Mangrove Squeeze(6)

Regrets? Sometimes, sure. Strangely, though, the heaviest regrets could be outweighed by tight and airy clothes. Open shoes. Warm breeze on her face. Besides, her current job—selling space for the Island Frigate—wasn't really so bad. It was nowhere near as obviously dead-end as most Key West employment; it might conceivably lead to something that could actually be interesting.

So she wrapped a skirt around herself. She did her eyes. They were wide-spaced, big, and blue—surprising against the blackness of her thick, unruly hair. There weren't many blue-eyed Greeks around, and her eyes made people notice and remember; they were an asset she'd learned to live with. She grabbed her satchel with its rate card and ad samples, and she rode her bike downtown.

Today she was making cold calls on potential new accounts. There were new ones all the time, because the turnover in Key West businesses was phenomenal. Duval Street rents were extortionate, pushed way up by the boom in T-shirt shops, mostly owned by Russians who didn't seem to care about the cost. The tourist market was notoriously fickle, rattled by everything from last year's hurricane to this week's murder in Miami. And many Key West proprietors were flaky as well as undercapitalized, had a mantra in place of a business plan. Sunglass shops, towel stores, cafes—no wonder so many of them went belly-up before a single season had run its rocky course.

Then there were the guest houses. Havens of heartbreak. Bankruptcies waiting to happen. How many of them had come and gone during the years Suki had lived here? Fifty? A hundred? All those fantasies exploded, all those nest eggs squandered. Gay guys too in love with wallpaper to notice that their cash flow was from hunger. Marriages stressed to the breaking point by stuffed toilets, bounced checks; sex preempted by a dread of the jingle of the front-desk bell. Why would anyone want to run a guest house?

She didn't think it was the money. More, maybe, just to have a place—a place to go, a piece of the town. An address where life could find you.

But other people's reasons—that was not her problem. The rent on her apartment was problem enough. So she hustled through the morning, sold a one-eighth page to a cappuccino joint that might or might not survive long enough to pay the bill, a sixteenth to a dim shop that offered custom goods in leather.

At around eleven-thirty she hopped back on her bike and rode from Duval Street down to Whitehead. It was shadier there, and quieter. Enormous banyan trees and strangler figs tunneled the street; their canopies had been hollowed out to make way for telephone and electric wires, and still the waxy leaves were dense enough to baffle sound. Homes mingled with businesses; black people from Bahama Village rode their bikes amid the pinkened tourists. After the relentless contrivance of Duval Street, Whitehead seemed like a real place in a real town. Besides, there was a promising account down there. The forlorn old Mangrove Arms had recently changed ownership yet again.

So she pedaled to the corner of Rebecca Street, where she saw a ragged man with a scraggly beard, holding a sign on a stick. Longtime locals in Key West all knew each other's faces if not their names. Suki vaguely smiled at the man; he vaguely nodded back from his perch atop the curb.

She stepped off her bike and took a moment to contemplate the troubled guest house. It was never going to be a showplace, yet it was clear that this most recent owner was no mere passive dreamer but a thrashing and ambitious one.

Emblems of work and hope were everywhere. Boards had been unsnaggled in the weathered picket fence. Rotten planks had been replaced; the new ones were a slightly different color, like the skin around a healing wound. The runaway hibiscus had been pruned into some semblance of a hedge; sun-shy impatiens, the dirt around them fresh as birth, had been tucked in among the stems. A hand- routed sign, tastefully funky, hung nearly straight from a beam on the porch. Suki saw the changes, felt the urge behind them—the urge to salvage, to restore—and, in spite of all she'd seen, she thought, who knew, maybe this time the old dump would make it.

She climbed the stairs, followed the wraparound veranda to the office door at the side, and, stepping in, she saw an old man with fluffly white hair sitting behind the desk. She hugged her satchel against her side and said her spunkiest good morning.

The old man said, "What?"

Suki said it again. Then she saw that the old man's hearing aid was in pieces on the desk blotter in front of him, next to a tiny screwdriver. She pointed at it.

He said, "Great gizmo. Voice activated. Picks out certain frequencies. Clever."

Suki nodded. "I was wondering if I could see the owner or the manager."

"I can hear okay without it," said Sam Katz. "What?"