Gone Bamboo (8 page)

13

I
don't see why we gotta hire a fuckin' mick," said Paulie Brown. "It don't seem right." He brought the big, gray Seville to a halt to avoid a taxi that had pulled over to pick up a fare.

"Go around him," said Richie Tic from the passenger seat. "Fuckin' rag head!" he yelled through the closed window.

"It don't seem right," repeated Paulie as he pulled back out into Second Avenue traffic, "lettin' a fuckin' mick whack a boss. It don't seem respectful. Even if the guy's a rat, it don't seem right. It sets a bad . . . a bad . . . whaddyacallit, a president. I mean, you let that happen once, and everybody's gonna feel free to take liberties . . . you gonna have every fuckin' eggplant, every porta ricken the fuckin' city thinkin' it's fine they take a shot atta boss every time they got a beef."

"Precedent? That the word you want?" said Richie. "Lemme tell you about precedent. You worried about settin' a precedent? That's what's worryin' you? Listen, somebody doesn't shut this guy's mouth an' we're all goin' . . . the whole fuckin' borghata's goin' away. Howzat for fuckin' precedent? Lemme tell you what's bad precedent: Jimmy gettin' locked down twenny-three outta twenty-four hours a day, no phone calls, nothin' -
that's
bad precedent. I don't care we gotta hire fuckin' Martians do the job, so long it gets done."

Paulie sat silently for a while, thinking things over. "An' this guy Rico?" he wondered out loud, chewing at his lower lip. "All I hear lately is this guy Rico says this, Rico says that . . . What is this Rico guy sayin' that's so bad?"

"RICO's a fuckin' statute, a law, numb-nuts. It's the law they gonna use put you, me, an' Jimmy an' just about everybody you ever talked to inna can.
Marrone!
Maybe you noticed a lotta fellas from the other families been goin' away lately? Maybe you noticed they ain't maybe never comin' back? That's what RICO is. It means like you got pinched doin' only one little thing, and the prosecutor, he puts your case in with a buncha things maybe you didn't do, some other things that maybe some other guys done, then both you and the other guys and everybody else gets to go away for it. You understand that? That penetrate in there, Paulie? You see what I'm sayin' to you?"

"I got it. I'm not fuckin' stupid, Richie." Paulie fumed silently for a few more blocks. "I still don't like usin' that mick. You see that guy last night? He looks like a fuckin' lush."

"You wanna do it, Paulie? You wanna go down there the islands? They got a whole buncha federal marshals down there just waitin' for some big guinea get off the plane from New York. You wanna like walk right over Charlie's crib an' put a couple in his head just like that? Yeah . . . why not? That'll be great. That'll look real good. Jimmy, Jimmy gets to explain to the nice prosecutor on the stand what his former close personal associate Mr Brown, that's
former,
notice, 'cause you'll be dead by then, he gets to tell the man what his good friend Paulie is doin' down there the Caribbean tryin' to clip a protected fuckin' witness in his case. You still wanna go?"

"I don't wanna go," said Paulie. "My wife would kill me I come back with a tan. I tell her I been gone on business all I want, she ain't gonna believe it."

"He's sendin' Petey down there anyways," said Richie.

"Petey? Which Petey you talkin' about? Big or Little?"

"Little. He's sendin' Little Petey."

"He's wit' Jerry Dogs."

"Yeah . . . that's the beauty part. Jerry's like sympathetic, and he's got a casino hotel down there, he's wired up pretty good. It was his people that heard about Charlie first, so he's like sendin' Little Petey down to supervise."

"So . . . so at least it's a friend of ours who's going down with him, right?"

"Right. So shut the fuck up about the Irishman," said Richie. "He's gonna do fine, this guy. He's a real fuckin' hoodlum, don't worry. This guy, this guy, you can cut his fuckin' arm off an' he'll pick it right up an' beat you to death with it. This guy is good. This ain't the first time out for him by a fuckin' long shot, okay? Don't worry. This guy likes his work - " Richie slammed his palm into his forehead. "Fuck!"

"What is it?" said Paulie, alarmed.

"Turn it around. I forgot something."

"What?"

"Turn it around. Go up Madison. We gotta go back uptown. I forgot somethin' we gotta get for Jimmy."

"Where we goin'? What do we gotta get?" asked Paulie, swinging the Caddy across two lanes of traffic to take a right on Thirty-fourth.

"Gotta go to Lane Bryant," said Richie. "He saw somethin' he wants inna catalog."

"Jeez," said Paulie. "I hate this. Why don't he just order from the catalog?"

"'Cause the FBI reads his fuckin' mail. He don't want people to know . . . I mean, fuck if I know. He's the skipper, okay? He wants something, I do it."

"I ain't the one goin' in this time," said Paulie.

"Why the fuck not?" said Richie. "Pretend like you're gettin' somethin' for the wife. Nobody's gonna think it's for you . . . what, you think somebody's gonna think it's for you?"

"I don't want nobody thinkin' my wife's that heavy," said Paulie. "It's embarrassin'."

14

T
he car arrived to take him to the airport at nine, just like Brian said, and, just like Brian said, Bobby Flannigan was at the wheel.

"You can do me a wee favor on your way to the airport," Brian had said. "As you're goin' out there anyway . . ."

It was a gray, drizzly morning, and Kevin, dressed for the tropics, was feeling shaky and cold in the front passenger seat. Bobby, a gravelly-voiced geezer, was making bitter observations on the state of the world as they crossed 125th Street to pick up the Long Island Expressway. Bobby had been around forever, and Kevin had to wonder if he sounded like that - bitter, old, his brain shriveled by alcohol.

"Look at these animals," said Bobby, moving his chin to indicate a group of young black men hanging out in front of a grocery store. "Monkeys . . . they look like fuckin' monkeys. Breed like them too . . . dirty little bastards. They're gonna be runnin' everything one a' these days, you watch. Mark my words, Kev . . . you come back you might be workin' fer niggers."

Kevin wasn't listening. He was running over his Things to Do list in his mind.

When they got to the American Airlines terminal, Kevin directed Bobby to a parking space in the last row, explaining he had to meet somebody before he got on the plane. Bobby pulled the clapped-out Oldsmobile into the space, next to a lemon yellow Camaro.

"We gotta wait here? What time's your flight?" asked Bobby.

"Quarter of," replied Kevin, reaching in his jacket pocket.

"Don't wanna miss yer plane . . . all that fun in the sun."

"Here he comes," said Kevin, indicating a moon-faced young man in a ski parka, approaching the car from the driver's side.

"That's Timmy Moon," said Bobby, smiling. "Know his dad."

Kevin put the barrel of the Colt up against Bobby's head and fired twice. Bobby fell over the wheel, his hair on fire, a momentary spume of red painting the dash. "Thanks for the ride, Bobby," said Kevin, under his breath. He got out of the car and handed the revolver to Timmy, who put it immediately under his coat. "You got everything?" said Timmy, reminding Kevin of his bag. Kevin reached in the back seat to retrieve it.

"You touch anything?" asked Timmy.

"No," said Kevin, "just the door handle."

"I'll get it," said Timmy. "Have a nice trip."

15

H
enry took Tommy over to Sandy Ground and they came away with a nearly new gas-powered generator for the amazing price of seventy-five bucks. It purred happily away beneath the palmettos, a respectable distance from the bar, bringing light and refrigeration. Cheryl bought some novelty Christmas lights in the shape of chili peppers in Philipsburg and strung them around the roof. The two hopeful entrepreneurs even set up a small stereo system, playing the Bob Marley and Peter Tosh that tourists expected on vacation.

A few wanderers from Dawn Beach
did
come over now and then, checking to see if there were any naked tits on Tommy and Cheryl's end of the beach. They'd have a burger and maybe a beer - // Frances or Cheryl was sunbathing nearby - before returning to their air-conditioned bunkers and their wives and kids on the other end. A few locals would stop by occasionally, for a single soda or a milk stout, but they never came in numbers.

Henry and Frances remained Tommy's Tropical's best customers - good for lunch every day, dinner at least twice a week, and about a half case of beer and a bottle of tequila a day. They insisted on paying - in cash - and dragged a few friends over from the marina, Captain Toby and his wife, a few heavy-drinking Aussies and South Africans. They even organized a few late evening lobster-diving parties, when the bar filled up and stayed filled for hours, Tommy and Cheryl rushing to keep up with the furious pace of two-fisted, career alcoholics. But none of them returned on their own.

Tommy's Tropical did not become the culinary mecca that Tommy had so fervently hoped for, and he was grateful for the distractions of their sailing trips with the older couple, their bar crawls to little Dominican whorehouses, French cafes, and waterfront lolos. He came to anticipate and even expect the gooey, high-grade dope that Henry and Frances always seemed to have in abundance.

Standing at the helm of a sleek, fifty-one-foot sailboat, a good breeze going, Tommy was thinking life in the tropics was, in spite of any business disappointments, not half bad. Cheryl, grinning ear to ear, the way she had been all morning, stood next to him holding a Heineken, squealing with delight every time a wave crashed over the rails, spraying them with seawater.

"How'm I doin'?" asked Tommy, apprehensively. The sea was rough today. In their previous trips it had been nothing like this twelve-foot swells, the deck at a steep angle, pots and pans rattling around in the cabin below, spindrift from the wave tops filling Tommy's eyes with salty mist.

"You're doing fine," said Henry from his seat. "Just keep the bow in line with that rock over there. You're doing great. Natural born sailor."

Pleased with himself, Tommy muscled the big boat up the side of another wave and surfed it down the other side into a deep trough. The next wave broke over his head, almost tearing him from the wheel and washing him overboard, thrilling him.

"Yeee-haaa!" yelled Henry.

Another wave, this one right over the bow, washed across the deck, worrying Tommy. He gave Henry an expectant look, thinking he'd want to take over, but Henry ignored him, draining his third beer since leaving port, his feet braced casually against the fold-down table in the center of the aft deck, looking dreamily over at Frances at the winches.

Isle Forchue and its surrounding rocks grew closer, and Tommy, more than a little drunk himself at ten in the morning, didn't like the way the dark sea boiled white around the projections of brown coral jutting out of the water a few hundred yards off.

"Isn't that . . . like, a reef or something?" he asked worriedly. "I don't . . . I really don't wanna rack this thing up."

"Don't worry," said Henry. "I'll take over when you get close. You're doing great. Few more times, you can sail around the world without help. Want another beer?"

Tommy shrugged, frightened and exhilarated. In a moment, Henry was pressing another cold, green bottle into his hand. This was fun. This was really fun. He was having the best goddamn time he could remember.

Cheryl clambered around behind him and held on to his waist. Saint Martin was ten miles or so behind them, a faraway mountain range surrounded by dark blue. When Tommy kissed Cheryl on the neck, he tasted salt.

Henry finally hopped to his feet and took the helm, swinging the boat around and through a narrow cut in the reef, using sail power the whole way. There was a towering black rock to the starboard side, and as they passed by it, into a previously unseen horseshoe-shaped lagoon, the wind died suddenly, the sails emptied and fell slack, and they drifted noiselessly over turquoise and green water, their view of Saint Martin obstructed now by Isle Forchue's outcroppings of rock and scrub-covered bluffs. Henry cranked in the main sheet, and Frances ran forward to drop anchor.

The island was deserted. Not a soul, not a house, not a boat, not a single structure of human design in sight. There was only a barren strip of white sand beach curving around the lagoon, some coconut palms, and, beyond the tree line, a hilly expanse of brown grass and low bushes. In the distance, Tommy could see sheep grazing.

"Cool," said Cheryl. "I feel like a pirate."

"The British used to keep French prisoners here," said Henry, squinting into the sun. "Held them for ransom until the local governor paid up."

Without warning, Frances peeled off her wet, olive drab jump vest, kicked off her shorts, and dove stark naked into the water. Tommy caught an enticing glimpse of mahogany brown ass and a flash of pubic hair before she disappeared beneath the surface. Cheryl unhesitatingly followed her example, leaving her maillot in a wet pile on the deck, leaping feet first into the lagoon. Another crash from the aft deck and Tommy saw that Henry too had dispensed with his clothes and gone cannonballing over the side.

He felt momentarily at a loss. Uncomfortable in any case with displaying himself in the nude, he was made even more uncomfortable by the fact that his quick look at Frances's rock-hard butt and that dark patch between her legs had left him with a hard-on, a noticeable semi, and the spectacle of both Frances and Cheryl, frolicking like naked mermaids a few feet away, threatened to make his condition even more apparent. The two girls began chanting from the water, "Tomm-y! Tooomm-y!" and he saw he had no choice. Before his penis popped out of the top of his bathing suit like a hand puppet, he belly flopped into the water.

It almost knocked the wind out of him. Swallowing water, he could only gasp for air as Cheryl came up behind him and dragged his suit down over his feet.

"That's better," she said, tossing the balled up suit onto the sailboat.

Cheryl ran her hands over his chest, and he thought for a second something was going to happen right there, with Henry and Frances only a few feet away. Things were different now. Something had changed, and the liberating sensation of treading water naked was pleasantly disorienting. When Cheryl slipped around and pressed her belly against his hard-on, he pushed her away, dog-paddling in a wide circle until less excited, trying to think of other things. He held his breath and dove as far down as he could, his eyes shut, and when he surfaced the two women were climbing onto the aft deck. Frances reached for the freshwater hose, and Tommy gaped appreciatively as she ran cold water over her body and Cheryl's. She was so tan. Completely untroubled by her nakedness, her long, brown body unmarred by a single white line. Tommy's eyes drifted over to Cheryl, noting with sadness the triangular white patch over her pubis where the sun had never reached.

"I'm hungry!" called out Henry, from behind him somewhere, churning water, and with a few even strokes he was pulling himself onto the deck. "Let's eat, man . . . you going to paddle around all day?"

Frances brought a large picnic basket from below, laying out a spread on the table. There was lobster salad, some cheese, two loaves of crusty French bread, a thick
saucisson a Vail,
and some soppresata. There were olives and dark pommerey mustard, and the last thing to hit the table was an enormous survival knife, a military issue KayBar. Henry used it to slice the sausage.

They ate greedily, without saying much, washing down the food with chilled Beaujolais drunk out of jelly jars, the only sounds the cries of the frigate birds, gulls, and boobies overhead and the gentle slapping of water against the fiberglass hull.

Chewing happily on a hunk of French bread, Tommy watched Henry slice sausage, noticing for the first time how muscled he was for such a long, thin guy. And the scars, he'd never noticed them either. They'd become livid in the water, and they were remarkable, a chronicle of incredible, violent violations of the flesh. Two large discs of scar tissue were noticeable on Henry's left side, under the rib cage - they puckered when he leaned forward to grab the cheese. Tommy wondered for a moment if he'd been gored by a bull. When Henry turned to root around in the picnic basket for a plastic fork, Tommy saw a whole constellation of jagged trails and old suture marks running diagonally across his back. He stopped chewing, transfixed, tabulating wounds, more and more of them, everywhere he looked. Suture marks under the right knee, a sizable hunk missing from the right foot, two more shiny punctures on the left instep, and just visible now, in the noonday sun, a hair-line scar extending from Henry's left ear to his right collarbone, below the Adam's apple. Jesus, thought Tommy, where did he get those scars?

"Henry, sweetheart," said Frances, startling Tommy. "Tommy's checking out your scars. Be a love and tell him how you got them. He's probably dying to know."

Tommy stammered a few protestations. "No . . . no . . . that's okay," he said, feeling guilty at having been caught staring.

"Well, I don't want you to think it was
me,"
said Frances, laughing. "Though there have been times—"

"It's alright," said Tommy. "Really."

"No, don't be embarrassed. Everybody who sees them wants to know." She smiled indulgently. "I mean, how could you not? He looks like Dr Frankenstein put him back together, poor thing." She leaned down and ran the tip of her tongue lasciviously along the hairline scar on Henry's neck, Henry grinning agreeably the whole time.

"Veet-nam." Henry sighed without drama. Bored with the subject.

Cheryl, naked still, like the rest of them, except for Henry's red-and-white kaffiyeh draped around her neck, sat down next to Frances and gaped openly at Henry's appalling collection of wounds, clearly fascinated. She leaned forward, wobbling a little drunkenly, one arm resting on Frances's leg, Tommy not liking at all the way her eyes were traveling over Henry's body.

"Wow!" said Cheryl, reaching the two punctures below Henry's rib cage. "I guess you got shot, huh?"

"Henry's been shot a gazillion times," said Frances. "A regular magnet for flying pieces of metal and sharp, nasty objects. Fortunately," she added, pausing to eyeball his crotch lewdly, "nothing vital got hit." She lifted the tip of Henry's penis with a pinkie finger before letting it drop back against his leg. The two women exchanged looks and burst out laughing.

"I was trying to be the boy hero. You know, Audie Murphy time. Too many damn movies. That was the problem," said Henry, still completely at ease with the difficult subject and Frances's casual handling of his privates.

"Did it hurt?" asked Cheryl, this time, at least, looking him in the face.

"Some more than others," replied Henry, cheerfully. "This one here hurt the most." He pointed to the round scar on his instep. "Stepped on a punji stake. Went right through the boot. That hurt. That hurt like a motherfucker."

"E
www!
" said Cheryl, grimacing.

"He was shot
five
times," said Frances.

"Well . . . it was on only two different occasions," Henry hastened to add, modestly. "After the first one hits you, you tend not to notice so much the ones that come after."

"Then some nasty commie threw a grenade at him," said Frances. "And this one here" - she traced the thin scar down his neck - "that's where he got stuck with a bayonet. Can you believe it? A bayonet!"

"No shit," said Tommy. "I thought they cut that shit out after like the Civil War."

"Victor Charles was sort of short on high tech," said Henry patiently. "But he was long on enthusiasm. Guy who gave me this came at me wearing nothing but swim trunks and a satchel charge. I thought, Wow! Swimsuit! . . . Wow! Bayonet! By the time I got over the surprise, he was making neck kabob outta me." He laughed and popped a heel of French bread into his mouth. Standing up, he grabbed a disposable camera and a jumble of snorkel equipment from a storage locker.

"Tommy, let's you and me climb that big rock over there. The view is sensational. We'll swim over. There's a big moray down there we can look at on the way. Check it out."

He tossed a pair of flippers and a mask at Tommy's feet and went over the side. Tommy looked wistfully at the two women, who were just stretching out for some sun, then reluctantly dove in after him.

Underwater, Tommy had to exert himself to keep up, breathing hard into his snorkel. He saw Henry stop and point over at a large, round hump of brain coral rooted in the sandy bottom of the lagoon. Seeking to impress, he dove deep for a closer look. Henry waved him off, and he immediately saw why. A snakelike thing, all eyes and angry-looking teeth, came darting out at him, mouth open. It was the moray Henry had spoken of, and it was enormous. The whole rock was teeming with them, a nest of smaller ones visible inside the hollows; yellow colored with bluish speckles, they squirmed and slithered noiselessly, their evil-looking heads extending out a few feet, all eyes on Tommy, row after row of jagged little teeth. Turning, Tommy caught a flash as Henry captured the moment on film - Tommy and the Medusa.