Mangrove Squeeze

by SKLA

  Within two hours the experts had descended. Men in what looked like spacesuits opened the metal containers and assayed the substances inside. Plutonium 239. Ninety- seven percent pure; weapons grade. Around seven hundred kilograms in all. Enough to build thirty bombs of the strength that leveled Hiroshima. Or to power three breeder reactors that would keep rogue nations supplied with fissionable goods for a millennium. It was by far the biggest stash of nuclear material ever known to have fallen into private hands.

  Fred and Piney were treated with suspicion for a while. They were questioned for a long, long time, though they could tell their story in fifteen seconds: They had a friend in danger from Russians. They saw a fat man who maybe was a Russian in the mangroves with a red wagon and a shovel. He didn't belong there. They thought they should see what he was going to dig up.

  The FBI concluded at last that Piney and Fred were not part of the conspiracy.

  Huge military trucks arrived to take the plutonium away. It was hard to keep all this a secret, and someone— most likely Donald Egan—leaked the story to the national media.

  By nightfall the TV crews had mustered, with their arc lights and satellite hookups and correspondents with sprayed hair, broadcasting live from the clearing near the hot dog and in front of the Mangrove Arms. The publisher of the Island Frigate, thrilled to be near the middle of a breaking story, spoke to everyone, told of how the phony article in his paper had forced the Russians' hand.

  Suki Sperakis did a couple of interviews then retreated to her old hexagonal turret room, the site of her chaste, confused recuperation. But she and Aaron hid out there together now. With their arms around each other, they watched the bright lights play on the underside of the banyan leaves that tickled the railings of the widow's walk.

  Then the lights were turned off, the media packed up and left, and things got relatively quiet.

  But Key West, in certain ways, was changed. With the T-shirt shops instantly defunct, there would be a sudden glut of retail space on Duval Street, and rents would plummet accordingly. Local artisans could once again move in. There could be painters' co-ops and handmade sandals, tiny stores that would sell fedoras woven from palm fronds and brightly colored wooden fish. Much of what was offered would be pure kitsch—but authentic, local kitsch—and a hard-core local like Suki could take pleasure and vindication at the change.

  Which didn't mean, however, that the new Duval Street would hold a place for her, or that surviving the Russians and bringing them down had solved the more mundane questions of what she would do for her living, how she would spend her time. She wouldn't go back to selling ads. She no longer fantasized about being a reporter; her brush with the media had cured her of that.

  "So what will you do?" Aaron asked her some days later, as they sat in the unromantic kitchen, drinking coffee. Sam, fixed up with a brand new hearing aid, sipped tea.

  "Oh, I don't know," said Suki, perhaps a little coyly. She looked up at the rack of outsize pots and pans, then through the doorway to the courtyard, with its shimmering pool and lounge chairs empty of guests. "Dreams are contagious," she said. "You once told me that, remember?"

  Aaron looked at her unlikely eyes, then down into his cup.

  "This place could really turn around," she said. "With all the work you've done, the free publicity ... Will you let me be here with you, help?"

  They were kissing when the silver service bell rang out from the front desk counter.

  Sam Katz, very glad to see them kissing, started standing up to answer it.

  "Sit, Pop," Suki said. She put her hands on his shoulders and went off to charm the guests.

  Astronauts; football teams. Everyone invited went.

  Still, some weeks later, when the weird case had been reviewed, and Fred and Pineapple were summoned to the White House, they hemmed and hawed about it.

  "They're using us," said Fred.

  "Using you for what?" asked Aaron.

  "A coup for the homeless they're calling it," Fred said. "We're not homeless. We live in a hot dog."

  "Ya go," Piney put in, "it's like saying y'approve, like everything is peachy."

  "But Piney," Suki argued, "face it, you're a hero."

  He could not quite squelch a smile that stretched his slot of a mouth. "Don't mean I approve," he argued back.

  In the end, of course, they went. Aaron bought them shoes. Bert lent them shirts. Fred's was white-on-white, Piney's a navy blue silk; no one noticed that the monograms matched each other but not the wearers' names. Four men from the Secret Service came to pick them up, blinked behind their Ray-Bans at the fiberglass wiener squooshed down into its yellow roll.

  Piney liked Washington more than he expected to. The Mall was nice and open. A lot of the buildings he recognized from postage stamps or dollar bills. The cherry blossoms were just getting ready to come out, and he liked it that people got excited. Key West was always in flower; no one bit their nails to see a bloom.

  The White House itself he hated.

  Big as it was, it was suffocating, as houses always were to him. Rugs to trip over, things that could break. Bullying hallways that pushed you one way or the other, walls that blocked the view. Ceilings that seemed to hover annoyingly like giant hat brims just above your eyes.

  He couldn't wait to get out of there, and even while inside, his thoughts were other places, less confining places. He thought of mangroves, of green clouds out beyond the reef. He thought of airplanes etching lines between the stars, lizards basking on warming rocks as time passed and the sun got higher in the sky. And that started him speculating: Did lizards have a sense of time as a separate thing from cold and warm?

  He was still trying to puzzle that one out as the line of people moved along and he found himself standing opposite the president of the United States.

  The president's hand was hot from shaking so many others, but his eyes had a twinkle and his voice was mellow and sincere as he thanked Piney for his extraordinary service to the nation.

  The words washed over Piney, whose mind had flown beyond the curtained windows to sample other things. "Mr. President," he said, "ya know what I sometimes wonder about? ..."

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR— Laurence Shames has set eight critically acclaimed novels in Key West, his former hometown. Now based in California, he is also a prolific screenwriter and essayist. His extensive magazine work includes a stint as the Ethics columnist for Esquire. In his outings as a collaborator and ghostwriter, he has penned four New York Times bestsellers, under four different names. This might be a record. To learn more, please visit http://www.LaurenceShames.com.

  ALSO BY LAURENCE SHAMES—

  FICTION—

  Florida Straits

  Scavenger Reef

  Sunburn

  Tropical Depression

  Virgin Heat

  Welcome to Paradise

  The Naked Detective

  NON-FICTION

  The Big Time

  The Hunger for More

  Not Fade Away (with Peter Barton)

  IF YOU LOVED MANGROVE SQUEEZE CATCH LAURENCE SHAMES'S NEXT NOVEL

  WELCOME TO PARADISE

  "Why we gotta drive?" said Katy Sansone, who was twenty-nine years old and Big Al Marracotta's girlfriend.

  She was bustling around the pink apartment that Big A1 kept for her in Murray Hill. It was not a great apartment, but Katy, though she had her good points, was not that great a girlfriend. She complained a lot. She went right to the edge of seeming ungrateful. She had opinions and didn't seem to understand that if she refreshed her lipstick more, and answered back less, she might have had the one- bedroom with the courtyard view rather than the noisy streetside studio with the munchkin-size appliances. Now she was packing, roughly, showing a certain disrespect to the tiny bathing suits and thong panties and G-strings and underwire bras that Big A1 had bought her for the trip.

  "We have to drive," he said, "because the style in which I travel, airports have signs calling it an act of terroris
m."

  "Always with the guns," she pouted. "Even on vacation?"

  "Several," said Big Al. "A small one for the glove compartment. A big one under the driver's seat. A fuckin' bazooka inna trunk." He smiled. "Oh yeah—and don't forget the big knife inna sock." He was almost cute when he smiled. He had a small gap between his two front teeth, and the waxy crinkles at the corners of his eyes suggested a boyish zest. When he smiled, his forehead shifted and moved the short salt-and-pepper hair that other times looked painted on. Big A1 was five foot two and weighed one hundred sixteen pounds. "Besides," he added, "I wanna bring the dog."

  "The daw-awg!" moaned Katy.

  Big A1 raised a warning finger, but even before he did so, Katy understood that she should go no further. Certain things were sacred, and she could not complain about the dog. Its name was Ripper. It was a champion Rottweiler and a total coward. It had coy brown eyebrows and a brown blaze on its square black head, and it dribbled constantly through the flubbery pink lips that imperfectly covered its mock-ferocious teeth. A stub of amputated tail stuck out above its brown-splashed butt, and its testicles, the right one always lower than the left, hung down and bounced as though they were on bungees. It was those showy and ridiculous nuts, she secretly believed, that made A1 dote so on the dog.

  She kept packing. High-heeled sandals. Open-toed pumps. Making chitchat, trying to sound neutral, she said, "So the dog's already in the car?"

  Big A1 nodded. "Guarding it" Again he smiled. Say this for him: He knew what gave him pleasure. He had a huge dog gnawing on a huge bone in the backseat of his huge gray Lincoln. He had a young girlfriend packing slinky things for a week-long Florida vacation—a week of sun, sweat sex, and lack of aggravation. For the moment he was a happy guy.

  Katy snapped her suitcase closed and straightened out her back. She was five foot eleven, and A1 had told her never to insult him by wearing flats. Standing there in heels and peg-leg pants, she looked a little like a missile taking off. Long lean shanks and narrow hips provided thrust that seemed to lift the dual-coned payload of chest which tapered in turn to a pretty though small-featured face capped by a pouf of raven hair.

  For a moment she just stood there by her suitcase, waiting to see if Al would pick it up. Then she picked it up herself and they headed for the door.

  His face was on her bosom the whole elevator ride down to the garage. Vacation had begun.

  Across the river in suburban Jersey, on the vast and cluttered selling floor of Kleiman Brothers Furniture on Route 22 in Springfield, a ceremony was in progress.

  Moe Kleiman, the last survivor of the founding brothers, had taken off his shoes and was standing, somewhat shakily, on an ottoman. He stroked his pencil mustache, fiddled with the opal tie tack, that, every day for many years, he'd painstakingly poked through the selfsame holes in the selfsame ties, and gestured for quiet. Benignly, he looked out across the group that he proudly referred to as the finest sales staff in the tri-state area. For a moment he gazed beyond them to the store he loved: lamps with orange price-tags hanging from their covered shades; ghostly conversation nooks in which a rocker seemed to be conferring with a La-Z-Boy; ranks of mattresses close-packed as cots in a battlefield hospital.

  Then he said, "Friends, we are gathered today to announce the winner of the semiannual bonus giveaway for top sales in dinettes."

  He gestured for quiet as though there'd been applause. But the fact was that for all of Moe Kleiman's attempts to bring some pomp to the moment, there was no suspense. Everybody knew who'd won. Who won was who almost always won. It was a regular routine already.

  Nevertheless, Moe Kleiman soldiered on. "The prize this time around is the best ever. It better be. We got a fancy new travel agent and we're paying through the nose."

  At this, people could not help flicking their eyes toward Alan Tuschman, the guy who always won. Twenty years before, he'd been a big-deal high school athlete—split end on the Cranford football team, power forward on a hoops squad that made it to the semis of the states—and, in a circumscribed, suburban way, he'd been winning ever since, sort of. Got a scholarship to Rutgers. Married a cheerleader with blond hair and amazing calves, cut and sculpted from years of leaping. The marriage didn't last; the scholarship evaporated when the coaches realized that A1 Tuschman's talents wouldn't carry him beyond JV. Still, a few semesters of college and matrimony felt right while they endured, lived on in memory like bonus chapters appended to the high school yearbook.

  Those temporary victories had helped to keep alive in Al the mysterious habit of winning, and he still got pumped and rallied at almost anything that could be called a game. Sales contests, for starters. Already this year he'd won the giant television set, for bedding; the trip by train to Montreal, for living rooms. His colleagues, of course, were sick of him winning, but they couldn't really find it in their hearts to resent him. He was a nice guy. Friendly. Fair. He didn't hog the floor, he didn't show off, and he didn't try too hard. People just liked to buy from him.

  "The prize this time," went on Moe Kleiman, "is nothing short of Paradise ... Paradise—that's the name of the hotel. In Key West, Florida. Seven days, six nights. Airfare included. And the winner is—"

  The old ham paused, of course. And in the pause, Alan Tuschman's fellow salesmen tried to figure out, for the thousandth time, the key to his success. Some people thought it was his height, pure and simple. At six-three and change, he was by far the tallest guy on the floor, and people felt good dealing with a tall guy. Others thought it was his looks. Not that he was model material. His cheeks were slightly pitted, his lips thick and loose; but his eyes were big and dark, the features widely spaced: It was a face that gave you room to breathe. Then there was the way he dressed—a strange amalgam of old-time collegiate jock and workingman suburban slick. Cotton cardigans over open-collared patterned shirts; pegged and shiny pants leading down to desert boots; a pinky ring that clattered up against a chunky school memento, class of '77. In its careless inconsistency, Al's style gave almost everyone something to hang on to.

  "And the winner is," Moe Kleiman said again, "Alan Tuschman."

  Amid thin and brief applause that was swallowed up by mattresses and chair backs, someone said, "Surprise!"

  "Alan Tuschman," Moe went on, "who in the past six months, in dinettes alone, wrote a hundred twenty-eight thousand dollars' worth of business. Ladies and gentleman, that is selling!... Al, have a well-earned rest in Paradise!"

  The boss shook Al Tuschman's hand, discreetly using the clasp as an aid in stepping off the ottoman.

  A couple of colleagues slapped Al's back, and then the group dispersed, spreading out through the beds and the imaginary living rooms to the four corners of the premises. It was 9:55 and the store opened at ten. Every day. No matter what.

  By a quarter of eleven, thinking of vacation, Al had sold a French provincial loveseat and a wall unit made to look like rosewood. But then he grew troubled and stepped around the low wall of frosted glass that separated the sales floor from the offices. He poked is head into Moe Kleiman's tidy cubicle. "Mr. Kleiman," he said, "I have a problem with this prize."

  The boss lifted his head and raised an eyebrow. When he did that he looked a great deal like the old guy from Monopoly.

  "If it's all the same to you," said Al, "I'm not gonna use the plane ticket."

  "All of a sudden you don't fly?" Moe Kleiman said.

  A1 Tuschman looked a little bit sheepish. 'Truth is, it's the dog."

  "The dog?"

  "Remember last year, I won that package to New Orleans—?"

  "I remember, I remember."

  "The dog was, like, traumatic. Put her in the carrier, she looked at me like I was sending her to the gas chamber. Then the tranquilizers made her sick. Woke up shaking. Laid down on my shoe so I wouldn't go anywhere. Two days I stayed in the hotel, looking out the window with this shell-shocked dog on my foot. I couldn't put her through that again. I'll drive. That okay with you?"

  "Sur
e, Al. Sure. Only, the reservation starts tomorrow."

  "You don't mind, I could leave today."

  Moe Kleiman stood up, took a token glance out toward the selling floor. A Tuesday in the first half of November. Very quiet. He said, "No problem, Al. If it makes things easier for the dog."

  "Thanks," said Tuschman. "Thanks for everything. You'll see, I'll come back tan and sell my ass off."

  He turned to go. He was not yet forty, but these days, when he pivoted, he felt old tackles in his knees, and the small bones in his ankles remembered rebounds when he didn't land quite right.

  He was just rounding the wall of frosted glass when he heard Moe Kleiman chuckle. "The dog. Hey Al, ya know something?"

  The salesman took a step back toward his boss.

  The boss lowered his voice. "The other guys, it drives them nuts, they constantly wonder why you're always top banana. But I know. I could give it to you in a word."

  Al Tuschman did not ask what the word was. He didn't want to know. Like everybody else, he had his superstitious side. Something worked, you didn't jinx it.

  Moe Kleiman told him anyway. "Relief."

  "Relief?"

  "Relief... People see you, A1—big shoulders, chest hair up to the Adam's apple—they figure, Oy, I'm dealing with a tough guy. Their guard goes up. But it soon comes down, and then you've got 'em. Why does it come down? I'll tell you: Because they're relieved to see you really are a softie."

  Pleased with his analysis, Moe Kleiman smiled.

  A1 Tuschman tried to, but it didn't work. His mouth slid to one side of his face; he looked down at a swatch book, shuffled his feet. A softie. Softie as in pushover? As in coward? Was it really that obvious? Did everybody know? He briefly met his boss's gaze, made another bent attempt at smiling, and steered his aching legs toward the partition.