Free World Gone By: A Novel by Dennis Lehane

own father had been known to snap his fingers several times before he dredged up his son’s name. For the past three weeks, Wyatt Pettigrue had driven into Ybor City every day, crossed the white/colored border at Eleventh Avenue, and driven down streets where the only pale men the inhabitants had seen in five years were milkmen, icemen, firemen, policemen, and the occasional landlord.
    He’d tailed Montooth Dix from the series of apartments the big Negro occupied above a pool hall to the coffee shop on Tenth Street, the laundry on Eighth Avenue, the drugstore on Nebraska, the chicken joint on Meridian, and the tiny but tidy cemetery on Ninth Street. Except for the cemetery, where, Wyatt had learned, Montooth Dix’s father, mother, two aunts, and an uncle were buried, all the other establishments either paid Montooth for protection, collected bets on policy numbers for him, or fronted for his illegal distilleries, which were still big business for anyone who sold liquor to people who didn’t give a shit whether their booze came bearing a federal tax stamp ornot. Montooth Dix’s customers did not. Montooth Dix’s customers were the only people more invisible than Wyatt Pettigrue. In Ybor City, an already amputated community, the Afro-Cubans and Afro-Americans were further cut off by that extra shade of darkness that separated black skin from toffee.
    Montooth Dix was their mayor, their governor, their king. He exacted a tax for his services, but he provided those services. When they went on strike, he protected them from the goon squads, left food on their back stoops when they were sick, even wrote off a few debts when, during the last decade’s years of strife and starvation, the men took off and never came back. Most of his people loved him, even the ones who owed him money.
    Which, of late, was more people than had owed him in some time, at least since the Turnaround had begun in ’38. For the second time this month, several of the debtors on the weekly payment program had cried poor, so Montooth decided to personally see to the accounts. Kincaid, the fruit man on Ninth, gave it up as soon as Montooth walked through his door. Montooth, at six foot two and in the habit of wearing hats that made him appear three inches taller, cut an imposing figure, and Kincaid was the first of three debtors who miraculously found the money they owed and right quick.
    Which allowed Montooth, who’d been feeling tired lately—and not sick-tired, but sick-of-all-this-shit-tired, sick of what it took to keep a firm hand on a shifting pulse—to duck the responsibility of asking why the debtors had been so remiss in forking over the cash the previous two weeks. Montooth was exactly as old as the century, but he felt older lately. Growing older seemed only to teach you that new crops of people kept coming up behind you doing the same stupid shit the previous crop had done. Nobody learned nothing. Nobody evolved.
    Christ. Montooth missed the days when everything justhummed along, everyone happy to make their money, spend their money, and get up the next day and do it the fuck over again. Those days when Joe Coughlin had run everything, Montooth had long since realized, had been the golden age. Now, at least until this war stopped scooping up their best muscle and their best customers, they were in a holding pattern. Nothing wrong with holding patterns, at least not on the surface, but they did tend to make everyone antsy, braid them up tighter than barbed wire.
    It was only at the end of his night, when he dropped in on Pearl Eyes Milton, the haberdasher on Tenth Street, and Pearl Eyes told him he couldn’t pay him, “least not this week and probably not the next,” that Montooth asked the question he didn’t want to know the answer to.
    “Why you doing me like this, Pearl?”
    “Ain’t trying to do you any which way, Mr. Dix, you know that.”
    “I don’t.”
    “But I ain’t got it.”
    Montooth pulled a silk tie from the rack