Florida Straits

by SKLA

  "They'll make you shit in a strainer, Vicki. You wanna shit in a strainer with five guys watching?"

  "This is some vacation, Gino," she groused. "I shoulda stood in Queens."

  He swilled whiskey and didn't answer.

  "They wouldn't do that," she resumed after a moment's pondering. "You're just trying to get me to stay."

  "No I'm not," said Gino. He was unshaven, jowly, his color was bad, his eyes were bloodshot, and he gave off the yellow smell of bourbon filtered through an overtaxed liver. "I'm fuckin' sick of ya, ya want the truth. Ya wanna go, go."

  She got as far as the swath of shade thrown by the hotel awning. Then she saw the dark blue Lincoln. It was parked not more than thirty yards from her taxi. Ponte's crew wasn't even bothering to be stealthy anymore; in Key West, where private life was public and strange behavior was the norm, they didn't need to be. They were just waiting, and they had the whole world to wait in. Gino and Vicki had their hotel room, a cubicle maybe twenty feet square, with a rumpled bed, a television set, a chair that skin stuck to when sweaty, and a tiny balcony that Gino was now afraid to go out on. Vicki went back upstairs, stopping only at the hotel pharmacy to buy some fresh cosmetics and a stack of magazines.

  By day five Gino was drinking bourbon with his breakfast grapefruit and talking back to game-show hosts. He could barely bring himself to touch his girlfriend, and she could barely stand to be touched, but there was nothing else to do. Outside, the sun moved across the sky, glared through the windows, turned the walls orange at sunset. Food arrived. Sleep came fitfully.

  "Gino, this is really fucking crazy," Vicki said, lying naked and bored after a passionless poke. "I mean, like psychotic. When can we get outta here?"

  He lifted himself on an elbow, scratched his hairy belly, and swirled his Jack Daniel's in the smudged glass. He couldn't bring himself to say so, but he didn't think they'd ever get out of there, unless he came up with a plan. And after a week of thinking about it night and day, while drinking, while screwing, while dreaming frenzied and terrifying dreams, he didn't have so much as a shred of an idea.

  —

  "So Joey," Sandra asked, "what's really going on with Gino?"

  They were in bed at the compound. A light breeze puffed out the curtains and a waning moon threw just enough light so that dim stripes were cast across the quilt by the slatted blinds.

  "You really wanna know?"

  A week before, she hadn't wanted to, or maybe it had just seemed to her that Joey didn't want to tell her. Couples must conspire to hide things from one another; it's too difficult for either party to do alone. Joey had come home clearly shaken and reeking of garbage. Sandra said she'd been worried, had called the hospital, didn't know Vicki's last name, asked about a young woman who'd been knocked through a window by a moped; the emergency room had handled no such case, and Sandra had felt like a fool. Joey said that Gino had lied, it was one of Gino's crazy schemes. And that was all he said. Sandra, as happened not infrequently, was faced with the choice of pressing or changing the subject. But where was the line between pressing and nagging? So she asked him if he wanted some crab claws. He wasn't hungry. He'd put his clothes in the trash, taken a long shower, and sat up drinking the wine meant for dinner while Sandra had gone to sleep.

  "You really wanna know?" Joey asked again now. It seemed to Sandra that this time there was more hope than hesitation in his voice.

  "Is it bad?"

  "It's really bad."

  "Are you involved, Joey?"

  "Not by choice—hell no."

  "Then tell me."

  So he did. He propped himself up on pillows and absently smoothed the creases in the quilt as he talked. The breeze coming through the window was cool and made him grateful for the warmth of Sandra's body next to him. She gave off a nice smell of talcum powder and hand cream.

  "So now he's holed up in his room," Joey concluded, "and Ponte is just waiting for a chance to kill 'im. Where the emeralds are, if he's got 'em, I haven't got a clue. What he was up to while me and Bert were kidnapped, why he didn't just blow town, I got no waya knowin'. I've tried calling him like a dozen times already. The switchboard just takes messages. I've gone past the hotel, just to scope it out. The Lincolns are always there. Pontes goons wave at me and laugh, like it's a big goddamn joke. I don't go inna hotel, of course. I mean, that crazy I'm not."

  "Joey," Sandra said, "there's nothing you can do."

  But he went on as if he hadn't heard. "Ya know what gets me, Sandra? What gets me is that, for all these years, Gino passed for smart. I mean, I believed it. Sure, I bitched, I argued, but basically I bought it. Gino, the guy with big ideas. Gino, the guy who gets things done. Is that pathetic or what? I mean, look at this guy. What the hell was on his mind? And selfish. Jesus Christ Almighty, is he selfish. I mean, he coulda got me killed. He coulda got Bert killed. And what if you came along, Sandra? I mean, you coulda come for the ride." Joey slapped at the quilt and exhaled ferociously, as if trying to dig some family germ out of the very bottom of his lungs. "The fucking guy thinks of no one but himself."

  Sandra snuggled closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Joey, those are all the reasons why you have to wash your hands of this."

  He pulled away, not in anger but only because her touch was too much a threat to his resolve. "No, Sandra, those are all the reasons I can't wash my handsa this. I walk away, and what happens? Gino gets killed. So now he's dead, but he's still the guy who had the big ideas, the guy who was doing things. And me, what am I? I'm still little Joey, the nobody, the guy who don't know nothin', can't do nothin', and sits by like a jerk, like a worm, while his brother gets whacked."

  "But Joey, you didn't make the problem."

  "Sandra, that's true, and it means nothing. Listen, I been thinkin' about this all week. If Gino gets killed, it's like the clock stops, nothing can change no more. To my old man he's still the golden boy. In his own mind he's still the big shot."

  "But Joey, if he's dead—"

  "The only way I can ever get rid of the fucking guy, the only way I can really be done with him, is to save his life. You see what I'm saying, Sandra? I wanna be able to say to him, 'Gino, you fucked up, I saved your ass. You were dead, I brought you back to life. So here, schmuck, here's your life. Take it and get outta my face.' Sandra, ya can't say that to a dead man, can ya?"

  Part III

  — 27 —

  "Joey," said Zack Davidson, "we gotta talk."

  It was nine o'clock on a bright blue morning on Duval Street, and Joey Goldman was not surprised. In fact, the only thing he found surprising about his job these days was that he still had one. If he'd been running Parrot Beach, he'd have fired himself some weeks before.

  He followed Zack up the shady pathway to the office. Study up, his colleague had told him at their first meeting. Learn to read people, to recognize the subtle signs by which they identify their peers, their social equals. Learn how to look in order to get the ones who could help you on your side. This was a fundamental requirement of salesmanship, by which Zack Davidson meant survival. So now, as Zack strolled ahead of him, Joey studied his smugly casual khaki shorts and had to acknowledge that in picking out the ones he himself was wearing, he'd overlooked certain details, missed certain nuances. Zack's shorts were of a dull twill with no sheen whatsoever; Joey's were polished in a manner that suggested too much processing. Zack's were not rumpled, exactly, but just mussed enough to create the impression that they had never seen the inside of a closet and spent their off-hours on the back of a bedroom chair; Joey's had a crisp crease that made them look less like shorts, pure and simple, and more like an amputated pair of chinos. So O.K., Joey admitted, he didn't yet have the act down perfectly, but he was getting there, he was learning. He wondered how much of it he'd remember, or what good it could possibly do him, now that he was about to get canned.

  Inside, the two men skirted the scale model of the condo complex. Joey glanced at it with a pained fondness, as if i
t were the shrunken but living embodiment of a memory. The sweet little buildings with their tiny pastel shutters; the plastic windblown palms and the swimming pool whose blue Saran Wrap shimmered like real water; the happy owners, littler than Barbies and Kens, laid out on their lounges or standing at the painted edge of the ocean: these things, for Joey, had come to seem the perfect picture of the easy life of Florida, the life whose private, uneventful, and unspectacular appeal was daily getting through to him, and which was being royally screwed up for him by Gino and the long reach of the old neighborhood. He was almost beyond feeling angry about it. Almost. At least he was not surprised Joey tries to do something on his own; Gino undoes it, basically by declining to notice that it might by some chance matter, and by dwarfing it with something so much bigger, flashier, and more urgent. To a kid brother, a bastard no less, this was not news.

  "Siddown," said Zack, motioning Joey into a slatted wooden chair next to his desk. Zack himself plopped down into his rolling, swiveling seat, rocked once so that the tilting back gave a homey squeak, then came forward and put his chin on his interlaced fingers. "Joey," he began, "some jobs, ya know, you do with your brain, right? Other jobs you do with your hands, or your back, or just by getting yourself into a certain land of mood. Those jobs call for parts of you. You see what I'm saying, Joey?

  Joey crossed his knees and hugged the top one. He didn't know exactly how to answer. Getting fired, he imagined, had its protocols and customs just like other parts of having a job, and Joey had never been fired before.

  "What I'm saying," Zack resumed, "is that this is a job you do with your whole person, every part of yourself. Sizing people up, that's brainwork, right? But standing out there on the hot sidewalk for eight hours a day, that's hard physical labor, no shit. As to how you actually approach people, that has a lot to do with the mood you're in, right? Whether you use humor, push the freebies, go for sympathy, whatever. And how the people respond to you, well, that's beyond mood, that's a mystery, like religious almost. Are you in the zone? In a state of grace? At one? Ya know, there's all different ways of describing that frame of mind where everything just falls right and people can't resist you. You know what I'm saying?"

  Joey thought he did, but he found himself increasingly impatient with Zack's analyses of effectiveness in sales and life. When Joey still had his job, he'd thirsted after Zack's advice, thought about it long and hard. But now it no longer seemed worth the effort. "You're saying I've been all fucked up lately, and you're right."

  Zack waved the comment away. It was far too negative for him. "No, Joey, no. That's not what I'm saying." He flipped open a manila folder and removed a piece of paper. On it was a week-by-week graph of Joey's performance on the job. The graph went up, up, up, hit a plateau, then came down, down, down, tracing out a pattern not unlike the pyramidal slope of Mount Trashmore.

  "Joey, look at this. The first week you were here, you made a hundred twenty dollars. That's not much money for forty hours of busting your butt and having people turn you down all day, but hey, you hung in, you stayed with it. Second week, you doubled. Third week, you jumped to four eighty. Fourth week, four eighty again. Now that's pretty damn good, Joey. For a guy still learning the ropes, that's excellent. But what happens after that? Three twenty. Two eighty. Two hundred even. Joey, these aren't just numbers. These are like a map of what's going on with you. You wanna talk to me, Joey?"

  Joey looked out the window, glanced at the Parrot Beach model under its perfect sky of Plexiglas. The graph depressed him. He was no stranger to lack of success, but this was different, this was active failure, failure clearly drawn and pushed in his face, and Joey didn't like it at all. Nor did he enjoy the bitterness that came with losing something he was just barely ready to admit he cared about losing. "Zack, if you're gonna fire me, can't we just please get it over with."

  Zack Davidson sat back and ran a hand through his sandy hair; it fell back exactly where it had been. "Who said anything about firing you?"

  Joey tried to say something but all that came out was a kind of blubbing sound, a sound from underwater.

  The other man spread his arms out wide and hugged the edges of his desk. "Joey, this isn't about firing you. This is about getting you back on the street so you can make some fucking money. Listen to me, Joey. There's some things you oughta know, and apparently you don't. You're very well thought of here. People like you. They like how hard you try, that you don't make excuses. They like that you don't bitch and moan, that you're not a prima donna. They like it that the people you send, they're almost always in a good mood. They don't feel like they've been jerked around. They feel like they've been dealing with a human being. You've got this warmth, Joey, this... I don't know what to call it. Life, call it life. People deal with you, they feel like they're dealing with someone with some blood in his veins and some thoughts in his head, some curiosity. That works for you. So let it work."

  To someone unaccustomed to receiving compliments, Zack's words were as intoxicating and unsettling as empty-stomach cocktails. Joey squirmed, as he generally did when wrestling with the question of thankfulness. He knew he should be grateful to Zack for saying what he'd said, but gratitude was a risky matter. As soon as you acknowledged that someone had done something for you, you opened up the chance that you'd look to them again and they could let you down. If they weren't family, if they weren't neighborhood, what assurance did you have? "Zack," he admitted, "I don't know what to say."

  "Don't say anything. But Joey, listen, I don't wanna pry, but it's real obvious that some strange shit is going on. Guys like outta the movies climb out of a Lincoln and rough you up on the sidewalk. Your brother comes to town and your commissions take a nosedive. Now this woman I know, she works at Flagler House, tells me there's some weird guy who hasn't been out of his room all week, there's two Lincolns camped in front of the hotel, and for some strange reason the cops won't go near them. Joey, is it me, or does all of this look a little strange?"

  Joey fiddled with a sneaker lace to stall for time. Why was everyone always asking him to spill his guts? Then again, what a giddy pleasure it might be if he could spill them. He'd laid it all out for Sandra, a woman. Why not tell it all to Zack, this curious outsider who for some odd reason seemed to want to be his friend? Why not tell everyone and have it the hell over with? Unloading his secrets—what a notion. It was dizzying. It was impossible. "Yeah, Zack," he said, "it looks strange. In fact, it is strange. But it's got nothin' to do with the job."

  Joey volunteered nothing further, and Zack put up his hands in surrender. "O.K., Joey, if ya can't talk about it, ya can't talk about it. But listen, if there's some way I can help, I'm here."

  Joey hesitated. He hesitated for so long that Zack began to fidget, putting paper clips on things, squaring the edges of stacked stationery. Hot shafts of sun streamed in the office window and glinted off the Plexiglas model. Joey was oblivious. He was wading through thoughts as through limestone muck, and while his preoccupations were the same as they had been for weeks, he was suddenly taking a very different course through the morass. He had two lives, Joey did, and until this moment he'd been trying his damnedest to keep them separate, to preserve the new from contamination by the old. Now he realized that the collision had already taken place—in fact, there had never been a time when the two lives weren't one. So he found a new idea: If the new life couldn't be quarantined from the old, maybe the old life could be solved, settled, and laid to rest by the resources of the new. When Joey finally spoke, his words seemed to Zack a bizarre departure from what they had been talking about. To Joey, however, the question was a perfectly logical and even inevitable conclusion to a rigorous line of reasoning.

  "Hey Zack," he said, "you got a boat?"

  — 28 —

  Along about the first of April, the weather changes in Key West. The daytime temperature jumps one day from eighty-two to eighty-five, and there it stays for six weeks or so, until a similar increment signals the setting in of
summer. The evenings suddenly no longer call for sweaters; the light cotton quilts are kicked down to the feet of beds, and even top sheets are likely to be bunched around waists but pulled no higher. The east wind, which had been rock-steady at twelve to fourteen knots all winter, becomes fitful, moves toward the south, loads up with salt, and blows moist enough to make cars wet. These changes, by the standards of the temperate zone, are so subtle as to seem insignificant. In the subtropics, however, people grow spoiled; the range of perfect comfort shrinks for them as it does, say, for the very rich, whose standards of acceptable luxury become so crazily refined that they can hardly ever be satisfied. So, while eighty-two degrees with a twelve-knot wind seems sublime, eighty-five with an eight-knot wind seems sultry, and people alter their routines accordingly.

  At the compound, Peter and Claude put aside their silk sarongs and seldom wore anything more confining than the lightest of seersucker robes. Wendy and Marsha decided that the hot tub was too hot, and were more likely to stand chest-deep in the pool while discussing modern sculpture and rubbing the stress out of each other's shoulders. Luke and Lucy spent a lot of time in their outdoor shower and never quite looked dry. And Steve the naked landlord, to fend off dehydration, carried four beers rather than three to the pool with him at ten a.m.

  "Whatcha reading, Steve?" Joey asked him as he went to hand over Sandra's check for the April rent.

  Steve turned the damp paperback over and looked at the green flying saucer on the cover. "Aliens," he said. "Germ warfare from space." Then he smiled.

  As for Sandra, she had finally broken down and done some shopping, finally put aside her fuzzy cardigans and long-sleeved business blouses with the built-in shoulders that made even Joey forget how radically compact she was. Now, for work, she wore pale blue cotton knits that nicely set off her version of a tan. Her skin, it seemed, had not changed color, but the tiny hairs on her arms had been bleached an almost tinsel silver, which offered much the same effect. Also, Sandra had greeted the warmer weather by going on a salad binge, a veritable orgy of roughage. Joey would open the refrigerator door and be confronted by a jungle of romaine, an impenetrable forest of spinach, watercress, endive. "Sandra," he'd say, "how come there ain't no food in heah?" And Sandra would smile. The heat made her softer-spoken but no less immovable. "There's a steak in the back somewhere. Probably behind the cottage cheese."