Key West Luck

by Laurence Shames

  “My mistake,” she said, though the fact was that she could not have done otherwise. She hated to lie. With Phoebe this was not exactly a matter of morality but of taste. A lie put a rancid and revolting flavor at the back of her throat, gagged her as if she’d bitten deeply into something rotten.

  They stood there by the door until it started feeling awkward, then Nicky said, “Can I buy you a beer?”

  “No.”

  “A coffee?”

  “No. No thank you.”

  She leaned closer to the door. Her thin arm was already reaching out to push it open when he spoke again. There was an odd note of something like supplication in his voice, as if he was asking for help instead of offering to give it. “You okay? You need anything?”

  She looked at him hard then. The look was not defiant and it wasn’t grateful either. It was neither trusting nor mistrusting. Mostly it was just curious. “Why?” she said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you care?”

  Nicky looked away a moment. He squeezed his lips together, let them puff out again. “Listen, I came down here just about a year ago. No job. No friends. Practically no money. My prospects weren’t so hot either. I know what it’s like.” He paused and his eyes locked onto hers. “I filled out applications.”

  At that she lifted an eyebrow, the one with the tiny silver stud through it, about a quarter inch. “You lie on yours?”

  “Didn’t have to. I don’t have a record. Should have one. Deserve one. Dodged a couple things. It’s not a perfect system.”

  Flatly she said, “I’ve noticed.”

  “So if you need some help—“

  “Look, you’re nice. I appreciate it. But I don’t take anything from anybody. Especially guys. I tried that last time. Didn’t turn out so well.”

  “Okay,” said Nicky, “fine. I get that. I really do. You like music?”

  “Sure, who doesn’t?”

  “Tell ya what. You feel like it, come back a little later. Have a beer, don’t have a beer, whatever. I’ll play you my favorite song. Song about people waiting for their luck to change. You can tell me if you believe it’s gonna change or not. Think you might come by?”

  8.

  Up in Miami, Charlie Ponte was wrestling with his conscience.

  The bout turned out to be a brief one and it ended as had so many similar contests in the past, with his conscience, having put up a showy but not very determined resistance, flat on its back, while Ponte emerged feeling justified and almost serene in doing what his greedier and more cynical impulses had inclined him to do from the start.

  He’d been thinking about the deal offered to him by Luis Benavides. Half a million bucks to deliver a fall guy. Not a charity case, not a guy who’d go happily off to the Pen to put a kid through college, just a sucker who’d be too dense to realize he was being set up. A loser. A victim. The idea hadn’t sat real well with Ponte; there was something too low about it even for him. Then again, maybe Benavides was right; maybe there were people who were born to be screwed, who carried their tough luck like a defective gene, and if it wasn’t one raw deal that found them it would be another.

  Plus there was the matter of the half a million bucks.

  Plus there was the fact, so humiliating that Ponte could not let himself acknowledge it in words, that he needed Benavides more than Benavides needed him. The Cuban boss could find another ally easier than Ponte could find another easy score. But it was about more than this one job. It was that guys like Benavides were coming up in the world and guys like Ponte were going down. It was an age thing. It was an ethnic thing. The world was changing, getting more complex, spinning faster, and Ponte was scrabbling to hang on to his place in it. If he said no to Benavides this time, the rising boss wouldn’t even call him next time, and he, Charlie Ponte, would come closer to not mattering. He decided that he’d find a fall guy.

  But how? His Miami crew had dwindled through incarceration, debility, and the occasional job-related death. This meant he’d have to find somebody new. But if it was a local guy and word got out that Ponte had used him as a patsy, it would make recruiting way harder in the future. So it made much more sense to find someone from out of town, preferably someone with local knowledge of the waters around Key West. But as Ponte’s power had waned, so had the radius of his influence, and the fact was that he barely knew anyone in Key West anymore. Inconveniently, the only colleague with whom he’d occasionally been in touch was a guy even way older than himself, unofficially retired for many years now. Still, Ponte had to start somewhere, and calling Bert the Shirt d’Ambrosia was the only idea he had.

  Bert was cutting up dog food when the phone rang on his land-line.

  The dog food came in a big loaf like a mortadella and looked quite disgusting, with greasy flecks of unidentifiable meat embedded in a glutinous matrix of squashed rice. Bert would hack a narrow slice of the loaf into tiny pieces, throw in a few bits of kibble, add a drizzle of warm water, and present it to his relatively new and relatively young chihuahua, Nacho, who would do a little stiff-kneed dance of anticipation then scarf it down in about four seconds.

  But now the phone was ringing while Bert was in the middle of the process and for a moment he was confused about the order in which things needed to be done. Finally he put the knife down, wiped his hands on a threadbare dish towel, and picked up the receiver. The dog looked at his empty food bowl then up at his master accusingly. Bert said, “Yeah?”

  “Bert, y’old bastard,” said the voice on the line, “it’s Charlie Ponte.”

  Bert took a few seconds to decide how he felt about this. His first impulse was to be happy and grateful that his phone had rung at all, since that no longer happened very often. On the other hand, hearing from Charlie Ponte had seldom been a reason to rejoice. True, they’d done some business together a few times in the distant past, but they’d never been real friends and on a few occasions things had stacked up in ways that made them, temporarily at least, definite enemies. Once or twice they’d nearly killed each other. But on the other hand again, there was a certain bond between them, maybe just based on history, maybe on some sort of tribal loyalty that trumped or at least mitigated personal differences. Put that all together, and Bert was feeling…what? A little bit of reluctant fondness and a whole lot of mistrust.

  “Hello, Cholly,” he said at last. “To what do I owe the honor of hearing from you?”

  “Nothing special,” Ponte said. “Just wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “Cut the bullshit. We known each other way too long for that.”

  “What? A guy can’t call an old pal just to say hello?”

  “Okay. Hello. But right now I’m inna middle of feeding the dog and the dog is looking at me like he don’t know why he’s being tortured. So what’s on your mind?”

  Ponte cast about for a way to ease into his request, but finding none said simply, “I need a guy down there.”

  “For what?”

  “For a job.”

  “I figured that, Cholly. What kinda job?”

  “You know someone?” Ponte asked in turn.

  “What kinda job?” Bert asked again.

  “I’d rather not say right now.”

  “You need a tough guy?”

  “No, it’s not that kind of job.”

  “Anyone likely to get hurt?”

  “What is this, twenty fucking questions?”

  Bert said, “You asked me if I know a guy. How can I tell you if I know a guy if I don’t know what kind of job you want this guy to do?”

  “Jesus Christ you’re nosy.”

  “Could I please remind you that you were the one who initiated or let’s say began this conversation and inna meantime my dog is having a meltdown waiting for his dinner. And as to your comment, which I believe was intended as a minor insult but which I regard as a simple statement of fact, yes, I’m nosy. I admit it. Always have been, always will be. In fact I get nosier all the time. What the hell e
lse I got to do? So what kind of job are we talking about here?”

  There was a pause as Ponte blew some air into the phone. Finally he said, “All right, all right. It’s a…let’s call it a little import-export job. I need someone to run a boat in from Havana. You know of anyone?”

  “No.”

  For some reason Ponte found the one-word answer exasperating. “And if I’d said I needed a tough guy, would you have known someone then?”

  “No.”

  “Then why you asking me all these fucking questions?”

  “Because I’m nosy,” Bert said. “You nailed that the first time. What’s the payday on this job?”

  “You don’t know anyone, fuck’s the difference what the payday is?”

  “Good payday, maybe I could find someone.”

  “Haven’t decided yet,” said Ponte. “Call it fifty grand. Plus ten for you if you find someone.”

  “I don’t take money, Cholly. You know that. But fifty large…I’ll keep my ears open. Ya never know.”

  Ponte knew he should say thank you but couldn’t quite squeeze out the words.

  “But one more question,” Bert went on. “This job, whyn’t ya have one of your guys do it?”

  “Can’t spare a man right now,” said Ponte. “Too much going on up here.”

  “Ah,” said Bert. The single syllable was a masterpiece of nuance, freighted with just enough dubiety that Ponte knew that Bert knew he was lying, yet at the same time soft and neutral enough that it could not be construed as taunting or even impolite. A brief silence followed, during which Bert’s hungry chihuahua ran around in frenzied circles, its tiny toenails ticking on the kitchen floor, its bright black nose just inches fromits upturned tail. “Listen, Cholly, gotta go. Dog’s having like a psychotic episode. I find someone, I’ll let you know.”

  9.

  Phoebe had in fact gone back to the Eclipse Saloon on that first day when she and Nicky met, and her showing up to hear him play had been the start of…well, it was tough to figure what it had been the start of. A nice platonic friendship? A chance alliance between two people who had drifted into town and were barely getting by? A flirtation that, so far at least, hadn’t featured anything that could really be called flirting? Nicky himself couldn’t really say what had started on that occasion. He only knew that something had.

  Phoebe had walked into the bar, which as usual was almost empty, when Nicky was mostly through the evening’s first set. She sat down alone at a small table off to the side and ordered herself a beer. She paid for it as soon as it arrived; she didn’t wait for a tab. She raised her glass about an inch in Nicky’s direction when he’d noticed her sitting there. When he got around to playing “Gone at Last” he tried to make her somehow understand that he was playing it for her and he wondered if she was flattered or touched or if she even liked the song.

  When it was finished he walked down from the stage, passed right by Ozzie Kimmel’s table, and went over to Phoebe. He asked if he could join her and with her eyes alone she motioned him into a chair. Sitting, he said rather shyly, “Nice you came. Thanks.”

  “You surprised?” Phoebe asked.

  “Yeah, a little.”

  “Me too.” She gave a tiny lift to the eyebrow with the stud in it and then said nothing more. Her hands were flat on the table in front of her. She hadn’t drunk much of her beer.

  Finally Nicky said, “So wha’d you think?”

  Mildly, in that level tone easily mistaken for facetiousness, she said, “I think you’re pretty good.”

  He waved away the compliment, such as it was. “No, not about me. The song. The long streak of bad luck. That it’s ending. That it’s just about to end. Wha’d you think? You believe it?”

  Phoebe seemed to take the question very seriously, and though he didn’t realize it at the time and probably never realized it altogether, it was at that moment that Nicky crossed the line between being curious about her, concerned, intrigued, and starting to fall a little bit in love with her. This had to do in part with what happened to her eyes as she considered how to answer. The lids fell halfway closed, the outside corners tightened; he could feel her concentration, sensed that for her, and therefore for him too, there was something at stake in her reply. The shape of her lips began to change; their expression, which up till then had seemed locked in that safe middle ground between a smile and not a smile, took on a definite hint of playfulness and cheer that made her look younger and less tough. “Yeah,” she said at last. “I believe it. I believe his luck is going to change.”

  Her eyes opened wide again as she said that; there was a spark in them, a gleam of optimism. But it only took an instant for the gleam to begin clouding over once again, for doubt or bad memories to bring her spirits back to neutral. “I mean,” she went on in her level tone, “you have to believe that, right? I mean, how could you keep going otherwise?”

  Nicky had not been able to get Phoebe off his mind, and so on that late morning when he should have been practicing, he instead jumped on his crummy old bicycle and rode over to Smathers Beach to see how she was doing. He found her squatting on the sidewalk next to the Sno-Cone truck, carefully writing on a chalkboard with many different-colored chalks. She was one of those people who all but disappeared into whatever task she happened to be working on at a given moment, and it was some seconds before she paused in her calligraphy to acknowledge Nicky standing there.

  “What’cha writing?” he asked, when she had finally said hello.

  “Flavors,” she said, looking back at him across her shoulder. The sunshine was bright on her magenta hair and Nicky thought the line of her thin neck was very graceful when she turned it. “I picked up my syrups today.”

  “Ah. What’cha got?”

  Phoebe read from the chalkboard. Each entry had been scrawled in a color that more or less matched the flavor. “Cherry. Grape. Orange. Strawberry. Lemon-Lime. Mango. And Blue.”

  “What’s Blue taste like?” Nicky asked.

  “I have no idea,” said Phoebe. “Supply place said it was a top seller.” She paused then added rather absently, “Syrups cost me over a hundred bucks.”

  “Cost of doing business,” Nicky said.

  “Plus the chalkboard was another twenty.”

  “Gotta advertise, I guess.”

  She shrugged then looked up and down the beach. It was mostly empty. There were a few scruffy guys hanging around by the public restrooms where the showers were, but they sure as hell weren’t buying Sno-Cones. At curbside a couple of hundred yards away there was another solitary vending truck, that one renting beach chairs and umbrellas. They weren’t doing any business either. Phoebe said, “It always this slow in November?”

  “Haven’t been here long enough to know,” said Nicky. “But what my buddy Ozzie says is that if you make your living off the tourists you can’t wait for season to start, then about forty-eight hours later you can’t wait for it to end. They’ll get here. They always have before.”

  Phoebe licked her lips and stared off toward the north for a moment as if she could see at some great distance a vast flock of snowbirds just starting their migration. “Want a Sno-Cone?”

  “Sure,” said Nicky.

  “What flavor?”

  “Guess I’ll try the Blue.”

  She went into the truck. Nicky heard the crunching clatter of the grinder chopping up the ice, the intermittent hiss and rattle as coarse snow, more like hail, really, was fired down the metal chute into the paper cone. Phoebe appeared at the wide window with the cup in her hand and Nicky reached into his pocket for a couple of dollars.

  “On the house,” she said.

  “Come on, don’t start that shit.”

  “Market research. You’re the guinea pig. What’s it taste like?”

  He raised the cone toward his mouth, pouted his lips toward the mound of blue snow, and nibbled some. He let it melt against his tongue and trickle down his throat, then he said, “Can’t really tell. Tutti-frutt
i maybe? A little minty? Hard to pin it down. You haven’t tried it?”

  “No,” said Phoebe. “I just put ‘em in the rack. Haven’t tasted anything.”

  “Here,” he said, reaching up toward the service window and handing her the paper cup. “You try. See what you think.”

  Without hesitation, without coyness, without the slightest acknowledgment that something sort of intimate was going on, she put her lips where Nicky’s lips had been just a few seconds before. It wasn’t a kiss but it was almost a kiss through the proxy of the Sno-Cone. She appraised the flavor of the blue slush and said, “Tastes blue. I don’t know what else to say.” She turned back toward her shelf of candy-colored syrups and said, “Let’s try a few others while we’re at it.”

  She served up some samples, and since there was no business anyway, she came down from the truck and they sat straddling the seawall to try them. It was difficult to tell the Cherry from the Strawberry, although the Cherry was a darker red. The Grape definitely tasted grapy, but it did so in the manner of grape candies, not of actual grapes. The Orange sort of burned at the end and the Mango tasted vaguely tropical though it was impossible to say exactly why.

  “All really good,” said Nicky. “I think you’ll do really well with these.”

  Phoebe half-smiled at that. Different-colored syrups had mixed on her lips and made them iridescent. For a moment she looked out at the ocean. The water was a milky green, not soupy but not translucent either. Out toward the horizon there seemed to be a layer of mist that floated just above the surface but left a bright, clear slice between. She said, “Nicky, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “That first time we met, when I got turned down for a job, you told me you deserved to have a record too. Why’d you tell me that?”

  “Why?” He shrugged, looked down at the imported sand that covered Smathers Beach. “I dunno. I guess because I could tell you felt bad and I thought that if I told you that it would make you feel a little better. You were being honest, I thought I should be honest too.”