Mangrove Squeeze

by SKLA

  He'd barely finished speaking when he understood that something had gone inscrutably and entirely wrong. Suki's face slammed shut, she hugged her satchel tight against her side. With a hardness that surprised them both, she said, "It's a little early in the day to get hit on."

  Wounded, baffled, Aaron said, "Was I hitting on you? I thought I was offering you a bowl of pasta."

  Suki looked down, seemed equally confused. She said, "I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that. Except there are so many jerks in this town—"

  "And I'm probably just one more of them."

  She raised her eyes. "I didn't say that. I don't think it. Look, I have a date for lunch."

  "Oh," said Aaron, and for an absurd instant his face clouded with jealousy, was taken over by an impulse from a part of the brain too ancient to learn manners or even common sense.

  Suki saw the look, surprised herself by feeling that she wanted to explain. "I don't mean a date date. I'm having lunch with Lazslo."

  She said it like it was a name that everyone in town would know. Aaron didn't. Now he couldn't tell if he was jealous because Suki was having lunch with this guy or because apparently he mattered in Key West and Aaron didn't and maybe never would. He said, "Who's Lazslo?"

  "You'll know when I know," Suki answered.

  "And what's that supposed to mean?"

  She looked down at her watch. "I have to go. Listen, what I said, it was just a reflex thing. Don't hold it against me."

  Aaron nodded but he felt a sorrow in his stomach, the pointless sorrow that comes from losing something before you ever had it. "And what about the ad?"

  "Another time," she said. "Next time."

  She turned and headed for the door. Aaron watched her go and listened to her footsteps on the porch. They made a syncopated, shuffling sound, the rhythm of a happy kid skipping.

  Chapter 4

  That evening, sitting on his deck and watching the early winter dusk go from pink to purple to slate above the flat water of the Gulf, Gennady Markov sipped his frozen vodka and casually announced: "The mayor is a feelthy peeg."

  He said it without rancor, without indignation or even mild censure; in fact the mayor's puny venality amused him.

  "Feelthy peeg is good," said Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky. He said it without pleasure, even though he was dipping a cracker into a mound of caviar whose grains softly twinkled in the failing light. "With feelthy peeg, nobody looks too close, you know what you must do."

  Markov turned to his nephew. Lazslo, dressed in denim, and with a big silver belt buckle between his navel and his groin, was also holding a glass of liquor, but he found it rank and sour, he touched it to his lips but didn't drink.

  "He came again today, Luzhka," the older man said. "Always I am surprise. Never I remember how short he is, how his pants fall on his shoes. I always think maybe he is paperboy or something."

  Markov laughed. Cherkassky did not. Lazslo made a show of joining in but his thoughts were somewhere else.

  His uncle continued. "He say 'Hello, Meester Markov.' I say 'Hello, Meester Mayor.' Then he start in with some crazy nonsense with the stores—how you say, the backsets?—"

  "Setbacks," Lazslo put in absently, though he wasn't really listening. He was thinking about his lunch with Suki Sperakis and wondering if there would come a time when she would go to bed with him. Usually, yes or no, he could tell right away, he didn't waste time. A woman liked his car, his clothes, was aroused when he was recognized in places, fawned on. Or not. He could tell. But with this one it was different.

  "Setbacks, yes," said Markov. "So many feet from street, so many feet from next guy. Mayor say, 'Is wiolation.' I say, 'Meester Mayor, just tell me what you want.' He say, 'racks on sidewalk, block people walking. Is other wiolation.' I say, 'Meester Mayor, we are not children here. Please, say what you are asking.'"

  "Coward," said Ivan Cherkassky, wiping a cracker crumb from the corner of his mouth. "Peeg and coward."

  Lazslo nodded in bland agreement But he was picturing Suki, not the mayor. The blue eyes framed in black and wild hair, generous breasts squeezed and rocked by arms that gestured lavishly. She was a little older than he, and Lazslo found this very flattering, intriguing. She was funny, sharp, interested in what he did, how he thought; she made him feel smart, substantial. This excited him. And older women, people said—they knew their own minds better, rumor had it they were bold, might take the lead and grab you by the leg, might suggest nasty and nonstandard acts in risky and forbidden places. So why was Suki so hesitant, so coy?

  "So finally," continued Markov, "I say, 'Excuse me one moment, Meester Mayor.' I go away. I come back with t'ousand dollars. I give it to him. I say, 'Does this take care of wiolation?' The money he puts in his pocket. Front pocket, like cowboy. He smiles. He say, 'Meester Markov, you sure must sell a lot of T-shirts.'"

  "Idiot!" Cherkassky said.

  "So you know what?" Markov rolled along, grabbing his nephew behind the neck, pulling their faces close, their foreheads almost touching. "You know what, Luzhka? I give you all credit. 'My nephew,' I say, 'my nephew is marketing genius.'"

  At this Lazslo Kalynin could not help snorting as he backed away from his uncle's grasp. Too loud, he said, "Marketing genius as long as the idea is losing money."

  The words seemed to break into small particles that persisted in the salty air. The two old Soviets dropped their chins and looked around themselves, but they saw no spies, no informers, only palms and shrubs whose colors were leaching out into the deepening twilight.

  Ivan Cherkassky frowned, did not try to mask his disapproval. "Lazslo," he said, "you say these things, I wonder where else you say them. I feel them in the bottom of my stomach. Reckless. Careless."

  The young man was feeling feisty, probably a side effect of stifled lust. He said, "Not careless, Ivan. Just not constantly afraid like you."

  The family friend sipped vodka, slowly ran a hand over his fretful concave face, then said very softly but with unexpected vehemence, "I am afraid, yes. Always. I was afraid under Brezhnev, afraid under Gorbachev. I was afraid when all the changes came—afraid to stay and afraid to leave. And still, today, I am afraid every time a canister must cross a border, every time we send a shipment. But I am sixty-three, and I am here, and I have money, and I am not in prison. Why? Because fear has made me very careful. Think about this, Lazslo."

  There was a silence and it soon turned rancid.

  Scolded by Cherkassky, Lazslo felt suddenly that he'd been insulted, belittled, taken lightly, all day long. Suki, with her teasing, her deflections—she enticed him but she treated him like a boy. These old men—they gave him no respect, no real power of his own. Sullenly, he stared off at the horizon, where the seam between the sea and sky was closing for the night.

  Gennady Petrovich Markov blinked off toward the dimness that had all at once turned grumpy, tried to figure the precise moment when things had gotten somber. With the geniality of the fat, he attempted to leaven the mood, to restore good cheer in time to salvage appetite for dinner.

  "Gentlemen," he said. "Gentlemen, why so serious? Is just another visit from the mayor. Is only one small bribe."

  There was only one good thing about the kind of work Fred did: It was the kind of work where every day was payday.

  He did casual labor. On the mornings when he felt like working, he'd grab his shovel and his rusty old bike from where they leaned against the hot dog. He'd walk out of the mangroves, then ride past Houseboat Row and a mile north on U.S. 1 to the seven-thirty shape-up on Stock Island. He'd stand there yawning in the early light among the other hopefuls—black guys with big shoulders, stringy white guys with stringy hair—and a foreman would assign the jobs.

  Mostly it was digging holes. Amazing when you thought about it, how many different kinds of holes there were, how many perforations even in a little town. Holes for fence posts, holes for pools. Holes for water pipes and holes that trees got planted in. Square holes for the studs that held u
p carports; round holes for the tubes of parking meters. Kidney-shaped holes for the sand-traps on the golf course; box-shaped holes for the graves of pets. Holes for flower beds, holes for hot tubs, holes that Fred spent hours digging without ever being told the use of.

  At the end of the workday, the laborers were brought back to Stock Island, and their pay—minimum wage minus this and minus that—was figured to the penny and delivered as cash into their toughened hands. For Fred this was the prelude to an evening out.

  When he had money, he went to bars.

  He liked bars—the noise of them, the randomness. He liked the way the click of billiard balls sometimes fell into a rhythm with the songs on the jukebox. He liked the smoke, the sound of people laughing. He liked to eavesdrop on the fishing stories, the travel tales. He liked it that, in Key West bars at least, anyone could talk to anyone, and that, as long as you didn't get too loaded or too shrill in your opinions, you were always allowed to come back.

  So on this particular January evening, Fred pocketed his pay, dropped his shovel at the hot dog, and rode his bike downtown. He stopped for an outdoor shower at County Beach—stripping to his boxer shorts between the parking area and the gazebo, holding the chain that started the flow of tepid water, then changing into fresh clothes in the men's room. He double-checked that he hadn't lost his money or his little piece of soap, and continued on his way.

  He rode to the Eclipse Saloon, an old favorite. It had a U-shaped bar whose edge was thickly padded and covered in black vinyl. It was good for resting your elbows and occasionally your head. Beer was cheap and cheeseburgers came automatically with fries and slaw, no hidden extra costs. Off Duval, it was mostly a place for locals, but a sprinkling of sunburned tourists provided some amusement. Rich people went there, poor people went there, and most folks dressed about the same.

  Fred grabbed a stool on the side that faced the door. He drank, he smoked, he ate. He watched a little basketball. Once or twice he joined in conversations, and didn't seem to notice that his joining in wasn't really all that welcome.

  Dinner hour passed and the place gradually started thinning out. There weren't that many empty stools, but there was one on either side of Fred.

  That's when Lazslo Kalynin came walking in.

  Fred was looking toward the door when Lazslo pushed through it. He didn't know who Lazslo was, but he instantly recognized a pissed-off, brooding guy, a guy who needed distraction and a drink. Even in the young face, there was a tightness at the corners of the eyes; the posture was clenched and the lips seemed thinned out, cramped, from too much held inside.

  Lazslo walked around to Fred's side of the bar, blindly grabbed a stool on Fred's right. Before he'd even sat, Fred said, "Lemme buy you a beer."

  Lazslo blinked at him, his face skeptical and no softer. His hand-tooled wallet was stuffed with twenties and with fifties. His running shoes were up in triple-figures. His belt buckle was real silver and he had real gold chains around his neck. His haircut cost more than everything Fred was wearing. "You're buying me a beer?" he said.

  Fred either didn't hear the sarcasm or elected to ignore it. He said, "I have money and I see a guy needs a drink, I'm buying that person a drink. That's me, okay?"

  Lazslo said, "I need a drink?"

  Fred said, "You need somethin', man. You look like a scorpion crawled up your ass and died."

  Lazslo gestured at the few damp bills sticking to the bar in front of Fred. "Your money's almost gone, sport."

  "And when it is," he said, "that's how I know when to go home. You'll have a beer?"

  Lazslo looked away. His face was in the midst of a gradual process that seemed more an easing of gears and cables than of skin and flesh. His forehead slowly smoothed, his eyebrows dropped, blood flowed back to his cheeks. He exhaled deeply, blew away his evening with the old Russians, an evening of whispers, paranoia, endless reminders that the world was lull of enemies. Now here was a stranger, a bum, sensing his funk and his anger and fearlessly approaching, reaching out to him for no good reason in the world, offering a pointless kindness. This was what he loved about America.

  The bartender came over, said, "Evening, Lazslo. What'll it be?"

  The young man in denim touched Fred on the shoulder. "This gentleman," he said, "is buying me a Bud."

  Chapter 5

  "Nice job on the T-shirt shops," said Donald Egan, publisher and editor of the Island Frigate.

  "Whaddya mean?" asked Suki, looking up without much interest from her cramped and cluttered metal desk.

  "They doubled all their advertising. You didn't know?"

  Suki went back to her paperwork. She used the computer when she had to, but she preferred the concreteness of the old way, the paper clips and tape and staples. It felt like childhood, a project for a rainy day in Trenton. She had a pencil between her teeth. She didn't answer.

  "Lazslo called," Egan went on. "Himself. Doubled everything. All eight stores."

  Suki snapped some carbons out of credit card receipts, said nothing.

  Egan said, "That's a hefty commission. I thought you'd be more pleased."

  Suki looked up. She wasn't smiling. She said, "He wants to get into my pants."

  Egan shuffled his feet. He was fifty-eight, and southern. He knew the world had changed and he knew that Key West wasn't western Tennessee, but he didn't think he'd ever get used to young women being quite that frank. Where was the fibbing, the pretense? He mumbled, "Your business, how you sell."

  "Thank you, Donald," Suki said. "I knew that."

  Her boss started to walk away. There wasn't far to walk. The Frigate's offices consisted of a room and a half of what once had been a grade school on Southard Street. One wall remained covered with a scratched old blackboard, eraser ledge and all. A broad wrought iron fire escape was bolted to the frame of a full-length window. And the place, in spite of the passage of years and the illicit smoke of Donald Egan's cheap cigars, still smelled faintly of the powdered disinfectant used to mask the stench of young children throwing up.

  Egan, perplexed, now doubled back, and with his hands on his ample hips he stood once more above Suki's desk. "You're doing very nicely for us," he said. "I don't understand why you're not more—"

  "I hate the T-shirt shops," she said.

  "They're half your income," Egan said.

  "That means I have to like them?"

  Egan lifted a yellow thumbnail to his teeth. "Look, none of us is thrilled—"

  "None of us is thrilled," she interrupted, "that the old locals are being all squeezed out. That none of the quirky little stores can possibly survive. That the whole downtown is just a tacky ugly strip for the cheap bastards who come off the cruise ships, buy a frozen yogurt and a T-shirt with a jerky slogan, and that's their whole impression of Key West."

  "Suki. Things change. That's the marketplace. Commercial real estate. Supply and demand."

  "Bullshit," Suki said. "There's something cockeyed there and you know it."

  "There's no hard evidence," Egan said.

  "They can't be making money. Those stores are fronts for something."

  "Oh, yeah?" said Egan. "What?"

  "How the hell should I know?"

  "You see? Speculation. Nothing more ... Besides, the jealousy thing, the prejudice thing—you sure that isn't creeping in? These people are foreigners, immigrants."

  "Who cares?" said Suki. "Sperakis, Donald. Wretched refuse of the Aegean. Sardine fishermen. Bee farmers. Do I have anything against immigrants? Do I have anything against Russia? Put a well-chilled Stoli in front of me, you'll see what I have against Russia."

  "Well then—"

  "What I'm against is people laundering money and fucking up my town."

  "Libel, Suki. You don't just accuse people of laundering money."

  "Especially if they're advertisers," she said.

  The publisher said nothing.

  Suki put her hands flat on the desk, craned her neck and cocked her chin. "Look, I realize I'm on
ly the cupcake who bats her eyes to sell the space, but I can do arithmetic. Twelve thousand a month for rent—per store. Five, six employees on every shift. A measly eight, ten bucks a shirt..."

  "No one knows the details of their business," Egan said. "This is all just speculation."

  "Speculation," Suki said. "Exactly. So why don't you assign one of your crack reporters to get past the speculation and find out what the story really is?"

  Suki paused for breath, and Don Egan reflected ruefully on his staff. Crack reporters? There was Peter Haas, restaurant reviewer, known to while away an entire afternoon searching for an adjective to describe the texture of a salmon mousse. Chrissie Kline, drama critic who thought everything was smashing. Casper Montero, literary editor, whose flights of metaphor tended to fly right past the limits of human comprehension. These were crack reporters?

  Egan got depressed. But Suki wasn't finished. "I mean," she hammered on, "isn't that what newspapers do? Get the story? I mean, is this rag a paper or isn't it?"

  The question hit Egan squarely where he lived, and he wished in that moment that Suki wasn't such a damn good seller, that he could afford to fire her.

  He carried a notebook, Egan did. He smoked cigars— not the fashionable expensive ones, but the stubby stinkers more proper to the city room. He'd been a real newspaperman once, covered fires and murders as a young man back in Chattanooga; he wanted badly to believe he was a bona fide journalist still. That certainly was his public stance. Over cocktails he spewed forth strong, informed opinions. He wrote editorials graced with slyly damning southern wit, commentaries that seemed courageous until you realized that his targets were always the obvious and safe ones—the buffoonish politicians who never changed, and couldn't sue, and didn't advertise. Where was his nerve when it came to opponents who might fight back?