Florida straits kwm-1

by Laurence Shames

  "Yeah? Who?"

  He threw his head back on the settee and looked upward through the louvered windows. "Bert."

  "Come on, Joey. I'm not gonna say anything against Bert. He's a sweet old guy. But really. He's three times our age. He's your friend, not mine. And he's not really the kind of people I have in mind."

  "No? what kinda people you have in mind, Sandra? My kinda people aren't good enough to be our friends all of a sudden?"

  Sandra leaned forward in her chair and hugged her knees. She was still wearing her bathing suit and Joey admired her midriff. It was one of the prettiest parts of Sandra, lean enough to show the arc of her ribs, the skin as smooth as if it were powdered. "Don't start in on that, Joey. You know that's not what I'm saying."

  "But Sandra, the way you make it sound-"

  "Joey, all I'm saying is I think it would be nice to have some regular friends. Some normal, ordinary people. That's nothing for you to get offended about."

  "You got friends at the bank, right?'

  "Yeah," said Sandra, "the girls at the bank are terrific. But Joey, this is exactly my point. Do I ever see them outsida the bank? No. And why not? 'Cause you don't seem to have any interest. The other girls, they see each other. Claire and Zack, they have dinner with Tina and Mike. Betsy, they invite her to the movies, they try to line her up with guys sometimes. But, ya know, they do things as a couple. Me, I get left out 'cause the guy I'm a couple with couldn't care less."

  Joey crossed his arms and listened to the palm fronds scratching against the roof. He was very tempted to flat out agree with Sandra and leave it at that: he couldn't care less. But he wasn't quite sure that was so. Was he thrilled at the idea of sitting in the movies and eating popcorn with these citizens? Was he all excited at the thought of hanging around their backyards and shooting the breeze over a bowl of potato chips? No. But at the same time, he had to admit that maybe he shied away from these ordinary, casual friendships for the same reason he'd shied away from the idea of a job: he just didn't know how they worked. Joey's own kind of friendship-that, he understood. It came from the neighborhood, it was like an outgrowth of family. It came from crime. Crime told you right away who your friends were because it made it so clear who your enemies were. But without family, without enemies, what reason did you have to fall in with this guy rather than that guy? Where was the glue to hold that kind of friendship together? And what did you do-like call up somebody you hardly knew and say, hey, you wanna go bowling or some-thing? It was a mystery. But Joey wasn't ready to admit that out loud.

  "Ya know, Sandra, it's not exactly like all these terrific people have been rolling out the welcome wagon for us."

  Sandra shook her head and flicked cold water off her glass. "Joey, I'll tell you the truth, I don't think you'd notice if the welcome wagon pulled up right in front of you with bells on. You just don't pay attention. Besides, that isn't how it works. It's give-and- take. Ya gotta make an effort."

  "Sandra, I'll be honest with ya." Joey rubbed his chin and ran a hand through his moist hair. "I'm just not sure I see the point. I mean, there's this stuff ya don't especially wanna do with people ya don't especially wanna know, you're pretty sure you're gonna be bored stiff, but still, you're supposed to make an extra effort to have it happen. Why?"

  "Why?" said Sandra. "Why? Because, Joey, it's one of the things ya do to make a life. It's nice to have friends. And it might help you at work-you ever even think of that?"

  He hadn't.

  "Besides," Sandra went on, "you don't know for sure you're gonna be bored. These people do nice things. They go boating. They go snorkeling. They look at fish. Don't laugh, Joey, you might even like it."

  Joey squinted backward through the louvers. The palm fronds looked feathery against the sky. He still wasn't convinced, but he was willing to take Sandra's word that maybe making some local friends was worth the trouble. Only not right now. He reached across and put his hand on her knee. "After Gino leaves."

  "After Gino leaves, what?"

  "After Gino leaves, we'll see, maybe we'll decide to make some friends."

  — 22 -

  That Wednesday evening, Gino, Vicki, and Bert were invited to the compound for dinner. Joey bought stone crab claws because they were the only thing he could find that was more expensive than lobster, and besides, he wanted to give his brother something he could crush. But when he got the claws home, Sandra pointed out a problem.

  "Joey, ya need, ya know, those squeezie things to break the shells. The crackers."

  "We don't have any?"

  "Joey, you know we don't."

  "Hm." He put the white paper bag on the counter, sniffed his fingers, and washed his hands with dish soap. "Well, we got a hammer and some pliers."

  Sandra put one hand on a hip and held the other out with the goofy grace of a charm school headmistress. "Vicki won't find that very elegant."

  "You give a crap how Vicki finds it?"

  "I don't if you don't."

  "And I don't if Gino doesn't. Which means that no one does. Wine inna fridge?"

  At a few minutes after the appointed time of seven-thirty, Bert arrived, resplendent in a big shirt of nubbly lavender linen, monogrammed over the left breast pocket in navy-blue silk. Don Giovanni was twitching in his hand, and as soon as the old man put him down, the dog ran stiffly toward the shrubbery, lifted a leg as scrawny as a chicken wing, and deposited a few drops of urine on a coleus. "Is that rude or what?" said Bert, but he could not quite disguise an expression of wonderment and admiration, as if life with the chihuahua were an unending discovery of the creature's profundity. "Most places he won't do that. I guess he's really getting to feel at home here."

  "We're so flattered," said Sandra. She approached Bert with a plate of olives in her hand, and kissed him on the cheek.

  "Come on," said Joey, "we'll have a glassa wine."

  They sat by the pool and made chitchat amid the faint smell of chlorine and damp towels. Overhead, the leaves shook in the light breeze with a raspy sound like a broom on a sidewalk. After ten minutes or so, Joey got up and fetched more wine; after ten minutes more, the small talk was wearing thin, the way it does when people are afraid they'll use up all their stories before the party actually gets going. By eight o'clock, Bert was sneaking glances at his watch. By ten after, Sandra was wrestling with the impulse to point out that Gino was being extremely inconsiderate, and Joey was secretly depressed at the realization that lateness had long been one of his half brother's many ways of insulting him.

  At eight twenty-five the telephone rang.

  Joey jogged into the cottage, sat down on the edge of the bed, and took a deep breath to collect himself before he picked up the receiver. "Hello."

  "Joey."

  "Gino. Where the hell are you?"

  "I'm inna hospital."

  Joey's sweet and righteous irritation soured instantly to guilt and made the wine go rancid in his belly. "Jesus, Gino, wha' happened? You O.K.?"

  "Me?" He sounded surprised at the question. "I'm fine. It's Vicki."

  Joey knew it was a lousy thing to feel, but he felt relief. "Wha' happened to Vicki?"

  Gino blew some air into the telephone, and Joey could picture him shaking his head and puffing out his heavy purplish lips. "Crazy fuckin' thing, Joey. Just before we're gonna come to your place, she goes out for a walk, ya know, to do some window-shopping. She's standin' there, lookin' inna window, fuckin' moped goes outta control, clips 'er behind the knees, knocks 'er right tru the fuckin' glass."

  "Holy shit. How bad is it?"

  "Bad enough. Not that bad. I mean, she's kinda cut up, took a lotta stitches. And she got a little hysterical, ya know, worryin' about her looks and all. So they give 'er a sedative, put her out for a while. But listen, kid, I gotta ask a favor."

  "Name it," said Joey.

  "Well, I rode out here inna cop car," Gino said.

  "So you want me to come get you? No problem."

  "Nah, I think I oughta be here
when she comes around. But I need ya to bring my car out here for me. I got some extra clothes in it so, like, if I spend the night, ya know."

  Joey paused. He was touched that Gino would give up the comforts of the Flagler House to be at the bedside of a girl like Vicki. Now and then, not often, his half brother surprised him. "Sure, Gino, sure. I'll work it out. I'll be there right away."

  "Thanks, kid," said Gino. "Listen, I'm sorry to fuck up your dinner."

  "Hey," said Joey.

  "And remember, tell the valet the car's for Dr. Greenbaum."

  "Goddamn mopeds," said Bert the Shirt. "I wish they'd ban 'em."

  "Treacherous," said Sandra. "And the noise."

  "Hey," said Joey, "I don't even know where the hospital is."

  "It's out on Stock Island," said the Shirt. "By the dump." He gathered up Don Giovanni and rose. The kind of guy Bert was, he didn't wait to be asked to help. "Come on."

  Sandra glanced through the sliding doors into the cottage, where the table had been set for five. It looked pretty festive, with a big mound of crab claws, a large hammer, a small hammer, two pairs of pliers, and an ice pick. "Come back for dinner, Bert," she said. "At least there's nothing to get cold."

  — 23 -

  Bert d'Ambrosia gently placed his dog in the passenger-side bucket of Gino's rented T-Bird, then snapped on his seat belt and fussed with the mirrors and the tilt on the steering wheel. Joey Goldman looked on through the smashed window of his rusting Cadillac and squirmed. Usually he didn't think of Bert as old. But now, when Joey was in a hurry, he noticed the fidgetiness, the excessive caution, the extra thought and care that went into an old man's preparation for almost any action. Now he tested the emergency brake. Now he clicked the car into gear, and double- checked that the shifter was firmly set in drive. Finally he inched forward through the parking lot of the Flagler House.

  Joey followed him through the narrow streets of Old Town. Bert came to a dead halt at every stop sign and waited a full five seconds before crawling on again. Joey looked out through the top of his roofless car, squeezed his steering wheel, and tried to talk himself out of his antsiness. There was no real reason to hurry. Vicki was asleep; Gino was probably watching television in a waiting room. Was his brother going to be impressed if he got there thirty seconds sooner? Besides, hadn't Joey had enough of the eager-beaver errand-boy routine, wasn't he a little tired of being the guy who arrives panting and sweaty so maybe he'll get a pat on the cheek for trying so hard? Screw it.

  At White Street, Bert turned onto U.S. 1, and Key West instantly stopped being a place and rejoined America. Franchise restaurants and chain motels lined the highway; stacked traffic lights said whose turn it was to pull into the six-plex movies and the supermarket that never closed. License plates from everywhere made it plain that you were nowhere in particular. Bert stayed in the right lane and braked every time someone pulled off the road for a doughnut or a hamburger.

  Key West is separated from Stock Island by the Cow Key Channel, such a narrow cut between the Atlantic and the Gulf that Joey barely noticed he'd gone over a bridge to cross it. Land is cheap on Stock Island; it is Secaucus, New Jersey, to Key West's Manhattan. The help lives there, in trailer parks and in half-painted cinder-block shacks that would not look out of place in the deep Caribbean. People get knifed in bars there, crack is sold on street corners, battered women now and then shoot the hearts out of their boyfriends. The parts of Stock Island not given over to squalor are given over to the public good. There is a junior college at which one can study the repair of outboard engines and get credit for scuba diving. There is the dump, Mount Trashmore, whose incalculable tons of garbage have been heaped into a weirdly splendid pyramid, the summit of which is the highest point in all the Florida Keys. Along the same road that skirts Mount Trashmore is the hospital complex, generously endowed by Key West's most prominent families, the proud descendants of pirates.

  Bert the Shirt turned down this road, and Joey followed. In the dim glow of headlamps and moonlight, he noticed how the old man held his thin neck perfectly still, as though driving a car at thirty miles an hour required his most ferocious attention. Maybe it was this recognition of Bert's frailty that gave Joey a sudden queasy recollection of his mother dying and the smell of the hospital she died in. It was a smell at once overscrubbed and putrid, bracing as ammonia yet stained with the stench of unspeakable fluids and vomit. Please, Joey thought, don't let this hospital smell that way; give it a different brand of floor cleaner at least. Then he wondered if he'd actually see Vicki, and then he was assaulted by a lewdly gruesome image of Vicki's body going through the plate-glass window, and her wrecked and bloody clothes being peeled off her.

  Then, in the shadow of Mount Trashmore and for no apparent reason, Bert the Shirt jammed on the brake, went into a tiny skid, and stopped just a few inches too short for Joey to avoid hitting him. Fenders collided, made a surprisingly soft sound, like the crumpling up of foil, and came away not destroyed but dimpled. The impact was not painful, just rude and startling, as when an unseen and unwelcome friend comes up and slaps you on the back. Joey barely had time to say What the fuck? and to put the Caddy in reverse, before he realized that he could not back up because a dark blue Lincoln had pulled snugly in behind him.

  A big guy in a blue suit was standing next to Joey, and he held a gun that glinted dully in the moonlight. "Get out and hug the fucking car," he said.

  Joey found he couldn't move, and so the big guy helped him. He yanked open the door of the Caddy, grabbed Joey by the front of his shirt, and pulled him up into the street. He turned him with a slap of the gun muzzle across the ribs, then pushed him down across the hood of the car and ran his hand along his sides and up his crotch to check for weapons. Joey just lay there. He supposed he was terrified, but mostly he was confused. The car engine was hot under his chest, and he found this strangely comforting. Lying there, his cheek against the warm gritty steel, he could see another dark blue Lincoln pulled across the road in front of Gino's rented T-Bird, and he could see that Bert the Shirt was also being frisked. Yes, it was very confusing, and all the while Bert's chihuahua was baying and howling like a very small and very shrill coyote.

  — 24 -

  The equipment shed did not smell like garbage, exactly. It smelled worse than that. It smelled like what garbage is on its way to becoming as it rots, as the brown bags soak through with the ooze of putrefying vegetables, as gristle falls off meat bones and turns to a yellowish paste, as bacteria eat through the membranes that have been holding the stink inside of things, letting the foulness into the air like a filthy secret. Added to the humid fumes of decay were the bitter tang of gull shit and the chicken coop reek that came from the riled and oily feathers of the carrion birds. Joey glanced around the room and tried to figure out if anyone else was on the verge of gagging.

  They were seven altogether: Joey and Bert; the two toughs from Duval Street and two of their sturdy colleagues, all of whom, like players in a second-rate orchestra, had suits that almost matched, but not quite; and a small neat man who was clearly the guy in charge. He sat on a scratched metal desk in the middle of the shed. Above him was a single yellow bulb tucked into a dented metal cone, and at his back a frame without a door outlined part of the slope of Mount Trashmore. He wore a pale gray suit over a white silk turtleneck, and even in the feeble light his patent leather pumps could be seen to gleam. His feet were very small, and the shoes' tall heels made his arches look impossibly dainty and high, like the arches of a leprechaun. His black hair was swept straight back on the sides and stood in ridges like the gunwales of a boat; on top his hair was thinner and less perfectly trained. His face was unlined but his eyes looked tired; under them, there were sacs the color of raw liver and the texture of poultry skin.

  " 'Lo, Bert," he said. He said it almost fondly but distractedly, like someone running into an old acquaintance at the racetrack.

  "Charlie," said Bert the Shirt, "where's my dog?"

&nbs
p; "Your dog? Your fucking dog?" Charlie Ponte glanced at his crew as if to say, Didn't I tell ya? "Jesus Christ, Bert, you really have become a fucking old lady."

  "You're right, Charlie. I'm a fucking old lady. But please, do me a favor, have my dog brought in."

  Ponte shrugged and nodded to one of his flunkies, who vanished through the doorless frame. "And you're Joey Delgatto."

  "Joey Goldman."

  Ponte shrugged again. It was his most characteristic gesture, but it didn't mean for him what it meant for most people. For most people, a shrug suggested a kind of helplessness, a lack of knowledge or clarity that stymied them. For Ponte, the shrug meant simply that he didn't know, he didn't care, it made no difference, he would do what he felt like. "I know who you are," he said.

  The flunky returned, carrying Don Giovanni at arm's length, as though he feared some exotic Mexican disease. At a nod from Ponte, he passed the quivering dog to Bert, and Joey could see that the old man's fingers were trembling. He hugged the animal to his belly, and the chihuahua flicked out a white- coated tongue and lapped at his wrist. Now that he had his dog back, Bert was bolder. "Charlie, what the fuck is this all about?"

  Ponte, the only one sitting, settled himself more comfortably on the metal desk, crossed his ankles, and said, "Bert, I called the meeting, I'll ask the fucking questions. For starters, Joey whatever the fuck your name is, whyn't you tell me what the fuck you're doin' out heah, with your brother's car, going to the dump when the fucking dump ain't even open?"

  Joey took a deep breath. He shouldn't have. The smell of rotting garbage became as solid as a piece of half-chewed steak sitting on top of his windpipe. "I wasn't going to the dump," he managed to say. "I was going to the hospital."

  "The hospital," said Charlie Ponte. He mugged toward his crew. "O.K., let's try that one. Why were you going to the hospital?"