Tricky Business

by Dave Barry

  For the rest of the cruise, she acts weird, like she’s off in space. A couple more times, you hear her crying in bed, but she still won’t tell you why. You figure she probably got her period.

  But when you get home, even after a week, she’s still acting weird. And then one night, after the kids are asleep, you come into the bedroom and she’s sitting on the floor, back against the wall, sobbing like a baby, and when you ask her why, all she says is I’m sorry, over and over, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, and you sit down next to her and put your arm around her and hug her, and that makes her sob even harder, and finally she turns to you, and she tells you about that night on the ship, how he took advantage of her, he gave her something to drink, she didn’t know what was happening, it was all hazy in her mind, she was too scared to say anything afterward. Somewhere in your mind is the suspicion that this might not be exactly what happened, but you believe her, because you need to believe her.

  That’s how Eddie Smith’s cruise-ship career ended. Cruise lines depend heavily on repeat business, and have a near-pathological obsession with customer satisfaction. The last thing you want, if you’re a cruise executive, is to pick up the phone and hear a customer screaming that he’s calling the police, calling a lawyer, calling the TV stations, that he didn’t pay your company two thousand fucking dollars to have one of your employees jump his wife.

  Eddie’s ship was at sea when this call came. The cruise line sent a helicopter to pick him up. That’s how badly they wanted to get him off the ship, bring him back to Miami, and fire him.

  In the end, the D.A. didn’t press charges, because it was pretty obvious to everybody but the husband what had really happened. But the cruise line had to pay $50,000 to make the couple shut up, and there was no way it was going to hire Eddie back. None of the major lines would even talk to him. He was cancer. He had traded his career for a sexual experience that had lasted maybe eight minutes. And it hadn’t even been particularly good sex.

  Eddie quickly ran out of money and started working as a mate on day-charter fishing boats out of Bayside, playing caddie to guys who, on their own, couldn’t catch a fish if it jumped into their shorts. He baited their hooks, rigged their lines, told them when they had a fish on, told them how to play it, half the time pretty much hauled the damn thing in himself. On the way home, he opened their beers, lit their cigars, listened to their bullshit, pretended to laugh at their moron jokes, hustling for tips.

  He was drinking a lot now, getting those veins on his nose. He lost some hair, didn’t take care of his teeth, no longer reminded people of Kevin Costner. He discovered cocaine, which was not difficult in Miami in the ’80s, when it was everywhere, it was falling out of the damn sky. He used it a little at first, and then more, and then more, and pretty soon he didn’t have enough money to support his habit. This is when the guy who supplied it asked him if he was interested in getting into the supply side of the business.

  And so Eddie embarked on a new kind of nautical career, living in the Bahamas, piloting a 38-foot go-fast boat, twin turbocharged 500-horsepower engines, screaming across the Gulf Stream in the dead of night at sixty, seventy, sometimes eighty miles an hour, lights out, rafting up with a transfer boat off the U.S. coast, offloading the cargo, then getting the hell out of there.

  The money was very, very good, enough to retire on soon if Eddie had saved it instead of putting it up his nose and leaving thousand-dollar tips for barmaids, just to get their attention. He’d go to Freeport, to one of the big casinos, with $15,000 cash in his pocket and wake up three days later with nothing, not even a memory of where it all went, and he didn’t care because there was always more coming. He figured there would be time to settle down, one of these months, but time ran out one night at Fowey Rocks, about ten miles out from Miami. Eddie had just rafted up and was about to transfer 1,400 pounds of cocaine and 600 pounds of pot when oh shit there’s a Coast Guard helicopter screaming over the horizon, searchlight blazing, making it look like daylight out there at 3:30 A.M.

  Eddie cast off instantly, left his crewman there on the transfer boat, yelling hey what the fuck, but Eddie was gone, gunning the engines, starting east but turning around when he saw two Coast Guard boats coming from that way—they’d set a trap for him—leaving him no choice but to run for the Florida coast.

  He was faster than the Coast Guard boats, but not that goddamn chopper, that thing was on him the whole way, trying to blind him, but he kept running, his plan being to get to Miami, get ashore somehow, lose himself in the city.

  He came screaming through the flats at Stiltsville faster than anybody sane would try, turning toward the big condos in Coconut Grove, blasting into the channel to the Dinner Key Marina, zigzagging out of the helicopter spotlight for a second, yanking back on the throttles to slow the boat enough so he could jump without killing himself, then shoving them forward again just as he dove, the water feeling like concrete when he hit it doing thirty miles an hour.

  He surfaced, took a quick look around, saw a sailboat moored about twenty yards away, inhaled, and kicked back under water. He came up for breath, heard a crash, loud, dove back under, kept swimming, reaching the sailboat in a couple more breaths. He grabbed the mooring line and hung on, gasping, and looked over toward the marina, where he saw a ball of fire, just like in the movies, where his boat had smashed into the dock on the far right end. He started swimming toward the left and oh shit the chopper was on him again, the searchlight putting him in the middle of a brilliant white circle, following him as he paddled to shore, where he was greeted by what appeared to be everybody involved in local, state, and federal law enforcement.

  That was the end of the ’80s for Eddie. He spent most of the ’90s in prison. He could have got out sooner, maybe; the feds promised him that he would do less time if he told them whom he was moving drugs for. They also promised that they could protect him. Eddie was considering this offer when he received a message, which was that if he cooperated with the feds, he would soon be exceedingly dead, and the feds could not protect him. Eddie took this message seriously, because the person who delivered it was a prison guard.

  And so he did his time, and when he got out he went back to being a mate on a fishing charter, because charter captains don’t care what your background is if you know your way around a boat. Eddie stayed clean and sober and found a small room in a run-down apartment building in Hialeah.

  One night there was a knock on his door. It was a slight, dark-eyed woman holding a little boy; he’d seen them around the building. She offered, in a combination of Spanish and English, to do his laundry for two dollars. He told her he hardly had any clothes to wash, except what he was wearing. She looked at his faded cutoffs and fish-gut-stained T-shirt, smiled, and said he was even worse off than she was, and she’d wash his clothes for free. He said if she’d do that, he’d buy her dinner, anything she wanted, as long as they sold it at Burger King. She laughed and said it was a deal.

  Her name was Luz. She’d come up from Nicaragua and lived common-law for a couple of years with an El Salvadoran man, who left her when she got pregnant. She was supporting herself and her boy by washing clothes and, when she could, cleaning rich people’s houses in Coral Gables, if they didn’t mind a cleaning lady who brought a kid along.

  The boy was three. His name was Alejandro. He was very small and sick a lot, but always smiling. For whatever three-year-old reason, he thought Eddie was the coolest thing ever. Eddie called him “Magnet,” because of the way he stuck with Eddie whenever Eddie was around. Sometimes, when Luz had work and Eddie didn’t, he’d watch the boy, take him on the bus out to the new mall by the turnpike, the two of them walking around, looking at the stores, the fountains, enjoying the air-conditioning. Eddie would swing Alejandro up on his shoulders—man, the kid weighed nothing—and carry him, holding him by his skinny legs, Alejandro thrilling to the view.

  When they got back to Luz’s room, they’d share a pizza and Alejandro
would tell Luz about his day, babbling bilingually. Then he’d fall asleep, and Luz would put him in his little mattress on the floor. Then she and Eddie would make love, silently yet spectacularly.

  Pretty soon, Alejandro was calling Eddie papi. Pretty soon, the three of them were living together in Eddie’s little room. It was the happiest Eddie had ever been.

  The happiness lasted three months. Then Alejandro started getting sicker. The doctors said that he had a problem with his heart, that he needed surgery. Neither Luz nor Eddie had insurance. They descended into the part of hell reserved for poor people who need medical care, a world of waiting and worrying and paperwork and more waiting and worrying. Luz spent her days fighting hospital bureaucracies, her nights stroking her boy’s head, weeping. Eddie spent his nights in a fever of helpless self-loathing, thinking about the money he’d pissed away, what it could have done for this little boy.

  Days, Eddie kept working the charters, struggling to keep his eyes open out on the water. One evening when the boat got back to Bayside, a man was waiting on the dock, a big guy in a golf shirt. He gave Eddie a big smile, stuck out a hand. Eddie did not take the man’s hand. He’d spent enough time in prison to know immediately when a guy was dangerous, as opposed to just big.

  The guy said, “Hey, Eddie.”

  Eddie said, “Do I know you?”

  “My name is Lou Tarant.”

  Eddie definitely knew that name.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  “Whoa whoa whoa,” said Tarant, holding up his hands, palms out. “I just want to talk, Eddie.”

  “We got nothing to talk about,” said Eddie. “I did my time, I’m out, I’m clean. I never said anything. I don’t plan to say anything. So leave me alone, OK?”

  “Eddie,” said Tarant, “I’m here to help.”

  “I don’t need your help,” said Eddie, turning away.

  “Maybe you don’t,” said Tarant. “But Alejandro does.”

  Eddie stopped, turned back around.

  “How do you know about him?”

  “We know all about you, Eddie. We got an interest in you. We know you could use some help. When you’re drowning, somebody throws you a life preserver, you don’t swim away, you grab it. I’m your life preserver, Eddie.”

  Eddie thought about it, about Luz and Alejandro, about the bills piling up, about how much money he had in his shorts, forty-two dollars and change, which was also how much money he had in the world.

  “OK,” he said, finally. “I’m listening.”

  “We want you to run a boat,” said Tarant.

  “No way,” said Eddie, starting to turn away again. Tarant gripped his arm.

  “Not like that, Eddie,” said Tarant. “This is a legit job, on a big boat.”

  “What boat?” said Eddie.

  “Casino boat,” said Tarant. “The Extravaganza of the Seas. You know it?”

  “I know it,” said Eddie. “You want me on the crew?”

  “No,” said Tarant. “We want you to be the captain.”

  “Real fucking funny,” said Eddie.

  “I mean it,” said Tarant.

  He had to say it five more times before Eddie’s mind could even start to accept it. Captain. Jesus. When he finally believed it was for real, he said, why me, and Tarant said, because you did your time like a man, and we don’t forget our friends. Tarant did not say, Also we own you and want to keep you where we can see you. But Eddie understood it.

  Eddie said there was no way, with his record, he’d be allowed to work as a ship’s captain; he’d never get the papers, never get his parole officer to approve. Tarant laughed out loud at that. Eddie said what’s so funny, and Tarant said this is Miami, for Chrissakes. Look who they got running the damn government. You think anybody’s gonna care who’s running a boat?

  And he was right. The rules got bent; the obstacles magically dissolved; the paperwork zipped right through, no questions asked. Eddie did his training, took command of the ship, was bringing home a nice paycheck. Alejandro got his operation and was doing better, though he still needed a lot of care, which thank God was mostly covered by Eddie’s insurance. Luz quit cleaning houses. They moved into a nicer apartment, with actual bedrooms. They talked about having another kid. Life was good for Eddie Smith, family man, ship captain, solid citizen.

  He tried not to think about the other side of it, which was, when you got right down to it, that he was still running dope. And maybe more. He didn’t know, because nobody told him what was going on back at the stern when the Extravaganza rafted up with the cabin cruiser out in the Gulf Stream. They just told him when and where.

  But he knew that, whatever it was, it sure as hell wasn’t legal, and if they ever got caught, nobody would believe that he didn’t know what was going on, not with his record. He’d be in just as deep as everybody else, maybe deeper, because it was allegedly his ship. Which of course is exactly why they gave him this job: He had the most to lose if anything went wrong.

  So he took the money and steered the ship, and he tried not to think about the rest of it. He never talked to Luz about it. She thought it was just a miracle that had happened in this great and wonderful country, America, where, just like that, you could go from being a guy with no money and no prospects to being captain of a great big ship. He didn’t tell her why, on certain days, he became edgy.

  He was very edgy this day. When he’d called Tarant that morning about the weather, he was sure that the rendezvous would be called off, and was appalled when Tarant told him it was on. He knew that if he were a real ship’s captain, if he had any balls at all, he’d have told Tarant forget it, absolutely no way was he going out in this weather with civilians on board.

  But of course he wasn’t a real ship’s captain, and he didn’t have the balls to defy Tarant, because he knew what Tarant could do to him, and because he couldn’t go home and tell Luz that their happy new miracle life was over, that they were poor again. Luz was now six months pregnant. If it was a boy, they were going to name him Eddie Jr.

  So he was going out, out in this mess. And as he’d feared, there would be customers on the ship. He could see them now, scurrying through the rain, buying their tickets at the booth on the dock, scurrying to the gangway. Coming out on a night like this just to lose money. Morons.

  “This is gonna be bad,” he repeated.

  “I heard you the first time,” said Hank Wilde. In theory, Wilde was the Extravaganza’s first officer. In fact, he was Lou Tarant’s main guy on the ship, which meant he was the real authority. He knew almost nothing about ships and deferred to Eddie on purely nautical matters. But, bottom line, Eddie answered to him.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t like this,” said Eddie.

  “You made that point,” said Wilde. “Time to move on.”

  “I’m asking you one last time, just call them, tell them it’ll be a lot safer to do this another night,” said Eddie. “A little delay is all I’m talking about.”

  “And I’m telling you, one last time, they told us to do it tonight, and we do what they tell us,” said Wilde.

  “Yeah, but they’re not going out in this,” said Eddie. “We are.”

  “That’s right,” said Wilde. “We are. So shut up and do your job. OK, Captain? Me, I’m gonna go get a drink. You want one?”

  Eddie didn’t answer.

  “Oh yeah, I forgot,” said Wilde. “You gotta drive.”

  Laughing, he left the bridge, leaving Eddie to stare out at the storm.

  JUAN HAD NEVER IN HIS LIFE FELT THIS NAUSEOUS, this stomach-churningly, cold-sweatingly, roomspinningly sick. The goddamn boat would not stop moving—rolling, then rising, then making a gut-heaving plunge, then rolling, rising and plunging again, over and over and over. It felt like this had been going on for hours, but when Juan checked his watch, he saw it had been only forty minutes.

  The cabin was hot and stank of b.o. and beer. Juan was standing with his back braced against the galley counter, his legs aching
from the strain of fighting the boat’s incessant motion. He wanted desperately to go out on deck, get some air, stick his head over the side. Or, better yet, die. But he had to stay there, had to keep watching the three men at the table. They were watching him back, giving him hard-ass looks, but he could tell they weren’t doing so great either, especially the fat guy in the middle. He looked like he was about to puke.

  Up on the bridge, Frank wasn’t feeling much better, watching the heaving sea, the waves sometimes breaking over the bow. Tark, braced against the captain’s chair, looked his way every now and then, giving him a big smile, clearly enjoying his discomfort. Frank suspected that Tark was deliberately steering the boat in such a way as to make the motion even worse, but there was no way he could tell. Frank had decided that he didn’t care who this scumbag knew in the organization, this was definitely the last time Frank was going to make this run on this boat.

  As he’d been doing every ten minutes since they left the marina, Frank went down the ladder to the cabin to check on Juan, stopping at the bottom, where he could still see Tark on the bridge.

  “You OK?” he asked Juan. Juan nodded that he was, but Frank could tell he wasn’t.

  “Hang in there,” he said, heading back up.

  “How’s bean boy doin’?” asked Tark. “He puke yet?”

  “He’s fine,” said Frank.

  “I bet he is,” said Tark, smiling big. “Maybe I should go down there and make him a nice big plate of corn beef hash. You think he’d like that? How about you? You want a nice big old plate of greasy hash? That sound good?” He yanked the wheel half a turn, and the boat lurched sickeningly.