Salty Sky (5 page)

In the United States, Francisco and Alberto would find an untraceable car waiting in the parking lot. They’d use it to enjoy Miami before driving to Savannah. There, he would upgrade his air fleet. Three Gulfstream Vs awaited his review. Forty-five million dollars, wired via a Caymans account this morning, sat with the escrow agent. Once he selected the G5, he would board it and seek out what America’s War on Terror referred to as
soft targets
.

Revenge. A degree of personal satisfaction. More important, an advance reminder to his soon-to-be business associates of his timeless memory. With his revenge complete, he’d then return to Savannah,
drive back to Miami, and fly commercial to Bogotá. The G5 would travel from Savannah to Bogotá directly, with his new crew and any luggage aboard.

Francisco very much looked forward to the week ahead. He could not help but wonder whether a long-ignored arsonist and pilot foolishly did as well.

5

IT’S A WONDERFUL
Life
was wrong. The George Baileys didn’t trash their lives when disaster struck the savings and loan. The Potters didn’t either. (The Potters chose a different path anyway.) It’s those somewhere between Bailey and Potter who fell apart
.

Three good actions: picking up litter, putting the neighbor’s dog back in its yard, and listening to a homeless man’s story. One bad action: not stopping to help the old woman with the flat tire in the rain. Or one small deception, initiated or accepted
.

“I’m sorry I didn’t …”

For pride. Convenience. Fear. Each of us our own faults. A run on the savings and loan brought the best out of old George. For the rest of us … flip a coin
.

A profound thought? Maybe, but as Cale switched from dreaming to being semiawake, he lost it. He could still see George holding his little girl. Was that confetti in the air, and if so, where did it come from? A bell rang for Clarence. Was George laughing or crying? The memory wasn’t clear. If he’d kept the thought, he was sure it would change things. Silver bullet, that improved it all. Could even get his knees back to where he could dunk a basketball. How proud he was of that at fifteen. How he took it for granted at twenty-five. With fifty in the windshield closer than forty in the mirror, he’d like to do it again
.

CALE FELT THE
sunlight through the screens, heard gulls, smelled marsh, and intuitively knew he was at home but not in bed. Each heartbeat resonated in his temples. A cheek stuck to the hardwood floor, the tingle of pins and needles in a leg. He shook the leg. Something was wrong. Adrenaline stoked by the fears of men with long memories from his earlier life woke him.

Oh, right. Jimmy’s head was on his calf. He pivoted his leg from the hip. Jimmy stood, circled, and laid his spine against Cale’s.

Cale heard
SportsCenter. Dun-na-nunt, dun-na-nunt
. His friends laughing on the den furniture behind him were traveling between drunk and hungover. Cale skipped the “between” part and awoke hungover.
SportsCenter
was the white noise behind every morning he’d felt like this. Chris Berman’s voice made him shiver.

It had seemed to Cale like a fun idea to fly old friends for a change. Peeling his face from the hardwoods, he reconsidered and found himself wondering whether they would reimburse him for the jet fuel.

The prior night’s worship of golden calves and the omnipresent drumline felt like déjà vu. But Cale had married so young and had been so wrapped up in work and family that he couldn’t remember from when. And Maggie, bless her heart, had been merciless on him when he indulged.

Once, when his twins were two, he dragged home from a guys’ weekend on a red-eye. Maggie met him in the driveway. She was radiant, and his loins stirred despite exhaustion’s fog. She was smiling, and he put on his bravest no-way-I’m-hungover-and-tired face and hoped to hide the scratchiness in his voice and the smell of smoke embedded in his clothes.

“How was Las Vegas … honey?” she asked.

Wariness should have crept into his mind with the pause before the word
honey
. He grabbed a long hug before replying.

“It was a lot of fun. The undercards on Holyfield’s match were better than the main event. The tickets were expensive, but at least I lost all my bets.”

The lame joke wasn’t acknowledged. “Sweetheart, I’m glad you had fun,” she said.

The switch to a different term of endearment was another missed warning. Cale obliviously plowed ahead with a request for quiet time where they could catch up. The request was politely rebuffed, and he was referred to as
sugar
. Maggie steered the conversation to the week’s logistics—who needs to be where doing what on which day. Cale felt the sunshine in every dehydrated cell in his body. He daydreamed of getting into his cool, dark house. Finally, he said, “Mags, I’m beat. You mind if I go catch a nap?”

He caught the word
actually
. Something about adults not complaining about hangovers. Then she was gone, and it was a long daddy day for Cale and not the most rewarding one for his girls. Maggie’s eyes laughed as the whip tore flesh from his back.

Anyway, tomorrow Cale could return to his pattern of two cold ones a night (preceded by a day or two of detox). Today, he’d take the Whaler to the beach and hope the sand and salt would wear his friends out. Could their livers keep up this pace for a full seventy-two hours?

Going vertical, Cale became slightly dizzy. He procured ibuprofen, antacids, and lemon-lime Gatorade for triage. More
dun-na-nunt, dun-na-nunt
in the background. The lemon-lime tasted like sweat.

Sweat was something Cale knew. Twenty-five years ago, August meant college football preseason. Two-a-days. Eat, heat, stretch, practice, ice, eat, nap, heat, stretch, practice, ice, eat, and sleep. The pizza guy showed up at nine o’clock to give everybody their large pizza for dessert before bedtime. That was two hours after a pasta and hot wings dinner. He didn’t remember vegetables, but he did remember lots of bananas at practice.

He missed preseason. But why? Was it the simplicity? The
competition? Camaraderie? Did they still give freshmen swirlies? Could he still play? The height, broad-shoulders, narrow hips, and big hands were all still intact. His feet were as big as ever, which was good for balance. He could take an eighteen-year-old version of himself, but maybe not a twenty-two-year-old version.

No, he’d take the twenty-two-year-old too, just not in a fair fight. Uncle Sam’s training took the fair fight out of him. He’d never wanted to fight, but if he needed to, why make it fair? How had he switched from thinking about playing to thinking about fighting?

Time waited for no one, and he now ached when it rained and knew this weekend’s hangover would drag until Thursday. Untold hours in the gym and water slowed the atrophy. Twenty straight years selecting hand-to-hand combat training for his continuing education had calibrated his rise, plateau, and slow decline. What a blessing Maggie had gotten pregnant before his junior season—not just because of the twins, but because it forced manhood on him when he wanted more years of boyhood.

His Augusts had gone through several cycles since his playing days. There were the girls’ cheerleading camp years. Those were his favorite Augusts for some reason. There was the year of night flights in the mountains. A decade of back-to-school shopping. One August, he crossed a border sixty times in thirty days. The hardest August, was as a new widower with daughters in high school. There was fruit wine miraculously growing in the bushes. White-knuckled trips to the gynecologist. An empty nester at thirty-nine—that was the second-hardest August. He had back-to-back father-of-the-bride Augusts. His next cycle of life was as a grandpa. If his grandkids had kids at twenty, he’d be a great-grandpa before he could collect social security, assuming they were still paying out social security at that point.

Cale grabbed the iPhone to see if his daughters had called. No. This was the part of life’s cycle where he loved them more than they loved him.

Maggie
, Cale thought,
I could have used you sticking around. I know, I’ve mentioned this before. I know you’ve mentioned you wanted to. I did my best as a father. I forced their dates to introduce themselves, even in college. I checked for a smile, a firm shake, a direct look in the eyes. Weather permitting, we’d meet in the backyard, me with my shirt off. I’d show whatever project I was working on. Did my power tools and slobbering dog deter the young men’s loins? The girls’ social networking left breadcrumb trails. Well, they survived. C’est la vie. They’ve started families of their own now. Old Gramps can wait for his Christmas cards to arrive and will not complain about it. I know you agree, but sometimes I need reminding
.

6

WHAT DID MARK
Twain say about life on a boat being like jail with a chance of drowning? How would Twain feel if he paid as much for the privilege as Joe had? Slips, refueling, and provisioning were all expensive. When the captain moved the boat without him and sent him a single bill, it was at least one quick slash of the knife rather than death by a thousand pinpricks.

The boat was really his wife’s. She had passed eighteen months ago, six months after the boat was ordered and two months before it was delivered. He had tried to sell it, but he couldn’t stomach losing a million dollars on something he’d never used. Now his stomach felt differently. Between the cost of owning and operating
Framed
and entertaining family guests, a million dollars sounded OK.

Maria had said, “Joe Pascarella, this boat will make your sons and grandkids come visit us.” But in truth, his sons were busy. They had families and careers. They barely had time for Joe to visit them. He saw his daughters-in-law’s hair go gray worrying about their two-year-olds out at sea.

No, he was trying to put himself in a bad mood. He liked the boat, and he could afford it.

Joe’s friend Tony Moreno was onboard. As teenagers, they started together as apprentice carpenters. In their twenties, they became
foremen together. At forty-two, after twenty-five years, Joe retired from the union to be a developer. Tony’s crews worked his local projects. Retired after forty-seven years in the union, Tony was in good financial shape with a nice pension and benefits for life.

On this trip, Joe’s nephew and two friends—all three professional fitness trainers—were along as a favor to his sister. He paid to have them flown from Islip to Miami. They were accompanying Tony, the captain, and Joe up the East Coast to Sag Harbor. For the first half of the trip, they hadn’t been much help. Then again, the ship hadn’t been attacked by pirates, so maybe their waxed chests deterred high crimes at sea.

Joe couldn’t get straight what to think of guys whose job was to get stay-at-home moms to do push-ups and sit-ups and who then did the same thing themselves in their free time. Joe had loved baseball as a kid, and his arms showed that he’d swung a hammer for the next twenty-five years. But his gut showed that he didn’t buy into the exercise-for-appearances phenomenon.