"Joey," Sandra said, "there's nothing you can do."
But he went on as if he hadn't heard. "Ya know what gets me, Sandra? What gets me is that, for all these years, Gino passed for smart. I mean, I believed it. Sure, I bitched, I argued, but basically I bought it. Gino, the guy with big ideas. Gino, the guy who gets things done. Is that pathetic or what? I mean, look at this guy. What the hell was on his mind? And selfish. Jesus Christ Almighty, is he selfish. I mean, he coulda got me killed. He coulda got Bert killed. And what if you came along, Sandra? I mean, you coulda come for the ride." Joey slapped at the quilt and exhaled ferociously, as if trying to dig some family germ out of the very bottom of his lungs. "The fucking guy thinks of no one but himself."
Sandra snuggled closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Joey, those are all the reasons why you have to wash your hands of this."
He pulled away, not in anger but only because her touch was too much a threat to his resolve. "No, Sandra, those are all the reasons I can't wash my handsa this. I walk away, and what happens? Gino gets killed. So now he's dead, but he's still the guy who had the big ideas, the guy who was doing things. And me, what am I? I'm still little Joey, the nobody, the guy who don't know nothin', can't do nothin', and sits by like a jerk, like a worm, while his brother gets whacked."
"But Joey, you didn't make the problem."
"Sandra, that's true, and it means nothing. Listen, I been thinkin' about this all week. If Gino gets killed, it's like the clock stops, nothing can change no more. To my old man he's still the golden boy. In his own mind he's still the big shot."
"But Joey, if he's dead—"
"The only way I can ever get rid of the fucking guy, the only way I can really be done with him, is to save his life. You see what I'm saying, Sandra? I wanna be able to say to him, 'Gino, you fucked up, I saved your ass. You were dead, I brought you back to life. So here, schmuck, here's your life. Take it and get outta my face.' Sandra, ya can't say that to a dead man, can ya?"
Part III
— 27 —
"Joey," said Zack Davidson, "we gotta talk."
It was nine o'clock on a bright blue morning on Duval Street, and Joey Goldman was not surprised. In fact, the only thing he found surprising about his job these days was that he still had one. If he'd been running Parrot Beach, he'd have fired himself some weeks before.
He followed Zack up the shady pathway to the office. Study up, his colleague had told him at their first meeting. Learn to read people, to recognize the subtle signs by which they identify their peers, their social equals. Learn how to look in order to get the ones who could help you on your side. This was a fundamental requirement of salesmanship, by which Zack Davidson meant survival. So now, as Zack strolled ahead of him, Joey studied his smugly casual khaki shorts and had to acknowledge that in picking out the ones he himself was wearing, he'd overlooked certain details, missed certain nuances. Zack's shorts were of a dull twill with no sheen whatsoever; Joey's were polished in a manner that suggested too much processing. Zack's were not rumpled, exactly, but just mussed enough to create the impression that they had never seen the inside of a closet and spent their off-hours on the back of a bedroom chair; Joey's had a crisp crease that made them look less like shorts, pure and simple, and more like an amputated pair of chinos. So O.K., Joey admitted, he didn't yet have the act down perfectly, but he was getting there, he was learning. He wondered how much of it he'd remember, or what good it could possibly do him, now that he was about to get canned.
Inside, the two men skirted the scale model of the condo complex. Joey glanced at it with a pained fondness, as if it were the shrunken but living embodiment of a memory. The sweet little buildings with their tiny pastel shutters; the plastic windblown palms and the swimming pool whose blue Saran Wrap shimmered like real water; the happy owners, littler than Barbies and Kens, laid out on their lounges or standing at the painted edge of the ocean: these things, for Joey, had come to seem the perfect picture of the easy life of Florida, the life whose private, uneventful, and unspectacular appeal was daily getting through to him, and which was being royally screwed up for him by Gino and the long reach of the old neighborhood. He was almost beyond feeling angry about it. Almost. At least he was not surprised Joey tries to do something on his own; Gino undoes it, basically by declining to notice that it might by some chance matter, and by dwarfing it with something so much bigger, flashier, and more urgent. To a kid brother, a bastard no less, this was not news.
"Siddown," said Zack, motioning Joey into a slatted wooden chair next to his desk. Zack himself plopped down into his rolling, swiveling seat, rocked once so that the tilting back gave a homey squeak, then came forward and put his chin on his interlaced fingers. "Joey," he began, "some jobs, ya know, you do with your brain, right? Other jobs you do with your hands, or your back, or just by getting yourself into a certain land of mood. Those jobs call for parts of you. You see what I'm saying, Joey?