Sunburn (21 page)

He skirted the cemetery, its whitewashed crypts stacked up like ghastly file drawers. He bounced down side streets whose old cobblestones were patched here and there with dollops of tar; his spiral notebook and ninety-nine-cent pen clattered in his wire basket. He dodged fallen trash cans knocked over by raccoons and bums. At length he pulled into the cul-de-sac of Nassau Lane, locked his bike to a skinny Christmas palm, then yawned and walked a little drunkenly to his cottage.

The screen on the outer door was torn; a corner of it hung down next to the knob. Arty made nothing of this. It had been slightly ripped before; probably a cat climbed on it. Cats sometimes did.

Nor was the writer particularly concerned to find the inside door unlocked. He thought he'd locked it, but he couldn't quite be sure; he was careless about such things. Hell, when he'd first come to Key West, no one locked their doors.

He stepped into the dark living room and didn't bother turning on a light. After six years his feet knew where to go. His steps creaked slightly on the warped boards of the wooden floor. He dropped his notebook on the ratty table that served him as a desk and continued on to the bedroom.

His hand waved blindly in the still air, found the hanging cord that pulled the switch. He blinked against the rudely sudden glare of yellow light. It was a moment before he saw that the top of his dresser had been swept clean: change, lamp, newspapers, books, scattered on the floor. The drawers were all thrown open; shirtsleeves and pants legs dangled down like the limp limbs of unstrung puppets. His mattress had been lifted, felt under, dropped back crooked.

The awareness that he'd been burglarized bypassed his woozy brain and went first to his readier spine. His body juiced itself and was instantly sober. Muscles twitched, short hairs stood like quills at the nape of his neck, on the backs of his hands. The rage of violation merged with the terror that the intruder perhaps still lurked.

Absurdly, standing there in bright light in the middle of the room, Arty now tried to be stealthy.

He slunk to the bathroom doorway, reached a hand around to the switch plate, waited breathlessly while the blue fluorescents hummed and pinged to life. But the bathroom was empty—there was no quailing burglar to confront or perhaps be murdered by. The medicine cabinet had been flung open, its mirrored door bent back on rusty hinges, its meager contents tossed into the sink.

He breathed deeply, tasted salt and iron at the roots of his teeth, felt his heart hammering against his ribs. He swallowed through a clamped-down throat, then moved again toward the living room, propelled by an ancient necessity that went chest-to-chest with fear and could not back down: the necessity to reclaim his place.

He stepped over the scuffed threshold, turned on a light, scanned the corners of the room. Attuned now, he thought he smelled contamination, yet the chamber, for the most part, was weirdly undisturbed. He looked around at the obvious things to be stolen, and because they were all there he didn't notice anything was gone. The small television still stood in the corner, its screen dusty, its top covered in unread magazines. The vintage stereo was unharassed on the bookshelf. The small computer on the table did not seem to have been moved.

He went to check his tiny kitchen. Dirty dishes were still piled in the sink. The cabinets had been thrown open, some canisters knocked over, but damage was slight; not even his small stash of liquor had been taken. He poured himself a glass of bourbon.

Standing in the living room again, he felt a need to touch things. He ran a hand along the back of the old rattan sofa, let his nails click over the woody strands that held it together. Affectionately he slapped the lumpy pillows. He fought against the depression that comes in on the rancid wake of helpless indignation. Like every survivor of every misfortune short of death, he told himself it could have been worse.

He took his drink into the bedroom, sat down on his bed, and thought about the botched and pointless breakin. Clearly, it had been the clumsy work of some pathetic drooling kid strung out on crack. Needlessly, the thief had torn the screen; with quaking hands he'd picked the easy lock. He'd gone straight for the medicine chest, found nothing more potent than Tylenol and Rolaids. He'd scoured the bedroom for cash and jewelry; Arty owned no jewelry and kept no cash at home. Maybe the thief was too lazy to carry out the electronic stuff; maybe by then he'd forgotten why he'd come.

Arty sipped bourbon, weighed the question of calling the police. He knew what to expect from the police, and he decided not to call. The garish roof lights of their cars would only make the ugly business seem yet more sordid. They wouldn't find the intruder, and their failure would only add another drop of bile to the world's supply of futile rage.

He stood up and started to undress. He felt soiled, he wanted a shower. He stood under the random spray of his cheap clogged showerhead until the hot water was all gone, begging his galvanized sinews to relax.

But he was still edgy when he switched off the light and climbed into bed. He tossed and turned, heard sounds that scared him, was assailed by bloody thoughts of some nameless and impossible revenge. He flipped his pillow, took deep breaths. He searched for some serene and decent thought that would sweep away the filth, would soothe him toward sleep, and to his surprise the thought that came was an image of Debbi shrugging, the slightly goofy, all-involving way her eyebrows paralleled her lifted shoulders, the way her bright eyes opened wide as hungry, trusting mouths to taste her life.

———

In the morning, a mug of coffee in his hand, Arty was crossing his living room when he realized what had been stolen.

It seemed crazy, it made no sense to him at all. It was so ludicrous that his very first reaction was to laugh out loud, though a bleak sound at the tail end of the laugh reminded him it wasn't funny in the least. Why would anybody want his cheap old spiral notebooks? Their covers were stained with outlines of forgotten coffee cups and bourbon glasses. Their pages were fat and wavy with years of spills and dampness. And what was written inside them was both largely illegible and patently worthless—of that Arty had no doubt. His random jottings, sophomoric raves and rambles, his juvenilia. A hundred false starts and not one goddam conclusion.

He stood over the ratty table where the notebooks had been stacked, looked straight down at the bare place they used to occupy, and the longer he looked the less he believed they were really gone. He squatted down, looked under and behind the table.

Nothing. He stood again. As if to confirm the testimony of his eyes, he moved his fingers to where the notebooks used to be. He touched the empty spot, and an unexpected flash of the purest grief, the most perfect, senseless, and irreparable loss, sliced through him and closed his throat. His young ramblings, his solitary jottings, his no doubt embarrassing attempts at learning how to think and feel in written words—in some ridiculous way he would have ached less if he believed his notebooks might be of any earthly use to anyone.

He wasn't crying but his eyes itched. He rubbed them, carried his coffee to the kitchen, left the half-filled mug sitting on the counter. It was time to go to work, and today, uncharacteristically, he was glad to have a job to go to. He wanted to leave the cottage, close the ravaged door, turn his back on the hurt place and not think about it for a while.

Duval Street was a grouchy place at 9
a.m.

It seemed tired, sullen, blinky, weighed down by a collective hangover. Yawning retailers grudgingly unlocked their stores, mustering their sarcasm for another day of dealing with the tourists. Drunks and cross-dressers who hadn't made it home the night before wandered aimlessly, stupidly, still looking for the party. The occasional wholesome couple from Michigan, Ohio, Canada strolled in plaid shorts, in futile hope of a genuine local place to get some breakfast.

Arty rode his old fat-tire bike down the middle of the street, tracing out the border of early yellow sunshine that lit up one sidewalk but not yet the other. He was quite close to the office of the Key West
Sentinel
before he noticed the two police cars parked in front. It very vaguely registered that maybe he was less surprised to see them than he might have been.

He quickly locked the bicycle, went through the door between the T-shirt shops, and climbed the narrow smelly flight of stairs. Just inside the
Sentinel's
frosted door, Clint Topping, the unflappable editor in chief, was leaning against the high reception counter, talking to a semicircle of cops, two in uniform, one in a suit.

" 'Course people get mad at the paper," he was saying. "Politicians. Developers. Guys written up in the blotter for soliciting hand jobs.
Everybody's
mad at the paper, but they don't come trash the office."

"And you say there's nothing to steal?" asked one of the cops in uniform.

Topping waved hello to Arty before he answered. "Your office is destroyed," he said blandly. Then he turned back to the police. "What's to steal? Old papers? Blue pencils? Only thing worth stealing is the computers. And they weren't."

Arty stood on the fringe of the group. From his vantage only a small part of the devastation could be seen. Red and green wires stuck out of the archaic three-button switchboard. The old AP teletype had been toppled from its pedestal like a Communist statue, its unfurled roll of yellow paper wound through the office like a strip of cheap rug. Beyond an open doorway, Marge Fogarty could be seen stooped down, picking up shards of a shattered vase.

"Some offices got it worse than others," said the other uniformed cop. "Personal vendetta maybe?"

Topping shrugged, then gestured toward Arty. "Here's the guy whose office got it worst of all. Anybody mad at you?"

The cops' eyes all turned toward him like they were wired to a single hinge, and Arty found he could not speak. Until that moment he had fought against believing that the trashing of his home and the trashing of his workplace might be linked, might be aspects of the same event. He wanted to imagine the series of invasions was just a grim coincidence, a run of stinking luck; now the extreme improbability of that was flooding in on him like cold and slimy water. Something else was flooding in on him as well: the awareness that he could not talk to the police. If he talked to them, he would have to tell them of his dealings with Vincente, and this was utterly impossible. No one could know about their book. That was rule one. Arty had given his word on it. Not that personal honor was the sole crux of the business; as he understood now with shattering clarity, he'd entered into a contract with the Mafia, a contract that, as the Godfather had made a point of telling him, lived as long as the parties to it lived, and infringements would be handled in the Mafia way.

A long time went by without Arty answering the question his boss had asked. At length he tried to force himself to speak; all that came out was a moist blubbering sound.

"City editor," Clint Topping said to the cops. "Very articulate. I think he's trying to say he doesn't know."

This was not good enough for the cop in the suit. He narrowed his eyes at Arty. "I think maybe he's trying to say he does."

The cluster of men dispersed, and Arty trudged to his office. He was tired of messes, and this mess was a bad one. His file drawers had been yanked out and emptied on the floor; brittle clippings were everywhere, leaning against the baseboards, poking out from folders overturned and spread like tiny tents. His crowded desk had been elbowed clear, the blotter flung aside; the Rolodex was upside down and dripping cards, the telephone hung dead at the end of a tangled cord.

Arty sighed, squatted ankle-deep in paper. He spent the morning trying to restore the minimum order that makes life possible and trying to think through just what the hell was going on.

———

The foreskin of the jet-way was not quite snug against the 767's fuselage, and Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia was hit by his first slap of northern winter before he'd even entered Kennedy Airport.

He labored up the ramp in a dark gray mohair suit that had been gorgeous before the moths found it and before the slow stretch of a decade on a hanger had given it a flattened and distended look, a shape like that of Gumby. His tie was maroon, his shirt white-on-white, with an elegant pattern of interlocked diamonds, a high collar, and French cuffs pegged with gold and onyx links. On his feet were hard black shoes he hadn't worn in years; they made his toes ride up on one another and didn't keep the cold out.

In his right hand he held the carrier with the perplexed and whimpering Don Giovanni inside; from the left dangled a small suitcase packed with toiletries, human and canine heart pills, dog food, simmered flaxseed, and a single change of clothes. A folded overcoat, double-breasted herringbone, lay over his right shoulder, and with each rocking step it slipped down a little, Bert couldn't help noticing that his shoulder was no longer broad or straight enough to hold it.

The airport corridor was packed and endless, its walls curved like a giant keyhole. Bert plodded along; it seemed to him that everybody was moving a great deal faster than himself. Businessmen jogged past, holding down their ties. Flight attendants raced by, pulling their carts like trotters pulling sulkies. Someone ran into the old man's back and caromed off without apology. Bert's arms were getting tired, his knees ached, but he was afraid to stop against the surge of people behind him.

At length he came to an escalator. Its treacherous and infernal metal steps tumbled endlessly away in front of him; he had no free hand to hold on to the dirty rubber banister. He froze an instant, hoping no one would notice his absurd humiliating terror. He bit his lip and stepped tremulously forward; the tread grabbed his sole and carried him away; he swayed as though standing on a boat in heavy seas. By the time he stepped off he was sweating inside his mohair suit.