Above the roar of the motors and the high, slapping rush of the boat through the water he felt a strange, hollow singing in his heart. He always felt this way coming home at the end of a trip. I hope they can fix that arm, he thought. I got a lot of use for that arm.
ALBERT SPEAKING
We were all in there at Freddie’s place and this tall thin lawyer comes in and says, “Where’s Juan?”
“He ain’t back yet,” somebody said.
“I know he’s back and I’ve got to see him.”
“Sure, you tipped them off to him and you got him indicted and now you’re going to defend him,” Harry said. “Don’t you come around here asking where he is. You probably got him in your pocket.”
“Balls to you,” said the lawyer. “I’ve got a job for him.”
“Well, go look for him someplace else,” Harry said. “He ain’t here.”
“I’ve got a job for him, I tell you,” the lawyer said.
“You ain’t got a job for anybody. All you are is poison.”
Just then the old man with the long gray hair over the back of his collar who sells the rubber goods specialties comes in for a quarter of a pint and Freddy pours it out for him and he corks it up and scuttles back across the street with it.
“What happened to your arm?” the lawyer asked Harry. Harry has the sleeve pinned up to the shoulder.
“I didn’t like the look of it so I cut it off,” Harry told him.
“You and who else cut it off?”
“Me and a doctor cut it off,” Harry said. He had been drinking and he was getting a little along with it. “I held still and he cut it off. If they cut them off for being in other people’s pockets you wouldn’t have no hands nor no feet.”
“What happened to it that they had to cut it off?” the lawyer asked him.
“Take it easy,” Harry told him.
“No, I’m asking you. What happened to it and where were you?”
“Go bother somebody else,” Harry told him. “You know where I was and you know what happened. Keep your mouth shut and don’t bother me.”
“I want to talk to you,” the lawyer told him.
“Then talk to me.”
“No, in back.”
“I don’t want to talk to you. No good ever comes of you. You’re poison.”
“I’ve got something for you. Something good.”
“All right. I’ll listen to you once,” Harry told him.
“What’s it about? Juan?”
“No. Not about Juan.”
They went back behind the bend of the bar into where the booths are and they were gone quite a while. During the time they were gone Big Lucie’s daughter came in with that girl from their place that she’s always around with, and they sat at the bar and had a Coca-Cola.
“They tell me they ain’t going to let no girls out on the streets after six o’clock at night and no girls in any of the places,” Freddy says to Big Lucie’s daughter.
“That’s what they say.”
“It’s getting to be a hell of a town,” Freddy says. “Hell of a town is right. You just walk outside to get a sandwich and a Coca-Cola and they arrest you and fine you fifteen dollars.”
“That’s all they pick on now,” says Big Lucie’s daughter. “Any kind of sporting people. Anybody with any sort of a cheerful outlook.”
“If something don’t happen to this town pretty quick things are going to be bad.”
Just then Harry and the lawyer came back out and the lawyer said, “You’ll be out there then?”
“Why not bring them here?”
“No. They don’t want to come in. Out there.” “All right,” Harry said and stepped up to the bar and the lawyer went on out.
“What will you have, Al?” he asked me.
“Bacardi.”
“Give us two Bacardis, Freddy.” Then he turned to me and said, “What are you doing now, AI?”
“Working on the relief.”
“What doing?”
“Digging the sewer . Taking the old streetcar rails up.”
“What do you get?”
“Seven and a half.”
“A week?”
“What did you think?”
“How do you drink in here?”
“I wasn’t till you asked me,” I told him. He edged over a little towards me. “You want to make a trip?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“We’ll talk about that.”
“All right.”
“Come on out in the car,” he said. “So long, Freddy.” He breathed a little fast the way he did when he’s been drinking and I walked up along where the street had been tore up, where we’d been working all day, to the corner where his car was. “Get in,” he said.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m going to find out.”
We drove up Whitehead Street and he didn’t say anything and at the head of the street he turned to the left and we drove across the head of town to White Street and out on it to the beach. All the time Harry didn’t say anything and we turned onto the sand road and drove along it to the boulevard. Out on the boulevard he pulled the car over to the edge of the sidewalk and stopped.
“Some strangers want to charter my boat to make a trip,” he said.
“The customs got your boat tied up.”
“The strangers don’t know that.”
“What kind of a trip?”
“They say they want to carry somebody over that has to go to Cuba to do some business and can’t come in by the plane or boat. Bee-lips was telling me.”
“Do they do that?”
“Sure. All the time since the revolution. It sounds all right. Plenty of people’ go that way.”
“What about the boat.”