Live by Night Page 0,62
of oil. And every minute or so, the burner got turned up another notch.
The other men who'd exited the train had, like Joe, removed their suit jackets; some had removed their vests and ties and rolled up their sleeves. Some had donned their hats; others had removed them and waved them in front of their faces. The women travelers wore wide-brimmed velvet hats, felt cloches, or poke bonnets. Some poor souls had elected for even heavier material and ear treatments. They wore crepe dresses and silk scarves, but they didn't look very happy about it, their faces red, their carefully tended hair sprouting splits and curls, the chignons unraveling at the napes of a few necks.
You could tell the locals easily - the men wore skimmers, short-sleeved shirts, and gabardine trousers. Their shoes were two-toned like most men's these days but more brightly colored than those of the train passengers. If the women wore headgear, they wore straw gigolo hats. They wore very simple dresses, lots of white, like the one on the gal passing him now, absolutely nothing special about her white skirt and matching blouse and both a little threadbare. But, Jesus, Joe thought, the body under it - moving under the thin fabric like something outlawed that was hoping to slip out of town before the Puritans got word. Paradise, Joe thought, is dusky and lush and covers limbs that move like water.
The heat must have made him slower than usual because the woman caught him looking, something he'd never been nabbed for back home. But the woman - a mulatto or maybe even a Negress of some kind, he couldn't tell, but definitely dark, copper dark - gave him a damning flick of her eyes and kept walking. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the two years in prison, but Joe couldn't stop watching her move beneath the thin dress. Her hips rose and fell in the same languid motion as her ass, a music to it all as the bones and muscles in her back rose and fell in a concert of the body. Jesus, he thought, I have been in prison too long. Her dark wiry hair was tied into a chignon at the back of her head, but a single strand fell down her neck. She turned back to shoot him a glare. He looked down before it reached him, feeling like a nine-year-old who'd been caught pulling a girl's pigtails in the schoolyard. And then he wondered what he had to be ashamed of. She'd looked back, hadn't she?
When he looked up again, she was lost to the crowd down the other end of the platform. You have nothing to fear from me, he wanted to tell her. You'll never break my heart and I'll never break yours. I'm out of the heartbreak business.
Joe had spent the last two years accepting not only that Emma was dead but that, for him, there'd never be another love. Someday, he might marry, but it would be a sensible arrangement, certain to raise him up in his profession and give him heirs. He loved the idea of that word - heirs. (Working-class men had sons. Successful men had heirs.) In the meantime, he'd go to whores. Maybe the woman who'd shot him the dirty look was a whore playing the "chaste" tip. If she was, he'd definitely try her out - a beautiful mulatto whore fit for a criminal prince.
When the porter deposited Joe's bags in front of him, Joe tipped him with bills grown as damp as everything else. He'd been told someone would meet his train, but he'd never thought to ask how they'd pick him out of the crowd. He turned in a slow pivot, looking for a man who appeared sufficiently disreputable, but instead he saw the mulatto woman walking back down the platform toward him. Another strand of hair fell from along her temple and she brushed it back off her cheekbone with her free hand. Her other arm was wrapped in the arm of a Latin guy in a straw skimmer and tan silk trousers with long, sharp pleats and a white collarless shirt buttoned to the top. In this heat, the man's face was dry, as was his shirt, even at the top, where the button was cinched tight below his Adam's apple. He moved with the same gentle sway as the woman; it was in his calves and his ankles, even as the steps themselves