Tropical Depression

by Laurence Shames

  "I'm sure you're mistaken," LaRue said pleasantly.

  Tommy licked his lips and stared at Murray. That bitter thing was making his eyeballs throb like boils.

  Murray said, "Listen, Barney—"

  But the congeniality of the poker table was history now, and the politician interrupted. "I'd appreciate it if you'd call me senator."

  "Senator," said Murray, and in the next heartbeat wished he hadn't given in and said it. The concession made him mad, and now he was ready to talk tough. But talking tough takes practice and Murray found that he was no damn good at it at all. "These threats, this pressure," he fumbled. "Tommy and me, we're not looking to make trouble, but what's been happening to us, if it gets out, the publicity—"

  "Ah," said Senator LaRue. "The publicity. Yes, that is a matter of concern."

  Murray stalled, nonplussed. He hadn't expected it to be so easy. "Awright, then. So what we want—" "What concerns me," the senator said, in a voice that triumphed not by volume but by suavity, "is Tommy's image."

  There was a pause. In the garden, palm fronds scratched, hibiscus leaves shook and blurred the shadows that dappled the office's pale wood floor.

  "Ethnic stereotypes," the senator went on. "Nasty things. Hateful. And I would hate to have it said that Tommy here, an emblem of Native Americans everywhere, got so stinking drunk on such an important occasion that he started imagining—"

  "You son of a bitch," said Tommy.

  "You were drinking heavily," said LaRue. "Forty people saw you drinking heavily. Forty people, some of the most respected people in this community, saw you stagger out without so much as a thank you or a goodbye. It wasn't very gracious, Tommy. I wouldn't think you'd want it in the papers."

  The Indian flushed dark as brick, the whites of his popping eyes had turned an acid yellow.

  LaRue folded his hands, composed his thin and bloodless mouth, summoned back his wallpaper smile. "And while we're on the subject of your island," he calmly said, "there's something you should be aware of, just in case you're not. You own the land, but the state owns right up to the shoreline. Place isn't worth much if people can't get there. People can't get there unless you dredge a channel. You can't dredge a channel without a special exception from the state. Think about that, Tommy, when you're calling people names ... Now, is there anything else I can help you with?"

  26

  Out on the sidewalk, Murray, who never tired of telling people that before moving to Key West he'd been the most moderate of drinkers, said, "I need a drink."

  It was around eleven-thirty in the morning. Tommy said nothing, just climbed on his bike and led the way crosstown. They rode through tunnels of bare-limbed poincianas waiting out the spring for a yet-higher sun to bring them into season; they rode past the first frangipanis springing weirdly into bloom, fragrant waxy flowers being dreamed by scaly, leafless stalks.

  At length they came to the Eclipse saloon. It was a low and charmless building with a big wood door on which was tacked a 1950's sign that showed a penguin on an ice floe and claimed that it was cool inside. The interior was dim and smelled of washrags. The place never closed; between four and eight a.m. no liquor could be served, hard-core patrons dozed or ate soft-boiled eggs. Now, in the lull before the lunch rush, a few of these pickled regulars leaned over the bar in postures that knew no time of day. Waitresses were filling saltshakers and ketchup bottles, a janitor was mopping the scuffed threshold to the kitchen.

  Murray slid onto a stool and ordered up a bourbon.

  Tommy asked for club soda.

  "Club soda?" the Bra King said.

  "That son of a bitch," said the Indian.

  The drinks arrived. The brown stuff in Murray's glass embarrassed him somewhat, but that didn't stop him from sipping it while he waited for his head to clear and his blood pressure to subside. Air-conditioning tickled his back; people started straggling in for lunch.

  Finally he shook his head and said, "I don't know how ya fight these bastards."

  Tommy was sucking lime. "Ya fight them by making yourself very small, so small that no one bothers to take a swat at ya."

  "I fucked that up for you."

  "I never said that."

  The Bra King put his bourbon to his lips, didn't in that moment like the taste of it. "Ya hungry?"

  "Not really."

  "Me neither. Let's have a nosh."

  "Knosh? I had one of those once, in Miami."

  "That's knish. Nosh is, ya know, a snack, a nibble."

  They ordered some conch fritters, and while they were waiting for them, Tommy said, "Murray, can I ask you something? You and Franny, what's the story?"

  Murray rattled his drink then blurted out, "I'm still in love with her." He paused, wondered if his own forthrightness would rise up to abash him. To his surprise, it didn't, so he carried on.

  "Last time I went crazy, I guess it was about the time I started noticing gray hairs clogging up the shower drain, I dumped her for a brainless model with perfect tits. We divorced, she moved to Florida. Within a year, I was absolutely miserable, I felt like I'd gnawed off my own arm, plucked out my internal organs. Franny, meantime, she'd figured out that being rid of me was the greatest thing that ever happened. She realized what a pain innee ass I'd been all those years."

  "Lemme understand this," Tommy said. "You dumped her. She thinks you're a pain innee ass. And now you think she's gonna take you back?"

  "I think I got a shot."

  The Indian looked down at his soda, stirred the shrinking ice cubes with a swizzle stick.

  "The way I look at it," the Bra King went on, "when she was with me, she didn't realize she'd be better off without me, and I knew she didn't realize it, and this made me feel I could act like a schmuck and get away with it. But now that she knows she's better off without me, I think she understands that if I don't act like a schmuck no more, we're really better off together. Does that make sense to you?"

  The Indian said no.

  "We're mates," said Murray. "Better or worse, we're mates. Franny, I'm not sure she sees it that way. But lemme put it like this—"

  But before he could get started, the conch fritters arrived. The Bra King, who was not hungry, picked one up immediately. Hot grease burned his hand, he put the fritter down again, licked his smarting fingers.

  He still had his fingers in his mouth when the Eclipse's door swung open, a quick rude rectangle of brightness swept across the murky room, and Arty Magnus, the gangly reporter and city editor for the Key West Sentinel, came in for lunch.

  The two friends saw the journalist before the journalist saw them. "I think we gotta talk to him," said Tommy.

  "LaRue," said Murray. "His clout. It could get really ugly."

  Tommy flashed a wry and bitter look through the bubbles of his soda. "It's ugly already." He waved to the skinny writer.

  Magnus squinted through the dimness and uncertainly approached. When his eyes adjusted and he could see who he was walking toward, he gave an affable hello. Then he asked if he could join them.

  "I was hoping you would," said Tommy. "I think it's time we had a talk about some of the putrid bullshit that goes on in this town."

  The journalist hadn't even got onto his seat yet. "You get right to the point," he said.

  "Indians tend to be very direct. That's why there's so few of us left. What can ya tell me about Barney LaRue?"

  The bartender came over, gave Arty the kind of hello reserved for steady customers who knew how to behave. Arty ordered a beer and a fish sandwich. The Eclipse's fish sandwich, like that of every other Key West restaurant, claimed to be the best in town and renowned throughout the world.

  "LaRue," said Magnus, turning back toward Tommy and Murray. "Old Florida family. Or as old as Florida families get. Great-grandfather made big money, did land deals, swamp drainage, your basic visionary fraud. Granddad was a banker type, dull, talked in capitalist proverbs. Father rebelled, pissed away the fortune, screwed everything that walked, drowned
falling shitface off a yacht with his pants around his ankles. Y'ever try swimming with your pants around your ankles?"

  The reporter's beer arrived. He took a swig, wiped foam from his upper lip. "As for Barney, nobody really knows why he picked politics. Some people think it was to redeem the family name, erase the memory of his old man's buffoonery. Personally, I think it was to raise the buffoonery to a whole new level."

  "What kind of senator's he been?" asked Murray.

  "The kind that gets reelected. Hawkish on Cuba. Pro-development while pretending not to be. Doesn't waste tax dollars on poor people."

  "Corrupt?"

  "Of course corrupt. But not for the money itself, I think. Corruption for sport. Theft as pornography."

  Tommy Tarpon finished his soda, wiggled his glass to signal for another. "Did you know he's tied in to the Mafia?"

  In his checkered life as journalist and writer, Arty Magnus himself had had some contact, strictly legal, with the Mob. He got a little cagey. "I've heard rumors. I'm not sure I buy them."

  "Do you know who Charlie Ponte is?" asked Tommy.

  The newspaperman just nodded.

  "Did you know he was at LaRue's cocktail party the other night?"

  At this, Magnus could not squelch a somewhat unprofessional look of genuine surprise. Tommy told him about the meeting in the study, Ponte's generous offer to build him a casino.

  The reporter shook his head. "Barney's got chutzpah, give him that. And you were at this meeting, Murray?"

  The Bra King admitted that he wasn't.

  "Anyone else see Ponte there?"

  "You didn't," Tommy said. "Why would anyone else?"

  The journalist remembered his half-eaten lunch, went back to it.

  Tommy said, "Then he sank my house."

  "He what?"

  The Indian explained.

  "Any witnesses?"

  "No."

  "And then his gorilla attacked me with a sno-cone," Murray said, "and hit me with a block of ice and drove off in a Lincoln."

  "Did you get the tag number?"

  Sadly, the Bra King shook his head.

  Magnus ate his sandwich. The sandwich was just getting to the stage where the last piece of the fish fillet always slid out of the frayed and cockeyed roll. Thinking aloud, the reporter said, "If I try and print this—"

  "If you try and print it," Tommy interrupted, "LaRue and his friends are gonna tell you I'm a no- good drunk who sees things that aren't there and is a blot on the reputation of Indians everywhere."

  Fish slid out the bottom of the roll, it landed on the pickle. "Are you?"

  "Am I what?"

  "A drunk."

  But now the Bra King was getting nervous. He was from New York, he knew from crappy newspapers, he could imagine a scandal that would do nothing but humiliate his friend. He hunkered low on his elbows and leaned in across Tommy. "We're off the record here, right?"

  "I never agreed to that," said Magnus.

  "Ya mean we're on the record?" Murray said.

  "I didn't say that either. Look, we're talking, well see what happens. I don't go off the record, it ties my hands too much."

  "So we're just supposed to trust you?" Murray said. "Why should we trust you?"

  The reporter picked up a french fry, pointed it at Murray. "You shouldn't," he said. "Nobody should ever trust a journalist. But sometimes people do. Don't ask me why."

  He sipped beer, seemed content to let things drop.

  Tommy scratched his head, then decided his neck itched, then his stomach, and he scratched those places too. "Look, I used to drink too much," he said. "Now I only drink a little."

  The journalist said, "Since when?"

  "Since I ordered this fuckin' club soda," Tommy said.

  There was a pause, bar noise flooded in to fill it. With the strange inhalation of restaurants at lunchtime, the Eclipse had gotten packed, its walls seemed to billow outward, it smelled of suntan lotion and cigarettes.

  Magnus ate a final french fry, pushed his plate away. "I don't know what to tell you guys," he said. "LaRue, I can't stand him. But the thinness of the facts, the lack of witnesses ..."

  Murray leaned across Tommy, his face was pointed downward toward the bar. There was bourbon on his breath and the beginnings of real fear in his voice. "Arty, I hear what you're saying, but lemme run this by you, give us, like, a reality check. LaRue and Ponte are in cahoots—do you agree with me so far?"

  "That's how it sounds," said the reporter.

  "And the things that have been happening to us," said Murray, "they've been like nuisance things, warnings."

  The journalist agreed.

  "And given who we're dealing with," the Bra King said, "it isn't gonna stop with nuisance things."

  "No," said Magnus. "If they're serious about persuading you, it isn't."

  "So whadda we gotta do?" the Bra King said. "We gotta sit and wait for something really bad to happen?"

  Arty wiped his mouth, dropped the napkin on his plate. "Listen," he said, "I'm sorry about this, I really am, but the way it works, when something bad happens, really bad, that's when they call it news."

  27

  Over the course of twenty-one years of marriage to Franny, Murray had formed a thousand little habits he didn't quite recognize as part of him; he'd invented, and been invented by, a thousand tiny rituals whose importance he never thought about, but which steered him through every hour of every day, and made his life his own and not some other life.

  One of these unconscious rituals involved the opening of doors.

  When Murray unlocked the door of his home— wherever his home had happened to be—he followed a procedure that was predictable as a sacrament and as crisply timed as music. He fished in his pocket for the key. Holding the knob in his left hand, he stabbed at the lock with his right. He waited for the crisp thunk of the bolt sliding free, then, precisely half a beat later, having taken precisely half a step into the room, he called out her name: Franny! The word always came out sounding exactly the same, though in Murray's throat it could feel a lot of different ways. On good days it was a bellow of triumph, on lousy days a crying out for comfort. But it was always an incantation, a sacred noise that kept foreign spirits from following him across the threshold, that separated home from outside world.

  Now he slid his key into the lock at the Paradiso penthouse.

  The power of ritual and dusty habit asserted itself over the power of change and loss. He waited exactly half a beat, took a half step through the doorway, and sang out, "Franny!"

  Nobody answered.

  With Tommy at his shoulder, the Bra King walked into the room, stopped in the middle of it and looked around at all four rented walls. He wasn't worried about Franny, he had no reason to be worried. It was only two o'clock, not even. Franny was looking at galleries. That was something she liked to do. So was shopping. So was going off on her own, chatting with strangers, exploring. She'd be home when she was ready to come home.

  Tommy went to the refrigerator, grabbed a mango and a pear. "I think I'm gonna go and sell some shells," he said.

  "Now?" the Bra King said. "So late in the day already?"

  Tommy shrugged. "No cash in my pocket. It bugs me. I'm restless."

  "Cash?" the Bra King said. "I'll give ya some cash."

  "Thanks," said Tommy. "But it's not the same. I like to see the tourists fork it over. I like to see how much it hurts them. I'll see ya later on."

  He went to his room, picked up the key to his cart, and left.

  As he was leaving, Murray had a thought that shamed him, that made him knock wood to undo it, to clear the slate. Tommy was going off alone, unprotected, on a bicycle, and Murray thought, if something bad is gonna happen, if it has to be that way, let it happen to Tommy, not to Franny. Tommy at least was tough, a pessimist, a stoic; Tommy was his friend but not his wife.

  Barely had Murray banished that thought when he was visited by another, even more unpleasant.

&nbs
p; Wait a second, it occurred to him, here I am, me, home alone, a sitting duck. Tommy they need; I'm the one that's standing in their way. Something bad happens, chances are I'm the one it'll happen to, and it would serve me right, God would punish me for thinking, even for a second, that it should happen to Tommy.

  He got up and double-locked the door.

  Then he thought, Schmuck! this is crazy, nothing bad is gonna happen, I shouldn't've had a drink with lunch, it's made me gloomy, paranoid.

  He found himself pacing. He told himself to calm down, he took deep breaths and held them in; the exercise made him slightly faint but no less jumpy. He opened the sliding glass doors to the balcony and stepped outside. He smelled the clement salty air, looked out at the peaceful greenery, the serene tableau of pool and putting green and tennis courts. Self-consciously, he smiled; finally he could feel his heartbeat slowing.

  But the next instant he was ambushed by an image of himself, plump, exposed, and slow, pinpointed in someone's crosshairs, targeted by a gunman hidden—where? Maybe behind the drawn curtains of Barney LaRue's penthouse, a straight shot across the quadrangle; maybe in a car with tinted windows cruising slowly past on A-1A.

  His pulse whooshing in his ears, the Bra King dove back into the living room, drew the curtains closed behind him.

  He paced some more. Absently, he wandered into Franny's room; through his fear he felt a guilty fascination as he spied upon her neatened bed, her plumped pillow, her herbal cures in brown glass bottles on the nightstand. Her suitcase was open on the floor; Murray felt a lunatic impulse to kneel before it and bury his face in her folded clothes.

  Then he thought, My God, I'm fifty-three years old and I'm still sneaking peeks at women's panty drawers. Mortified, he lumbered from the room.

  He went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, gulped some juice straight from the bottle. He thought of taking a good hot bath—yes, that would relax him—but the thought of being murdered in the tub, trapped and naked, his laid-open organs soaking like a brisket in the gray and soapy water, was too appalling.

  The phone rang.

  Murray flinched but then felt joy. He knew it would be Franny, saying she was still downtown, she didn't know where the time went, she was coming home. He moved quickly to the sofa with the nautical stripe, grabbed the handset, said hello.