Florida Straits (25 page)

" 'Bout five miles out," Joey said, "there's
a little island. We're gonna ditch the boat there, scrape the name
off, bust it up as good as we can. Then we come back and you're
outta heah."

Gino nodded, though he was paying only
half-attention. His body was on deck but his brain was in the
bilges. He tried to recapture the feel of wet emeralds in his
palm.

For some minutes they didn't speak, then
Gino asked absently, "How you know that?"

"It's onna chart." Joey was leaning against
the
Osprey's
stern, steering with the stem of the
engine.

Gino made no response. He didn't much care
what a chart was and he didn't want to give Joey a chance to show
off what he knew. So he kept quiet and fantasized. He pictured what
a sport he'd be when he cashed in his three million dollars' worth
of rocks. He saw himself in an immaculate mohair suit, spreading
smiles and fifties around crowded restaurants and nightclubs. He'd
buy Vicki something nice. Discreetly, he'd lay some money on the
widows of Vinnie Fish and Frankie Bread.

Joey steered the boat and watched his half
brother swelling into the role of big shot.

Gino gave a self-contented little smile. He
seemed to be imagining the pride and affection he'd bask in when he
presented some of the stolen money to his father. He liked money,
Vincente Delgatto did; he liked the rituals of people forking it
over. And Gino liked when his father patted his cheek.

But then Gino frowned. With a flash of
secret shame such as assails a person who has somehow forgotten a
dear old friend at Christmas and knows deep down there's a reason
why, he realized he had left out Joey. Jesus. Without Joey, he'd
still be in his hotel room with his gums wrapped around a bourbon
bottle; the emeralds would still be sitting at that falling- down
dock with nothing but mosquitoes and rats for company.

"Kid," he began. After the long interval of
silence but for the whine of the motor, the sound seemed out of
place, intrusive. "Listen, I gotta give credit where credit is due.
Ya did good, Joey. The way ya thought things through, I got a lotta
respect for that. And I wanna show my appreciation."

Joey looked off at the glinting water, the
steady stars. Gino didn't exactly sound like his old self, and Joey
figured he was rehearsing his role as the bigger cheese he was
about to become. But now Gino had put himself in a position where
he had to name a number. A guy like Gino, if he talked about
appreciation, gratitude, he couldn't just leave it vague like that,
he had to make it a specific amount. And this was difficult. It
wasn't that Gino was cheap. It was more complicated than that.
Whatever he gave to Joey didn't only mean there was less for
himself; it also meant that Joey would be a little bit of a big
shot on his own, and the real question was, how much of a big shot
could Gino stand for him to be?

The older brother cleared his throat and ran
a hand over his chin. Then, in a gesture he'd seen his father make
in similar situations, he yanked down on the collar of his shirt as
if to give it a military straightness. "Ten thousand, Joey. For
you. For helpin' out. Howzat sound?"

Some questions just cannot be answered, and
this was one of them. Besides, Gino wasn't asking it to open a
discussion but only as a set-up to be thanked. Joey was not
inclined to thank him. He was neither surprised nor unsurprised by
the paltriness of his brother's offer, and he decided he would not
regard it as an insult, just as a matter of bookkeeping. That's
what it came down to with Gino, after all—bookkeeping, the totting
up of gyps and bonuses, the usual disappointments and very
occasional windfalls of regard. "That's fine, Gino. Whatever you
think."

Gino started to speak again, but just as the
air was pushing past his throat, he realized he had nothing to say.
In some dark recess of his mind he suspected he was being a cheap
and jealous son of a bitch. He filtered this suspicion through his
well-developed machinery for making himself seem right, and it came
out looking like Joey was being very ungrateful in the face of his
largess. But then, Joey had always been like that—grumpy even, or
especially, when Gino was trying to help him out. The kid just
couldn't accept generosity.

The
Osprey
plowed on slowly through
the Florida Straits. Behind it, the land had fallen away until the
mangroves looked like nothing more than dead spots on the ocean,
and the dim lights of U.S. 1 appeared as stars bellied down to the
horizon. The moon was nearing its zenith and its light was now a
stark white that seemed to throw a sphere of steam around it. The
breeze came in soft warm puffs from the south; ahead, the water was
nearly flat, and then, perhaps a half mile away, just beyond a buoy
that blinked a mesmerizing red, it broke into curious moonlit
ripples, as if whipped by some unfelt freshening wind. Gino yawned.
Joey dodged the contagiousness of it by looking away and taking a
big breath of salty air.

Now, it has often been observed that in the
midst of a terrible accident, time slows down and disaster unfolds
with an almost pornographically explicit sense of close-up detail.
When a boat runs up on coral, just the opposite is true. Everything
that has been quietly humming along to the languid rhythm of calm
water is instantly, bafflingly accelerated, as if the entire racing
violence of the ocean were sluicing through the crazy currents in
the shallows.

The
Osprey
was laboring along at a
three-knot crawl when she first hit bottom.

Even so, her momentum carried her forward so
that the stern came up like the backside of a bucking horse and the
suddenly airborne propeller revved like a jet. When the creaking
hull came back down, it listed to starboard, took a groaning bump,
then turned its nose broadside to the chop.

"What the fuck?" screamed Gino, spreading
out his arms and trying desperately to hold on to a gunwale.

"Fuck," said Joey. He was still trying to
steer, but his efforts counted for nothing. The eddies carried the
soft wooden boat from one coral head to another. The doomed craft
slammed, caromed, and flew on helplessly toward the next blow; it
was as if giant, stone-hard hands were playing volleyball with it.
Overhead, the stars wheeled as the boat was tossed. Gino's thin
shoes gave him no purchase on the slimy boards, and he slid around
the deck as if on skates. The
Osprey
reared up, dove nose
first, then, on the return bounce, slammed the shaft of the little
outboard into unyielding coral. The force cracked the already
rotten transom; it sheared off like wet cardboard. The motor, still
attached, still running, dove backward like a scuba diver, punched
a hole in the water, and vanished.

"Gino, man, we're fucked."

"My stones," he yelled. "Jesus Christ, my
stones."

The older brother scrambled forward toward
the pilothouse. A vicious, twisting collision with the bottom sent
him sprawling, his face against the slimy planks, his ribs
compressed against the side. He took a breath that burned, then got
up on his hands and knees and tried crawling toward his fortune. He
was hallway over the threshold of the roofless cabin when the
Osprey
came crashing down onto a spike of coral that poked
into it like a drill. Water came spraying up through the pierced
deck like oil from a gusher. Gino crawled over the rupture, and the
hissing water seared his skin. He groped toward the loose plank,
and a head-on crash sent him skidding face first into the base of
the console where the rat had nested. Lying there, smelling brine
and rodent, Gino heard or rather felt a profound and ungodly noise.
It was a slow but all-encompassing vibration, a loose rumble as
from the bowels of the earth. The boat was breaking in half.

Still pinned on his belly, Gino strained to
look back over his shoulder. Through the pilothouse doorway, he
could see that the back half of the
Osprey
was at a
different angle. The craft was folding, like it was on a hinge. He
pushed off with all his strength and scuttled backward like a crab.
He made one last desperate grope toward the plank that hid his
millions, but came away with nothing except a pencil-size splinter
that tore through a waterlogged finger. Then he felt his ankles
being grabbed. Joey pulled him backward, yanked his rigid body over
a widening fissure in the middle of the boat and launched him
toward the stem, where warm salt water was already pooling,
welcoming the
Osprey
to the bottom of the sea.

"Quick," said Joey. "Inna rowboat."

Without quite knowing how he got there, Gino
Delgatto found himself over the side, his hands clinging to the
sundering timbers, his feet groping for the dry boards of the
dinghy. A moment later, Joey followed. He took the oars just as the
Osprey
was going down. The bow went first. Like a dying
animal, it seemed to give its head one final shake of defiance or
supplication, then slid silently into the deep water at the far
side of the coral canyon. Somewhat anti-climactically, the stern
had yet to follow. Thinly attached by the few boards still intact,
it had to be pulled down like a ham actor reluctant to leave the
stage, and gave off an unseemly sucking sound as it finally
submerged.

Joey needed to row only a couple hundred
yards to escape the ferocious turbulence of the reef, and the
instant he'd done so, the water was again so placid, the night air
so still and coddling that it would have been easy to imagine that
the wreck of the
Osprey
was only a quick nightmare, a
hellish vision from a brief and otherwise pleasant nap.

Except the boat was gone. The motor was
gone. The emeralds were gone.

Joey rowed in silence past the buoy blinking
red.

Gino looked back in disbelief toward the
empty place where his fortune had been. Moonlight twinkled on the
ripples, and that was it. He pulled in a deep breath that added
weight to the unhappy suspicion that he had cracked some ribs. Then
he grabbed his hair and pulled. "Ah fuck, Joey," he said. "Fuck,
fuck, fuck."

Joey put his back into his rowing. He hadn't
wanted to thank Gino for his offer of a measly ten grand, and he
didn't want to apologize now. He shrugged as well as he could shrug
while handling the oars. "Gino, hey," he said. "I'm new at this. I
tried."

—
36 —

"You tried. You tried? You
tried
?
Joey, you fucking little halfass loser pissant twerp, tree million
dollars onna table, and you tried? That kinda money, Joey, ya don't
try. A boy
tries
, Joey. A man
does
."

Gino Delgatto sat in the stern of the
rowboat and screamed. Salt water squished through his nylon socks
and out through the seams of his soft, ruined loafers. His silk
jacket was full of slime and splinters. He was bleeding freely from
his sliced-open finger and didn't notice until after he'd run that
hand through his hair.

"I shoulda known you'd fuck it up," he went
on. "Ha!" He slapped himself on the forehead. "Where was my fucking
brain? What was going on in my fucking head that I would leave
anything up to you? I must be crazy. How long I known you always
fuck things up? Always. Shit, don't I know that's why you come down
here inna first place? You couldn't cut it in New York, Joey, so
here you are in this pissant little nothing place."

Gino enjoyed screaming. He had a voice that
razzed like a trombone as it got louder, and it could fill a room,
a house; sometimes it seemed like it could shout down everything
for a city block. But it couldn't fill the ocean at four A.M., and
this was a little frustrating. Also, to really crank up the volume,
he had to squeeze from the gut, and this made his ribs burn as if
touched with lit cigarettes. Well, tough, thought Gino. Let it
hurt. His emeralds were at the bottom of the ocean and, goddammit,
somebody, everybody, was going to pay.

"Yeah," he resumed, agreeing with himself.
"You come down here because up there ya gotta do things right, and
you never did. Ya couldn't even handle a bagga money without
fucking it up somehow. Rough a guy up? Forget about it. You got no
nerve, Joey. No balls. And everybody knows it, don't kid yourself.
Pop, your so-called buddies—they all know you're worthless." He
slapped himself in the head again. "Me, I know it. So why the fuck
did I listen to you? Did I figure, O.K., I'm on your turf, maybe
you're less of a fuckup here? Did I figure, hey, give the kid a
chance, maybe by some miracle he ain't such a total loser
anymore?"

Rowing is a very serene activity, private,
repetitive, with constant evidence of slow but uncomplicated
progress. So Joey rowed. He'd never done it before, and he didn't
do it well, but he did it. He'd kicked off his wet sneakers, rolled
up his wet pants legs, and was almost comfortable. He answered his
brother softly. "Gino, come on, you listened to me 'cause you were
desperate. You were drunk as a skunk, scared shitless, and you
didn't know what to do next."

To Gino, this version of events already
sounded wildly false, and if he didn't yet have a more satisfactory
tale to tell himself, he'd construct one on the fly. "That's where
you're wrong, kid," he razzed, wagging a bleeding finger in Joey's
face. "Very wrong. I woulda come up with a plan. I was already
workin' on it. And it wouldn'ta been so fucking half-ass like
yours. Mine woulda worked. I got impatient. That was my mistake."
He slapped his head. "I got impatient, and yeah, I let my
confidence get shook, that much I admit. So I depend on a little
shitass nobody like you to pull me through. So O.K., I deserve what
I got. Nothin'."

Joey rowed. Emerald-green flashes of
phosphorescence streamed out from the blades of his oars, and the
whole world seemed to exhale with relief at the pause in Gino's
tantrum. The stars appeared to be receding with the prospect of the
end of night. When Gino spoke again, he was not yelling but seemed
to be thinking aloud.