Key West Luck

by Laurence Shames

  “You know,” the other man went on, “my side of this is extremely complicated, lots of moving parts. Yet I’ve managed to put it all together. Your side is pretty simple. And that’s what’s holding us up. Does that seem right to you?”

  Ponte’s temper had become more manageable and more finely calibrated over the years, but it still flared when he felt that he was being dissed, and now a surge of heat came rising up his neck and radiated in pulses from the top of his mostly balding head. His voice clenched, he said, “Don’t talk down to me, Luis.”

  “Was I talking down? Is that how it sounded? No, I’m just trying to ask you a simple question. Can you get this done or do I need to find someone who can?”

  So there it was, the threat that Ponte knew was coming. Not a violent threat, not a threat of confrontation; just a threat to leave Ponte out of something, to drop him, to brush him off as someone inessential. Straining to keep his voice firm, he said, “I’m working on it. I’m close. Couple of people should be getting back to me.”

  None of this was true. Ponte had done nothing except for one call to his ancient former colleague in Key West; the embarrassing truth was that he didn’t know who else to ask. And no one, not even Bert, had promised to get back to him.

  “Two more days,” said Benavides. “I’ll give you two more days.”

  He said this with finality. There was nothing to negotiate, nothing to discuss. Two days to find a fall guy, or Ponte could say goodbye to a half a million dollar payday that he’d have an awfully tough time making up with the rest of his faltering rackets.

  “Fine,” said the older man. “Fair enough.”

  He hung up the phone and a humiliating realization came over him. He’d have to go to Key West himself and try somehow to recruit a man.

  This was the sort of thing he’d had to do much earlier in his career, when he was first building a crew and rising in the ranks. Finding raw talent on the street—it wasn’t very different from pimping, and while it was necessary at certain junctures, it was the kind of errand that was beneath a boss’s dignity to do. There should be underlings to do it, young guys trying to curry favor, middle-men hoping to add some muscle. Except there weren’t anymore.

  Ponte got up and starting preparing for the long ride down the Keys. He couldn’t shake the feeling that his life was suddenly going backwards.

  17.

  Next morning, at the Sno-Cone truck, Nicky Angelo was saying in his emphatic way, “Look, what’s the argument against we just go talk to the guy? I mean, how much of an asshole can he be?”

  “He’s quite an asshole,” Ozzie said. “I’ve known him just a little bit for years. Asshole and a slob.”

  “Okay,” said Nicky, “asshole, slob, whatever. But the point is we’re offering him a good deal.”

  Softly and evenly, Phoebe said, “We’re not offering him anything, Nicky. Forget about it.”

  “You forget about it,” he countered. “Me and Oz, we’ve already talked it over. We pool our savings, we got like almost four grand. We give that to him, you get a little breathing space, you pay us back when you can.”

  “I’m not doing it.”

  Nicky went on as though he hadn’t heard. “Guy wants a penalty, we negotiate something, we work it out. But inna meantime—“

  Just very slightly louder, Phoebe said, “I’m not doing it. Besides, he doesn’t want to cut a deal. Isn’t that obvious by now? What he wants is to get his truck back.”

  “I dunno,” said Ozzie. “He gets the truck back, he’s gotta get off his fat lazy ass and work it.”

  “Right,” said Phoebe. “For four months. And it’s totally worth his while. Do the math. When season finally gets here, I’m guessing this truck takes in around two hundred a day. Almost all profit. So call it twelve hundred a week, five thousand a month. Four months. That’s twenty grand he can sock away, plus he’s still got the truck so he can run the same scam next year. That’s the way he set it up. Isn’t it clear?”

  Frustrated in a battle against logic, Nicky said, “I still say we should talk to the guy. Reason with him. See if we can persuade him.”

  At the mention of persuasion, Phoebe and Ozzie, by a common reflex, glanced down at Nicky’s hand, the one that had been broken against the jaws or cheekbones of people he’d been hired to persuade.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Phoebe said. “You’re not persuading anyone.”

  Nicky might have scared himself a little. He backtracked. “Okay. I didn’t mean persuade. I just meant, ya know, persuade, see if we could reach an understanding.”

  For a moment Phoebe said nothing, just stood there with her tattooed arms resting on the service counter of the Sno-Cone truck.

  Nicky went on, “I say we gotta talk to the guy, at least. I mean, come on, ya really got nothing to lose.”

  He meant it kindly but Phoebe’s face revealed just the tiniest of flinches when he said it. Her chest stretched as if she was sighing though not a sound escaped her. She lowered the plywood awning on its rusty hinges and started closing up the truck.

  In most places it would have seemed a little strange to see three grown-ups heading for a crucial business meeting wearing shorts and sandals and t-shirts in varying degrees of funkiness, and riding in a loose chevron formation on clunky, rusted bicycles. In Key West it was just how things were done. Ozzie led the trio as they hugged the shoreline, scudding along the promenade that flanked the ocean. The path took a looping left just beyond the airport and led on to the Cow Key Bridge, the completely undramatic and in fact barely noticeable link between Key West and the rest of the world.

  On the far side of the bridge lay Stock Island, a disheveled and uncouth cousin to its far more glamorous if also uncouth neighbor. Alongside U.S. 1, dust rose from the unpaved parking lots of liquor stores, greasy vapors wafted from the exhaust vents of cheap restaurants. Where the highway angled off onto Macdonald Avenue, trailer parks shared frontage with body shops and tattoo parlors.

  But then, quite suddenly, the area didn’t exactly gentrify but became almost charmingly nautical, rather like a broken-off piece of blue-collar New England. There were shipyards and chandleries; unexpected glimpses of the sea appeared behind cranes and boat cradles. Pocket-sized marinas occupied skinny inlets; Ozzie led the way to one of these, where a semi-converted trawler with a rusty old winch still bolted to its stern was tied up at a wooden dock.

  On the trawler’s deck at the bow there was a hammock, one of those cheap Mexican jobs made of scratchy woven fibers, strung between the cabin roof and the bowsprit. It could not immediately be determined if there was a person in the hammock, but it sagged and bellied as if underneath a heavy load.

  Phoebe, Nicky, and Ozzie climbed off their bikes and stood there in the sunshine. Ozzie shouted, “Yo, Gus!”

  A few seconds passed. From deep in the hammock came a belch then a voice said, “Who the fuck is that?”

  “It’s Ozzie. Ozzie Kimmel.”

  Not without a note of humor, albeit of a very sour kind, the voice said, “Oh, shit. That can’t be good.”

  The tormented strands of the hammock stretched and squeaked, the whole thing swayed, then a pair of fat bare feet emerged from the cocoon, one on either side, groping toward balance on the deck; the feet were followed by thick calves that were red and scabbed from bug bites that had been scratched too much. A moment later, wriggling and scuffling with his elbows, Gus Delios had managed to sit up. He was holding a jar of peanut butter that he’d been scooping out with the index finger of his other hand. He licked that finger then wiped it off on the front of the sleeveless t-shirt he was wearing. Tiny clumps of peanut butter lingered in his beard and at the corners of his moustache but he didn’t seem to notice. He said to Ozzie, “What the fuck you want?”

  Only then did he see the other two people standing on the dock. The guy he didn’t recognize. The girl he did. Grudgingly he said, “Hey. Bebe, right?”

  “Phoebe.”

  She offered n
othing more, so Nicky put in, “We need to talk to you.”

  “I picked up on that,” said Gus. To Phoebe, he said, “Tough luck about the payment. It’s a bear this time of year.”

  Phoebe just looked at him without much of an expression.

  Nicky said, “And everybody knows it. Especially you.”

  Delios said nothing to that, just ate another fingerful of peanut butter.

  Trying to be the diplomatic one, a role to which he was utterly unsuited, Ozzie said, “The contract between you and Phoebe. We’d like to renegotiate.”

  “I’m not interested in that.”

  Nicky said, “Come on, man, it’s a really shitty deal.”

  “She didn’t have to take it.”

  The words were true but the tone was way too dismissive and smug, and Nicky felt the skin on his forehead start to tighten and the muscles of his back begin to clench.

  Very softly, Phoebe said, “He’s right. I didn’t have to.”

  Her mildness and resignation exasperated Nicky even more and he said, “I don’t care if you had to or didn’t have to. It’s a shitty deal and he knew it was a shitty deal and now he’s being a dick about it.”

  Unruffled, Delios said, “Great. Call me names. That really helps.”

  Ozzie said, “Gus, look, we’ll give you four grand. Call five hundred a penalty. Put the rest toward—“

  “I’m not interested,” said the man in the hammock. “The contract is the contract.” He went back to his peanut butter.

  Nicky stewed a moment and when he spoke again his voice was not loud but it was so tight that he almost wheezed. “That truck is her home. She lives in it. Everything she planned, everything she’s working for, it’s all about that truck.”

  Delios wiped his finger on his shirt. “Put away the fucking violin, okay? This is business.” To Phoebe he said, “You want the fucking truck so bad, all you need to do is come up with ten grand. That’s a lot of sno-cones but it’s not a lot of money. Ever considered hooking? You kind of have the look. The hair, the tats, the stud…”

  Nicky didn’t remember jumping onto the gangplank but he was halfway up it, fists balled, eyes glued to the fat man in the hammock, when he heard from the cabin a frantic scratching and clicking of paws and in the next instant an albino pit bull exploded through the companionway hatch, launched itself like a bazooka toward the gangway, and landed snarling about a foot from Nicky’s ankle. Nicky tried to freeze, his momentum carrying him to an absurd and tenuous forward lean like something out of a manic tap-dance routine. The dog dug in and hatefully barked, its white-flecked tongue dangling obscenely over jagged teeth. A web of veins was clearly visible through the thin skin of its square and stupid skull; its pink eyes were bloodshot behind their red-rimmed narrow slits. A sudden sweat broke out on Nicky’s neck and trickled down his spine, his knees ached from holding his ridiculous posture.

  Still in his hammock, still clutching his jar of peanut butter, Gus Delios was smiling. Over the harsh rasp of the barking, he said, “If you back away very, very slowly there’s a chance he won’t bite you.”

  Inch by inch, his gaze never leaving the pit bull’s infernal eyes, Nicky started his retreat. His tiny backward steps squeaked against the rocking and suddenly insecure boards of the gangplank until his foot found the level of the dock. His shirt was plastered to him by then and he hoped no one could tell that his legs were trembling.

  The fat man whistled for his dog. Suddenly placid, it turned and trotted toward the bow. Delios gave it a fingerful of peanut butter, then he said to Nicky, “What you did just now, that was very rash. You could’ve gotten hurt.”

  Ozzie said, “And your fucking monster dog would’ve gone to the gas chamber.”

  “For defending me against a charging trespasser? I don’t think so. But let’s not argue about something that didn’t happen. Let’s talk about something that will happen.”

  He turned his heavy-lidded, puffy eyes toward Phoebe; she lifted her chin one small defiant notch to meet his stare straight on. “What’ll happen,” he said, “is that on or before December twenty-fifth you’ll pay me my ten grand or you’ll come here to deliver the truck. Don’t make me get the repo man. That creates a lot of headaches. You make me get the repo man, I have to sue you to recover his fee, then if you don’t pay the judgment I have to swear out a warrant and get the cops involved. I’m guessing you don’t want that. Do we understand each other?”

  18.

  “Nice a ya to drive down all this way just to have a drink with me,” said Bert the Shirt d’Ambrosia. “Never knew ya to be so, let’s call it sociable or maybe even nostalgic before.”

  He and his dog and Charlie Ponte were sitting at a bar called the Clove Hitch. With two hundred ninety-three establishments to choose from, Key West had a bar for every occasion, every mood, every hour, and every possible set of atmospheric conditions. The Clove Hitch was Bert’s favorite on afternoons when it wasn’t too hot and wasn’t too windy. It was an outdoor joint cantilevered over the shallow brown water of the Garrison Bight Marina. Sitting there, you could look at sailboats and houseboats and some days, if you timed it right, you could see the crews from the charter fishing fleet gutting and cleaning grouper and snapper on the docks.

  “Salud,” said Ponte, and he raised the squat glass that was filled with ice and amber booze and topped off with a maraschino cherry. The two men clinked. Ponte took a slow and contemplative sip of his cocktail before continuing. “Bert,” he said, “I’ll be on the level with ya.”

  “First time for everything,” the old man said while stroking the chihuahua in his lap.

  “Come on, don’t bust my balls. Not right now. I’m kind of in a bind here. I’m kind of…you know what? I kind of don’t know what the fuck I am. I’m kind of just not sure what I should do.”

  Bert the Shirt was exceptionally good at keeping his expression steady and preventing such tell-tale emotions as fear or surprise from showing in his eyes. But even he had a difficult time hiding his reaction to Ponte’s expression of uncertainty. The two men had known each other for something like forty years. Had Bert ever before heard anything quite so tentative, quite so wavering, quite so human, in Ponte’s words or tone? He didn’t think so, and his old colleague’s self-exposure drew forth from Bert at least a provisional sympathy. He said, “Okay, Cholly. So talk to me.”

  The Miami mobster didn’t seem to know quite where to start. His lips moved, he made a couple hand gestures, he took another sip of his drink. Finally he said, “S’okay, I got a piece of a deal down here.”

  “Right,” said Bert. “And you need a guy to do a job.”

  “Right. So I head down here to try to find a guy, I call you up ‘cause I’m still hoping you can help me, except what happens is that like halfway down the Keys I start wondering if I want to be involved with this at all. I don’t like the guy I’m in business with. I don’t trust him. I don’t like what’s gonna happen to the guy I find—“

  “What’s gonna happen?”

  “Never mind. Leave that onna side for now. Point is, I got time and whaddyacallit, credibility, invested here, but I just don’t know if I want to do it.”

  “So don’t,” said Bert.

  For some reason the straightforward and reasonable suggestion exasperated Ponte. His hands were damp and cold from cradling his drink and he raked them roughly through the patches of hair on the sides of his head. “So don’t,” he mimicked. “Like it’s that simple.”

  “Isn’t it? What happens if you just don’t do it?”

  “What happens? Nothing happens. No vendetta, nothing like that. He gets somebody else.”

  Bert shrugged. “Seems to me like there’s your answer.”

  “Except it isn’t,” Ponte said. “Look, here’s what I’m afraid of—“

  “Afraid of, Cholly? You’re afraid of something?”

  “Come on, don’t bust my balls. What I’m concerned about is this. Could I just not do this deal? Sure, not doing i
t would be easy. But what if not doing stuff gets to be a habit? You don’t do this, you don’t do that, pretty soon you’re not doin’ nothing.”

  “It’s called retirement,” Bert said. “Not the worst thing inna world.”

  “I dunno,” said Ponte. “I mean, ya wake up inna morning, what the fuck do ya do?”

  “First thing usually, ya take a leak. The day kind of goes from there.”

  “Nah, I’m not ready to retire,” Ponte said. He said it feistily, as if it was some invisible third party who was trying to fire him.

  “Look, I’m not saying you should, I’m not saying you shouldn’t. You’re the one who brought it up. My opinion? You’ll know it when it’s time.”

  Shying back from the terrifying thought of doing nothing and just living with himself all day, Ponte said, “Shit, I’m making way too much of this. All I gotta do is find a guy to do this job.”

  “Right,” said Bert. “And if you can’t find a guy, or if finding a guy suddenly seems like too much of a pain innee ass, then that’s kind of how you know it’s time. You don’t just decide outa nowhere. Life decides.”

  Ponte sipped his drink but it didn’t take him long to conclude that he hated that idea, the passivity of it, the yielding of control. “Bullshit,” he said, “life don’t decide squat. Not for Charlie Ponte. I’ll decide. I’ll decide how long I stay in and I’ll decide when I get out and I’ll decide the terms.”

  He was quite worked up by now. A jagged vein shaped like a lightning bolt was pulsing in his temple. His feet, propped up on his barstool, were tapping against the air. Bert calmly stroked his dog and looked beyond the bar at boats. “Okay,” he said, “who’s arguing?”

  The Clove Hitch bar was oval-shaped, sort of like a race track. In the middle there was a tall double rank of bottles and taps, while around the perimeter there were stools facing in at various angles. On the side of the bar opposite to that where Ponte and Bert were having their discussion, hidden from view by the mountain of booze, two men and a woman were three drinks deep into a celebration of their recent run of luck. The luck they were celebrating had all been bad, but they were trying with mixed results to have a laugh or two and not to get morose about it.