Florida straits kwm-1

by Laurence Shames

  –

  "So Joey," said Zack Davidson, "you ever run a boat before?"

  Joey looked down at the water, wiggled the earpieces of his shades, and tried to choke back his long-standing impulse to bullshit, to make it sound like he'd done more than he had and knew more than he knew. "Well, uh," he began, "this one time, up at Montauk, well, uh. No."

  It was after work, around five-thirty, and they were at City Marina, a decidedly no-frills establishment for people with yacht club tastes and a rubber ducky budget. A very democratic place, City Marina was. Very Key West. Clunky houseboats with vinyl siding and TV antennas lay in berths next to dainty sloops whose polished hulls reflected every glint in the water, and also next to the staunch craft of working fishermen, where razor-beaked gulls scraped slime off moldy planking. The marina was nestled in a well-protected cove known as Garrison Bight, whose location underscored Key West's status as an intersection at the end of the world. On its south end, the Bight lapped quietly against the embankment of Highway 1. To the west, narrow channels wound through mangrove flats toward the open Gulf of Mexico; to the north and east, the long arced chain of the Keys stretched away under its freight of bridges and pylons.

  "No." Zack repeated the single syllable, briefly puffed his cheeks out like a trumpeter, and ran a hand through his unvarying hair. He looked down at his little boat, which had never before appeared so frail. It was an eighteen-foot fiberglass skiff with a dark blue Bimini top. A perfect flats boat, it did less well in the ocean swells, where it bounced from wave to wave like a skipping stone and skidded down following seas like a riderless surfboard. The skiff had a sixty-horsepower outboard and an eight-horse auxiliary that was propped next to it on the transom, seeming to nestle up like a duckling to its mother.

  "What's the little motor for?" Joey asked.

  "Emergencies," said Zack. His mouth twisted up as if the word tasted bad. "But hey, first things first. You know how to tie up?"

  Joey gave a nonchalant shrug. He told himself that, in his pink shirt and khaki shorts, he at least looked like he belonged at a marina. "Sure," he said. "I mean, I guess so. Well, not really."

  Zack showed Joey how to make a clove hitch around a post, whtle pelicans banked by and cormorants dried their spread wings on top of pilings. On board, he showed him how to tilt the engine down, hook up the extra gas tank, and close the choke. "You know what the buoys mean, right, the green and the red?"

  "Yeah, sure," said Joey. "It's, like, the red ones are stop and the green ones are go."

  Zack leaned back against the gunwale and played with an ear. His boat was insured, but only for liability, not for being totally trashed by a guy who had no idea what he was doing.

  "Joey, you sure there's no way I can go with you?"

  The novice looked down at the fiberglass floor of the cockpit, toyed with his sunglasses, and shook his head. "Zack, listen, if you're having second thoughts, I understand. I really do. But like I said, this is something I hafta do alone. Believe me, it's not fair to involve anybody else."

  Zack hesitated, though there was really nothing to hesitate about. He'd offered Joey the use of the boat, no strings attached, no explanations demanded, and it would be too undignified to back out now. "Well, let's take 'er out for a test drive, at least. Ya know, once you're away from the dock, it's mostly just like driving a car."

  "Yeah," said Joey, "that's what I figured, like driving a car. That I can do."

  "And swim," said Zack. "You can swim, right?"

  Joey choked back his impulse to bullshit, but not quite soon enough. "Sure," he said. "I can swim. Sort of. Like, a little. Not really. Nuh-uh."

  — 29 -

  Zack told Joey many things, but he failed to get across how different water looks at night. Mainly, it disappears.

  Joey realized this while edging the skiff out of Garrison Bight, just after ten P.M. on an evening without a moon. The shadings and dapplings had vanished from the surface, and all that remained was a featureless blackness shot through here and there with green flashes of phosphorescence. Was Joey even seeing those green flashes? He couldn't be sure, because they looked so much like what happened inside your head when you pressed on your eyeballs. Another thing Joey couldn't be sure of was where the coastline was. In daylight it had been so clear; now the boundary where land met water seemed unhealthily approximate. That flasher over there-was it a buoy or a traffic light? That dark bulk getting closer to him- was it another boat or a stray shred of North America?

  Joey Goldman squinted, leaned so far forward that his head was almost caught between the top of the windshield and the front edge of the Bimini, and squeezed the steering wheel in his sweaty palms. Go under the bridge and hang a left, Zack had told him. It sounded so easy, as easy as driving the Caddy to the grocery store for a carton of milk. But Joey hadn't figured on the eddies that formed near the bridge, the swirling rushes that rendered the wheel almost as useless as if it had come off in his hands, and that spat him broadside, as though in distaste, between the stanchions.

  Stay between the red and green markers, Zack had instructed, but Joey hadn't realized that at night, with only starlight on them, red and green channel markers look very much alike. Joey had expected two ranks of beacons, pointing the way as clearly as the reflectors on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. What he found was a seemingly random array of unlit pilings hammered into muck, winding through grass flats and scattered coral heads. He throttled back, rubbed his eyes, and took a thin comfort from the sound of his engine. The motor noise sounded a lot like a car; it had become the only thing still linking him to the world of the familiar.

  He picked his way to the mouth of the harbor, where the vast Atlantic collides with the huge gyre of the Gulf, and the clapping currents raise ripples whose foamy tops stand in the air like cake frosting. Joey didn't understand why the boat was bouncing so much all of a sudden, why every instant his knees had to find a different angle to stand at. He didn't grasp why he was going more sidewise than forward. He fed more gas to plow through the rip; warm spray hit him in the eye and a big splash soaked his sneaker.

  Then he was past the harbor entrance and out into the Florida Straits.

  Here the water was empty and the shoreline black with the drooping shapes of the Australian pines. Small waves were pushed toward Joey by the breeze, and the boat did belly flops over them, the hull taking off like a low-launched rocket, then smacking back down with a spanking sound, the engine whining as the prop lifted into the foam, then stabbed back into the solider water below.

  For some minutes Joey sliced ahead through the sameness of the waves, and from moment to moment a change was coming over him. There is a wide-awake drunkenness that comes from doing something new and finding that it is not impossible. In the grip of that brave giddiness, nothing seems impossible, and people look for ways to prove this joyful lunacy to themselves. They take dares, jump from rooftop to rooftop, surpass themselves and usually survive but sometimes die excited. Joey suddenly remembered a conversation he'd had up north, sitting over an espresso with his buddy Sal. Joey, you're gonna be like all alone down there, Sal had warned. Maybe I like that idea, Joey had said, with swagger, but in his own mind the accent was on the maybe. But here he was, in a boat, in the ocean, at night, without even experience for company, about as alone as a person can be, and whaddya know, he did like it. He liked it the way some people like icy showers or large amounts of hot sauce. It set him up. It got him ready. Ready for what? He couldn't have said and it didn't matter. Just ready. Ready was enough.

  A few minutes before eleven o'clock, Joey climbed onto the private dock of the Flagler House with two lines in his hand, and tied four different attempts at knots in each of them. Then he took a moment to get his land legs back and look at the hotel. The building was long, squat, and heavy, a checkerboard of lights turned on and lights turned off. A cool blue glow hovered over the swimming pool, and on the palm-strewn beach torches were still burning, the remnants of a Caribbean Ni
ght cookout or some such entertainment. Joey did not yet have a plan of approach. Something inside him knew that in a place where most people arrive by car, rented cars no less, the man who arrives by boat is marked as special and should stroll in like he owns the joint. But he could not be sure that Charlie Ponte had not put a lookout in the lobby; or that his thugs outside didn't have a sight line to the elevators, or that Ponte hadn't bribed someone on the staff to do his watching for him. Getting caught consorting with Gino-with Dr. Greenbaum-would no doubt win him another and final trip to Mount Trashmore.

  So Joey slowly and vigilantly walked the length of the pier. On the beach, busboys were still clearing chafing dishes from long tables whose cloths were splattered with barbecue grease and melted sherbet. Their soiled uniforms tinged orange by torchlight, they loaded the glinting pans onto trolleys and wheeled them away. Joey watched where they went: along a narrow concrete path that lost itself in a clutch of palms, then reappeared at the back end of the poolside bar and curved off again toward what seemed to be a descending ramp near the far end of the building.

  Discreetly, trying to look like any other tourist who hoped not to appear lost, bored, or caged, Joey meandered toward the ramp. Skirting the pool, he heard vapid hotel lounge music filtering through beaded curtains; under the thatched roof of the poolside bar, a blender, sounding very much like a tiny, frenzied outboard, was frothing up some dubious milk shake of a cocktail for what seemed to be the only couple left outside. The bartender gave Joey a friendly nod, an offer of conviviality in sympathy for his being all alone. Joey smiled the shy smile of a passerby who knows that he will be forgotten the moment he has passed.

  At the head of the ramp, there was a pair of ocher- painted limestone posts, and on the right-hand post was a sign that said Staff Only. Joey paused. His pants legs were damp from the ocean spray; his left sneaker was wet. His thick black hair had been blown tautly back by the wind and was coarsened by the airborne salt. His hands still tingled from the vibration of the boat's wheel, and he still didn't know what he'd say to his brother.

  He started down the incline.

  At the base of it was a set of swinging doors, their brushed-steel surface marred from the push of trolleys and the banging of trays. Joey went through and found himself in a long narrow hallway lit by bare bulbs in yellow wire baskets. On the left, through a broad open doorway, was the kitchen; above the din of pans and dishes clattering, the singsong of Spanish banter rang between the cinder-block walls. Joey slipped past, walking quick and silent to where the corridor turned right and led to a bank of elevators. Unfortunately, a room service waiter was already there. He was thin and blond, had a cart in front of him with a champagne bucket on it, and was dressed, absurdly, in a tuxedo. Joey caught him picking his nose, which seemed to make the waiter feel defensive.

  "May I help you?" he asked accusingly.

  Joey opened his mouth well before an idea had sparked. But he was cruising on that insane and blessed sense of readiness, and he said the first thing that came into his mind. "Mafia."

  "Excuse me?" said the waiter. His pale eyebrows lifted, he swallowed so that his bow tie did a little dance, and he seemed by reflex to be wiping his thumb on the satin stripe of his pants leg.

  "The linens, the labor situation," Joey said. "It's like, ya know, a spot check. They treatin' ya right, or what?"

  "Oh, fine," said the waiter. "Fine." He looked down at the napkins on his cart. He hoped he hadn't grabbed a frayed one.

  The elevator arrived. The employee stood aside for Joey to enter first, though it was unclear whether he did this out of protocol or to avoid showing his back. He rolled his cart out, very quickly, at the second floor, and Joey continued to the fourth, the top. Gino had a list for hotel rooms, as he had for everything. Top floor, water side-that was the best, and so that, of course, was what Gino had bragged he had. Only the best for Joey's older brother. The best of every-thing, so he could remind himself that he was doing good.

  — 30 -

  "Who is it?" said Gino Delgatto, in the rough yet somehow mousy voice of a man who has his door double-locked, with the night chain on, and his sweaty hand wrapped around the warm butt of a gun he clutches by habit but in whose power to protect him he has stopped believing.

  "It's me. It's Joey."

  There was a long pause. Gino had now been holed up in his room for almost two full weeks, and his life had become so radically uneventful, his mind and body so muddily torpid, that the channels in his brain had silted over. Any piece of information now struck him as dauntingly new; any decision, such as when and for whom to open his door, required all the concentration he could possibly muster.

  "Whaddya want?" he said at last.

  "I wanna save your sorry ass. Lemme in."

  Again there was a pause.

  "You alone?"

  "Totally."

  There was a sound like surrender in the dry slide of the dead bolt, the cheerless tinkle of the night chain. Gino opened the door just wide enough for a man to slip through, and stood there framed for a moment in the slice of yellow light. He was wearing a hotel bathrobe and he looked like hell. He'd put on ten pounds during his days of doing nothing but eating and drinking, and the increment was enough to push his barely handsome features over the border into brutishness. His fattened cheeks rose into little pads that accentuated the piggishness of his eyes. His nose seemed somehow to have softened and broadened, and was spreading across his face like melting clay. Deep lines at the edges of his mouth gave his jaw the slightly spooky, hinged look of a puppet's, and his skin had the stretched oiliness of someone who is thoroughly constipated. But he was still strong. He grabbed Joey by the arm and yanked him into the room so that the two men were standing chest to chest. Was Gino giving his half brother a hug, or just trying to get the door shut and double-locked as fast as possible?

  "Anyone see you?" he asked. Their faces were close and Joey smelled the bourbon.

  "No one that matters."

  "How'd ya manage?"

  "I came by boat."

  Gino stepped back and took a moment to process this new fact. He seemed to see in it an opportunity to get on top of the situation by his time-honored tactic of patronizing Joey. But for this he needed an ally, so he shot a facetious glance at Vicki. She was lying in bed, the sheet pulled up so that only the top acre of her chest was exposed. She'd been leafing through a fashion magazine, which she now placed facedown on top of her boobs; the bent spine made a kind of tent for her cleavage. Gino's glance was meant to say, Ain't he clever-for a nobody? and while he was flashing that look at Vicki, he said to Joey, "Fuck you know about driving a boat?"

  "Enough to get heah. It needed doing and I did it, didn't I, Gino?"

  Gino sat slowly on the edge of the bed, as if something in Joey's tone had grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him down. Absently, he noticed that his gun was still in his hand. He slid it along the sheet and tucked it under a pillow. "Drink, Joey?" He motioned toward a low table where the dirty dinner dishes were scattered and a two-thirds empty bottle of Jack Daniel's was standing like a monument. On the dresser next to the table, the television flashed the eleven o'clock news with the sound turned off.

  Joey shook his head, settled into a vinyl chair, and took a moment to rearrange his damp trouser leg so the wet part wouldn't lie against his thigh. "You're a selfish prick, you know that, Gino?"

  Gino absorbed the comment like an exhausted heavyweight eating one more jab. "You come here just to tell me that?"

  "I come here to get you outta my town and outta my life. But first, we talk. You coulda got me killed the other week. You even give a shit about that?"

  Gino wrapped his meaty hands around the edge of the mattress and looked down between his knees. "I'm sorry, kid. I was in a bind."

  "In a bind?" Joey pulled himself forward by the arms of his chair. "In a bind? You fucking jerk. You're in a bind, so the whole resta the world can go to hell? What if Bert dropped dead? What if Sandra wa
s with me?"

  Gino took a deep breath that seemed to cost him a lot of effort. He couldn't help looking back over his shoulder at Vicki. Girlfriends were not supposed to hear this kind of thing. It messed with their respect. "Listen, kid, I'm sorry. I fucked up. 'Zat what you wanna hear me say?"

  "Yeah, Gino, that's exactly what I wanna hear you say. And now that you've said it, I want some explanations. Like why the fuck are you still here? You almost get me killed so you can run away, then you don't even manage to run away."

  "Joey, Joey," said Gino, in a tone the younger brother knew well. It was the tone he used when he wanted to make it clear that he, Gino, was the planner, the thinker, and Joey, like an army grunt, had neither reason nor right to ask the why of things. "There's more to it than you know about."

  "Wanna bet?" Joey snapped. "It's about three million dollars in Colombian emeralds that disappeared from Coconut Grove."

  A wave of slow surprise moved across Gino's swollen face. It pulled at his mouth and made him mumble. "Ponte tell ya that? Bert tell ya?"

  "Never mind. But now I want your side of it. From the top."

  Gino crossed his legs, uncrossed them, slapped his knee, and grunted. "Sure you don't want a drink?"

  "You have one, Gino. You need it. I don't."

  The older brother got up and lumbered toward the bourbon bottle. Joey looked at Vicki, lying just at the fringe of a yellow pool of lamplight. In some ways, oddly, she looked better than she had before. She'd washed the tease out of her hair, and while it was now lank, thin, and coarse as straw, at least it looked like part of her. Without the foot-high helmet on her head, her features looked less pinched, and without their labored paint job, her eyes even had a kind of softness. Her mouth seemed calm, though Joey could not tell if she had broken through to some extreme form of patience or had become quietly deranged.