Sunburn

by Laurence Shames

  "Good. You'll go fishing, you'll do the ads, when you're ready, you'll come back. In the meantime, talk to Max. Soon. Please, Murray."

  "Okay, okay," the Bra King said. "I'm calling him right now."

  3

  Just then, some twenty feet from the southernmost point in the continental United States, a man named Tommy Tarpon, still agitated from a conversation earlier that morning, was setting up his seashells, which were displayed on a homemade plywood cart that he towed behind his ancient bicycle. His wares arranged, he sat down on a blue plastic milk crate, his back against the fence that cordoned off U.S. Navy property. Sunlight glared off the ocean, but Tommy was shaded by an enormous banyan tree whose unearthly dangling roots were lifting up the sidewalk. He sat there and waited for customers.

  Some minutes later, he pretended not to watch as an oldish tourist with a green visor and red knees approached the cart of shells and nonchalantly slipped two fingers into the sun-warmed opalescent orifice of a queen helmet.

  "That's how you can tell when they're sexually mature," said Tommy, when the tourist was in

  there two knuckles deep. "When the labium gets pink and thick like that."

  Caught, the man with red knees quickly swept his hand behind his back. Tommy had seen it again and again. Women always held the shells up to their ear to hear the ocean; men always wanted to finger them, first thing. The old tourist moved to change the subject. "Is it local?"

  "You bet it's local," Tommy said. "Gathered by Indians near Cape Sable."

  "Is that so? How much ya want for it?"

  "Seven dollars."

  The tourist took some time to think it over. He peered at the flat ocean, glanced at a knot of Asians photographing each other in front of the marker that said Havana90 miles. "You a Seminole?" he said at last.

  Tommy crossed his arms against his chest, put on a very Indian expression, said nothing.

  "I'll give ya six bucks," said the tourist.

  Tommy tugged lightly at the fringes of his chamois vest. "Eight," he said.

  "You just said seven."

  "Have it your way. Seven."

  The tourist beamed. Now he was having fun. Haggling with a real live Indian. "Clever," he said.

  Tommy smiled pleasantly, finished the thought for him. "For a Redskin. Seven bucks."

  The tourist hesitated. A new concern had seized him. Did he really want a big heavy fragile seashell? He had a drive to Fort Lauderdale and four days in Orlando before flying home to Michigan. Carry a shell all that way only to get back home and find it chipped? "I'll think about it."

  "Big decision," Tommy said, and he scratched his back against the Navy fence as the tourist wandered off on pink and scrawny legs.

  Murray had meant to call his shrink right then, but somehow he didn't do it.

  He was seized by a sudden urge to go for a walk instead, smell the chlorine in the pool. Besides, by now he could no longer hide it from himself that his high spirits were extremely fragile, less a part of him than an overlay, a cheery suit of clothes that could at any moment detach itself and walk away without him. Max Lowenstein—sober, probing Max—would discover that in about ten seconds. And Murray was not so eager to have it pointed out.

  So he swept off his tie, unbuttoned the top two buttons of his rumpled shirt, and rode the elevator downstairs to the pool.

  He walked the perimeter of the courtyard, brushed past red and pink hibiscus in big clay pots. He watched a fat man sink an eight-footer on the putting green. Along the row of lounges, he saw slender fellows lying side by side in tiny bathing suits, women facedown with their tops undone, dollops of bosom swelling at their sides.

  Murray smiled at everyone as he floated past, now and then somebody briefly smiled back. But no one smiled first, everyone seemed too absorbed in paperbacks or backgammon or cancerous communion with the sun, and by the time Murray completed his circuit, he was feeling isolated, apprehensive. His steps got heavy, it was like the instant when an airplane drops its flaps and you understand abruptly that gravity has been there all the while. For a long moment he stood still, couldn't decide which way to move his feet. He choked down panic, told himself this was not depression socking in again, just an understandable fatigue, a temporary winding down that, after all, was part of arriving someplace new.

  Then he heard a soft gruff voice behind him. "First day here?"

  He turned to see an old man sitting in the shade of a metal umbrella that was painted like a daisy. He was wearing a canary yellow linen shirt with topaz-colored placket and collar; oddly, he seemed to have a moth-eaten muff in his lap. Then the muff lifted up its knobby head and revealed itself to be an ancient pale chihuahua, with drooping whiskers and a scaly nose and milky eyes.

  Murray said, "How could you tell?"

  "For starters, ya got pants on," the old man said. "And you're curious. I seen the way ya look at people."

  Murray, a little guilty, cleared his throat.

  "Place like this," the old man went on, "what happens is people stop being curious. Too much coming and going. Transients. People decide, hey, this guy's only here a week, why bother gettin' to know 'im? The year-rounders, they figure these seasonal people, they dump us inna summer, why bother makin' friends? But my question, where d'ya draw the line? Everybody dumps everybody when they die, so this means ya don't bother makin' friends wit' nobody? Siddown."

  For a second Murray was paralyzed by thankfulness. To have someone to sit with, this was no small thing. He coaxed his feet toward a metal chair, felt the heat of it against his butt, took a moment to study his companion. The old man's face was long and thin, his eyes were crinkly but clear and bright as marbles, he had neady combed white hair that flashed with glints of pink and bronze.

  "Bert's the name," the old man said, holding out a gnarled and spotted hand. "Bert d'Ambrosia."

  "Murray Zemelman."

  "New Yawka, right?"

  "How'd ya know?"

  "The shoes. Beautiful loafers like that, Italian I bet, you'd only find 'em New Yawk or California. And California, excuse me for sayin' this, ya'd look a little fitter."

  "Very observant," Murray said.

  "Hell else I got ta do? So Murray, y'on vacation?"

  The Bra King didn't answer right away. He scratched his head. He opened his mouth. He giggled, not with mirth but freedom. He was in a transient place where there was not the slightest reason not to tell the simple naked truth. "Actually," he blurted, "I left my wife and quit my business yesterday."

  Unruffled, the old man stroked his chihuahua. The chihuahua blinked and wheezed, short white dog hairs fluttered onto Bert's Bermuda shorts. "Ah, so you're havin' a whaddyacallit, a midlife crisis."

  Murray waved that idea away. "Nah, I had that one already. That's when I left my first wife. Bought a sports car. Got tennis elbow shifting. It was stupid anyway. Leaving the wife, I mean. Really stupid. But this is something different. This one, I don't think it has a name."

  Water surged along the edges of the pool, made a sound like a cat lapping milk. Bert pursed his lips and nodded. "Good. I don't like it the way everything, they give it a name, it's like it isn't yours no more. Some things, okay, I guess they gotta have a name. Haht attack. Diabetes. But stuff inside ya head? I don't see where alla that, it has to have a name."

  For this Murray had no comeback, so he just looked out at the palms and the sky. The sun was getting higher, and Bert moved his chair a few inches to keep his napping dog out of the sun. Then he said, "Ya play poker, gin rummy, anything like that?"

  Murray nodded that he did. Bert gestured toward a screened gazebo set back from the pool. Even empty it seemed to ring with the easy congeniality of card games, seemed fragrant with the oily richness of potato chips.

  "We need a hand sometime, I'll let ya know," said Bert, and Murray nearly panted with the hope of things to do. "What apartment y'in?"

  The Bra King pointed at the West Building and said, without false modesty, "The penthouse."
r />   "Whaddya know," said Bert. "Guy who plays sometimes has the East penthouse. Politician. LaRue's his name."

  "Ah," said Murray, "I went into his place by accident this morning. Got kicked out by a geek in a hair net after being called an asshole by a screaming Indian."

  The old man calmly stroked his dog. "Feather or dot?"

  "Hm?" said Murray. "Ya know. Indian. American Indian. Native American, whatever they like to be called these days."

  "In costume?"

  "Costume?"

  "Yeah. Ya know, Tonto vest, ponytail?"

  "Yeah," said Murray. "That's him."

  "That's Tommy," said Bert. "Sells shells. Makes himself look like an Indian for the tourists."

  "Now I'm confused," said Murray. "Are you saying the man's an Indian or are you saying the man is not an Indian?"

  "He's an Indian," said Bert. "I'm sayin' he's an Indian. But I'm sayin' he makes himself more like an Indian than an Indian really is, because this is the way the stupid tourists want an Indian ta look. Capeesh? I wonder what he was doin' at LaRue's."

  "I'm surprised you don't know," said Murray.

  "Why should I know?"

  "You seem to know everything else."

  "I know what I see," said Bert. "I know what people tell me. More'n this, I don't know." He put the ghostly chihuahua on the table, where it did a stiff-legged pirouette, its paws clicking dryly on the metal surface. Then he labored upward from his chair. "You'll excuse me, Murray, I gotta go upstairs and give the stupid dog a pill."

  Slow but straight, he walked away. Murray closed his eyes a moment and listened to the watery and rustly sounds of Florida.

  PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS NOVELS OF LAURENCE SHAMES

  Florida Straits

  "As crisp and posturing as a fresh hundred dollar bill. Sooner or later you gotta do yourself a favor. You gotta read this book."

  —Margaria Fichtner, Miami Herald

  "Funny, elegantly written, and hip ... a nifty new crime novel!" —Robert Ward, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  "Sharp and funny... a comic suspense novel where the comic and the suspenseful are beautifully merged . . . funky, funny characters that will have you hooked on the whole ride." —Daniel Woodrell, Washington Post Book World

  "Resounding with great Noo Yawk dialogue and packed with bad guys in shiny blue suits and good guys in pink bikini briefs, Florida Straits is a caper too wondafull fa woids."

  —Carol Peace, People

  "The plot flows like a strong ocean current, and Shames's quirky Key West denizens clash wonderfully with the insulated and seamy lives of the mobsters."

  —Publishers Weekly

  "Florida Straits is sharp and knowing and deftly satirical all the way through—a mighty impressive first novel."

  —Newsday (N.Y.)

  Scavenger Reef

  "Strongly written . . . superior entertainment." —Christopher LehmannHaupt, New York Times

  "An inventive, goofy, engaging Key West tale . . . Shames's new book is terrific."

  —Felicia Gressette, Miami Herald

  "An engaging whodunit . . . Shames is developing into one of our best crime fiction writers."

  —Gary Dretzka, Chicago Tribune

  "Shames delivers another dose of criminal high jinks in relentlessly bohemian Key West."

  —Publishers Weekly

  "What happens when a renowned artist, friend to many, cash cow to some, reappears several months after being presumed drowned? This clever premise is explored with delicious dark humor and healthy cynicism."

  —San Francisco Chronicle