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Florida Straits(45)

By:SKLA


Joey followed him through the narrow streets of Old Town. Bert came to a dead halt at every stop sign and waited a full five seconds before crawling on again. Joey looked out through the top of his roofless car, squeezed his steering wheel, and tried to talk himself out of his antsiness. There was no real reason to hurry. Vicki was asleep; Gino was probably watching television in a waiting room. Was his brother going to be impressed if he got there thirty seconds sooner? Besides, hadn't Joey had enough of the eager-beaver errand-boy routine, wasn't he a little tired of being the guy who arrives panting and sweaty so maybe he'll get a pat on the cheek for trying so hard? Screw it.

At White Street, Bert turned onto U.S. 1, and Key West instantly stopped being a place and rejoined America. Franchise restaurants and chain motels lined the highway; stacked traffic lights said whose turn it was to pull into the six-plex movies and the supermarket that never closed. License plates from everywhere made it plain that you were nowhere in particular. Bert stayed in the right lane and braked every time someone pulled off the road for a doughnut or a hamburger.

Key West is separated from Stock Island by the Cow Key Channel, such a narrow cut between the Atlantic and the Gulf that Joey barely noticed he'd gone over a bridge to cross it. Land is cheap on Stock Island; it is Secaucus, New Jersey, to Key West's Manhattan. The help lives there, in trailer parks and in half-painted cinder-block shacks that would not look out of place in the deep Caribbean. People get knifed in bars there, crack is sold on street corners, battered women now and then shoot the hearts out of their boyfriends. The parts of Stock Island not given over to squalor are given over to the public good. There is a junior college at which one can study the repair of outboard engines and get credit for scuba diving. There is the dump, Mount Trashmore, whose incalculable tons of garbage have been heaped into a weirdly splendid pyramid, the summit of which is the highest point in all the Florida Keys. Along the same road that skirts Mount Trashmore is the hospital complex, generously endowed by Key West's most prominent families, the proud descendants of pirates.

Bert the Shirt turned down this road, and Joey followed. In the dim glow of headlamps and moonlight, he noticed how the old man held his thin neck perfectly still, as though driving a car at thirty miles an hour required his most ferocious attention. Maybe it was this recognition of Bert's frailty that gave Joey a sudden queasy recollection of his mother dying and the smell of the hospital she died in. It was a smell at once overscrubbed and putrid, bracing as ammonia yet stained with the stench of unspeakable fluids and vomit. Please, Joey thought, don't let this hospital smell that way; give it a different brand of floor cleaner at least. Then he wondered if he'd actually see Vicki, and then he was assaulted by a lewdly gruesome image of Vicki's body going through the plate-glass window, and her wrecked and bloody clothes being peeled off her.

Then, in the shadow of Mount Trashmore and for no apparent reason, Bert the Shirt jammed on the brake, went into a tiny skid, and stopped just a few inches too short for Joey to avoid hitting him. Fenders collided, made a surprisingly soft sound, like the crumpling up of foil, and came away not destroyed but dimpled. The impact was not painful, just rude and startling, as when an unseen and unwelcome friend comes up and slaps you on the back. Joey barely had time to say What the fuck? and to put the Caddy in reverse, before he realized that he could not back up because a dark blue Lincoln had pulled snugly in behind him.

A big guy in a blue suit was standing next to Joey, and he held a gun that glinted dully in the moonlight. "Get out and hug the fucking car," he said.

Joey found he couldn't move, and so the big guy helped him. He yanked open the door of the Caddy, grabbed Joey by the front of his shirt, and pulled him up into the street. He turned him with a slap of the gun muzzle across the ribs, then pushed him down across the hood of the car and ran his hand along his sides and up his crotch to check for weapons. Joey just lay there. He supposed he was terrified, but mostly he was confused. The car engine was hot under his chest, and he found this strangely comforting. Lying there, his cheek against the warm gritty steel, he could see another dark blue Lincoln pulled across the road in front of Gino's rented T-Bird, and he could see that Bert the Shirt was also being frisked. Yes, it was very confusing, and all the while Bert's chihuahua was baying and howling like a very small and very shrill coyote.





— 24 —

The equipment shed did not smell like garbage, exactly. It smelled worse than that. It smelled like what garbage is on its way to becoming as it rots, as the brown bags soak through with the ooze of putrefying vegetables, as gristle falls off meat bones and turns to a yellowish paste, as bacteria eat through the membranes that have been holding the stink inside of things, letting the foulness into the air like a filthy secret. Added to the humid fumes of decay were the bitter tang of gull shit and the chicken coop reek that came from the riled and oily feathers of the carrion birds. Joey glanced around the room and tried to figure out if anyone else was on the verge of gagging.