Florida Straits (23 page)

"Prob'ly right in Garrison Bight," said Bert
the Shirt. "Along the embankment there. There's always some winos,
they sit in these old boats, sleep in 'em, I guess. Offer 'em
twenty bucks. They'll take it, get drunk, and steal the boat back
tomorrow."

Joey nodded, rapped the metal table with his
knuckles, and started to get up. "Sounds easy enough. But ain't
that what you tol' me, Bert, that in Florida everything should be
easy?"

The Shirt nodded, a little bit uncertainly.
He hated getting tripped up on what he did or did not remember
saying.

"And money comes outta the water here," said
Joey, pressing the old man's bony shoulder. "You tol' me that, too,
didn't ya, Bert?"

Here Bert felt himself more firmly in the
grip of recollection, and he smiled his loose-lipped long-toothed
smile. "Always has," he said. "It's, like, tradition."

—

Sandra was in the pool.

Now that the evenings were staying hot, this
was her favorite time at the compound. Steve the naked landlord had
disappeared, taking his beers, his ash-tray, and his nakedness with
him. Peter and Claude had left for work; Wendy and Marsha had gone
inside to eat either brown rice or pepperoni pizza; Luke was off
playing music somewhere, and Lucy the mailman was in front of
television with her feet up. Sandra had the place to herself, under
a dimming sky that was still greenish yellow at the western fringe,
with the palms and poincianas losing the last of their daylight
color and turning black and flat as etchings overhead. She stood
midriff-deep in her chaste two-piece and breathed in the jasmine
and the chlorine.

Then she grabbed on to the edge of the pool
and started doing her kicking exercises.

That was when Joey came through the gate.
Sandra was facing away from him, and he watched her as he
approached. She craned her neck to keep her pale short hair out of
the water. She pointed her toes, probably the way she'd once seen
in a magazine. And while she was kicking furiously, she barely made
a splash or a sound. Sandra, Joey thought. This is Sandra. Quiet,
private, disciplined, precise. The little kid who would always find
something worth doing if stuck in her room, who would always have a
project for a weekful of rain. He watched her firm and narrow back,
her skinny and determined shoulders, and a strange thing happened:
he realized he truly was in love with her. He did not prime himself
to feel this, and there was no such thing as readiness for the
feeling when it came. It started at his feet and swelled upward as
pure, sore, and irresistible as a sudden welling of graveside
grief, and it left him with a closed throat and a milky feeling at
the backs of his knees.

He walked lightly around the pool's damp
apron and crouched low in front of her. "Hello, baby."

"Hi, Joey," she said, still kicking. "Thirty
more makes four hundred."

"I love you," he said.

Sandra, the banker, had never before lost
count. But now her scissoring legs fell out of their forced march
and fluttered softly downward until her feet found the bottom.
Joey, kneeling on the wet tiles, kissed her and tasted
chlorine.

"I mean, Sandra, I think you're terrific.
The best. The way you are. The way you've stuck with me. Hey,
Sandra, you want friends? We're gonna have friends, Sandra. I
promise. Lotsa friends. And salads. Friends and salads, all you
want. And, like, we'll do stuff. I don't know what, whatever you
like. Ya know, regular stuff that people do. Movies, picnics, I
dunno. But we'll like go out, we'll have, like, a life. You and me.
O.K.?"

—
33 —

Viewed from even a little distance out at
sea, the life of the land looks small and slow, cozy but at the
cost of being locked into lines and lanes, blocks and clusters.
Compared to the tireless movement of water, things on land look
stunned; it seemed to Joey that they could practically be under
glass. Houses seem bolted to the earth. Cars crawl, pushing their
meager lights ahead of them. Trees clutch the ground, rooted
desperately as teeth.

At eleven fifty-five, Joey Goldman, alone at
the wheel of Zack Davidson's little skiff, veered in from the open
ocean toward the Flagler House dock. He was towing behind him a
paintless plank rowboat with rusty oarlocks and mismatched oars, a
broken stem seat, and a cut-off bleach bottle for bailing. He'd
offered ten dollars for it and bought it for twelve.

In front of him, the hotel windows were
nearly all dark; a few flickered with the fugitive light of
television. Outside, orange floodlights collided with the blue
shimmer of the pool and gave a mottled desert aspect to the beach.
On the far side of the building, Charlie Ponte's thugs sat in their
Lincoln scratching their bellies, yawning, talking about Italian
food and parts of the female body. Their landlocked brains traveled
predictably down marked roads; they could not conceive of a getaway
on the wide, dark, and laneless water. Joey idled at the end of the
pier and waited.

His view to the top of the service ramp was
blocked by the shaggy thatch of the poolside bar, and by the time
he saw the silhouettes of Gino and Vicki, they were winding their
way through the ranks of vacant lounge chairs near the beach. Gino
had his hand in the small of Vicki's back, a gesture not of
gallantry but of bullying. Shadowy and forward-leaning, the couple
bore, for all their attempted nonchalance, the unmistakable stamp
of people fleeing, and when Gino stepped onto the thick boards of
the dock, his heavy tread seemed to pass along an edginess that
shuddered through the nails and down the pilings until it was
smothered by the muck at the bottom of the sea. Halfway along the
pier, one of Vicki's high heels caught between two planks; she took
her shoes off and scurried the rest of the way with mincing
steps.

"So you made it," Gino said. He managed to
muster some of his former high-spirited sarcasm, maybe because Joey
was now literally beneath him, hugging a piling to keep the boat
close and not looking especially dignified. But it was also true
that Gino had made a brave attempt to pull out of his nosedive on
this, his last evening in Florida. He'd eased off on the bourbon
and just let Dr. Greenbaum buy him one final bottle of champagne
with dinner. He'd shaved, cut his toenails, and even managed to
find a clean shirt and a silk sports jacket. Like many people who
have been humiliated in a strange and distant place, he seemed to
imagine that going home would be sufficient to erase the episode,
that since none of the neighborhood guys had witnessed his shame
and the baring of his weakness, it hadn't really happened.

"Come on," said Joey, "get in. Step inna
middle of the boat."

Vicki's behind was in his face as she
lowered herself down the wooden ladder. Her butt was clothed in
mauve-colored capri pants and seemed to be perfumed. Vicki had
tried to fix her hair in honor of her reemergence into the world,
but she couldn't duplicate the skill, patience, and apparatus of
the beauty parlor. Like a failed soufflé, the rough teased do held
its own around the edges but caved in in the center; in silhouette
it was as if her scalp had been cleft by a hatchet. She lurched
around the cockpit until she managed to grab a rail. Then Joey
stepped well back as Gino lumbered in. The skiff rocked under his
weight, and once he was safely in the boat he cast a sneering
glance back through the hotel to where his colleagues were intently
but stupidly waiting to kill him. "Assholes," he said.

Joey pushed off, took the wheel, turned the
boat toward open water, and jammed the throttle forward.

The breeze was light, the water only
slightly rippled like a washboard, and no one spoke until the skiff
was half a mile out from land. Then Joey slowed the engine and said
to Gino, "Gimme your guns."

A late half-moon was just coming up. Its dim
red-dish glow mixed with the silver blue of starlight to make a
spectral gleam that seemed good for telling lies. "I didn't bring
em," Gino said. "I mean, Christ, we're goin' to the airport, ain't
we?"

Joey turned off the motor. It was a gesture
intended to remind his passengers of their essential status as
captives. Amid the violent silence of the ocean, the only sound was
the lapping of water against their hull; it was a noise at once
delicate and full of threat, like a lion licking its chops. "Gino,
I known you a long time. Gimme the fucking guns."

Gino seemed to be considering, though in an
eighteen-foot boat a person does not have a lot of options as to
where to go or what to do. He reached into his jacket pocket,
pulled out his pistol, and with a resentful pout on his jowly mouth
handed it to Joey. Then he pulled his second gun out of his pants
at the small of his back and surrendered that one, too. Joey
glanced at the weapons for just a second, and tossed them over his
shoulder into the Florida Straits. They somersaulted through the
red moonlight then landed with a slap-slap followed by a baritone
kerplunk as they broke the skin of the water and dove pin-wheeling
toward the bottom.

"Fuck you do that for?" Gino asked.

Joey restarted the engine. " 'Sgonna be a
long night, Gino. It could get, like, emotional."

At the eastern end of Key West, the airport
beacon raked the water, and through the cut of Cow Key Channel, the
weird mass of Mount Trashmore could momentarily be seen. Then came
the low, dark sweep of Stock island, with its trailer parks and oil
tanks, then the barricaded expanse of Boca Chica, where navy pilots
learned to fly. The skiff planed along the ripples, two miles out
from shore; the towed rowboat sledded along in the flat water
between the rays of the wake.

"This is
nice
," Vicki yelled over the
roar of the motor. She sounded surprised, innocent, and girlish, as
if the salt air had blown away her years of bimbohood, swept her
back to the younger verge of an adolescence marked by wonder at the
mystery of ballooning breasts and their hypnotic effect on certain
sorts of men. The wind had yanked her hair straight up and back and
made her look unprecedentedly stylish. "Gino, how come you never
took me boating?"

"Shut up, Vicki," he shouted. Was he still
sulking over the loss of his gun, or was he just that thoroughly
sick of her?

"No, you shut up, Gino," she yelled back.
Then she started cackling. Had she truly lost her mind, or was she
just so tickled to be standing up to him? "I'm sicka you bossin' me
around."

"Shut up the botha yuhs," said Joey. "I
gotta find the spot."

He slowed the boat and peered toward shore,
wondering if the contour of the land would look anything like the
image he'd carried away from the nautical chart. He was looking for
the place where the bulge of Big Coppitt gave onto the cluster of
mangrove outcrops called the Saddlebunch Keys, where Highway 1
hopped and curved from one dry place to another over a series of
short low bridges. Turning landward, he rode the current that was
streaming toward the Gulf, filtering through the islands and the
trestles as through a giant sieve, and when he could just make out
the hum of traffic from the pavement, he cut back to idle speed and
drifted. The raised road loomed ahead like a low black rainbow.
Widely spaced streetlights lit up globes of vapory air; the
occasional car pushed its meager beams straight in front of it.

"We gettin' off here?" Vicki asked as they
floated toward the stanchions.

"You are," Joey said. He didn't look at her
but kept his eyes on the bow of the boat.

Vicki swallowed, blinked, licked her thin
dry lips. She'd thought the kid brother was her ally. That made it
O.K. to stand up to Gino. But would an ally drop her off all by
herself in the middle of nowhere with lizards and bugs and maybe
even alligators all over the place? She pointed her chest toward
Joey and inhaled. "Hey," she purred.

By way of answer, Joey reached down and
handed her a neatly bundled sleeping bag. "Ever been camping,
Vicki?"

She looked at the quilted parcel like it
came from Mars. "You gotta be crazy," she said. "I'll get raped.
I'll get murdered."

Joey maneuvered the skiff so that it was
drifting broadside toward the bridge. Current parted around the
concrete pillars; the pavement sang under the weight of a truck.
Off to the left, the land was low, dark, and overhung with tangled
trees. "Vicki, this ain't New York. The worst that's gonna happen
is you'll get mosquito-bit. Gino, get onna side and get ready to
grab the bridge."

Gino Delgatto compressed like a squeezed
beach ball as he absorbed the impact between fiberglass and
concrete. He held the skiff fast while Joey hoisted Vicki onto the
small front deck. The roadbed was just at the level of her face,
and under it was an I-beam that was pocked with rust and had the
texture of a nutmeg grater. Vicki grabbed it and leaped about six
inches into the air. "Hold on, now," Joey said. "Lift. Come on,
lift."

The boat was rocking, current was slapping
against it, and Vicki was trying her damnedest to pull herself onto
the bridge. In her mauve capri pants, her long legs kicked and
jerked like those of a hanged man. Finally Joey put his hands on
her perfumed backside and shoved for all he was worth. It was
satisfying, this vigorous handling of his brother's girlfriend's
ass, and it propelled her to where she could swing a leg onto the
pavement and scrabble up to the shoulder of the road. She stood,
monumental from the perspective of the men below, and glared down
at them accusingly. Joey tossed the sleeping bag up to her, and she
clutched it to her bosom as though it were her last friend in the
world.

"Go over by the trees there," Joey said.
"We'll be back around dawn."

She looked down at Gino, who was still
hugging the bridge stanchion, and for a moment it appeared she
might spit on him or burst into tears. Instead, she just walked
away. After a few steps she turned around. "Some vacation, Gino,"
she hissed. "I shoulda stood in Queens."