A couple of hours later the whole gang, both contingents of us, assembled at the Schooner Wharf, a splendid waterfront bar roughly between our two sites.
We were home at last. And already beginning to realize it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Hip Square
“People who are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.”
—J. Danforth Quayle
“BOY,” I TOLD DOUBLE
Bill, “I can’t help thinking this bar right here would be a hard one to beat.”
The Schooner Wharf was (and still is) an open-air oasis overlooking Lands End Marina, an agreeable boat basin packed with ships of all kinds, including one custom houseboat that fit my personal mental image of Travis McGee’s Busted Flush. The bar itself was a mahogany racetrack oval with a roof overhead to keep the sun and rain and seagull shit off, and three bartenders dressed as shipwreck victims were working very hard in there. An adjacent shack produced decent finger food and housed supplies and washrooms. There were plenty of tables around, shaded by huge folding umbrellas advertising exotic beers, and there was a covered stage nearby, empty now, but piled with equipment that suggested a blues band would be playing there that night. Looking around me, I saw as many obvious Conchs as obvious tourists—a hard trick to pull off. Neither group seemed to even notice the arrival of a hundred more people who knew each other. The air was full of happy laughter, and canned music that alternated between island music and blues, and the scents of beer and oysters and fried food and rum and drinks involving citrus fruits.
“It’s in the top ten,” Bill2 agreed. “But I have a few spots in mind I’ll show you tomorrow. Not on the water, of course, the kind of money you’re talking.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I like ocean—but I don’t completely trust it.”
“Smart.”
Doc Webster’s familiar booming voice was heard then, and a pleasure it was to be hearing it again. “All right, everyone who came here with Jake, the Mary’s Place gang—can I have your attention a minute?”
Like all of us, I turned in my chair and gave him my attention. I assumed some kind of toast was coming, and wondered where we were supposed to smash our plastic cups when we were done.
Beside the Doc stood a striking woman, striking even in this context. She was a mix of some kind of Asian and something else, I guessed black. There are no ugly interracial children, and she brought up the average. I estimated her age at about thirty, give or take. Petite and slender but not frail, and definitely female. She was showing a lot less skin than most of the women present, but she didn’t need to. If you’d seen her go by wearing a chador, she’d have caught your attention. Amazing pale eyes. She wore a lovely low-cut lime green dress with tasteful diamond cutaways at the waist, a matching hairband, a matching purse slung over her left shoulder, and brown low-heeled sandals. She seemed just a little nonplussed at having accidentally strayed into the midst of such a huge group of pale strangers, just as the speeches were about to begin, but she hid it well, I thought. There was something odd about the strap of her purse, where it crossed over her shoulder; my first stoned impression was, four brown bullets in a bandolier. I looked closer.
They were Doc Webster’s fingertips. He had his arm around her.
“—wanted to wait until I had all of you together,” he was declaiming, “so I’d only have to say this once.”
Even the other customers were listening now.
“Now, nobody’s asking you for a quick decision or anything,” he went on. “I know you all just got here, and you’re all disoriented and tired, okay? And I know you’ve all got a lot to think about already, and it’s damn near impossible to think about anything your first week in Key West, I can testify to that—” Rousing cheer from the locals. “—but I feel a certain urgency about this matter, and I figure the sooner you start to at least consider—”
The woman turned her head and looked at him, and he stopped speaking.
A silent shockwave went through our group. None of us had ever seen, or ever expected to see, Doc Webster cut off in midsentence.
“Right,” he said to her, and then to all of us again, “Uh, folks, this is Mei-Ling. She…uh…”
Doc Webster at a loss for words? That was it: anything was possible.
The moment I heard her clear strong contralto voice I had to abandon a perfectly rotten pun I’d been hatching: if she’d been a recent immigrant, I could have done something with Webster’s new American. But her accent made it immediately clear she’d been raised in the States, possibly even in New York. I was so busy mourning the lost opportunity, I almost missed what she said.
“Sam says you people are the ones I have to ask for his hand in marriage,” she announced.
There, you see? Anything.
She might as well have set off a grenade. No, a grenade wouldn’t have startled us nearly as much, most of us were immune to them. We gaped at her, in dead silence, for what seemed like an eternity. She stared back at us with her jaw firmly clamped and her face as expressionless as she could make it.
And then she lost it, and laughed in our faces.
We all broke up too. So therefore did all the eavesdropping locals and tourists, and the bartenders started up a round of applause that soon swept us all.
The Doc and Mei-Ling stood at the center of it, and as we all saw how they looked at each other, the applause swelled to the point where they probably heard us back in Key Largo, a hundred miles to the east.
When it finally wound down, Mei-Ling murmured in the Doc’s ear, and he pointed me out. She took him by the hand and marched directly up to me, looked me in the eye, and smiled. “Hi, Jake,” she said.
“Hi, Mei-Ling,” I said. “This is my wife Zoey, and our daughter Erin.”
She nodded at each one. “Zoey. Erin. I’m pleased to meet you both. Welcome to Key West.” She turned back to me. “Well?”
I stared at her, and blinked a lot.
“How soon can I have an answer?” she persisted. “I want to nail him down before he can change his mind.”
I looked to the Doc. “I’m the Dad, am I?”
He raised one eyebrow and shrugged. “That’s about the size of it, son. You speak for the group, everybody knows that.”
I glanced at Zoey. She too lifted one eyebrow—the other one—and shrugged.
So I turned back to Mei-Ling and looked her up and down, as politely as that can be done. Now that she was up close, I could see that the red trim at the bodice of her dress was actually little red letters, spelling out the words “Mei-Ling, Duval Street,” across her chest. There was a certain natural tendency to keep exploring the area, but I pulled my eyes back up to hers.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked her.
“Is anyone?” she asked me.
Good point. “Uh…can you cook?”
“That’s what the cabdrivers all say,” she said, pokerfaced.
I was beginning to like her. “And you fully understand that Sam is the only retired doctor in Florida who isn’t rich.” Doc’s hospital on Long Island, Smithtown General, had been blessed with an anonymous benefactor who sent in regular donations for over thirty years—right up until the month the Doc retired and left the state.
She nodded. “Not a problem. I am.”
Mild alarm bells were starting to go off. She was beautiful, smart, quick, twenty to thirty years younger than the Doc, and rich? And anxious to nail him down? You didn’t often meet either rich people or beautiful people who were wise enough to cherish a man like Doc that much.
But what else could she be after? He didn’t have anything to steal, except his time and company. Her Long Island accent and Americanized manner said this could not be some kind of immigration scam. He no longer had any drug access. Even fifty pounds lighter, he was not Adonis.
Well, there was one good way I could think of to test true love.
“And you have
been properly warned? He has fully and freely disclosed to you the nature and extent of his…behavior, and you understand that he is powerless to change?”
She glanced at Doc, looked back to me, and lifted an eyebrow inquiringly.
I leaned closer and lowered my voice discreetly. “He makes puns,” I explained.
She rolled her eyes. “Tell me about it. That’s how we met.”
I nodded. “Typical. Sad case, really.”
“We passed each other on the street one night, and I had this dress on, and three steps past me he turned on his heel and bellowed, ‘I get it!’ So naturally I turned around, and he pointed at these—” She indicated the letters that ran along the top of her bodice. “—and said, ‘That’s your Mei-Ling Ad Dress you’re wearing! Have I cracked its unZip Code?’ Well, he was the first one who’d ever got it, so what could I do? I took him home and put him on my Mei-Ling List.”
Light began to dawn. “You like puns.”
She nodded. “I used to work for someone who cherished them; she corrupted me, and I’ve never been able to kick.”
Now their relationship began to make sense to me. Doc Webster is the finest improvisational punster it has ever been my misfortune to try and compete with, certainly the best that ever walked into either Callahan’s or Mary’s Place. Olympic class, in other words. They wanted to put him into Guinness, once, but he politely explained that he’d rather put Guinness into him. (Stout fellow.) If Mei-Ling was one of those poor perverts, like myself, who actually enjoyed horrid puns, she had certainly found the fatherlode.
What he saw in her, of course, I could not guess.
Zoey spoke up. “What do you do, Mei-Ling?” she asked politely.
Mei-Ling smiled warmly at her. “I’m a hooker.”
“Oh, what a coincidence!” Zoey said. “Four of our group are hookers, too; you’ll have to—well, look at this: here they are now.”
“Hi, Mei,” said four voices at once.
Mei-Ling’s eyes went wide with shock and joy. “Mo! Professor! Arethusa! Joe! Oh, this is wonderful. I didn’t know you were with this bunch, I never saw you—Sam, why didn’t you tell me?” The five of them embraced at once.
“I didn’t know you knew them,” the Doc explained to the air, and perhaps to me.
“Oh, it’s been so long—”
The penny was just beginning to drop. “Mei-Ling—you used to work at Lady Sally’s House?” I asked.
“Too long ago,” she agreed, returning to the Doc’s side. “I had to leave a few years before the Lady closed down, and I’ve always regretted it.”
That explained why I’d never seen her there. I knew I’d have remembered her if I had. Lady Sally’s House—closed these fifteen years now, more’s the pity—had once been the finest brothel in the eastern United States, run by Mike Callahan’s wife, Lady Sally McGee. It was where I had met Doc Webster myself in the first place.
“Us too,” Maureen said. “Mei was solid, Jake—we could have used her, there at the blow-off.” I said nothing; from what I hear, they could have used a Ghurka division that day. “Mei, did you really manage to bag Sam?”
Mei-Ling looked around. “Well, from the general reaction, I’d say I’ve got a shot. This was his last excuse. Nobody’s said ‘no’ so far.” She was looking at me as she said the last sentence.
“Forget it,” Arethusa told her. “You’re in. If anybody does object, we’ll make ’em go back to Long Island.” She seemed to be looking at me, too. “This girl is something special, Jake. Everybody at Sally’s took a crack at Sam, at one time or another. Mei-Ling’s the first one of us who ever set the hook.” She turned back to Mei-Ling. “And I’m dying to hear all the details.”
Mei-Ling said nothing, kept looking at me.
It suddenly came to me that in all the years I had known Sam Webster, it had never once occurred to me to wonder how he was in the sack.
“Hey,” I said, “the issue is settled. Mei-Ling, if you’re good enough to work for Lady Sally, you’re good enough to marry our Doc. Bless you, my children—may you be as happy together as Zoey and me.”
The cheer started out local—then Maureen turned and announced, “It’s a done deal,” and the whole place went up. Tourists from Dortmund, Singapore, and Johannesburg began competing to buy drinks for the wedding party, loosely defined as all of us gathered around the Doc and Mei-Ling, which over time became all of us, and we might still be there swilling down free piña coladas if Tom Hauptman hadn’t noticed that the sun was going down.
He got us organized, and Doc and Double Bill led the way. Maybe a quarter of the Schooner Wharf’s other patrons tagged along with us. As we turned onto Caroline Street and started heading west, I saw lots of people heading in the same direction, some ambling and some in a hurry. I felt a tug at my short sleeve, and looked over to see Double Bill offering me a smoldering spliff. I did the indescribable eyes-and-face dance that means, Is this really cool? and he smiled. “It’s not considered polite to do it in the Square itself. Making a cop ignore a crime while geeks from Milwaukee are pointing camcorders at him would be, like, inconsiderate, you know?”
I could see the logic—it was the concept of having cops it was worth being considerate of that boggled my mind just a little bit. But not enough to keep me from helping him destroy the evidence before we accidentally embarrassed a policeman. The six-block walk seemed to take a long time. I didn’t mind. I was at the head of a company of glory, marching to the sea to pay it our respects.
Nonetheless we got to Mallory Square with plenty of time to spare: the sun was still well above the horizon. First an overfull parking area and a public washroom facility used by almost all of us, then a phalanx of chained-up bicycles and mopeds, then a swarm of sunburned humanity milling around in the Square itself, a stone pavilion right at the water’s edge. Some were inspecting the wares of local vendors, spread out on tables or blankets: handmade jewelry, clothing and ceramics; paintings, sculpture, and other objets d’art; food and drink of several exotic kinds; your fortune told or portrait painted or cards read—nothing that looked junky or tacky or purely mark-up commercial. (Clearly a co-op of some sort was at work here.)
Another sizable segment of the crowd was watching the live entertainment—which included a unicyclist dressed like Uncle Sam who rode around giving out $22 bills, a first-rate bagpiper in full clan kit, a sword-swallower (they’re always more impressive when you can walk around them and satisfy yourself they’re not using sleight of hand), a fire-eater who kept belching enormous fireballs into the air, a couple of clowns, a balloon artist in a tall top hat, a bed-of-nails guy who doubled as a glass walker, a strolling female violinist, an incredible guy named Frank who filled a shopping cart with truck tires and then balanced it on his chin, two folksingers with beat-up Martins and an endless repertoire of upbeat and slightly off-color songs…and, of course, the informal king of the Square, Will Soto. With his gunfighter mustache and long ponytail, he looked like a Hell’s Angel in tights. He held center stage, right at the seawall itself, performing unlikely feats of juggling, general legerdemain, and Robin Williams-like improvisational comedy—on a tightrope, balanced high above water that had not yet made up its mind whether it was Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico. As tourist boats, powerboats, and yachts came gliding slowly by to show off their wealth and leisure to the poorer tourists on the dock, Will would shout abuse at them, or pull down his tights and moon them, to the immense delight of the crowd.
The third general component of the melee was the shutterbugs. Every square inch of seawall that had not been appropriated as some performer’s stage area was packed with photographers and videographers, shoulder to shoulder and craning to see over and around each other. Nearly every lens was trained in the same direction: at the sun, sinking down just to the south of Sunset Island, a little spit of land a little ways out that had been placed there by God specifically for the purpose of making a congenitally stupendous sunset even more photogenic. A few mavericks w
ere taking shots of the seagulls and pelicans that squatted out on two or three concrete cruise-ship pilings about fifty yards from the dock. A constant parade of watercraft went by, slowly and gracefully.
I looked around for a while with a New Yorker’s practiced eye, and failed to spot a single pickpocket working this ripest of crowds.
One of the clowns went by me, a sort of psychedelic Santa whose hat was labeled Amazin’ Walter, and I found myself beaming like an acidhead at him and asking, “Does all this really happen every night?”
Amazin’ Walter grinned and shook his head at once. “Hell, no. Only when it ain’t snowin’.” He passed on.
In my ignorance, I believed that particular sunset must be one of even Key West’s finest. I’ve since learned it was about an eight on a scale of ten. At least one percent of the visible color spectrum was not represented anywhere in those pastel clouds that evening. A lot of us wedged their way in among the shutterbugs to get a good view of the spectacle. I’d like to say I was cleverer than that, but actually I just couldn’t drag myself away from catching Will Soto’s act, and stayed to gawk. As I should have expected, he timed it to end about three minutes before the sun touched the island, hopped down off his tightrope frame, and began passing the hat—and now I had a peachy view. So did Erin, perched on my shoulders. As Will came by with his hat, I had her grab hold of my hair while I reached down with one hand and dug a twenty out of my pocket I dropped it in the hat, caught Will’s eye, and said, “You’re as good as the game, brother.”
He nodded graciously. “Are you with it, friend?”
“Not presently,” I told him. “Folksing a little.”
“Just get to town?”
“Yes,” I told him, a little surprised.
“You’ll stay,” he said, and went back to working the crowd. His hat filled with cash quickly, very little of it coins.
“He’s nice, Daddy,” Erin said.
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