Florida Straits(53)

Joey fiddled with a sneaker lace to stall for time. Why was everyone always asking him to spill his guts? Then again, what a giddy pleasure it might be if he could spill them. He'd laid it all out for Sandra, a woman. Why not tell it all to Zack, this curious outsider who for some odd reason seemed to want to be his friend? Why not tell everyone and have it the hell over with? Unloading his secrets—what a notion. It was dizzying. It was impossible. "Yeah, Zack," he said, "it looks strange. In fact, it is strange. But it's got nothin' to do with the job."

Joey volunteered nothing further, and Zack put up his hands in surrender. "O.K., Joey, if ya can't talk about it, ya can't talk about it. But listen, if there's some way I can help, I'm here."

Joey hesitated. He hesitated for so long that Zack began to fidget, putting paper clips on things, squaring the edges of stacked stationery. Hot shafts of sun streamed in the office window and glinted off the Plexiglas model. Joey was oblivious. He was wading through thoughts as through limestone muck, and while his preoccupations were the same as they had been for weeks, he was suddenly taking a very different course through the morass. He had two lives, Joey did, and until this moment he'd been trying his damnedest to keep them separate, to preserve the new from contamination by the old. Now he realized that the collision had already taken place—in fact, there had never been a time when the two lives weren't one. So he found a new idea: If the new life couldn't be quarantined from the old, maybe the old life could be solved, settled, and laid to rest by the resources of the new. When Joey finally spoke, his words seemed to Zack a bizarre departure from what they had been talking about. To Joey, however, the question was a perfectly logical and even inevitable conclusion to a rigorous line of reasoning.

"Hey Zack," he said, "you got a boat?"





— 28 —

Along about the first of April, the weather changes in Key West. The daytime temperature jumps one day from eighty-two to eighty-five, and there it stays for six weeks or so, until a similar increment signals the setting in of summer. The evenings suddenly no longer call for sweaters; the light cotton quilts are kicked down to the feet of beds, and even top sheets are likely to be bunched around waists but pulled no higher. The east wind, which had been rock-steady at twelve to fourteen knots all winter, becomes fitful, moves toward the south, loads up with salt, and blows moist enough to make cars wet. These changes, by the standards of the temperate zone, are so subtle as to seem insignificant. In the subtropics, however, people grow spoiled; the range of perfect comfort shrinks for them as it does, say, for the very rich, whose standards of acceptable luxury become so crazily refined that they can hardly ever be satisfied. So, while eighty-two degrees with a twelve-knot wind seems sublime, eighty-five with an eight-knot wind seems sultry, and people alter their routines accordingly.

At the compound, Peter and Claude put aside their silk sarongs and seldom wore anything more confining than the lightest of seersucker robes. Wendy and Marsha decided that the hot tub was too hot, and were more likely to stand chest-deep in the pool while discussing modern sculpture and rubbing the stress out of each other's shoulders. Luke and Lucy spent a lot of time in their outdoor shower and never quite looked dry. And Steve the naked landlord, to fend off dehydration, carried four beers rather than three to the pool with him at ten a.m.

"Whatcha reading, Steve?" Joey asked him as he went to hand over Sandra's check for the April rent.

Steve turned the damp paperback over and looked at the green flying saucer on the cover. "Aliens," he said. "Germ warfare from space." Then he smiled.

As for Sandra, she had finally broken down and done some shopping, finally put aside her fuzzy cardigans and long-sleeved business blouses with the built-in shoulders that made even Joey forget how radically compact she was. Now, for work, she wore pale blue cotton knits that nicely set off her version of a tan. Her skin, it seemed, had not changed color, but the tiny hairs on her arms had been bleached an almost tinsel silver, which offered much the same effect. Also, Sandra had greeted the warmer weather by going on a salad binge, a veritable orgy of roughage. Joey would open the refrigerator door and be confronted by a jungle of romaine, an impenetrable forest of spinach, watercress, endive. "Sandra," he'd say, "how come there ain't no food in heah?" And Sandra would smile. The heat made her softer-spoken but no less immovable. "There's a steak in the back somewhere. Probably behind the cottage cheese."

Certain other routines were also changing around Key West, although for different reasons. Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia, for example, no longer took Don Giovanni to the beach across from the Paradiso condominium to watch the sun go down, but had moved a third of a mile or so down the shoreline, closer to the Flagler House. He brought with him on these excursions his wife's old opera glasses, ladylike things encased in mother-of-pearl and trimmed in silver, and he looked quite eccentric if not perverted, fondling the chihuahua as he peeked through the oleanders and buttonwoods that fringed the beach. Joey had asked him to study up on the habits of Charlie Ponte's thugs, and Bert, while he hemmed and hawed at getting involved in any way, was still pissed off enough at Charlie Ponte to do it. As far as the old man could tell, two guys in one Lincoln were always stationed at the near end of the self-parking area, with a clear view of the hotel entrance. At around seven o'clock this watch was relieved by the two soldiers in the other car. The second car would take over the same parking space as the first one drove away. It didn't appear that all four thugs were ever employed at once. And it didn't seem that Charlie Ponte had thought to place a lookout on the ocean side.