Florida Straits (13 page)

Then, finally, he spotted Bert. Bert was
sitting in a beach chair, far out on a finger of crumbly gray rock
that jutted into the green ocean. His back was to the land, and he
was recognizable only by his bronze- white hair; that, and the
canary-yellow polka-dotted silk of his shirt.

"Hello, Joey," Bert said when the younger
man was still half a dozen steps behind him.

"How'd ya know it's me?"

"Dog twitched," said the Shirt, turning
slowly, "so I knew it was someone. That it was you, that was a
percentage play. Ya know, kid, it's not like I'm really that
popular. But how are ya?"

"Not bad, considering I saw my asshole
brother today."

Bert shook his head slowly. Family feuds
saddened him, but not because he regarded them as unnatural. Just
the opposite. What was more natural than that disappointment, rage,
and the sense that you were being gypped should start at home? The
family was where you really took a beating. You looked to the
outside world for comfort not because the outside world was kinder
but because it mattered so much less, it couldn't get under your
fingernails. "Joey," Bert said, "lemme ask you a question. Is he
really an asshole, or does it just look that way to you because of,
ya know, the situation?"

Joey looked at Bert, and at Don Giovanni
nestled in his lap. The dog really did seem to be savoring the
sunset. Twin orange disks were reflected in its glassy, oversized
eyes, making it look like some diminutive species of hellhound.
"Bert, I've had a lot of time to think it over. As God is my
witness, he's really an asshole."

Bert just nodded and never took his eyes off
the sky. The sun was almost on the horizon now, at the point where
its reflection seemed to jump out of the ocean to rejoin it, making
it look not like a sphere but a cylinder, a giant candle slipping
away.

"And what's going on," Joey resumed, "I
really don't like it. It's the exact same bullshit as in New York.
The lying. The hiding things. All the time having to wonder who
said what to who. Who's clued in, who ain't. It's like ya can't
open your goddamn mouth without worrying ten different ways if
you're gonna say somethin' ya shouldn't say. I mean, Bert, life
shouldn't be that fucking complicated."

Bert the Shirt, his long face rosy in the
last red rays, smiled the inward smile of a patient teacher whose
lesson is at last getting through. "No, it shouldn't be." He didn't
want to say I-told-you-so to Joey, so he spoke to his dog instead.
"Ya see, Giovanni, now he's starting to talk like Florida."

"Yeah," said Joey, "but now I got my brother
here, and he talks like the gutters of Astoria."

"That's a problem," the old man conceded. He
lifted the chihuahua off his lap and gently placed it on the warm
gray rock. Then he plucked a real or imaginary dog hair from the
belly of his splendid yellow shirt. "So kid, let's think this
through. First off, why do you really think your brother is
here?"

Joey gave a mirthless snort of a laugh that
had to do only with what he saw as the ridiculous obviousness of
the question. "Bert, lemme put it this way. I can't think of one
fucking time my brother ever crossed the street to say hello to me,
let alone went fifteen hundred miles. So it ain't a social call.
Vacation? Nah. He hates gays, he's with a broad who all she wants
to do is shop—he wouldn't come to Key West for vacation. It's gotta
be this bullshit with Charlie Ponte."

"Awright," said Bert. "We agree. Now, does
he know you know about Ponte, about the emeralds?"

"No."

"You sure?"

Joey glanced off toward the west, at the
underlit pink clouds whose edges were already dimming out to
purple. "Yeah, I'm sure."

"You tell anybody in New York?" Bert
pressed.

"One guy. My buddy Sal."

A look of concern flickered across the old
man's face, and the look triggered in Joey an instant of doubt
followed by a moment of anger toward Bert for being the agent of
suspicion. Mistrusting Sal would be about as painful as any
possible consequence of being let down by Sal. If you couldn't rely
on your family, then you could not afford to doubt your friends.
"Sal's solid," Joey said, and there was defiance in his voice.

"O.K., O.K." The Shirt raised a pacifying
palm. "So what're you gonna do, kid?"

"About Gino? I'm gonna do what I always do
with Gino. I'm gonna try to stay outta his way and hope I don't get
steamrolled."

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 had 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.