taken notice; there just wasn't any percentage in it.
The shorts that followed were forgettable, though the boys on the team all laughed a lot, their eyes as wide as the base pads he'd bought them, and it took Joe a moment to realize that they knew so little of the movies they'd thought the newsreels about Germany were the feature.
Then came the main event - an oater called Riders of the Eastern Ridge starring Tex Moran and Estelle Summers. The credits flashed quick across the black screen and Joe, who never went to movies in the first place, couldn't have cared less who was responsible for making it. He was, in fact, starting to look down to make sure his right shoe was tied when the name that popped on the screen snapped his eyes back up:
Screenplay
Aiden Coughlin
Joe looked over at Ciggy and the boys, but they were oblivious.
My brother, he wanted to tell someone. My brother.
On the bus ride back to Arcenas, he couldn't stop thinking about the movie. A Western, yes, with gunfights galore and a damsel in distress, and a stagecoach chase along a crumbling cliff road, but something else too, if you knew Danny. The character Tex Moran had played was an honest sheriff in what turned out to be a dirty town. A town where the most prominent citizens gathered one night to plot the death of a swarthy migrant farmer who, one claimed, had ogled his daughter. In the end, the movie retreated from its own radical premise - the good townspeople learned the error of their ways - but only after the swarthy migrant farmer had been killed by a group of outsiders in black hats. The message of the movie, then, as far as Joe could tell, was that the danger from without would wash clean the danger from within. Which, in Joe's experience - and in Danny's - was bullshit.
But, either way, it was a hell of a fun time at the theater. The boys had gone wild for it; the whole bus ride home they'd talked about buying six-guns and gun belts when they grew up.
Late that summer, his watch returned from Geneva by mail. It arrived in a lovely mahogany box with velvet inlay and gleamed from a polishing.
Joe was so overjoyed that it would be days before he could admit to himself that it still ran a bit slow.
In September, Graciela received a letter informing her that the Greater Ybor Board of Overseers had elected her Woman of the Year for her work with the less fortunate in the Latin Quarter. The Greater Ybor Board of Overseers was a loose collection of Cuban, Spanish, and Italian men and women who gathered once a month to discuss their shared interests. In the first year, the group had disbanded three times while most of the meetings had ended in fights that spilled out of the restaurant of choice and into the street. The fights were usually between the Spaniards and the Cubans, but every now and then the Italians threw a punch or two so they wouldn't feel left out. After enough of the bad blood had been given full measure, the members managed to find common ground in their shared exile from the rest of Tampa and grew into a fairly powerful interest group in a very short time. If Graciela would agree, the board wrote, they would be pleased to present her with her award at a gala to be held at the Don Ce-Sar Hotel on St. Petersburg Beach the first weekend in October.
"What do you think?" Graciela asked over breakfast.
Joe was groggy. He'd been having variations on the same nightmare lately. He was with his family and they were somewhere foreign, Africa he felt, but he couldn't say why exactly. Just that they were surrounded by tall grass and it was very hot. His father appeared at the limit of his vision, at the farthest edge of the fields. He said nothing. He just watched as the panthers emerged from the tall grass, sleek and yellow-eyed. They were the same shade of tan as the grass and, thus, impossible to see until it was too late. When Joe saw the first of them, he shouted to warn Graciela and Tomas, but his throat had already been removed by the cat that sat on his chest. He noticed how red his blood looked on its great white teeth and then he closed his eyes as the cat