Florida Straits (19 page)

"You really wanna know?" Joey asked again
now. It seemed to Sandra that this time there was more hope than
hesitation in his voice.

"Is it bad?"

"It's really bad."

"Are you involved, Joey?"

"Not by choice—hell no."

"Then tell me."

So he did. He propped himself up on pillows
and absently smoothed the creases in the quilt as he talked. The
breeze coming through the window was cool and made him grateful for
the warmth of Sandra's body next to him. She gave off a nice smell
of talcum powder and hand cream.

"So now he's holed up in his room," Joey
concluded, "and Ponte is just waiting for a chance to kill 'im.
Where the emeralds are, if he's got 'em, I haven't got a clue. What
he was up to while me and Bert were kidnapped, why he didn't just
blow town, I got no waya knowin'. I've tried calling him like a
dozen times already. The switchboard just takes messages. I've gone
past the hotel, just to scope it out. The Lincolns are always
there. Pontes goons wave at me and laugh, like it's a big goddamn
joke. I don't go inna hotel, of course. I mean, that crazy I'm
not."

"Joey," Sandra said, "there's nothing you
can do."

But he went on as if he hadn't heard. "Ya
know what gets me, Sandra? What gets me is that, for all these
years, Gino passed for smart. I mean, I believed it. Sure, I
bitched, I argued, but basically I bought it. Gino, the guy with
big ideas. Gino, the guy who gets things done. Is that pathetic or
what? I mean, look at this guy. What the hell was on his mind? And
selfish. Jesus Christ Almighty, is he selfish. I mean, he coulda
got me killed. He coulda got Bert killed. And what if you came
along, Sandra? I mean, you coulda come for the ride." Joey slapped
at the quilt and exhaled ferociously, as if trying to dig some
family germ out of the very bottom of his lungs. "The fucking guy
thinks of no one but himself."

Sandra snuggled closer to him and put a hand
on his shoulder. "Joey, those are all the reasons why you have to
wash your hands of this."

He pulled away, not in anger but only
because her touch was too much a threat to his resolve. "No,
Sandra, those are all the reasons I can't wash my handsa this. I
walk away, and what happens? Gino gets killed. So now he's dead,
but he's still the guy who had the big ideas, the guy who was doing
things. And me, what am I? I'm still little Joey, the nobody, the
guy who don't know nothin', can't do nothin', and sits by like a
jerk, like a worm, while his brother gets whacked."

"But Joey, you didn't make the problem."

"Sandra, that's true, and it means nothing.
Listen, I been thinkin' about this all week. If Gino gets killed,
it's like the clock stops, nothing can change no more. To my old
man he's still the golden boy. In his own mind he's still the big
shot."

"But Joey, if he's dead—"

"The only way I can ever get rid of the
fucking guy, the only way I can really be done with him, is to save
his life. You see what I'm saying, Sandra? I wanna be able to say
to him, 'Gino, you fucked up, I saved your ass. You were dead, I
brought you back to life. So here, schmuck, here's your life. Take
it and get outta my face.' Sandra, ya can't say that to a dead man,
can ya?"

—
27 —

"Joey," said Zack Davidson, "we gotta
talk."

It was nine o'clock on a bright blue morning
on Duval Street, and Joey Goldman was not surprised. In fact, the
only thing he found surprising about his job these days was that he
still had one. If he'd been running Parrot Beach, he'd have fired
himself some weeks before.

He followed Zack up the shady pathway to the
office.
Study up
, his colleague had told him at their first
meeting. Learn to read people, to recognize the subtle signs by
which they identify their peers, their social equals. Learn how to
look in order to get the ones who could help you on your side. This
was a fundamental requirement of salesmanship, by which Zack
Davidson meant survival. So now, as Zack strolled ahead of him,
Joey studied his smugly casual khaki shorts and had to acknowledge
that in picking out the ones he himself was wearing, he'd
overlooked certain details, missed certain nuances. Zack's shorts
were of a dull twill with no sheen whatsoever; Joey's were polished
in a manner that suggested too much processing. Zack's were not
rumpled, exactly, but just mussed enough to create the impression
that they had never seen the inside of a closet and spent their
off-hours on the back of a bedroom chair; Joey's had a crisp crease
that made them look less like
shorts
, pure and simple, and
more like an amputated pair of chinos. So O.K., Joey admitted, he
didn't yet have the act down perfectly, but he was getting there,
he was learning. He wondered how much of it he'd remember, or what
good it could possibly do him, now that he was about to get
canned.

Inside, the two men skirted the scale model
of the condo complex. Joey glanced at it with a pained fondness, as
if it were the shrunken but living embodiment of a memory. The
sweet little buildings with their tiny pastel shutters; the plastic
windblown palms and the swimming pool whose blue Saran Wrap
shimmered like real water; the happy owners, littler than Barbies
and Kens, laid out on their lounges or standing at the painted edge
of the ocean: these things, for Joey, had come to seem the perfect
picture of the easy life of Florida, the life whose private,
uneventful, and unspectacular appeal was daily getting through to
him, and which was being royally screwed up for him by Gino and the
long reach of the old neighborhood. He was almost beyond feeling
angry about it. Almost. At least he was not surprised Joey tries to
do something on his own; Gino undoes it, basically by declining to
notice that it might by some chance matter, and by dwarfing it with
something so much bigger, flashier, and more urgent. To a kid
brother, a bastard no less, this was not news.

"Siddown," said Zack, motioning Joey into a
slatted wooden chair next to his desk. Zack himself plopped down
into his rolling, swiveling seat, rocked once so that the tilting
back gave a homey squeak, then came forward and put his chin on his
interlaced fingers. "Joey," he began, "some jobs, ya know, you do
with your brain, right? Other jobs you do with your hands, or your
back, or just by getting yourself into a certain land of mood.
Those jobs call for
parts
of you. You see what I'm saying,
Joey?

Joey crossed his knees and hugged the top
one. He didn't know exactly how to answer. Getting fired, he
imagined, had its protocols and customs just like other parts of
having a job, and Joey had never been fired before.

"What I'm saying," Zack resumed, "is that
this is a job you do with your whole person, every part of
yourself. Sizing people up, that's brainwork, right? But standing
out there on the hot sidewalk for eight hours a day, that's hard
physical labor, no shit. As to how you actually approach people,
that has a lot to do with the mood you're in, right? Whether you
use humor, push the freebies, go for sympathy, whatever. And how
the people respond to you, well, that's beyond mood, that's a
mystery, like religious almost. Are you in the zone? In a state of
grace? At one? Ya know, there's all different ways of describing
that frame of mind where everything just falls right and people
can't resist you. You know what I'm saying?"

Joey thought he did, but he found himself
increasingly impatient with Zack's analyses of effectiveness in
sales and life. When Joey still had his job, he'd thirsted after
Zack's advice, thought about it long and hard. But now it no longer
seemed worth the effort. "You're saying I've been all fucked up
lately, and you're right."

Zack waved the comment away. It was far too
negative for him. "No, Joey, no. That's not what I'm saying." He
flipped open a manila folder and removed a piece of paper. On it
was a week-by-week graph of Joey's performance on the job. The
graph went up, up, up, hit a plateau, then came down, down, down,
tracing out a pattern not unlike the pyramidal slope of Mount
Trashmore.

"Joey, look at this. The first week you were
here, you made a hundred twenty dollars. That's not much money for
forty hours of busting your butt and having people turn you down
all day, but hey, you hung in, you stayed with it. Second week, you
doubled. Third week, you jumped to four eighty. Fourth week, four
eighty again. Now that's pretty damn good, Joey. For a guy still
learning the ropes, that's excellent. But what happens after that?
Three twenty. Two eighty. Two hundred even. Joey, these aren't just
numbers. These are like a map of what's going on with you. You
wanna talk to me, Joey?"

Joey looked out the window, glanced at the
Parrot Beach model under its perfect sky of Plexiglas. The graph
depressed him. He was no stranger to lack of success, but this was
different, this was active failure, failure clearly drawn and
pushed in his face, and Joey didn't like it at all. Nor did he
enjoy the bitterness that came with losing something he was just
barely ready to admit he cared about losing. "Zack, if you're gonna
fire me, can't we just please get it over with."

Zack Davidson sat back and ran a hand
through his sandy hair; it fell back exactly where it had been.
"Who said anything about firing you?"

Joey tried to say something but all that
came out was a kind of blubbing sound, a sound from underwater.

The other man spread his arms out wide and
hugged the edges of his desk. "Joey, this isn't about firing you.
This is about getting you back on the street so you can make some
fucking money. Listen to me, Joey. There's some things you oughta
know, and apparently you don't. You're very well thought of here.
People like you. They like how hard you try, that you don't make
excuses. They like that you don't bitch and moan, that you're not a
prima donna. They like it that the people you send, they're almost
always in a good mood. They don't feel like they've been jerked
around. They feel like they've been dealing with a human being.
You've got this warmth, Joey, this... I don't know what to call it.
Life, call it life. People deal with you, they feel like they're
dealing with someone with some blood in his veins and some thoughts
in his head, some curiosity. That works for you. So let it
work."

To someone unaccustomed to receiving
compliments, Zack's words were as intoxicating and unsettling as
empty-stomach cocktails. Joey squirmed, as he generally did when
wrestling with the question of thankfulness. He knew he should be
grateful to Zack for saying what he'd said, but gratitude was a
risky matter. As soon as you acknowledged that someone had done
something for you, you opened up the chance that you'd look to them
again and they could let you down. If they weren't family, if they
weren't neighborhood, what assurance did you have? "Zack," he
admitted, "I don't know what to say."

"Don't say anything. But Joey, listen, I
don't wanna pry, but it's real obvious that some strange shit is
going on. Guys like outta the movies climb out of a Lincoln and
rough you up on the sidewalk. Your brother comes to town and your
commissions take a nosedive. Now this woman I know, she works at
Flagler House, tells me there's some weird guy who hasn't been out
of his room all week, there's two Lincolns camped in front of the
hotel, and for some strange reason the cops won't go near them.
Joey, is it me, or does all of this look a little strange?"

Joey fiddled with a sneaker lace to stall
for time. Why was everyone always asking him to spill his guts?
Then again, what a giddy pleasure it might be if he could spill
them. He'd laid it all out for Sandra, a woman. Why not tell it all
to Zack, this curious outsider who for some odd reason seemed to
want to be his friend? Why not tell everyone and have it the hell
over with? Unloading his secrets—what a notion. It was dizzying. It
was impossible. "Yeah, Zack," he said, "it looks strange. In fact,
it is strange. But it's got nothin' to do with the job."

Joey volunteered nothing further, and Zack
put up his hands in surrender. "O.K., Joey, if ya can't talk about
it, ya can't talk about it. But listen, if there's some way I can
help, I'm here."

Joey hesitated. He hesitated for so long
that Zack began to fidget, putting paper clips on things, squaring
the edges of stacked stationery. Hot shafts of sun streamed in the
office window and glinted off the Plexiglas model. Joey was
oblivious. He was wading through thoughts as through limestone
muck, and while his preoccupations were the same as they had been
for weeks, he was suddenly taking a very different course through
the morass. He had two lives, Joey did, and until this moment he'd
been trying his damnedest to keep them separate, to preserve the
new from contamination by the old. Now he realized that the
collision had already taken place—in fact, there had never been a
time when the two lives weren't one. So he found a new idea: If the
new life couldn't be quarantined from the old, maybe the old life
could be solved, settled, and laid to rest by the resources of the
new. When Joey finally spoke, his words seemed to Zack a bizarre
departure from what they had been talking about. To Joey, however,
the question was a perfectly logical and even inevitable conclusion
to a rigorous line of reasoning.

"Hey Zack," he said, "you got a boat?"

—
28 —

Along about the first of April, the weather
changes in Key West. The daytime temperature jumps one day from
eighty-two to eighty-five, and there it stays for six weeks or so,
until a similar increment signals the setting in of summer. The
evenings suddenly no longer call for sweaters; the light cotton
quilts are kicked down to the feet of beds, and even top sheets are
likely to be bunched around waists but pulled no higher. The east
wind, which had been rock-steady at twelve to fourteen knots all
winter, becomes fitful, moves toward the south, loads up with salt,
and blows moist enough to make cars wet. These changes, by the
standards of the temperate zone, are so subtle as to seem
insignificant. In the subtropics, however, people grow spoiled; the
range of perfect comfort shrinks for them as it does, say, for the
very rich, whose standards of acceptable luxury become so crazily
refined that they can hardly ever be satisfied. So, while
eighty-two degrees with a twelve-knot wind seems sublime,
eighty-five with an eight-knot wind seems sultry, and people alter
their routines accordingly.