6
IRVING MCMANN BUILT HIMSELF another vodka gimlet, to the brim of the squat glass. He carried it across to the sliding glass doors, sipping it down as he walked. The curtains were open. He gazed out across the third fairway. On the other side of the fairway was a narrow fringe of rough running along the seawall. Beyond that the channel out to the Atlantic. An early-morning squall in the distance out over the water.
Just a big water hazard was all the Atlantic Ocean was to most of the people at Coral Reef Club. Even the ones with yachts, what did they know about the ocean, about navigating? All the rich owners with their Vietnam vet captains, young guys who kept their boats going hot, straight, and normal while they were below wanking off or getting shit-faced. Irving’s old man was one of those, so Irv knew what went on below while the captain stayed up on the tower listening to rock and roll, keeping his superior distance. Irving hated those guys, know-it-alls, with the “yes, sir, no, sir,” military bearing. He hated them, and he hated the old red-faced farts like his old man who’d bought into chicken franchises at forty and now had the money machine pumping in high gear.
He hated them ’cause they were doing nothing with their lives, nothing of any creative purpose, but they gave him all kinds of shit about how he seemed to be fucking off all the time. Especially the goddamn captains, the guys his age. It was nothing specific they said; they wouldn’t come out and insult Irv. They played their same ass-licking game with him they used on his father, always yes, sir, no, sir. But with Irv they had a hint of a smirk. He’d called them on it, caught them doing it to him. Even pointed it out to his old man. But his old man was always so fucking stoned, so grateful to have anybody around who could park his damned yacht without knocking down the dock that he just let it all go. Fucking burned Irving up. One of these days.
Irving gulped the gimlet. It was his third in the last hour. It was what, only nine o’clock? As usual neither of them could sleep after a job. They’d gotten back ashore about twelve last night, just been smoking dope, drinking, watching TV ever since.
It was That’s No Way to Treat a Lady Week on Channel 8, so the two of them sat through The Boston Strangler with Tony Curtis and a middle-aged Henry Fonda. Curtis kills all these women, and nobody has a clue about him; but he blows it by doing a robbery. Irving talked the whole way through it, saw it as a lesson to the two of them. Specialization was the only way these days. You get good at something, you stick to it, you learn it inside and out, refine the technique, become the fucking Nobel prizewinner at it. Milburn, moaning about his bloody eye the whole time, missing the point, hardly even bothered to watch it. And there it was, like a message from the gods, right to them.
Irving still smelled the fish stink on him, tasted the fucking minnow chum that she’d thrown at them. Rotting fish at every breath. What a scene. The gimlet hadn’t covered it up. Listerine, Lavoris. He’d splashed Giorgio cologne all over himself, showered again, and more Giorgio. But the smell was still there. Like some kind of voodoo curse. You can kill me, but you’ll smell like this forever.
And with Milburn whining and complaining all night, Irv was growing himself a category five headache.
“Let’s go on down to Largo.”
“The fucking doctor doesn’t open till ten. What do you want, man? Sit out in the parking lot, let everybody have a good look at you with your goddamn bandage?”
Irv tossed back the rest of the gimlet, feeling the acid rise in his stomach as he swallowed. All in all, though, acid stomach and a headache were better than a slug in the chest, which it could’ve been if she’d been any kind of shooter. It sent him back to the wet bar just thinking about it. He’d cut it kind of close, maybe hammed it up a little too much at the end. No reason for it really, just felt like doing a scene.
“Don’t yell at me, man,” Milburn said, trying to muster a threatening tone. “You’re the one should be down on his knees asking forgiveness. I’m going to lose this fucking eye for sure. Half blind, and for what? So you could play some movie scene, man, milk it for some kind of ego thing.”
Irving drew back his gimlet glass for a fastball down the gut, but Milburn flinched and looked so pathetic covering himself up on that checkered couch, there in his pink polo shirt and white pants, so much like a big, ugly girl in his stringy hair and bland white face that Irving didn’t have the heart for it. Though the shit deserved it, if for nothing else, for that whine, whine, whine.
“You know you dig it, Milburn. You do. You’re going in there and going to ask the doctor if you can wear a black eye patch. Tough guy, pirate eye patch. You’re whining, but you love it. It’s the first real thing that’s happened in your measly life since I beat the shit out of you in prep school.”
“Look,” Milburn said. “It was a simple operation. We go out there, splat the old lady, dump the carcass, and get the fuck out of there. We sit down, figure it all out, agree on everything. We practically have it in writing, it’s all so definite. And we get out there and you fucking flip out and start some other goddamn scene. I mean, what’s the point?
“I’m standing there not believing what I’m hearing, thinking maybe you’ve had a nervous breakdown or some shit. I mean, it’s Jack Nicholson out there, flipping out like in that movie, going after his wife and kid in that hotel.”
“The Shining.”
“Yeah, that’s it. It’s like that. I think for a second I should shoot you, kill that fucking devil that’s taken over inside of you. Man, like you were possessed.”
Irving took a hard look at Milburn over that.
“Who are you talking about shooting, you fucking moron?”
“I’m just saying ...” Milburn shifted on the couch. “I wouldn’t do anything like that for real. Hell, no. But it’s like you weren’t normal.”
“You’re goddamn right I’m not normal. If I was normal, I’d blow you away right now for saying what you just said.”
“It’s like you become somebody else. It’s like—I don’t know. It’s scary. You can’t stay with the fucking plan.”
“The fucking plan, the fucking plan.” Irving reached around and drew the curtains shut. Dramatic effect. Scare the big shit. “What it is is a play.” He wasn’t so much angry anymore. Even a little relieved that Milburn had revealed his murder fantasy. Made it easier someday when he had to turn the gun on him, fill a slab with a slob.
“Some play,” Milburn said. “You shoot the fucking audience in the last act. I mean, who you doing this for? ’Cause if it’s for me, this big production, forget it. I’m not applauding. You see me applauding? It doesn’t win any Oscars from me. Do it the fuck like we talked about it. That’s creative enough for me, believe it.”
Talking himself in deeper and deeper. Irving was enjoying this. He liked talking about it. The postmortems. And he liked Milburn talking himself into a deep pit of shit. Make it real easy someday. Very little regret.
“I don’t give a shit about you. I want to make you applaud, I’ll slide a barrel up your butt.”
“Who then? Who’s it for? The hit? You doing it for the hit? She was real impressed, let me tell you. You scored big with that old lady, man. I mean it, she just loved the hell out of that routine.”
“You’re out of control.”
“Listen to Mr. Mental Health.”
“I’m an artist,” said Irving, not giving a rat’s ass anymore if Milburn laughed or not. He was up to here with Milburn anyway. “An artist looks at the script and goes it one better. The idea is to create, for its own sake. You play to the audience and you’re dead. That just shows how stupid you are. An artist, it just rolls up out of him, like that, like you’re just the channel, the conduit for the art. I don’t plan this or that. It’s spontaneous, but it’s disciplined spontaneity. Premeditated spontaneity. Very Zen.”
“Like I said, possessed.”
“That’s the reason you flunked out of college.”
“The fuck it is.” Milburn got off the couch, grimacing at the effort, rubbin
g at the edge of the bandage on his eye. “I flunked out ’cause of all the dope we were doing. Same as you.”
“You were too stupid,” Irving said, happy now, grinding his favorite asshole.
“Stupid,” Milburn said. “Stupid, huh? What’s your IQ? Mr. Jack Nicholson, Zen master. You know what it is, and I know what it is. What is it, above average? Would you believe, ladies and gentlefolk, it is subnormal, a mere shadow of a brain, the very edge of handicapped, we’re talking Down’s syndrome here, way, way down.”
“And you’re the big Mensa hotshot with the hundred forty IQ and shit for brains.”
“One hundred fifty-three. I’m the smart one in this group. You should be paying attention to me. You should be following my plan.”
“You’re a joke, Milburn. I heard this same speech, what, a hundred times? A hundred fucking times, and it never varies. You should be the leader; you should be rich like your daddy; you should be running this and that. Well, how come you’re such a dirtbag then? How come you’re not governor, or mayor, or even the head of the fucking garbage department? It’s because you’re such a fucking jerk, a wimp, and a goddamn whiner.”
Milburn swallowed another Percodan from the bottle on the glass table, chased it with the rest of his St. Pauli’s Girl. He sat down at the wet bar, threw a dart at the dart board. It hit the outer rim, hung for a second, and fell to the floor.
“All I’m saying is, it’s a weird fucking thing to see when you start up with that Jack Nicholson shit.”
“You love it. The whole thing. There we are, the ultimo Cubans. We had her fooled every way from Tuesday. I just wanted to see her face, man, when she finds out she’d been had. Tough old lady captain. Big billfish dyke. That’s what it’s all about, man, see their faces when you take off the mask and they see they been dancing with the devil.
“So don’t give me your shit, man. If it wasn’t for me not following the fucking plan, we’d still be stoolies for Abe Philpot. You liked that? Flying around everywhere, tagging around behind Abe, looking mean? You want to go back to that? Waiting for fucking Abe’s check every month to buy groceries? Man, if it wasn’t for me coming up with our own plan, inventing things, we’d still be muscle for some two-bit real estate contractor, putting a barrel in some zoning official’s ribs so Abe can build a couple of extra fucking stories on his condo. You want that? You want to get back to that kind of fucking, dim-witted life, being somebody’s lackey? Man, I don’t believe you sometimes. Mr. Plan Follower.”
“I need to get down to the doctor, man.” Milburn not whining now. The pain turning him serious. The sweat making a dark butterfly on the front of that pink shirt. He was probably right about that eye. He’d lose it. That old lady got the tip way in there, punctured the shit out of it.
Irving found the keys to the BMW. He felt fine, happy. Not so much the five thousand for the job. Shit, he’d given Ricki the bargain basement rate anyway. Five thousand, he got that every month from his old man. Smelled like fried chicken, every dollar of it.
But it was the idea of it, his profession. He was sailing now, a career in the fine arts. His name getting around where it mattered, people with money and some dirty little deal to do. People he’d met when he and Milburn had been Abe’s goons were calling him up. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, all over the place. They remembered Irv, said they liked his style, his unfucking-predictabilities.
He felt good. Even getting fat Milburn on his feet and out the door. There were parts for a lifetime. Parts and parts and parts. He hadn’t even scratched the goddamn surface.
7
THE PUFF, THE HARD PUFF, Wild Harry’s Delight, the Muddler, Improved Nasty Charlie, the Horror, Bonebuster, Purple Shadow.
Thorn sat at his rolltop desk and looked up at the cork board where his collection of flies was displayed. It was quiet, still an hour till daybreak. He could finish maybe three Crazy Charlies before the roosters started in.
There was an old rooster and a young one that’d recently begun to debate over a brood of wild hens that lived in the mangrove woods that bordered his house. The chickens provided him with feathers for his flies, and the crowing coaxed him back to an earlier day when the Keys were more a cousin of South Georgia than Miami’s weekend playground and a tour stop on the Disney World circuit.
Captain Eddie would be showing up at dawn. Seven days a week he poled up to Thorn’s dock, even at high tide, when there was water enough to use his engine, always wanting his half dozen assorted flies.
And after Eddie it would be Bill Martin, a retiree from Massachusetts, a professor of something or other who had discovered fly-fishing for bones and had acquired gradually the same reticence and sun-glazed stare of all bonefish addicts. And on like that all day, Thorn tying between their visits, never enough, always learning from them what was catching fish this week. And standing out on his coral dock, wondering with them why in the hell that little scrap of hokum brought those fish awake.
Crazy Charlie was the epoxy flat base fly he’d created in June. It skittered across the mud flats, trailing purple flasharoo, these Mylar strings that shook like tassels on a stripper’s skirt. Silver beads from a key chain for eyes. A pinch of white squirrel fur for the body. Like a Martian roach. Glitter and flash, dressed for a twenty-first-century nightclub.
He had a desk full of animal fur, pelts, tails, whiskers, toenails. His friend Jerome Billings had a contract with the county to keep the dead animals off the highway. Thorn got his pick of the daily supply of highway cats and dogs, squirrels, raccoons, and rats. If the pelt were still fresh, Jerome would drop it by. Thorn gave him flies as payment, though he knew Jerome had never fished a day. Either Jerome sold them, or Thorn couldn’t imagine, displayed them somewhere, used them in the bedroom? Scraping up squashed animals all day might have put a deep kink in there somewhere.
He laced the Crazy Charlie tight with the purple Mylar, tying a double turle knot and leaving a single thread, something to attach the last of the squirrel fur to. All glitter and flash, but a bonefish might smack that thing and rip off a hundred yards of line in about four seconds. All torque, that fish wouldn’t waver or jump, just burn those reel bearings, one long frizz. The pole straining. Heart crawling up into the esophagus. Thorn had been there; he’d been there and been there. And now he was here.
He loosened the vise a notch and rotated the Crazy Charlie. That vise had cost him a couple of hundred. It was a custom job he’d designed with a machinist in Tavernier. It had a needle-nose vise, rubber-coated gripping surface, and a largemouth vise with a fine-tune setting so he could hold a hook without marring the finish. Beautiful little tool.
The vise was about the most expensive thing he owned. His house. A few tools. A trickle of cash to pay the lights, and more anytime he wanted to speed up production. A library card. The land was his. Taxes paid from the trust fund Dr. Bill had left. A little cash left for gas for his rusted-out ’65 Cadillac Fleetwood, his Keys Cruiser.
It’d been Dr. Bill’s final car and had just enough life left to make the journey down to Islamorada once a month for Mexican food. It was about that often that Thorn wanted a break from snapper, grouper, trout, lobster, his payments, or gifts, from the guides who knew who he was, where he was, and what he did better than anybody else in the Keys.
All of his two dozen regular customers could tie their own flies, often bringing one by so Thorn could admire. But Thorn could do something else, some bright tiny nightmare magic he could bring to that chenille, that pipe-cleaner body, the flourish of calf tail or rabbit fur or cat. His flies caught fish. And not one of them looked like anything real.
Let it drift down into the murky dull mud of a saltwater flat, down into the drab world of bonefish, that little wedge of clear epoxy with bead-chain eyes and a flare of calf tail, and drag that fantasy through the silt anywhere in the peripheral sight of a bone and it’d smack that thing and run that zinging line to Bimini.
Bones ate like paranoid schizophrenics. Scared of food half the ti
me. Offer them a jumbo shrimp, flicking away in front of their noses, snap, they’d be gone into the fourth dimension. But flicker one of those garish little gremlins nearby and they just might gulp a ton of them. You never knew. Not even the best ever knew.
Far as Thorn could tell, it was a kind of voodoo. He didn’t have any picture in mind, but he’d sit there at that old railroad desk, start pulling scraps of fur from pigeonholes, badger, possum, raccoon, horse, cow, dog. Get his clear nail polish ready, his bobbin, his scissors, his hackle pliers, holding, tying, looping, imagining. Three-eyed Louie came in a frenzy like that. No plan. But it emerged, three silver eyes across a bar in front, and for one whole June in 1979 it caught bones every day from Marathon to Card Sound. Then poof, it was over. The guides standing out on the dock, shaking their heads, grinning at the bounty, frowning at the ongoing search.
That was the great pleasure of this for Thorn. The minor wacko variations. Permutations of eyes, head, body, tail. And always the barbless hook. There were a hundred thousand possible bonefish flies. Oh, hell, lots more than that. Nobody had found one that worked every time. Nobody ever would. The best bonefishermen in the world could go a week without having one on. They could pole across a hundred miles of flats, see a hundred tailing fish, lay a quiet line and a perfect lure right in their path, perfect presentation a hundred times, and that fish would rather starve.
Those guys were priests. They thought like priests. It meant whatever they thought they kept to themselves. When they did talk, they all talked alike, quiet as dust floating in church. And they had eyes burned hard and transparent by the sun off shallow water, from tracking ghosts with a ten-ton pull.
Thorn had been one of them for a decade. Back from his failed year at college, he’d started up. Nineteen and with about nineteen years of experience on the flats. Baptized out there. Knew how to be quiet and blend in. For ten years he tried to learn how to take money from strangers who knew how to do neither.
Under Cover of Daylight Page 6