The Wicked Redhead. Beatriz Williams
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some confusion. I take in a little more Scotch whiskey and watch Logan as he pulls out a cigarette and lights it with a match kept in this special jar with a lid. I guess sailors worry about such things. Anyway, he watches me watching him and offers me a cigarette, which I accept because a low-down wicked dame like me ought to take a cigarette when it’s stuck in her direction, oughtn’t she? The better to corrupt her menfolk with. And I pick up a little courage with the familiar smell of burning tobacco, so I say, “Why does that make any difference? Being French?”
“Why, because of taxes, Miss Kelly.”
Anson lays his arm across my shoulders and speaks in this low, gravelly voice. “In the first place, Saint Pierre’s import duties amount to maybe a tenth of what they charge in Nassau, which is pure profit for suppliers.”
“And the French don’t even pay that,” says Logan, “so they don’t send no more bottles by way of Nassau. Why should they? You could about bathe in champagne, on the island of Saint Pierre.”
Anson smiles. “And second, the Canadian distillers don’t have to pay duty on export bottles, so the government refunds the tax once the company provides proof it’s been imported into another country. That’s where the good men of Saint Pierre oblige. Unload the liquor, hand the captain a stack of stamped import certificates. Distiller gets his tax bond back from the Canadian government and sells the cargo to whatever racket’s waiting there in the harbor for some merchandise.”
“Or else ships it direct to the Row,” Logan says.
“Now every man, woman, child, and dog in Saint Pierre keeps busy from dawn to dusk in the liquor trade.”
“I bet they never had it so good.” I wave my cigarette to indicate the ship around us. “The liquor trade beats the fishing trade, any day. In price and in general atmosphere, if you know what I mean.”
Logan leans forward. “Listen to this, Miss Kelly. Listen good. I spent seventeen years fishing the coast around here, and I never cleared more than a thousand dollars in a single year. Just enough to get by. Keep my wife and my three kids. Now? I clear more than that in a month. Sometimes a week. I make so much dough, I got a wife and a girl down in Port Saint Lucie.” He roars his joy and slaps Anson’s knee. “Now that’s what I call prosperity!”
“I guess your wife’s over the moon,” I say.
“Aw, she don’t care. Why, she’s sitting in her nice new house right now, wearing a nice new dress.” He inspects the uninspired neck of my own serge frock. “You could use some more dough yourself, Marshall, now that you’re out of the enforcement business. You need to set this doll of yours up like she deserves.”
I suck on my cigarette and say I couldn’t agree more.
“You see, Marshall? A beauty like this, she likes a fellow with a little bread in his pocket. If she don’t get it from you, she’ll be looking elsewhere fast.”
Anson shrugs his big shoulders. Fingers draw a circle or two on my upper arm, through the thick material of the dress. “I might have a plan or two up my sleeve. You never know.”
“Well, you better not wait too long, brother. You better not. I hear there’s some talk of a new treaty. Move the line out another ten miles or more.”
“Is that so?”
“You mean the boundary for United States waters?” I ask.
“That’s what I mean.” Logan points out the nearby porthole. “You can just about see the shore from here, when the haze don’t set in too bad. From ten or twenty miles out, you might as well be in the middle of the ocean, for all you can catch glimpse of the United States. And some fellow carrying a few bottles from ship to shore, why, he’s got a lot of water to cover. Lot of salt water for the Coast Guard to catch him in.”
From the gathering tension in the muscles of Anson’s arm along my shoulders, I figure this piece of information interests him. But his fingers continue that delicious circling at exactly the same pace. His voice continues in the same gravelly drawl. He reaches out the other long arm and gathers up his glass of whiskey, and I guess I’m the only one who feels him wince. Those poor abused ribs of his. “Lot of water,” he agrees.
“Sitting ducks,” says Logan. “Sitting fucking ducks. Forgive my language, Miss Kelly, but it ain’t going to be pretty, if such a thing comes to pass.”
“Stinking Coast Guard,” I say.
“It ain’t the law I’m thinking of, Miss Kelly. The law plays fair, most days, and they got a job to do, I understand that, and if you want to break that law you might get arrested and your booze took away. But the pirates.” He shakes his head. Waves away the gathering smoke. “Pirates just as soon kill you. And when a fellow’s taking a few bottles from ship to shore, and he’s got ten or twenty miles of lonely ocean to cover, who do you think is going to find him? Coast Guard with a few little boats and a stingy Congress behind ’em, or a fellow with no conscience and a nice profit dangling in front of his nose? Why, already they’re getting greedier.” He turns to Anson. “That gang you was taking down the year before last, the Wilson boys. They was killed in ambush a few months ago, and what do you think happened? Do you think the trade went away? Got any softer?”
“I’ll guess it didn’t,” says Anson.
“No, it did not. Got worse. You can’t cough out here at night without some pirate hears you and flies on in with his machine guns. Sometimes mounted right there on his boat, like the Coast Guard itself. And he ain’t there to arrest you. Oh no. He ain’t worried about your constitutional rights. Why, we brought in a crate full of guns just last week, armed every man on board. Had no choice. Some ship got boarded a few miles south, and they killed everybody, everybody, dumped the crew over the rail, and left behind nothing but the captain’s head. Just his head, Marshall, just his head sitting there on the deck by the wheel. Now what kind of fellow does that?”
“Who was it? Which ship?”
“Aw, it was some new outfit, I never knew him. Maybe he was muscling in on somebody else’s neighborhood, I don’t know. But the whole thing shook us up. Put everybody on edge, up and down the Row. Sometimes you can hear the gunshots at night, and I don’t know whether it’s—”
Pop-pop-pop-a-pop-a-pop, comes a noise from outside, like somebody is making popcorn, like somebody is setting off some distant fireworks.
NOW I am already gone cold, already froze up and sick at the image of that dead captain’s head standing guard by his wheel, so what do I do at the sound of those fireworks but shriek. Shriek and startle and spill my whiskey all over the floor, the deck as they call it, while Anson lifts his arm away from my shoulder and puts his hand inside his jacket. Draws out a revolver. Logan jumps to his feet and swears. Heads right out the cabin door, and Anson turns to me.
“Stay here, for God’s sake!”
“You know I won’t.”
Anson is not a man who speaks profane, not the kind of man who takes the name of his Lord in vain, but he does now. Swears good and loud, better and louder than the captain himself, and hands me the revolver.
“You keep under cover at least, all right? You do as I tell you. And if you need to shoot, you just shoot. God knows you can fire a gun straighter than any man here.”
I stare down at the revolver in my palm, and then I look back up at Anson. Blazing, bruised face full of trust.
“Jesus God, how I love you,” I say.
He snatches my hand and commences to bolt straight out that door, pulling me behind, and I move my legs after him so fast as I can, because I will not be left behind to discover Anson’s blank face staring sightless, no sir. No more than I will be left behind to die in some dank cabin.