World Gone By Read online

  “HOP OFF THE TABLE, YOUNG MAN.”

  Joe did.

  “Walk.”

  “What?”

  “Walk. Heel to toe. From this wall to that one.”

  Joe did so.

  “And now back to me.”

  Joe crossed the room again.

  GRETA HADN’T LOVED NED BACK, though he hoped that would change once she saw how much he could better her life. Their courtship was brief; her father knew a man like Ned only came around once, if that, for white-trash girls who grew up in The Basin. Greta married Ned and soon grew comfortable enough in her surroundings to learn the difference between a dinner fork and a salad fork and occasionally beat the maid. Sometimes she could be pleasant to Ned for three or four whole days before the squalls of her dark disposition returned. It was those good days that kept Ned believing she would soon wake up and realize that what she mistrusted as a dream was real—she would never want for food or shelter or the love of a decent and prominent man, and her black moods would evaporate. Her pitiless view of humanity would be replaced with empathy.

  NED ADJUSTED HIS GLASSES and made a note on the form attached to his clipboard. “Relax.”

  Joe said, “Can I roll down my sleeves?”

  “Be my guest.” Another scratch of the pen. “And no earaches, no shortness of breath, no excessive nosebleeds?”

  “No, no, and no.”

  Dr. Lenox glanced at him for a moment. “You’ve lost some weight.”

  “Is that bad?”

  He shook his head. “You could have stood to lose a few pounds.”

  Joe grunted and lit a cigarette. He offered Dr. Lenox the pack. The doctor shook his head but produced a pack of his own and lit one.

  WHEN GRETA BECAME PREGNANT, Ned felt sure a positive metamorphosis was imminent. Instead the pregnancy made her even less agreeable. The only time she was happy—and it was a hopeless, bitter happiness—was when she was with her family, because the Farland family, as a whole, was happiest when they were hopeless and bitter as well. When they came to visit, heirlooms and flatware disappeared and Ned could tell they hated him for having everything they coveted but had gone so long without they now wouldn’t know what to do with it if they got it.

  NED EXHALED A STREAM OF SMOKE and returned the pack to his shirt pocket. “So tell me again.”

  “Don’t make me repeat it.”

  “You’ve been having visions.”

  Joe felt himself redden. He scowled. “Are they a brain tumor or not?”

  “You do not show any evidence of a brain tumor.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t have one.”

  “No, but it means the likelihood is awfully minute.”

  “How minute?”

  “About the same as being struck by lightning on a rubber plantation under a cloudless sky.”

  NED WASN’T SURPRISED—shocked maybe, but not surprised—the day he came home unexpectedly and found Greta in their bed, four months’ pregnant, with her father grinding his dick into her from behind, the two of them rutting like hogs on a bed that had been in the Lenox family for three generations. They didn’t even have the decency to stop when they saw his forlorn reflection in the dressing mirror he’d bought for her as an engagement gift.

  “SO LET’S TALK ABOUT SLEEP. You getting any?”

  “Not much.”

  He scribbled on the form again. “As the bags under your eyes would attest.”

  “Thanks. My hairline receding too?”

  Lenox looked over his glasses at him. “Yes, but that doesn’t have anything to do with our topic today.”

  “Which is?”

  “When’s the last time you saw this, uh, vision?”

  “Couple days ago.”

  “Where?”

  “My house.”

  “What was going on in your life at the time?”

  “Nothing. Well . . .”

  “What?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “You’re in my office for a reason. Tell me.”

  “There’s a rumor that an associate of mine may be angry with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “And is this associate someone you can reason with?”

  “Don’t know that, either. Don’t know who he is.”

  “And in your business,” Dr. Lenox said with a careful tone, “angry associates don’t always deal with conflict in a . . .” He searched for the words.

  “Genteel manner,” Joe said.

  Lenox nodded. “Exactly.”

  WHEN GRETA’S FATHER, Ezekiel “Easy” Farland, found Ned in the drawing room a few minutes later, he pulled a chair across from his son-in-law and chomped on a peach he’d grabbed off the dining room table.

  “I know you got lots of things you think you want to say,” he told Ned, “but they don’t mean anything to me or mine. We got our ways. And I expect you’ll learn to abide them.”

  “I won’t abide anything of the sort.” Ned’s voice shook and strained like a woman’s. “I won’t. I will cast your daughter out of this—”

  Easy put the tip of a knife to Ned’s scrotum and put his other hand around his throat. “You do anything but go along, I will fuck your ass until you taste me in your mouth. Call my boys in and have them do the same, one after another. You understand? You in my family now. You part of us. That’s the contract you made.”

  And to make his point, he made a clean slice in Ned’s groin just above his testicles and to the right of his penis.

  “You a doctor.” He wiped the blade on Ned’s shirt. “Fix yourself.”

  JOE THREADED A LINK through the holes in his right cuff. “So you think the vision could be connected to what?”

  “Stress.”

  “Fuck,” Joe said as his cuff link fell to the floor. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He bent to pick it up. “Really?”

  “Really do I think you’re under stress? Or really do I think stress is causing you to see things? Can I speak frankly?”

  Joe went back to fiddling with the cuff link. “Sure.”

  “Some unknown person or persons may wish you bodily harm, you’re raising a son by yourself after your wife died a violent death, you travel too much, smoke too much, I presume drink too much, and don’t sleep enough. I’m surprised you’re not seeing an army of ghosts.”

  FOR THE NEXT MONTH, Ned walked, ate, went to work but did it all without conscious thought. For thirty days, to the best of his recollection, his limbs acted from memory, not because he told them to. His food—wet ash on his tongue—reached his mouth not by act but by rote. He made house calls and kept hospital hours in a city struck asunder by the flu pandemic. Every family of respectable size had at least one member infected with it, and 50 percent of them died. And Ned tended to the sickest of them, saw some to full recovery and pronounced others officially dead. And remembered none of it. Each night, he returned home. Each morning he left it.

  During the checkup he gave his wife every morning, he noted that her blood pressure had skyrocketed. He decided to think no more on it for the rest of the day and went off to work. When he returned, Greta’s condition had worsened. He tested her urine and found clear evidence of kidney malfunction. He assured her she was fine. He listened to her heart and found it racing, listened to her lungs and heard the fluid sloshing within them. He held her hand and assured her that what she was feeling were the normal symptoms of a woman in the second trimester.

  “SO THIS IS STRESS?” Joe said.

  “This is stress.”

  “I don’t feel stressed.”

  The doctor let loose a long sigh through his nostrils.

  “Well,” Joe explained, “I mean, not much more so than usual. Definitely not compared to, I dunno, ten years ago.”

  “When you were a bootlegger during the Rum War.”

  “Alleged,” Joe repeated.

  “You didn’t have a child who depended on you then. Plus, you were ten years younger.”

  “Y
ounger men don’t fear death?”

  “Some do, but most don’t really believe it’ll happen to them.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “What can you tell me about this boy you’re conjuring up?”

  Joe hesitated, looking for even the slightest hint of amusement on Lenox’s face. But all he saw was avid curiosity. He would have been embarrassed to admit how good the prospect of talking about the boy suddenly felt. He finished his second cuff link and took a seat across from Lenox.

  “Most times,” he began, “his face looks like a used eraser, you know? He’s got a nose, a mouth, eyes, but I can’t really see them and I can’t tell you why I can’t. I just can’t. But once, I saw him in profile and he looked like family.”

  “Like family?” Lenox lit another cigarette. “Like your son?”

  Joe shook his head. “No, like my father or some cousins I met once. Like a picture I saw of my brother when he was little.”

  “Is that brother alive?”

  “Yeah. He’s in Hollywood, writes for the pictures.”

  “Could it be your father?”

  “I thought of that,” Joe said, “but it doesn’t feel right. My father was one of those guys came out the womb a full-grown man. Know the type?”

  Lenox said, “But that’s not what your mind is telling you.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  Lenox waved his cigarette at that. “You didn’t visit a psychic or some fortune-teller with your concerns. You came to me, a medical practitioner. You were worried about a tumor, but I’m telling you it’s stress. Whatever you’re conjuring up, it means something to you. Whether your father thought of himself as a boy or not, you may have seen fit to imagine a boyish version of him. Or maybe something happened with one of these cousins you mentioned, something in the long ago you can’t reconcile with.”

  “Or maybe,” Joe said, “it’s a real fucking ghost.”

  “In that case, take consolation—there’s a God.”

  Joe frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “If there is such a thing as ghosts, that means there’s an afterlife. Of some kind anyway. If there’s an afterlife, then it stands to reason there’s a supreme being. Ergo, ghosts are proof of God.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

  “I don’t. Hence, I don’t believe in God.”

  WHEN GRETA BEGAN TO SCREAM TOO LOUDLY, Ned gagged her. He tied her to the bed, tied her ankles as well. She was feverish by this point, delirious and babbling, and he wiped her forehead, whispered his hatred into her ears and rattled off every statistic he’d ever learned in med school about the incidence levels of retardation, mongolism, suicidal tendencies, and severe depression in children of incest.

  “The line must be broken,” he whispered while nibbling on the outer edge of her ear. He fondled her engorged breasts and slapped her face or pinched her throat to keep her awake while the eclampsia first took hold and then took root. And he was certain he’d never seen a more beautiful woman than this one who died three hours and eleven minutes into labor.

  Her child, product of a sin so unholy that it was the only sin outlawed by every civilization known on this earth, entered the world stillborn, its eyes scrunched tight against the horrors that would have awaited it.

  LENOX LEANED BACK ON HIS STOOL and straightened his trouser crease at the knee. “Here’s why I don’t believe in ghosts—it’s boring.”

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s boring,” Lenox said. “To be a ghost. I mean, what do you do with your time? You walk through places where you don’t belong at three in the morning, scare the hell out of the cat or, I dunno, the missus, and then you vanish into a wall. What’s that take—a minute tops? What’re you doing with the rest of your time? Because, as I said, if you believe in ghosts, then you believe in an afterlife. You have to. The two go together. No afterlife, no ghosts, we’re all just decayed meat for the worms. But if ghosts, then an afterlife, a spirit world. And whatever’s going on in the rest of the spirit world or heaven or limbo or wherever you are, I have to assume it’s at least slightly more interesting than hanging around your house all day, waiting for you to come home so it can stare at you and say nothing.”

  Joe chuckled. “When you put it that way . . .”

  Lenox scribbled on his prescription pad. “Take that to the pharmacist on Seventh.”

  Joe pocketed the prescription. “What is it?”

  “Chloral hydrate drops. Don’t exceed the dosage or you’ll sleep for a month. But it’ll help you at night.”

  “What about during the day?”

  “If you’re well rested, you won’t be seeing visions, day or night.” Lenox’s glasses slipped down his nose. “If the visions or the sleeplessness persist, call me and I’ll prescribe something stronger.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. “I will. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  After Joe left, Ned Lenox lit a cigarette and noticed, not for the first time, how yellow the nicotine had made the flesh between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. The nails too. He ignored the baby who sat shivering under the examining table. She’d sat there the whole of Joe Coughlin’s visit, rocking and shivering in place, even as her father had lied about the afterlife being too boring a place for a ghost to live. Unlike in life, however, her eyes were open, her face unscrunched. She looked a bit like her mother, around the jawline mostly, but the rest of her was all Lenox.

  Ned Lenox got down on the floor across from her because he had no idea how long she’d stay and he liked her company. In the first few years after he’d killed her and killed her mother, she had come to him nightly, crawling around the floor and the bed and even the walls a few times. For the first year, she made no noise, but by the second she was squawking, letting loose high-pitched and hungry cries. To avoid going home, Ned worked himself to the bone in his office, making house calls, and finally as the field medic to the Bartolo Family and their friends in the underworld. He enjoyed the latter the most. He had no romantic notions about men like Joe Coughlin and the life they lived—it was steeped in greed and penalty; the men who lived it died bloody or made sure others did. No overriding principle or moral code was at work except those that served self-interest while reinforcing the illusion of the opposite—that all was done for the greater good of the family.

  Still, Ned found an honesty in this world that he found lacking most other places. All the men he met in this world were prisoners to their sins, hostages to their own broken parts. You didn’t become a Joe Coughlin or a Dion Bartolo or an Enrico DiGiacomo because your soul was whole and your heart was untethered. You became part of this world because your sins and your sorrows had multiplied so prodigiously you weren’t fit for any other type of life.

  On the bloodiest day of the Tampa Rum War, March 15, 1933, twenty-five men died. Some had been shot, others hung, stabbed, or run over by automobiles. They’d been soldiers, yes, adult men who’d made their choices to live this life, but some had died screaming and others begging to live on behalf of their wives and their children. Twelve had been massacred on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico and then kicked overboard to be consumed by sharks. When Ned Lenox had heard of the feeding frenzy, he’d prayed all twelve of those men had actually been dead by the time their bodies hit the water. Joe Coughlin had ordered their deaths. The same reasonable, kind-eyed, impeccably tailored Joe Coughlin who’d come to this office complaining of visions.

  If the sins were big enough, Ned knew, the guilt didn’t recede. It grew stronger. It took other forms. Sometimes, when outrage begat outrage with enough frequency, it threatened the fabric of the universe, and the universe pushed back.

  Ned crossed his legs and watched his baby stare back at him, a gnarled and malignant almost-infant. When she opened her toothless mouth and spoke for the first time in twenty-four years, he wasn’t surprised. Nor was he surprised that her voice was her mother’s.r />
  “I’m in your lungs,” she told him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  This Time

  AFTER HE CLOCKED OUT OF HIS JOB as a dispatcher at Bay Palms Taxi Service, Billy Kovich stopped at the Tiny Tap on Morrison for a shot and a beer. The shot was always Old Thompson, the beer was always Schlitz, and Billy Kovich never had more than one of each. From the Tiny Tap, he drove over to Gorrie Elementary and picked up his son, Walter, after band practice. Walter played the tenor drum, not so well he’d get a scholarship but not so poorly his place in the band was ever in jeopardy. With his grades, he wouldn’t need a music scholarship anyway. Walter, twelve years old and nearsighted, was the biggest surprise in Billy Kovich’s life. His other two children, Ethel and Willie, were in high school when Penelope became pregnant with Walter. She was forty-two at the time and Billy and the doctors had worried about a woman so small and frail delivering a child at that age. Privately, one of the doctors warned Billy the baby would probably never come to term. But come to term he did, and the delivery went quite smoothly. If Walter had been born just two months later, however, they probably would have discovered the tumor on her ovary.

  She passed when Walter was barely a year old, just starting to walk, teetering from side to side like a drunken Indian at his mother’s wake, a quiet boy even then, not so much introspective as insular. Smart as a whip, though. He’d already skipped a grade—third—and his teacher this year, a young man named Artemis Gayle, freshly arrived from Vanderbilt, told Billy that he might want to think about sending the boy to Tampa Catholic next fall if he thought Walter was ready for it. Intellectually there was no question he was, Gayle promised, they only had to question whether he was emotionally capable of handling the transition.

  “Boy doesn’t show much emotion,” Billy said. “Never has.”