ribs. They cracked, and then he stood and looked at the three of us.
“The fuck you gonna do, jailbird? The fuck you gonna do, you motherfucking illegals? Get the fuck back to work.”
Gleason puked again in the rain. He moaned. I bent to pick him up. Rener and Marcello stood frozen with fear. I heard the X5’s door slam, the girl laugh, and the tires squeal.
Gleason spent the night on the line, taking hard stares from the waitresses and puking into the trash can as he worked the sauté pans.
The next day we didn’t joke or laugh. No music. Just headdown work. Gleason’s face still held some of that green color, and he winced each time he turned or breathed too deeply. The morning and afternoon rolled on like that, silent, like the space his tooth left behind.
Gleason worked the whole shift, on the line again. The waitresses stared, and the three of us doubled our efforts to take some of the strain off him. We got through. I washed the line down with Marcello, and we took our shift drinks out back. DePuzzo hadn’t shown at all.
Gleason was sitting with Rener in the parking lot next to the storage garage on chairs they’d dragged from the restaurant. I walked over. They stopped talking and peered at me. Rener said something to Marcello in Portuguese, and he turned around before he caught up to us. Then Rener stood up, stuck his hand on my shoulder, and walked toward the kitchen. Gleason nodded at the chair Rener left behind. I sat.
I had my shift drink in silence. Gleason watched. When his hands moved, I flinched. He drew his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped it open.
The screen showed two tanned young kids with dark hair and black eyes, a boy and a girl, smiling in a posed photo, the beach all around them.
“Ten-year plan,” Gleason said. “They’re mine. Twins. We talk every day. They’re eight.”
I nodded like I understood. But I didn’t have kids. I hadn’t left home to work for them while they were still in the womb. I didn’t know shit.
“My girl’s in Brazil with them. I’m going back to Brazil and stop working. Own a car repair shop so my father has a job. Enjoy my kids.”
I looked at him. There was a dark, thick scab above his temple. Half-brown scars crisscrossed his forearms. I had the same scars. Ovens. Grease burns pockmarked the backs of his hands. His rubber kitchen clogs were covered in grease and food bits. The shadows under his eyes were deeper than the Cape night. Eight years.
He closed the phone and stuck it back into his pocket. I finished my drink. His eyes changed. He looked into me.
“Can you get me a gun?” he asked.
* * *
I remember I didn’t sleep. I remember rain on and off for a week. Parked at the beach, I watched the storms roll in and the breakers snap in the wind. Because of my parole, I couldn’t drink a beer in the cab of my truck to help put it out of my head. Shit. Stay free. But he was asking me to go back in again. Not to jail, but to what went before it.
Gleason didn’t say anything at work. Marcello and Rener acted like it was all the same toward me, and I was okay with that. DePuzzo showed here and there. Never sober. Still played his paycheck games. And when I couldn’t sleep, I heard Gleason’s tooth hitting the pavement in the rain.
Stay free.
Two paychecks later and still I had done nothing.
Then it came on me like I was sucked out into those breakers, the air dying.
I rolled out of bed before dawn, slipped on jeans, a T-shirt, a gray hoodie, and reached below my bed for the hollowed-out book. I took what I needed, closed the book, and stuck it back. My savings.
I got into the truck and drove off the Cape to New Bedford, listening to Jimmie Rodgers the whole way.
The pay phone was still outside Taqueria la Raza on Acushnet. Probably still had that girl’s number etched into the plastic handle. I went around back and knocked on the kitchen door. Balthazar opened it, sleep long out of his eyes. His old half-toothless grin lit up when he saw me. The Mexican flag tattooed on his forearm was still the same dull blue. We went into the kitchen and he made two stacks out of cases of beer for