Florida straits kwm-1

by Laurence Shames

  Gino fanned invisible bugs from in front of his face. "Joey, man, this can't be right. It's like we're halfway inna fucking jungle." Black leaves and low branches drank up the sound of the engine.

  Ahead, on a nubbly, tilted wooden stake, was what might have been another marker. Joey edged toward it. Behind it loomed a seemingly endless wall of mangrove that gave off a smell of sulfur and anchovies kept too long in tin. But at this second stake, the channel took a sudden dogleg left, and the new angle revealed an overhung cut between two islets. The cut was so narrow that waxy mangrove leaves scratched against the skiffs hull as the little craft slipped through.

  Then there was a clearing in which the still water gleamed black and flat as a lake.

  At the edge of this cove was a falling-down dock.

  Its outermost pilings had crumpled like the forelegs of a crippled horse, and its planks had come unhinged like the keys of a broken xylophone. On shore, half grown over with vines and shrubs, was the rotting structure of what once had been an office or store; next to it was a gas pump with no paint left on it, then, propped on cinder blocks, a rusty mobile home with smashed windows and a guano-caked TV antenna.

  "Here's your marina," Joey said. "Don't feel bad you couldn't find it. And there's your boat."

  He pointed to a black hulk tied up to the far side of the dock. Made of ancient planking, with thick sides and a small, square pilothouse that had lost both its windshield and its roof, it seemed to be floating only out of habit. Joey pulled the skiff closer. In small flecks of brittle paint caught between splinters of wood, he could just make out the vessel's name: Osprey.

  If Gino Delgatto had had a tail, it would have been slapping wildly against his buttocks. As it was, he paced the skiff with avid steps, making it rock as though in a gale. "Holy shit, Joey! Tree million bucks. There it is! It's mine! Oh baby, I can taste it! Come on, willya, move the boat closer, lemme get on there and grab the fucking stones."

  Joey didn't. He idled some twenty feet away and held steady at that tantalizing distance while a cloud of mosquitoes formed around them and his brother tried to jerk the skiff closer with body english. "Hol' on a second, Gino. We're not just grabbin' the emeralds. We're takin' the whole boat."

  On Gino's red and beefy face, the features all pushed forward, as if his mouth and nose were racing to the stones. The more his blood rushed to the surface, the better the mosquitoes liked it. "Joey, what I want with the fucking boat? Just lemme get the emeralds and let's get the fuck outta here."

  Joey crossed his arms. "Gino, did you or did you not just swear we're doing things my way?"

  "Sure, kid, yeah. But I don't see the fucking point-"

  "Gino, use your head. The guys that got whacked- you got no waya knowing what Ponte got out of 'em before he clipped 'em. Am I right? Ya gotta figure he squeezed 'em pretty good. So maybe they gave it up that the stones are on a boat. Maybe they even told 'im where, and Ponte couldn't find it, just like you couldn't."

  "So?" Gino crushed a mosquito that had landed in his ear; it squirted some of his blood. He never once took his eyes off the junked fishing boat.

  "So, what if sometime Ponte does find the boat, and the stones ain't on it? Who's he gonna figure got there first? You, Gino. So you'll be fucked all over again. This way, we take the whole boat, there's nothin' to find, it's done with."

  Gino scratched, thought, and let out a deep breath that blew some bugs around. "O.K., kid," he said. "You're right."

  "I know I'm right," Joey pressed. "I been thinkin' this through for weeks. So Gino, willya do me a favor? Stop questioning every little goddamn thing and do like I tell ya."

  Gino nodded through a faceful of mosquitoes. Anything to get his hands on the emeralds. Besides, what did it cost him to take orders from Joey in a place where no one could see and no one would ever know?

  "Awright," Joey resumed as he clicked the engine into gear and edged closer. "So here's what we're gonna do. The skiff, we're gonna leave it here. We're gonna take the little motor off the back, put it on the junker, and use it to get the junker outta heah. We're gonna tow the rowboat, then put the little motor onna rowboat to get back, then pick up the skiff. Got it?"

  Gino hadn't got it. He wasn't listening. He was thinking about emeralds and swatting mosquitoes, and had no attention left for other things.

  Joey mustered a tone of command. "So Gino, don't just fucking stand there. Take the little motor off."

  Gino unclamped the auxiliary engine and hoisted it over the Osprey 's splintery gunwales as Joey softly clunked the skiff against its side. But once Gino actually reached the treasure boat, his fragile patience let go all at once and he went blind with lust for the emeralds. He leaped out of the skiff, sending it scudding sideways, and clambered onto the Osprey 's damp and spongy deck. His soft imported loafers skidded on the slimy planks and he dove obliviously toward the roofless pilothouse. By the pale but steady light of the moon, he searched out the board on which an X had supposedly been marked. For some moments he couldn't find it, and seemed inclined to rip out his eyes for their failure.

  Then he spotted a smudge as of damp powder. He fell to his knees in front of it and tried to pry up the plank with his fingernails. A soft unwholesome grit of moldy wood and the remains of ancient ants and spiders covered his fingers. Then, from a hole at the base of the steering console, not two feet from where Gino knelt, there emerged a rat the size of a dachshund. For an unspeakable moment the rodent's beady red eyes met those of the mafioso from New York. Gino could see the gleam of mucus on its pointy black nose, which was twitching in terror. The rat scratched at the floor, hunkered low as a snake, then, with desperate courage, it charged along the only escape route it had. It darted over Gino's hands, its damp, rank fur obscenely tickling his wrists. Gino, recoiling, flicked his arms and caught the rodent in the underbelly. It rose in a macabre claws-out somersault, landed on Gino's Achilles tendon, and scampered away. Gino went back to pawing at the plank.

  Finally it lifted. Nothing was visible in the dark, narrow gap, but far down in the bilges, fetid water was dully gleaming. Gino plunged his hand in, and slime stretched out along the sleeve of his silk jacket. The slime had a skin on it like burned milk, it clung to his wrist like a condom. His fingers found a small burlap sack, and squeezed it hard.

  Still kneeling, his pulse throbbing in his mosquito- covered neck and his lips stretched tight across his teeth, he tugged at the sack's drawstring, then poured into his palm a sampling of uncut, unpolished Colombian emeralds.

  They didn't look like much, just green rocks that didn't shine, and were coated with a rough white dust that seemed to have bubbled out from inside them. They varied in size, the biggest like brazil nuts, but nubbly as potatoes. Gino closed his hand around them and shook them softly like a favorite set of dice.

  "You happy now?"

  Joey was standing on the deck, leaning against the rickety frame of the pilothouse. He'd secured the skiff and put the small outboard on the Osprey's rotting transom. "You got your stones. You happy?"

  The words seemed to bring Gino out of his trance of avarice. He glanced up over his shoulder, and for an instant he seemed abashed, as if it had dawned on him that he must look like a real horse's ass, kneeling like in church, slime all over his hands, elbow-deep in crud. Only now did it register that a rat had run on him, that he had touched its fur and felt the yielding of its gut, and he choked back a sudden nausea. But what the hell, he had the emeralds, it was worth it, worth everything. He grinned. "Fuck yeah, Joey. Hell yeah."

  "Good," the younger brother said. "Now put 'em back, and put the plank back on."

  Gino swiveled on his knees. "Fuck for?"

  Joey showed him the tired look of a teacher stuck for too many years with the dumb kids. "Coast Guard, Gino. They patrol. For drugs. But a bagga emeralds on a crummy old fishing boat-Gino, how's it gonna look?"

  — 35 -

  "So Joey, wha'?"

  The sodden hulk of the Osprey had scratch
ed its way through the narrow cut and lumbered out of the Sand Key channel, Zack Davidson's little eight-horse motor laboring mightily to push it through the lapping water and pull the paintless rowboat behind. It was two a.m. The Big Dipper, dimmed by a bright moon, loomed in the spring sky. It was the only constellation Joey recognized because it was the only one piercing enough to have occasionally penetrated the gummy and overlit summer air of Queens. He and Sandra used to go up on the roof sometimes to look at it and neck.

  " 'Bout five miles out," Joey said, "there's a little island. We're gonna ditch the boat there, scrape the name off, bust it up as good as we can. Then we come back and you're outta heah."

  Gino nodded, though he was paying only half-attention. His body was on deck but his brain was in the bilges. He tried to recapture the feel of wet emeralds in his palm.

  For some minutes they didn't speak, then Gino asked absently, "How you know that?"

  "It's onna chart." Joey was leaning against the Osprey's stern, steering with the stem of the engine.

  Gino made no response. He didn't much care what a chart was and he didn't want to give Joey a chance to show off what he knew. So he kept quiet and fantasized. He pictured what a sport he'd be when he cashed in his three million dollars' worth of rocks. He saw himself in an immaculate mohair suit, spreading smiles and fifties around crowded restaurants and nightclubs. He'd buy Vicki something nice. Discreetly, he'd lay some money on the widows of Vinnie Fish and Frankie Bread.

  Joey steered the boat and watched his half brother swelling into the role of big shot.

  Gino gave a self-contented little smile. He seemed to be imagining the pride and affection he'd bask in when he presented some of the stolen money to his father. He liked money, Vincente Delgatto did; he liked the rituals of people forking it over. And Gino liked when his father patted his cheek.

  But then Gino frowned. With a flash of secret shame such as assails a person who has somehow forgotten a dear old friend at Christmas and knows deep down there's a reason why, he realized he had left out Joey. Jesus. Without Joey, he'd still be in his hotel room with his gums wrapped around a bourbon bottle; the emeralds would still be sitting at that falling- down dock with nothing but mosquitoes and rats for company.

  "Kid," he began. After the long interval of silence but for the whine of the motor, the sound seemed out of place, intrusive. "Listen, I gotta give credit where credit is due. Ya did good, Joey. The way ya thought things through, I got a lotta respect for that. And I wanna show my appreciation."

  Joey looked off at the glinting water, the steady stars. Gino didn't exactly sound like his old self, and Joey figured he was rehearsing his role as the bigger cheese he was about to become. But now Gino had put himself in a position where he had to name a number. A guy like Gino, if he talked about appreciation, gratitude, he couldn't just leave it vague like that, he had to make it a specific amount. And this was difficult. It wasn't that Gino was cheap. It was more complicated than that. Whatever he gave to Joey didn't only mean there was less for himself; it also meant that Joey would be a little bit of a big shot on his own, and the real question was, how much of a big shot could Gino stand for him to be?

  The older brother cleared his throat and ran a hand over his chin. Then, in a gesture he'd seen his father make in similar situations, he yanked down on the collar of his shirt as if to give it a military straightness. "Ten thousand, Joey. For you. For helpin' out. Howzat sound?"

  Some questions just cannot be answered, and this was one of them. Besides, Gino wasn't asking it to open a discussion but only as a set-up to be thanked. Joey was not inclined to thank him. He was neither surprised nor unsurprised by the paltriness of his brother's offer, and he decided he would not regard it as an insult, just as a matter of bookkeeping. That's what it came down to with Gino, after all-bookkeeping, the totting up of gyps and bonuses, the usual disappointments and very occasional windfalls of regard. "That's fine, Gino. Whatever you think."

  Gino started to speak again, but just as the air was pushing past his throat, he realized he had nothing to say. In some dark recess of his mind he suspected he was being a cheap and jealous son of a bitch. He filtered this suspicion through his well-developed machinery for making himself seem right, and it came out looking like Joey was being very ungrateful in the face of his largess. But then, Joey had always been like that-grumpy even, or especially, when Gino was trying to help him out. The kid just couldn't accept generosity.

  The Osprey plowed on slowly through the Florida Straits. Behind it, the land had fallen away until the mangroves looked like nothing more than dead spots on the ocean, and the dim lights of U.S. 1 appeared as stars bellied down to the horizon. The moon was nearing its zenith and its light was now a stark white that seemed to throw a sphere of steam around it. The breeze came in soft warm puffs from the south; ahead, the water was nearly flat, and then, perhaps a half mile away, just beyond a buoy that blinked a mesmerizing red, it broke into curious moonlit ripples, as if whipped by some unfelt freshening wind. Gino yawned. Joey dodged the contagiousness of it by looking away and taking a big breath of salty air.

  Now, it has often been observed that in the midst of a terrible accident, time slows down and disaster unfolds with an almost pornographically explicit sense of close-up detail. When a boat runs up on coral, just the opposite is true. Everything that has been quietly humming along to the languid rhythm of calm water is instantly, bafflingly accelerated, as if the entire racing violence of the ocean were sluicing through the crazy currents in the shallows.

  The Osprey was laboring along at a three-knot crawl when she first hit bottom.

  Even so, her momentum carried her forward so that the stern came up like the backside of a bucking horse and the suddenly airborne propeller revved like a jet. When the creaking hull came back down, it listed to starboard, took a groaning bump, then turned its nose broadside to the chop.

  "What the fuck?" screamed Gino, spreading out his arms and trying desperately to hold on to a gunwale.

  "Fuck," said Joey. He was still trying to steer, but his efforts counted for nothing. The eddies carried the soft wooden boat from one coral head to another. The doomed craft slammed, caromed, and flew on helplessly toward the next blow; it was as if giant, stone-hard hands were playing volleyball with it. Overhead, the stars wheeled as the boat was tossed. Gino's thin shoes gave him no purchase on the slimy boards, and he slid around the deck as if on skates. The Osprey reared up, dove nose first, then, on the return bounce, slammed the shaft of the little outboard into unyielding coral. The force cracked the already rotten transom; it sheared off like wet cardboard. The motor, still attached, still running, dove backward like a scuba diver, punched a hole in the water, and vanished.

  "Gino, man, we're fucked."

  "My stones," he yelled. "Jesus Christ, my stones."

  The older brother scrambled forward toward the pilothouse. A vicious, twisting collision with the bottom sent him sprawling, his face against the slimy planks, his ribs compressed against the side. He took a breath that burned, then got up on his hands and knees and tried crawling toward his fortune. He was hallway over the threshold of the roofless cabin when the Osprey came crashing down onto a spike of coral that poked into it like a drill. Water came spraying up through the pierced deck like oil from a gusher. Gino crawled over the rupture, and the hissing water seared his skin. He groped toward the loose plank, and a head-on crash sent him skidding face first into the base of the console where the rat had nested. Lying there, smelling brine and rodent, Gino heard or rather felt a profound and ungodly noise. It was a slow but all-encompassing vibration, a loose rumble as from the bowels of the earth. The boat was breaking in half.

  Still pinned on his belly, Gino strained to look back over his shoulder. Through the pilothouse doorway, he could see that the back half of the Osprey was at a different angle. The craft was folding, like it was on a hinge. He pushed off with all his strength and scuttled backward like a crab. He made one last despera
te grope toward the plank that hid his millions, but came away with nothing except a pencil-size splinter that tore through a waterlogged finger. Then he felt his ankles being grabbed. Joey pulled him backward, yanked his rigid body over a widening fissure in the middle of the boat and launched him toward the stem, where warm salt water was already pooling, welcoming the Osprey to the bottom of the sea.

  "Quick," said Joey. "Inna rowboat."

  Without quite knowing how he got there, Gino Delgatto found himself over the side, his hands clinging to the sundering timbers, his feet groping for the dry boards of the dinghy. A moment later, Joey followed. He took the oars just as the Osprey was going down. The bow went first. Like a dying animal, it seemed to give its head one final shake of defiance or supplication, then slid silently into the deep water at the far side of the coral canyon. Somewhat anti-climactically, the stern had yet to follow. Thinly attached by the few boards still intact, it had to be pulled down like a ham actor reluctant to leave the stage, and gave off an unseemly sucking sound as it finally submerged.

  Joey needed to row only a couple hundred yards to escape the ferocious turbulence of the reef, and the instant he'd done so, the water was again so placid, the night air so still and coddling that it would have been easy to imagine that the wreck of the Osprey was only a quick nightmare, a hellish vision from a brief and otherwise pleasant nap.

  Except the boat was gone. The motor was gone. The emeralds were gone.