by Condition
Half a mile later, he found a break in the hedge and shimmied through it, the branches scratching his arms. He felt buoyed by this small success. Before him stretched a manicured lawn. He crossed it with an easy stride, as though he belonged here, a carefree tourist on vacation. He heard squeals and laughter in the distance, the thwack of a volleyball. The sounds of leisure, of wealthy white people—he thought of Gabriel in the hot car overlooking a power plant—enjoying themselves in the sun.
He headed in the direction of the sounds, following a path through a grove of mangrove trees. He stopped a moment to admire them, their trunks long and swanlike, the arching necks of primeval creatures half buried in the earth. He was grateful for the momentary coolness, the soft sandy path beneath his feet.
Ahead was a sunny patio, paved in flagstones. Scott stopped short.
Everybody was naked.
Naked people stretched out on chaise lounges, bubbled in the hot tub, tiptoed barefoot across the hot flagstones. Naked breasts wobbled invitingly. Dicks and scrotums danced and dangled. A naked girl careened down the water slide, bouncing and squealing. In the vast swimming pool naked volleyball was under way.
It appeared to be naked lunchtime. A waitress in a green bikini served sandwiches to naked diners. The chairs, Scott noted, were thoughtfully padded. The prudent had laid napkins across their laps.
A hostess approached him. Like the waitress she seemed overdressed in her green bikini. The three triangles of Lycra looked as incongruous as a parka.
"I'm sorry," she said with a smile. "This patio is for nude guests only. You can leave your clothes in the locker room"—she pointed to a white stucco building behind her—"or dine on the main patio, if you prefer."
It struck him as very funny, the businesslike way she'd asked him to shuck his pants.
Scott smiled stupidly, grateful for the dark glasses that hid his roving eyes."Actually, I'm a little lost. I'm looking for the reservations desk."
"The main building is right up that path," she said, pointing.
"And please come back later." (Or was it come buck naked?) "We serve lunch until three."
He turned and headed through another grove of mangroves, blinking. His mind had stalled, the gears jammed at the sight of so many bodies, the ripples and nipples and hairy flesh. When the machine finally restarted, a stunning thought occurred to him: his sister had stayed at a nude resort. The idea was so mind boggling, so completely at odds with his notion of Gwen's character, that he wondered if he had the wrong hotel. Again the feeling overwhelmed him: his instincts were worthless, his perceptions skewed. The trees themselves seemed suspect. Nothing was as it seemed.
Pot could make you paranoid. He'd heard this for years, from so many different people that there had to be some truth to it. Scott, who'd smoked more weed than most people on earth, had dismissed this as user error, a hidden psychic weakness in the smoker himself.
Cannabis was not to blame, any more than you could blame a car if you drove it into a wall. Yet now, for the first time, he felt frozen with paranoia. A disastrous development for a man on a mission.
He scolded himself to stay focused. To stop looking at those freaky trees.
He found the main building, took a deep breath and approached the front desk. It seemed rude not to remove his sunglasses, rude but necessary. Who knew what paranoid gleam flickered in his eyes?
"Excuse me," Scott said pleasantly, in the voice he assumed on such occasions. It was a deep, courtly voice, manly and charming. His father's voice. "I'm looking for my sister, who was a guest here recently. Can you tell me if she's still staying here?"
The pretty desk clerk regarded him quizzically."I'm sorry. I can't reveal any information about our guests."
"Of course," he said smoothly. "But this is a family emergency, and I need to find her. Her name is Gwen McKotch." He took his driver's license from his wallet and laid it on the desk. "See?" he said, pointing to his name."I'm her brother. Scott McKotch."
The girl looked worried. "Wow," she said. "I hope it's nothing serious. But Pleasures has a strict privacy policy. I'm not allowed to tell you anything."
"Not even if she's staying here? If she's ever stayed here?"
The girl smiled sadly. "My manager is off for the weekend, but he'll be here tomorrow morning. If it's really an emergency, maybe he can help you then."
"Tomorrow?" Scott repeated. In twenty-four hours he would be on a plane to Connecticut.
At that moment, a plump middle-aged couple crossed the lobby, sunburned and wet haired. The man was carrying two heavy tanks.
Scuba tanks.
Scott jogged across the marble floor."Excuse me," he called in his Frank voice."Are you going scuba diving?"
"We just got back," the woman said.
"Well, can you tell me the name of the—instructor, I guess? The guy who took you out."
The two looked at each other, frowning.
"I can't recall," the man said in an English accent. Another English accent! This seemed ominously significant. Scott's paranoia flared.
Deliberately he tamped it down.
"I'm drawing a blank," the woman said.
"There were several of us." The man glanced behind him. "The others should be coming any minute. We were the first ones off the boat."
Scott headed toward the door, nearly colliding with two middle-aged blondes showing freckled cleavage. The women toted vinyl duffels. A pair of blue rubber fins poked from one of the bags.
Scott repeated his question slowly, in his most resonant Frank voice.
The women looked at each other and grinned broadly. "Rico!" they shrieked in unison, and dissolved into giddy laughter.
His heart kicked up."Can you tell me where to find him?"
The taller blonde pointed."The dock is that way."
Outside Scott broke into a run. He raced across a wide lawn toward a sign marked Beach Access, then clattered down a boardwalk toward another sign: Boat Ramp. In the distance he saw a motorboat, spanking white, roar away from the dock. A brown-skinned man, shirtless, coiled a rope around his elbow.
At the helm, her red hair flaming, was his sister, Gwen.
"You serious, man? You find this guy, and you don't even talk to him?"
Gabriel spoke slowly, incredulously, though he didn't look especially surprised. He didn't look especially awake. Scott had found the car, to his immense relief, just where he'd left it, on the sandy access road overlooking the power plant.
"I tried." He had run to the end of the dock waving his arms, shouting Gwen's name, then Rico's, at the top of his voice. They hadn't heard him over the roaring engine, but everyone else had—including two green-suited security guards who'd escorted him off the property and dumped him at the gate.
He sat a moment pondering. He would meet this Rico; in noble, masculine fashion he would take the measure of the man. He tested the feel of the words in his mouth: What are your intentions regarding my sister? Then again, he wasn't sure the answer mattered. The goal was to bring Gwen home safely, to put an end to this foolishness, as his mother said. Paulette, after all, had financed this mission, and only one outcome would satisfy her.
Define success at the outset, Dashiell Blodgett counseled. Set your compass, then keep moving.
Tomorrow morning he would return to Pleasures and wait at the boat ramp—all day, if necessary—until Gwen and Rico reappeared.
He had memorized the letters stenciled at the helm of the boat: 2STE.
Recent experience had proven his memory unreliable. Before he twisted up another joint—which he needed to do, immediately—he was going to write it down.
"Gabriel," he said. "Buddy. Do you have something I can write with?"
Gabriel opened one baleful eye, like a sleeping cat unhappily disturbed.
"Pen and paper," Scott said.
Gabriel reached beneath his seat for a notebook and ballpoint pen. He flipped through the book—the pages filled with neat columns of figures—and tore out a clean sheet.
"What are all those numbers?" Scott asked.
"What you think?"
Scott wrote down 2ste, folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket."All right. Let's have a smoke."
He reached under his own seat and felt around for the plastic bag. Nothing. He turned to Gabriel, whose heavy eyelids were fluttering.
"You're kidding me," he said."You smoked the whole bag?"
"You were gone a long time, man."
"How long? An hour? Two?" A long walk each way, the mangroves and naked people, the front desk and the boat ramp. It hadn't occurred to him, then, that he'd left Gabriel alone with his stash.
"There's a little left," said Gabriel, taking the bag from his pocket.
"We can roll one more."
"That was a quarter, man. You smoked a quarter in two hours?"
"We smoked two joints before," Gabriel reminded him.
"But still." Scott had had this conversation a hundred times, in cars and back alleys, dorm rooms at Pearse and Stirling, shitty apartments in La Jolla and Portland and Oakland and San Berdoo.
He had lived most of his adult life in a pot-based economy—which, as it turned out, was not so different from the other kind.
In their attention to price and quality, their obsessive tracking of profit and inventory, potheads were not so different from Carter Rook and his Wall Street friends, the most fervent capitalists Scott knew.
"Okay. Fine." Scott took the bag from Gabriel and set to work rolling. He managed to scrape together two joints, the second composed of a disemboweled Marlboro from Gabriel's pack and the ganja dust at the bottom of the bag. Scott slipped the joints into the bag and returned it to its place beneath the seat.
"You don't want to smoke?"
"Later." Scott got out of the car and circled around to the driver's side."Move over," he said, taking the keys."I'm driving."
Surprisingly Gabriel did not protest. They headed back over the mountain, Scott at the wheel, Gabriel offering occasional directions.
They wove through the back streets of Pointe Mathilde and parked behind the Ambrosia Café.
"You owe me fifty dollars," said Gabriel.
"You smoked fifty dollars," said Scott. "Come on. I'll buy you dinner."
On the front porch of the Ambrosia they ordered two steak-frites, a Fanta for Gabriel, a Red Stripe for Scott. Revived by the sugar, Gabriel looked alert and bright eyed. He waved and called out to acquaintances in the street.
"Salut, mon pote!" he called to a boy on a bicycle wheeling swiftly down the street. The boy braked, turned, broke into a smile. He was a handsome kid, smaller than Gabriel. He leaned his bike against the porch rail and came to shake Gabriel's hand.
"Where you been, man?" said Gabriel.
"Working," said the boy. "All day on that fucking boat. Pretty soon I be black as you."
"I'm working too, man. Driving for him." Gabriel pointed a thumb at Scott. "He looking for some guy. Dude ran off with my man's sister."
"He takes people diving," said Scott."Some guy named Rico."
"Rico?" Gabriel turned to look at Scott. A moment later he dissolved into stoned laughter."Shit, man. How come you didn't tell me his name Rico?"
"What's so funny?" Scott demanded.
"My friend, here. He work for a guy name Rico."
The other boy grinned.
"I don't believe you," said Scott.
"It's true."The boy lowered his voice. "What, you got a problem with Rico?"
"No problem. I don't even know him. I'm just trying to find my sister."
The boy eyed him, considering."You give me fifty dollars, I take you to her."
"Bullshit," said Scott.
"Your sister name Gwen. A little redhead girl."
"How the fuck do you know that?" Scott gaped."Where is she?
I want to see her."
"You got fifty dollars?"
"Whoa, whoa. Hold on a second." Scott glanced at Gabriel, the thirteen-year-old drug dealer who'd smoked up all his pot."You know this guy?"
"Relax, man." Gabriel clapped Scott's shoulder. "You in good hands. This my great friend Alistair."
They sped through the night in the Plymouth Reliant, Scott McKotch and two thirteen-year-old drug dealers, down the winding mountain roads of an island Scott still couldn't find on a map. The strangeness of the situation struck him moment by moment, but oddly, he was not panicked. He had a full belly, two joints for later. The boys, though clever, were little and skinny. Scott had a hundred pounds on either of them. If necessary he could break them both in half.
He had never felt better in his life.
They followed the autoroute westward, in the opposite direction from that morning, then turned onto a narrow road that hugged the coastline. For once Scott was paying attention. For once he knew exactly where he was.
The road ended in a sandy clearing, where a few old cars and motorcycles were parked."There's the boat ramp," Alistair said, pointing."Rico's slip is number four."
Scott got out of the car and started down the walkway, glancing over his shoulder at the boys in the car. The orange sun hung low in the sky. Gabriel gave a little salute, and Scott returned it, suspecting—correctly—that he would never see the boy again.
He headed down a shaky aluminum ramp pitched at a steep incline. It clanged loudly with each step. He recognized the boat immediately. Rico, naked to the waist, sat on a kind of plastic locker, writing on a clipboard. What is he writing? Scott wondered. And doesn't he own a shirt?
"Excuse me," Scott called. "Are you Rico?" Only then did he realize he didn't know the man's last name.
The guy looked up from his clipboard."Who wants to know?"
"Is Gwen McKotch on this boat? I'm her brother. I want to talk to her."
"Billy?" Rico grinned broadly."Come on up, man. This is a marvelous surprise. Gwen's at the bathhouse taking a shower. She'll be thrilled."
Scott clambered up the ladder onto the deck. "Hi. Thanks. Except I'm not Billy. I'm the other brother, Scott."
"Scott," Rico repeated."I didn't know she had another brother."
The words hit him like a cold wind. "Oh. Well. I was away for a while," he said idiotically."We didn't see each other very often."
They stood there a long moment staring at each other. The words Scott had rehearsed— What are your intentions regarding my sister? —were too lame-brained to be spoken aloud. Rico's eyes bristled with alertness. He looked to be in his thirties and was built like a bantam weight boxer, lean and powerful; his muscles seemed to twitch beneath his skin. Scott thought, absurdly, of Dashiell Blodgett, the half-wit who'd lost a toe on K2 and now wrote books about it. Screw Blodgett. This was what a man of action looked like.
They stood staring at each other. Scott would tell the story later with some embellishment: the tension in the air, the fierce and possibly fatal contest of masculine will that would surely have ensued if Gwen hadn't, at that moment, come clanging down the ramp. She stopped short, shading her eyes."Scotty? Is that you?"
Immediately Rico relaxed; his bulging muscles ceased to twitch.
He broke into an affable grin."Scott," he said, offering his hand."Forgive me. Welcome to our home."
Gwen scrambled up the ladder. "Wow. God." She was flushed, a little breathless. A man's white T-shirt hung nearly to her knees. Her hair, slightly damp, hung in loose waves to her chin. She looks pretty, Scott thought. He couldn't have been more astonished if she'd walked on her hands.
"What are you doing here?" She sat on the plastic locker and ran a comb through her hair.
"I came to see you." He turned to Rico. "Buddy, can you give us a minute?"
Rico glanced uncertainly at Gwen.
"It's all right," said Gwen."He's my little brother."
Rico bent and kissed her, his hand lingering protectively on her shoulder."Call if you need me. I won't go far."
Scott waited until Rico had descended the ladder. He sat on a canvas deck chair across from Gwen.
"God, Scot
ty, what are you doing here?"
"What do you think? I wanted to make sure you're okay."
She gave an exasperated sigh."I'm okay, I'm okay! For God's sake, I've always been okay."
"Well, Mom's out of her mind. You had to expect that when you just disappeared."
"I disappeared?"
"Well, you didn't tell her where you were going."
"Spare me," said Gwen. "Aren't you the one who ran away to California and didn't call for two years?"
"That's not the same," he said."She doesn't worry about me like she does about you."
"Are you joking? She practically had a nervous breakdown," said Gwen. "Seriously. I thought she was going to end up in McLean. Dad and Billy were gone, and I was stuck in Concord for two years babysitting her." She stopped."You get the idea. My point is, I can still call her once a month like always. Whether I call from here or Pittsburgh isn't anybody's business. Honestly, I don't see the problem." She clamped her mouth shut, then, the familiar Gwen-like set of her jaw. Until that moment she had seemed a stranger. Here, finally, was a Gwen he recognized.
"Well, what about this guy?" he asked, changing tactics. "This Rico. You have to admit it's pretty sudden."
"Sudden? Scotty, I'm thirty-four years old." She cocked her head.
"Think about it. You get to run away and get married, and Billy goes to New York and falls in love. Why am I the only one who's not allowed to have a life?"
Billy's in love? Scott thought, but there was no time to process this information. Gwen, silent for twenty years, wouldn't stop talking. It was as though she'd been saving up words her whole life.
Scott looked around him then, really looked. The boat wasn't new, but handsome and well maintained, the deck spanking clean. A small table had been unfolded, Murphy bed style, from the port side.
On it were a bottle of wine, half a loaf of French bread and a bowl of cut fruit.
"I interrupted your dinner," he said.
"Oh, no. That's left over from breakfast. There's a terrific bakery in town. Rico goes every morning. He eats bread all day long. He could live on bread." She smiled then, fondly, a little amused. She had a beautiful smile.
"So you live here," he said, checking his facts."On the boat?"