Welcome to Paradise (3 page)

"You're a dog," said Al, "people don't expect
that much. Don't gotta be strong just because you're big. Don't
gotta keep winning the same game over and over again. What ya gotta
do? Not pee on the floor. Roll over. Sit down, ya wanna biscuit.
'Course, ya gotta be loyal."

He stopped petting her just long enough to
wag an index finger in her face. She licked the finger then bit
down lightly on the bulbous knuckle.

"Loyalty's big," he went on. "Then again,
it's big in people, too. But somehow it's more appreciated in a
dog. . . . And look at the other advantages. Say it's the middle of
the afternoon and you wanna go to bed. You curl up with a rubber
hamburger and people say how cute. None of this wondering am I
depressed, is something wrong? ... Or even, like, with sex. You're
young, you have a fling or two, a good screaming hump across a
couple of backyards, then boom, ya get fixed and your worries are
over. None of this wondering do I still look good, am I hip, if I
get somebody in the sack with me, how's it gonna go? I don't see
where being a dog is such a bad deal."

Fifi did nothing to change his mind. She
scratched her supple back against the leather upholstery, kicked
her manicured and carefree paws into the air.

Al Tuschman stretched his dully aching legs
and let out a deep, unhurried sigh that filled the car. He was
thinking something that he wouldn't say aloud, even to the dog.

He was thinking how odd it was to have worked
so hard to win this contest, to have
had
to win this
contest, when the truth was that he needed a trip to Florida like
he needed a hole in the head. Oh, the sun would be nice. He'd enjoy
people's envy of his tan. It would feel good to dunk in a pool, and
maybe he'd get lucky in the bars. But he couldn't help believing,
secretly, that all in all he'd be happier at home. In his
neighborhood. In the store. Where he knew what he was doing and who
he was.

On vacation, who was he? One more aimless,
nameless shmeggegi in boxer trunks, getting a headache from
drinking in the afternoon sun, desperately pretending to be loving
every minute. A disconnected guy waiting for life to throw him an
experience.

Whereas at home he was comfortable,
recognized, embraced. A well-liked character who got warm hellos in
diners. Who kibitzed with the car-wash guys, the cops. Everybody
knew him, or as much of him as he wanted them to. Maybe as much of
him as he knew himself. The schoolboy hero. The top salesman. The
smiling, easy fella who'd started putting up big numbers at an
early age, and was putting them up still. The kind of guy who had a
nickname known even to people who hadn't actually met him.

Big Al. Slightly famous in his town, a legend
in his neighborhood.

There is one road leading to Key West.

Like a muddy river draining many streams,
U.S. 1 gathers up the suckers who feed the resort economy, and the
seekers who refresh the town's battered and eroding soul, and
funnels them into two thin lanes that hop from key to key between
the ocean and the Gulf, between ranks of power lines and strings of
pelicans, between dank motels and stalking egrets, salty bars and
patient barracuda, porno stores and sweeping tides. There are exits
from this road but they are all dead ends, incomplete, unsatisfying
stoppings-short. Only one route leads through to the edge that is
powerfully agreed upon as the finish to this part of the world. On
that hurtling and constricted path there is nowhere to hide.

Which is why Chop Parilla and Squid Berman
had positioned themselves on the shoulder of the highway just where
it crosses Cow Key Bridge and enters Key West proper.

It was early afternoon when they took up
their post. The sun drew steam out of the mangroves when it broke
between the spongy clouds that were blowing westward, carrying with
them some of the last of the prodigious summer rains. The day grew
hotter and traffic rumbled on the bridge. Each sort of vehicle made
a different noise. Mopeds buzzed like paper on a comb. Cars plunked
over seams in the concrete. Trucks forced a groan from the trestles
and sent forth walls of wind that whistled in the railings.

Sid the Squid, morbidly sensitive to noises,
as to most things, was made jumpy by the cacophony. He kept getting
out of Chop Parilla's Jaguar—a mosaic of extracted, reassembled
parts—patrolling some yards of Florida, and climbing in again.

Squid was built to be jumpy. He was shorter
than average, and small-boned, but with incongruously bandy muscles
that swelled between his narrow joints; at moments it seemed like
he might snap his arms and legs from movements too spasmodic. His
elbows were pointy, like Popeye's, and his Adam's apple stuck out
so far that it deformed the collars of his T-shirts. His eyeballs
bulged, and an improbable expanse of white could usually be seen
around his flickering hazel irises. Now he dove back into the
idling, air-conditioned Jag and said, "Hey, Chop, y'ever do a job
like this before?"

"No." Truth was, Parilla's career had cleaved
to the mundane. Besides stealing cars, he collected loans,
occasionally set insurance fires, broke fingers and noses when it
was unavoidable. Straightforward stuff, conventional.

"Me neither," said the Squid. "But I like it.
I'm psyched. Ya know what I like about it, Chop?"

He paused what was, for him, a beat, but for
most other people was a quarter beat. Chop did not have time to
answer, and Squid went on in his chronically humid voice, the voice
of someone with too much wetness seeping through the blue strands
underneath his tongue.

"It makes no sense. I mean, it's pure—it has
no purpose. Not like, say, robbing something. Torching something.
Vulgar ordinary shit. Where's the creativity in that? This is like
. . . it's like getting paid to be a gremlin. Hired to direct a
nightmare. Yeah! Ya see what I'm sayin'?"

The statement was a little high-flown and
abstract for Chop. He answered, "Can we steal his car?"

Squid rolled his bulging eyes. "That ain't
the job."

"We're s'posed t'annoy him," argued Chop.
"Wouldn't that annoy him?"

Squid didn't answer. He sprang out of the Jag
again, paced along the shoulder, listening to the orchestra of
traffic.

Shadows started to lengthen, silhouettes of
palms were pasted on the roadway. The sun went from white to yellow
and revealed the fine grain of the inconstant air. After a time
Chop lowered the electric window and yelled out, "Squid, let's get
a cuppa coffee."

The bandy man hesitated. He was launched on a
performance, bringing to bear on a campaign all his loony
concentration. It bothered him to leave his lookout, and he bounced
from one foot to the other, deciding whether he would stay or
go.

"C'mon," said Chop, and he gestured toward a
pink and orange Dunkin' Donuts sign a quarter mile away, at the
point where the Key West coastline bellied out and the dreary
commercial strip began.

Squid calculated. It would take ten, twelve
minutes to get there, score some coffee and a box of doughnuts, and
get back to his post again. What were the odds? Not without
ambivalence, he climbed into the Jag.

And while they were standing at the doughnut
counter, discussing the merits of glazed and iced and Boston cream,
Big Al Marracotta slipped unnoticed into town, his carsick
rottweiler clawing at the windows of the Lincoln, his girlfriend
refreshing her mascara, now that they had finally arrived.

*

Sunset approached.

Clouds flattened into slabs, spikes of
sunlight slashed orange and rose and burgundy between them, a
different color for each latitude of sky. Downtown the event was
being celebrated as the climax of the day and the harbinger of
cocktails, but for Alan Tuschman, still on the highway, heading
west, it was mainly just a nuisance. Stoplights disappeared against
the glare. Cruel rays shot through the smeared and eggy corpses of
a million dead bugs on the windshield. His sunshade just missed
being where the sun was, as sunshades always did, and he had to pee
so badly that his solar plexus burned.

But at least he was very nearly at the Cow
Key Bridge, the stubby gangplank to Key West.

On the far side of that bridge, Chop Parilla,
bored into a trance, his Jag backed partway into mangroves, was
looking toward the road, coveting selected vehicles, noting the
tricks the red sun played on the pebbly reflective surfaces of the
license plates.

Sid the Squid, jazzed up on caffeine, grease,
and sugar, was pacing along the boundary where road shoulder
softened into muck, sniffing low tide and the residue of hot tires
while he scanned the stream of traffic.

Then, suddenly, at the moment when the
sunshine went woolly in horizon haze, there it was: the long-
awaited license plate, a hundred yards away, its shining letters
filling up Sid's bulging eyes. BIG AL. NEW JERSEY. GARDEN
STATE.

Berman's neck locked and his haunches
quivered like a pointer's. He dove into the idling Jag just as the
target car passed by. Chop Parilla peeled onto the highway,
compressing him against his seat before his door was even
closed.

"Hot shit," Chop said. "Lexuses I like. Best
Jap car there is."

But tailing Alan Tuschman turned out to be
too easy to be fun. He was tired and he didn't know where he was
going. He crawled in the right lane the whole way down the
Boulevard, his brake lights flashing now and then for no apparent
reason.

At White Street, the boundary of Old Town, he
pulled into a gas station, not up to the pumps, but to the curb
next to the convenience store.

Thinking fast, Chop Parilla nosed the Jag
next to the air hose. Squid Berman, on the pretext of checking the
pressure in the tires, got out and crabbed along the warm and oily
ground. He stayed there, low, kowtowing, as Alan Tuschman unfolded
himself from his Lexus.

The tall man exited the car in stages. It
took a long time. Big feet and fibrous ankles touched down on the
pavement; a head of curly black hair dipped carefully beneath the
door frame. Then he rose and the middle parts filled in: muttonlike
thighs in snug black pants, a stretched thick torso that pulled at
the buttons of a purple shirt. Rippling neck sinews festooned with
gold; a strangler's veined and flexing hands, the furry fingers
bearing rings.

Squid Berman, his eyeballs almost on the
asphalt, looked steeply up and thought, Christ, he's huge.

Al Tuschman kicked one leg out, then the
other. Hitched his pants up, sailor-style, with his forearms. The
shih tzu jumped down from the car, sniffed around a moment, and
squatted underneath a fender.

Squid Berman slipped back into the Jag as the
furniture salesman, searching for a men's room, went into the
convenience store. Chop Parilla said, "Fucker looks really tough.
D'ya see the fuckin' wrists on the guy?"

Fear and excitement made moisture pool
beneath Squid Berman's tongue. Damply he said, "Ya don't get the
New York fish market lookin' like a wuss."

"Wuss?" Chop said, with a slightly nervous
laugh. "Hey, I asked around about this guy, shit he did to convince
Tony Eggs he's the guy to run the market."

"Like what?"

"Cut a deadbeat's nose off. Hand-fed it to
his dog."

Squid stared at the shih tzu. It didn't seem
the sort of creature that would eat pieces of a person's face, but
with animals you never knew.

" 'Nother guy," said Chop, "he had a problem
using Tony Eggs' trucks. Big Al shipped 'im back from Montauk
packed in ice between two tunas." He paused, had a sudden
misgiving. "Mighta been swordfish. He catches us, we're
fucked."

Squid hotly rubbed his hands together, yanked
on each of his thumbs. "He ain't gonna catch us. I brought
disguises."

Chop nodded absently, then turned his
attention toward the Lexus. "Lives in Jersey. Figures. Needs a
place to chill. Bet he has a huge house, big gate, doctors and
dentists all around. What a fuckin' world, huh?"

A moment passed. Dusk was deepening, the
lavender of sunset being elbowed aside by the orange of
streetlamps. Squid stared off at the shih tzu, who was
investigating shallow pools of transmission fluid, windshield
detergent. Then he said, "Hey, wait a second. Didn't you tell me
the guy was little and the dog was big?"

Parilla scratched his stomach. Detail was not
his long suit except when it came to cars, and he didn't like
admitting that maybe he was wrong. "Nah," he said, gesturing
vaguely. "The dog is little. The guy is big."

Al Tuschman appeared once again in the
doorway of the store. His shoulders blocked the light and he
towered above a clerk who was gesturing directions. Squid quibbled,
"I coulda swore you said—" Chop Parilla cut him off, slipping the
Jag into gear as his quarry moved back toward the Lexus. "Squid,
hey— can ya argue with a license plate?"

Big Al Marracotta, fortunate and lusty, had
arrived in time to stash his queasy rottweiler in the Conch House
kennel, to lose his Lincoln in the hotel's dark garage, then to
enjoy the sunset from the rooftop bar, seven stories above the
middle of Duval Street.

He and Katy sipped champagne and nibbled the
obligatory fritters as a lounge pianist labored bravely, and the
sun was doused in the pan-flat water out behind Tank Island. Al was
happy. Key West. The air felt great and there were cocktail
waitresses in fishnet hose, and some of them were female. New York
was far enough away that he could forget about the headaches, the
arguments, and remember only the good things. Rolling trucks. Tons
of ice. Lobsters, crabs, and money. Seafood was a beautiful
commodity. Delicious and perishable. Like life itself, but more
so.

Al had timing. He was draining the last of
the bubbly as the last of the red leached out of the clouds,
leaving behind a blanket of slate gray. Without lowering his
upturned flute, still hoping that a final drop might sizzle on his
tongue, he said to his companion, "Nice, huh?"