“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, Al?”
“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.”
“We’ll have to steal the boat. You know they ain’t got her fixed so I can’t start her.”
“How you going to get her out of the sub-base?”
“I’ll get her out.”
“How’re we coming back?”
“I’ll have to figure that. If you don’t want to go, say so.”
“I’d just as soon go if there’s any money in it.”
“Listen,” he said. “You’re making seven dollars and a half a week. You got three kids in school that are hungry at noon. You got a family that their bellies hurt and I give you a chance to make a little money.”
“You ain’t said how much money. You got to have money for taking chances.”
“There ain’t much money in any kind of chances now, Al,” he said. “Look at me. I used to make thirty-five dollars a day right through the season taking people out fishing. Now I get shot and lose an arm, and my boat, running a lousy load of liquor that’s worth hardly as much as my boat. But let me tell you, my kids ain’t going to have their bellies hurt and I ain’t going to dig sewers for the government for less money than will feed them. I can’t dig now anyway. I don’t know who made the laws but I know there ain’t no law that you got to go hungry.”
“I went out on strike against those wages,” I told him.
“And you come back to work,” he said. “They said you were striking against charity. You always worked, didn’t you? You never asked anybody for charity.”
“There ain’t any work,” I said. “There ain’t any work at living wages anywhere.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “But my family is going to eat as long as anybody eats. What they’re trying to do is starve you Conchs out of here so they can burn down the shacks and put up apartments and make this a tourist town. That’s what I hear. I hear they’re buying up lots, and then after the poor people are starved out and gone somewhere else to starve some more they’re going to come in and make it into a beauty spot for tourists.”
“You talk like a radical,” I said.
“I ain’t no radical,” he said. “I’m sore. I been sore a long time.”
“Losing your arm don’t make you feel better.”
“The hell with my arm. You lose an arm you lose an arm. There’s worse things than lose an arm. You’ve got two arms and you’ve got two of something else. And a man’s still a man with one arm or with one of those. The hell with it,” he says. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Then after a minute he says, “I got those other two still.” Then he started the car and said, “Come on, we’ll go see these fellows.”
We rode along the boulevard with the breeze blowing and a few cars going past and the smell of dead sea grass on the cement where the waves had gone over the seawall at high tide, Harry driving with his left arm. I always liked him all right and I’d gone in a boat with him plenty of times in the old days, but he was changed now since he lost his arm and that fellow down visiting from Washington made an affidavit that he saw the boat unloading liquor that time, and the customs seized her.
When he was in a boat he always felt good and without his boat he felt plenty bad. I think he was glad of an excuse to steal her. He knew he couldn’t keep her but maybe he could make a piece of money with her while he had her. I needed money bad enough but I didn’t want to get in any trouble. I said to him, “You know I don’t want to get in any real trouble, Harry.”
“What worse trouble you going to get in than you’re in now?” he said. “What the hell worse trouble is there than starving?”
“I’m not starving,” I said. “What the hell you always talking about starving for?”
“Maybe you’re not, but your kids are.”
“Cut it out,” I said. “I’ll work with you but you can’t talk that way to me.”
“All right,” he said. “But be sure you want the job. I can get plenty of men in this town.”
“I want it,” I said. “I told you I want it.”
“Then cheer up.”
“You cheer up,” I said. “You’re the only one that’s talking like a radical.”
“Aw, cheer up,” he said. “None of you Conchs has any guts.”
“Since when ain’t you a Conch?”
“Since the first good meal I ever ate.” He was mean talking now, all right, and since he was a boy he never had no pity for nobody. But he never had no pity for himself either.
“All right,” I said to him.
“Take it easy,” he said. Ahead of us I could see the lights of this place.
“We’re going to meet them here,” Harry said. “Keep your mouth buttoned up.”
“The hell with you.”
“Aw, take it easy,” Harry said as we turned into the runway and drove around to the back of the place. He was a bully and he was bad spoken but I always liked him all right.
We stopped the car in back of this place and went into the kitchen where the man’s wife was cooking at a stove. “Hello, Freda,” Harry said to her. “Where’s Bee-lips?”
“He’s right in there, Harry. Hello, Albert.”
“Hello, Miss Richards,” I said. I knew her ever since she used to be in jungle town, but two or three of the hardest working married women in town used to be sporting women and this was a hard working woman, I tell you that. “Your folks all well?” she asked me.
“They’re all fine.”
We went on through the kitchen and into this back room. There was Bee-lips, the lawyer,
