Key West Luck

by Laurence Shames

  “So, like, it’s catching? Like the flu?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, it was kind of you to do that. You didn’t have to.”

  Nicky considered that while hiding behind the paper cup that he had tipped up to polish off the last of the Mango Sno-Cone. Then he said, “Maybe I did. Maybe I did have to.”

  “How come?”

  “Maybe because I wanted to get to know you better and part of that would be you getting to know me better too.”

  Phoebe finished off the Orange. “Tastes a little like battery acid,” she said. Nicky didn’t disagree. She went on in her level way. “So, you want to tell me? About the record you don’t have?”

  Nicky squinted toward the ocean. He wanted to tell her and he didn’t want to. He was ashamed of some things he’d done in the past and he was afraid that Phoebe would be disgusted and hate him if she knew. On the other hand, if she didn’t know, then it would always be a lie and a wedge between them, and if she was going to be disgusted with him it would be better to know that sooner rather than later. Without quite deciding what he’d say, he heard himself begin to speak.

  “It was in Philly,” he said. “Where I’m from. Bad neighborhood. Shitty Catholic school I hated. Quit after eleventh grade. Went to work for a local bigshot. Didn’t know what else to do. Seemed kind of cool at the time. I was basically a gofer. Then I got moved up. Supposedly. Know what an enforcer is?”

  She nodded that she did.

  “I was an enforcer’s helper,” he went on. “My job was to look scary and help dish out beatings. Most of the time beatings weren’t necessary, intimidation was enough. I’m talking frightened little people here, guys who couldn’t pay back loans, betting losses, protection money. Usually you showed up and that was enough. But if guys didn’t pay after a visit or two, it got physical. I broke a couple fingers on the job. These two here,” he said, holding up his hand. “Serves me right.

  “Then one day things got way out of control. The guy I was working with, he sort of went crazy, took something really personal, I don’t know. He started hurting this poor bastard way worse than he had to. There was blood, teeth on the sidewalk. It was horrible, it turned my stomach.”

  He paused, wincing at the memory, at the still vivid image of the broken victim trying to crawl away. He couldn’t look at Phoebe then, just gazed blankly at the ocean. When he spoke again, the words sped up, tumbled out, just needed to be got rid of. “So I went to the boss, guy named Tommy Zito, and told him I couldn’t do this anymore, I wanted out. He called me names. The usual insults. Stuff that was supposed to hurt my pride, get me really mad. I didn’t care, I took it. Finally he tells me I’m worthless anyway, get out of his sight, and if he ever hears of me working for anybody else in Philly, I’m a dead man. So that was that. My career as a tough guy. Never got caught. Never got arrested. Never got so much as talked to by a cop. Never paid any—“

  He broke off suddenly because something had happened that completely amazed him. Phoebe had reached across the small space between them on the seawall and was very softly touching the back of his hand, stroking it so lightly that he almost wasn’t sure if it was a touch or just the tickle of a breeze. In her mild and even voice she said, “It’s okay now, Nicky. It’s in the past.”

  Something let go in him when she said that. His skin flushed, his eyes stung and he felt a terrible congestion building up behind them; his ears rang and for a humiliating moment he thought he’d start to sob. Shaking his head like a child saying no to anything that might be of comfort, he said, “It isn’t in the past. I got off too easy, I wasn’t punished. I hate myself for what I did. I hate it that I got away with it.”

  “Not a perfect system, right?” said Phoebe. “Isn’t that what you said to me? People don’t always get what they deserve. Or maybe they do, but not always in ways that seem to make a lot of sense at first. Give me your hand, Nicky.”

  Her voice was so soothing, so lulling, that he wanted just to let himself be bathed in the sound of it; the words almost didn’t register. He didn’t quite get what he’d been asked to do. He looked down at his hands as if they belonged to someone else.

  “Your hand, Nicky,” Phoebe said again. “The hurt one. Give it to me.”

  He lifted his eyes to meet hers and very slowly raised the hand that had been broken. She took it softly in both of hers and brought it toward her lips. Her lips were still a little cool and a little iridescent from the Sno-Cones. Just once, very chastely, more in the manner of a mother than a lover, she kissed the wounded fingers, the knuckles that were bent and thickened from long ago mistakes. “It’s all right, Nicky,” she said. “Let it go. It’s over now.”

  PART TWO

  10.

  A few weeks passed. Thanksgiving came. On that day almost everyone in Key West felt lousy. For some this had to do with homesickness and a mawkish nostalgia for northern things like construction-paper cut-outs of turkeys and of Pilgrims with buckles on their shoes. For others it had to do with a stubborn and perverse insistence on eating stuffing and gravy and sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie even though it was eighty-seven degrees outside and the air was as heavy as wet wool.

  December arrived, bringing with it a fresh breeze from the east. The haze lifted and twirled away in wisps and people gradually remembered how blue the sky was meant to be. Stale aromas of low tide and sulfur were displaced by the sharp tang of windborne salt and the flinty astringency, felt almost more than smelled, of drying seashells. Passion vine flowered on fences, plumbago dropped its pale and very sticky blooms onto sidewalks and shoes and passing cats, but the tourists were late in arriving that year and no one quite knew why. Maybe it was an economy that continued to sputter. Maybe it was fear of a late-season hurricane, though no hurricanes had been predicted. Or maybe it was that the tourists seemed late in arriving every year, because by early December the locals were running low on funds and businesses were strapped for cash and even people who really didn’t like to work were getting antsy for a job.

  For Ozzie Kimmel, the bike tour business had been barely limping along these last few weeks. Some days he had just one or two clients, barely worth his time. Now and then he had no customers at all and would stay aboard the Sea Queen, getting high and thinking about doing chores that he never got around to doing.

  On this particular day he had a decent-sized flock, half a dozen, but it was not an easy group. It had a know-it-all in it. The know-it-all was a girl on vacation with her parents, probably around fourteen, with big square sunglasses and frizzy hair the color of a yam.

  The trouble started when Ozzie was showing them the house on Duncan Street where Tennessee Williams used to live. It was a modest cottage with white wood siding, a sweet if narrow porch, and red shutters. Regular people lived there now and they had got so sick of tourists gawking at the house that they had let the shrubbery get tall and dense enough to hide the place almost altogether. That didn’t stop Ozzie from pausing his group in front of it and launching into his spiel.

  “Folks,” he said, “if you find your knees trembling, don’t be too surprised. You are standing now on hallowed ground. This is where the magic happened. This is where the very famous Tennessee Williams, if he wasn’t drunk and if he was being a good boy and staying on his meds, used to do his writing. This is where he wrote his masterpiece, one of the most depressing and therefore greatest works ever to grace the American stage, Death of a Salesman.”

  That’s when the know-it-all chimed in. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I think that was Arthur Miller.”

  “Oh you do, do you? What are you, some kind of English major?”

  Undaunted, the smart girl went on. “Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie.”

  “Very good,” said Ozzie. “Very good. You want to do the rest of the tour? No? Then see if you can answer this one. How many bars in Key West?”

  The fourteen-year old just shrugged.

  “Ha. Didn’t think yo
u’d know. Two hundred and ninety-three. Try finding that in Wikipedia. S’okay, our next stop is the justly famous White Street Pier…”

  The rest of the circuit had gone relatively smoothly though Ozzie couldn’t quite shake the dispiriting suspicion that the group no longer believed a single word he said. This put a bit of a damper on his enthusiasm, but he tried his best to rally when they were coming around the curve of Bertha Street toward Smathers Beach.

  “And this,” he sang out, “is the soon-to-be-famous Key West Sno-Cone emporium, your source for the perfect refreshment on a hot day. Or a lift to your spirits on a not-so-hot day. Cheerful colors. A tickle on the lips. A perfect excuse to rest a while and stare out at the ocean like you’ve never seen water before. Also, convenient to a bathroom. Anybody want a Sno-Cone?”

  For a couple weeks now, Ozzie had been including Phoebe’s establishment on his tour. She and Nicky had gotten to be pals—nothing more than pals as far as Ozzie could tell, and Ozzie could tell with some certainty because, given his utter tactlessness, he was not at all bashful about asking his housemate if he was sleeping with someone; not to mention that Nicky’s bed was only a thin mattress and a piece of plywood away from his own. What was going on between Nicky and Phoebe seemed to be a friendship, pure and simple. No, make that pure but not simple, since there was clearly some simmering desire on Nicky’s part to move things toward that mysterious and dicey threshold of becoming lovers, at which point friendship might ripen into a deeper devotion or quickly go down in flames. In any case, for now they were buddies and Ozzie had glommed on to the alliance, as he glommed on to many parts of the life around him. He was happy to help Phoebe sell some Sno-Cones if he could; and of course his own was free when he showed up with a group.

  A couple of people, eager to get off their bikes a while, said a Sno-Cone sounded good. The brainy girl made a snide remark about the syrups just being sugar water with artificial coloring, but she ended up having one as well. The little group took its paper cups filled with red or purple or orange ice and wandered over toward the seawall. When they’d moved away, Ozzie looked up toward the service window and asked Phoebe how business was.

  Wiping her hands on the syrup-stained apron that was loosely tied around her waist, she said, “Well, I just made nine dollars off your group, plus two bucks in the tip jar. That’s been in it for the day. So I guess I’d have to say that business kind of sucks.”

  “It’ll pick up,” Ozzie said, licking at the mango ice he’d got for free.

  “That’s what people keep telling me,” said Phoebe, in that ultra-level tone that was often mistaken for sarcasm, though in this instance the sarcasm was meant.

  Ozzie squinted up at her. With his usual bluntness, he said, “You look really thin. You gotten even skinnier? You eating enough?”

  “I don’t eat much. I eat enough for me.”

  “Should come by the Eclipse sometime. Off-hours, someone would slip you a burger or something.”

  “I don’t take handouts,” she said, though it was difficult to hide the fact that her mouth was watering at the prospect of a burger or of almost any change from the diet of canned chili and macaroni and Spam that she’d been living on.

  “It’s just a burger,” Ozzie said.

  Phoebe shrugged and slightly lifted the eyebrow with the stud in it. A silent moment passed. Then, following a meandering line of thought that seemed, to her, not only logical but inevitable, she said, “I missed my truck payment a couple days ago. Was due on the fifth. The very first one, and I missed it. Great start, huh?”

  “How much was it?”

  “Just a measly five hundred bucks. Didn’t have it.”

  “Shit, you should’ve told us. Nicky would’ve fronted it. Or I would’ve.”

  Phoebe shook her head just very slightly. “No. Then I would’ve had two debts instead of one. Guess there’ll be a late charge.”

  “Hey, lotta people miss payments this time of year,” said Ozzie. “It’s almost, like, expected. How bad’s the penalty?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Phoebe wiped her hands again though they were perfectly dry by now. “I guess it’s in the contract, the bill of sale, whatever. I guess I should have read it through more carefully. But I was so excited to get the truck. And I never thought I’d have a problem with the payments. Work my tail off and can’t make five hundred dollars in a month? That’s pathetic.”

  For once Ozzie had nothing to say and he stood there for a moment licking at his Sno-Cone. Then he thought of something that was worrying and he tried his best not to show that he was worried. He said, “The truck, you bought it from a guy named Gus, right?”

  She nodded that she had.

  “Gus Delios? Fat guy with a beard? Lives up on Stock Island? On an old trawler with a hammock on the deck?”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”Ozzie looked down at his sneakers and tried but failed to overcome his lifelong tendency to say whatever came into his head. “You better read the fine print, Phoebe.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The fine print. In your bill of sale. This guy Gus, I know him a little bit from when I tended bar over at the Brigantine. He hung out there a lot. Not a nice guy. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete and total asshole. Has quite a reputation.”

  Phoebe’s face did not change much, but then again, it never did. All that showed was a slight tightening at the corners of her mouth and a small rise in the sinews of her throat. “What kind of reputation?”

  “Not the kind you want in a little town like this. Lotta people who’ve lived here for a while, they say they’d drink poison before they’d deal with him. Say he’s a total sleaze.”

  Phoebe was leaning on her wrists against the service counter. Where the tattoos ended it could be seen that her hands were pale from bearing down. Without intonation she repeated the single word. “Sleaze.”

  Ozzie looked over his shoulder. His clients were tipping up the last of their Sno-Cones and crumpling the paper cups. “Gotta go,” he said to Phoebe. “Look, I’m not saying you should worry, I’m just saying you should check. See what the contract says, okay?”

  11.

  At the Eclipse Saloon early that evening, Nicky was setting up his mike and guitar stand when Cliff, the manager, motioned to him through the swinging kitchen door and asked him to come in for a chat. Nicky steeled himself, not against the upcoming conversation, which he had no reason to be concerned about, but against the sights and smells of the kitchen. He went into the kitchen as little as he could, and when he did it made him leery of ever eating in a restaurant again. Maybe it was just that, because business was so slow, things sat around too long. There were metal tubs of salad dressings that had skins on them. The dappled yellow and white of the egg salad bore an unwholesome coppery sheen and the fish filets were faintly blue. The deep fat fryers, even when they weren’t frying, seemed to exhale a fine mist of grease that made you feel oily at the hairline.

  When Nicky went in, Cliff was sitting on the chrome counter between two sinks, his big hands curled over the rounded edge. He wasn’t a bad guy, which is to say he wasn’t an especially good guy either. When he’d first gone into the tavern business, maybe fifteen years ago, he’d been nicer and more caring. But by now he’d seen too much—bartenders stealing, wait staff just not showing up, busboys shooting heroin in the back alley. Over time, being disappointed by people made him feel less bad about sometimes disappointing them first. In Key West, in the bar business, in life, people came and people went; there was nothing to be done about it and it didn’t make sense to extend a lot of loyalty when you could never really tell if the loyalty would be returned.

  Nicky came in taking shallow breaths, trying to avoid the reek of stale fried onions.

  Cliff said, “How’re you doing?”

  Something in the tone of the simple question made Nicky a little nervous. “Fine. Doin’ fine.”

  “Playing here, y
ou enjoy it?”

  Not knowing if there was a right or wrong answer, Nicky said, “Yeah. It’s good. It’s fine.”

  Cliff lowered his head just a bit so he was looking at Nicky through the mesh of his eyebrows. “Making much money?”

  “Not much. Not really.”

  “Neither are we. Not much at all. We need to talk about this, Nicky.”

  The guitar player couldn’t tell if the smells of the kitchen had finally broken through or if it was the way the conversation was going that made him feel a little sick to his stomach. “Cliff, hey, I’m trying. It’s off-season. Town is dead.”

  “Not as dead as here,” Cliff said. He paused and lightly drummed his fingers against the counter-top. “Listen, Nicky, here’s how it’s supposed to work. Musicians need to build a following. People come in, even off-season, even if it’s just a few. They like what they hear, they tell their friends. It builds. It grows. At whatever level, it has to grow. That’s not happening with you. It just isn’t.”

  Nicky wanted badly to deny it but he couldn’t, so he fell back on the vague but crucial faith that season was just about to start and his luck was just about to change. “It’ll happen,” he said. “I know it will. I just need a little more time to break through.”

  Cliff said, “I’m cutting back your schedule, Nicky.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a new guy I want to try out. I’m giving him Wednesday and Thursday. You’ll keep Tuesday.”

  Nicky’s voice pinched down to a rasping whisper that hurt his throat. “Tuesday? Fucking Tuesday? Jimmy fucking Buffett couldn’t make a living here on Tuesday.”

  “Sorry, Nicky. It is what it is.”

  “And you know what? I hate that fucking expression. Is it supposed to be deep? It is what it is. What the fuck does that mean?”