Florida Straits (20 page)

At the compound, Peter and Claude put aside
their silk sarongs and seldom wore anything more confining than the
lightest of seersucker robes. Wendy and Marsha decided that the hot
tub was too hot, and were more likely to stand chest-deep in the
pool while discussing modern sculpture and rubbing the stress out
of each other's shoulders. Luke and Lucy spent a lot of time in
their outdoor shower and never quite looked dry. And Steve the
naked landlord, to fend off dehydration, carried four beers rather
than three to the pool with him at ten
a.m.

"Whatcha reading, Steve?" Joey asked him as
he went to hand over Sandra's check for the April rent.

Steve turned the damp paperback over and
looked at the green flying saucer on the cover. "Aliens," he said.
"Germ warfare from space." Then he smiled.

As for Sandra, she had finally broken down
and done some shopping, finally put aside her fuzzy cardigans and
long-sleeved business blouses with the built-in shoulders that made
even Joey forget how radically compact she was. Now, for work, she
wore pale blue cotton knits that nicely set off her version of a
tan. Her skin, it seemed, had not changed color, but the tiny hairs
on her arms had been bleached an almost tinsel silver, which
offered much the same effect. Also, Sandra had greeted the warmer
weather by going on a salad binge, a veritable orgy of roughage.
Joey would open the refrigerator door and be confronted by a jungle
of romaine, an impenetrable forest of spinach, watercress, endive.
"Sandra," he'd say, "how come there ain't no food in heah?" And
Sandra would smile. The heat made her softer-spoken but no less
immovable. "There's a steak in the back somewhere. Probably behind
the cottage cheese."

Certain other routines were also changing
around Key West, although for different reasons. Bert the Shirt
d'Ambrosia, for example, no longer took Don Giovanni to the beach
across from the Paradiso condominium to watch the sun go down, but
had moved a third of a mile or so down the shoreline, closer to the
Flagler House. He brought with him on these excursions his wife's
old opera glasses, ladylike things encased in mother-of-pearl and
trimmed in silver, and he looked quite eccentric if not perverted,
fondling the chihuahua as he peeked through the oleanders and
buttonwoods that fringed the beach. Joey had asked him to study up
on the habits of Charlie Ponte's thugs, and Bert, while he hemmed
and hawed at getting involved in any way, was still pissed off
enough at Charlie Ponte to do it. As far as the old man could tell,
two guys in one Lincoln were always stationed at the near end of
the self-parking area, with a clear view of the hotel entrance. At
around seven o'clock this watch was relieved by the two soldiers in
the other car. The second car would take over the same parking
space as the first one drove away. It didn't appear that all four
thugs were ever employed at once. And it didn't seem that Charlie
Ponte had thought to place a lookout on the ocean side.

—

"So Joey," said Zack Davidson, "you ever run
a boat before?"

Joey looked down at the water, wiggled the
earpieces of his shades, and tried to choke back his long-standing
impulse to bullshit, to make it sound like he'd done more than he
had and knew more than he knew. "Well, uh," he began, "this one
time, up at Montauk, well, uh. No."

It was after work, around five-thirty, and
they were at City Marina, a decidedly no-frills establishment for
people with yacht club tastes and a rubber ducky budget. A very
democratic place, City Marina was. Very Key West. Clunky houseboats
with vinyl siding and TV antennas lay in berths next to dainty
sloops whose polished hulls reflected every glint in the water, and
also next to the staunch craft of working fishermen, where
razor-beaked gulls scraped slime off moldy planking. The marina was
nestled in a well-protected cove known as Garrison Bight, whose
location underscored Key West's status as an intersection at the
end of the world. On its south end, the Bight lapped quietly
against the embankment of Highway 1. To the west, narrow channels
wound through mangrove flats toward the open Gulf of Mexico; to the
north and east, the long arced chain of the Keys stretched away
under its freight of bridges and pylons.

"No." Zack repeated the single syllable,
briefly puffed his cheeks out like a trumpeter, and ran a hand
through his unvarying hair. He looked down at his little boat,
which had never before appeared so frail. It was an eighteen-foot
fiberglass skiff with a dark blue Bimini top. A perfect flats boat,
it did less well in the ocean swells, where it bounced from wave to
wave like a skipping stone and skidded down following seas like a
riderless surfboard. The skiff had a sixty-horsepower outboard and
an eight-horse auxiliary that was propped next to it on the
transom, seeming to nestle up like a duckling to its mother.

"What's the little motor for?" Joey
asked.

"Emergencies," said Zack. His mouth twisted
up as if the word tasted bad. "But hey, first things first. You
know how to tie up?"

Joey gave a nonchalant shrug. He told
himself that, in his pink shirt and khaki shorts, he at least
looked like he belonged at a marina. "Sure," he said. "I mean, I
guess so. Well, not really."

Zack showed Joey how to make a clove hitch
around a post, whtle pelicans banked by and cormorants dried their
spread wings on top of pilings. On board, he showed him how to tilt
the engine down, hook up the extra gas tank, and close the choke.
"You know what the buoys mean, right, the green and the red?"

"Yeah, sure," said Joey. "It's, like, the
red ones are stop and the green ones are go."

Zack leaned back against the gunwale and
played with an ear. His boat was insured, but only for liability,
not for being totally trashed by a guy who had no idea what he was
doing.

"Joey, you sure there's no way I can go with
you?"

The novice looked down at the fiberglass
floor of the cockpit, toyed with his sunglasses, and shook his
head. "Zack, listen, if you're having second thoughts, I
understand. I really do. But like I said, this is something I hafta
do alone. Believe me, it's not fair to involve anybody else."

Zack hesitated, though there was really
nothing to hesitate about. He'd offered Joey the use of the boat,
no strings attached, no explanations demanded, and it would be too
undignified to back out now. "Well, let's take 'er out for a test
drive, at least. Ya know, once you're away from the dock, it's
mostly just like driving a car."

"Yeah," said Joey, "that's what I figured,
like driving a car. That I can do."

"And swim," said Zack. "You can swim,
right?"

Joey choked back his impulse to bullshit,
but not quite soon enough. "Sure," he said. "I can swim. Sort of.
Like, a little. Not really. Nuh-uh."

—
29 —

Zack told Joey many things, but he failed to
get across how different water looks at night. Mainly, it
disappears.

Joey realized this while edging the skiff
out of Garrison Bight, just after ten P.M. on an evening without a
moon. The shadings and dapplings had vanished from the surface, and
all that remained was a featureless blackness shot through here and
there with green flashes of phosphorescence. Was Joey even
seeing
those green flashes? He couldn't be sure, because
they looked so much like what happened inside your head when you
pressed on your eyeballs. Another thing Joey couldn't be sure of
was where the coastline was. In daylight it had been so clear; now
the boundary where land met water seemed unhealthily approximate.
That flasher over there—was it a buoy or a traffic light? That dark
bulk getting closer to him— was it another boat or a stray shred of
North America?

Joey Goldman squinted, leaned so far forward
that his head was almost caught between the top of the windshield
and the front edge of the Bimini, and squeezed the steering wheel
in his sweaty palms.
Go under the bridge and hang a left
,
Zack had told him. It sounded so easy, as easy as driving the Caddy
to the grocery store for a carton of milk. But Joey hadn't figured
on the eddies that formed near the bridge, the swirling rushes that
rendered the wheel almost as useless as if it had come off in his
hands, and that spat him broadside, as though in distaste, between
the stanchions.

Stay between the red and green
markers,
Zack had instructed, but Joey hadn't realized that at
night, with only starlight on them, red and green channel markers
look very much alike. Joey had expected two ranks of beacons,
pointing the way as clearly as the reflectors on the
Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. What he found was a seemingly random
array of unlit pilings hammered into muck, winding through grass
flats and scattered coral heads. He throttled back, rubbed his
eyes, and took a thin comfort from the sound of his engine. The
motor noise sounded a lot like a car; it had become the only thing
still linking him to the world of the familiar.

He picked his way to the mouth of the
harbor, where the vast Atlantic collides with the huge gyre of the
Gulf, and the clapping currents raise ripples whose foamy tops
stand in the air like cake frosting. Joey didn't understand why the
boat was bouncing so much all of a sudden, why every instant his
knees had to find a different angle to stand at. He didn't grasp
why he was going more sidewise than forward. He fed more gas to
plow through the rip; warm spray hit him in the eye and a big
splash soaked his sneaker.

Then he was past the harbor entrance and out
into the Florida Straits.

Here the water was empty and the shoreline
black with the drooping shapes of the Australian pines. Small waves
were pushed toward Joey by the breeze, and the boat did belly flops
over them, the hull taking off like a low-launched rocket, then
smacking back down with a spanking sound, the engine whining as the
prop lifted into the foam, then stabbed back into the solider water
below.

For some minutes Joey sliced ahead through
the sameness of the waves, and from moment to moment a change was
coming over him. There is a wide-awake drunkenness that comes from
doing something new and finding that it is not impossible. In the
grip of that brave giddiness, nothing seems impossible, and people
look for ways to prove this joyful lunacy to themselves. They take
dares, jump from rooftop to rooftop, surpass themselves and usually
survive but sometimes die excited. Joey suddenly remembered a
conversation he'd had up north, sitting over an espresso with his
buddy Sal.
Joey, you're gonna be like all alone down there,
Sal had warned.
Maybe I like that idea,
Joey had said, with
swagger, but in his own mind the accent was on the maybe. But here
he was, in a boat, in the ocean, at night, without even experience
for company, about as alone as a person can be, and whaddya know,
he did like it. He liked it the way some people like icy showers or
large amounts of hot sauce. It set him up. It got him ready. Ready
for what? He couldn't have said and it didn't matter. Just ready.
Ready was enough.

—

A few minutes before eleven o'clock, Joey
climbed onto the private dock of the Flagler House with two lines
in his hand, and tied four different attempts at knots in each of
them. Then he took a moment to get his land legs back and look at
the hotel. The building was long, squat, and heavy, a checkerboard
of lights turned on and lights turned off. A cool blue glow hovered
over the swimming pool, and on the palm-strewn beach torches were
still burning, the remnants of a Caribbean Night cookout or some
such entertainment. Joey did not yet have a plan of approach.
Something inside him knew that in a place where most people arrive
by car, rented cars no less, the man who arrives by boat is marked
as special and should stroll in like he owns the joint. But he
could not be sure that Charlie Ponte had not put a lookout in the
lobby; or that his thugs outside didn't have a sight line to the
elevators, or that Ponte hadn't bribed someone on the staff to do
his watching for him. Getting caught consorting with Gino—with Dr.
Greenbaum—would no doubt win him another and final trip to Mount
Trashmore.

So Joey slowly and vigilantly walked the
length of the pier. On the beach, busboys were still clearing
chafing dishes from long tables whose cloths were splattered with
barbecue grease and melted sherbet. Their soiled uniforms tinged
orange by torchlight, they loaded the glinting pans onto trolleys
and wheeled them away. Joey watched where they went: along a narrow
concrete path that lost itself in a clutch of palms, then
reappeared at the back end of the poolside bar and curved off again
toward what seemed to be a descending ramp near the far end of the
building.

Discreetly, trying to look like any other
tourist who hoped not to appear lost, bored, or caged, Joey
meandered toward the ramp. Skirting the pool, he heard vapid hotel
lounge music filtering through beaded curtains; under the thatched
roof of the poolside bar, a blender, sounding very much like a
tiny, frenzied outboard, was frothing up some dubious milk shake of
a cocktail for what seemed to be the only couple left outside. The
bartender gave Joey a friendly nod, an offer of conviviality in
sympathy for his being all alone. Joey smiled the shy smile of a
passerby who knows that he will be forgotten the moment he has
passed.

At the head of the ramp, there was a pair of
ocher- painted limestone posts, and on the right-hand post was a
sign that said Staff Only. Joey paused. His pants legs were damp
from the ocean spray; his left sneaker was wet. His thick black
hair had been blown tautly back by the wind and was coarsened by
the airborne salt. His hands still tingled from the vibration of
the boat's wheel, and he still didn't know what he'd say to his
brother.