"You stood up for me, Bert?" A sublime and un-bounded gratitude made the hair lift on the back of Joey's neck.
Bert looked at the rug, at his quailing dog.
"What did you tell em?" Joey asked.
"Never mind what I tol' 'em."
"Hey," said Joey, "I wanna know." He squeezed the arms of his chair and puffed up within himself, opening the passageways like a young man does, the better to absorb a compliment from a respected elder.
"Forget about it," Bert advised.
"Come on," Joey insisted. "I wanna know."
"Awright," said Bert. "I told 'em you were too much of a loser to be involved in anything that big."
"Thanks, Bert. Thanks a lot."
"Sorry, kid. You asked. Besides, it was the best thing to say at the time. On that you hafta trust me."
— 11 —
"Joey, will you think about it at least?"
Sandra held an enormous fish sandwich in both hands and had a glass of beer in front of her. They were sitting at the Eclipse Saloon, in a booth under a big stuffed marlin and a faded photograph of a novelist who used to be world-famous in that bar and regularly got stewed there. A loop of fried onion was dangling from the underside of Sandra's roll and, fish-like, she approached from below to snag it between her teeth. "I mean," she said, "it's not like it's a regular job. All you do is talk to people, schmooze 'em up. You work outside. It's straight commission. You don't really have a boss."
"That part's bullshit," said Joey. He absently dredged a french fry through a puddle of ketchup. "There's always a boss. I'd still be depending on some suit to hand me a paycheck."
"Joey, what can I say? Life is bosses. That's how it works. Your pals from New York—don't they have bosses? Your buddy Sal, he has a boss. Your brother Gino has a boss."
"At least their bosses aren't citizens," Joey said, but the argument sounded thin even to him. His resistance was fading, diminishing in direct proportion to his bankroll, and in proportion, as well, to his growing if still unadmitted awareness that it was no easier to launch a criminal career than any other kind, only more dangerous.
Then, too, as jobs went, what Sandra was suggesting didn't really sound so awful. OPC, it was called— Off-Property Contact. What it meant was that he would hang out on a corner of Duval Street, button-hole tourists as they drifted past, and try to persuade them to take a tour of a time-share resort. If they took the tour, Joey got forty bucks a couple, and that was the end of it. Didn't matter if they bought, didn't matter if they'd never buy in a million years. His job was only to talk them past the door. The fellow who had the job now was this guy named Zack, the husband of Claire, who was one of Sandra's fellow tellers, and supposedly he was pulling in eight hundred bucks a week. A real go-getter, this Zack. He'd just passed his real estate test and was ready to move inside, to sell. No doubt Sandra, whose circuits were wired between the opposing poles of practicality and dreaming, imagined that Joey would get on that same track.
"Joey, you'd be great at it," she coaxed. "It's exactly what you like to do. Don't be pigheaded just because it happens to be legal. It's a hustle."
Joey wavered. The last thing he had in mind was an ongoing entanglement with the world of pay stubs and file cabinets, sales meetings and company picnics. But as a temporary thing, very temporary, well, maybe he could salt away a few dollars while planning his next moves. "I don't know, Sandra, standing there all day, having to be nice to these jerks—"
Sandra played her trump card. "Who says you have to be nice? That isn't how this guy Zack makes his eight hundred a week. He browbeats. He needles. Joey, the idea isn't to be nice, the idea is to capture these people. You use anything that works. Guilt. Jokes. Fibs. Crazy promises. It's a con, Joey. It's a game."
"And it's legal?"
"And it's legal. It's real estate. Joey, think of it as a legal way of taking hostages."
—
Across the street from the Eclipse Saloon was a bank, and in front of the bank was a sign that blinked out the time and the temperature. Other places, those thermometer signs tended to exert the morbid fascination of an accident scene: How bad was it? you asked yourself as you drove by. Would it hit one hundred in July? In January, would the frigid numbers skid through zero into the awful minus? In Key West it was different. There was something smug about the temperature sign. It made you feel like knocking wood, as if you'd caught yourself gloating about your own good fortune. In the daytime the sign always seemed to read eighty-two degrees, though on occasion the mercury would plummet to seventy-eight or a heat wave would raise it to a steamy eighty-four. When the sun went down, the temperature went down with it, and just as gently. By full darkness the reading had settled into the middle seventies, and there it stayed until after mid-night. By dawn it was just cool enough so that, many mornings, you woke up with a dim but pleasurable recollection of having groped for a cool sheet to pull under your chin.