by Jim Nisbet
Anyway, after bumming around for almost a year without a pot to piss in, other than Vellela Vellela, I’ve decided to undertake one more big score. A score modest enough, by most people’s standards, but one sufficient unto my needs. I’m sure you’re all too aware that I know but one or two ways to do that. But just in case the slots don’t come up all cherries, I want you to know about it.
“Damn it,” Tipsy said. “Those cops were right.” She slapped the pages of the letter. “I don’t want to know!”
“He’s talking about smuggling, isn’t he?” Quentin asked.
Tipsy made a face.
“I guess that rehabilitation stuff isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Perhaps that explains the gloomy philosophical tone communicated by this particular epistle?”
“Charlie has been writing me letters since he ran away from home.” She indicated the letter. “Almost since his friend was building jetports in the Stone Age.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Tipsy blinked. “Could I be squandering my adulthood by constantly restating the obvious?”
“I never thought of you as a progressive essayist.”
“I love his letters. Email and cellphones have completely blown away snail mail, but Charley has never stopped with postcards and letters. Look at this.” She showed Quentin the envelope. “Hand addressed, hand written. A careful hand. Stationery off a ruled pad. Exotic stamps. Water stains.” She sniffed the pages. “Rum and kerosene smoke.”
Quentin noted the edge in her voice. Instead of asking her to tell him something he didn’t know he said, “Sure, baby.”
On the other side of the bar, Faulkner paused for a look at the stamp as he dried his hands on a towel. “I already have that one.” He mopped his forehead on his sleeve, hung the towel under the bar, and turned back to his work.
“Rum Cay. Can you imagine? Wouldn’t you like to travel there?”
“Why would I want to go there when I can stay in San Francisco arguing about Vietnam and workers’ rights? You think it’s any different there?”
“Charley says it’s hard to find somebody in the islands who gives a shit about what the United States is up to.”
“Oh yes?” Quentin bristled. “That will all change the minute we start bombing them.”
“That’ll get their attention.”
“Don’t they know we’re the most important country in the world?”
“I guess not.”
“That’s what my ironically pink brother on the terrace there thinks.”
Tipsy turned to have a look. “I thought he left.”
“Nope. He’s out there telling his friends there’s bogus negritude to be baited at the bar.”
“Maybe they’ll buy you a drink before your mind turns to dust in the Museum of Old Ideas.”
“What do you suppose is going build that museum?”
“Money?”
“The evergreen idea that contains all other ideas.”
“We’re stoking its inventory by the hour.”
“Point taken,” Quentin muttered tightly. It was clear that he was genuinely annoyed.
“Quentin, answer me straight: Are we going to have to shoot our way out of here?”
“Hey.” Quentin stabbed the bar top with a forefinger. “I am the regular here. That buppie out there is a fucking provocateur.”
“I though you could hold your water better than this.”
Quentin stiffened. “Water? Good idea. Let’s pamper yourself with a shot of tequila. You know how I like to watch.”
Tipsy didn’t object.
“Faulkner.”
“Yo.”
“One shot of Casaderos.”
The place had a good crowd in it. But Faulkner tumbled a shot glass onto a coaster and had it generously brim full and flanked by a lime wedge and a saltshaker, with the quart back on the shelf, before Quentin and Tipsy could resume their conversation.
“Poetry in motion.” Quentin covered the orphaned dollar bill with a ten. “That’s yours.”
Faulkner gathered up the cash and rapped a knuckle on the bar.
Ignoring salt and lime Tipsy lofted the shot glass. Quentin raised his pint of water. “May the scales fall from their telemesmerized eyes.”
“What are you talking about?” Tipsy said, backing her glass out of the toast. “They’re running the country. They’re running the goddamn world. Toast something plausible, for chrissakes.”
Without hesitation Quentin came back with, “May their telemesmerized eyes be poached in light sweet crude and served up to the delectation of voracious hapkeite miners between shifts in the cafeteria of our first lunar maquiladora, as mandated by the Extraterrestrial Lunches for Labor Act of 2052.”
Tipsy smiled. They touched glasses.
You’ll remember Red Means as the guy who once took care of you as a favor to me while I was on vacation, as the euphemism goes. Add to that the hulk of Vellela Vellela, the shipyard job in Guadeloupe, and a bunch more stuff. Long story short, three years ago, when I splashed Vellela Vellela, we went our separate ways.
Well, not much has changed, so far as Red is concerned. He could be living high on any one of the more expensive islands around here. He’s got money buried in suitcases on half the beaches in the Caribbean. He’s a legal, passport-bearing citizen of at least three sovereign countries, the United States among them, but he prefers to live modestly aboard his fish boat, wherever she may be docked or anchored. His employees make landfall there all the time, of course, here and there in the Keys, off the coasts of Florida and Georgia, up the St. John’s River, the Barrier Islands, Cape Fear, and so forth.
This reminds me of the story of a certain barrier island community. This is in the early nineties. Red had the local sheriff in his pocket, you understand, so every couple of weeks or so this sheriff would have pressing business on the mainland. An hour or two after the eastern taillights on his westbound patrol car disappeared over the causeway, some slab—which is what they call a rotten-hulled shrimp boat up and down the Gulf Stream, the type that has to get towed in half the time it goes out—would come listing out of the mist and tie up at the town’s only wharf. The only paved road on the island runs from the causeway through the outlying swamp and three blocks of ersatz urbanity to dead-end onto that very dock. And this slab is gunnels awash with dope. Five or six guys and a box-bed truck materialize and twelve hundred pounds of marijuana transship, quick as a knife through spotted dick.
“Through what?” Quentin asked.
“Some kind of seagoing comestible,” Tipsy shrugged.
… Later it was cocaine. Still later, the Drug Enforcement Agency showed up and took everybody away, including the sheriff—who by the way managed to beat the rap and hang on to several hundred thousand francs he’d parked in a Swiss bank account.
I ought to know.
Quentin leveled the edge of his hand between his nose and upper lip. “Doesn’t your brother know the general public is up to here with dope stories?”
“Who says this is a dope story?”
Quentin looked at her. “It appears that, not only does our man not hear his own music, neither does his sister.”
Tipsy sighed. “Yes. …”
Quentin grunted. “Faulkner.”
“Yo.”
Quentin moved his chin at his empty glass.
“The same?”
Quentin nodded.
“Not for me,” Tipsy said modestly. “I’ve had enough.”
“The heck you say,” Quentin pointed out, “it’s your round.”
“Oh, shoot. In that case …” She glanced at the page beneath the one she’d been reading. “We’re almost to the end.”
“Let’s hear it.”
… part about the rainy day bank account I somehow never learned, when you come right down to it. Although, in a slightly different context—Somebody’s knocking on the hull …
“Now I see the point,” said Quentin. “It’s not how you lose
the game, but how you play it.”
Okay, it’s two hours later. I’m going to put a stamp on this and send it to town with the guy who just dove the hull. I’m set to weigh anchor at first light. Lots to do between now and then. Much love.
“Way out there on the vast blue sea,” Tipsy folded the letter, “my brother Charley’s thinking of me.” She batted her eyes.
“Better he were thinking of his lawyer,” Quentin muttered.
“There you go again.” Tipsy folded the letter into its envelope and set it aside. “Always the level-headed pessimist. Who says he’s going to get caught?”
“Are you kidding? The cops are waiting for—”
She covered his mouth with the fingers of her free hand and with the other touched the shotglass to his fresh pint of water. “Let’s keep it a secret until it’s over?”
Quentin thoughtfully took up his glass. “So, Tipsy,” he said as if casually, “What do you know about this Red guy?”
“Red is the guy Charley refused to drop the dime on.”
“So Red owes Charley—no? Owes him big, it sounds like.”
“Big.” She raised an eyebrow. “Yes.”
“So he couldn’t—you know—just bail Charley out?”
“Instead of giving him a dangerous job, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never met the guy. I’ve just heard about him over the years. The first time was while Charley was still in prison. One day I received a money order for five thousand dollars.” She tapped the bar with the bottom of the shot glass. “Right here. Out of the blue. I was still living aboard Dhow Jones at Mission Creek.”
“That was one leaky scow, as I recall.”
“It was one leaky scow. In fact, at that point she had flooded and settled onto the bottom—which was only about four feet below her keel at maximum flood—but it was time to find a new home or die from breathing mold spores. I was at my wit’s end when all that money showed up.”
“But you didn’t know about spores and mold at that time.”
“That’s true. I thought I was asphyxiating on my lifestyle.”
“Explain the difference to me again?”
“That money bailed me out for close to a year.”
Quentin smiled and began to sing. “Once upon a time, life was cheap and easy, in the most beautiful town in the world …”
“Tell me about it. These days, I’d be lucky to stretch five grand for five months.”
Quentin looked at her and smiled. How perfectly charming. Once upon a time in the most beautiful town in the world Quentin Asche had been known to make five thousand dollars in five minutes, and they both knew it. “Anyway, the money came from Red.”
“It came from Red, and Charley had asked him to send it. Reimbursement wasn’t expected. And I still haven’t met him.” She paused. “It was only much later that Charley happened to mention the source of the money.”
“It was dope money?”
Tipsy shook her head. “If only.”
“Whatever could you mean?”
Tipsy sighed and shook her head. “Red had a wife at the time. She was the mother of two of his kids.”
“How many kids does he have?”
“No idea. She was strung out when she got pregnant, she was strung out when she gave birth, she was strung out the whole time she was nursing.”
“Oh, please,” Quentin said.
“Yeah. Well, anyway, when Charley got busted, it was a very near thing that Red wasn’t caught, too. Red and the wife farmed out the kids and went underground for a year or so. They lived in a fishing shack jacked up on cypress posts in southwest Florida, somewhere in the swamps around Watson’s Store. You needed an airboat to get near the place, and just about anybody you ran into out there would just as soon shoot a stranger and feed him to the gators and use his airboat for parts as talk to him about, I don’t know, the Battle of Hue, let’s say.”
“How about,” Quentin suggested, “the American War of 1959-1975.”
“Quentin …”
Quentin stabbed the bar top with a forefinger. “First American officially killed in action in Vietnam? July 8, 1959. Very good. Last American officially KIA in Vietnam? April 29, 1975, right again. We qualify the qualification officially.”
“You’re making me sick.”
“Here’s a tougher one, so tough I won’t phrase it as a question. The first American shipment of arms arrived in French colonial, pre-partition Vietnam on August 10, 1950. You heard me. It’s reasonably safe, as it were, to assume that somebody died as a result, so that adds up to a 25-year engagement. And by the way, young lady …”
“Yes?”
“It’s not me who’s making you sick, it’s the mold known as your government.”
Tipsy shrugged. “Roll the blank dice.”
“What is that, fatalism? The dice are government-issued,” Quentin muttered darkly.
“That would appear to be correct, as Officer Few might say.” She brightened. “I like that expression.”
Quentin shook off the malaise of his statistical foray with remarkable aplomb. “Do you like Officer Few, too?”
“He is kind of cute. …”
“One story at a time.”
“But Quentin, darling, it’s all one big story.”
He waved this off.
“Anyway, Red had kept this woman loaded the whole time he was a high-flying dope dealer. Now they were up against it, with damn little money of their own, and no way to access the various suitcases buried on half the beaches in the Caribbean, as my brother would have it. Red figured he’d kill three birds with one stone. Make good this solid he owed to Charley by helping Charley’s sister; help his wife; help himself. Marriage sure is complicated.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Quentin archly.
Tipsy gave him a look, but Quentin rebuffed it with one of his own. “So,” she continued, “long story short, one night by the dark of the moon they slipped into some illegal clinic in Miami where, longer story shorter, Red sold one of his wife’s kidneys.”
Quentin’s face went slack. “That’s too short.”
“It turned out she was dying of cancer anyway. …”
“That’s supposed to increase my understanding?”
“… which is why she was a junkie the whole time. The habit helped her deal with the pain, which is why Red let her stay strung out, and it’s at least one of the reasons why Red stayed with her.”
Quentin blinked.
“It’s what happened.” Tipsy shrugged. “According to Charley, anyway. He wrote me a long letter about it. He likes to tell stories in his letters.”
“As perhaps I’ve noticed.”
“Her name was Carmen. Charley liked her.”
“I can scarcely believe it.”
“So,” she said, “scarcely believe it.”
“So he didn’t send all the, er, kidney money to you?”
“He sent half the money to me. The rest he used to keep her supplied with narcotics until the time came for her overdose.”
“Because—what? How … ?”
“Because the wife owed one to him, and he owed one to Charley, and I am Charley’s sister, and Red loved her, and they knew she was near the end.” She spread both hands over the bar. “Simplicity itself.”
“It’s not euthanasia that’s complicated, it’s marriage.”
“That would be correct.”
“Wait.” Quentin reanimated his face sufficiently to frown. “I’m trying to get a grip on … I mean, how do you fit into that equation? I mean …” He touched two fingers to the bartop, between himself and Tipsy, and struggled for an appropriate expression. “I mean, what is this? Karma?”
Tipsy drew away from him. “They’re going to have to give you a couple of rooms to yourself,, in that Museum of Old Ideas,” she pronounced solemnly.
“In other words,” Quentin surmised, “you certainly hope not.”
SEVEN
CHARLEY HAD HEARD OF CURIOUS THINGS RISING FROM THE BILGES ONCE a vessel is certain of going down, especially a vessel that has passed years in the tropics. Vermin of course, insects and little mammals of every description, but also reptiles, originally attracted, perhaps, by the other denizens of the below-decks ecosystem. A Nicaraguan skipper once told him of clambering all over his foundering schooner in the midst of a hurricane with all manner of creatures slithering and scurrying about the deck under his bare feet. Though the odd blast of lightning gave him a glimpse of what he might expect to be stepping on at any given moment, at the time it was, as he pointed out, the least of his worries. The hurricane lasted three days.
Charley wondered what port the centipede hailed from. Could it have been aboard the entire time he’d owned the boat? Watching him as he slept? But the speculation was half-hearted, a holding action to fend his imagination off brooding over what else might go wrong, and it soon petered out.
No need to brood, counseled the bosun. Just stick around.
As if in response to this fatalism, despite its remaining unexpressed aloud—though that’s ridiculous, Charley autoremonstrated, for, once an idea has been consciously articulated, even if in silence, it’s donned clothing, become real—something bumped the starboard bow. The sound reminded him of a rug, perhaps burdened by the weight of a corpse rolled up in it, being dragged along an unfinished concrete floor. Not that he’d ever been in such a circumstance, but hey, let the imagination run full and by, since nothing else is, then check in on the reality—another shark scraping along the hull, testing, testing. … And this sharp reminder of his true circumstance led Charley to wonder, insofar as it may or may not be within his power to affect it, what manner of death might the skipper prefer to the one of being eaten by a shark?
And so it’s now we find the time to be askin’ the big questions, growled the bosun.
Charley ignored him. Not a protracted fade while languishing in prison. We decided that. Nor being keel-hauled by Red Means. We know that, too. Dehydration? Too slow. He considered the centipede. Knife to the heart? Does a centipede have a heart? Now there, he reflected, languishes a subject for a book I’ll never read or write. Although it certainly seemed preferable to death by shark, he had to wonder if he had the nerve to knife himself. So perhaps that’s the threshold between passive and active? But Charley had a memory of attempting to inject himself with a tiny dose of heroin, one fine summer’s afternoon, in a rundown bunkhouse behind an Orlando truck stop. Tied off, syringe loaded, vein thumped up proud, his best fair-weather buddy watching—fair-weather because Charley had purchased enough dope for two—he couldn’t bring himself to do it. And it wasn’t fear of the poppy that stayed his hand; it was fear of the needle. They must have a term for it, though “smart” might do. In the end his fair-weather buddy did it for him. His fair-weather buddy was good at it, too. So good that he kept right on until he killed himself doing it just a year later. For his own part, Charley didn’t like it in the first instance and never injected anything again. And the high? Well, there’s high and there’s high, Charley thought wryly. All he could really remember, some thirty years down the road, was the puking. Right now, though, the bosun reminded him, you’re high on suicide and estate planning. Charley surveyed the empty ocean beyond the transom. What euphoria could possibly eclipse the contemplation of a saline eternity?