Bobby had always wanted to decorate the lot with colored lightbulbs and all the plastic propellers and windmills and streamers that he thought added so much excitement to the atmosphere of a used-car operation, but the trouble was that the minute a dealer went beyond plain white bulbs on the overhead wires the city said he was getting out of the realm of safety and into the realm of display, for which he had to get a special permit, and Bobby had never been able to persuade himself over the years that the razzle-dazzle would bring in enough business to justify all the extra expense — and now of course the whole idea was out of the question when he had to cut every corner just to keep his head above water. Still, sometimes be liked to think of how sharp the lot would look with the colored lights and the red and green and yellow propellers and windmills and streamers all spinning and fluttering.
He went over to Oscar.
“Hombre, I have to tell you something,” he said. “I wasn’t going to tell you but now I think I better. I was talking to a guy today. He says you’re in a lot of trouble with some people he knows because of the things you’ve been saying about the FCU and Ramón Pache.”
Oscar looked around. “What kind of a guy?” he said. “A Cuban?”
“No, a gringo,” Bobby said. “He said they’re getting ready to shut you up, permanently.”
Oscar started wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, and he started sweating even in the cold wind. “Who’s the guy?” he said.
“Mike Duran,” Bobby said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
Oscar shook his head.
“I sold him a car once,” Bobby said. “That’s all I know about him. But I have a feeling he knows what he’s talking about.”
Oscar looked at the face on the billboard across the road. “They know how to get you,” he said bitterly. He turned and started to walk away very quickly with his head down and then stopped abruptly and stood making futile gestures as if he had run into a cobweb.
“I want to close up,” Bobby said across the distance between them.
Oscar looked back. “Close up?”
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Right now.”
“Bobby, don’t do that to me,” Oscar said, returning, looking desperate. “See, I have to be here tonight. I’ve got a guy coming on the Dodge. He was here last night and said he would definitely come back tonight. Then I’ve got another guy coming tonight on the Galaxie, definitely. So I could write two deals tonight. And then I know a guy who likes the Rambler—”
“I want to close up,” Bobby said. “If they want these cars bad enough they’ll come back.”
“You’re afraid they’re going to bomb this place, aren’t you?” Oscar said, his voice quivering, spitting a little over his words. “Same at Dixie. That’s what I mean when I say they know how to get you. See, I got fired at Dixie Ford today.”
“Shit,” Bobby said.
“They gave me two weeks’ pay and told me not to come back. They said it was the economy, but I think they heard the same thing you did today. Now they’re afraid of getting bombed, just like you. When I went home and told Maria she got sick. She told me you called her, what you said — and then all of a sudden, Bobby, I see the truth. The truth is I can’t hurt Ramón Pache even a little bit no matter what I do, but he can hurt me plenty. I can’t got nobody to march with me down 8th Street — they won’t even listen to me when I try to tell them the truth about Pache and the FCU. And I know I can never get close enough to him to shoot him. But he can bomb Dixie Ford and bomb you and kill me and my wife and kids or do anything else he feels like doing. So you know what I do today? I make a very big decision — maybe the biggest decision of my whole life. This is what I decided, and this I promise my wife and now I promise you too — that I will never talk against Ramón Pache no more, never talk against the FCU no more. All of that I throw out of my mind, because what good does it do anyway? From now on, if you will allow me, I will just work hard and try to sell a lot of cars.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, “but what if it’s too late?”
Oscar frowned and then moved away and leaned against the fender of a car with his arms folded tightly across his chest and his head lowered.
“Want a drink?” Bobby asked.
“Okay,” Oscar said.
Bobby made them each a rum and Coke and they stood in front of the office door with their drinks, watching the cars going by on 8th Street. Three Cuban kids were having a game of tag between the cars at the far end of the lot, and somewhere off in the distance a radio was playing “Cuando salí de Cuba.”
“How do you know Pache killed your friends?” Bobby asked.
“The Death Squad has killed twenty-eight people in the past three and a half months. They were all known enemies of Ramón Pache, like Juan and Ricardo Azuela. So?”
A car drove onto the lot.
“That’s the guy on the Dodge,” Oscar said.
Bobby nodded. “Go get him.”
“And then?”
“Yeah, you can stay open tonight if you want to,” Bobby said.
“Muchísimas gracias,” Oscar said.
“Are you afraid?”
Oscar hesitated. “Yes, I’m afraid,” he said. “But I’m going to pray to God that I can get through tonight okay. And if I get through tonight I’m going to pray to God that they’ll see I ain’t talking against them no more and that maybe after a while they’ll just forget about me.”
“Call me if anything happens,” Bobby said. “And stay in the office as much as you can. Watch TV, keep warm, okay?”
Bobby climbed into a 1967 Lincoln Continental convertible from his back line that had no paint, no seat covers, no muffler, no hubcaps, no top and no valid inspection sticker and drove it across the sidewalk and off the curb and headed east down 8th Street, in the wild Cuban traffic, between the sidewalks crowded with Cubans, past all the brightly lighted Cuban shops and restaurants. Everywhere there were signs and posters and spray-painted graffiti saying VIVA EL FCU! and EL FCU ES LA RESPUESTA! and PACHE! PACHE! PACHE!
Then he was out of Little Havana, climbing the ramp to I-95, then gliding swiftly on the expressway past downtown Miami. The streets below the expressway, shimmering in the pink glow of the sodium vapor lights, were deserted. The people in the cars on the expressway looked down on an empty city flooded with pink light. The narrow river that wound through the city didn’t look like a river from up there but a crack in the earth, into which, perhaps, all the people who were not down there on the streets had fallen. The wide bay in the distance, that separated Miami from Miami Beach, didn’t look like a bay from up there either but a dark plain stretching away to the east.
Bobby took the first Miami Beach exit off I-95 and the ramp came down on the MacArthur Causeway. Then the skyline of Miami was behind him and he was racing along beside the main ship channel of the port of Miami, the cruise ships in a row across the channel at Dodge Island, flags whipping in the wind, searchlighted funnels, people strolling on the decks, colored lights and calypso bands playing on the stern, each ship a bright city of lights in itself. Out in the channel small fishing boats were plunging against the current in the darkness, their masthead lights bobbing resolutely toward the sea buoy miles away. The cars on the causeway hurtled dangerously close to the channel on the big curve where the seaplanes in the Bahama Islands service nested like shore birds by the water’s edge.