Tropical Freeze (18 page)

“Oh, shit, Darcy. That’s nuts,” he said. “There’s got to be a better way.”

She studied him in the dim light, making up her mind about something. She looked away into the dark, then back at his eyes. Some moment seemed to pass for her, some shift Thorn could see in the set of her mouth, the deepness of her breath. She had settled an argument in her mind, and her face softened as she continued to regard him. But he knew in some subtle way he had lost her. Lost the way they’d been.

“He’s gone,” she said, a new edge in her voice. “Gaeton’s gone, and I’m not about to play it safe. Call nine-one-one or something. Hell, no. Only way to find out how cows turn into steaks is go into the slaughterhouse.”

“Bad metaphor,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you know what I mean.” She cocked her head at him. And again her voice was calm, almost uninterested now. “It’s because I’m a woman, isn’t it? You wouldn’t argue like this if it were Sugarman or one of your male friends. The two of you, you’d just do it. Flex your muscles and jump into it.”

“OK,” Thorn said. “You found me out. I’m a sexist shit. If I care about a woman, I try to talk her out of slipping a thirty-eight into her mouth. I admit it, I’m a Cro-Magnon.” She turned away from him and began to walk. He had to hurry to stay with her. She’d shifted into a long stride, her face turned away.

“Well, here’s a test for you,” she said, still walking fast. “Let’s see if it’s possible for you to care about a woman who doesn’t need your help.”

He dropped back a little at that, following her to her trailer. She walked up to the doorway, turned, faced him. Thanks for a wonderful evening. Let’s do it again sometime. Thorn watched her eyes go slack, begin to drift inward.

He reached out, put his hands on her shoulders, massaged the tension at the root of her neck. Her head sagged forward, giving in to his hands. He ran his hands down her shoulders, her arms, took her hands. She let him hold them but didn’t grip back.

She shook her head sadly at him, looking at him from inside the faraway place she’d gone.

“Just get back to building your house, Thorn. Tying your flies,” she said. “That’s where your heart really is. This isn’t your problem.”

Thorn looked at Darcy’s hands, limp in his own. Then brought his eyes back to hers. A breeze stirring her hair.

“Screw my house,” he said. “Screw fishing flies.”

“So, how’s your shit doing these days, Papa?” Benny asked.

Papa John Shelton flicked some ashes from his Camel overboard and turned to get a better look at Benny Cousins. The guy was holding his ten-pound rod like he was scared of it, like it might turn into a snake and slither right out of his grip.

The guy was wearing a khaki shirt with a sailfish embroidered on the back of it. Khaki short pants, white legs, boat shoes, a khaki long-billed fishing hat with earflaps and a neckflap. Throw in dark glasses with leather blinders. Everything just off the rack.

Number one, the guy had money. He had somebody guiding him to the fancy clothes aisle, number two. But number three, he was such an asswipe Papa John was ready to fire up the engine and go in, even though they were into some good-size yellowtail.

“What kind of shit we talking about?” Papa John said.

“Shit shit,” Benny said. “The kind that comes out of your backside.”

“What kind of question is that to ask somebody?”

“It’s a personal question,” Benny said. “I’m getting personal with you.”

“My shit’s fine.”

“Well, I’m happy to hear it,” Benny said. He shifted the rod around, and took another grip on it. It still looked like he was ready to drop the whole thing if a fish hit. “You haven’t ever heard the saying, so goes your shit, so goes your day?”

“I may have,” Papa John said. He took another couple of sandballs out of the bucket. They were a chum and sand mixture that he balled up and froze overnight. He dropped them over the side. Then he sprinkled some toasted oats on the surface of the water. That ought to fire them up, bring them to the surface.

It was about four-thirty in the afternoon, a Tuesday. The weather was warming up a little, but still nippy. Maybe sixty today, a light northwestern breeze. A moderate chop, with an empty blue sky.

This Benny Cousins had sent one of his people over to roust Papa John first thing that morning. The man was just standing there on his boat, never asked permission to board. Papa John lay in his bunk, groggy from a first-class hangover, staring at this jocko.

Normally he would’ve reached up and pulled down the .45 nickel-plated service revolver he kept over his bunk and pointed it at this guy and told him to get off his boat, and try starting over the right way. But this guy didn’t look like he’d move. Papa John would have to shoot him a couple of times to teach him any marine manners. And what with his headache banging like it was, he didn’t want to face the noise.

The guy had told him that Mr. Benny Cousins wanted to charter his boat for the afternoon. Mr. Cousins wanted to go out to the reef, catch some fishies. He’d said that,
fishies
. And Papa John had looked at him and told him to go fuck himself and Benny whoever it was and to take his white pants and his purple tennis shirt and his Rolex watch and get the hell off his boat.

The gorilla had said, “You got that off your system, now roll out and start getting ready. He’ll be over at noon. He has a hard-on to see you. Don’t ask me why.”

At noon Benny had parked his brown Mercedes in the shade beside the Bomb Bay Bar and got out in all his khaki glory, and Papa John had looked out from the bar and said to himself, “Jesus Christ, not that guy.”

Benny Cousins had worked out of the Miami office of the DEA for ten years, back in the seventies before all the white powders started coming ashore, changing things. He’d come down on weekends and hung around, sitting in the Bomb Bay Bar, shooting the breeze with the local scuzzbags who were just then considering moving out of the marijuana business and into the white powder business.

Benny drank scotch, telling war stories about Miami cops and robbers. Everybody wondered about him. Is he looking for action? Definitely. But what kind? Nobody was sure. He’d come in, acting all down-home friendly and how y’all doing. He’d sit there and tell his stories, buy a few rounds of drinks, but nobody became his buddy. People shooting looks at Papa John.

John finally had to ask the guy to stop coming in. It was hurting business. He put it as friendly as he could. John back then was buying a forty-pound bale of grass once a month, dealing out of the bar, so he didn’t want some DEA agent taking a personal dislike to him. Benny had said, huh, you’re kicking me out of here? But these are my people. This is my home, this bar, this stool, this town. His eyes getting wet.

Isn’t nobody in here gonna be sorry if you don’t ever come back, Papa John had told him. He thought he should just get the man’s snout right down there in reality and let him root. And Benny’s eyes had shut off. His smile just died away. Not that he was mad or anything, but like somebody had just clipped the wires to him.

And he’d gotten up and walked off, and that was it for Benny. Took his Nerf ball and his glove and went looking for some other sandlot. Till today. And here he was, same guy.

“See,” Benny was saying, “I’m a shit examiner myself. I look at it, I readily admit to it. It comes from my insatiable curiosity about all things human.”

“You’re a philosopher,” Papa John said.

“Yeah, yeah I am. And what shit is, it’s a miracle. A daily miracle. We put something in one end, it comes out the other. It’s different, totally changed. You look at it and you think, Jesus, my body did that. My body. It’s how this country used to operate. You put some poor illiterate slob in one end, and America takes that slob and … you see what I’m saying?”

“No,” Papa John said.

He splashed in two more sandballs. He was half hoping that Benny’s live shrimp would get smacked by a hammerhead cruising by and pull this guy overboard, haul him out to the Gulf Stream, where he could examine the turd flow from South America.

Benny said, “I look at my shit, and I make assumptions based on things, like consistency, color. Even the smell, that can tell you a lot. I’m not saying I stick my nose down in the bowl, and I don’t actually probe it with a tongue depressor like the crazy Germans, looking for undigested particles, run them through again. I’m not a fetishist or anything.”

John had his line running out, the one-ounce jig carrying it down nice and smooth. He was staring at Benny, wondering why he’d taken this guy’s two hundred bucks and come out here fishing with him. He guessed he was getting bored, and because he’d wondered why a guy with a pet gorilla would want to see him so bad. It reminded him a little of the old days. People with bodyguards were always wanting to use his connections.

Benny said, “Like this morning, I’m standing there and it’s been a great dump, a miracle dump. And I’m buckling up, feeling ten pounds lighter, and all at once it hits me.”

John’s bait bumped bottom, and he brought it up a little, began to jig it, reel in a few feet, jig.

“It hit me that here I am down here, making this place my home, getting all the plugs plugged in, the keys working in the right locks. And I thought, Papa John! The main man. Or, well, the used-to-be-main-man.

“And I go, hey, Benny. You can have the mayor carrying your books home from school, you can have the commissioners doing your cuticles and the whole Chamber of Commerce trying to get their noses inside your rosy red, but if you ain’t got Papa John, man, you ain’t got squat.”

“Uh-huh,” John said. “This all came to you, buckling up your pants? I’m supposed to do what now? Curtsy? Genuflect?”

“See how it is is, I’m down here now. I’m in the Keys to stay. Benny’s come home to roost. And well, till the other day, I had this guy, a Conch type, and he was setting things up for me, greasing the chutes, you know, introducing me to the so-called big shots down here. But this guy, he turned out to be a Benedict Arnold. I had to let him go.

“So I’m there thinking what to do next, and bang, it comes to me, how about if I talk to the old man, see about what it would take for him not to kick me out of the bar anymore? How many dollars it would cost for you to welcome me
into
the bar. Act like you’re fucking glad to see me is what I’m talking here. ’Cause see, I’ve got this idea, we could be partners, blood brothers.”

“You ain’t got that much money, Benny.”

“No, no,” he said. “You see money’s just part of it, man. I’m not talking about just money. I’m talking about putting you back together again, Humpty Dumpty.”

John’s line jerked, his pole having that little spasm of a yellowtail, maybe six, seven pounds. He hit it hard. Got it, and started reeling it up, feeling Benny staring at him.

“You caught a fucking fish, man,” Benny said.

John turned and offered him the rod. Benny looked at it, at the tip bobbing.

“I don’t know how to do it,” Benny said.

“Just crank.”

Benny dropped his rod on the deck and took John’s. He leaned way back like he was hooked to a great white, tried to crank with his left hand, looking at John with his feeble-ass grin. He switched hands finally, got it around about two turns, and the fish broke off. Benny stumbled back, almost going over the port side.

“You lost it.” John took his rod back.

Benny going shew, whew, wiping at sweat on his face. Give him a real fish and his heart would explode.

“Hey, I liked that. That was good. I wondered what all the fuss was about. All these years, I wondered. But that was good.”

“
That
was shit,” Papa John said.

Benny took a few minutes getting his breath back, leaning against the fish box, gazing back toward land. John bit off the tail of a shrimp, spit it overboard, and fixed the rest of it to his jig. Let it back down into the chum slick.

“See what I got in mind is,” Benny said, a slight pant still in his voice, “I rent a barstool at your place. I pay you a little something every month and you introduce me around. I shake some hands, do some magic tricks. If somebody’s got a problem, needs a variance, a canal dredged out, whatever, then Benny’ll switch into action, slice through the bureaucracy.”

“That’s Key West,” Papa John said. “You’re off by a hundred miles. Down there’s where the Bubbas are, where the county’s run from.”

“That’s exactly my point, John. There’s a power vacuum here. See, I know you used to be head pirate down here, you had some influence. You mounted some heads on your wall and all that. I go in your bar, I see all those pictures. You with this guy and that guy. And I think, man, that’s sad. That’s a fucking shame. ’Cause things progressed and you didn’t keep up.”

Benny was standing beside him then. John felt a bump on his line, or maybe it was just brushing against the rocky ledges.

Benny said, “I’m here, my man, to save your ass, help you retain, retool your skills, and move into the electronic age. You teach me, I teach you. One hand jerking off the other.”

“I already got myself a lackey,” John said. “I don’t think I could train two morons at once.”

Benny shook his head, looking down at the deck.

They had about an hour of light left, and about that long till slack tide. Siesta time down below. For that hour between tides, you could dump a ton of shrimp in the water and those fish would just watch them rot. If the tide wasn’t moving, they weren’t eating. Fish were programmed like that, not able to adjust. They’d gotten hard and fixed after a million years of evolution.

Yeah, John thought, like me. Ordering the same goddamn thing off the menu at Mrs. Mac’s diner for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the past five years. Christ, look at him. The most excitement in his life lately, the most change, was this fuckbrain Ozzie. Then all of a sudden here was Benny, a jumbo shrimp snapping in front of his face. Well, what the fuck.

John turned to Benny and said, “I could sell you a barstool. Wood-burn your name on it. I could take a one-time token of respect.”

Benny raised his head, a horse-trading light in his eyes.

“I was thinking more of the virtues of renting, like a trial thing,” Benny said. “Month to month, till we could see how we fit, how things were shaping up.”