One Big Joke

by Laurence Shames

  It wasn’t until that moment that she fully realized how squeezed most of her life had been. Squeezed into small rooms under low ceilings back in Queens. Squeezed between glass counters under phony lighting at her job. Squeezed until recently into a stifling and airless relationship with a crazily jealous boyfriend. Well, she promised herself, she was just about through with feeling squeezed. True, for the moment she felt squeezed pretty tight by a paranoiac lover who needed a lot of coaxing and a disguise just to step outside the confines of their hotel room. But that wasn’t the real Ricky; at least she hoped it wasn’t. That was Ricky in crisis, understandably relentless in his self-involvement. Once the crisis had passed, the real Ricky would emerge…right? He’d be free of this fretful self-concern, ready to be a wonderful companion for travels and adventures and lots of laughs under lots of boundless skies. The prospect of those open skies overwhelmed her whispering doubts about the man she’d fallen in love with and made her so happy that she stood up on her pedals and barely felt the effort of making the wide tires spin.

  

  The four-cheese calzone at Vinny’s of Varick Street had a center like a volcano, and Fat Lou knew it was unwise to bite into it at the same moment he was dialing up a phone call. But he couldn’t help himself. He was hungry and the vapors curling up from the calzone—garlic, oregano, fruity olive oil—were just too tempting.

  So he took a chomp and burned his face four different ways. A whiplash of mozzarella unfurled and branded him on the chin. A clump of molten ricotta lodged in a tender spot between his lower lip and gums. The blue part of the gorgonzola sizzled down to fiery granules that seared his tongue. And the parmesan stuck to the roof of his mouth as though welded on with an arc lamp. “Fuck!” he said, just as Bert was picking up the landline in his kitchen.

  “That’s a fine way to start a conversation.”

  “Hol’ on a minute. I just burned my mouth. I think it’s gonna blister.”

  Bert waited. While he waited, he grabbed a dog treat from a cabinet and held it up in the air. The chihuahua jumped about three feet high and did a full three-sixty while grabbing it out of his fingers.

  When Fat Lou came back on the line he seemed to be sucking an ice cube. It clattered against his molars. “I just had a call from Ted Clifton,” he said.

  “Lucky you.”

  “He’s not real happy you’re involved.”

  “Then my efforts haven’t been in vain.”

  “Says you got a conflict of interest.”

  “He’s right. I do.”

  “Says you’re gumming up the works.”

  “Right again. I am.”

  “Wants me to take you off the job.”

  “Fine by me. Just say the word.”

  There was a pause. Fat Lou looked down at the steaming calzone with the big bite missing. He knew in his heart that it was still too hot to eat but he simply couldn’t resist. The burn was only half as bad this time. When he was able to speak again, he said, “Bert, I don’t see how we’re gonna get anywhere if you just keep agreeing wit’ everything I say.”

  “Sorry, but I ain’t heard nothin’ I disagree with yet.” He winked at the dog. The dog ran around in little circles, paws ticking and skidding against the old linoleum. “But lemme ask you one now. This club owner whose lease you want. Clifton ever tell ya it’s a woman?”

  “A woman? No, he never mentioned that.”

  “And there you have it. Clifton in a nutshell. Allergic to the simple truth. Always holdin’ somethin’ back. Well, it so happens that your Galahads don’t feel so great about roughin’ up a woman.”

  “So don’t rough her up. Don’t even touch her. Leave ‘er out of it altogether. Just torch her fuckin’ place and have it over with.”

  “Fine. Great,” said Bert. “’Cept it wouldn’t be over with. It’s city property, Lou. Ya don’t think there’d be a long investigation? Could take years. City could end up condemning and then it’d be no use to anybody. Plus what if our bozo cops actually solve a case for once? Who’s left holdin’ the gas can? Can you afford to send these guys on a long vacation in the slammer? So that’s why I’m gummin’ up the works. Tryin’ to prevent people doin’ somethin’ dumb that they ain’t thought through. But hey, it’s your deal. You want me to step aside, say the word and I’m gone.”

  Lou had gone back to his calzone while Bert was talking. It was a pretty perfect temperature by now, hot enough to send fragrant steam wafting up his sinuses, not so hot as to further aggravate his scalded taste buds. He wiped his oily lips on a paper napkin then dropped it onto a pile of several others he’d already gone through. Finally he said, “Okay, Bert, I hear what you’re sayin’, but can you try and meet me halfway, at least? Can ya be a little nicer to Clifton? Can ya show ‘im some respect?”

  “No. Now you’re askin’ me to do something that I cannot do.”

  “Try to keep him a little happier?”

  “I don’t want ‘im to be happy.”

  “Try to keep him off my back at least?”

  “Okay, fair enough, that much I think I can do. Don’t know exactly how, but I’ll get him off your back.”

  32

  “You want me to do what?" said Ricky. “With who?”

  They’d been pedaling against a warm east breeze almost to the end of the oceanfront promenade and were way up by the airport when his phone rang. The incoming number was Pat’s, so he hit the brakes and took the call. Carla stepped off her cruiser and leaned it on its kickstand, then sat down on the knee-high seawall, lightly kicking her heels against it like a little kid. Below, in maybe six inches of water, baby barracudas were darting out of shadows and gobbling other fishes’ babies. Small rays stirred plumes of silt as they hoovered up unlucky shellfish from the bottom.

  “You trust him?” Ricky was saying to his phone. “Oh, you think you trust him. That’s just swell. The old gangster hangs around in clubs with the guy who wants to kill me, but you’re pretty sure he’s on our side. Pretty sure. What if you’re pretty wrong? I guess that makes me pretty dead.”

  At the waterline, the seawall was studded with barnacles that gleamed like onyx. Carla watched as crabs with outstretched claws strained upwards toward them, trying to gain a purchase on their shells so they could crush them and suck their insides out. Gulls hovered and squawked, grabbing some of the slower crabs then dropping them from a great height to smash their bodies on the pavement.

  Ricky said, “I don’t care if it’s public and crowded, I don’t want to meet him on the beach. I don’t want to meet him anywhere. He scares me, okay?...Yeah, I know he’s a very old man. He scares me anyway, what can I say?”

  Carla looked on as, a few yards away, a heron skewered a fish right through the middle. Farther offshore, an osprey tucked its wings and swooped, then flew away with its wriggling prey clasped in pitiless talons.

  Ricky said, “You think it’s maybe our best chance to get this settled? Get what settled?...The club? They’re trying to take the club away? Shit, I’m sorry for that, but look, everyone has troubles. Most aren’t fatal. Some are...Yeah, I know I’m being selfish. Trying to survive does that to people.”

  A pelican dove. A heartbeat later, Carla saw the outlines of doomed sardines writhing in its throat sac. A tern skimmed the roiled water and picked off one that got away.

  Ricky held the phone a little distance from his ear, closed his eyes as if avoiding the sight of some disaster, and frowned. Finally, with a theatrical sigh, he said, “All right, all right. I’ll meet with him, but only under one condition. Only if it’s at your house, and if you and Lenny are there, and if you guys scout the street and make sure he arrives alone…Okay, okay you’re right, that’s three conditions. Don’t be so fucking literal. I’ll see you there in an hour.”

  He clicked out of the call and put the phone back in his pocket. Carla tore herself away from the various murders she’d been watching and got back on her bike. The breeze was behind them as they pedaled back towa
rd town.

  

  Marsha and Lenny were standing in the pool. It was that part of afternoon when the sun was sliding along in a perfect groove between the palms so that shadows danced around the edges of the yard but never fell across the water. Marsha was wearing a chaste two-piece with polka dots that she hadn’t put on since the previous Labor Day at Fire Island. Her shoulders and tummy were very pale, as pale as Lenny’s had been just a few days earlier, the kind of pale that showed tan lines in about five minutes. She was doing some gentle aerobics, slowly swinging her arms against the resistance of the outflow from the skimmer. Tiny water droplets twinkled on the ends of her hair. Now and then one broke loose and tickled the back of her neck. “I see why you love it here,” she said in mid-exercise. “But did you really have to just run off like that?”

  “Yeah, I did,” said Lenny, who was folding himself over the pool steps, trying to stretch out a balky hamstring. “Sorry. It wasn’t planned. Didn’t really know what I was doing. But I guess I had to. If I stuck around we would have just kept arguing, digging in. Nothing good would have come of it.”

  “I was being pretty tough on you,” she said.

  “I deserved it. I was in a bad rut. Knew I was but couldn’t climb out. Didn’t like the way I was acting, the way I was sounding. Pretending nothing could really bother me as long as I could make a dumb joke out of it. Nothing against dumb jokes. My bread and butter. I just got a little too relentless about it.”

  “And I went way too far the other way,” admitted Marsha. “Started sounding like a total killjoy. It’s weird—you stake out a position and suddenly you hear yourself saying things you don’t really believe. Or half-believe, at most. And saying them solemnly. Like, how dare anybody laugh with the shape the world is in? Well, who the hell am I—who the hell is anybody—to tell people whether it’s okay to laugh or not? I don’t blame you for getting sick of hearing it.”

  He shrugged that off and began trying with very little result to stretch out the other hamstring. “Kind of funny,” he said, “that we had to come to the goofiest town in the world to sort of be reminded what’s serious and what isn’t.”

  “And that being a goofball isn’t the worst thing a person could be.”

  “So you still think I’m a goofball?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  33

  Ted Clifton looked up from some papers on his immaculately polished desk in his mock-authentic office and said, “Generally, Bert, I only see people by appointment.”

  “Duly noted. But I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by anyway.” He sat down across from his host without waiting for an invitation and unceremoniously plopped his chihuahua down onto a corner of the faultless desk. The fastidious businessman frowned at the dog and wondered what sort of unsavory things it might have been rolling in lately. Bert said, “Fat Lou tells me you’re very unhappy with me.”

  Clifton flushed around the collar and fished for words that didn’t come. It was clear he hadn’t expected his complaints to be passed along.

  “A very straightforward guy, Fat Lou,” the old man went on. “I like that in a person. The opposite of straightforward, that I don’t admire too much. Anyways, I thought I’d check in with a progress report.”

  “So?”

  “The report is that there’s very little and that if you keep gettin’ in Lou’s face and bitching about me behind my back there’s gonna be even less. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is some slight but meaningful progress. Pat Coates understands the situation. She gets it that the goombahs aren’t just decorative. She’s considering her options.”

  Smugly and impatiently, Clifton said, “She has no options.”

  “No good options, maybe. But she has a couple choices. She can cave and try to cut a deal, or she can say fuck you and call our bluff. So far she’s leaning toward fuck you.”

  “That’ll change when you stop wasting time and show her that you aren’t bluffing.”

  “We,” said Bert.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That we aren’t bluffing. You and Lou are partners, Ted. You seem to forget that at convenient moments. Lou is not your hired help and Lou’s guys are not your hired help. It’s a partnership. If our bluff gets called and if a line gets crossed, if someone gets hurt, someone dies, you’re just as responsible as anybody else. Aren’t you even man enough to admit that to yourself?”

  It was impossible to tell if it was the comment that finally shook Clifton out of his bland and almost clinical composure, or if it was that the dog, at that moment, curled itself into an arc on a Morocco leather corner of his desk blotter and began noisily licking its anus and the blank pink place where its balls had been, then nuzzling its damp and soiled nose back and forth against some papers. In any case, the businessman abruptly pushed back in his rolling chair, sprang up into a belligerent and exasperated forward lean, puffed out his purplish cheeks, and violently shoved the dog off the desk. The little creature flew off the polished edge as if it were a ski jump, did two back flips and a half-twist in mid-air, its paws seeming to rotate in slow-motion like the panels of a satellite, then landed, flailing, in its master’s lap. It gave one quick whimper then started licking Bert’s fingers as though nothing at all had happened.

  The old man looked sorrowfully at his host’s engorged and twitching face. “And now you’re pickin’ on a three-pound dog. Really, Ted, you oughta be ashamed.”

  

  Alone in the small, low-ceilinged, and very air-conditioned fitness room at the Flagler House hotel, Carmine was lifting weights. There were many pleasanter things to do on a perfect Key West winter afternoon, but the big man seemed to have no interest in doing any of them. So he stayed indoors and by himself, lifting dumbbells and barbells, kettle bells and stacks of iron plates attached to cables, lifting anything that was there to be lifted. His expression hardly changed as he raised the weights and put them down again. He didn’t grunt or groan. There was a grim steadiness, an unwavering and unpunctuated tempo in how he lifted, as if the lifting were an act of penance or ritual of mourning.

  The fitness room had mirrored walls, and although, in the past, Carmine had taken pride in watching his torso swell and his arm muscles tighten into ropes as he worked out, today he tried to avoid seeing his own reflection. When he did catch a glimpse of himself, he didn’t much like what he saw. A bulky man of great strength but little grace; a fierce but aimless figure sweating alone in an empty gym.

  He kept lifting. He added more weight, more repetitions, until at some point he began to feel lightheaded. The sensation was not totally unpleasant, less like dizziness than a kind of swimming in the air. While he was feeling it, he bent to put some weights back in their rack, and when the bar settled lightly into its cradle it gave off an unexpected ping, a tinkling sound of a certain volume and particular pitch, and Carmine once again heard a brief note of Carla laughing. It struck him as the most welcome but also the most unwelcome sound in the world. If the sound pursued him even to an empty gym in a faraway town, where did he have left to hide?

  There was a punching bag in the gym, the old-fashioned kind that was filled with sand and hung from the ceiling by a heavy chain. He went over and hit it as hard as he could. The bag recoiled and the chain rang with that same certain note. In a fury now, he swung at the bag again and again, making it twirl in a widening loop while the chain mercilessly squeaked out its softly maddening music. He punched until he could barely lift his arms, then he leaned exhausted into the bag of sand and held it against himself for some moments in a mockery of an embrace. In those moments, with his chest pounding against the lifeless bundle, he finally understood something that he hadn’t quite let himself believe before, not really. Carla was never coming back to him. It didn’t matter what he did or didn’t do, who else was or wasn’t in between them. It was over. She was lost. He finally got it. When he killed her lover, it would
n’t be with any lame imagining that he could once again reclaim his place. It would only be to punish her. To punish her for haunting him. And maybe to make the mocking laughter finally stop.

  Embarrassed by how long he’d stood there numbly in the clinch, he pushed the bag away with fresh rage and started pummeling it again, telling himself it was only sweat that flew from the corners of his eyes as he whaled on it.

  34

  Pat and Lenny were, as promised, patrolling Pine Street when Bert came walking slowly up the lane that led from Bayview Park. “Hey,” he said, “ya didn’t have ta come out to meet me. I woulda found the house.”

  “We’re on guard duty,” Lenny said. “Making sure your buddies didn’t tag along.”

  “Ricky insisted,” said Pat apologetically. “He’s afraid of you.”

  Without nostalgia, Bert said, “Been a long time since anybody felt that way. But, nah, it’s just me and the dog. Unarmed. Wanna frisk me? I could use a little thrill.”

  The offer went untaken and the three of them strolled into the perfect yellow house then straight through it to return to daylight by the pool. Near its edge, in a patch of shade, Marsha was reading in a lounge chair. Sam was stringing a racquet on a machine she’d set up by the pump shed. On the table was a bucket full of wine bottles. Pat poured drinks and for a couple minutes everyone made rather labored small talk.

  Then, from the narrow, tangled side yard, there came sounds of twigs snapping, vines being torn, creepers getting yanked out of the ground. Muffled curses and metallic squeaks were added to the complaints of slaughtered vegetation before the gate swung open and Ricky and Carla rolled in on their rented cruisers, whose spokes and chains were fouled with shreds of weed and whose fenders trailed festoons of greenery. Bits of leaf and a few twisting caterpillars were sticking to their clothes. To the questioning eyes of the others, Ricky said, “I thought it would be safer, staying in the foliage.”