Cape Cod Noir

Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin


INTRODUCTION

SUMMER AND SMOKE



I first began to think of Cape Cod in noir-ish terms during the fall of 1979. I say that, of course, entirely in hindsight, since noir was not then part of my lexicon. I was eighteen, just out of high school, on a year off that would later take me to South Texas and San Francisco. My best friend and I were making this journey together, and before we left, I spent a week at his parents’ cottage in Wellfleet, where he was living alone, working as a cranberry picker, stockpiling money for the trip. Every day, he would go to work, and I would pretend to write a novel, staring out the windows at the gray October sky. At night, we would go to bars. The house was on a marshy point of land known as Lieutenant’s Island, which was only an island at high tide. Some nights, we’d come back to find the road flooded, as if it had never been at all. I was not new to the Cape—I’d spent summers there, or parts of summers, since 1971—but this was a more conditional experience, more elemental and more charged. The same was true of the bars we frequented: dark places, their air thick with cigarette smoke and a kind of survivor’s tenacity. Cape Cod in the off-season was a hunkered-down place, if not in hibernation exactly then in a strange, suspended state. In those days, before the Internet, when even cable TV was still scarce, there was nothing to do but drink.

Here, we see the inverse of the Cape Cod stereotype, with its sailboats and its presidents. Here, we see the flip side of the Kennedys, of all those preppies in docksiders eating steamers, of the whale watchers and bicycles and kites. Here, we see the Cape beneath the surface, the Cape after the summer people have gone home. It doesn’t make the other Cape any less real, but it does suggest a symbiosis, in which our sense of the place can’t help but become more complicated, less about vacation living than something more nuanced and profound.

This, it might be said, is also the case with noir, which is the dime-store genre that exposes our hearts of darkness, the literary equivalent of the blues. In noir, bad things happen to good people—or more accurately, possibilities narrow, until every option is compromised and no one ever wins. How one deals with that might seem a narrative question, but noir is less about the particulars of story than it is about point-ofview. As for the way such a point-of-view asserts itself, I think of it as stoic, stripped clean of illusion, like the faces I used to see in those off-season bars. In noir, we know that help is not coming, that the universe devolves to entropy, that everything goes from bad to worse. And yet, if this leaves us resigned or even hopeless, we have no choice but to deal with it as best we can. “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun,” Philip Marlowe observes in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, a novel that helped define the noir aesthetic, and seventy-one years later, that air of desolate clarity, of a character staring into the abyss as the abyss stares back, is still the form’s defining sensibility, a cry in the darkness of a world that is, at best, apathetic, and at worst, in violent disarray.

Cape Cod Noir is an attempt to pay tribute to that perspective even as it moves beyond the traditional landscape of noir. The idea is to stretch a little, to gather writing rich in local color, while remaining true to the ethos of the genre. Here, you’ll find a range of work, from the contemporary noir of Paul Tremblay and Dave Zeltserman to the more fanciful creations of Adam Mansbach and Jedediah Berry, whose stories go in unexpected directions, asking us to question our assumptions about the form. Dana Cameron’s “Ardent” takes us back to the eighteenth century, while Elyssa East and William Hastings portray a Cape Cod the tourist brochures don’t recognize, marked by hard luck, history, and loss. In some stories, noir operates mostly in the background, like a whisper in the air. But this, too, is as it should be, for if there is a principle at work, it is that noir has become, in its three-quarters of a century of evolution, both stylized and supple, less a way of writing than a way of seeing, less about crime or plot or killing (although there is plenty of that in these pages) than about how we live.

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that noir forces us to face things, that it cuts to the chase. It functions, to borrow a phrase from William S. Burroughs, as a kind of “NAKED Lunch—a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” We expect this when it comes to cities, where noir grew up during the Depression, or in the rural corners staked out by authors from Edward Anderson in the 1930s to Daniel Woodrell in the present day. Still, what my experiences on the Cape suggest is that noir is everywhere. You can see it in the desperate excitations of the summer people, the desire to make their vacations count. You can see it in the tension of the year-rounders, who rely on the seasonal trade for survival, even as they must tolerate having their communities overrun. You can see it in the history of the place; the Pilgrims landed first at Provincetown, after all. And after Labor Day, once the tourists have gone home, it is still a lot like it has always been: desolate, empty in the thin gray light, with little to do in the slow winter months. You drink, you brood, you wait for summer, when the cycle starts all over again.

When I was a kid, and first exploring my little corner of the Cape, I used to spend a lot of time alone. I would ride my bike or walk for hours, watching all the summertime activities, keeping myself a bit apart. Even then, I had the sense that there was more going on than I was seeing on the surface, that there were promises that had been left unkept. This, I’ve come to realize, is true everywhere, but it has a different feeling in a summer place. For me, Cape Cod is a repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration, which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when the summer trade began. There are lines here, lines that get crossed and lines that never get crossed, the kinds of lines that form the web of noir. Call it what you want—summer and smoke is how I think of it—but that’s the Cape Cod at the center of this book.

David L. Ulin

March 2011





PART I



OUT OF SEASON





TEN-YEAR PLAN

BY WILLIAM HASTINGS

Falmouth



There was a time, just after I was jailed, when all I did was work, deal with my p.o., and keep my nose clean. No more shit, nothing. Just work, cash that paycheck every two weeks, stuff the bills into a hollowed-out book beneath my bed, and count the days. What I was counting for I didn’t know, but looking back on it, I guess I was counting days for some type of clearing, like that moment just after a thunderstorm when the clouds part and a little light sneaks through. Except that when things finally did part and clear, I didn’t get much light, but I saw it all damned well. Nice and clear, the only way you can from inside it.

To see the inside, I had to go back into a kitchen. It was a gig my p.o. lined up. He was tight with a restaurant owner. A tiny man, with child’s hands and a wide forehead, he smiled when he gave me that bit of news. The job took me back home, right back to the Cape. All I had to do was learn a new system and try to keep everyone happy.

That first day I drove my old truck down Main Street, Falmouth, looking at what seven years had done to the place. A new library spread across the town green, its marble still white. The tight, weed-free circles of mulch around the trees looked fresh. The storefront windows shone, clean and filled with goods that seemed to smile at you. There were some new stores, mostly small boutiques that sold blue jeans costing more than I would take home in a single paycheck. I hung a left off Main, swung into the parking lot behind the strip of stores that housed DePuzzo’s Restaurant, and pulled up next to a dumpster. I watched a guy push a shopping cart full of used car parts through the lot.

The kitchen was what I expected. It was Brazilians in the back, and they spent the whole day speaking Portuguese to each other and telling me what to do by pointing or demonstrating. They watched me and I watched them. That’s all I was there to do: get the job done. I had to. The four Brazilians back there with me had been at this together for close to eight years and they had it down fast. That’s how it was: two Brazilians on the line, a sauce/sauté guy and a grill/oven guy. Then there was me and another Brazilian as prep cooks. During service we did salads and desserts. An older Brazilian woman worked the dishwasher, slinging those greasy pots and pans and plates, working the steam and spray gun just trying to stay ahead. I didn’t see the owner until evening.

He came in while we were winding down our prep and walked right up to me. He didn’t say hello or shake my hand. He looked at me and went to the space between the walk-in and the bakery racks where the large cutting boards were kept. He picked one out, laid it in front of me, and got a yellow onion. He slapped it down onto the board.

“You know how to dice an onion?” he said.

“Yeah,” I answered and reached for my knife.

“No you don’t,” he said. “You don’t know shit about cutting an onion.”

He took the knife out of my hand, split the onion in half from the root end, peeled the skin back, and did a large rough dice, fast, looking at me the whole time.

“That’s how to dice an onion for the pomodoro sauce,” he said. He put the knife down and walked to the front of the house.

I should have known better. It was his restaurant, his kitchen, his recipes, his system. I had to learn that, down to the finest detail. Even having done it before, I had forgotten to let it all go. Guess first impressions are best made through silence sometimes.

The owner came back in, watched me work, then asked me to step outside.

We went out the back door, into the parking lot where the summertime heat was cooking the dumpsters. There were so many flies I could hear them. I could also hear heavy traffic on the other side of the building running down Main Street. Cars driving slowly, checking out the walkers and the clean window displays. I swatted at a fly.

“You get paid every two weeks with a paycheck. I won’t take uniform expenses off the top, but you don’t tell them that.” He jerked his head back toward the kitchen door where the Brazilians were chopping and banging pots. “You call me Mr. DePuzzo,” he said. “I’ll call you whatever the f*ck I please.”

He turned and left me standing there, the Cape air just starting to cool with the onshore breeze. A gull picked at an old french fry next to a gutter. A woman came around the corner into the lot and parked in one of the spaces for the jewelry store. She was in a Mercedes with Connecticut plates. She stretched her tanned and sandaled legs and brought herself up into the fading sunlight. She looked at me in my apron and white T-shirt, turned, and walked quickly to the rear entrance of the store.

The Brazilians were working fast to leave some sit-down time before dinner service began. Like all cooks, they wanted that time outside before the shit started. I went back to my cutting board and began prepping the garnish parsley. The other prep cook was working behind me. Something slid up between my butt cheeks and I jumped. The Brazilians all laughed. I wheeled fast and clenched my fist and the other prep cook raised a thumb in an all’s good sign.

“You don’t know how to cut a f*cking uneeon,” he mocked in English and laughed.

“I tell you something,” one of the line cooks said. “You no say shit to DePuzzo, you follow us, you be okay.”

“So you motherf*ckers speak English?”

“Yeah, buceta, but the owner don’t know that,” the line cook said. He was wrapping blue electrical tape around the handle of a set of tongs, marking his pair. He came out from behind the line and stuck out his hand. “Gleason. That’s Rener on grill and Marcello with you.” We all shook hands.

“Vai toe man o cu,” I said in Portuguese. F*ck you. Like I said, I’d been on the line before.

These guys worked clean. They didn’t do lines to keep going or show up high. They’d take their shift drink out back when we were done for the night, but that was it. Hell, I was the only one who smoked butts back there. They just worked and called the waitstaff buceta to their faces. It was their only recourse.

The Cape Cod summers did that to them. Falmouth’s population was exploding, the stress and long hours boiling with it. Going through work shirts like they were disposable because they got filthy so fast. Jamaican community expanding for the season. The Cape Verdeans battling with the Jamaicans for jobs and with knives at house parties. Eastern Europeans in on work visas cranking out eighty-hour weeks. I once worked with two Bulgarians mowing on a golf course who did five a.m. to three p.m. at the course and then went to Stop & Shop from four until two a.m. to stock shelves. Every day for four months. Then they went home to Bulgaria and bought apartments, cars, and set up a computer business. That’s all they wanted, a little place of their own in the same building as their parents and enough to get them out of the cracks.

But the Brazilians. The Brazilians had originally come to the Cape because of the language. The Portuguese were already here. Now, the Brazilians worked like dogs, kept their heads down and saved, figuring they could work hard and long enough for ten years to move back home and retire.

“Man, in Brazil,” Marcello told me one day, “I had a bike and a girl and the beaches, man. Your beaches here don’t know. In Brazil there are guys who come up to you and sell you beer out of a cooler and the girls are walking. Man, here people just lay around and you can’t drink or dance. Here I just work and there are no girls, man.”

“Yeah, but you’re making money.”

“Money, yeah, man. But there are no girls. What do I say to American girl, man? I know English only for kitchen. What do I say when I want to go out with them? You want special salad? Man, you have it easy, you speak English.”

“Your English is fine.”

“Marcello’s right,” Gleason said. “You have it easy.”

“What are you talking about? You run the line. You make more money than me.”

Gleason just laughed and went back to making demi glace.

DePuzzo used to run the line, but then he got Gleason. Gleason was fresh to the Cape, called up by his brother who thought he could get him a job at the fish market where he worked. He showed up to the Cape, but it turned out there wasn’t any work at the market for him. Gleason beat doors for two weeks before DePuzzo took him on as a dishwasher. All the time he was spraying dishes and racking them, DePuzzo taught him the details of prep cooking. How to move fast, how to set up the line for the service so that they didn’t start calling for more ingredients until the end of the night. DePuzzo worked Gleason up a little at a time, knowing that he needed the money and wasn’t dealing drugs out of the back of the kitchen or snorting up his paycheck like the last two cooks. There’s a lot of coke on the Cape, bad during the summer, even worse during the winter. It’s cold and there’s no one. You lose a lot of line cooks that way. You lose a lot of college girls that way. I got lost that way.

Gleason worked his way up, and about the time he made prep cook, Rener and Marcello came aboard. They all knew each other back in Brazil. DePuzzo showed them the ropes, let Gleason teach them some, and kept his kitchen tight. He skimmed off their paychecks but they were working on other people’s Social Security numbers so they didn’t say anything. That’s how they do it. They come in on a visa and when the visa runs out and an employer asks for a Social Security number to keep INS and the IRS happy, they get one from another Brazilian who’s been in the country for a while.

Marcello kept on about that bike and that girl. But damn if he didn’t work refinishing furniture all day and then come into the kitchen, two hours before dinner service. He had the ten-year itch too.

“What about you, G?” I asked Gleason one afternoon. “You saving up to go back to Brazil?”

He didn’t answer. He just pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, flipped it open, looked at the screen, and quickly shut it. He turned away from me.

“Hey buceta,” Rener said. “You working like us. You saving to go back to Brazil?”

“Yeah boy,” I said. “You and me. We’re gonna dance in the f*cking streets when I get enough up. Car-knee-val!”

I bent at the waist, put my face halfway to the ground, and stretched my arms to my side like I was a swallow in flight. I pointed the index finger on my right hand toward the wall and stiffened my whole body. I shook the hell out of my leg and jabbed that finger like I was trying to poke through the air.

“This is my car-knee-val dance, boys. This is how I’m gonna do it when we go back to Brazil.”

They laughed.

“You crazy, man,” Rener said. “You get no girls you dance like that in Brazil.”

Gleason just shook his head.

By then, I could joke with them like that. Fifteen hours a day in a summer kitchen, no one to talk to but the guys working next to you, all of you dependent on each other, and you get close, tight, real quick. Some don’t, of course—they take ego in and rub everybody wrong. Those people never last, or they end up in serious shit with the other cooks. I once saw two Jamaicans take a white kid fresh out of Johnson & Wales into a restaurant basement, bend him over a flour sack, and paddle the shit out of him with a baker’s peel. They had been in that kitchen five years and this boy comes fresh out of cooking school, gets put on as prep cook, and starts talking shit about the “untrained Jamaicans,” slowing them down on purpose. Two days of that in the summer rush, and he got that baker’s peel so bad he wouldn’t sit for a week. Some nights while I was doing my bid, I’d hear crying on the tier and I’d swear it was that same college boy crying from the basement between the thwacks of a baker’s peel, like a wet hand slapping a stomach.

But after I got out, I was just another motherf*cker humping his shit for a p.o. and trying not to get violated right back. To hell with ego. You can’t get those seven years back. So I just rolled into DePuzzo’s and tried to laugh and keep those Brazilians laughing. In the heat and with DePuzzo, it was all we had.

DePuzzo came up on the Cape. I remember having some kids with that last name in some of my high school classes. On the Cape, everybody knows everybody. Or is related to them. He spent his summers working in the kitchens on Main Street, saving money for fifteen years until he could set up a place of his own. From day one, it’s been busy. Small joint, damned good food. And he takes care of the locals. Sends them a shot of homemade whiskey after their meal. Doesn’t even answer when the tourists or summer residents ask what it is. Summer residents aren’t local no matter how long they’ve lived here. You don’t shovel snow in the winter or deal with the ice storms, you aren’t local. Simple.

Way I began to see it in those first weeks in the kitchen, DePuzzo, at some point, had been a good guy. Stand-up. The kind you’d buy a two-buck beer for at the Elks on Wednesday and then ask after his kids. But then, after he got Gleason and those guys, he figured on something else and let it go.

I saw how far he’d come when he was set to pay my second paycheck. I’d never seen the first. He said some of it went back to him for training and the rest went to my p.o. for a finder’s fee. Guess I knew then how I got that job so damn quick. And what was I gonna say? He’d just pick up the phone, call my p.o., and they’d make some shit up and violate me right back. When you’re leaving prison, some guys will yell at you from the tiers, “Stay free.” I intended to do just that.

Second paycheck, I figured he was gonna skim me again. Instead, he put an envelope in my hand and walked out to the front of the house. I heard him calling for the two busgirls. Eastern Europeans. They didn’t speak to me too much. Sometimes that’s how it goes, front of the house keeps to their own unless they need something special or there’s a complaint. Anyway, I opened the envelope and it was all there. I still heard him calling for those two girls. I stuffed the envelope into my pocket and got back to work. I made a ricotta spread, then I remembered I had to go across the lot to a small garage where we have extra refrigerators for storage. I needed lemons. I headed out the back door and across the lot. When I opened the side door to the garage, there was DePuzzo, his back to me, ass to the wind, arms behind his back holding another envelope while one of the Eastern Europeans sucked him off. When he heard me open the door, he held her head with one hand, looked over his shoulder at me, and winked. Then he flicked his wrist so I could see the girl’s paycheck in his hand. It was pretty clear, the whole thing.

Back in the kitchen, side by side with Marcello cutting mushrooms, I told him about it.

“Every time,” he said, “or he doesn’t pay.”

The next day, he came in to pay the kitchen guys. He waited the extra day because he gives them cash and doesn’t want to take too much out of the bank at once.

He came in wearing jeans and a white Oxford open to his solar plexus. A thin gold chain snaked through his black chest hair. He had four stacks of bills rubber-banded in his hands. That next-day smell of booze came out of his skin in the kitchen heat. Ray-Bans on, he stood at the edge of the line next to the standing oven, slapping the stacks of bills against his palm.

The Brazilians knew exactly what to do. They all got in line in front of him, the dishwasher first. I watched from the corner, mashing potatoes. The dishwasher stepped forward and DePuzzo dropped her stack of bills on the floor. Without looking him in the eye, she bent and picked them up, and walked back to her stack of dishes. Rener stepped forward in her place and looked DePuzzo right in the eye. Guess being twenty-eight still meant something. DePuzzo twisted a sick smile and slapped the last three stacks against his open palm.

“Buceta,” he said, and dropped the stack on the floor. Rener flinched, looked down, then bent and picked it up.

Marcello bent and got his.

Gleason was last in line, and I could see the base of his neck getting red. His jaw muscles corded as he ground his teeth. His head was tilted, his eyes shaded by his greasy kitchen-use Red Sox cap. He opened his cell phone, peered at the screen, closed it, and stepped up. He didn’t look DePuzzo in the eye, but didn’t look at the floor either. He just stared at DePuzzo’s throat, head raised enough so the boss could see his face, his grit, but not his eyes beneath that cap.

“Stick your hand out,” DePuzzo said.

Gleason looked up.

“I said stick your hand out.”

Gleason raised his right hand slowly, and opened his palm. DePuzzo held the stack above the palm like he was going to drop it right there. He waited a second. Then he tossed the stack on the rubber mats and said, “Who the f*ck you kidding?” as he walked out.

Every day, the Brazilians and I listened to bootleg favela hiphop at top volume, or Jota Quest, or even Brazilian sertaneja music. I dug it. I was learning new tunes. Every day trying to crack a joke, trying to keep the dishwasher from yelling at us. She didn’t like us cursing and trying to make it light before DePuzzo showed up. They stopped saying buceta to the staff’s faces after they saw he knew what it meant. And every two weeks the Eastern Europeans went out back and the Brazilians picked their stacks off the floor. DePuzzo always handed me my money in front of the Brazilians. He figured it would turn them on me, or at least make things tough. He should have known better, he used to work the line.

One rainy Saturday, I was opening with Gleason, trying to rip through the prep work before the lunch rush. Rain means people don’t go to the beach. They go to restaurants for lunch to bitch about wasting their vacation time. I was cleaning a halibut. Gleason was staring at the screen on his phone again. He hadn’t put any music on yet. He was just standing and not paying much attention.

“That the ten-year plan?”

He glanced at me, the spell broken, all of him coming back from somewhere. He shut the phone and placed it on top of the industrial shelving above the buffet-style water heaters where the soups were kept warm.

“Ten-year plan,” he said. “Saving every day.”

“Going back to Brazil,” I said.

“Going back to Brazil, buddy.”

But there was something in him that reminded me of when we reach for something just beyond the fingertips. Like the first night in a cell, trying to shake the names out of your head because they’re over the wall and just thinking about them makes the time grow.

“What about you? What you saving for?” he asked.

“Same as you. Except it’s not in Brazil.”

“You want out of here?”

I looked at the floor and felt jail.

“Yeah, G, I do. But I’ve got three years before they’re off my back. Anyway, who’s gonna hire an ex-con?”

Gleason nodded. “What you do to go to jail? You never say to me, man.”

I looked away. “I was trying to save every day a little more quickly.”

He nodded.

We worked through the morning and beat the lunch rush. Marcello and Rener came in later and the four of us got through the prep hard and fast and then took a break out back. We sat in chairs beneath the awning over the back door listening to the rain. The waitresses and busgirls were busy up front folding napkins and talking. Gleason and I weren’t any closer since the morning, but we weren’t any farther away.

That was when I heard the car tires squeal. I—we—knew. And I think all our guts dropped.

DePuzzo came tearing into the lot in his BMW X5. His windows were closed for the rain, but Van Halen was blasting so loud I could hear David Lee Roth’s voice nice and clear. He gunned it across the lot, jammed on the brakes, and slid into a little turn to pull the car up in front of us. We weren’t quick enough to get inside.

He shoved his door open and lurched toward us. A blond girl with bug-eye sunglasses leaned back against the passenger seat. She turned the music down so she could hear.

“What are you lazy motherf*ckers doing?” he screamed. He got right up on us and stared. We got to our feet.

“Just taking a break before service,” I spoke up.

“Shut up,” DePuzzo said. He was drunk. Shit-stone drunk. His nostrils were red. A little of that Great Equalizer to straighten out the head.

“But …” I said, not knowing where it came from.

“I said shut it, or I bounce you back up to that butt-f*cking prison in Norfolk.”

Prison did it. I looked down when I should have looked up. I could look up in prison to stay alive, but on the outside?

“Motherf*cker,” DePuzzo said to Gleason, “I leave you the kitchen to run and this is how you do it? The f*ck.”

Gleason started to say something, then put his hand in his pocket around his cell phone. His jaw was set, his neck red.

“I said, the f*ck you think is going on here?”

The girl sat up in the passenger seat, smiling at the cokehead show.

DePuzzo was so angry we couldn’t move.

“I pay you motherf*ckers for what? I should can your asses now for this shit. Lazy spic motherf*ckers.”

Rener and Marcello stared around him, but Gleason looked right at him. He started to raise his hand, as if to pause the moment, but DePuzzo stepped closer, stopping it.

He was too fast. I didn’t even see his hands move. I just heard the hard thump of bone on flesh and saw Gleason go down, blood and saliva bubbling out of his mouth. He spit and I heard the rattle of a tooth hitting the pavement.

DePuzzo moved quickly. He crouched and slugged two rights to the side of Gleason’s head. The bone sound made me sick. His ring cut a gash above the temple. Gleason went sea green and puked. DePuzzo drove the tip of his loafer into Gleason’s ribs. They cracked, and then he stood and looked at the three of us.

“The f*ck you gonna do, jailbird? The f*ck you gonna do, you motherf*cking illegals? Get the f*ck 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 us to sit on. We sat and stared at each other and he reached out and slapped my shoulder. I told him in Spanish what I needed and he nodded.

After some huevos rancheros, I left the taqueria and made the call at the pay phone. Then I drove down Acushnet toward Whitman, past old houses split into two apartments. Past their chain-link fences, dying grass, and silent doors. All of it looking back at me.

Two hours later, my wallet empty, I headed back to the Cape, listening to the wind the whole way.

I kept the .45 Smith & Wesson in an oiled rag in my truck. Just couldn’t bring myself to give it to Gleason right away. He was still breathing hard because of the ribs, but the green color had left his face. The scab was close to a scar. I worked and watched and tried to laugh with them, but the gun weighed on me. Everything left me but that.

Gleason kept his head down. Instead of working hard to save some time before service at night, he began going out to the storage garage during prep time to make phone calls. He knew DePuzzo didn’t come around during the day, and he wanted to stay busy right through the afternoon into the night. He didn’t speak much to Marcello or Rener. Nothing was broken, it was just that those fists had taken something out of the air between them. That, or forged it solid.

Payday came and DePuzzo showed with my p.o. DePuzzo was in his finest jeans and a black Harley Davidson T-shirt. My p.o. looked like his khakis and Oxford shirt would swallow him. His thin arms constantly moved, like bisected worms fighting for life. They laughed while DePuzzo gave me shit. My p.o. gave the Brazilians shit, poking them in the back and telling them to work harder. He went up to Gleason and leaned in close to the side of his face and whistled approval at the scab. DePuzzo laughed. Then my p.o. watched the paycheck routine. I waited, then went out back and watched the two of them get blowjobs from the busgirls with their hands behind their backs, each holding a paycheck.

Dusk fell. The service began and time slid into speed, into work, into the heat and oil stink of a kitchen running at full bore. I stopped thinking, stopped feeling that weight, and kept my mind on salads, desserts, and calls for more lobsters from the line. The orders began to slow. Marcello and I stopped plating salads and desserts, and started repacking food into smaller containers.

A waitress came into the kitchen, a tall woman with graybrown hair who’d been with DePuzzo from the get-go.

“There’s an eclipse outside,” she said.

We froze at the news. It was something natural, unlike our aprons and secrets. We followed her outside.

The moon was three-quarters hidden by a perfect shadow. Its light played out from the edges, leaving a crescent of ice blue along the rim of black. Its silence came at us clearly and quickly and we took it in. The waitress stood by the kitchen door. Rener sat on a flowerpot, and Marcello and I sat against the hood of a parked car. Gleason stood next to us. We craned our necks and tilted our faces toward the growing shadow, staring into the black. I could hear Gleason’s slight wheeze. The shadow moved, not slow or fast, but it moved, you could sense it more than see it. Just as the shadow was about to take the moon, Gleason’s cell phone rang. He answered without looking at who was calling. I was standing close enough to hear the voice come through the phone’s speaker, thin and electric.

“Daddy, can you see the moon?”

The eclipse passed. I grabbed Gleason’s wrist and whispered to him to wait. Everyone returned to work. I went to my truck and pulled the .45 from beneath the front seat. I closed the door and tucked the gun behind my back into my waistband. Gleason watched. He walked over to his car, a beat-up Pontiac Grand Prix with a green hood and silver body handed down through the Brazilian pipeline. He got in. I climbed into the passenger seat. The locks clicked, and I pulled out the gun.

“It’s loaded,” I said. “It’s clean, meaning no one can trace it. When you’re done with it, dump it in a salt pond at night.”

I handed him the weapon and showed him how to work the safety. The chrome slide was definite against the night in the car. The black pistol grip disappeared in darkness. He took it from me with both hands, half-cradling it like a broken bird.

I spoke before he could. It was better that way.

“Take care of yourself, Gleason. Stay free.”

He didn’t smile, just stared at the gun. He looked at me and gave a short, sharp nod. I got out of the car and walked toward my own. Then I stopped and peered back in through the rear window. Gleason’s hands were spread out a little from his sides. He was looking at his kids on his cell phone in his left hand. The gun weighed down his right.

I drove right out of that parking lot without looking back. Had to get a step ahead. After that, I lived in New Bedford for a few weeks. I stayed in a small apartment Balthazar owned down the street from Taqueria la Raza. It had a stove and a bookcase. He took the little rent he charged out of my paycheck. I worked the line with him in the kitchen, and he kept my name off the books.

We kept our eyes to the papers, our ears to the radio, and Balthazar’s son checked the Internet at the library. We made calls from the pay phone. There was never any news. I couldn’t chance a run back up to the Cape, and it was only a matter of time before my p.o knew I had stopped showing for work. If he cared at all. On the outside, I’m a threat to him because he’s neck-deep in this shit too.

I couldn’t stay with Balthazar long. No news came from the Cape. The night before I left Taqueria la Raza, I remembered the words that echoed down the tiers at me. They made me think of what we looked like beneath that eclipse, totally clear in the black, the guts of it all shining silver like an animal with its belly slit.

I’ve got my savings. And illegals aren’t the only ones who can play tricks with Social Security numbers.

I’m on the run. Movement is freedom.

I hope he made it back to Brazil.