"Ya know," said Joey, gesturing back toward the twinkling bulk of the Flagler House, "I been wanting to see this place since the first day I got here."
Gino exhaled some smoke and said nothing.
"I think Pop used to come here with my mother."
Gino stiffened and bit down on his cigar, but Joey didn't notice. The younger brother was drifting into memory and into trust, two places he didn't often visit.
"Yeah," he went on, "I'm pretty sure this is the place. I don't remember the name, but my mother useta describe it to me. Said it had the big dining room with the hanging-over porch. Said it had its own beach, private from the others—"
Gino stopped walking and stood with the yellow moonlight on his shiny dark hair. "Joey, I don't really wanna hear where my father went to catch some pussy."
Joey did not know he was about to hit his brother. He didn't notice that the cigar had dropped out of his hand and was glowing dull red on the beach, and he didn't feel his arm draw back, coiling to throw a punch. He was about as surprised as Gino when his fist slammed into the stronger man's gut, finding the soft triangle at the bottom of the ribs.
The air came out of Gino as from a ruptured football, a popping whoosh followed by a long wheeze. Helplessly, he doubled up and stayed that way for the endless moment of wondering if his lungs would ever again remember how to breathe. He struggled to lift his head, and strained his eyeballs upward to look at Joey with the befuddlement of a bystander who finds himself winged.
Joey stared down at him and felt no remorse, only fear. Gino could beat the hell out of him, easily. He'd seen Gino fight, with his fists and his feet and his elbows, he'd seen him use the top of his head to knock out other men's teeth, and the thought of it gave Joey a sickening awareness of cigar smoke turning to brown juice at the back of his throat.
But Gino didn't go for him. He straightened up slowly, arched his back, and threw his arms behind him to stretch his chest. "Fuck you do that for?"
"You don't talk about my mother that way."
"Talk about your mother? What is this, Joey, the fucking schoolyard? Talk about my mother. What are you, a fucking baby?"
Joey locked onto Gino's hard narrow eyes, and Gino was the first to quit the stare. "Awright," he said. "Awright. I shouldn'ta said it. But Joey, let's you and me decide on something right now. We don't talk about my father and your mother, O.K.? We just don't talk about it."
Joey shifted his feet in the caked sand and nodded. He couldn't have said why he'd raised the subject anyway. He didn't need Gino to tell him never to raise it again.
"Now where's my fucking cigar?" said Gino. He scanned the moonlit beach and found his corona smoldering a couple of yards away, where it had blown out of his mouth. He went to retrieve the smoke, and as he dusted the sand off it, his face took on an expression that was almost like genuine approval. "Joey," he said, "you're a crazy little fucker. I mean, to hit me, man, you gotta be fucking nuts. I mean, crazy."
— 20 —
Just before five the next day, Bert d'Ambrosia came walking down Duval Street in a seersucker shirt of mint-green and cobalt-blue stripes, colors that vibrated in the orange light of late afternoon. Unseen, and with his nervous chihuahua quivering against his chest, he watched Joey from half a block away, saw him dance toward his prospects, lean toward them as if he could somehow stretch his being to surround them, smile the salesman's hungry smile, and launch into his pitch. Eight hours of that, Bert thought. It must take a hell of a lot of energy. You had to show a lot of animation. That's what people responded to, animation. Like show biz. You wanted to get people on your side, you had to put out for them. And the street was hot. As March advanced, the sun climbed higher in the sky and sliced more relentlessly between the shimmering roofs. The cars and the scooters shot their hot blue puffs at sidewalk level, you felt them on your shins.
"Joey, why don't you wear shorts at least?"
"Oh, hi, Bert," Joey said. He swept off his repaired sunglasses and raked a forearm across his sweaty brow.
"No, I'm serious," said the old man, as if Joey had suggested he wasn't. "You'd be a lot more comfortable."
Joey gave a noncommittal shrug. He felt he'd given in enough already. He had the pink shirt, the sneakers. He'd broken down and bought a smugly cheap plastic watchband like Zack Davidson's. But shorts, that was where he drew the line. Where he came from, only dorks wore shorts. He could picture them. Dorks in shorts waiting for the bus on Astoria Boulevard. Dorks in shorts collecting deposit bottles in shopping carts. Dorks in shorts, with baseball caps, lumbering in overweight packs toward Shea Stadium. Nah, forget about it. These were losers with hairy knees and goofy socks. Even Bert— Joey didn't like to think anything bad about Bert, but face it, Bert looked a little dorky in his shorts. Too much empty space around his shrunken thighs. Too much skin for the amount of meat that was left. But O.K., with old guys it didn't matter as much. Old guys deserved some extra slack, they could look a little dorky without totally giving up their dignity.