Straits of Fortune

by Anthony Gagliano

  He was falling behind, but he was still close, too close. One misstep and he’d be on me. You hit top speed at thirty yards, and after that it’s just a question of who slows down first. The lactic acid begins to outstrip the body’s ability to clear it from the bloodstream, and the muscles lose their efficiency. They begin to tire, to cramp up, and from that point it’s a basic question of chemistry. There was one other fact I was banking on: The stronger and more powerful a man is, the more he sacrifices in terms of endurance. For Williams and me it had come down to the equation between life and death.

  He kept coming. It had to be the Morphitrex. Not even steroids could have allowed a man of Williams’s size and age to run so fast for so long. But I had nature’s own private stock of juice powering me forward. It’s called adrenaline, and in moments of extreme excitement it’s the best stuff in the world. The little glands that ride the kidneys were working overtime producing it, and I felt my stride evening out and my chest expanding, preparing for the inevitable switch of energy systems that would allow for the use of oxygen as a fuel source. That’s the system that marathoners use. It’s very efficient. You can run just about two hours before the sugar in the muscles gets used up and you hit the wall. The problem with that is by then you’re no longer sprinting, and I could feel myself slowing down.

  A hundred yards with the juggernaut still coming, but not as fast. Even better, I could no longer hear his breathing. I checked ahead for a smooth stretch of sand, then glanced quickly behind me. The gap between me and Williams was now sixty or seventy yards. He was still running, but he was kicking up a lot of sand and having trouble keeping a straight course. He ran with his head down, like a drunk looking for a place to collapse. I ran for another twenty yards, then slowed a bit until my breathing evened out. I needed to save something for the end.

  I stopped and waited for him. When he saw me standing there, he redoubled his efforts. I picked up a chunk of coral and threw it at him. His head jerked back, but his body surged forward. He was almost cooked. He was mean, and he was crazy, and he had a great deal of willpower, but the laws of exhaustion are nonnegotiable. He was already into oxygen debt, and his body, despite its strength, couldn’t pay it off quickly enough. I let him get within twenty yards, then took off running again. I slowed down just enough to keep his rabid hopes of killing me alive. Whenever I was satisfied that he was still coming, I trotted away from him.

  Again I looked back. It was well that I did so, because he had closed to within twenty yards of me. He’d put everything into one last surge, but he was finished, used up. As I watched, he fell forward onto his knees like a man kneeling in prayer. I stopped and called to him. He looked up and struggled to his feet, stumbled forward, then fell to his knees again. I turned and faced him. He was sixty yards behind me now, a shadow of a ruin rising up out of the sand. Say what you will of Williams, but he had a lot of Bushido in his bullet head.

  I ran at him, full speed, or what I had left of it. The world on either side of me blurred into a mass of incoherent light, like a palette of watercolors smeared in a rainstorm. I couldn’t feel my feet on the sand, but I was moving fast. My mouth was full of blood, my blood, and it made me mad.

  Williams lifted his head, but it was too late, because I was already in the air, my knees tucked into my ribs and then the jackknife straightening of the legs as I thrust out my heels. There was no way you could have planned it, but Williams turned his chin to one side just as I struck him. His neck made a sickening sound, like the mast of a ship snapping in two. He spun half around and toppled backward. I landed hard on my hands and belly, facing away from him, the air knocked out of me. I must have hit a nerve when I landed, because my left arm was numb clean up to the shoulder. I got to my feet as quickly as I could, pushing up with my one good hand, and walked over to where Williams lay.

  I noticed the revolver lying in the sand at his feet. He must have had it in an ankle holster. It had come loose when he fell. You tell me why he hadn’t tried to shoot me with it. The .38 didn’t have much range, and it would have been a tough shot in the dark with both of us running, but he might have tried, especially in the beginning when he was still close enough to have hit me. But that wasn’t Williams. He had chosen to be the lion right through to the end, and that was maybe why I was alive and he was almost dead. I scooped up the gun and checked the clip. Its gold shells winked at me in the weak light.

  Williams was still breathing. I stood over him with the gun pointed at his head. He looked up, but not at me. His blue eyes were peering into the vast depths of the stars and seeing nothing. There was blood all around his mouth and nose. His massive chest lifted once, twice, then dropped and stayed down. It sounds cold to say it, but under the circumstances it seemed to me like a fairly natural death, a grim fact that tells you something about the kind of territory my life had entered. I had a fresh gun, there was a dead man lying at my feet, and all I can tell you now is that it didn’t shock me. I didn’t feel any kind of satisfaction. I didn’t feel anything at all.

  I sat on the sand next to Williams’s body for five minutes with the revolver still pointing at him until I was sure he wasn’t faking it. Then, finally, I checked for a pulse at the carotid artery in his tree trunk of a neck. He was dead, all right. I went through his pockets, found his wallet, and buried it in the dunes under a patch of sea grass. What I needed now besides food and rest was time, and the longer it took the cops to identify the body, the better it would be for me.

  There was nothing to do about Williams’s body except to get away from it, so I started walking. I was just about played out, but I needed to leave the vicinity as soon as possible. Come the morning, someone taking a stroll or jogging along the beach would spot him and call the cops. They’d bring Williams to the morgue, but without identification it would be a few days before they could identify him. Probably they would have to take fingerprints. Williams didn’t have a criminal record, as far as I knew, but his prints would lead the authorities to his military files. Eventually they would tie him to the Colonel, but not—I hoped—to me.

  I went down to the edge of the ocean and did what I could to wash the blood from my face. I had no doubt that I looked like death on a hot plate, and it would not be a good thing if someone were to remember the sight of a man with a bloody face emerging from the beach near where a dead man was found the following day. Still, a nosebleed is hard to stop, especially when you’re walking, so I had no choice but to stay on the beach until I looked a little better.

  I walked south for a mile or so, my energy winking and blinking inside me like a fluorescent bulb about to flicker out. I was way too beat to go very much farther, but I pushed myself for another mile or so until I reached a place behind the dunes that held a small picnic area, complete with a rusty barbecue stand and half a dozen weather-worn wooden tables. I found a dark spot and stretched out on my back under a tree with the intention of resting for a few minutes while giving my nose a chance to stop bleeding. That was the plan anyway, but I didn’t stay awake long enough to review it.

  I woke up eight hours later with the sun in my eyes and the Sahara in my mouth, but at least my nose wasn’t bleeding anymore. Just to make sure, I walked down to the shore and washed my face again. I touched my nose with a tentative finger. It felt a little flatter than usual, and it hurt badly, but I didn’t think it was broken. I looked down the beach and saw an old man walking toward me, sweeping a metal detector in front of him as he came, his head down like a man looking for his car keys in the sand. I took off my shirt and waited for him to pass, but he didn’t pay me any attention. All his hopes were buried in the sand.

  From the heat and the height of the sun, I estimated it to be around seven or eight o’clock. Surely someone must have spotted Williams’s body by now, and that meant it was time to go. The question was, where? It occurred to me that I had absolutely nowhere to go except home. It was the only place that made any sense, even if the cops were looking for me. It didn’t matter;
I was too tired to care.

  I walked up to where the street flanked the beach and checked for some signage to figure out where I was, which turned out to be a bit north of a little town called Dania Beach. I walked into a diner and ordered ham, eggs, coffee, and a pitcher of water. In a booth at the end of the restaurant, a pair of middle-aged cops were eating their breakfast and ignoring me. The waitress who served me treated me as though I looked perfectly normal and even called me “sweetheart” when she refilled my coffee cup. The food brought back some of my strength, though it hurt to eat, especially when I tried gnawing through the slab of ham that came with the eggs. By the time I finished my third cup of coffee, I began to think I might actually make it home without collapsing.

  A half hour later I was on U.S. 1, walking south and feeling vaguely human and looking for a pay phone so that I could call a cab. Finally, at a gas station, I found one that actually worked, and ten minutes later I was sailing toward Miami Beach. I was well fed, poorly rested, and ready to go to jail. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, the driver was waking me up.

  “Rough night, huh?” he said. His Russian accent was as thick as herring in cream sauce.

  “Very rough,” I told him. My face was hurting again, and I was thinking about having it amputated when I got the time. I handed the driver a twenty-dollar bill and told him to keep the change.

  “I hope she is worth it,” he said. “My friend, you look like hell.”

  “People keep telling me that. I’m beginning to take it personally. Was she worth it? Ask me in a month. I’ll tell you then.”

  Sternfeld, the landlord, was standing on the front step when I hauled my body out of the cab. As usual, he was braced inside the chromium bay of his walker. He was nearsighted, and so I was almost in front him before he realized who it was. He squinted at me and frowned.

  “You look like the walking dead,” he said.

  “Coming from you,” I said, “that’s hard to take.”

  “Where the hell have you been? I saw you on television the other night. There’s some people looking for you, kid.”

  I put my foot on the first step and looked over my shoulder. “It was all a big misunderstanding. Everything’s okay now.” I heard myself saying it, but I had trouble believing that it was true. It was as though some divine law were being violated, a law that says there must be a wake created by our actions that will surely wash back on us no matter how long it takes. I looked up at the cracked façade of the Lancaster Arms as if it were the Wailing Wall. It had taken a long, hard night to make the place look good to me, but then, like I said, every paradise is relative.

  “You’re late with the rent again,” Sternfeld said. “Nothing new there.”

  “Anybody come by to look for me recently?” I asked.

  “The cops, a few days ago. Suits with badges. I told them you had skipped. They didn’t seem that disappointed.”

  “They search my room?” I asked. I was thinking about the fifty grand under the kitchen sink. That might be hard to explain.

  “They searched the one I showed them—204,” Sternfeld said, smiling slyly. “Right next door to yours. Vacant, though.” He shrugged. “What can I tell you? I guess maybe I got the Alzheimer’s.”

  “Why’d you do that for? You might get yourself in trouble.”

  “I did it because I liked them even less than I like you.”

  “Anyone else besides the cops stop by?” I asked.

  Sternfeld surged forward in his walker so that the back legs came off the ground like those of a horse about to buck its rider.

  “Do I look like some kind of goddamn concierge to you or something? And you ignored me when I said you were late with your rent. Don’t think I didn’t notice that, Mr. Wise Guy.”

  “Come on, Sternfeld,” I said. “Us New Yorkers have to stick together, right? Just tell me. You’ll get your money.”

  “All right, asshole. A couple of days ago, a big guy stopped by asking for you, but I didn’t like the look of him, so I told him you had moved out. Looked like a fucking Nazi. He a pal of yours?”

  “Not even close.”

  I gazed at Sternfeld. He was two years older than water and had every disease this side of leprosy, but time was still having a hard time pinning him to the ground. He’d been a cabdriver in New York and had saved enough money over the years to buy first his own cab and then nine more. He’d bought the Lancaster Arms and retired to Florida after his wife died ten years ago. He’d been in North Africa during World War II and had the shrapnel in his right shoulder to prove it, and if you think he was gruff with me, you should only hear how he spoke to people he didn’t like.

  “What the hell are you looking at?” he asked.

  “Nothing. How are you feeling these days?”

  He spit into the hedges to his right. “Swell. My youngest daughter just called to tell me she’s a lesbian now, but at my age I could give a flying fuck. Besides which, I got enough grandchildren anyway—every single goddamn one a halfwit. Other than that, though, everything’s jake.”

  “Look,” I told him, “I’m just going upstairs and sleep for a week or two. After that maybe you and I will take the redeye out to Las Vegas and hit the buffets and the blackjack tables. You must be tired of playing bingo by now.”

  Sternfeld perked up. “That sounds pretty good. Hey,” he said with a grin, “wouldn’t it be a riot if anybody I used to know in Vegas was still alive? And hey, by the way, you prick, your rent is due.”

  “I heard you. Tomorrow, okay? I just need to sleep.”

  “So sleep. See if I care. Just don’t die before you pay me.” With that he wheeled his walker around and tap-tap-tapped away.

  I found the spare key I kept under the air-conditioning unit and opened the door to 206. It looked the same, and I was glad to be there, glad really to be anywhere. The books on the shelves looked down at me like the old friends they were: Montaigne and Dante and Shakespeare and Mickey Spillane—all the classics. I walked into the tiny kitchen and stared benignly at the dirty dishes in the sink. They were a welcome sight for some strange reason, a sign of human business left undone but still within reach of completion. I found a six-pack of beer in the fridge, and it seemed to me that I had indeed reached my own personal promised land, even if it was going to be a very brief oasis.

  I went back into the living room, unplugged the phone, and closed the blinds. I turned on the A/C and set the ceiling fan on a light, breezy spin that swirled the air around like a straw swirling cold lemonade in a glass. I sat on the sofa, opened a beer, and waited for the room to get comfortable. I felt good. The whole trick was in not thinking too much. I put Williams’s gun under the sofa cushion and sat back and waited for something to shatter my peace. Let them come, I thought, not really caring whether they came or not, but holding out the hope that it would not be today or tomorrow, that I could finish this beer and possibly the next. I wasn’t ready for any more trouble yet, but the hell with that. The long, crazy summer was over, and I was too weary to care. Let them come.

  I stayed fairly drunk for a day and a half and ordered take-out over the phone. I must have still looked a little crazy, because none of the delivery people would meet my eyes after their first sight of me, and one of them ran off without his tip. That’s what happens when you get behind in your shaving. Then, on Tuesday night, I came down with a bad case of cabin fever and realized I had to get out, so I put on my Nikes and a pair of shorts and opened the back door. The air had dried out, and there was an unexpectedly cool breeze blowing down from the north. It was nine o’clock, and the southbound traffic was light. I stepped through the door and waited for someone to shoot me. When no one did, I went for a run. Usually I ran on the beach, but I’d had enough of running in the sand for a while. Besides that, it was pretty dark down by the water’s edge, and there was no sense in pushing my luck.

  Susan called me at seven o’clock the next morning. Her voice had nothing in it to hold on to, j
ust words strung together in formation without emotion or excitement. She said she’d be there to pick me up at eight-thirty, and that was about it. You would not have believed she knew me at all. Maybe she didn’t. I took a shower and got my only suit out of the closet. It was a khaki number I’d worn only once, and it looked a bit wrinkled, but it wasn’t like I was going on a job interview, so I put it on over a light blue shirt and wrapped up the package with a black tie located only after the greatest of difficulties.

  Susan’s car was already there when I went outside. It was cloudy, and the streets were wet. She didn’t say anything when I got in beside her, and from this alone I knew it was not going to be a jubilant morning. I wasn’t exactly unhappy with the silence, as I was contemplating dark thoughts of going to the slammer, something I’d told my mother I would always try to avoid. That wasn’t the only area where I’d disappointed her. She had told me once that I should try to make a new friend every day, but a cursory review of the recent past revealed that I had fallen a bit behind schedule on that mission, too.

  “What do you think is on today’s agenda?” I asked.

  “Your ass, what else?”

  A few minutes later, we were in a conference room on the sixth floor of the federal building in a room with an Arthurian-style round table, floor-to-ceiling windows, worn gray carpeting, and about ten cops of all persuasions, none of whom looked particularly glad to see me. Hackbart was there, too. He was standing by the window drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. He saw me come in and gave me his best scowl, perhaps the first of the day. Over his shoulder I watched a squadron of turkey buzzards flying lazy circles around the Freedom Tower to the north and hoped it wasn’t an omen.

  Hackbart smiled at Susan and handed her a cup of coffee. I got my own. Then we all sat down around the table. The atmosphere in the room was thick with solemnity and, from my side, fear. We were introduced. There were CIA, FBI, DEA, Customs, coast guard, cops from the city of Miami, and cops from Miami Beach. There were cops of every make and model, and I knew at that moment without a doubt that I was the safest man in the world. I didn’t see anybody from the Justice League of America, however, but for all I knew, Batman was under the table with a tape recorder.