Welcome to Paradise

by Laurence Shames

  She was not, of course. She was going back to the man who'd brought her here.

  Al continued toward the beach. Without admitting he was doing it, he counted up the days until vacation would be over and he could go back home. In the meantime he looked forward to the yielding crunch of sand and the cooling sting of ocean water against his blistered feet.

  14

  From where the road finally ended, it was another third of a mile to the water's edge. Through a scorching asphalt parking lot. Beyond a grove of Australian pines whose feathery needles imperfectly screened the blaze of mid- afternoon sun, and where dog and master drank greedily from a lukewarm fountain. Down a slope of coral rocks that challenged ankles and clawed at heels. Then past a swath of trucked-in sand that gave, at last, onto the ocean.

  By the time he got there, Al Tuschman was really ready for a swim.

  Squid Berman had figured that he might be.

  He'd stationed himself—in a loud and baggy print bathing suit that came down to his knees, bug-eyed goggles, and a pebbled shower cap—in a shadowed cranny of a pile of rocks that rose up from the green water thirty, forty yards offshore. Kids with snorkels climbed up on the rocks, yipping like a pack of seals. But Squid's weirdness enforced an empty space around him, and from his private grotto he had a panoramic view of the life on land—the gay trysting grounds over near the jetty, the picnic area with its whorls of charcoal smoke, the occasional topless European with teenage boys walking casually back and forth around her.

  He saw Big Al swagger toward the shoreline, his water-shy dog quailing behind, sniffing sand. Watched as he kicked off his sandals and stepped into the first cool lick of the ocean. He imagined he heard a sizzle come off the tough guy's feet.

  He willed him in farther, deeper.

  But Al Tuschman stayed right where he was. He still had his shirt on, his sunglasses. The water felt great but he wasn't sure how much of it he wanted. He was an okay swimmer, not terrific. Besides, it was a commitment, going in the ocean. The adjustment in body temperature. The inevitable dried salt itching in the chest hair. The wet bathing suit that was sure to chafe the inner thighs on the long walk home.

  Then again, there was the widely known effect of cool water on the scrotum. Given his stretched and irritated state, it might be very therapeutic. He pulled off his sweaty shirt, laid it on the sand with his sandals and his shades, told Fifi to be good and stay right where she was.

  Squid Berman watched him stride into the ocean, big legs fighting off the suck of sand and the weight of water. Squinting through his goggles, he firmed his concentration and thought, Come on, you bastard, dive. Swim!

  Al Tuschman took his time. Strolled in up to his calves, his knees. Stared off at fishing boats returning to the harbor, pleasure sloops just heading out. Felt the faint and ghostly pull of an undertow that was stifled by the reef.

  Finally a wavelet lapped against his bathing suit and wet his nuts. The water wasn't cold but still he shivered. Ravaged skin contracted, inhaled into corrugations. He rose up on tiptoe, did a little dance.

  The crisis over, he took another step, feeling now a primordial delight and wondering, as people always did, why he'd hesitated plunging in. A resolute stride brought the water past his waist, and he made a less than graceful lunge that soaked his head and started him swimming toward the far horizon.

  Crouched in his cranny of the rockpile, Sid the Squid swallowed hard, licked dried salt from his twitching lips.

  Al swam ten strokes, twenty, scudding even with, then past, the outcrop. The exercise chased away the remnants of his hangover. Not as fit as he wished he were, he yet reveled in the strength of his arms, the scissoring force of his kick. The ocean blotted out sound, turned the searing sun into a gentle blanket tickling his back, and it dimly dawned on Al that, for the first time since he'd got here, he felt like he was on vacation. Away from everything, including his usual self. Refreshed by strangeness. Not so much feeling as being the plain, gut happiness that some people insisted was a mission. Joyfully, he swam another dozen strokes.

  Then he saw the shark.

  The shark was around the same size he was, but half of it was mouth. Behind the fearsome maw was a rank of gill slits like the airholes on old Buicks, and behind the gill slits a miraculous machinery of fin and muscle that gave swimming the suave weightlessness of flight.

  The beast was fifteen, twenty feet ahead of Al, swimming slowly with fluid wiggles, crosswise to him. Al fixed on one beady, sleepily malicious eye and froze. His body lost its buoyancy, helplessly went vertical. His feet groped for, and couldn't find, the bottom. He held his breath, treaded water, and watched.

  It seemed the shark was easing past him. Then it turned. Maybe it had caught a glint of pinky ring. It banked with the merest flick of fin and tail, and torpedoed straight toward Al. Its mouth was slightly open, crooked rows of incurved teeth just barely visible. In the instant before he screamed, Al imagined he saw water sluicing through the gills.

  He screamed before his face was quite clear of the ocean. He sucked in a mouthful of water and choked on the stony taste of salt.

  Still spluttering, he swam like hell for land, arms thrashing, neck craning. Even as he kicked he tried to pull his legs into his torso, hiding his feet and knees from the ripping pull of triangle teeth.

  Terror made him forget about the need to breathe; he was winded after half a dozen strokes. For a while, fear filled in for oxygen, and he kept pumping with his arms although his ears were ringing and his vision had narrowed into a hellish tube of glare.

  He was even with the rockpile when he saw that the shark had changed its course, had circled up ahead of him. Had cut him off from other swimmers the way a lion cuts from the herd a single antelope; blocking the salvation of the beach and forcing him seaward once again.

  Al skidded against the scant resistance of the water, begged his body to pivot, somersaulted outbound. His lungs burned; his arms screamed in their sockets. Confused and piteous thoughts raced through his mind: the orphaned Fifi, never knowing what terrible thing she'd done to be abandoned on the beach. Old Mr. Kleiman with his opal tie tack, standing on an ottoman to eulogize his favorite salesman . . . He swam, waiting each moment for the clamping bite and the nauseating rend of flesh, the iron smell of his own blood spilling in the ocean. He couldn't tell if he was crying or if his eyes were simply melting into the salt water.

  Ahead of him the blank and bright horizon was suddenly sealed off by the gray flank of the shark.

  It had circled once again, bands of muscle folding back upon themselves with humiliating ease. The red cave of the open mouth was like a door to hell. Once again Al did a desperate one-eighty. His arms would no longer lift clear of the water; he paddled like a hound dog throwing dirt. His hip joint scraped, his pumping legs abraded sinew with each kick.

  Sucking spasmodically at the soup of air and water, his lungs heavy and puffed up like a mildewed sponge, he flailed toward the impossibly distant shore. Flailed until his sinking feet miraculously touched bottom.

  Leaning forward on numb hands and jelly knees, droplets flying from his heaving chest, he rose up and stomped through the cruel knobs of coral that floored the last fringe of the ocean, escaping at last from the horrors of the sea and collapsing full-length on the beach like a shipwrecked, sun-mad sailor.

  Fifi ran over and licked his face. He turned on his side and burped up salt water, gurgling and wheezing as he strained to breathe.

  In the shadow of his rock, Squid Berman's brain was itching underneath the shower cap, his eyes tearing with squelched laughter inside their glinting goggles. He fiddled with the radio control and steered the toy shark back to him, then pulled the little air plug and deflated it at leisure in the privacy of his grotto. No one but Big Al had seen a thing.

  The tough guy writhed on the beach a couple minutes, coughing, spitting. Then he sat up, shaking his head, groping for his sunglasses.

  When he finally stood up on shaky legs to leave
, Squid noted with satisfaction that he was too freaked even to go to the water's edge to rinse off the coarse and salty sand that coated him from feet to cheek.

  15

  Katy Sansone knew what she would find when she returned to the Conch House.

  She'd find Big Al either sprawled out on a poolside lounge or chest-deep at the swim-up bar. Either way, he'd have had a couple drinks. That boy-devil look would be stretching the corners of his eyes, and he'd be getting horny. He'd make some teasing cracks to stoke himself along. Ask her if she got picked up by any bulging Cuban studs at the beach. Offer comments on the breasts and backsides of the women at the pool. It would all be flip and crude—and also, Katy could not help but admit, comforting in its familiarity. Al had his routines. He was predictable. A man in whom habits cut an instant groove. Blunt in his wants, consistent in his appetites. And, no matter what else was right or wrong or crazy or impossible, it was nice to be consistently desired.

  So she was surprised and, in spite of herself, a little disappointed when he wasn't where she thought he'd be. She walked the whole perimeter of the pool, skirted the lanai rooms, the towel kiosk. Scanned the flushed and vacant faces at the bar. No Al. She took a moment to decide what she should do. His absence, she felt, gave her permission to go off on her own a little longer. That might be nice, and yet.. . and yet she sort of didn't want to. This embarrassed her. Did it mean, she wondered, that she actually missed the sonofabitch? Or only that she'd had all the independence she could handle for one day?

  She went up to their room, found Al in the same long pants he'd been wearing when they parted. He was pacing between the TV and the window, and his expression wasn't playful. Katy's first thought was that she'd stayed away too long and he was mad. She waited for him to talk.

  "How was the beach?" he asked. He said it with neither interest nor blame, and Katy felt relieved.

  "Fine. Nice," she said. No reason to elaborate, since he wasn't listening. She watched him pace. The skin was drawn and gray around his eyebrows, the stubble on his chin was flecked with silver, and she realized that he truly wasn't young. Not young, not happy all the time, not free of worries and responsibilities. "Something wrong?" she asked.

  Big Al paused in his circuit, briefly stared up at her. The question gave him a dilemma. You didn't talk to broads. That was elementary. But up North he would have had pals, goombahs, that he could bitch to. Here there was no one else, and keeping silent gave rise to stomach acid. Laconically, he said, "Guy I left in charge .. . aw, it's all fucked up."

  The answer, in turn, put Katy in doubt as to how much further she should go. Left in charge of what? She pretty much knew that Al was Mafia. He carried guns and knives and large amounts of cash; his New York friends all talked like they were eating crackers. But as to the specifics of his business, she was serenely in the dark. She had noticed that, when they dined out in the city, it was almost always seafood, and Al got fawned over shamelessly. The best tables. Free champagne. But that was as much as she knew. Now she tried to steer a middle course between showing concern and seeming to pry. "Fucked up how?" she asked.

  Al was wearing a loose-fitting shirt, but he twisted his neck like his collar was too tight. Fighting back each word, he grunted, "Guy they replaced my guy wit'— worst guy they coulda picked."

  Katy sat down on the bed, tried not to notice the two big bags of sex toys leaning up against the television cabinet. "How come?"

  "How come what?" said Al, his throat closing down around the rising question.

  "How come he's the worst guy?"

  " 'Cause we hate each other's guts."

  "Why?"

  "Why?" Al echoed, and stopped to ponder. Up until that moment it hadn't dawned on him that there had to be a reason. "He hates me," he said at last, " 'cause he thinks I took his job away. And I hate him 'cause he hates me."

  Katy said, "If that's the only—"

  Big Al, suddenly impatient, annoyed with himself for blabbing, waved his arms, started pacing once again. "I don't wanna talk no more," he said. "What I said, fuhget about it."

  Katy watched him pace, the short legs seeming disconnected from the barrel chest, the skin of the face pulled back taut as that of an astronaut. He went from carefree to wretched with almost nothing in between, and Katy had to acknowledge that his seldom-seen unhappiness gave a new dimension to his carnality, made of it a kind of victory. He stole pleasure between fits of misery. The pleasure had to be as extreme as his anxieties, and his greed for it was in proportion to his desperation. Knowing in some corner of her being that she was being suckered, was suckering herself, she felt a surge of tenderness for her thug of a boyfriend. He had his problems, too. "Hey, Al," she said. "How 'bout a back rub?"

  "A back rub?" he said, and he gave a little snort. The snort was not derisive, just surprised. A back rub. A simple kindness. Unselfish. "Katy," he said, "you're really a good kid."

  "Come on," she said, and motioned him off his circuit to the bed.

  He threw himself facedown at her feet.

  She got up on her knees and worked his knotty shoulders. He moaned, he sighed, and after a few minutes, not really meaning it but feeling it was called for by the moment, he said, "I don't deserve a girlfriend good as you."

  Powered by a stubborn reflex sympathy, she leaned into his flank and vaguely wondered why it was so hard for her to accept that he was absolutely right.

  *

  The knots were somewhat letting go until the phone rang.

  But at the first clang of the instrument they came cramping back all along his spine. Big Al quickly scrambled onto his side and told Katy maybe she'd like to take a bath. He didn't pick up the receiver until she'd closed the bathroom door behind her and started running the water.

  Then he finally squeezed the thing and said hello.

  "Al? Carlo."

  He knew it would be Carlo. He'd tried to reach the consigliere an hour or so before. It took the frail old guy about that long to drain his silty bladder and shuffle to a safe phone he could use.

  Now Big Al got straight to the point. "What's this bullshit Nicky's in charge?"

  "Someone's gotta be in charge," said Carlo calmly.

  "Why him?"

  "Who else is there, Al?"

  Big Al knew this argument, and for him it didn't wash. Sure, the ranks had thinned. Sure, it was tough to find a colleague who was halfway competent and not in jail. But it wasn't that tough. "Come on," he said. "There's Rod the Cod. There's Big Tuna Calabro. Guys I trust. Guys I can talk to, for Chrissake."

  Carlo didn't answer. Air wheezed through his nose.

  "Somethin' else is goin' on," Al said.

  Carlo came forth with a soft and weary sigh. "Don't make more a this than what's there."

  "So what's there?" pressed Al Marracotta.

  Ganucci sniffled, said at last, "Al, ya want the trut'?"

  "Nah, I want more bullshit."

  "I think Tony's p.o.'d ya took vacation."

  Al sprang up from the bed, wrapped himself in phone cord. "P.o.'d I took vacation? This is fuckin' rich. Once every t'ree, four years a guy can't go off wit' a broad a lousy week or so? This is fuckin' America, Carlo!"

  "I'm not takin' a position," the consigliere purred. "You asked what's goin' on, I gave you my opinion."

  Big Al thought that over. He hoped that thinking would calm him down, but for him it didn't work that way. "So lemme get this straight," he said. "I'm forty-six years old. I been workin' wit' you people thirty years. An' I'm bein' punished, like a fuckin' kid, for goin' on vacation?"

  "Al, don't look at it like—"

  "I mean, if Tony wants me so bad to be home, he can't call me, man to man, and ask me ta come back?"

  "He doesn't want you to come home," the consigliere said. He said it softly, and he meant it to be soothing, though, of course, Al heard it just the opposite. Defiance and insecurity were inseparable in Big Al. You couldn't tell him what to do and you couldn't tell him you didn't much care what
he did.

  He said, "That preening fuck Nicky's doin' my job, and Tony doesn't want me to come home?"

  Ganucci sighed. These logical tangles—they happened more and more as he got older, and he never quite knew where the confusion started. "Al, he'd love to have you home. Tell ya what. I think I got it, a way that everybody's happy: have vacation, then come home."

  Stubbornly, Al said, "Like I could be happy, this bullshit goin' on?"

  "Al," the consigliere urged, "relax—"

  "Well, I'm gonna be happy," Big Al insisted, his feisty side once more rearing up to defeat his paranoia. He thought about Katy, naked in a fragrant bath. He glanced off at his brand-new stash of gizmos. "I'm gonna have a fuckin' cabaret."

  He almost knew that he was lying. His body was still in Florida, there was still sunshine and champagne and sex, but his vacation was basically over, and in the pit of his stomach he knew it. Nicky Scotto, after all, had succeeded brilliantly in spoiling it for him, if not quite in the manner he'd intended.

  "Fine, Al, fine," said Carlo Ganucci. His bladder was burning and he wanted at all costs to end this no-win conversation. "Have a great time and come home when you're ready. We'll be thrilled to have you back. Goo'bye."

  16

  Lungs sodden, legs heavy and chafed, Al Tuschman trudged slowly back toward his hotel. Salt simmered in his belly; he coughed if he drew air too deep into his chest. Late sun baked his back, and he was barely aware of Fifi tugging at her leash, urging him along the sandy road between the navy's chain-link fences.

  He was thinking about his luck.

  There were perhaps two dozen people in the water near where he'd been swimming. Why had the shark selected him to chase? For that matter, why had some crazy, tourist-hating vandal picked his car to trash? And what about the freak hijacking? And what about the faceless delivery man putting lobsters in his bed?