Florida Straits

by SKLA

Bert reached down and absently stroked Don Giovanni behind the ears. "Well, your brother knows who I am. He knows I'm here. Maybe he'll look me up, maybe he won't. I hope he doesn't."

  Joey could not help laughing. "Ain't it great what a popular guy my brother is, the way he's always spreading sunshine?"

  'Yeah, it's great," said Bert. "But listen, kid, if you want my advice, or even if you don't, play as dumb as you can for as long as you can."

  Joey looked down at his feet and kicked lightly at a knuckle of coral. "That'll be easy. I mean, that'll just be acting like he expects me to act."

  "And Sandra? What'll you say to Sandra?"

  "As little as I can," said Joey. He hadn't really thought about it, but he knew the answer that was expected of him. "I don't want her involved."

  The old man nodded his approval. "Best that way," he said.

  Joey nodded back, glanced briefly at the vacant western sky, and for just an instant felt as empty as the place the sun had been. "Best that way."

  —

  "So how'd it go with Gino?"

  Sandra was standing at the stove, watching macaroni boil. She wasn't a bad cook, just a nervous one, an Irish girl making Italian food for a half-Jewish boyfriend who'd grown up with the finest pork products Queens had to offer. In her efforts to be organized, precise, she meddled too much with the food. She was always poking at cutlets, stirring things that didn't need stirring. She memorized recipes and timed things on her watch.

  "Went O.K.," Joey said. He was looking for some orange juice and his head was in the fridge. "He's got a new girlfriend with him."

  "What's she like?" Sandra bothered the broccoli.

  By way of answer, Joey held his hands about a foot and a half out from his chest.

  "He's consistent," said Sandra.

  "Give him that," said Joey.

  There was a pause. A lid lifted softly from a sauce-pan, then settled back down. Sandra had an instant's panic that the red sauce was scorching. It was not. She stirred it anyway. "Joey, why's he here?"

  He leaned against the sink and hid his face in his glass of orange juice. His answer, when it came, sounded harsher than he meant it to be. "Sandra, get real willya. You think my big shot brother tells me why he does things?"

  Or maybe Joey meant the answer to be harsh. Maybe he wanted to goad Sandra into pressing him. If she pressed, maybe he would tell her more, and could persuade himself he wasn't violating the code that made him wrestle with things alone but was only giving in to a woman's nagging. But Sandra didn't nag. She had her code too.

  "I didn't even know your brother was such a big shot," she said.

  "Well, he is," said Joey, and even as he was mumbling out the words, he was thinking how ridiculous it was: standing up for Gino practically in the same breath he was saying what a louse he was, still trying to make him a big brother instead of a big pain in the ass. Ridiculous. This whole business with family was ridiculous, and to stop himself from saying anything more, Joey filled his mouth with orange juice and walked out of the kitchen.

  — 18 —

  "Hello, folks, how ya doin? Crummy day, ain't it? Barely eighty-one degrees, I'd say, and hey, where'd that one little cloud come from, Cuba? Yeah, that's some kinda Commie cloud. Havana's only ninety miles away, ya know, twice as close as Miami. Yeah. Think about it. We're practically, ya know, in South America. And this beautiful condo, Parrot Beach, it looks right at downtown Havana. You think I'm kidding? Hey, get a good pair of binocs, you can watch Castro trim his beard inna morning. Really, take a tour. Takes an hour or so, and we give ya champagne, free food, a paira passes to . . ."

  Joey was having a good day. He'd chalked up two commissions and it wasn't even noon. Moreover, he was gradually discovering what tens of millions of working people already knew but would not publicly admit: that going to your job was a great way to forget about your life. Patrolling his street corner, giving his spiel, he didn't have to think about the dinner he and Sandra would be having with Gino and Vicki that evening. He didn't have to worry about why Gino was in town. He could imagine himself beyond the long reach of circumstance. On these few squares of sidewalk, he was in control of things. He was confident, and more so all the time. He knew how people would react to him, knew how to play off the drunks and the yogurt eaters and the kids. Like anyone who's any good at anything, he could at moments drop out of time and move into the blessed and utterly private realm of his skill.

  He was in that realm when the dark blue Lincoln pulled up.

  It had come down Duval Street slow and heavy, as if it were leading a funeral, overflowing its fair share of the pavement like a fat man in an airplane seat. The car stopped in front of a fire hydrant, its tires squeaking against the curb. Two men got out. They exuded menace like a bad smell, and an open space instantly appeared around them on the crowded street. They wore blue suits that almost matched the car and almost matched each other. They were beefy in a way that made them walk with their feet wide apart because their thighs rubbed together, making wrinkles in their groins and shiny places on their pants.

  "Yo, fuckface," the taller of the two said to Joey. He had the pink upturned nostrils of a pig, and his hair was raked, swirled, and peaked like something you'd see in the window of a fancy bakery.

  "Me?" Joey found himself strangely unsurprised to be confronted by these thugs, who, he realized in an instant, worked for Charlie Ponte. But unsurprised is not the same as not terrified. The bone seemed to melt out of his knees and he wanted to sit on the john. Having grown up with thugs, he was both more and less afraid of them than the average person. More, because he knew they were killers. Not by rumor, not from the movies; he knew it. Less, because he also knew what fakers they were. They had to act scary like doctors had to act concerned. It went with the job. It didn't mean they meant it.

  'Yeah, you, dickhead," said the thug. "We wanna talk to you."

  "So talk."

  "Take your sunglasses off," said the shorter thug. His lower lip was creased by a deep off-center scar, and he wore a very bad toupee. It was the color of a wet brown dog, and where it was parted there was a fissure as between two strips of badly laid sod. "So we can see if you're lying."

  "They're prescription," Joey lied.

  "I should give a fuck they're prescription?" said the shorter goon. "I don't give a fuck if you're blind. Take 'em off."

  "Go fuck yourself."

  Joey had only an instant to savor this flash of bravado. The shorter goon stepped behind him with the practiced quickness of a high school wrestler and pinioned his arms. The taller goon reached out and plucked the sunglasses off his face. In a moment of excruciatingly slowed-down time, Joey watched them tumble to the sidewalk. They landed eyebrow-side down, bounced once, and did not break. They cast twin blue shadows onto the pebbled sidewalk. Then the taller goon lifted his foot. His shoe was shiny and tapered like a missile, and it came down heel first on the sunglasses Sal Giordano had given him. The lenses were reduced to tiny blue beads as from a thrown bottle.

  "So now, douchebag," said the taller thug, "we talk. You in on this with your brother?"

  "In on what?" said Joey. He tried to look past the two sets of massive shoulders to remind himself there was still a world beyond the blue suits. Traffic continued going by on Duval Street, bending around the parked Lincoln. Pedestrians gave wide berth, as they might around someone throwing up, but showed no particular interest.

  "Don't be cute, shitbird," said the goon with the terrible rug. "You know what we're talking about."

  "Sorry, guys, but I really don't." As if to prove his innocence, his uninvolvement with anything rough and dangerous, he gestured delicately toward his own pink shirt and down at his wholesome tennis shoes. "I live here. I got a job. My brother's here on vacation. I really don't know what you want from me."

  The two goons glanced at each other. They seemed to be straining to maintain their aspect of menace, but mostly they just looked confused. They were not long on ideas, and they ha
d come to the end of their morning's worth. If Joey had given them one single thing to grab on to, they could have clubbed him with it. But he hadn't. Play as dumb as you can for as long as you can.

  "You gonna be seeing your brother?" asked the taller thug.

  "Course. He's my brother."

  The thug wagged a thick forefinger under Joey's chin, but it was an unimpressive gesture, a shot in the air by an army in retreat. "Tell him to watch his ass."

  The thugs stepped around the ruins of Joey's sunglasses, got into the Lincoln, and drove away. Almost immediately the life of Key West surged back into the space they'd emptied, the way water finds the only dry spot on a piece of cloth. Joey bent down and picked up his shades as one would an injured bird. The frames at least seemed more or less intact. He put them in his pocket. Then he walked gingerly into the Parrot Beach office to use the bathroom.

  —

  "Did I ask you if they were worth fixing? I mean, did I come in here and ask your expert opinion, or did I just say I'd like 'em fixed?"

  The young woman behind the optician's counter was wearing tinted contacts in a startling shade of copper. She leaned back slightly in the face of Joey's vehemence, but held on to her pleasant and relentlessly helpful tone. "It's just that, with the cheaper frames—"

  "Did I ask if they were cheap frames? Did I ask what any of this costs?"

  Zack Davidson, his sandy hair falling in a perfect arc across his forehead, his pink shirt immaculately draped, intervened. "He's a little upset. The glasses have sentimental value. So if you could just fit them with new lenses ..."

  The woman behind the counter lifted the frames, wiggled the loosened hinges of the earpieces, and said, "Sure. O.K. What color?"

  "Blue," said Joey. He said it like a little boy who's fallen down, is being bribed into feeling comforted, but owes it to himself not to come around too soon.

  "O.K.," said the woman behind the counter. "Blue. They'll be ready by five."

  On the short walk back to the Parrot Beach office, Zack regarded Joey from under his reddish eyebrows. "You wanna tell me what that was all about?"

  "Nothing," said Joey. "It was about nothing. These two guys thought I was needling them, I guess."

  Zack frowned. From his office window, he'd noticed the Lincoln pull up and the two men approach. He didn't hear what was said, but the two beefy fellows hadn't waited to be needled, that much was clear. "You in trouble, Joey?"

  "No."

  "Debts?"

  "No."

  "Drugs?"

  "No."

  "You want me to call the police?"

  "No."

  For a minute they walked in silence among the characters of Duval Street. A fellow in a torn undershirt with a green parrot on his shoulder. A woman with a small monkey in a diaper. Then Zack said, "You know, Claire and Sandra, they're getting to be good friends."

  The remark seemed to connect with nothing, and Joey turned it this way and that in his mind, trying to see where it fit. It didn't at first dawn on him that maybe it was a backdoor kind of offer, an offer of confidence, of alliance. Joey wasn't used to offers like that. He was isolated, and isolation made people suspicious, and suspicion kept them isolated. "That's nice," said Joey. "I been hoping Sandra would make some friends."

  Zack looked as if he might speak again, but didn't. He turned up the pathway to the Parrot Beach office, and Joey resumed his patrol on the corner. But he made no more commissions that day. His stride had been broken, his timing was off. And the calm place where he was alone with his salesman's skill seemed farther away than Astoria.

  — 19 —

  Gino Delgatto, whatever else he was or was not, was a true sport as a host.

  When Joey and Sandra arrived in the grand columned dining room of the Flagler House, a magnum of Dom Perignon had already been placed tableside in a silver bucket, canapés of caviar and salmon had been arrayed on triangles of toast, and the staff had fallen into the somewhat ironic deference that accrues to the big spender. On the presentation plates of the expected guests lay pink hibiscus flowers. Gino had moved his to his bread-and-butter plate, and Vicki had placed hers between her alpine breasts, where its pistil had at first quivered then begun to droop from the excessive heat.

  Gino, on best behavior, stood up as the maitre d' ushered Joey and Sandra to the table. He gave Sandra a quick hug, deciding in the first glance that, in her cream-colored slacks and cardigan, she was, as usual, not dressed up enough. Gino had known Sandra for over three years now, and had never yet managed to pin down what he thought of her. He supposed she was pretty in her way, but her way was so unshowy, so unglamorous, that Gino really couldn't tell. Sandra was practically flat-chested. Her nails were short and she didn't do much with her hair. She wore makeup but, as Gino saw it, not enough. As to her personality, she seemed to have some brains, give her that. Now and then she could be pretty funny, in a dry kind of way. But fun-loving she was not. Had Gino ever seen her have more than two, three drinks? Had he ever seen her really drop her guard and laugh? He didn't think so. In fact, she usually seemed to be the one who decided when the party was over. Probably she was good for Joey, who, after all, didn't have much going for him and wasn't likely to attract the really super babes, but still, she was a little bland, a little dull.

  It did not occur to Gino that Sandra was subdued around him because she loathed him to the marrow of her bones.

  But he was family, and so she returned his hug and answered his kiss on the cheek with one of her own. She shook the red-taloned hand that Vicki presented with the weirdly arched wrist of a great lady from some previous century. Then everyone sat down and started sipping champagne.

  "Cheers," said Gino.

  "Cheers," said Joey.

  "You having a good time here?" Sandra asked Vicki.

  Vicki reached toward her cleavage on the pretext of toying with the flower that was wilting there, and twisted her thin mouth into an expression of mixed feelings. "Pretty good. Weather's great. But the shopping—" She made a dismissive sound that was something like dyukh, then leaned close to Sandra as though sharing a deep and shameful secret. "It's like junky stuff. Homemade. No brand names. No designers. It's not like, ya know, elegant."

  Gino emptied his glass and gave his head an indulgent shake. Like sugar daddies everywhere, he felt truly secure only when his mistress was either spending his money or talking about it. "Vicki thinks 'elegant' is a whaddyacallit, a pseudonym for 'expensive.' "

  "Synonym," said Sandra.

  "What the hell," said Gino. "Anyway, she don't like cheap stuff. Do ya, baby?"

  Vicki shrugged her shoulders with an effect that was seismic. "Who does? I mean, if people liked it, it wouldn't be cheap no more."

  "Hey, that's good," said Gino. He said it looking at Joey and pointing a thick finger at Vicki. "Well, hey, anybody hungry?"

  They looked at menus and decided to order lobsters from Maine.

  "Seems crazy," Vicki said, when the waiter had re-filled the champagne glasses and vanished. "I mean, here we are right by this ocean just full of a zillion kinds of fish, and we have lobsters flown in from Maine."

  "There's nothing like Maine lobster," said Gino with finality, and Joey realized, in spite of himself, something he admired or at least envied about his half brother. Gino knew what he liked. He enjoyed things. For him, everything fell into a list, and you went for the things at the top. Drinks, that was champagne. Champagne, that was Dom Perignon. Food, it was lobster. Women, big tits and high hair. Shoes, suits, cars, watches, hair tonic, olive oil, whatever. There was always something that was the best, and if you could have that thing, you knew you were doing good.

  Then, too, lobster was a great equalizer. Everybody was a slob eating lobster, and so Gino, who was a slob eating almost anything, didn't especially stand out. Or rather, he stood out unmistakably as the leader in a ritual of gusto. Too strong, with not enough grace, he crushed shells so that juice went squirting out of every crevice, hitting his wa
xed bib with a sound like soft rain on a tin roof. Vicki, hampered by her long nails, plucked at her lobster with the patient murderousness of a gull. Sandra was, as ever, methodical, her small neat hands coaxing out the flesh as efficiently as if she were counting out twenties at the bank. And Joey, who was perhaps too tentative at many things, was tentative as well in his attack on his dinner. He didn't get all the meat out, for fear of twanging a sinew and having it fly off, for fear of flicking a speck of lobster at a tablemate—for fear of being like Gino.

  "More champagne?" the older brother asked.

  "Not for me," said Sandra.

  "Maybe one glass," said Joey.

  Gino summoned the captain with a wave of a hand covered in lobster slime and ordered up another magnum.

  "So Gino," Sandra said, "all the time I've known you, I've never once heard of you taking a vacation. How come all of a sudden you are?"

  Did Gino flinch at the question, or was he just yanking off a stubborn lobster leg? "Just due for a break, that's all. Besides, Vicki here, she's been such a good kid, I thought it would be nice to take a trip with her."

  "I wanted to go to Aruba," Vicki said. "Ya know, where there's duty-free. But no. Gino says he's got some business down here anyway."

  "Shut up, Vicki. What she means is I wanted to visit you guys."

  Sandra dabbed her mouth on her napkin. Around the dining room, plates clattered and corks popped.

  They finished the lobsters, had mango ice cream and coffee, and the captain brought the check nestled in a leather sleeve on a silver tray. "I trust everything was satisfactory, Dr. Greenbaum?"

  "Yeah, terrific," said Gino, signing. "Here's a little something for you." The captain retreated, backing and bobbing, and Gino dropped his napkin onto the table. "Walk onna beach?"

  Outside, a yellow half-moon was perched over the Florida Straits, and a light south breeze that smelled of dry shells and seaweed was just barely rustling the palms. Underfoot, the trucked-in sand felt cakey with the moisture of the evening. Gino handed Joey a cigar and unwrapped one for himself. The gesture was enough to make Sandra and Vicki fall in side by side, leaving the men to trail behind, wreathed in their blue and nasty smoke.