Sunburn (11 page)

Still, there were times when obedience was a burden, a cramp, a real pain in the ass, and in those situations it was only natural that a guy would find a reason, many reasons, to disobey. Who wouldn't? If other guys played by the rules no matter what, that would be one thing, but hey … Gino squeezed the steering wheel and thought about his old man's book. It broke the rules in every way. Telling secrets. Trusting outsiders. Did you still have to follow orders from a man who did things like that? Especially if the orders held you back from something where there was a nice buck to be made?

Gino didn't quite notice where he'd made a U-turn, but at some point he'd spun the car around; the moon was on the other side. He was heading back toward Flagler House and something had been decided.

When he bulled into his top floor oceanfront room, he did not at first see Debbi. He found her out on the balcony, sipping a martini and looking at the stars. She was holding her fingers at peculiar, pained, arthritic angles, and it took Gino a moment to understand her nails were drying.

Debbi looked through the railing at the palm trees on the beach. "Other people," she said, "they come ta Florida ta relax. You, ya come ta Florida, ya run around like a cockaroach."

Gino went inside to call room service.

Debbi kept talking to his back. "Can't we sit still five minutes? Can't we settle in a little bit?"

Gino ordered a bottle of bourbon, switched the TV on, and poked his head just for a second through the open sliding door to the balcony. Obedience could sometimes be a cramp, a pain, and so could the company of a complaining broad. "I'm drivin' up for a day or so. You wanna stay, stay. I don't give a fuck."

"Look," said Sandra Dugan, as she rummaged through the refrigerator for romaine, endive, hearts of palm, "it's always a gamble. When I started in with Joey, that was a gamble too."

Debbi Martini leaned against the counter and sipped a glass of water. She was happy to be standing in this kitchen, pleased with herself for having had the nerve to call Sandra that morning. When Sandra invited her to come by and have lunch, gratitude had closed her throat. Now she gave a little laugh and said, "Joey, a gamble? Joey's so nice, so regular."

Sandra's head was in the fridge, her voice was muffled by lettuces, muted by the pith of grapefruits. "When I met him," she said, "he didn't know it yet."

"Didn't know it?" Debbi said.

Sandra wheeled, handed the other woman some greens, kicked the fridge door shut. "We were living in Queens. He was still very close with his family, that whole group. You know what I'm saying. Joey was the kid brother. He thought he had a lot to prove."

Debbi considered, and realized all at once that she felt like a kid sister, standing there with Sandra. They were pretty much the same age, give or take a year or two, but Sandra had a husband, ran a business, was mistress of a real house with matching plates. Sandra hired and fired people, picked out furniture. She had a sense of the future—her stocked refrigerator told you that. Sandra, in short, was a grownup, had lucked or bluffed or willed her way to some mysterious graduation, while she, Debbi, seemed to keep repeating the same dreary classes in remedial life. From bad in school to frustrated at work. From Mr. Wrong to Mr. Trouble to Mr. Cokehead to Mr. Slob.

"You like sprouts?" Sandra asked.

"Hm?" said Debbi. "Yeah, love 'em. ... So with Joey—what made him change?"

Sandra took a sun-warmed tomato off the windowsill behind the sink. She cut into it and seeds spilled out. "Hard to say."

"Coming to Florida?" suggested Debbi.

"Nah, the change had to come before the move. Otherwise he never would've made it south of Staten Island." She pointed toward a high shelf with her nose. "Grab that salad bowl, would ya?"

Reaching up, Debbi said, "I guess people have to get pretty fed up before they change, pretty sick and tired of not being happier."

"And they have to believe they
could
be happier," said Sandra.

She finished cutting the tomato, then tested an avocado with her thumbs. Debbi shredded romaine and looked out the window. She saw trees, light, air; the clean spaciousness sucked the deflating truth right out of her. Absently, she said, "Gino—Gino's never gonna change."

The avocado wasn't ripe enough, Sandra put it back on the sill. She bit her lip, weighed how far to get involved. She was chewing back the words
So dump him, girl
, when the doorbell rang. Glad to escape, she wiped her hands on a dish towel and went to answer it.

It was Bert the Shirt. His lean form was framed by glaring sunshine and he seemed to be fresh out of the shower; his white hair with its bronze and pinkish glints was brushed back in neat damp bundles. He was wearing a canary yellow pullover of polished Egyptian cotton and carrying his drowsy dog. "Hullo, Sandra," he said. "Your father-in-law around?"

"He's in the garden," Sandra said. "Puttering as usual. Come in."

She led the visitor through the living room, into the kitchen. He saw the food on the counter. "Hey, if you're having lunch, I'll come back—"

"Vincente's not eating," Sandra said. "Doesn't want to break off pruning. But Bert, say hello to Debbi. She's down here with Gino."

"Charmed," said the old mafioso, and he extended his hand. Debbi took it and smiled at him, but almost instantly her attention shifted to the dog.

"And who's this little fur face?" she asked.

"This?" said Bert. He put on a dismissive scowl and held the chihuahua away, as if it were a smelly little parcel he was taking to the trash. "This is Don Giovanni, world's oldest, laziest, most worthless dog. This is a rug-wetting curse from my late wife. This is a brainless four-legged bundle a aggra—"

"He has some problems, doesn't he?" said Debbi.

There was something in her tone that Bert had not expected, something knowing, serious. It instantly pulled him out of his old routine. "Yeah," he said. "He has some problems."

"Cataracts," said Debbi. "Probably arthritis."

Bert looked at her more closely. Red hair, probably perked up from a bottle. Long fingernails perfect as wax apples. Nose-cone boobs scoring a dramatic but temporary victory over gravity. So far, standard equipment for a woman traveling with the Ginos of this world. Still, there was something in the blue-green eyes that didn't fit the mold. Bimbos' eyes—you could look at them but never into them, they were blank and opaque, like the paint on a car. But Debbi's eyes invited you in; behind the colored part was a room as comfy as a paneled den. "He's got other problems too," confided Bert.

"Like what?" asked Debbi.

Bert glanced at the salad bowl, the glistening tomatoes. "You ladies are about to eat," he said. "It ain't the pleasantest subject."

"Tell me," Debbi said. "Maybe I can help."

Bert looked at his sneakers, pulled an earlobe. "Well," he said, "ya want the truth, he's constipated somethin' awful. I can't think the last time he had what you could call a successful walk."

"Poor puppy," Debbi said. She said it to the dog, and the dog lifted up its white and ancient head. It weakly shook its whiskers, a ray of hope seemed to flash in its milky eyes like dim lightning buried in the clouds. The pet groomer reached out and felt the creature's abdomen; it was hard and nubbly as a potato. "There a health food store around?" she asked.

The old mobster found the question droll. "Debbi, I live on meatballs, sausage. I smoked t'ree packs till I was sixty-five and had a haht attack—"

"There's one on Southard Street," said Sandra.

"Get some flaxseed," Debbi told Bert.

"Flaxseed?"

"Just ask for it. Take a tablespoon of it, slow-simmer it in a quarter cup of mineral oil—"

"How 'bout olive oil?" asked the Shirt.

"Whatever," Debbi said. "Simmer it like half an hour, let it cool, mix it with his dog food."

Bert was leaning forward now, avid at the prospect of a cure. "Yeah? Then what?"

"Wait an hour, take him for a nice relaxing stroll, and sing to him."

"Sing to 'im?" said Bert.

Debbi petted the dog. "That part I made up. But the rest, really—"

Bert looked hard at her, took the measure of her wisdom. Then he said, "How you know all this?"

Debbi felt suddenly bashful and only shrugged.

"You're a clever kid," Bert told her.

She looked down at the tiled floor. "No," she said, "I'm really not."

Certain things you could only do when your hair was white, when your teeth were loose, when the sleeves of your shirts flapped like hung laundry around your shrunken arms. Bert reached out a hand and lifted Debbi's chin. "Don't contradict an old man," he said. "I tol' ya you're a clever kid."

Out in the garden, the Godfather was trimming bougainvillea. Streamers of the stuff hung over him as he worked, he half disappeared behind a curtain of fuchsia flowers and wicked ocher thorns. Fallen petals lodged in his straw hat that was unraveling at the edges, a line of sweat traced out his backbone beneath the old blue shirt. He was barefoot, he had a red bandanna tied around his stringy neck, and he was too immersed in his task to see or hear Bert the Shirt approaching. He kept right on clipping until his old friend gave a low chuckle and said, "Vincente, Jesus, no offense, but ya look like a real
paisan
."

The Godfather brushed aside a strand of vine and turned around. "Bert, what could I tell ya—I
am
a real
paisan
."

He stepped out from the canopy of flowers, put his shears point down in the soft imported dirt, and raked a forearm across his sweating brow. As he did so he felt Bert's eyes on his naked feet, his soiled insteps.

He shook his head and said, "Poor fuckin' immigrants, huh? They get shoes that pinch, they try ta grow basil onna fuckin' fire escape; they get a job wit'out a window, their wives start wearin' girdles. They tell themselves they're doin' good, but down deep. . . . Ah, screw it. What's up, Bert?"

"Siddown a minute?"

Vincente didn't answer, just started walking toward the low table on the patio. It bothered him to take a break, but since his fainting spell it bothered him less. This surprised him, and he thought, Thank God that people—some people—got less pigheaded when the alternative was dropping dead, that they could give some ground without totally losing pleasure in the things they loved to do.

Vincente nodded. He'd never met Ben Hawkins but he knew who he was. His roving circle of cops and robbers—at the more select levels it was a very small club.

Bert petted his chihuahua, plucked a ghostly dog hair from his yellow shirt. "They know you're here. They were askin' me 'bout the Carbone thing."

Still the Godfather said nothing. He put a hand under his nose, smelled soil and sap; the smell pulled him back to ancient summers and memories of greater strength.

Bert paused, then cleared his throat. "Vincente, I know better than t'ask—"

"Then don't," said the Godfather, not unkindly. "It's simpler that way."

Bert looked down at his lap. Vincente glanced over at the bougainvillea. The papery flowers were fluttering in the breeze, the leaves were a lush green but the sound they made was brown and dry.

"The Feds," the Godfather went on, "they can set me up, arrest me any time. I knew that when I took the job, Bert. The power they have, it's unbelievable."

"Big power," his friend agreed. "Like the whole fuckin' world's their neighborhood."

"But I don't want 'em in my face down here," Vincente said. "I don't want 'em botherin' my family. 'Zat too fuckin' much t'ask?"

Bert stroked his dog reflectively, like the dog was his own chin. "Nah," he said, "it ain't too much. They should at least be whaddyacallit, discreet."

Bert smoothed the placket of his shirt. "The trut'? Him I didn't like. He's two things that worry me: young and short. Tries too hard, double. I'm just not sure he'd give a guy an even break."

"An even break from the Feds?" Vincente said. "Bert, you always were a dreamer."

Arty Magnus raised his right arm high and let the thin and tortured spray of lukewarm water chase the soap out of his armpit and down his flank.

His showerhead had annoyed him every day for just over six years now. It was a small, cheap, fake-chrome job to begin with, and over time many of its holes had silted up with minerals. Water squeezed through it painfully, it was like a man with kidney stones. Instead of forceful parallel streams, it hissed out dribs and jets at random angles, a lot of the water missed his body altogether and clattered uselessly against the aluminum stall, which was painted a lumpy, ugly shade of tan, a sort of nuthouse beige. Some years before, something had gone wrong with the floor of the shower; the drain was no longer at its lowest point. Water pooled in a corner, and tropical algae, mold, and fungi often grew there. Sometimes the growths were green, sometimes black—it just depended what spores were in the air. Once the stagnant puddle had turned golden and begun to foam like beer.

Rinsed now, drying off, Arty looked around and wondered for the thousandth time why he'd stayed so long in the rented four-room transient-looking cottage on Nassau Lane. When he'd first come to Key West, he'd been reluctant to take a more expensive place—the job at the Sentinel was brand-new; what if it didn't pan out? As he became more entrenched in the town, he'd wrestled with the question of buying something. But at first the prices seemed too high, and so he'd hesitated. He'd been tempted when values began to decline, but stalled, waiting for the bottom of the market. Two years into the slump, he was no longer convinced that a house was necessarily such a great investment. Besides, did he really think he'd stay in Key West that much longer? He was reluctant to commit to it.