Beyond that certain point, yes, quantity ceased to have any meaning, but up to that certain point it represented a pattern of living so at odds with her background she did not believe she could ever accept it without a sense of wonder and unreality.
The leased car was down there in the parking space underneath the building. If it developed any odd noise, or ceased to run perfectly in any way, one phoned and they came and took it and brought another. And there was always the limousine service, of course. If you bought a suit which did not really please you after one or two wearings, you gave it to Goodwill and bought another. When Lee ordered your birthday ring by telephone, a courier brought it down from New York. Mrs. Schmidt, that competent Swiss, did all the buying, cleaning, and almost all the cooking. Lee’s bank received all their mail, paid all bills, accepted all income and forwarded the personal mail. They never had to stand in lines, wait in waiting rooms, bicker with bureaucrats, or suffer the attentions of fools and boors. Best of all was never having to think about money at all, about how much or how little for this or for that. It was there, and this life-style could not use it all as fast as it accumulated, so you never thought of what anything cost anymore.
10
COMMISSIONER JUSTIN DENNIVER sauntered into Billy Scherbel’s office in the east wing of the Palm County Courthouse, closed the door behind him, beamed at Billy, who was on the phone, and settled into one of the chairs facing the desk.
Billy was saying, “… there’s a set procedure everybody has to go through, Mrs. Johnson. I’m not saying it’s actually required, but I do think you’d be better off having an attorney check into this for you. No, there wouldn’t be any point in talking to the County Manager at this stage of the game. Right. Thanks for calling.”
Scherbel hung up and grimaced and said, “She wants a platted road vacated. Right now. Kids riding trail bikes up and down it, and she and her neighbors want to fence it off.”
“How’s Bets?”
“She’s coming along fine. They got her walking up and down the hall already.”
“That fast! Glad to hear it.”
“I’ll tell her tonight you asked about her, Justin.”
“Lew Traff get hold of you?”
“Sure did.”
“What did he have in mind, anyway?”
“You sure you don’t know, Commissioner?”
“Now why the hell would I be asking you if I knew?”
“Well, don’t get in an uproar. I just thought he’d maybe mentioned the two items to you before he came to me. What it is, both items are on that Silverthorn Tract on Fiddler Key, on the bay behind Golden Sands. Both come from Al Borne over at Palm Coast National Bank, in the trust department, the bank being executor for the estate of Becky Silverthorn. First, to extend the permit to clear the land for another year, it running out the end of this month, and second, a minor work permit they want to do some dredge and fill. Those permits would go along with the property in case of transfer, and it’s obvious Marty Liss would be the one to follow through on it, him having the option to buy.”
“Billy, friend, you seem defensive.”
“Well, it’s on account of about nine thousand people jumping the hell all over me if I ramrod these things, Justin. Now damn it all anyway.”
“Listen, now. What I want you should do, Billy, is come in with a whole list of stuff for the meeting next Thursday, and you have those two buried in the middle. You make Palm Coast National the applicant, and you give the government lot line numbers and parcel numbers. I don’t want to hear the name Silverthorn in any part of it, hear?”
“Yes, but—”
“I know, I know. You got those environment freaks all poised to jump all over you for recommending it and us commissioners for passing on it. What I’ll do, I’ll question you first. I’ll ask you is there any big deals and you say it’s a lot of small stuff, and I’ll move we let you go down the list and we’ll vote them all to once to save time. Jack Dorsey will give me a quick second, and we got me, Jack and Steve Corbin for the three aye votes. All you got to do is drone through the list in that go-to-sleep voice of yours and turn in just the one copy for the record.”
“What if Mick picks up on it?”
“On the agenda, we’ve got the extension on the Crestway sewage disposal plant coming up before we get to you, Billy, so that newspaper son of a bitch, Mick Rhoades, is going to be over at the press table so busy writing that story in his head, he’ll never pick up on those two little things you’ll have stuck in the middle of a long list.”
“Jesus, it makes me pretty nervous. It really does. I get this indigestion all the time lately. Honest to God, Justin, the favors we do Martin Liss, I’d like to see a little gratitude.”
“Figure it this way. We’re doing a job for the community. The odds are that Marty won’t go ahead with his project anyway. Times are too rough, costs too high. Would we want to be responsible, you and me, for loading on the straw that breaks his back and makes him give up on it? The building trades here are really hurting, Billy.”
“I know. I know. But what they want to do isn’t any minor work permit. They aren’t scouring any little channel, Justin. They’re building a goddam yacht harbor. You want to see the drawings?”
“No. And don’t bring them to the meeting. Hold on to them. If anybody thinks to ask for them for the record, say you’ll submit them later and apologize for forgetting.”
“For what I do for you, I could go to jail.”
Justin Denniver stood up and grinned at Billy Scherbel and shook his head. “Hell, we could all get put in the slammer for a lot of things, Billy. Take that Conference on County Administration over in Orlando in January. That little piece you hustled in the bar and took to the room, she hadn’t even turned sixteen.”
Billy paled and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Go on! She had to be twenty or twenty-one.”
Wearing the same merry smile, Denniver said, “It would be some kind of laugh, wouldn’t it, if someday somebody showed up with a certified copy of her birth certificate and a signed and notarized statement from that kid.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m not trying to tell you a thing, Billy. I’m just saying this is no time in our lives we ought to worry about jail.”
“She was at least twenty.”
“If you say so.”
“Justin, you weren’t even there!”
Denniver winked at him. “Her name was Cindy Martinez and she was born and raised in Ybor City, and she was wearing yella jeans and a white top, and you took her to Room Thirty-eight in the Tropic Winds Motel, baby.”
“Jesus Christ! What are you trying to do to me?”
“Do? Nothing. What’s the matter with you, Scherbel? We’ve always got along in the past and we’ll keep getting along in the future, as far as I can tell. I don’t fault a man for chasing tail when he’s out of town on business. You take care, hear. And give my best wishes to Bets. She’s one wonderful woman.”
“How do you know about Cindy Martinez?”
“Cindy? Cindy? Who you talking about, boy? I never heard of her. See you Thursday.”
• • •
Frank Branhammer sat in his living room, clenching and unclenching his big red fists. He had a white crew cut a quarter inch long, broken veins in his broad red face, faded tattoos on his forearms, and a belly that rested in his lap like a semi-inflated beach ball tucked under his white T-shirt. His wife, Annabelle, sat beside him on the couch. She was a spare bony woman with a long sallow face, frightened eyes behind gold-wire glasses, sucked-in lips, and hair dyed sulfur yellow.
David Dow, representing the Condominium Association, sat facing them across a marble coffee table, wishing that Stan Wasniak had been assigned Apartment 3-G. With an inward sigh he tried once again to slip past the man’s uncompromising hostility.
“Please, Mr. Branhammer. The five of us accepted the responsibility of running the Association.”
“You can run it up your ass, fellow.”
“Frank!” the wife said.
“Keep out of this, Annie,” Frank said.
“I will put the facts in the simplest possible way, Branhammer. You will make up the hundred and sixty-six sixty deficit just like everybody else has to, and you will pay monthly maintenance of a hundred and sixty-eight fifty from now on, like everybody else.”
“It’s like you don’t hear me, fellow. I do no such goddam thing. No little prick spent his whole life in an office is going to walk in here and tell Frank Branhammer the rules is changed. From the time I was seventeen, I worked hard all day every day. All my life I sweated. Mother and me raised three kids. One boy got killed in the army. The other boy got drowned surfing in California. The girl got killed when the car she was riding in went off the road and hit a tree. Killed her and three other girls, bam. There’s nobody left to leave anything to except Annie’s brother I wouldn’t give house room to. A drunk. I decided we’d both worked hard all our lives, lost our kids, we’d live nice the time we got left. On the pension and the Social Security. I bought this goddam place in good faith, fellow. I figured it up how we can afford eighty-one fifty a month maintenance, and that’s what it was, and that is what it is going to be, and not one dime more, and I’ll pay it on time.”
Dow said in exasperation, “I’m not your landlord, for God’s sake. I represent you. Read your Declaration of Condominium, for God’s sake. In black and white it says that when the costs go up, the assessment goes up, and you either pay it or we go to court and get a lien against your apartment.”
“In a rat’s ass you represent me! I represent me. All my life there’s been little lightweight pricks like you coming around with big words, trying to screw me out of anything they could get. Go get your fucking lien, and then see if you can figure out what to do next. Anybody comes around here making to throw us out of our home we paid for, I throw them through that fucking glass there and over the fucking railing, and that goes for you too if you come back here with more of this shit, fellow.”
Dow stood up, shrugged, and said, “Well … I tried.”
Branhammer stood up. “Need any help getting out through that door?”
Dow took two quick steps and then his pride slowed him down. He turned and nodded at the couple before he closed the door behind him. He leaned against the wall and took out his notebook. He put a check mark beside the name and apartment number. He hesitated until he found the right words to express Branhammer’s decision. No way, he wrote. He told himself he ought to resign. The thought came to him six times a day. But if he resigned, who would step in? And if Golden Sands went down the drain, what would the rest of retirement be like?
Annie Branhammer was huddled over. She saw Frank’s big slippers standing in front of her.
“Stop bawling!” he said.
“We … we … we’re going to lose this place.”
“Don’t you never believe stuff like that!”
“All I wanted—I told you—I wanted some little place on an acre of land so I could grow stuff and have an orange tree. I told you.”
“Jesus Christ. Here we got every kind of convenience, Mother. And tennis and the community room and the pool and the beach.”
“All my life I been scared of water and you know it. It could have been any kind of shacky little place long as there was garden land around it. And we could have brung Duke down with us instead of you have him put away. He was only ten. He had good years left. Everything I ever love keeps dying off.”
“Shut up, Mother.”
“We’re going to lose it. I’m telling you. That’s a nice man came here. You talked so ugly to him. So ugly.”
“Stop your bawling, will you?”
“Nothing has ever turned out good for me and I shouldn’t get so foolish as to hope anything ever will, not in my whole life, not ever.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
“You wouldn’t listen to a word I said and you just don’t care what I want, ever. It’s always what Frank Branhammer wants. I got no rights at all. Where are you going?”
“I’m going to put on some shoes and go walk on the beach. You get on my nerves lately something terrible.”
“If you walk south, Frank, we need a loaf of bread and a half-dozen eggs.”
“Okay, okay, okay!”
11
THE SAND DOLLAR BAR was on the southern outskirts of Beach Village, beyond the Beach Mall Shopping Plaza, on the left-hand side of Beach Drive for anyone heading south down Fiddler Key. It had been a private residence, one of the oldest structures on the key, a high-shouldered frame building made of hard pine and cypress. Road widening had brought Beach Drive to within a sidewalk’s width of the front of the building. The front was boarded up and curtained and beer signs flicked on and off in the shallow space between the glass of the unused windows and the plywood interior. There was a small modern annex adjacent to it, and opening into it, called the Sand Dollar Discount Package Store.
Inside the bar structure the ceiling was hung with nets, with glass and cork floats. Harpoons were chained to the walls. The low-power wall sconces held orange bulbs with orange shades. Overhead prisms shone puddles of white light down upon the black Formica bar. The front edge of the bar and the barstools were upholstered in red Naugahyde, spotted with cigarette burns and old stains.
On that afternoon in late May, Peggy Brasser was the only customer. Though a relatively recent arrival on Fiddler Key, she had quickly become a regular bar customer.
Tom Shawn, the owner, and bartender most afternoons, saw her put down her empty glass, and in a little while he drifted closer to her and said, “Try another one on for size, Miz Brasser?”
“Honest to God, how’m I going to get you to ever call me Peggy? How many times have I asked you to?”
“I forgot, Peggy. I’m sorry.”
“Okay, you forgot. I forgive you, Tom. Sure, you can hit me again. I’m ready.”
She liked Beam on the rocks, doubles, which came to two fifty a pop, two sixty with the tax. She would come in about two, have three or four doubles, usually three, and drop a ten on him and leave the change.
It had taken him quite a while to figure out a good safe way to work any kind of leverage on her. If she’d been a gin drinker, it would have been easy to short her. Beam was fairly heavy, and so it was easy for her to watch the color, drinking it on the rocks as she did. He couldn’t give her strong tea, certainly, Darleen Moseby’s safe and sane habit when she was hustling. It tantalized him until finally, with water and vegetable coloring and about thirty percent of the cheapest bar whiskey he carried, so the taste would be there, he had mixed up the first of many quarts of what he called, privately, Brasser Blend. When she came in sober, indicated by a slow and slightly unsteady walk and an almost inaudible voice and no desire to chat, he would give her a legitimate double Beam to start her off and Brasser Blend from then on. If she came in stepping quickly, confidently, with good coordination and a sunny smile, then she was already bagged and he could go right to the Brasser bottle, with which he could make her the two-dollar-and-sixty-cent drink for an estimated raw-material cost of eleven cents.
He put the glass in front of her and she smiled wistfully and said, “I just can’t get my husband off my mind today.”
“That’s the way it goes sometimes.”
“What his real name was, it was Newcomb Carlyle Brasser,” she was saying, “but everybody called him Charley. Honest to Christ, he must have had ten thousand friends all over everywhere. What he did for a living, he sold heavy equipment, stuff for construction. Euclids and draglines and cranes and big cats and stuff like that. I ever tell you how I come to be down here in the apartment?”
Only about fifty times, Tom thought. “You and him visited down here?”
“No, no, no. It was a sales trip he made down here and he brought me along. Those last years of his life Charley took me along with him, which he never done before, you know, when
the kids were growing up and so on. All those years I never did get to go, I know for sure Charley had girls everyplace he went. Girls always liked Charley. It was a way he had, laughing and kidding around. He was some hundred-and-ten-percent man, you better believe it. I knew about the girls, even though he wouldn’t never confess it, but he’d still come home and make me a very happy woman.… Wanna hit me again, Tom? Right on this old ice is okay.… Whoa! You trine get me drunk or something? There was a time no som-bitch on earth could get me drunk, or Charley neither, but nowadays it really hits me after a while, and Charley got to where two drinks and he mumbled so bad you couldn’t tell what he was saying hardly.… Be that as it may, he’d had some bad luck selling for a half a year, and we come down here and stayed in Fort Myers and worked out from there, and maybe you won’t believe this, but he made one sale to a big developer opening up raw land, Charley’s commission was damn near a quarter million dollars! My Charley made good money his whole life, and the sombitch spent good money too. Hell, I helped him spend it. Anyway, we saw that Golden Sands place and they had a model apartment there to look at, and Charley says to me, Peggy, he says, we grab one of these, then we’ll have a place to go when I retire. So we signed up for Four-A and paid cash. Just like that. And he was sixty years old the day we got back home, and he was dead a month later. He had terrible varicose veins in his legs and the doctor kept telling him he ought to have them stripped because he could get clots in there, and that’s what he got. You wouldn’t believe how his left leg swole up, enough to make you sick looking at it. I was in the hospital with him the afternoon before they were going to operate on him the next morning, and I went home and come back in the evening and went right in and went to his room and it was empty! I went storming around wanting to know what they’d done to my Charley, and finally I found a nurse knew he was dead. A clot come loose and went to the heart. They’d tried to phone me, but they missed me at the house.… Where was I? Oh, when the kids come home for the funeral bringing their wives and the grandbabies, we had long talks and the boys figured out the best thing I should do is sell the big house and come down here into Four-A, which I did. Cheers, Tom.”
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