she was right. He'd given her the key; from that point, it was hers to do with as she saw fit.
"And the dead girl? The one they kept finding pieces of?"
She turned off the hose and leaned against the stucco wall of her bordello. "Remember Albert talking about how he'd found himself a new girl?"
"Not really."
"Well, he did. She was in the car. Never got her name."
"You kill her too?"
She shook her head, then tapped her forehead. "Her head hit the back of the front seat during the crash. Don't know if she died then or later, but I didn't stick around to find out."
He stood on the street feeling like a fool. A fucking fool.
"Was there a moment when you loved me?" he asked.
She searched his face with growing exasperation. "Sure. Maybe a few moments. We had laughs, Joe. When you stopped mooning over me long enough to fuck me proper, it was really good. But you had to make it something it wasn't."
"Which was what?"
"I dunno - something flowery. Something you can't hold in your hand. We're not God's children, we're not fairy-tale people in a book about true love. We live by night and dance fast so the grass can't grow under our feet. That's our creed." She lit a cigarette and plucked a piece of tobacco off her tongue, gave it to the breeze. "You don't think I know who you are now? You don't think I've been wondering when you'd show up over here, among the natives? We're free. No brothers or sisters or fathers. No Albert Whites. Just us. You want to come by? You have an open invitation." She crossed the sidewalk to him. "We always had a lot of laughs. We could laugh now. Spend our lives in the tropics and count our money on satin sheets. Free as birds."
"Shit," Joe said, "I don't want to be free."
She cocked her head and seemed confused to the point of genuine sorrow. "But that's all we ever wanted."
"It's all you ever wanted," he said. "And, hey, now you have it. Good-bye, Emma."
She set her teeth hard and refused to say it in return, as if by not saying it she retained some power.
It was the kind of stubborn, spiteful pride you found in very old mules and very spoiled children.
"Good-bye," he said again and walked away without a look back, without a twinge of regret, with nothing left unsaid.
Back at the jeweler's he was told - delicately and with great care - that the watch would need to make the trip to Switzerland.
Joe signed the release form and the repair order. He took the jeweler's scrupulously detailed receipt. He placed it in his pocket and left the shop.
He stood on the old street in the Old City and, for a moment, couldn't think of where to go next.
Chapter Twenty-eight
How Late It Was
All the boys who worked the farm played baseball, but some were religious about it. As the harvest came upon them, Joe noticed that several had covered their fingertips with surgical tape.
He asked Ciggy, "Where'd they get the tape?"
"Oh, we got boxes of that, man," Ciggy said. "Back in Machado's days, they sent in a medical team with some newspaper writers. Show everyone how Machado loved his peasants. Soon as the newspaper writers leave, so do the doctors. They come, take all the equipment, but we hold on to a carton of that tape for the little ones."
"Why?"
"You ever cured tobacco, man?"
"No."
"Well, if I show you why, then will you stop asking dumb questions?"
"Probably not," Joe said.
The tobacco stalks were now taller than most men, their leaves longer than Joe's arm. He didn't allow Tomas to run in the tobacco patch any longer for fear he could lose him. The croppers - mostly older boys - arrived one morning and picked the leaves from the ripest stalks. The leaves were piled on wooden sleds and then the sleds were unhitched from the mules and hitched to tractors. The tractors were driven to the curing barn on the western edge of the plantation, a task left to the youngest boys. Joe stepped out on the porch of the main house one morning, and a boy no older than six puttered past him on a tractor, a sledful of leaves piled high behind him. The boy gave Joe a big smile and a wave and kept puttering along.
Outside the curing barn, the leaves were pulled from the sleds and placed on stringing benches under the