Coronado - Dennis Lehane [37]
NOW THAT YOU’VE been in prison, there’s documentation on you, but even they’d had to make it up, take your name on as much faith as you. You have no Social Security number or birth certificate, no passport. You’ve never held a job.
Gwen said to you once, “You don’t have anyone to tell you who you are, so you don’t need anyone to tell you. You just are who you are. You’re beautiful.”
And with Gwen, that was usually enough. You didn’t need to be defined—by your father, your mother, by a place of birth, a name on a credit card, a driver’s license, the upper-left corner of a check. As long as her definition of you was something she could live with, then you could too.
You find yourself standing in a Nebraska wheat field. You’re seventeen years old. You learned to drive five years ago. You were in school once, for two months when you were eight, but you read well and you can multiply three-digit numbers in your head faster than a calculator, and you’ve seen the country with the old man. You’ve learned people aren’t that smart. You’ve learned how to pull lottery ticket scams and asphalt paving scams and get free meals with a slight upturn of your brown eyes. You’ve learned that if you hold ten dollars in front of a stranger, he’ll pay twenty to get his hands on it if you play him right. You’ve learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks with lies.
You’re seventeen years old in that wheat field. The night breeze smells of woodsmoke and feels like dry fingers as it lifts your bangs off your forehead. You remember everything about that night because it is the night you met Gwen. You are two years away from prison and you feel like someone has finally given you permission to live.
THIS IS WHAT few people know about Stuckley, West Virginia—every now and then, someone finds a diamond. They were in a plane that went down in a storm in ’51, already blown well off course, flying a crate of Israeli stones down the eastern seaboard toward Miami. Plane went down in a coal mine, torched Shaft #3, took some swing-shift miners with it. The government showed up along with members of an international gem consortium, got the bodies out of there and went to work looking for the diamonds. Found most of them, or so they claimed, but for decades afterward there were rumors, given occasional credence by the sudden sight of a miner still grimed brown by the shafts, tooling around town in a Cadillac.
You’d been here peddling hurricane insurance in trailer parks when word got around that someone had found one as big as a casino chip. Miner by the name of George Brunda suddenly buying drinks, talking to his travel agent. You and Gwen shot pool with him one night, and you could see it in the bulges under his eyes, the way his laughter exploded—too high, too fast, gone chalky with fear.
He didn’t have much time, old George, and he knew it, but he had a mother in a rest home, and he was making the arrangements to get her transferred. George was a fleshy guy, triple-chinned, and dreams he’d probably forgotten he’d ever had were rediscovered and weighted in his face, jangling and pulling the flesh.
“Probably hasn’t been laid in twenty years,” Gwen said when George went to the bathroom. “It’s sad. Poor sad George. Never knew love.”
Her pool stick pressed against your chest as she kissed you and you could taste the tequila, the salt, and the lime on her tongue.
“Never knew love,” she whispered in your ear, an ache in the whisper.
“WHAT ABOUT THE fairground?” your father says as you leave the office of True-Line Efficiency Experts Corp. “Maybe you hid it there. You always had a fondness for that place.”
You feel a small hitch. In your leg, let’s say. Just a tiny clutching sensation in the back of your right calf, but you walk through it, and it goes away.
You say to your father as you reach the car. “You really drive her home this morning?”
“Who?”
“Mandy?”
“Who’s…?” Your father opens his door, looks at you over it. “Oh, the whore?