The man with the squashed nose swallowed back his disappointment and said, “You haven’t been feeling like it a lot lately. What’s up, baby boy?”
The one with the cratered face pushed back the cuffs of the pale green terry-cloth jacket he’d put on after their sunset dip in Buttonwood Bay. The light was mostly gone by now. What was left of it seemed to pulse forth in muted flashes from the stacked up slabs of pink and orange cloud that were slowly collapsing into the Gulf. “Things have just been weighing on me,” he said at last.
“Like what kinda things?”
“Like, everything,” said the pitted man, his face tightening down into an expression midway between a pout and a grimace. “All this stupid stuff we’re supposed to do. Macho tough guy stuff. Wearing shiny shirts. Glaring at people. Making dumb wisecracks about women so people will see how straight we are. It’s embarrassing already. All this faking, all this bullshit—doesn’t it ever make your skin crawl?”
“Yeah, course it does. But—”
“I’m just so tired of pretending, Rock. It’s 2019. There are gay governors. There are gay congresspeople. There are gay guys in the NFL and NBA. Why are we still hiding out? Can’t we just cut the bullshit by now and be who we are?”
Rocco’s answer was a mix of tenderness and exasperation. “We are who we are. When we’re here. When we’re home together. Just not on the job.”
“On the job burns up a lot of our life.”
“Maxie, please, we been through this before. Who the hell wants a coupla queer enforcers? And how else we gonna pay the rent? We got no whaddyacallit, resumes. We got no marketable skills. We’re Cat’lic school dropouts who happen to be big and strong and even tough when we gotta be, even though, believe me, the tough guy stuff turns my stomach almost as much as it does yours. But we gotta do it sometimes. We gotta. It’s a job. That’s just how it is. Plus, let’s face it, Costanza’s been very good to us over the years. We go to him now and tell him we lied to his face wit’ all those stories about girlfriends and bimbos and how much pussy we were gettin’? And if we give up this gig, fuck else we gonna do, Maxie?” He let the question dangle in the tepid air a moment while, waving his free hand, he searched for the most far-fetched non-option he could think of. “We gonna open up a florist’s shop?”
The stratagem backfired. Max’s face relaxed, took on a dreamy glow that made him look gentle and boyish and even handsome in spite of his ravaged skin. “I’d love to have a florist’s shop,” he said. “Roses. Carnations. Poinsettias at Christmas. I don’t think I’d put that colored foil around the pots. Kinda tacky, don’tcha think? But irises. Tulips. Clean white smocks wit’ our names embroidered on ‘em. In script, of course. We’d have to come up wit’ a really good name for the store. Whadda ya think the name should be, Rock?”
The man with the squashed nose looked out toward the dimming horizon, exhaled deeply, let his knotted shoulders drop. He turned his wrist so that he could intertwine his fingers with his partner’s. “Offhand, I got no idea. Time ever comes, we’ll think a somethin’. Sure we will.”
So here is something I have never understood: Why are dogs allowed in certain places and not in others? For example, on restaurant patios but not in dining rooms. To me, this makes no sense. What bad thing could happen in a dining room that couldn’t happen equally on a patio? In fact, if we’re worrying, let’s say, about a dog forgetting its manners and dropping a number two, wouldn’t it be way more likely to happen outside, where he’s used to going anyway and is often congratulated for it? Maybe it’s just some vague hygiene thing, but that makes no sense either. People let dogs lick their babies right on the kisser. They take us into their beds. Suddenly they’re all freaked out about a one in a billion chance of a flea in their soup?
I should mention in passing that Master always finds ways to sneak me into bars and restaurants anyway. Usually he hides me in the folds of a sweater carried over his arm, then slips me under the table when no one is watching or keeps me in his lap for the duration. Try doing that with a Rottweiler, pal. Like I’ve said, being petite has its advantages.
Anyway, it’s not only restaurants where these stupid no-dog rules pertain. It’s public buildings, the post office, even city piers. And what happens when people pass laws that everybody knows are stupid? People just find ways of getting around them. So now all of a sudden half the mongrels you see on the street are wearing little plastic vests that say Service Dog. What a load of crap. I’m not knocking the German Shepherds leading around the guys with the dark glasses and the canes. But now you’ve got these narcissistic little Pomeranians who are so caught up in their fancy haircuts that they barely notice that anyone else exists—what the hell kind of service are they providing? The sign that really cracks me up is Therapy Dog. What, you need a diploma for this? It’s some kind of specialty? Every dog is a therapy dog. We make people feel better. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t get fed.
Oh, and just for the record, I have a Service Dog vest too. What my supposed service actually is, I have no idea. But it would not be like Master to come across such an easy scam and not glom onto a piece of it.
I mention this because, a few evenings ago, Master snapped the bogus vest around my belly, so I knew we were headed someplace special. Turns out we were going to the Monroe County Public Library over on Fleming Street. It was almost dark when we got there. The streetlamps were just coming on. They buzz at the start, or maybe that’s just the moths flying all around them, and their light is pretty feeble at first. Compared to the streetlamps, the light coming from inside the library seemed very cheery and inviting. Other people must have felt this also, because there were quite a few of them inside. One or two were reading. The others just seemed happy to be sitting down on chairs. Some had backpacks or bundles near them. Some I recognized from Bayview Park; I knew them mainly by their flapping shoes. I guess those guys just went from place to place, and when one place closed or they got kicked out, they went someplace else. Where they’d go when the library closed, I couldn’t tell you. If these guys were dogs instead of people, people would take them in, feed them, clean them up, and at least some would get adopted. Why more people don’t adopt people and give them a place to live is one more thing I’ll never understand.
Anyway, we go in, Master picks me up, and we go over to a lady at a counter, who asks us very softly if she can help us. Master, whose hearing is a little dicey and who doesn’t always realize when he’s talking loud, says, “Yeah, thank you, I was hoping to get some information or you might say do some research or some investigating about a guy I know, a friend of a friend, not the best guy inna world, let’s be honest heah, who went off to the Penitentiary, ‘cept I’m tryin’ to find out, or you could say discover, exactly which Penitentiary he went to and who he mighta been there wit.’”
The lady doesn’t bat an eye. “I can try to help with that,” she says. She says it even softer than she talked the first time, which I guess was a polite way of reminding Master he should turn the volume down a bit.
Master says, “What?”
She says it again, a little louder, sort of meeting him halfway. A lot of life is like that, right? Just trying to find middle ground, I mean. She asks what the person’s name is. Master tells her. She says, “Oh, Carlo Costanza. I remember following that story.”
“Ya do?”
At this, for some reason she starts to blush. “Actually,” she says, “I’m a bit of a Mafia buff. It’s one of my guilty little pleasures.”
Master’s reply to this is, well, excuse me, masterful. True, I’m biased, I love the guy. But I don’t think that anyone could deny he’s charming or that he has great instincts for how to get people on his side and for what he can get away with, given his age and silver hair and crinkled skin. So he rests an elbow on the counter, the elbow of the arm that’s holding me, in fact, so I’m right up front and center, and he leans in a little closer, and he says, “Got any other guilty little ple
asures you’d like to tell Uncle Bert about?”
Now the nice lady’s blush goes to a whole ‘nother level. And I’ll tell you something that’s different and way richer from a dog’s point of view. People see a blush. We see it plus we also smell it, which is by far the most interesting part of a blush. A blush brings secret aromas right up to the surface. So as her cheeks and ears are getting pink, I’m also getting the smell of her perfume, mostly pine and vanilla, that she probably put on that morning, and which had gone dormant until she blushed. I’m getting the aerosol smell of her hairspray plus I can tell her lipstick has a strawberry flavor. And I’m also getting just a faint hint of…how can I put this delicately? Sexual receptivity. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not even remotely suggesting the merest possibility of anything going on between these two. He’s a very old man, she’s a librarian doing her job. But flirting is flirting, and when it’s cute, it gets a response. So all I’m saying, all I’m trying to point out to you unlucky creatures with a defective sense of smell, is that there’s so much more going on in every moment than people ever notice. So much interesting stuff just sort of slides by and doesn’t register. For everything that happens, there’s like a thousand things that could but don’t.
Anyway, the lady chooses not to answer Master’s question. She just says, “Let me see what I can find,” and she turns to her computer. Her fingers start flying on the keyboard, her eyes are flicking back and forth behind her glasses. In about twenty seconds, she says, “Ah, here it is. Costanza was sent to Cumberland Penitentiary, a medium-security facility in Maryland. Sentenced to six years, served just over four.”
“You’re a whiz,” says Master. “It woulda taken me like twenty phone calls and ten hours a BS’in’ around to find that out. Can you tell maybe who was in wit’ ‘im?”
Her eyes go back to her screen. “Well, the prison holds 1179 men.”
“Ah. That’s a lotta guys. But I’m tryin’ ta figure who he mighta struck up an acquaintanceship wit’ or even let’s say concocted an entrepreneurial opportunity for when they got outa the can. Could you find maybe how many from Miami? Or guys who went in or came out around the same time he did? Or maybe someone from the liquor business?”
“Liquor business?” she says. “Wasn’t Costanza rather famously involved with fish? They called him The Codfather, right?”
“Ah,” says Master. “You know whereof you speak.” I guess he was trying to impress her with some fancy grammar, her being a librarian and all. Then he finally lowers his voice. “But strictly on the QT, in total confidence meant to go no farther than this Information Desk, which by the way is now a two-way street, he seems to have a more recent enterprise, which is booze.”
“Ah,” she says, and she squirms a little in her chair, so I guess that, as a Mafia buff, she really liked getting this bit of inside skinny. Then she goes into some mumbo-jumbo I couldn’t quite follow, about cross-referencing and parameters and such. Master asks if he can use the rest room while she looks stuff up. I was amazed that he held out as long as he did. It was a pretty long walk to the library.
By the time we get back to the desk, the lady is looking pretty pleased with herself and even sort of conspiratorial. I mean, for her this is quite a caper, right? “Well,” she says, “I struck out on the liquor part, but I think I’ve got it narrowed down to three on dates and places. The first is a man named Ernesto Puig, from Coconut Grove.”
“What was he in for?” Master asks.
“Running guns to Venezuela.”
“Nah, I doubt that’s him.”
“Then there was one named Emmanuel Schreiber. Miami Beach. Ponzi scheme.”
“Nah, I don’t think so.”
“Good, because I’ve saved my favorite for last. Favorite as in least favorite. Remember a man named Mikel Shintar?”
“Mikel Shintar, Mikel Shintar,” says Master, the way he does sometimes while waiting for a bell to ring except it never does.
“Chemist turned pharmaceutical executive,” the lady says. You can tell she’s really into it by now. She’s sort of biting off her words like someone on a cop show on TV. “Most hated man in America for a while, remember? Had patents on some drugs that people needed to stay alive, and he made them fifty times more expensive. Government tried to get him for price-gouging, which apparently is not a crime, so they finally convicted him of Medicare fraud. Went to Cumberland a month before Costanza did. Got out a month after. Lives in Coral Gables.”
“Hmm,” says Master, and he starts rubbing my head to help himself think. Maybe this is what qualifies me as a Service Dog, who knows? Head-Scratch Thinking-Aid Dog. Like I said, the whole thing’s a crock. Anyway, after a moment he says, “Coral Gables. Pharmaceuticals. Not a perfect match but way better than the other two. Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.”
The lady beams and comes close to starting another blush. Everyone likes to be thanked, right? Seeing how happy this little bit of appreciation makes her, Master decides to add on more. I mean, why not? Praise makes everybody feel good and it doesn’t cost a thing. I for one wish people would be less stingy with it.
“In fact, you’ve been amazing,” he goes on. “All that stuff you found—how you find it out so fast?”
She gives a modest little shrug. It’s really kind of adorable, how modest she is. “Google.”
“Ah. I heard a that. Pretty amazing. Silly name though, ain’t it?”
13
“H ow was the distillery?” Blake asked, when he appeared at the tasting room to take over from Rita for the next day’s evening shift.
“Loved it,” she said, as she dried glasses and noiselessly slid them into their wooden racks. “Really interesting. I mean, the science, it’s one thing to read about it, but then to see things gurgling and steaming right before your eyes…it was way cool.”
“That Anthony’s a strange bird, isn’t he?”
She paused with a glass lifted halfway to its destination. “Strange? I don’t know that I’d say strange. Passionate. He’s passionate.”
Blake studied her a moment, then said in a tone that blended disbelief and resignation, “Passionate? When I hear a woman say that about a guy, what I make of it is that she finds him sexy. But that just can’t be. Tell me it isn’t what you mean. You find him sexy?”
“What I meant is passionate about his work. Totally absorbed in it. I mean, he hardly noticed I was there. It took him three tries to get my name right.”
“Some people might call that rude.”
“I didn’t take it that way. Look, he had more important things to do than memorize my name. He didn’t fake it just to be pleasant. I respect that. And since you insist on bringing the conversation down to the level of sex, the simple truth is yes, I found it very sexy.”
“His ears stick out!”
“I noticed.”
“He’s got that Bozo hair.”
“I noticed that too.”
Exasperated, Blake slapped at the thighs of his crinkled khaki shorts. “I guess I just don’t understand women.”
“And I’ve definitely noticed that,” said Rita.
“Me,” he went on, “I’m nice to you, I read your resume, I show an interest, I try to help you out. Him, he ignores you, he treats you like a houseplant, and him you find sexy.”
Still shaking his head, he picked up a dish towel and helped dry the last of the glasses. What was hardest to take was that, deep down, in spite of the protests and the posing, he really wasn’t surprised that Rita preferred Anthony to him. Anthony—and lots of other men as well—must have some mysterious something that was lacking in himself. He just wished that sometime before he was too old to care he could figure out what the hell it was.
By the time Rita left the tasting room, the tourist crowds along the wharf had finished cocktail hour, ooh’d and ahh’d at sunset, and were wobbling off to dinner. Stars were already shining in the east; the western sky was a slatey lavender, fuzzy like
rubbed up flannel. The daytime breeze had fallen away to nothing, and the boats in the marina sat as still in their slips as if they were nested in earth not water.
She unlocked her old clunker bicycle from the bench where it was chained and walked it gingerly through the chaos of scooters and drunks and Goths and pirates. Once the crush of Caroline Street was behind her, she climbed on and started to ride.
It was one of the best parts of her day: Pedaling along, picking up speed, creating her own breeze as she glided past locals sitting on porches on suddenly quiet streets that, day by day and week by week, felt more like her own. She had her favorite houses by now, her favorite trees; she knew the places where dogs would bark and where stray cats would likely glance at her before slinking back to their hiding places under cars.
In the mornings, on her way to work, she’d weave through the paved paths of the cemetery; but now, in the evening, the cemetery was locked behind its spiky iron fence, so she skirted its perimeter instead, riding along very narrow streets amicably shared by the living on one side and the dead on the other. Music was playing in some of the houses on the living side of the street; Tibetan prayer flags hung in windows here and there. On the graveyard side, there was perfect silence, and the squat and blockish family monuments threw jarring, asymmetric shadows that grew fainter with the fading dusk.
Her pace was steady and unlabored. The air that tickled her face and arms was the same temperature as her skin. It was just as she was angling around the bend where Passover Lane became Windsor that she first had the vague sense that she was being followed.
The feeling was instinctual; she could not have said exactly where it came from. Not from anything she’d seen; not yet, at least. It probably began with a pattern of sounds that at some point broke out of the random: She’d hit a bump and her bike would jangle; after an interval there’d come an answering jangle, then another. A tire would plunk through a pothole; after a pause that was steadily growing briefer, there would be a second plunk, then a third.
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