by Sean Rowe
It was not like anything I had ever experienced, and I thought I’d lived quite a bit even before I got married. But living with her was something completely different, and it kept getting better. For me, anyway. For her, too, I had believed, right up until a couple of years before the end. Then I would see something in her eyes, like the shadow a jet casts crossing the sun on a sunny day, startling and then gone. I was pretty sure I knew what it was.
FONTANA THOUGHT he had my number, but he was way off target. I lay in my own bed later that night and tried to remember what he had said the other day, something about going your whole life not knowing if you’re a coward. My experience was, it just didn’t come up. It was something people in movies thought about. Maybe he was saying that it ought to come up, that everything was watered down nowadays. It didn’t matter. That didn’t matter, and neither did some credit-card bills. Getting fired was a bit more of a problem. So was a black box the size of a cigarette pack with my fingerprints all over it. But even that seemed a long way off, music in another room.
I looked at the ceiling, the shadows there. The more I thought about it, the more I knew what the real problem was and didn’t want to face it. It was so stupid, so much smaller than I wanted it to be: I was bored. Bored, and I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t been. I could leave, just get some things in a bag and drive away, go north, then west. Yes, it was unrealistic. But at this point, what was realistic?
After a while light started coming through the blinds. I got up and waited in the street until a cab came along, then rode across the causeway into downtown Miami and found a pay phone in the lobby of the Everglades Hotel.
Fontana answered after five rings. I heard a woman’s voice in the background sounding sleepy and pissed off.
“You know who this is?”
“It’s a little early, Matt.”
“Why don’t we get together sometime next week?”
There was a long pause. “Next week is too late. As in after the fact.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
I took a deep breath. “Tomorrow?”
“You mean today, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Where?”
“The Cardozo. One o’clock?”
“That’s fine. Please tell me you’re not calling me from your apartment.”
“No. My phone’s cut off.”
He laughed. “Of course it is.”
I had asked the cabbie to wait, but he didn’t. I went out on Biscayne Boulevard and walked until I found a Haitian guy asleep in the backseat of a yellow station wagon. I rousted him, and he yawned and got in the front and started driving.
When we hit the on-ramp to the causeway, I put the straw down in the Baggie and worked on it slow and easy. Pretty soon I had a nice, icy hum starting up in my sinuses. I caught the driver glancing in the rearview mirror. There was a moment when we held each other’s gaze, not saying anything. He had the radio locked on a station that was giving the news in Creole.
“You want some, you can have it,” I said.
After about five seconds he started slowing down, putting on his turn blinker.
The sun was coming up between the new high-rises on South Beach, throwing light on Government Cut. I was thinking maybe I would have the guy drop me next to Penrod’s, walk down on the beach and look at the water, maybe even go swimming.
Jesus, I thought, this is it. Fucking Fontana, back at it again.
PART TWO
WATER
7
THE TOURISTS WERE milling around on Mallory Pier, drinking rumrunners and watching the trained cats jump through flaming hoops, the guy who could juggle chain saws and get out of straitjackets, everyone waiting to see the sunset. It was going to be a disappointment because a big cloud bank reached all the way across the sky off Key West.
Three days had passed since the freighter blew up and sank in the Miami ship channel, and now we were four hours south of there, sitting in deck chairs on the back of Fontana’s cabin cruiser, the Ya-Ya, at anchor in the lee of Christmas Tree Island. Fontana leaned forward to study the newsletter the cabin stewards slipped under the stateroom doors aboard the Norwegian Empress. The Empress herself lay a mile to the south, across Key West Harbor and just beyond the tourists, tied up in her berth behind the Truman Annex.
“It’s like something out of The Twilight Zone,” Bryant said, talking about the floor show on the cruise ship. “Old Broadway shit, they don’t even sing the songs all the way through. There’s this Bahamian guy who plays the steel drums from ten in the morning till suppertime and then guess what? He puts on a tux and does this tap routine. I wanted to cap his ass right there. I mean it was degrading, man.”
“Fuck you, Kunta Kinte,” Kip said. “It was fun. They had a comedian later on, you didn’t even see him. Tomorrow night it’s Max the Magician.”
Krystal was on the bow with a Walkman, tanning her backside in a thong bikini. For ten minutes Kip had been sitting on the gunwale wearing a rubber monster mask, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The mask, the way Kip kept lifting it up and blowing his nose one nostril at a time over the side of the boat, it was starting to get to me.
“You expect me to work with this retard?” Bryant now, giving Kip the glare, talking to Fontana.
Fontana kept looking at the newsletter. “How many people in the casino?”
“It’s not a gambling crowd,” Bryant said. He folded his arms across his chest. “About eighty at any one time. The dealers couldn’t get jobs mopping floors in Vegas. There’s one guy was in there at the blackjack table counting cards all night, they just kept comping him drinks.”
Kip said, “Three hundred in the Neptune Lounge watching the shows. Another sixty in the bars. Everyone else crashes by eleven.”
“How many skeet guns?” I asked just to see if they’d paid attention.
“Six, Mr. Security Chief.” Kip pulled a yellow shotgun cartridge out of the pocket of his shorts and threw it at Bryant’s head. It missed and bounced off the cabin doorway. “Twenty-gauge Remingtons with bird shot. The purser locks ’em up in a deck box around five thirty with all the ammo. You should see this one fat guy. He shoots from the hip and nails those birds every freakin’ time. He’s some kind of retired doctor from Kansas.”
“That’s impressive to you, isn’t it?” Bryant said, bending down to pick up the shotgun cartridge. “I guess when you grow up in a trailer eating possum stew and MoonPies, that sort of thing is a big thrill, right? A fat man on a cruise ship who’s adept at shooting clay pigeons?”
“Yeah,” said Kip. “It’s sort of like, for you, getting fucked up the ass by a big Cuban prison guard. I wish I could’ve seen the look on your Black Panther face getting off that Seven Forty-Seven in Havana. Did you think ol’ Fidel was going to give you a cigar, maybe have you make a speech or something? You and your Afro?”
I wondered why Fontana wasn’t saying anything. What was strange, I got the feeling Bryant and Kip were getting along just fine. Bryant: never caught, never locked up since his stint in a Cuban jail in the late seventies; a Marxist hothead and onetime airline hijacker turned top-notch armored-car heister. I knew exactly one thing about armored cars, the only thing worth knowing: there’s absolutely no way to jack one without being prepared to kill somebody; no bluffing, no hesitation. From what Fontana said, Bryant had antifreeze for blood, and three murder warrants on him in three different states. Kip: a stone killer with more trigger time under his belt than a Ranger platoon; I doubted his diastolic blood pressure hit ninety even when he was pulling out someone’s windpipe in a Central American shithole fifty miles from anywhere with plumbing.
Bryant threw the cartridge in the water. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “This mercenary rep we’ve all heard about, you ever fight for something you believe in? You got any beliefs at all? I’d like to hear one actual idea you ever had. Go ahead.”
“OK,” said Kip,
adjusting his mask. “Topless mermaids.”
“That’s your idea, huh?”
“That’s it.”
“You want to expand on that, make yourself intelligible?”
“Krystal used to work at Weeki Wachee Spring,” Kip said. “Our plan is to start a mermaid show down here, but with more skin. We’re thinking of South Beach, maybe have some mermen jump in the tank with the girls, bring in the butt-pirate crowd.”
“You going to let my homies look at your mermaids? You got any bootylicious sisters lined up to do some swimmin’? I bet you don’t.”
“You’re right, we don’t. And to answer your first question, anyone will be welcome at Wet Dreams, irregardless of their racial persuasion. Coons included. Just not ex-Commie hijacker coons.”
We had been out to Stock Island the night before to look at Kip’s lobster boat. The Dumpster was chained to the deck and covered with a plastic tarp. We stood around and smoked cigarettes, and that was that. At seven thirty this morning, Saturday, Fontana and I had met the Empress as she worked her bow and stern thrusters and settled into her berth behind the Truman Annex and began off-loading old ladies and honeymooners with fresh sunburns. Bryant had come down the gangway in his Dirty Harry Ray-Bans, followed by Kip and Krystal in Panama hats and matching Hawaiian shirts. As we were walking down a side street, Fontana passed out and fell on a café table where a pair of twinks were having Bloody Marys. He was out for only a minute, and when he came to, he said it was some medication he was taking. The twinks looked like they’d been up all night and didn’t mind people passing out on their table, like it happened all the time.
Before the Empress left Miami on Friday afternoon, I had gone on board and put a paper sack with a pair of SIG-Sauers and flash suppressors inside one of the fire-hose cabinets on the promenade deck. Kip and Bryant and Krystal checked on the guns while they rode the ship from Miami down to Key West. There was nothing more to say without repeating ourselves, but that’s not the way Fontana saw it. He kept asking about the layout, where people spent the most time. Except for planting the pistols, I hadn’t done anything. We were just hanging out in Key West for the weekend, fishing buddies on a fishing boat.
I was learning things about my fishing buddies. Manny had hooked up with Krystal years ago to take down traveling diamond merchants in lonely hotel rooms across the Midwest. The only pull he’d done lasted three years because he wouldn’t roll on her, and I could understand why. When she was still a high-school cheerleader and aspiring cosmetologist, Krystal had spent one summer vacation tracking down her own rapists, a pair of Outlaw bikers from Winnipeg. When she found them, she served them a special dinner: their own balls, in a homemade marinara sauce.
How it stood: the Empress would stay to let everyone get drunk on Duval Street and go see Ernest Hemingway’s house and Mel Fisher’s Treasure Museum, then it would leave for Havana tonight, which happened to be Halloween.
“I remember back in the seventies you could go down there and roll a doob and really watch the sunset,” Fontana said, looking across the harbor at the crowd on the pier. “I’m surprised no one’s started charging admission.”
“They have,” I said. “Some crackhead got arrested last week for selling tickets. It was in the paper.”
No one said anything, so I added, “Back in the seventies they didn’t have the guy with the house cats. This French guy. He’s got a whip like a lion tamer.”
“You can’t make a cat do shit,” Bryant said.
“That’s what I thought, but he does. He has to keep running over and popping them on the head with his knuckle. One of ’em does flips. There’s another one that walks a tightrope.”
“The thing about cats I always wondered,” said Fontana, “they’ve got this fur coat that covers their whole body, so how did God know exactly where to cut holes for the eyes?”
Bryant stopped digging in the ice chest. “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. It makes you sound imbalanced.” He was looking around for a bottle opener until he realized the beer in his hand was a twist-off.
“Tell me about the engine room,” said Fontana, back again. He shook a couple of Percocets out of a prescription bottle just as the sun slipped under the cloud bank and disappeared below the horizon. The tourists clapped.
8
WHILE WE SAT around on the Ya-Ya, Manny was anchored on the edge of the Marquesas, thirty miles from Key West. He was out there alone in Kip’s lobster boat thinking up a seven-letter word for “noted Bolshevik,” working on one of his crossword puzzles; that, or he was long gone, getting on a plane bound for New York, Bogotá, anywhere. Fontana didn’t seem worried, though. He had something heavy on the guy, something to really make him jump.
Manny ran a car dealership in Coral Gables, used Mercedes and Jags, other high-end stuff. In between being an accountant and a diamond thief, he had run around the Keys in a lot of loaded-down speedboats, so he got stuck with lobster duty. The plan was to meet him in the Marquesas, anchor Fontana’s cabin cruiser for a few hours, and head out from there in the lobster boat. Manny’s job would be to stay with the Ya-Ya until we were ready for him to pick us up at sea.
It was time for Kip and Krystal and Bryant to get back on board the Empress. I watched Fontana get in the dinghy with them and head for Key West Bight, and then I lay down on one of the quarter berths in the salon and dozed. In a dream I saw my wife in moonlight, walking into the surf on Bimini. When she turned around and started back from the sea, something dark was behind her that seemed like a storm cloud at first but then came closer and moved like something alive. I was running down the beach as fast as I could run, but the dark thing drew her farther into the water. She was smiling even while it happened, and I was running in deep sand, screaming as she moved away from me into darkness. Then I was drowning, and then I was waking up.
I came to hearing a motor pass by. It was almost nine thirty. Fontana had been gone an hour and a half.
I sat up and put my feet on the teak cabin sole and tried to think. The thing for me to do was get out of here now while everything was still a joke. There was a water taxi that picked people up from boats and took them to shore, and in a minute I would hail it on the radio. There was probably a number to call, but I didn’t see my cell phone anywhere in the salon.
The town was starting to get wild. Outside, from the stern, I could hear two bands playing. Hundreds of people were on the pier across the harbor. Three guys were throwing a football around, until one of them missed a pass, and the football landed in the water.
I opened the cooler and grabbed a cold one and stood there remembering a night thirty years ago when Jack and I had gone over the mountains in our patched-together uniforms to play a school rich enough to have lights on its football field. The game was one we didn’t have a prayer of winning. In my memory Jack stumbled backward, his thumb broken and one eye swollen shut from a lineman’s cleat, and let loose a sixty-yard Hail Mary. The football had spiraled through electric night, and time slowed down and nearly stopped as my hands reached up to draw in the world and connect with him, against the odds. The clock ran dry and made us champions. And the next night: me and Jack tearing up Ironton with a pair of hardscrabble blondes, twin sisters from a hollow even farther out Coal Haul Road than our own, the whole town buying us drinks. In the last and roughest tavern, I had got up to take a leak and come back to an empty table. Jack was gone, along with the sisters, and later he would tell me about his big night in the backseat with both of them. Our father—Jack’s father, my stepfather—sat on the porch steps and smoked his pipe the next morning while Jack and I beat each other bloody in the yard. The skirmish was an even draw, like always: I was bigger; Jack was that much meaner. And limping back from the creek, the two of us side by side but ten yards apart, I had to laugh, and I laughed now. It was just how he was. I’d accepted it long ago.
Fontana was the trickster, the jack-in-the-box, the carnival barker who slipped beneath a corner of the tent and doub
led as the lion tamer. He was an undercover movie mogul whose cast and crew and audience were everyone he met on any given day. What brought us to Key West was just another episode for him, his latest act. But not for me. This wasn’t a card trick or a football game or some dick-measuring contest for a pair of back-country blondes with straight razors in their purses. This was real.
In particular, the endgame bothered me. Fontana said he’d arranged for bail money, $50,000 apiece, with the idea that we would almost certainly get stopped and questioned after we hit the Empress and made a getaway. But what if that wasn’t enough? What if things got complicated?
Fontana was going to get us killed. I was insane for being here. As soon as he got back, I would take the dinghy and head for shore.
That was it then. It was settled. What I’d been thinking two days ago was just late-night excitement, the coke doing the thinking for me. It was moon-madness, nothing more.
But I did owe him, that was the thing.
I got another beer and went inside. In the head I found some suntan lotion and untied the drawstring on my shorts. I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to look in the mirror and tried to hold on an image of Krystal with her Walkman, asleep in sunlight. Just when I was going with it, I remembered how one of her legs was much thinner than the other, and pretty soon instead of Krystal, I was thinking of Julia Bonnell. I was seeing her at the Delano in the shadows by the pool, and at first I had the coolness of the air next to the pool and her there, just her smiling. But seeing her made me hear her, too. Words came with the images now, and I was losing it. I noticed that I couldn’t bring back parts of how she looked, even though I had seen her two days ago. I was pretty sure I was never going to see her again.
I was hearing the sound of my cell phone going off, and then I was grabbing for a towel, pushing open the door of the little bathroom compartment. I found the phone behind the weatherfax and mashed the talk button.
