Florida Straits(62)

Then she grabbed on to the edge of the pool and started doing her kicking exercises.

That was when Joey came through the gate. Sandra was facing away from him, and he watched her as he approached. She craned her neck to keep her pale short hair out of the water. She pointed her toes, probably the way she'd once seen in a magazine. And while she was kicking furiously, she barely made a splash or a sound. Sandra, Joey thought. This is Sandra. Quiet, private, disciplined, precise. The little kid who would always find something worth doing if stuck in her room, who would always have a project for a weekful of rain. He watched her firm and narrow back, her skinny and determined shoulders, and a strange thing happened: he realized he truly was in love with her. He did not prime himself to feel this, and there was no such thing as readiness for the feeling when it came. It started at his feet and swelled upward as pure, sore, and irresistible as a sudden welling of graveside grief, and it left him with a closed throat and a milky feeling at the backs of his knees.

He walked lightly around the pool's damp apron and crouched low in front of her. "Hello, baby."

"Hi, Joey," she said, still kicking. "Thirty more makes four hundred."

"I love you," he said.

Sandra, the banker, had never before lost count. But now her scissoring legs fell out of their forced march and fluttered softly downward until her feet found the bottom. Joey, kneeling on the wet tiles, kissed her and tasted chlorine.

"I mean, Sandra, I think you're terrific. The best. The way you are. The way you've stuck with me. Hey, Sandra, you want friends? We're gonna have friends, Sandra. I promise. Lotsa friends. And salads. Friends and salads, all you want. And, like, we'll do stuff. I don't know what, whatever you like. Ya know, regular stuff that people do. Movies, picnics, I dunno. But we'll like go out, we'll have, like, a life. You and me. O.K.?"





— 33 —

Viewed from even a little distance out at sea, the life of the land looks small and slow, cozy but at the cost of being locked into lines and lanes, blocks and clusters. Compared to the tireless movement of water, things on land look stunned; it seemed to Joey that they could practically be under glass. Houses seem bolted to the earth. Cars crawl, pushing their meager lights ahead of them. Trees clutch the ground, rooted desperately as teeth.

At eleven fifty-five, Joey Goldman, alone at the wheel of Zack Davidson's little skiff, veered in from the open ocean toward the Flagler House dock. He was towing behind him a paintless plank rowboat with rusty oarlocks and mismatched oars, a broken stem seat, and a cut-off bleach bottle for bailing. He'd offered ten dollars for it and bought it for twelve.

In front of him, the hotel windows were nearly all dark; a few flickered with the fugitive light of television. Outside, orange floodlights collided with the blue shimmer of the pool and gave a mottled desert aspect to the beach. On the far side of the building, Charlie Ponte's thugs sat in their Lincoln scratching their bellies, yawning, talking about Italian food and parts of the female body. Their landlocked brains traveled predictably down marked roads; they could not conceive of a getaway on the wide, dark, and laneless water. Joey idled at the end of the pier and waited.

His view to the top of the service ramp was blocked by the shaggy thatch of the poolside bar, and by the time he saw the silhouettes of Gino and Vicki, they were winding their way through the ranks of vacant lounge chairs near the beach. Gino had his hand in the small of Vicki's back, a gesture not of gallantry but of bullying. Shadowy and forward-leaning, the couple bore, for all their attempted nonchalance, the unmistakable stamp of people fleeing, and when Gino stepped onto the thick boards of the dock, his heavy tread seemed to pass along an edginess that shuddered through the nails and down the pilings until it was smothered by the muck at the bottom of the sea. Halfway along the pier, one of Vicki's high heels caught between two planks; she took her shoes off and scurried the rest of the way with mincing steps.

"So you made it," Gino said. He managed to muster some of his former high-spirited sarcasm, maybe because Joey was now literally beneath him, hugging a piling to keep the boat close and not looking especially dignified. But it was also true that Gino had made a brave attempt to pull out of his nosedive on this, his last evening in Florida. He'd eased off on the bourbon and just let Dr. Greenbaum buy him one final bottle of champagne with dinner. He'd shaved, cut his toenails, and even managed to find a clean shirt and a silk sports jacket. Like many people who have been humiliated in a strange and distant place, he seemed to imagine that going home would be sufficient to erase the episode, that since none of the neighborhood guys had witnessed his shame and the baring of his weakness, it hadn't really happened.