Mangrove Squeeze(70)

"Strong guy. Yiddish." Aaron got up from his chair, measured empty space around himself. He went into an exaggerated slow-motion windup that looked more like martial arts than baseball.

"'Look,' he told me, 'the power, it all comes from the middle. Not the arm. And the pitch—a million miles an hour it doesn't have to be. Location. Pinpoint. That's what we'll work on.'"

Aaron's arm was back now, his shoulders turned as though he were about to chuck a spear. "And we did," he went on. "And I pitched. Little League. Junior High. Was I great? No. Lack of talent takes you just so far. But I had excellent control."

He was just going into his delivery when he saw the misshapen mango muffin on the counter. With hardly a hitch in his motion, he picked it up in battered fingers. Then his arm came forward, pulled by the uncoiling of his middle, and the muffin flew across the room and landed cleanly in the garbage can.

Suki said, "Strike three."

And the telephone rang.

Aaron, slightly abashed at finding himself in the middle of the kitchen with muffin crumbs between his fingers, let it ring another time then moved to answer it. Out of Little-League mode and back in somber adulthood, he said, "Good morning, Mangrove Arms."

There was a brief but ragged silence on the other end, a beat with some clumsy fraction added. Then a male voice echoed, "Mangrove Arms?"

There was something odd about the voice, a stilted precision that Aaron could not place at first. "Yes, Mangrove Arms," he said. "May I help you?"

Again, a pause with jarring syncopation. Then the single careful word: "Hotel?"

A rolling cramp climbed up Aaron's back. His spine was registering the wrongness even as his brain was denying that anything was wrong, claiming only that Key West was a city of misdialed numbers, of people who were lost, of drunken fingers that couldn't find the buttons. But that careful voice—the h had too much breath; the o was too perfectly round. This was someone laboring to hide an accent. Perhaps a Russian accent. Aaron swallowed, turned his too-revealing face away from Suki, urged a steadfast neutrality on his tightening throat. "Hotel, yes. Bed and breakfast. May I help you?"

A final mistimed pause, then he heard a click.

He held the receiver an extra moment then replaced it slowly in the cradle. He put off turning around because he didn't know what he would say to the woman the Russian Mafia was looking for.

When he finally met Suki's eyes, the coffee cup was at her mouth, it made a kind of veil. Looking at her, he felt the thwarted helplessness that turned people reckless, that drove them to acts of flamboyant but unhelpful martyrdom. His father was out there somewhere, blundering through the world; Suki was in here, hidden only by some scraps of hedge and a rotting picket fence; and he, to mask his own anxieties, was clowning, combing through boyhood for clues about what it was to be a man. He was in the prime of life and not devoid of courage. But what did it take to protect another person, to keep somebody safe? Did only freaks of opportunity make heroes, or did heroism call for things he couldn't see because he didn't have them?

He looked at Suki, the surprising dark blue eyes beneath the coarse and wild hair. "Wrong number," was all he said to her.





"Fred," said Piney, "ya know what I sometimes wonder about?"

It was late afternoon and they were wandering through the unearthly no-man's-land that stretched back from their clearing, just north of the airport, where the mangroves were fenced in. It was weird back there in every way. In a jam-packed little town where strangers' beach towels touched at the edges, and visitors piled up three- deep at the bars, here was an expanse where almost no one went. On a tiny island where building lots kept doubling in price, here was a tract the developers didn't bother trying to grab. Certain people might have found it beautiful but for the most part it was ugly. Colorless crumbled coral that passed for soil. Salt puddles ringed with dusty shrubs whose leaves could slice through skin. Greedy gulls shaking dying tadpoles in their beaks.

Piney gave Fred a few seconds to ignore him, then answered his own question. "Air raid drills."

"Air raid drills?" said Fred.

They strolled, skirting puddles. An egret landed, wings whooshing, and for a moment it seemed like they were very far from anywhere; then a gap opened in the mangroves and they could see the airport runway, not three hundred yards beyond.

"Like in grade school," Piney said. "Remember?"

Grade school was the only school that either of them knew, but Fred didn't like to think about it. "Fuckin' school," he said.

"That bell," said Pineapple. "Different from the fire bell. No, not a bell now that I think of it. More like a horn. Trumpet. So loud it was. Made the walls ring. Made your pencils rattle on the desk. Remember?"