“Graciela,” he called, “it’s Joe. Are you okay?”
She peeked out from behind the tree and Joe nodded. Esteban came around behind her in the scout car and she climbed in it and they drove over to Joe.
He picked up the rifle and looked down at the sailor. He sat in the water with his arms draped over his knees and his head down, like a man trying to catch his breath.
Graciela climbed out of the scout. Actually, she half fell out, half reeled into Joe. He put his arm around her to right her and felt the adrenaline racking her body as if she’d been hit with a cattle prod.
Behind the sailor, something moved through the mangroves. Something long and so dark green it was almost black.
The sailor looked up at Joe, his mouth open as he drew shallow breaths. “You’re white.”
“Yeah,” Joe said.
“Fuck you shoot me for then?”
Joe looked at Esteban and then at Graciela. “If we leave him here, something’s gonna eat him within a couple minutes. So we either take him with us or…”
He could hear more of them out there as the sailor’s blood continued to spill into the green swamp.
Joe said, “So we either take him with us…”
Esteban said, “He’s gotten too good a look at her.”
“I know it,” Joe said.
Graciela said, “He turned it into a game.”
“What?”
“Hunting me. He kept laughing like a girl.”
Joe looked at the sailor and the kid looked back at him. The fear lived far back in the young man’s eyes, but the rest of him was pure defiance and backwoods grit.
“You want me to beg, you barking up the wrong—”
Joe shot him in the face and the exit hole splattered pink all over the ferns, and the alligators thrashed in anticipation.
Graciela let out a small involuntary cry and Joe might have as well. Esteban caught his eye and nodded, thanks, Joe realized, for doing what they all knew had to be done but which none had been willing to do. Hell, Joe—standing in the sound of the gunshot, the cordite smell of it, a wisp of smoke trailing from the barrel of the .32 no more substantial than the smoke from one of his cigarettes—couldn’t believe he’d actually done it.
A man lay dead at his feet. Dead, on some fundamental level, only because Joe had been born.
They climbed into the scout without another word. As if they’d been waiting for permission, two alligators came at the body at once—one walking out of the mangroves with the steady waddle of an overweight dog and the other gliding up through the water and the lily pads beside the scout’s tires.
Esteban drove away as both reptiles reached the body at the same time. One took an arm, the other went for a leg.
Back in the pines, Esteban drove southeast along the edge of the swamp, running parallel to the road, but not turning toward it yet.
Joe and Graciela sat in the backseat. Alligators and humans weren’t the only predators in the swamp that day: a panther stood at the edge of the waterline, lapping up the copper water. It was the same tan color as some of the trees, and Joe might have missed it altogether if it didn’t look up as they passed from twenty yards away. It was at least five feet long, wet limbs all grace and muscle. Its underbelly and throat were creamy white, and steam rose off its wet fur as it considered the car. Actually, it wasn’t considering the car, it was considering him. Joe met its liquid eyes, as ancient, yellow, and pitiless as the sun. For a moment, in his jagged exhaustion he thought he heard its voice in his head.
You can’t outrun this.
What’s this? he wanted to ask, but Esteban turned the wheel and they left the edge of the swamp and bounced violently over the roots of a fallen tree, and when Joe looked again the panther was gone. He scanned the trees to catch another glimpse but he never saw it again.
“You see that cat?”
Graciela stared at him.
“The panther,” he said, holding his arms wide.
Her eyes narrowed like she worried he might have sunstroke. She shook her head. She was a mess—more scratches on her body than skin it seemed. Her face was swollen from where he’d hit her, of course, and the mosquitoes and deerflies had feasted on her—and not just them but the fire ants as well, leaving behind their white welts with red rings all over her feet and calves. Her dress was torn at the shoulder and over her left hip and the hem was shredded. Her shoes were gone.
“You can put it away,” she said.
Joe followed her gaze, saw that he still held the gun in his right hand. He thumbed the safety on and placed it in the holster behind his back.
Esteban pulled out onto 41 and stomped the gas so hard the scout shuddered in place before streaking down the road. Joe looked out at the crushed-shell pavement racing away from them, at the merciless sun in the merciless sky.
“He would have killed me.” Her wet hair blew across her face and neck.
“I know.”
“He hunted me like a squirrel for his lunch. He kept saying, ‘Honey, honey, I will put one in your leg, honey, and then have at you.’ Does ‘have at you’ mean…?”
Joe nodded.
“And if you’d let him live,” she said, “I would have been arrested. And then you would have been arrested.”
He nodded. He considered the insect bites on her ankles and then raised his eyes up her calves, across her dress, and into her eyes. She held his gaze just long enough to slide hers off his face. She looked out at an orange grove as they raced past it. After a while, she looked back at him.
“Do you think I feel bad?” he asked.
“I can’t tell.”
“I don’t,” he said.
“You shouldn’t.”
“I don’t feel good.”
“You shouldn’t feel that, either.”
“But I don’t feel bad.”
That pretty much summed it up.
I’m not an outlaw anymore, he thought. I’m a gangster. And this is my gang.
In the back of the scout car with the sharp smell of citrus giving way, once again, to the stench of swamp gas, she held his gaze for a full mile, and neither of them said another word until they reached West Tampa.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
About Today
When they got back to Ybor, Esteban dropped Graciela and Joe at the building where Graciela kept a room above a café. Joe walked her up while Esteban and Sal Urso went to dump the scout car in South Tampa.
Graciela’s room was very small and very neat. The wrought iron bed was painted the same white as the porcelain washbasin under a matching oval mirror. Her clothes hung in a battered pine wardrobe that looked to predate the building, but she kept it clear of dust or mold, which Joe would have guessed impossible in this climate. The one window overlooked Eleventh Avenue, and she’d left the shade down to keep the room cool. She had a dressing screen made of the same raised-grain wood as the wardrobe, and she pointed Joe to face the window as she went behind it.