Sunburn (15 page)

The traffic was heating up on Ocean Drive. Foursomes of gorgeous men, their shirts the colors of lollipops, cruised slowly past in vintage Chevy convertibles. The occasional Rolls went by, driven usually by some devilish little fellow with a silver ponytail.

The second aperitif made Debbi feel feisty, and when the waiter once again confronted her, she shot him a look that said, Fuck you too, buddy. Over the buzz of chat and giggles, she ordered a martini, straight up, two olives, very dry.

It was getting on toward nine o'clock. Models slunk past, vacant as cats, and with a cat's knack for holding the eye while giving nothing in return. Smells of garlic and mushrooms came forward past the stink of car exhaust and the feint hint of ocean just a few hundred yards away. Debbi felt suddenly maudlin. She was getting smashed and she didn't want to be. Nor did she want to be sitting in this cafe. Places like this—they made you feel like you were missing something, yet the longer you stayed, the more you felt that what you were missing was no better than what you had, however crummy what you had might be. She called for her tab, put down a somewhat overgenerous tip, and left.

On the other side of Ocean Drive was a park.

This was still the old Miami Beach; there were slatted benches where ancient people could sit and rest their swollen ankles and brag about their grandkids. Debbi decided that's where she would wait for Gino.

She picked her way across the bustling avenue and plopped down on a bench that faced the sidewalk. She stayed there a long time. During rare lulls in the traffic she could hear the ocean. Waves broke, but the sound was less a crash than a slow boiling hiss against the sand.

After a while she noticed that a police car had been cruising past again and again, pausing a moment in front of her each time. Now she met the eye of the cop on the passenger side, and the bleak condescension in his gaze made her realize something galling. My God, she thought, they think I'm a whore.

The mute accusation made her mad and also made her feel ridiculous, pathetic, lonely and exposed as a lighthouse on a single rock. A tourist with no one to talk to and nowhere to go. A woman ditched by her date, an easy object of false pity and true scorn. It was after ten and she was furious.

The alcohol was wearing off, it left in its wake a groggy edginess, a grouchiness as from an interrupted nap. Where the hell
was
he? She opened her purse. She had no credit cards and about a hundred dollars in mad money. If ever there was a time for mad money, this was it—but what would her lousy hundred bucks do for her? It wouldn't get her to New York; in this neighborhood it wouldn't even get her a hotel room. Besides, if Gino came back and couldn't find her, what then?

Frustration made her face flush hot, she wished to her soul she had never met Gino Delgatto.

The wish made her feel guilty. There was something murderous in it, some impulse not just to escape the boyfriend but to undo him, erase him, blot him out. She made amends for the evil thought by letting herself realize she was worried.

By eleven she was very worried and by midnight she was panicked. Gino did dangerous things with dangerous people. She knew that. She didn't let herself think about it very much, but she knew it.

By 1
a.m.
the procession on Ocean Drive was just beginning to slacken, the crowd at Bar Toscano just starting to thin. Debbi wandered back across the street, sat down at a table near the rail, and ordered a double cappuccino. She nursed it unharassed till four; then the place closed up and she went back to her bench.

An exhausted numbness had set in against the sinister sparseness of the predawn hours. Homeless people drifted by with shopping carts stacked up with tin cans, beach toys, shoes; furtive men, their blank eyes on the sidewalk, stole glances at her breasts before slipping off to the shrubbery to masturbate. Debbi was afraid to sleep but now and then she briefly dozed—her nodding head would trip a trigger in her neck and she would jerk herself awake. Around six, day began to break. The sky floated free of the black ocean; the palms, heavy with night, showed their slack outlines against the faint horizon. A hazy orange sun came up from out beyond the Gulf Stream.

At exactly seven Debbi went to a pay phone, took from her purse a piece of notepaper from the Flagler House, and dialed the only person she could think to call in Florida.

Sandra tried to rouse herself, came up on an elbow. Joey gave a little grunt and seemed to will himself back to sleep. Soft light filtered through the thin bedroom curtains. "Where are you?"

Debbi paused a moment because she could feel her throat clamping shut and the tears simmering behind her itchy eyes. She bit her lip, swallowed hard, but still her voice caught when she said, "Miami Beach."

"Lemme change phones," said Sandra. She slipped out of bed and went to the kitchen.

When she returned ten minutes later, she was carrying coffee mugs. Joey was awake. He'd propped himself on pillows and put on his blue-lensed sunglasses to ease the shock of the early light. "Who was 'at?" he asked.

Sandra sat down near her husband and stroked his hair before she answered. "Debbi. Gino dropped her off in South Beach yesterday and didn't come back to get her."

Joey reached for his coffee but didn't drink, just held the mug in front of him and looked past the rising steam at the window. He knew his brother was a shit with women, but the knot in his gut was telling him that Debbi's stranding meant something else entirely. Guys who lived like Gino—they had to believe that some rogue saint was looking out for them, deflecting bullets, bending enemies' knives. At the same time, somewhere at the bottom of their brains, they had to know that they were diddling death, heading crotch first toward the buzz saw.

"Where'd he go?" asked Joey. "Who'd he see?"

"She doesn't seem to know," said Sandra. "She was rambling. She's very tired and very scared."

Joey pulled a deep breath in, pushed it out, sipped some coffee. "The old man," he said. "Jesus." He shook his head and let it go at that.

"I told her to get a cab and come down here," said Sandra.

Joey just nodded.

"Look," said his wife, "why don't we try to keep it to ourselves for now, give it some time. Maybe he'll turn up, maybe he'll call."

Joey nodded again. Maybe he'd turn up, maybe he'd call. The younger brother didn't think so. He stared through his sunglasses, past the thin bedroom curtains at the brightening day, and wondered how it would be when he could no longer stall and had to tell Vincente.

Somewhere in the Carolinas, sometime after dawn, Pretty Boy pulled his Lincoln off the Interstate and swung into a Shoeless Jimmy truck stop. He parked in a distant comer of the lot. Not that he was seriously worried that Gino would draw attention to himself. The captive was handcuffed, his mouth sealed with duct tape, his legs bound up double so he couldn't kick against the carpeted walls of the trunk. Still, he could bounce a little, he could groan. Better to leave him where the highway hum would drown him out.

The Fabretti thugs got out of the car and stretched. Less than twelve hours from Miami, it was already a different world, an ice age. Against the red sky, frost-loving pine trees, ramrod straight, were wreathed in frigid mist, the vapor wound through the branches like a corkscrew.

Pretty Boy did a little dance, shifted his weight from foot to foot. "I hate the fuckin' Sout'," he groused. His breath showed opaque white as he said it. "You're gonna freeze your ass off, why call it Sout' to begin wit'?"

"It's called Sout'," said the philosophic Bo, " 'cause, like, back inna Civil War—"

"And they got such stupid fuckin' names for things down heah," interrupted Pretty Boy. He gestured disgustedly toward the frosty neon sign above the restaurant. "Shoeless Jimmy Truck Stop. Betty Sue Biscuit's White Trash Cafe. Whistlin' Darkie Trailer Lodge—"

"Go easy onna pills, huh?" Bo suggested. "They're makin' you, like, irritable."

Pretty Boy flapped his arms to warm himself. "What's makin' me irritable is that dog turd inna trunk. I still say we shoulda—"

"How many more states I gotta listen ta dis?" protested Bo. "Florida. Georgia. Sout' Carolina—"

"And fuck geography too," said Pretty Boy. "Ya fuck geography," said Bo, "how ya gonna know where you're at?"

His partner didn't answer, just fumbled in the pockets of his sharkskin pants for his bennies. A couple more pills, three, four cups of coffee, he'd be driving over the Verrazano Bridge, looking at the skyline, getting ready to deliver his half-dead cargo to Aldo Messina on the seafood docks in Brooklyn.

———

Over breakfast, Joey said, 'Take a ride wit' me, Pop? I gotta look at some property up the Keys, I'd like to know what ya think." The Godfather looked up from his grapefruit. He knew nothing about real estate, and his son had somehow come to be an expert, as much an expert as a briefcase guy who went to a fancy college. But it wasn't Joey's know-how that Vincente was reflecting on; it was the deeper mystery of his kindness. The kindness to coddle an old man's vanity, to let him believe he wasn't in the way, he was helping. Vincente thought, His mother was very kind. He musta got it from his mother. He said, "Sure, Joey, I'm always happy ta take a ride."

The two men left the house around nine-thirty, comfortably before Debbi would arrive in her taxi from Miami. Sandra would have a chance to talk with her alone. Maybe Gino would call while Vincente was out.

It was a beautiful morning, with just enough breeze to animate the palms, and with scattered puffy clouds whose flat bottoms were tinged green by the reflecting water of the Straits. The old El Dorado hummed along, archaic and imperial beside the rented compacts, its enormous tires gripping the pavement like giant paws. There was something goofily erotic about the knobs and swellings of the dashboard. Vincente stroked the orifice of the AC vent. "I'm glad you kept this car," he said. "Car this nice, ya can't find 'em anymore."

Joey just gave his father an absent glance from behind his blue-lensed sunglasses.

They looked at lots on Summerland Key, three rocky parcels overgrown with grayish scrub and fronting on a silted-up canal that smelled like anchovies. While Vincente listened in with pride, Joey and the seller talked about flood plains, dredging regulations, rights-of-way. The seller wanted eighty-five a lot, and Joey said he'd think about it. He said it with a perfectly unreadable neutrality that the Godfather could only admire.

It was now eleven-thirty, and Joey suggested continuing on to Marathon, twenty-five miles farther up, for lunch. It seemed a long way to go for a bowl of chowder, but Vincente didn't argue.

They went to a place on the Gulf side of the highway and sat outside, under an umbrella made of thatch. Between spoonfuls of soup, Vincente said, "Joey, I never really thanked ya for gettin' me together wit' Ahty, for pushin' me on 'at."

"Pop, hey," said Joey, "it's—"

"It's a good thing, what ya got me ta do," the old man said. He dabbed his full lips on a napkin; his dark eyes twinkled in their deep nests of brows and wrinkles. "Ya know, it's a crazy thing: ya can be an old fart, ancient, and there's still so many things, you're like a kid, a virgin, ya just don't know how they're gonna feel. Like talking. I mean really talking, lettin' things out."

Joey broke a soggy saltine; it didn't snap, it folded. He managed only a distracted nod.

Vincente looked out across the water, at the distant mangrove islands that seemed to float a few inches in the air. "But there's somethin' I don't understand," he said.

"Whassat, Pop?"

"Writers. Ya hear about 'em, they're supposed ta be unhappy. They drink too much, they blow their brains out. ... I don't get it. I think they oughta be the happiest guys on eart'. Somethin' bothers 'em, they write it down. Someone fucks wit' 'em, they make 'im the bad guy, they make 'im an asshole. Ya know, they spit stuff out, get rid of it. They don't gotta carry shit around for forty—"

The old man broke off abruptly. Some flatness in the air made him realize, not with anger but with a slight embarrassment, that he wasn't being listened to.

"Somethin' on your mind, Joey? Somethin' botherin' ya?"

The younger man looked up from his chowder and met his father's eyes. The old man could not be lied to, lies wilted under that gaze like lettuces in August—but still, in the name of compassion, the truth could sometimes be deferred. "Yeah, Pop," Joey said. "Somethin' is. But it isn't somethin' I can go inta right now."

Vincente nodded, swallowed. He was a parent, it wounded him to be shut out from his child's pain. But Joey was a grownup, a husband, an expert in real estate; he'd earned the right to deal with things his own way. The old man reached out and put a hand on the young man's wrist. "OK," he said. "I unnerstand. But Joey, I'm your father, you can talk to me. You know dat, right?'

———

Around two o'clock Debbi woke up from her nap.

It took her a moment to remember where she was, and then she was seized by an infinite and nameless gratitude, a gratitude like waking up in the hospital, comfortable and cared for, after thinking one would die. The clean sheets felt delicious against her skin; smells of sand and jasmine filtered through the guest bedroom window. She nestled her head against the pillow and luxuriated awhile in the pure, supreme delight of safety.

After a time she got up and dressed. She found herself wanting to touch things. She ran her fingers across the weave of the wicker bureau, traced out the grooves in the paneled walls. Everything about this airy house seemed a pleasure and a solace; it seemed a house where a person could be happy.

She left her room, went to look for Sandra, and found her sitting on the patio, the low metal table now a makeshift desk littered with ledger books and yellow pads. Sandra wore big square glasses as she did accounts; the lenses smeared her eyes when she looked up at her guest. "Good morning. Coffee?"