Rita said, “So why’d y’answer?”
“Why? Well, they called. And if I didn’t take the call and tell them off, how would they know I didn’t want them to call again?”
“They will anyway.”
“Yes, of course they will. I know that.”
“You don’t really have a grandchild, do you?”
“Me? Don’t be absurd. A grandchild? My dear, I am proud to say I have never committed a procreational act in my life. Well, maybe once or twice when I was very young and unformed. A mere erreur de jeunesse, as they say.”
“I don’t know anyone who says that either.”
“A grandchild!” he resumed, then shook himself as though he’d caught a chill or bit into a very sour orange. “Why? So I could be worried sick about them getting shot in a school hallway? Or drowning waist-deep in muck while Florida sinks into the sea? No thank you. Deciding how and when to end my own little life is more than enough worry for me. But let’s move on from that subject, since you find it morbid. What is it you came by about?”
“Oh,” said Rita, who’d sort of forgotten all about her original errand. “I got that job. A tryout, at least. Wanted to tell you.”
“That’s wonderful. Congratulations.”
“Well, thanks…But I just wanted to make sure you didn’t feel dissed or anything.”
“Dissed? Don’t be silly. Why would I feel dissed?”
“Well, I kind of had the feeling you were trying to talk me out of it.”
“Not at all. Not at all.”
“You know, because of the boss guy you don’t like.”
He tried to keep his eyebrows steady and almost managed it. “Look, that’s just my little issue. Nothing at all to do with whether you take that job or not. I’m happy for you. I hope I didn’t sound like some old fart giving unwanted advice.”
“Well, if you did, I didn’t take it.”
“No one ever does, I’ve noticed.” He tapped the suicide journal that was still spread across his lap. “Untaken advice. Maybe that’s a topic I should consider one of these days.”
4
T hree days later, Rita trimmed her bangs so that they ended precisely two finger-widths above her eyebrows, put a fresh coat of clear polish on her short but tidy fingernails, pulled on her favorite light blue thrift-store jumper, and pedaled off to her audition.
Blake met her at the door of the tasting room. He seemed to have cleaned up for the occasion, or at least tried to. He’d shaved, but not well; bits of bloody toilet paper clung to his chin where he’d nicked it. His shirt was tucked in but it bore an ink stain at the bottom of a chest pocket. His eyes looked just as tired as they had the time before. They made a little chit-chat and then he said, “Okay, Jersey girl, you good to go?”
Stepping through the doorway, she said, “Yeah, I think so.”
In what might have been an apologetic tone, he said, “Just so you know, I don’t plan on helping.”
“Just so you know, I don’t plan on needing any help.”
“Touché. Done your homework?”
“I always do my homework. In fact, I’ll tell you a little secret, don’t let it get around. I like homework. Always have. Gave me an excuse to close the door when my parents were fighting and the other kids were bouncing off the walls. Couldn’t admit I liked it, of course. Wasn’t cool. So I’d get to class, lotta kids are pretending they did their homework when they didn’t. Me, I’m pretending I didn’t when I did. As usual I’m the odd one.”
He had no response to that so he just cleared his throat and looked at her a moment. “Can I say just one more thing? Don’t sue me. I think you look terrific this morning.”
“That wouldn’t be harassment, would it?”
“Look, I’m just paying you a compliment. I really like that dress.”
“Jumper.”
“I really like that jumper.”
“Okay, compliment accepted, thank you. I try to dress appropriate.”
“Appropriately.”
“And don’t start with the grammar bullshit, okay?”
He turned the shop’s little hanging sign from Closed to Open. Then he moved around the room and stood off to the side, in a narrow doorway that led to a back office. Rita took a deep breath, smoothed her jumper, and took her place behind the bar.
Everything seemed different from that side. Beyond the front door and the display window, the view was halved into blue sky and green water. Boats bobbed and masts swayed. But what mainly seemed different were the people walking by on the wharf. They didn’t look different—there was still the usual Key West mix of sunburns and tank tops and silver ponytails and the occasional pirate get-up—but they had now become the public. Customers. Strangers who expected things. Entertainment. Information. A grown-up in charge. Rita was supposed to know stuff, have answers. This was scary. So far, she wasn’t bored. She polished glasses and waited for game time.
After some minutes, three men walked in together. They didn’t look like locals, but they didn’t quite look like tourists either. Two of them were dressed in tight black pants and shiny shirts that fit like skin; they were both tall and bulky, with knobby muscles on the tops of their shoulders. One had a strangely squashed nose, pancake flat at the bridge but upturned at the tip; the other had a round though not fat face and a complexion pitted like the craters of the moon. The third man, considerably older and with wiry gray-brown hair thinly distributed over a mottled scalp, wore a suit but no tie. His very handsome loafers squeaked. He was of nearly average height but seemed short next to the others and because he didn’t have much of a neck.
They settled themselves onto barstools. Rita smiled her best opening smile and said, “Good morning and welcome to Wreckers. You gentlemen here to taste some world-class rum distilled right here in the Keys?”
“Well, we ain’t here for waffles,” said the one with the squashed nose.
She kept on smiling. “That’s lucky. We just ran out of those.” She fetched three small and gleaming snifters from their hanging racks and reached behind her for an amber bottle. “What say we start with our youngest rum. We call it Hurri-Cane. Know why?”
“I don’t much like guessing games,” said the one with the cratered face.
“Because,” she soldiered on, “it’s made entirely from fresh sugar cane juice. Never cooked, never processed. The cane is cut by hand at our fields in Puerto Rico, then rushed straight to the fermenting barns. Never tampered with, just crushed. Like extra-virgin olive oil. Then the juice is slow-fermented like fine wine.”
“Olive oil. Wine,” said the one with the expensive shoes. “Which one is it, hon?”
Another smile from Rita, along with just the quickest half-glance toward Blake, who was looking down at his feet and keeping his promise not to help. “Just trying to make the point that nothing is added, nothing taken away. It’s natural. So it keeps its fruitiness, its complexity. The most distinctive rums start out that way. But there is one disadvantage to that method. Know what it is?”
“Again with the guessing games,” said the pitted man.
“Rums like these can only be produced at harvest time. Like a vintage. But the bigger producers need to keep their pipelines full, so they churn out rum all year. How? They boil the juice down into syrup, killing all the interesting stuff that’s in it, and stash it away till they need it. Then they dilute it with boring old water and ferment it from that and call it rum. Just like orange juice from concentrate is still called orange juice. Me, I’ll take fresh-squeezed any day.”
“Me,” said the one with the flattened nose, “I’ll take some booze if science class ever gets over with.”
She poured out three tastes. The big guys fired theirs down in an instant. The one with no neck sniffed his then pushed it aside without drinking any. “What’s the alcohol?”
“Eighty proof. Forty percent.”
“Take a while to get wrecked on that,” said the one with the ravaged complexion. “Kinda wimpy fo
r stuff called Wreckers.”
“Actually,” Rita said, “the name’s in honor of the ship-salvors who first made Key West wealthy. Florida’s first millionaire was a wrecker, you know.”
“Ain’t that fascinating,” said the one with the flat nose. “You don’t make a one-fifty-one?”
“We leave that to certain major brands. It’s very good for sales of aspirin and perfect for people who drown their rum with lots of Coke.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Blake shoot her a minimalist fist-pump. Encouraged, she went on. “And since you can’t really taste anything that high in alcohol anyway, they make it from the cheapest stuff they can. Molasses.”
“What’s wrong wit’ molasses?” asked the pitted one.
“Nothing, if you’re making feed for cattle and pigs.”
“Hey, my mother, God rest her soul, cooked wit’ molasses all the time.”
Rita licked her lips and smoothed her jumper. “Well, I guess that’s a whoopsy on me. Look, no offense to Mom. I’m sure she was a very good cook. But do you know what molasses is?”
“Christ,” said the flat-nosed guy. “Another quiz. Can we make it multiple choice this time?”
“A by-product,” she said. “The sludge that’s left over after the juice has been evaporated to get at the granulated sugar. But maybe we should just move along.”
She reached back for another bottle, one with a fancier label this time. She dumped the small guy’s sample into a silver bucket and poured out three fresh ones.
“This,” she went on, “is our Slumbering Beauty. Distilled about five miles from where we sit, then aged four years in oak casks that held sherry. It’s the wood that gives it that gorgeous reddish-golden tint. No caramel coloring, nothing artificial.”
The guy with the short neck sniffed at his.
The tall guys gulped theirs down. The cratered one said, “Not bad. Pour us a coupla doubles.”
Pleasantly, Rita said, “I’m sorry, but we don’t do that here. We’re a tasting room, not a bar.”
The one in the suit said, “My friends here would like a drink. Pour them one, please.”
A notch more firmly, still smiling, she said, “No can do. Sloppy Joe’s is just a two-minute stroll. They’re a bar. They have drinks.”
The one with the squashed nose said, “But we ain’t at Sloppy Joe’s. We’re here and we’re thirsty.”
Rita spread her hands on the bar and said nothing. She wasn’t about to call for help, but still, her eyes automatically flicked over toward the doorway where her manager had been standing. Except he wasn’t there any more.
The stalemate went on for a couple of breaths. Then the guy with the fancy shoes reached into his back pocket and pulled out a bulging wallet. He plucked a fifty out of it and dropped it almost under Rita’s nose. “Be nice, hon,” he said. “Pour my friends a decent drink and put that in your purse. What the hell’s the harm?”
She regarded the crisp bill just long enough to see Grant’s face on it, then pushed it back toward him. “Thank you, but no. You’ll get much more for your money someplace else.”
At a deliberate pace, working hard at steadying her hands, she started clearing off the bar.
“But we ain’t finished the tasting yet,” the pitted one said.
“Actually, you have.”
The big men watched the glasses and the bottles disappearing, then, almost simultaneously, they backed off their barstools, stretched to full height, puffed up so that their shirt buttons strained across their chests, and stared at Rita. They said nothing, just stared. She crossed her arms, held her ground, and stared back. A moment passed. She felt her eyelids wanting to blink, getting heavy, itching, but she didn’t let them. A flash of heat moved through the room.
Then, abruptly, the small man with the fancy shoes turned toward the vacant doorframe where Blake had recently been standing and called out, “Okay, she gets the job.”
Rita said, “What?”
The manager emerged from the back office. The small man addressed him, not Rita. “She’s nice, she’s tough, she knows a thing or two, she isn’t on the take. She’s hired.”
Blake shot her a rather shamefaced glance and tried to muster some enthusiasm when he said, “Congratulations.”
Rita felt slightly dizzy and didn’t reply.
“Let me introduce you to our owner,” he went on. “This is Mr. Costanza.”
“Carlo,” he said, extending a pudgy and surprisingly soft hand and taking Rita’s in an unexpectedly unassertive clasp. Then he smiled for the first time since he’d stepped through the door. The smile didn’t last long; it vanished as abruptly as it had appeared; but for as long as it lasted it conveyed a puzzling and incongruous warmth, a hint of caring, something almost avuncular; the smile seemed to contradict the hard slyness of his eyes, and the eyes seemed somehow regretful that they couldn’t let go and be more like the smile.
“Sorry for the third degree,” he went on. “But I happened to be in town to check up on the distillery and decided to handle the tryout myself. There’s a few things you need to understand. Quite a few people depend on this little operation we got here. And it’s a delicate operation. With booze, everything is delicate. So I can’t have any wimps in here and I can’t have any crooks and I can’t have anybody bending rules and getting the licensing people up my ass with a microscope. But you did good, very good. I think you’ll work out fine. Welcome to the team.”
5
O kay, me again. Nacho. I would hope that by now you have enough background so that you’ll understand at least the basics of the situation and you’ll start to see how I just sort of ease into the story now and then to quietly pave the way for my eventual heroics.
Anyway, it so happens that my Master is very old friends with Albin, Rita’s neighbor and new pal. They met many, many years ago, way before I was even born, of course, but they still have a laugh about how it happened almost every time they get together, so I’ve heard the story so many times that I sometimes imagine I was right there in the room.
It was back in the ‘80s. People say that like it’s nothing, but if you pause a second to think about it, you realize it was a helluva long time ago. Three dog lives, maybe four. Half a human lifetime, give or take. I mean, wow. Not as in bow-wow. Just wow. That’s a long time to know someone. A long time to stay in touch. Anyway, I gather that Master was pretty new to Key West back then, and I gather that the lady he shared his life with—the one who put the different-smelling stuff in the closets—had recently passed away. I don’t know the details. Maybe he had to have her put down. I just know she was dead.
So Master was lonely, needed things to do. One day he sees an ad in the newspaper from a hotel right down on the ocean. It’s gone now, that hotel, like a lot of the old, funky places. I’ve heard people mention it as Atlantic Shores, and I’ve noticed they’re always smiling when they say the name. Anyway, the ad is for a Sunday afternoon event called the Old Queens Reunion and Tea Dance. Well, Master is from Queens, so he figures he’ll go. Might be nice to see some people from the old neighborhood.
He dresses nice for the occasion, like he always does. I can make a pretty good guess for what he might have worn, since he still wears the exact same stuff today. Probably a silk shirt in either royal blue or Kelly green, with contrasting piping and his monogram above the left chest pocket; that, and an alpaca cardigan, the kind where you can get a paw caught in the loops if you’re not careful. All in all, though, pretty sharp.
Well, he gets to the event and soon realizes that, sharp though he may be, there are lots of guys outshining him in the finery department. There are guys in ball gowns, guys in leather from head to toe, guys in togas and sandals with straps up to the knee. The first guy he actually talks to is wearing a tennis dress and a ruby necklace. They say hello. Master goes to shake hands. The guy comes up on tiptoe and kisses him on the cheek. Master thinks what the hell and kisses him back, even though, from what I’ve gathered, back
where he’s from, men only kiss men if they’re family, and usually it means someone’s in bad trouble. But I’m guessing that no one had kissed Master for a while, him being a recent widower and all, and he probably appreciated the gesture. So, after the kiss, Master says, “Nice ta meet ya. What parta Queens ya from?”
The guy says, “Excuse me?”
“Rego Park? Bayside? Me, I’m from Astoria.”
Well, eventually the confusion is cleared up, but Master’s having a nice time, good music, friendly people, so he stays. A little later, on the buffet line, he ends up standing next to a guy with a big, sparkly silver star pinned to his chest. This turns out to be Albin. Master says to him, “What’s with the star? You the sheriff or somethin’?”
Albin says modestly, like he’s proud and embarrassed at the same time, “No, actually, I’m one of the honorees.”
“Honorees,” says Master. “That’s nice. Always nice to be honored. Whatcha bein’ honored for?”
“Oh, nothing really. I guess just for how long I’ve been down here. Being in that first wave of queers who staked out this little town, made it a safe place.” He shrugs and gestures around him at the party, the dancing. “It’s kind of amazing, really. Wasn’t that long ago there were maybe four places in the whole country where a thing like this could happen.”
Master thinks about it and says, “Jeez, man, you’re a freakin’ pioneer, like Davey Crockett or Daniel Boone or somethin’.”
“No, not really.”
“Yeah, y’are. That’s great. Lemme buy ya a drink.”
So that was the start of the friendship.
Anyway, on the particular day I started off talking about, Master and me had walked over to Albin’s. We did this regularly enough so that I had my favorite trees and bushes along the way and could tell at a sniff if anything was new in the neighborhood— territorial conflicts, a bitch in heat, whatever. Albin’s place was maybe a fifteen-minute walk from our condo, which was about as far as Master could go at a stretch without getting a cramp in his leg or having to pee. Seems to me he could have extended his range and also spared himself a lot of walking pigeon-toed by getting over his bashfulness and just peeing on a shrub or car tire when he felt the urge, but he rarely did that in daylight unless it was a true emergency, don’t ask me why he was so shy about it.
Nacho Unleashed Page 3