Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  Tipsy drew back. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “The line of credit on it,” Quentin lowered his voice, “is a cool two hundred grand.”

  “Get further the fuck out of here.”

  “They didn’t even want to see my tax returns. There would have been a bidding war.” Quentin looked at her. “What part of Kansas are you from?”

  “Mars.”

  “Let me get that drink.” Quentin put a hundred dollar bill on the bar.

  “You really refinanced your gutted house?”

  “A new owner would have knocked it down, built a new place for another million, and wound up paying some $37,500 a year in property taxes alone. Plus insurance, debt service, and blah blah blah.” Quentin drew himself up to his full height. “I felt it incumbent upon myself, as a citizen of this community, to prevent this calamity from overwhelming some hapless buppie.”

  Tipsy shook her head. “That’s mighty civic-minded of you.”

  “It’s a new era, darling,” Quentin assured her. “I’m telling you. If I die the day before I spend the last dime,” he touched the bar with the tip of his index finger, “I’ll be getting out in the nick of time.”

  “Let’s hope you live that long.”

  Quentin looked at her. “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Just exactly in what way did you mean it?” Quentin ignored his own question. “I really put my house up for sale.” He sounded a little hysterical. “I’m going to live the rest of my short life in interesting hotels. When I mentioned to the bank I needed a little money to tide me over until the house sells, they fired up that $200,000 line of credit faster than you can say Roy Cohen. Times have changed.” Quentin moved in close, nudged her elbow with his own, and tilted his head. “It’s a different world than the one I plundered.”

  Tipsy looked down, only to see a roll of cash halfway out of his trouser pocket. It was the thickness of the business end of a baseball bat.

  “Criminey,” Tipsy whispered. “That looks like enough money to jump-start the Cuban economy. Don’t be flashing it like that. Christ, I’ve never felt so weird about money in my entire life. What’s the deal? You’re paranoid without it, you’re paranoid with it?”

  “Who’s paranoid?” Quentin giggled loudly.

  Faulkner looked their way from the other end of the bar. Quentin waved the fingers of his empty hand at him. Tipsy rolled her eyes. Faulkner looked the other way.

  Quentin took up his water. “Need any cash?” he whispered over the rim of the glass.

  Tipsy nodded her head, yes, then began to shake it. “No. I don’t want to foul up our relationship. It’s fouled up enough as it is.”

  “What relationship?”

  “But, oh,” she hooked her arm through his, “I’ve missed you so.”

  Quentin sipped. “Just so you know it’s there.”

  Tipsy’s eye fell on the envelope. She pursed her lips. “There is one thing I have to ask you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Who did you tell about Charley?”

  Quentin narrowed his eyes. “You’re causing me pain.”

  “I asked you once before and you didn’t answer me.”

  Quentin gingerly set down his drink. After a pause he said, “Okay.” He tented his fingertips below the tip of his nose and looked straight ahead. “One night, three, maybe four months ago, when you first started getting the letters about Charley’s recent … his projected … his … that he was contemplating … a trip—China was waiting for me when I got home.”

  “China … ,” Tipsy breathed. “I knew it.”

  “Hear me out?”

  “Sure,” Tipsy nodded. “What do I have to lose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She caught her lower lip between her teeth.

  “He was reasonably sober for a change. It was a warm night. China had the big window open, and he was cooking the one recipe he’s really good at.”

  “Chipotle and green olive chicken with wild rice and okra.”

  “Very good. You could smell it from De Haro Street. Plus—and I don’t know where he got them—he had chilled a bottle of Pinot Grigio and opened another of Crozes-Hermitage. Just on the off chance, you understand, that I’d like to taste them. Which I did. One sip each. Delicious.”

  “Which of your books did he sell to pay for them?”

  Quentin closed his eyes.

  Tipsy sipped her drink. “Anyway, China doesn’t know anything about wines. He must have looked them up on the internet.”

  “Just …” Quentin’s eyes moistened. “It was unbelievable. The aromas of Côtes du Rhône and roasting chicken were competing for my saliva. Do you know how long it’s been since I could really taste anything?”

  “He wanted something,” Tipsy began. “He—”

  Quentin held up a forestalling hand. “Oh, thought I to myself, the child can’t help himself. He wants something.” He shook his head. Tipsy nodded hers. “I braced myself for a fine meal and maybe even some sparkling conversation, followed by the kind of sex that suckered me, if you’ll pardon the expression, into that domestic morass in the first place. Enjoy yourself, I told myself; but drink very little, and don’t get too relaxed, because, after everything else—”

  “Comes the bite,” Tipsy concluded.

  “That’s right. But I was wrong and so are you. He didn’t want anything—at least,” Quentin hastened to add, “not right then he didn’t want anything.”

  Tipsy waited.

  “It was just like the old days,” Quentin posited with a smile. “Before he got involved with all the wrong people, too much alcohol, the drugs …”

  “The personal trainer …”

  “Yes, yes …”

  Tipsy had her doubts about the rosiness of Quentin’s recall, but she said, “Delicious food?”

  Quentin nodded. “Great conversation …”

  “Come on, Quentin,” Tipsy insisted, annoyed. “Passable conversation.”

  “No …” Quentin began.

  “At least you weren’t fighting,” Tipsy suggested.

  “We weren’t fighting,” he conceded.

  “And finally, great sex.”

  “No,” Quentin hastened to correct her, “it was … meaningful sex.”

  “Oh,” Tipsy said, slightly clearing her throat. “Meaningful sex.”

  “He was just as loving as the China I remembered. Firm without being too demanding, not too strict, took his time …”

  “Oh, please,” Tipsy said. “I’m going to puke.”

  “Nobody puked …” Quentin continued dreamily.

  “Okay okay,” Tipsy hurried him. “Afterwards you lay in each other’s arms and talked. Just …”

  “… talked,” they said together.

  Tipsy swirled the last inch of beer in the bottom of her glass. “About anything in particular?”

  “At some point,” Quentin sighed, “he asked about you.”

  “Oh,” Tipsy said. “This is about me?” She pointed a finger to her breast. “China Jones asked about me?”

  “And I told him your great news,” Quentin said simply. “We were talking about the things that we both cared about,” he added defensively. “After all …”

  “After all?”

  “I care about you, Tipsy.”

  “And I you.” She patted his arm. “What exactly did you tell him?”

  “Just that Charley had gotten in touch after months of silence.”

  “Did you tell China that Charley had work?”

  “Well, that was good news, too, wasn’t it?”

  “Did you tell China what kind of work?”

  Quentin held up his hands and inverted them, palms up. “Do I even know what kind of work?”

  “Did you tell China about Charley coming to San Francisco?”

  Quentin frowned ingenuously. “Charley is coming to San Francisco?”

  “Charley was coming to San Francisco.” She made a fist
and stabbed the bartop with her middle finger. “I sat right here and read it aloud. You were here.”

  “So you must have done. I’d forgotten.”

  “I thought you were all bent out of shape about my good news?”

  “Totally,” Quentin insisted, “absolutely one hundred percent infatuated with your good news. It had been a long time since you’d had any, and I was happy for you.” He faced her, as if frankly, and placed one hand on her forearm, as if in sincerity. “Put yourself in my place. China was making nice and he really really wanted to know what else was going on in my life. I couldn’t wait to tell him. I was so happy for you!”

  Tipsy removed her arm from his touch. “Blabbermouth.”

  “Blabbermouth?” Quentin sat upright and touched the fingertips of both hands to his chest. “How dare you. I’ve been keeping your counsel for just about as long as I can remember, and I know it’s been going on for as long as you can remember.”

  Tipsy paused the rim of her glass before her mouth and raised an eyebrow. “You have a point there.”

  “I,” Quentin said forcefully, “think so.”

  “Don’t get worked up.”

  “Now she tells me.”

  “China’s it, right?”

  “What do mean, China’s it? Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me he’s not unique?”

  “Far from it. What I meant to say was, is China the only one you told about Charley?”

  “Who else would I tell, for God’s sake?”

  Tipsy handed note and envelope to Quentin. Quentin read it. She showed him the envelope. Quentin didn’t have to be told to compare the handwriting. He noticed the uncanceled stamp. He read the note again. He handed envelope and note back to her. “Have you heard from Charley lately?”

  Tipsy shook her head.

  Quentin indicated the note with his chin. “Are you going to meet this guy?”

  “You bet I am.” Tipsy nodded gravely. “Are you coming with me?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  RED MEANS STARTED OUT IN LIFE THINKING HE WANTED TO GET BY DOING as little work as possible.

  That didn’t fly.

  So he got energetic. He’d found that so long as you didn’t mind working up a sweat and getting your hands dirty, you could always get a job. And what’s the dirtiest job you can do without getting too dirty?

  Dope smuggling. That’s right. Not dope dealing, but dope smuggling. There’s a difference.

  It’s the immigrant way, it’s the path of upward mobility, it’s the booby-trapped shortcut out of the wilderness of impecuniosity and into the freshly manicured lawns of financial stability, where the water in the swimming pool is always blue and the beer is always cold and it’s against the law to fire up a leaf blower before nine in the morning.

  And that’s only the rosy side of the picture.

  Do something illegal, and do it well, you get paid a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times the guaranteed minimum wage. Play your cards right and the sky’s the limit. Play your cards wrong and, if you live, time is all you will get. Either way, as went the universal perception of every dope smuggler he ever met, it beats a day job.

  Dumb. In all his years in the game, Red Means had played his cards so as not to get caught. Money was the second priority.

  In his day Red had made many hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps even a million or two. He’d started out with a partner. She turned out to be smarter than he was, which was okay so long as they were in business together. But later, when drug smuggling became much more heavily penalized than it had once been, except in Texas, and commiseratively more dangerous, too, even in Texas, she bent her superior mind toward getting out of the business altogether, with a reasonable amount of money to boot, but her primary objective was to get out in one piece. No jail time, no scars, but not wholly destitute, either. She made it, and with enough money to buy a house. In due time she married a building contractor, produced a couple of kids, the husband added a room onto the house, and her homemade jam won a prize at the county fair.

  Now that Red was sixty years old, the thrill of living on the edge had lost most of its luster. He never liked to admit that his partner had seen a light twenty years ago that he himself still preferred to pretend didn’t exist; but, in the event, after his first twenty years of being a full time criminal, he thought himself tired. Plus, his partner’s departure was disorienting. So he’d turned his talents to various cons.

  He started a sailing school. At first he was its only instructor. Soon enough however, various other reprobates, themselves tired of the game, thought to turn their more dubious hands toward something more or less honest, and turned up at his doorstep asking for work. Relieved of his teaching duties, Red turned his considerable talents toward cooking the books. Right away it became obvious that his various old cronies weren’t any more interested in teaching than he was. Rather, they preferred to countervail the boredom induced by honest endeavor—knot tying, man-overboard drills, setting and resetting the anchor—by getting loaded; although one fellow, in particular, hove to with a lovely solo student and let the vessel drift aground while assaulting her. It turned out that the student was a lawyer who was learning how to sail so she could spend more quality time with her lawyer boyfriend on his very large yacht. Before the lawsuit could really get going, Red had to disappear his old crony, who could not bring himself to consider the situation in any but retrograde terms, viz., “If she don’t want to get laid, what’s she doing on a boat with the likes of me?”

  Red fit him for the shingle chemise and declared bankruptcy.

  Next he started a money management fund. And who were his clients? Successfully retired and ambitious-to-be-retired dope dealers, of course. A bottomless client pool. Red began receiving threats offering to fit him for the thousand-fathom turtleneck from idiots who expected better than a 10% return on a legitimate investment. He didn’t take them seriously. After somebody blew up his car, however, that business, too, went south.

  Finally Red turned to real estate. Florida real estate, in particular, presented many of the elements lacking from his other businesses, and many in common with dope smuggling. Piracy, back-stabbing, and throat-slitting, to name three. Coke whores were replaced by real estate whores. It wasn’t difficult to distinguish between the two. The former rubbed whichever of your knees was closer to the mirror, the latter rubbed the knee closer to the stack of comparables. But here, too, he met with less than spectacular results. Realtors of both sexes with frosted hair and sensible shoes and Jaguar convertibles with A-frame OPEN HOUSE signs piled in the back seat drove circles around him. No commission was too small to be undercut, no state-wide real estate license examination was so stringent that it couldn’t be made more difficult by industry-lobbied legislators, no oddball request by neurotic snowbirds from New Jersey was too demeaning to be fulfilled.

  Red just couldn’t hack it. He was not a people person. You can’t fit a jerk for the sandy loam hoody just because they don’t like the charcoal flecks in the alabaster granite some overextended speculator had spirited off some other job to spruce up the half-bath in a condo he desperately needed to flip.

  Finally, at a greyhound track outside of Miami, Red found himself sitting at the bar with about two hundred dollars to his name, an empty glass in front of him, and the slip fee overdue on the mildewed 32-foot non-navigable Chris-Craft he called home at the time. Miami had changed around him, the Keys were too hot for him, he had no friends, most of his former associates were dead, in prison, or permanently retired to South America, and, as a musician acquaintance had observed about a trumpet player, if there had been any design changes in women over the last year or two, Red would be the next-to-last person to ask about them: the last one being the trumpet player.

  Not that Red was bereft of experience with women. He had at least three grown kids scattered around the trailer parks of south Florida and another married to a socialite up in Newport, R.I., so the procreative aspect of living wit
h a woman no longer interested him at all—which had in fact been true the whole time. What he did miss about having a woman in his life was the fighting. A good fight, in Red’s experience, meant that he was alive. After the fight, of course, they should lick each other all over. It is so stipulated in The Dope Dealer’s Handbook to Domestic Bliss, right after the illustrated sidebar that shows how to sharpen a hypodermic needle on a brick.

  Smuggling carried a similar appeal. The adrenaline of the chase, the furtive, mosquito-infested nights, the extreme risk and proportionate rewards—these were clues, in Red’s experience, that he was fully alive. The seventeen months he’d spent living in the Everglades with the mother of two of his kids? The nadir of his life. Boredom incarnate. If it hadn’t been for convincing her to donate that kidney, which was illegal, he might have killed her and himself too. Little else in those days eclipsed the satisfaction of pulling off that deal—well, except maybe the day he’d forced a recalcitrant debtor to feed his favorite pit bull to an alligator the guy kept in his swimming pool. Payday is payday.

  He didn’t particularly care about snorting the fruits of his labors. He preferred staying clean, the better to savor every detail of existence, not to mention the competitive advantage it gave him. He’d learned that from Darla. Everybody in the business knew better than to short him or vend him inferior product. Besides, the way all of his wives and girlfriends had looked at it, it meant more dope for them. Every woman in his entire life, without exception, elevated that priority over every other. It was a feedback loop of self-defeat if ever there was one, from which he didn’t at all mind taking a year or two off.

  In a weak moment he’d tracked down his erstwhile partner and called her. A little girl answered the phone, then turned it over to her mother.

  “Darla?”

  “Yes?”

  “Red.”

  Silence.

  “Darla?”

  “Red.”