Florida Straits (2 page)

"Look," she said, "the apartment's a dump.
Who's arguing? You wanna move to Park Avenue, I'm ready. But Joey,
people don't turn their whole lives upside down because they have a
small bedroom."

"Maybe they should. It isn't like their
lives are so terrific right side up."

Sandra was putting on lipstick. She tried to
talk and got some on her teeth. "Joey," she finally said, "maybe
life isn't supposed to be terrific."

"No? Then what's it supposed to be?"

"You know. Like O.K., organized, decent.
Regular."

Joey put his coffee mug on the nightstand,
sat up in bed, and hugged his knees. "Nah," he said at last. "Just
decent? Just regular? Nah, I can't buy that. Besides, Sandra, can
we be a little honest here? I don't believe that's really what you
want either. Because if it was, you'd be a jackass to be with me,
and I don't think you're a jackass. I'm never gonna be a working
stiff, you know that. A regular guy hoping for a ten-dollar raise?
I'd slit my goddamn wrists. I gotta do things the way I gotta do
'em."

"That's fine for you, Joey. But what about
me?" Sandra turned to face him. She had thin bluish skin that
flushed salmon pink in the cold, the heat, or the wind, and now a
rise in blood pressure was making her cheeks gleam through her
makeup. "I realize this is hard for you to grasp, but I feel pretty
good about things the way they are. I don't mind it here. And I
like my job."

"So you'll get another job," he said. "They
have banks in Florida."

There was a certain expression, not severe,
exactly, but immovable, that came onto Sandra's face at moments
when she realized that a double helping of practicality was
required of her. "You sure it's that easy?" she said.

Joey wasn't sure, it showed in his face.
Sandra pressed her advantage. She squared her shoulders and
straightened the placket of her blouse. "Besides, I like being able
to say, 'I'm your Anchor banker.' I like the sound of it. I like
the prestige."

"What prestige? Sandra, you're a teller at a
drive- up window in Rego Park."

"And what the hell is wrong with that?"

Joey held up his hands as if fending off a
punch. "Nothing's wrong with it. It's terrific. It's great. But
don't make it sound, ya know, like I'm asking you to throw away a
career in high finance."

"No," Sandra said, "all you're asking me to
do is throw away the only job I've got, leave my friends, drop out
of accounting class for like the third time already. And I'm
supposed to do all this just because you've got something to prove
to your father and brother?"

Joey let his hands fall so that they slapped
against his thighs. He pushed a noisy breath past his gums and
shook his head. "First of all, Sandra, he's my half brother. Second
of all, this has nothing to do with them."

Sandra crossed her arms and leaned back
against the dresser. Her mouth curled into what would have been a
smirk except that her light eyes softened at the same time. "Joey,
I thought we were being honest here. Let's face it—everything you
do has to do with them."

Joey pursed his lips and looked down at the
creases in the blanket, the way they fanned out, then flattened. He
reached for his coffee mug and took a few seconds to hide his face
in it and think. But Sandra went on before he'd come up with
anything to say.

"Listen, Joey, I'm late. I'll think about
it."

She slipped into a fuzzy white cardigan and
sidled around the bed to give Joey a kiss. She was in the doorway
when she turned and spoke again. "Joey, lemme ask you something. I
know better than to look for any promises from you. O.K. But you're
asking me to drop everything and move to Florida. Will you at least
admit that that's like a serious thing to ask somebody to do?"

Joey absently smoothed the creases in the
blanket. For a moment it seemed harder to answer the question than
it would be to sit there sipping coffee until Sandra left, then
quietly pack a bag and go away without her. Then he pictured the
empty front seat of his car. "Yeah," he said softly.

"Yeah what?" Sandra pressed.

Joey looked down at his feet under the blue
blanket. The radiator started to hiss and a drop of rusty water
plopped into the pie plate that Sandra had put underneath the
valve. "Yeah, it's like serious."

—
3 —

On the long ride south on Interstate 95,
Joey Gold-man's 1973 Eldorado convertible burned five quarts of
oil, drank up two hundred and thirty gallons of gas, and blew a
right rear tire next to a water tank that said Lumberton, N.C.
While putting on the spare, Joey tore a fingernail and spent the
rest of the day trying to nibble it back into shape. It was the
sort of thing you could do on cruise control.

When Sandra saw her first palm tree, she
started to laugh. It was all by itself in front of some rest rooms
in a turnoff just north of the Florida border, like Georgia was
telling the world that it had palm trees too.

"What's so funny?" Joey asked her.

"Tropicana," Sandra said. "It looks like the
girl on the orange juice."

South of Jacksonville, they stopped at a
Waffle House for sausage and eggs, and Sandra changed into a pair
of turquoise shorts and white sandals with flowers on the insteps.
Joey rolled up his sleeves, undid the second button of his shirt,
and told himself he would never again remove the sunglasses that
Sal Giordano had given him as a going-away gift. He loved them.
They had dark blue lenses that gave everything the velvety look of
the half hour after sunset; the black plastic earpieces slid
through his hair with a feeling smooth as sex. At Vero Beach he
pulled off onto the shoulder and took the Caddy's top down. This
required some wrestling because the frame was rusty and the
electric system hadn't worked in years. "January eleventh," Joey
said. "Seventy-six degrees. Sandra, did I tell ya this was gonna be
great?"

They spent that night south of Miami so they
could drive the Keys in daylight. Their motel room had a smell that
would always be with them from then on, but which they would hardly
ever notice again, it was so much a part of south Florida. The
smell was a sort of far-off mildew mixed with salt, mixed with
iodine, mixed with oysters choking on mud, mixed with a very fine
dust of limestone that was always dissolving in the breeze.
Rounding off the aroma was a hint of toasted sawdust, as if the
termites cooked the wood as they ate it.

Joey and Sandra made love amid that Florida
smell, then they listened for a few minutes to the locusts and the
distant traffic, then Sandra started to cry.

"Hey?" said Joey. He touched her shoulder
under the damp sheet.

"It's O.K.," she said. "It's O.K." She
nuzzled her face into her pillow. "But Joey, aren't you even a
little afraid we just won't like it here?"

He raised himself up on an elbow and
breathed deeply of the dust, mold, and strange flowers closed up
for the night. He'd never really thought about it quite that way.
He'd decided he would like it, he didn't have to think about it. He
was going someplace warm, to do some business, establish himself,
launch an enterprise. The place had to be suitable, but beyond
that? Did Al Capone like Chicago? Did Meyer Lansky like Las
Vegas?

"It's gonna be fine," he said. "Terrific."
He turned over and groped around in the dark to make sure his
sunglasses were on the nightstand next to him. Then he fell asleep
with just the haziest misgivings barely beginning to scratch at his
brain.

—

"Islamorada," Joey said, pointing out the
open window of the Cadillac at many millions of dollars' worth of
gleaming boats. "That's where the President goes fishing. Also my
Uncle Tony. He went fishing there once. Brought back this big
stuffed thing, this fish with like a spike kinda nose. But the guy
didn't stuff it right. Still smelled like fish. Then it rotted.
Right up onna wall. Got all soft and started to drip. Uncle Tony
was pissed."

Sandra rubbed sunblock on her pale arms and
looked out at the bait shops and the seashell stores. Then she
started smearing up her legs, and by the time she looked out the
window again, the shops were gone, the palm trees were gone,
everything was gone. "Joey," she said, "there's no land there." She
grabbed her armrest.

"Ain't that something?" Joey said. "Yup. The
Keys. Unbelievable. You ever hear of this guy—what was his name?
Flagler. Right. This guy could organize. You see that other bridge
over there?"

He pointed to an arc up on trestles that ran
parallel to U.S. 1. Pelicans were perching on it, scratching their
bellies with their beaks. Black kids were fishing, dropping hand
lines into the shallow green water where the Gulf of Mexico met the
Florida Straits.

"That was Flagler's railroad. Now get this,
Sandra. Guy buys up all this land, dirt cheap 'cause you can't get
to it. So he builds a railroad, which makes the land very valuable.
He builds hotels, and he charges whatever he likes 'cause he's the
only guy who's got 'em. It's like total control, and it's legal.
Flagler needs cash, he sells a swamp somewhere for a few
million
. Oh, it's underwater? The land's onna bottom.
Trust
me. He puts up dog tracks, amusement parks. This guy had all the
leverage. A genius."

Sandra looked over at the railroad trestle.
"But Joey, there's big holes in it. I mean, places where it just
stops."

And it was true that large stretches of
shining water and empty sky could be seen through Henry Flagler's
railroad

'Yup. That was the only problem. Hurricanes.
Some trains blew inna water and it wasn't fun anymore, I guess.
Well, you can't buy off a hurricane. At least this way boats can
get through." He adjusted his sunglasses, wiggled the plastic
earpieces through his hair.

Sandra watched him out of the corner of her
eye. Joey was not usually so chatty, almost never before noon. Most
days he woke up grumpy, his mood as rough as his morning stubble.
Sandra wasn't crazy about that, but at least she was used to
it.

"You say you've never been here before?"

Joey was too wrapped up in the scenery to
notice that the question had a suspicious edge to it. True, there
were things he didn't tell Sandra, though they were not the sort of
things a girlfriend needed to get jealous about, just things it was
better she didn't know. But he'd never been to the Keys before, and
he said so.

"You seem to know a lot about the
place."

He let go of the steering wheel and
shrugged. "I know people who've been here."

"Like your Uncle Tony."

"Yeah, Uncle Tony. And my mother."

Sandra paused. She seemed surprised—not that
Joey's mother had been to the Keys but that Joey mentioned it. His
mother had been dead six years. Sandra had never met the woman, and
Joey never talked about her if he could help it. Three, four times
a year, she came up in conversation, usually around some holiday,
when everyone was feeling lousy anyway. Not that Joey hadn't loved
his mother. That was just it. He had, Sandra knew that. But Joey
was not one of those people who managed to pull some sweet juice
out of being sad. For him, to linger on a sad thing that couldn't
be fixed was as pointless as sticking your finger in your eye.

"When was your mother down here?" Sandra
ventured.

Joey looked away from her, out the window at
the pelicans, and waited to see if he'd get the usual knot in his
belly and if it would clamp his mouth. It didn't happen. Maybe it
was the sunshine, maybe just being away from Queens. "I think she
was here a few times," he said.

Sandra stayed still and quiet.

"I never really got the story straight,"
Joey continued. "And of course I'm never gonna hear it from my old
man. But as well as I can make out, what happened was like, if my
father had business in Miami or Tampa or even Havana in the old
days, he'd arrange for my mother to come down, and they'd have a
few days together. You know. Some lobsters, some champagne, some
dancing, some jazz, some walks onna beach. Pretty romantic, I
guess. Then he'd go back to the wife and baby Gino, and my mother
would ride home on a separate train."

He squeezed the steering wheel, pursed his
lips, and tugged on an earlobe. "Fucking sordid, isn't it?"

"If they cared for each other. . ." Sandra
began. But then, as though the notion didn't convince her, she let
it trail off through the open roof. Joey flashed her a bent look
that seemed to say,
Thanks for trying
, but the notion didn't
persuade him either. He blew out a long breath, turned on the
radio, and listened to static for a while.

"Reception sucks down here," he said.

—

It took Seven-Mile Bridge to pull him out of
his sulk.

"Now
this
is really something,
Sandra. Seven miles, nothing but water. How'd they do it? Like
hammer some stakes innee ocean? I mean, this whole road is just
like. . . like if they had a pier at Coney Island that ran
practically to Sandy Hook. I mean, look at this!"

Sandra held on to her armrest and squirmed,
as if trying to find a shady place in the roofless car. Pelicans
scudded by, big and slow as clouds, and terns dove underneath the
trestles. Joey clicked on the cruise control and half stood in the
driver's seat to get a better view of the green water dotted with
clumps of dusty mangrove and splotched with reddish patches of
submerged coral. The salt wind steamed his sunglasses even though
the air felt dry.

"You love it, huh?" Sandra shouted
skyward.

"Love it," Joey said. "Feels like home."

He let the Caddy steer itself and spread his
arms out wide, laying claim to the green water, the diving birds,
the tinted sky. Sandra glanced up at him and tried to shield her
sunburned forehead. All the sunblock in the world wasn't going to
keep her from turning pink.