“Oh. That Loomis. Doom Loomis. Sure. He’s got his yacht boat tied up out back.”
“Now?”
“Out back. Right now. But Doom Loomis has been a big boon to the local economy, and he wouldn’t like it if I sent just any fuckhead around to see him.” Black Caesar spotted the fake pearl butt of the bad news bulging in Lucas’s waistband. “But you’re old comrades in arms, shipmates from the big waters, right?”
“Right.”
“So you just go on out that back door, turn right on the dock, and there’s his yacht boat. You can’t miss it. Want another beer? I’ll knock off a buck.”
Ignoring the nigger, Lucas headed for the back door. Maybe he wouldn’t do it this time, maybe he’d just reconnoiter for another time, at night, when he felt better. Lucas had a hard time navigating the rickety dock with the big holes in the planking. He turned right.
Black Caesar removed the wet mop from its bucket and carried it to the dockside window. He pulled open the curtain as Lucas came along. “See it? Right there?”
As Lucas passed the window, Black Caesar placed the mop head against Lucas’s cheek and with a flick of the wrist ramrodded him off the dock. The splash was spectacular.
Four of the white guys in greasy baseball caps gathered at the door to watch. Billows of bubbles broke the milky surface. One crutch, then the other, floated up languidly. But not Lucas Hogaboom. His cast was stuck in the mud like a mushroom anchor. The guys in baseball caps watched until their beers began to turn tepid in the sun. The natural light was hurting Black Caesar’s eyes, so he returned to his place behind the cash register. The white guys straggled in after him. They didn’t give a shit, as long as Black Caesar didn’t start charging them twenty bucks a Bud.
Binx and Ridly waited in the car, engine running, for twenty minutes, during which Ridly told Binx about his brother-in-law problem.
“Think something’s wrong with Lucas?” asked Binx.
“Definitely.”
“No, I mean do you think something went wrong?”
“Do you want to go see?”
“I’ll twist one, then we’ll go see…Gee, that’s real troubling, Wheezer on your ass like that.”
“Thing is, Wheezer’s about the size of a Jeep Cherokee. I don’t know how he got that big. My wife is a petite person.”
“Big knockers, though.”
“Don’t talk that way about my wife.”
A half hour later Binx and Ridly blundered into the darkness to see what had become of Lucas Hogaboom. When their eyes adjusted, Binx asked the black guy behind the bar if he had seen a friend of theirs, large fellow, leg in a cast.
“He’s out back.”
“Out back where?”
“Swimming,” said Black Caesar.
“Swimming? How can he be swimming!”
“Breast stroke?”
“He had about four hundred pounds of plaster on his leg!”
“I told him it wasn’t a great idea.” Black Caesar walked out back, Binx, Ridly, and the four guys in baseball caps following. “He went in right there.” Black Caesar pointed to a spot on the milky green surface.
“And where’d he come out?” asked Ridly reasonably.
“Didn’t.”
“You mean—he’s still down there?”
The white guys stood in a knot like backup singers in a Caucasian doo-wop group and nodded in unison.
“Maybe I ought to go in and get him,” suggested Binx.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Black Caesar.
“No?”
“I’ve seen guys dissolve in that water. Come out looking like a turd in a pizza oven.”
Binx wasn’t interested in dissolving. He looked at Ridly, who was peering into the water. “Well,” said Ridly, “we’ll stop back later.”
“Yeah, he might be up by then,” said Black Caesar.
WALTER VALE
Mr. R.J. Kreely drove his Jaguar from his sprawling split ranch in Poinciana Plantation Estates north on South Bayshore Drive past the art museum, on whose board he sat, past Deering’s eccentric old mansion, Viscaya, where R.J. picked up the Rickenbacker Causeway onto Virginia Key, past Planet Ocean and the Miami Seaquarium, across Bear Cut Bridge onto Key Biscayne. There was scant traffic at 7:30 Sunday morning. By ten the route across the bay would be clogged with picnickers and beachgoers heading for Cranden Park, which was why Mr. Kreely and his cronies teed off at eight. Walter Vale followed him at a discreet distance in a Budget Rent-a-Car.
Walter Vale had never heard of R.J. Kreely before he started following him two days ago. Kreely was just another of those self-made men who thought his wealth and standing in the community made him invulnerable. It didn’t matter to him who he pissed off. They were all the same, those self-made men, arrogant and stupid.
Mr. R.J. Kreely turned right onto a narrow lane lined with causerina pines and thick hedges shielding the mansions from rubberneckers. He turned right again at the gate of the Henry Flagler Golf, Tennis, & Bath Club and paused at the security guardhouse. He must have said something funny, because the sun-bleached blond teenage attendant laughed and waved him through. Walter Vale drove two hundred yards past the gate, pulled over and stopped at the side of the lane. He smoked a Kool and watched an ancient black guy edge around the ornamentals with a Weed Buster before he turned around and drove back to the guardhouse, where the teenager eyed him coldly.
“Hello,” smiled Walter Vale, “I’m a guest of Mr. R.J. Kreely.”
“Oh, yes sir, he just went in. They’re teeing off at eight. You can just make it.”
Walter Vale sat down on a bench in the shade of an ancient banyan tree near the first tee. He stretched out his legs to admire his new alligator-hide penny loafers, which he wore sockless. With his maroon yachtsman’s slacks, white leather belt, and blue knit shirt, a penguin on his tit, Walter felt he fit right in among these self-made chumps.
By the time he’d snubbed out another Kool, R.J. Kreely and the rest of his fat foursome, each member dressed nearly identically to Walter, putt-putted up to the tee on their cart. They got down and waved clubs around, warming up, trying to touch their toes. Not one of them had seen their own dorks without a mirror in twenty years. Walter Vale had positioned himself close enough to the first tee to eavesdrop on the foursome.
R.J. Kreely was bragging about someone named Conchita, who had “the cutest little tits you could ever hope to see. Nice big brown aureoles. The wife’s visiting her old lady in Trenton for one whole week. It’s a time of bliss for old R.J. vis-à-vis Conchita.”
But Walter Vale knew that was not true. R.J. Kreely’s wife had not gone to Trenton. Walter Vale had followed her to the airport yesterday. There she had met a guy who looked like a forties movie gigolo at the Varig Airlines check-in desk, and arm in arm they boarded a flight to São Paulo. Walter wondered if Kreely knew about that.
The bulbous golfers chose up sides, settled on a cheap wager. The fat guy who hit first knocked one short but straight down the immaculate fairway. Then the second fat guy sliced one into a stand of melaleuca trees. It ricocheted off three boles before it plopped into the soggy marsh grass.
“That’s one for the snakes, Humphrey.”
“Monica Hardcastle got bit in the ass by a snake in the rough just last week. You should have seen the guys line up to suck it out.”
The foursome giggled like a clot of frat boys.
Then R.J. Kreely stepped up to the tee and took a couple of wristy backswings, making a big deal about it. Walter Vale noticed that R.J. was left-handed. Good. That alone made the early morning trip out here worth his trouble. Walter didn’t even wait to see where R.J. Kreely’s ball went.
YOUNG AT HEART
Back aboard the King Don, Donny Sikes gave his crew the night off. He stood alone on the fantail watching for shooting stars and listening to the mechanical squeaks and clanks as the crew ran out the skiff davits. Lowering away, they cackled about female body parts and what they intended to do with same
. Everything was closed within twenty miles, except for bucket-of-blood bars and all-nite chicken carryouts, devoid of female parts, but youth was ever hopeful. Donny wished he could go with them, perhaps build a beach bonfire, roast hot dogs, tell dirty jokes—sweet, youthful doings which, if once you missed, you never got a second chance at.
Lonely and sad, Donny had just downed his third piña colada. Roger was blending another. Donny could hear the whir from the wet bar. He had been looking for shooting stars, but he hadn’t seen any. He and Gramps used to look for shooting stars at the sylvan cedar-log Throckmorton Camp in the Adirondacks. Gramps would paddle him out into the middle of Saranac Lake, where, bobbing, they would search the summer sky. Gramps said for each shooting star you see, one wish will come true. Donny would lie on his back in the bow for the panorama while Gramps stroked the still surface.
“There’s one!” Its tail shed sparks, arcing across the blue-black sky. “I get one wish!”
“That’s not a shooting star,” said Gramps. “That’s a comet.”
“It is?”
“It’s Throckmorton’s Comet. Comes right over the camp every August.”
“You mean it doesn’t count?”
“Doesn’t count? Of course it counts. It means we’re special. How many people have their own comet flying over their summer place? Keep looking.”
Donny kept looking until his neck stiffened and sleep seemed impossible to stave off. But then the entire sky awakened with shooting stars. When one fizzled, three others exploded in its place, crisscrossing, flitting, and popping in the upper atmosphere.
Gramps smiled. “That’s enough wishes to last you a lifetime.”
Had Donny made that up, imagined it? There really were shooting stars, weren’t there? Most of his wishes had come true, hadn’t they? He was one of the ten richest. He had property, yachts, jets, lackeys, you name it. People bowed and scraped; he got invited places, inaugural balls, opening nights, auctions. So the shooting stars couldn’t have been just fireflies or something, passing airplanes, swamp gas, all puffed up with memory and with longing. Could they?
“It’d be sweet to be that age again, huh, boss?” said Roger Vespucci, delivering the piña, the crew boat cutting a phosphorescent wake shorebound, almost like aquatic shooting stars.
Donny felt blue. Another piña would cut the gloom, might even put Throckmorton’s Comet back into the firmament.
“I know what, Roger. Let’s go swimming.”
“When? Now?”
“Sure, let’s go. I used to go swimming every night in the summers after I watched the shooting stars.”
“Where was this?”
“Saranac Lake.”
“A lake? That’s different. This is the middle of the ocean. They got sharks in there which’ll bite your spine out just for the hell of it. I’ve seen pictures. You don’t want to go in there.” Probably even now fins were cleaving the black surface, waiting for chumps in trunks.
“But I’m hot.”
“Maybe a nice cool shower?”
“Come on, get into your suit, Roger.” Donny Sikes was already wearing his.
“I’m sorry, boss, but there’s no way I go swimming at night. Hell, even daytime I don’t swim anywhere I can’t touch. I get cold chills just thinking about that black water out there. I’ll do a lotta things for you, but swimming at night ain’t one of them.”
“Uh, would you plant a bomb in the Broadnax mansion?”
Roger decided to humor him, get him into bed, he’d sleep off his snootful, forget all about bombs and suicide swims. The guy was falling into one of his funks. “Is that what you want me to do, boss?”
Donny said he wasn’t sure whether or not that was what he wanted to do, but he was considering it. “You still know bombs, right, Roger?”
“Sure. Bombs are just like bicycles. Once you learn, you never forget.”
“Well, how about coming down the gangway and watching for sharks while I take a swim?”
“Will you wear a life preserver?”
“You just don’t want to have to rescue me.”
“You got that right, boss.”
The gangway was a complex and ingenious piece of hardware made necessary by the King Don’s twenty-five-foot-high topsides. Without a climbable contrivance of some sort, there was no way to board guests from a small boat alongside. Commercial ships solve the boarding problem in spartan fashion—they drop a Jacob’s ladder down the side of the hull—but hosts can’t ask influential guests and business associates to clamber up a glorified rope ladder in Italian suits and $500 FootJoys. The King Don’s gangway was engineered like an escalator. When lowered, as now, it formed a civilized flight of stairs down to the water with a secure platform at the bottom. When raised by means of an electric winch, the gangway automatically collapsed to stowable size, each step folding neatly under the one above. Even the boarding platform tucked itself away in three small rectangles.
Roger Vespucci followed Donny Sikes down the steps onto the platform three feet above the shark-infested water, undulating. It was just a matter of moments before the boss would chicken out. Wasn’t it? Roger considered asking the boss if he could tie a rope to the life jacket, pull him in if necessary, the richest shark bait in the Atlantic.
“Wait,” said Donny, “I forgot my earplugs. I’ll be right back.” Donny went back up the steps two at a time. Roger didn’t even like standing that close to the sea at night.
Aboard, Donny switched on the electric winch, and the big drum began to turn. Donny watched it turn, trying to figure out which way the rope went around it. He’d seen the crew do this dozens of times…Clockwise.
Donny took three turns around the drum and pulled. That was it. The gangway began to rise, collapsing as it did so. If there was any doubt about that—Donny couldn’t winch and watch at the same time—the shout from Roger dispelled it: “Boss! Boss, the fucking stairs—the stairs—going up!”
Heaving on the line, Donny knew what was happening out there over the bulwarks. The steps were turning vertical and tucking away under Roger’s skittering feet.
“Boss!” Roger’s voice was thin and shrill. “Helllllp!”
Donny kept the line taut as he looked over the side. Roger was hugging the unit, feet kicking for toeholds. Roger looked up into the boss’s face, and a terrible realization momentarily displaced Roger’s panic.
Donny Sikes was doing this on purpose.
Then Donny cast off the line. The gangway plummeted. When it reached the end of its rope, it snapped open with a sharp crack, the force of which flipped Roger Vespucci off backward. Donny saw the bottom of Roger’s shoes as he hit the boarding platform and bounced into the Atlantic with surprisingly little splash. Donny winched the gangway back up out of Roger’s reach.
Roger surfaced, arms flailing. “Boss! What are you doing! Are you nuts!” Roger already knew the answer to that, why’d he waste breath asking?
“You tried to cut an independent deal with Broadnax.” Donny leaned his elbows on the cap rail and looked down. Tears streamed. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“Boss, no! I didn’t! Why—? Boss, let’s talk this over—” Roger swallowed some saltwater, like hot sand in the back of his throat, and began to retch.
“It’s no use, Roger. I saw the bomb. That wasn’t too bright, Roger.”
“Boss! I never! Never! Some—somebody’s bullshittin’ you! Please pull me up!”
“Don’t think it doesn’t hurt me to do this, Roger.”
Roger splashed to the hull and clawed for a handhold, anything, a rust crack, a rivet head, but there was nothing, a wall of glare ice. “Please, boss! I didn’t!…” But Roger knew it was no use.
His only hope would be to swim ashore. He’d better get started before he wasted his energy. “Hey, boss, you know why you’re always lonely? Because you’re a crazy asshole!” The sharks were taking numbers, lining up from here to Nassau. “Land ho!” shouted a sailor in Spanish from the masthead. Ba
refooted seamen slapped across the wooden deck and shinnied up the yardarms to see it—land! They hadn’t fallen off the edge of the earth. They were safe! Roger Vespucci stepped stalwartly onto the bowsprit and said, “Listen, Christopher, I don’t think that’s China at all. I think that’s a whole new land, an undiscovered land. You know what I’m saying?”
“No shit?” said Christopher. “Undiscovered? Then we’ll call it Rogerland, okay?”
“Okay, great.”
Donny Sikes sat on the fantail finishing his piña colada and watching his friend Roger Vespucci drown.
Hearing Gramps approaching from the main salon, Donny Sikes had the quickness of mind to chuck his piña over the side. Gramps wouldn’t have understood how Roger’s treachery had hurt him and how there was nothing to do but chuck Roger overboard. “I haven’t seen any shooting stars yet tonight, Gramps.”
“Well, keep looking. Perseverance pays dividends.”
“Right you are, Gramps.”
Shooting stars could break your heart.
YOUR LOVE
Doom and Rosalind lay on their backs naked in the V-berth. Droplets of sweat were forming, Doom noticed, in the valley between her breasts. Their lovemaking, now finished, meant only a brief respite from the cloudy depression that hung over Black Caesar’s Yacht Club.
The milky creek remained still and airless. Breezes often twittered the topmost mangrove leaves but seemed never to descend to sea level. On occasion, decomposing fish with diseased gills floated by among the plastic six-pack yokes and soda bottles. Even the threadbare egrets patrolling the shallows moved torpidly, as if on their last legs. Only mosquitoes and horseflies flourished. A green scum had formed around Staggerlee’s waterline, and she too seemed dispirited, immobilized. Doom feared vaguely that just being here would cause her to give up her watertight integrity and sink in despair. Fine white coral-rock road dust settled deeper on her spars and deck with each passing pickup truck. How different she’d feel in the open ocean, cool and free, with no home port painted on her transom.
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