Key West Luck

by Laurence Shames

  Nicky hadn’t noticed exactly when he started pacing, but he was pacing now, moving low and clenched past the stoves and cutting boards, underneath the hanging pans, around the tarnished bins that held the drying blobs of crummy food.

  “It is what it is,” he snarled again. “What it is, is that you’re screwing me. I show up here all fucking summer, making chickenshit, playing to an empty room, waiting for season. Now season’s practically here and you give me fucking Tuesday.”

  “Only if you want it.”

  “What? Or else I’m fired altogether?”

  “There’s lots of other places, Nicky. Maybe you’ll go over bigger someplace else. Could happen, never know.”

  “Could happen,” Nicky echoed. He’d stopped pacing in front of the garnish station and stood there with his fists against his hips. “Yeah, right. Thanks. Could happen. You know what else could happen? What else could happen is you could take your Tuesday gig and shove it up your ass. And you could take your rancid egg salad and your stinking onions and your sprigs of shitty-looking parsley and shove ‘em up right after till it all comes out your fucking nose. So long, Cliff. It’s been nice.”

  A puff of nasty air followed him out of the kitchen as he bulled through the swinging doors and went to pack up his gear.

  12.

  Pineapple’s roommate in the red fiberglass hot dog often scavenged odd bits of equipment from the job sites where he did day labor. His name was Fred and by now, after a number of campfire chats in the mangrove clearing, he was one of Phoebe’s pals. Unlike Pineapple, who neither drank nor cursed, Fred did quite a bit of both and could be extremely argumentative, but he was extraordinarily good at putting pieces of broken things together to make new things that would work. Sometimes the things Fred salvaged had been abandoned, other times they were more in the nature of things that weren’t exactly un-owned but probably wouldn’t be missed—archaic and disconnected electrical parts, fragments of old car motors, coils of wire, lengths of hose.

  Inside the odd curved spaces of the hot dog, traces of Fred’s ingenuity were everywhere. He’d fixed the ancient, pronged rotisserie on which the wieners used to turn so that it could now be used for anything from making toast to drying socks. He’d rigged up a pump and propeller to turn the old sauerkraut steamer into a miniature washing machine.

  But of all the gizmos and appliances Fred had cobbled together from his assortment of detritus, his masterpiece was a crude generator that would run on vegetable oil and turned out just enough current to power a hot plate and a couple of twelve-volt lamps that were more or less adequate to brighten the hot dog’s interior. It was by the light of those dim and yellowish lamps that Phoebe, with her two friends leaning close on either side of her, was now reading the contract she’d signed with Gus Delios.

  The document, like a well-constructed horror movie, opened with the utterly mundane: The truck’s VIN number, some reference to the chain of title, establishment of the base purchase price of eleven thousand dollars. Then came a few bits of innocent arithmetic: a down payment of one thousand dollars followed by twenty-four monthly payments of five hundred dollars each, bringing the total price to thirteen thousand dollars, which worked out to a financing charge of eighteen percent.

  Only after those lulling, numbing matters had been dispensed with was there the first faint suggestion that something was amiss, that something could go very wrong. The danger was hinted at in a fine-print clause referring to the actual transfer of title, which would take place only on condition that all payments had been timely made. Then, buried in a sub-clause, further indented and in even smaller type, came the sort of oh-shit detail on which every horror story turns. If a monthly payment was missed, there would no late charge but there would be no grace period either. The entire remaining purchase price would become due twenty days from the date of the scheduled payment. Failure to pay the purchase price would result in a voiding of the agreement and a forfeiture of monies paid to date.

  Phoebe read the clause several times, hoping each time to discover that she’d misread it the time before or that in fact it didn’t say exactly what it seemed to. Pineapple and Fred read it along with her, Pineapple moving his thin lips as he formed the words.

  Finally Fred said, “That fucking scumbag.” Fred was stocky, with short thick arms that stuck out from his sides a bit like the wings of a penguin. He had a scruffy beard and overgrown moustache and when he got worked up tiny flecks of foam sometimes appeared in the wiry hairs at the corners of his mouth. “He can’t get away with that. Can’t just say the whole amount is due. Shit, I’ve seen contracts before, you think I haven’t? There’s gotta be a grace period, some wiggle room. There always is.”

  In her flat voice that could almost pass for calm, Phoebe said, “Not in this one.”

  Pineapple was pressing his lips together while deciding whether he should speak. Because of his height he had to bend his neck and incline his head close beneath the hot dog’s concave ceiling; the arc of his body coupled with the lamplight coming from below gave him the spectral look of a figure from El Greco. “Other years,” he said at last, “other people had the truck till winter. Then suddenly it was Gus again. Guess that’s how he did it.”

  “Goddamn sneaky bastard,” said Fred. “Well, he’s not gonna do it this time.” He slapped a counter with the flat of his hand. He would have paced but there was nowhere to go except to squeeze between the weenie-cooker and the bedrolls on the floor.

  Phoebe said simply, “I’m gonna lose the truck.” She was picturing her vehicle and home as she said this: the high red seat patched with duct tape, the cozy cot notched between the sink and fridge, the upturned bottles of different-colored syrups. At certain hours the sun flashed through the blue and red and orange liquids and the bottles gleamed like glass in a cathedral.

  “Bullshit,” said Fred. “You’re not gonna lose the truck. We’ll get a lawyer.”

  “Lawyers cost money. I’m gonna lose the truck. My own fault. He was smart. I was dumb.”

  “He’s not smart,” Fred insisted. “He’s a scumbag.”

  “Fine line sometimes.”

  There was a pause. In the clearing outside the hot dog, the cooking oil generator clattered and sputtered, mostly but not entirely drowning out the rasp of crickets and the baleful calling of frogs. Pineapple’s lips were working as he thought over what he’d read in the contract and did a little arithmetic. Finally he said, “Money was due on the fifth. Then it’s twenty days before he takes back the truck. That’s Christmas, isn’t it? That really isn’t right, to take something back on Christmas.”

  “Nothing’s getting taken back,” said Fred, and though the tone was still feisty the confidence seemed to be ebbing.

  “It’s all right,” said Phoebe. “I thought this could work but I guess it can’t. That’s life.”

  Pineapple was appallingly shy about ever touching a woman, even brushing up against a woman, but in that moment his shyness briefly fell away and he put a hand on Phoebe’s arm. “You can always stay with us,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about a place to stay.”

  Phoebe glanced around the cramped and cluttered vending wagon and almost smiled at the preposterous notion of the three of them squeezed in there, but when she tried to say thank you for the offer the words caught in her throat. If she was going to let herself cry, that’s the instant when it would have happened; it would have been Piney’s kindness that triggered it. But she wasn’t going to cry, and that was that. Instead, she stood up, folded the disastrous contract neatly in thirds, and slid it into the back pocket of her shorts.

  “Anybody want a Sno-Cone?” she asked. “I’m sure not gonna leave that bastard any of my syrups.”

  13.

  “Coulda been worse,” said Ozzie Kimmel. “At least you didn’t hit him. This way, you decide to take Tuesdays, you can probably go crawling back.”

  “I’m not crawling back,” said Nicky. “No chance. And as far as hitting him goes, y
ou know what? That never even occurred to me.”

  “Some tough guy,” Ozzie said.

  Nicky let the comment pass. “You know what did occur to me? Throwing shit. Grabbing a fistful of that nasty egg salad and flinging it up to the ceiling, that occurred to me. Chucking a couple frying pans, playing Frisbee with some trays, that occurred to me. But hitting him? No.”

  They were sitting in mesh beach chairs on the deck of the Sea Queen, drinking beers from bottles. The sun had been down for close to an hour but there was still a faint coppery glow on the water, as if the drowned daylight was still struggling upward from the bottom of the sea. Around them the funky marina was mostly quiet, though here and there an industrious fellow with a day job was using the early evening hours to get some work done on his boat. A dock or two away a man and woman were arguing about whose turn it was to walk the dog.

  “So what’ll you do?” asked Ozzie.

  “Don’t know. For right now I’ll drink a couple beers.”

  “Try out other places,” Ozzie advised. “There’s lots of other bars.”

  “Right. Two hundred-ninety-something. And about a thousand other half-ass musicians with guitars.”

  “Hey, come on,” said Ozzie, “don’t get down on yourself.”

  “I’m not down on myself. I’m just saying the exact same thing you said a couple weeks ago. My act is nothing special.”

  “I said that?” In truth, Ozzie didn’t remember that he had, and this was not unusual, because he tended to blurt things from the very outmost surface of his mind, before they’d had a chance to resolve into a considered thought or to cut a groove in memory.

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “Shit, that was harsh. I take it back.”

  “You can’t take it back. It happens to be true.”

  Ozzie sipped some beer. “Okay, maybe it is. But you can’t just give up just because you’re nothing special. Hardly anybody’s really special, right? I mean, if lots of people were really special it wouldn’t be special anymore. There’d have to be a different word. So, like, even if you’re just sort of average, so-so, let’s call it mediocre—“

  Nicky said, “You really aren’t helping, Oz.”

  “I’m trying,” his friend insisted.

  Nicky turned his face away, leaned far back in his crummy chair as if daring it to tip or buckle, and finished off his beer.

  Phoebe felt a sudden yen to hear some music. At least she told herself that’s what she felt, though the impulse to go out might simply have sprung from a desire to get away from the truck for a while. Now that it seemed she’d be losing it, what was the point of spending more time there, settling in more deeply, letting it feel ever more like home? Hanging around the Step-Van would be a kind of deathbed vigil; it was better to go out. Then again, if she went out there were lots of places she could go; why did she zero in on listening to some music at the Eclipse Saloon? She had a tough time admitting to herself that what she really wanted was to spend some time near Nicky. It’s not that she was dodging the realization that she liked Nicky and found him attractive, that she enjoyed locking onto his bright black eyes and hearing his emphatic voice. No. What made it difficult for her to admit that she wanted to see him was that she was in trouble now; and if she saw him it would probably be irresistible to speak with him about her trouble; and telling someone your troubles was getting perilously close to asking for help; and asking for help was something that she absolutely would not do.

  Then again, it would be nice to hear some music and drink a beer. Since she’d be losing the truck anyway, she might even loosen up her budget and order a rare burger. The thought of it made her stomach tingle. She took down the old red bicycle from its hook on the back of the truck and headed out of the mangroves toward A1A.

  The beachfront promenade was so quiet at that hour that she could hear the tiny gurgling collisions of wavelets against the seawall; bouncing back, the redirected ripples, as if registering surprise or protest, sometimes gave off faint puffs of phosphorescence. The fat tires of her bike rhythmically plunked over the seams in the pavement; the air was the same temperature as her skin and it seemed to cling to her like a soft favorite blouse as she rode. She was trying not to think of either past or future, just to cruise along in the bubble of the present, but her sorrow about the truck and her disappointment in herself for taking such a stupid deal kept tugging her out of the moment and forcing her to think about the through-line of her life, which in her current mood seemed like one long losing streak. Just plain bad luck, maybe. Or bad luck that stayed bad with the help of bad decisions.

  The first really bad decision had been her choice of a boyfriend back in the mid-state Massachusetts town she’d come from. Her second bad decision was not breaking up with him when he started dealing drugs. She’d cut him a lot of slack on that because he’d lost his job, as had many people they knew when the town’s last remaining fabric mill finally shut down. So he didn’t seem to have a lot of options. From there it was the usual story: he knew a guy who knew a guy who could get large quantities of this or that, and pretty soon he was dealing in fairly serious volume. The irony is that the drugs he sold weren’t even fun. They were just painkillers—Opana, Norco, Oxycontin. But the boyfriend’s market was people in pain, and in that depressed community there seemed to be no shortage of them. Pretty soon he was making quite good money, and he and Phoebe were living way higher than they’d lived while working at the factory—fancy phones, big thick steaks, Hi-Def wraparound TV. But the drug business was also scary and creepy, and when the boyfriend had accumulated fifty grand or so, Phoebe urged him to give it up and use the cash to make a fresh and legal start somewhere else. He promised they’d do that soon. Her next bad decision was believing him, or kidding herself that she did.

  Then came the really awful decision of riding in the car with him on the day he got busted with enough generic pharmaceuticals in the trunk to anaesthetize three counties.

  The boyfriend got five years. When it was Phoebe’s turn to be sentenced, the judge indulged himself in a bit of grandstanding. Silver-haired, with a crisp robe and world-weary eyes, he was everything a judge should be—condescending, self-righteous, arrogant, and vain. But for all of that, there was a wisdom and a kindness that hadn’t yet been entirely squeezed out of him. “Young lady,” he said to Phoebe, “I happen to believe that you bear very little responsibility for these illegal acts. I could give you a suspended sentence, put you on parole, but I don’t think I’d be doing you a favor. I’m sentencing you to six months in the county prison. I’d urge you to use that time to do some better thinking, to come up with some better ideas for how to run your life.”

  He’d pounded the gavel and Phoebe had gone off to jail, where she did, in fact, do lots of thinking and formed some fundamental resolutions. One of them was that she would never again put herself in a position where an old gray man could sit in judgment far above her and call her young lady. Another was that it would be a good long while before she took another boyfriend. And if she did take another boyfriend sometime, she wouldn’t look to him for money or advancement or a fancier life than she could work out on her own.

  Before her prison term was halfway finished, she’d decided that when she got out she was moving to Key West. Getting to the island city became something of an obsession and a sustaining fantasy, even though she’d never been there before and her imaginings about the place were rather sketchy. She’d heard some stories and seen some pictures. The pictures generally featured green water and palm trees that had grown up at sweetly yielding angles to accommodate the warm and mild winds. The stories were usually about eccentrics and the funny things they did in a town more prone to laugh than judge, a town where people didn’t ask but often told, a town whose vapors of booze and flowers encouraged the act of forgetting. It seemed the perfect place to reboot and start again.

  And on the long ride down the Keys by Greyhound, it had in fact felt like maybe she was finally outdistancing he
r own bad luck. The mainland fell away, and once it had vanished beneath the curve of the earth it seemed to shed its power and its consequence. The road hopped and looped from islet to insignificant islet, and it was possible for Phoebe to believe that the thread of her old mistakes would be stretched too thin and would surely snap before the end of such a twisting journey.

  The problem, of course, was that there were always new mistakes to be made. Such as signing a contract that she hadn’t carefully read. Shaking her head, wondering if she would ever figure out the mystery of how to run her life, she pedaled steadily along

  the promenade that flanked the ocean and reminded herself to savor the feel of the warm unjudging breeze.

  14.

  Teddy Meara had not expected to go for a boat ride that afternoon, but at the end of his shift he was accosted at the Customs yard gate by a huge Cuban, maybe six-foot-six and wearing a metallic silver jacket with no shirt underneath, who didn’t kidnap him, exactly, but grabbed him firmly by the arm, told him Mr. Benavides wanted to see him, and led him to a speedboat tied up at one of the commercial docks nearby.

  “So we going to Miami?” Meara had asked.

  “Shut up,” said the giant Cuban. He started the engine and didn’t say another word for several hours.

  Meara had turned green and started retching almost as soon as the speedboat cleared the reef and first nosed into the steep chop of the Gulf Stream, and he was still dry-heaving four hours later when land finally came into view once more. Peering out through sea-bleary eyes, Meara saw a long low promontory topped with a huge but squat and rather graceless fortress. He said to the Cuban, “That doesn’t look like Miami.”

  “It’s Havana, pendejo.”

  Havana! The magical word instantly made Meara feel better. True, his kidneys ached from a thousand lifts and slams against the churning water; his eyes felt like they’d been shaken in their sockets like dice in a cup. Still, in spite of the extreme discomfort, he was already looking forward to bragging to the knuckleheads at the Brigantine about how he’d seen the legendary city.