Free Under the Skin by James Carlos Blake

years older than Rose and
much bigger, but Rose lit into him like a bulldog and got him down
and beat the hell out of him while a crowd of kids cheered him on.
He banged the bully’s head on the deck till he was almost unconscious, then dug through his pockets and found the watch, then
started dragging him to the rail to shove him overboard, but a deckhand intervened.
Another thing the brothers learned from their daddy in the early
•• Louisiana days was how to make wine. When they moved to Galveston they made it in tubs in a shed behind their rented house. At first
they made it just for themselves and a few close friends, then they
started selling jugs of it to some of their regular barbershop customers. When Prohibition became the law, they produced the stuff in
greater quantity and sold it under the counter to anybody who
wanted it. Pretty soon they became partners with one of the two main
gangs fighting for control of the island’s bootleg business. Over the
next few years there were gunfights in the streets and killings in
broad daylight, but the Maceos were able to stay legally clear of the
worst of it. Once the top dogs of the two gangs were all in prison or
the graveyard, Sam and Rose brought the factions together and took
over the whole operation. By then they were also in the gambling
business, which swiftly became their most lucrative enterprise.
    Most of the Maceo stories you heard were about Rose, of course,
and no telling how many were true. That’s always how it is—the guy
nobody really knows is the guy who gets the most tales told about
him. Like the story about his first wife, who’d been murdered way
back when the Maceos were just starting in the bootleg business. I
heard it from LQ, who’d heard it from somebody else, who’d heard it
from who-knows-who. The way the story went, one evening Rose invited three friends home for dinner on the spur of the moment—although he’d never invited anybody to his house before—and when
the four of them got there, they found his wife in bed with another
man, both of them naked and both of them dead.
    “You could say they died of natural causes,” LQ said, “since it’s
pretty natural to die when somebody shoots you in the brainpan.”
According to the witnesses, Rose wept like a baby, but there was
a lot of secret curiosity about the true cause of his tears—whether he
was crying because his wife was dead or because she’d put the horns
on him. The police investigated but the killings were never solved.
“Way I heard it,” LQ said with a sly look, “the cops had no idea •• who mighta done it. About the only thing they knew for sure was
that it wasn’t suicide. The old boy who told me the story did say real
quiet-like that it was sorta like suicide, since a woman who’d cheat on
Rose Maceo might as well wear a big ‘Kill Me’ sign on her back.”
    Caruso finished wailing about the tragic clown. Rose dabbed at his
eyes with his napkin, then blew his nose.
“Fucken guinea,” he said. “Voice like an angel.”
The waiter came and topped off our coffee. A moment later the
window abruptly brightened with an explosion of light and sparkling
skyrocket trails arcing over the gulf. There was a muted staccato popping of firecrackers, an outburst of car horns. Somebody in the
kitchen began banging pots and shouted “Happy New Year!”
Rose raised his coffee cup and I clinked mine against it.

I
drove Rose back to the Club and parked the Lincoln
in the reserved spot by the back door of the building. The moon was down now, the stars larger and
brighter. Rose said he had to take care of a few things before he went home. He slapped me on the back and said
goodnight, then went into the Club.
    I walked up the alley and into the bright lights of 23rd
Street. The haze and smell of spent fireworks were still on
the air. The theaters had let out and the line of people waiting outside the Turf Grill was even longer than