Mangrove Squeeze (4 page)

She said it gently but it made Aaron look down at his shoes. Tenure was everything in Key West, and everybody came to realize that without needing to be told. "Couple of months," he said, gesturing around him. "But I don't seem to manage to bust out of here very often."

"You're doing a great job with the place," said Suki, maybe a shade too glibly.

Aaron rallied. "Wrestling with my own incompetence," he said. "And the truly impressive incompetence of others."

There was a brief pause. They were looking at each other. Brown eyes, blue eyes. Necks and mouths and shoulders. Looking without talking was more intimate than was quite polite.

Suki said, "The
Frigate's
a weekly. News, reviews, opinions, politics. It's really the locals' paper."

Aaron said, "Okay, I'll subscribe."

"It's free," said Suki. "I'm selling ads."

Aaron pursed his lips. "I'm in the tourist business. If it's a paper for the locals—"

"That's why the tourists read it," Suki cut in quickly. "So they can feel like locals."

Aaron's right eyebrow shot up. He was glad to be out of New York and away from the daily yank and whine of business, but he still appreciated quickness, moxie, salesmanship. He smiled, said, "Good save."

Suki smiled back. Smiling, her whole face opened. Aaron couldn't tell if he was looking more intently now or if it was just that she was showing him more, allowing him to see. She had a disconcerting upper lip that was fuller, lusher than the bottom one. There was a slight gap between her two front teeth. She was a little fleshier than was fashionable, with the sort of fullness that put appealing creases where the shoulder met the arm. Bantering with her, Aaron had begun to feel like they were dancing—no matter that the registration counter with its silver bell loomed chastely between them—and he didn't want to stop.

He said, "What's the circulation?"

She said, "Forty thousand."

"Paper's free," he said. "How do you know?"

She bit her lip—the upper one. "The truth?" she said. "We have no idea how many get read. Forty's what we print."

"And distribution?" Aaron said. He'd never before thought of it as a sexy word.

"They get dropped off at groceries, bookstores," Suki said. "How many end up as rain hats, bike-basket liners? No one has a clue."

"You shouldn't admit that to advertisers," Aaron said.

"Hey," said Suki, "I'm from Jersey. Someone asks me a question, they almost always get an answer."

Aaron hesitated, wished he hadn't. Without momentum he was lost. Fact was, he wasn't very suave, and what nerve he'd ever had with women had in recent times dried up from disuse. Flow was everything; rhythm bypassed fears, made things that were excruciatingly difficult seem in that instant easy, inevitable even. In the last heartbeat that he could possibly have said it, Aaron said, "Then I'll ask you something else. Any chance you can stay for lunch?"

He'd barely finished speaking when he understood that something had gone inscrutably and entirely wrong. Suki's face slammed shut, she hugged her satchel tight against her side. With a hardness that surprised them both, she said, "It's a little early in the day to get hit on."

Wounded, baffled, Aaron said, "Was I hitting on you? I thought I was offering you a bowl of pasta."

Suki looked down, seemed equally confused. She said, "I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that. Except there are so many jerks in this town—"

"And I'm probably just one more of them."

She raised her eyes. "I didn't say that. I don't think it. Look, I have a date for lunch."

"Oh," said Aaron, and for an absurd instant his face clouded with jealousy, was taken over by an impulse from a part of the brain too ancient to learn manners or even common sense.

Suki saw the look, surprised herself by feeling that she wanted to explain. "I don't mean a date date. I'm having lunch with Lazslo."

She said it like it was a name that everyone in town would know. Aaron didn't. Now he couldn't tell if he was jealous because Suki was having lunch with this guy or because apparently he mattered in Key West and Aaron didn't and maybe never would. He said, "Who's Lazslo?"

"You'll know when I know," Suki answered.

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

She looked down at her watch. "I have to go. Listen, what I said, it was just a reflex thing. Don't hold it against me."

Aaron nodded but he felt a sorrow in his stomach, the pointless sorrow that comes from losing something before you ever had it. "And what about the ad?"

"Another time," she said. "Next time."

She turned and headed for the door. Aaron watched her go and listened to her footsteps on the porch. They made a syncopated, shuffling sound, the rhythm of a happy kid skipping.

That evening, sitting on his deck and watching the early winter dusk go from pink to purple to slate above the flat water of the Gulf, Gennady Markov sipped his frozen vodka and casually announced: "The mayor is a feelthy peeg."

He said it without rancor, without indignation or even mild censure; in fact the mayor's puny venality amused him.

"Feelthy peeg is good," said Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky. He said it without pleasure, even though he was dipping a cracker into a mound of caviar whose grains softly twinkled in the failing light. "With feelthy peeg, nobody looks too close, you know what you must do."

Markov turned to his nephew. Lazslo, dressed in denim, and with a big silver belt buckle between his navel and his groin, was also holding a glass of liquor, but he found it rank and sour, he touched it to his lips but didn't drink.

"He came again today, Luzhka," the older man said. "Always I am surprise. Never I remember how short he is, how his pants fall on his shoes. I always think maybe he is paperboy or something."

Markov laughed. Cherkassky did not. Lazslo made a show of joining in but his thoughts were somewhere else.

His uncle continued. "He say 'Hello, Meester Markov.' I say 'Hello, Meester Mayor.' Then he start in with some crazy nonsense with the stores—how you say, the backsets?—"

"Setbacks," Lazslo put in absently, though he wasn't really listening. He was thinking about his lunch with Suki Sperakis and wondering if there would come a time when she would go to bed with him. Usually, yes or no, he could tell right away, he didn't waste time. A woman liked his car, his clothes, was aroused when he was recognized in places, fawned on. Or not. He could tell. But with this one it was different.

"Setbacks, yes," said Markov. "So many feet from street, so many feet from next guy. Mayor say, 'Is wiolation.' I say, 'Meester Mayor, just tell me what you want.' He say, 'racks on sidewalk, block people walking. Is other wiolation.' I say, 'Meester Mayor, we are not children here. Please, say what you are asking.'"

"Coward," said Ivan Cherkassky, wiping a cracker crumb from the corner of his mouth. "Peeg and coward."

Lazslo nodded in bland agreement But he was picturing Suki, not the mayor. The blue eyes framed in black and wild hair, generous breasts squeezed and rocked by arms that gestured lavishly. She was a little older than he, and Lazslo found this very flattering, intriguing. She was funny, sharp, interested in what he did, how he thought; she made him feel smart, substantial. This excited him. And older women, people said—they knew their own minds better, rumor had it they were bold, might take the lead and grab you by the leg, might suggest nasty and nonstandard acts in risky and forbidden places. So why was Suki so hesitant, so coy?

"So finally," continued Markov, "I say, 'Excuse me one moment, Meester Mayor.' I go away. I come back with t'ousand dollars. I give it to him. I say, 'Does this take care of wiolation?' The money he puts in his pocket. Front pocket, like cowboy. He smiles. He say, 'Meester Markov, you sure must sell a lot of T-shirts.'"

"Idiot!" Cherkassky said.

"So you know what?" Markov rolled along, grabbing his nephew behind the neck, pulling their faces close, their foreheads almost touching. "You know what, Luzhka? I give you all credit. 'My nephew,' I say, 'my nephew is marketing genius.'"

At this Lazslo Kalynin could not help snorting as he backed away from his uncle's grasp. Too loud, he said, "Marketing genius as long as the idea is losing money."

The words seemed to break into small particles that persisted in the salty air. The two old Soviets dropped their chins and looked around themselves, but they saw no spies, no informers, only palms and shrubs whose colors were leaching out into the deepening twilight.

Ivan Cherkassky frowned, did not try to mask his disapproval. "Lazslo," he said, "you say these things, I wonder where else you say them. I feel them in the bottom of my stomach. Reckless. Careless."

The young man was feeling feisty, probably a side effect of stifled lust. He said, "Not careless, Ivan. Just not constantly afraid like you."

The family friend sipped vodka, slowly ran a hand over his fretful concave face, then said very softly but with unexpected vehemence, "I am afraid, yes. Always. I was afraid under Brezhnev, afraid under Gorbachev. I was afraid when all the changes came—afraid to stay and afraid to leave. And still, today, I am afraid every time a canister must cross a border, every time we send a shipment. But I am sixty-three, and I am here, and I have money, and I am not in prison. Why? Because fear has made me very careful. Think about this, Lazslo."

There was a silence and it soon turned rancid.

Scolded by Cherkassky, Lazslo felt suddenly that he'd been insulted, belittled, taken lightly, all day long. Suki, with her teasing, her deflections—she enticed him but she treated him like a boy. These old men—they gave him no respect, no real power of his own. Sullenly, he stared off at the horizon, where the seam between the sea and sky was closing for the night.

Gennady Petrovich Markov blinked off toward the dimness that had all at once turned grumpy, tried to figure the precise moment when things had gotten somber. With the geniality of the fat, he attempted to leaven the mood, to restore good cheer in time to salvage appetite for dinner.

"Gentlemen," he said. "Gentlemen, why so serious? Is just another visit from the mayor. Is only one small bribe."

There was only one good thing about the kind of work Fred did: It was the kind of work where every day was payday.

He did casual labor. On the mornings when he felt like working, he'd grab his shovel and his rusty old bike from where they leaned against the hot dog. He'd walk out of the mangroves, then ride past Houseboat Row and a mile north on U.S. 1 to the seven-thirty shape-up on Stock Island. He'd stand there yawning in the early light among the other hopefuls—black guys with big shoulders, stringy white guys with stringy hair—and a foreman would assign the jobs.

Mostly it was digging holes. Amazing when you thought about it, how many different kinds of holes there were, how many perforations even in a little town. Holes for fence posts, holes for pools. Holes for water pipes and holes that trees got planted in. Square holes for the studs that held up carports; round holes for the tubes of parking meters. Kidney-shaped holes for the sand-traps on the golf course; box-shaped holes for the graves of pets. Holes for flower beds, holes for hot tubs, holes that Fred spent hours digging without ever being told the use of.

At the end of the workday, the laborers were brought back to Stock Island, and their pay—minimum wage minus this and minus that—was figured to the penny and delivered as cash into their toughened hands. For Fred this was the prelude to an evening out.

When he had money, he went to bars.

He liked bars—the noise of them, the randomness. He liked the way the click of billiard balls sometimes fell into a rhythm with the songs on the jukebox. He liked the smoke, the sound of people laughing. He liked to eavesdrop on the fishing stories, the travel tales. He liked it that, in Key West bars at least, anyone could talk to anyone, and that, as long as you didn't get too loaded or too shrill in your opinions, you were always allowed to come back.

So on this particular January evening, Fred pocketed his pay, dropped his shovel at the hot dog, and rode his bike downtown. He stopped for an outdoor shower at County Beach—stripping to his boxer shorts between the parking area and the gazebo, holding the chain that started the flow of tepid water, then changing into fresh clothes in the men's room. He double-checked that he hadn't lost his money or his little piece of soap, and continued on his way.

He rode to the Eclipse Saloon, an old favorite. It had a U-shaped bar whose edge was thickly padded and covered in black vinyl. It was good for resting your elbows and occasionally your head. Beer was cheap and cheeseburgers came automatically with fries and slaw, no hidden extra costs. Off Duval, it was mostly a place for locals, but a sprinkling of sunburned tourists provided some amusement. Rich people went there, poor people went there, and most folks dressed about the same.

Fred grabbed a stool on the side that faced the door. He drank, he smoked, he ate. He watched a little basketball. Once or twice he joined in conversations, and didn't seem to notice that his joining in wasn't really all that welcome.

Dinner hour passed and the place gradually started thinning out. There weren't that many empty stools, but there was one on either side of Fred.