joe’s luggage inside. “We’re only going a few blocks, but in this heat…”
Joe reached for the passenger door but Dion beat him to it. Joe looked at him. “You’re having me on.”
“I work for you now,” Dion said. “Boss Joe Coughlin.”
“Quit it.” Joe shook his head at the absurdity of it and climbed inside.