and now I’d made good, she was sure of it—Christ, that woman knew what she wanted. Didn’t reckon I could do better. She was gonna make me feel like a king again. No, not a king—just a man. I married her a month later, twins was born lickety-split, but the delivery was too much for her. I had a whole future in frontta me, Alice, straight as a goddamn arrow, five, six decades together. Buying a house in Jersey, hollering at grandkids. The two of us feeding ’em too many penny candies. It was gone in a year, and most of that year I was on a Pullman car. When I look at them kids, Rosie’s so real it . . . it crushes me. When I’m here, or on the rails, she might as well have been a dream.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, circling his wrist.
He nods. “Saw a lotta fellas die for no reason in No Man’s Land. But Rosie died on accountta wanting a family. And there ain’t nothing crueler.”
“Do the others know?”
“Nah. Apart from Blossom. I don’t get no comfort outta being pitied, and Blossom . . . With her, it’s different.”
“I understand.” Pausing, I venture, “Did you love her?”
He shakes his head, eyes shutting. “Wasn’t around enough. But I coulda. Another year, maybe two. And that’s worse. What a crying waste.”
Max sets his cigarette down. He tugs his drawers on and I memorize the lines of his stomach, the V-shaped dusting of hair.
“Coffee,” he says. “You wanna cup?”
“With a kick?”
“Like a mule. I got no other way to serve coffee, Alice James.”
“You are a gourmet, sir.”
“Back in two shakes.”
“I’ll keep the bed warm for you.”
Lovely, Alice. Light a torch in it for him and set the cabin on fire, why don’t you?
Max putters around the kitchen, and the purr of the water boiling tickles my ears. It isn’t as if I was going to get to keep him. Max lives in-between, in the empty spaces, in the hours spent getting somewhere else. And he’d have to have positively shucked his last oyster to carry on an affair with me in Portland of all places, I don’t admire to see him dangling. But I know what Max meant by crushing.
Loneliness is a weight, not an empty space, and it’s pressing on my chest so I can hardly breathe.
“What in the name of fuck?” I hear.
Throwing Max’s shirt over my shoulders, I pad barefoot into the other side of the cabin. It’s a tiny place, just a living area with a sofa and a low trunk for a table, an armchair adjacent, a braided rug, and a galley kitchen. Max stands with his hands splayed on his hips, breathing awfully hard for a gent fixing liquid breakfast. He stares at a tatty Indian blanket draped over one arm of the couch, spilling onto the overstuffed chair.
“Last night we never done bothered over lights.” I’ve never seen Max this upset, and I’ve lamped him as he took in a roasting cross.
“Whatever’s the matter?”
He stabs a finger at the worn coverlet. “This here blanket and pillow, this is a shit show. Davy Lee always arranges it like this when I brings him up to camp. Pretends as it’s a cave. Half the time the kid’s a dragon, half the time a bear or a troll, I dunno, there’s crazy worlds in that sweet little tyke’s head.”
“Oh, Max. It must be ever so upsetting to see it, what with him missing.”
“No, it ain’t.” A muscle leaps in Max’s jaw. “’Cause I always puts it back, like. I did last time. And I ain’t been here since.”
He meets my eyes with a haunted expression. “Which means that Davy Lee has.”
◆ Twenty-One ◆
THEN
The mafia is not a band, nor anything of that sort. It is the resistance which the whole Sicilian people opposes to all kinds of government and authority. It is, how shall I say? A sentiment, a feeling, a sort of wild love of our country, that is a secret, and will do anything. With us, everybody knows what it is, and evil comes to everyone who opposes it—generally death.
—FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD, Corleone: A Tale of Sicily, 1896
I stood on the West Harlem waterfront in 1921 wearing steel-toed boots, denim trousers, and a corded sweater that made my neck itch even more than the anxious sweat I’d sprouted. A little artful shading and tucking my hair up in a woolen cap completed the image of your average tidal rat. This