Gibbs looked down at the bill. What the fuck was a dollar? Two-thirds of a beer. Three quarts of gas. One three-hundredth of his rent. Nothing that would last the evening. Gibbs's hairline itched. He raked his forearm across it, then took a moment to look up and down the dock at the Key West charter fleet. There were maybe thirty boats that cost an average, say, of eighty thousand bucks apiece. Fuck had all that money come from? Some of it, Gibbs knew, was drug money. Well, O.K., people would do what they had to do, and anyone who thought otherwise was an idiot. Some of it had come from land that the old families, the real Conchs, sold off to developers for what seemed at first vast sums then always turned out to be a lousy deal, a deal that ate the soul. Then of course there were the guys who acted like big shots but were really hired help, the paid captains with the silent partners in Dallas, Atlanta, or New York. They'd use the boat a week or two, these money guys, and take most of the profits the rest of the time. They liked the idea of being able to say they had a fishing boat in Key West. My boat. My captain. My crew. It gave them a hard-on, they could run around all thinking they were little Hemingways.
Gibbs reached into a bucket, grabbed a grouper by the tail, slapped it onto the cleaning table, and stabbed and slashed it open. He'd almost bought a boat once, Jimmy had. It was during the recession that most people hardly remembered, '81-'82, when business stank, no one was making money, and the market was flooded with bargains. There was an old Bertram, thirty-one feet, twin gas inboards, worth a good forty grand and going begging at twenty-seven. Back then, Jimmy Gibbs had five thousand dollars put away, the proceeds of some discreet transporting of bales of marijuana He'd put on a fresh blue shirt and jeans with a crease and gone to the bank to borrow the rest.
The banker was a realist. "Lotta guys, Jimmy, they think a charter boat's a money machine, think once ya got the boat, everything is easy. Not true. Things go wrong. There's a lousy season. Ya get sick. Someone breaks a leg and sues. A lotta guys can't cut it. And we take the boats back, Jimmy. Don't think for a second we don't. It's embarrassing, it makes you crazy mad, and you can't ever borrow money again. You sure ya wanna try?"
Gibbs yanked the guts out of the grouper, flicked off a loop of purplish intestine that was clinging to his finger. He had been sure he wanted the loan, until he came to the part of the application that asked if he'd ever been convicted of a felony. "I gotta answer this?" he'd asked.
The banker had folded his hands, dropped his voice, and put on an expression that was a mixture of concern and grisly curiosity. "Jimmy, we're a local bank. You're a local guy from a local family. Up to a point, we're very understanding. . . . What you did, how bad was it?"
Gibbs slid the hollowed grouper to the edge of the cleaning table and plunged into the bucket for a yellowtail. It had already begun to curl and grow rigid, he had to flatten it with one hand while puncturing its belly. Jimmy Gibbs didn't go around telling people what he'd done as a younger man with a vicious temper and a stock of grievances close-packed as a seaman's trunk. He'd told the banker he'd finish the application at home. Then he'd left, crumpled up the paper in the parking lot, dropped it in the trash, gone out and gotten shit-face drunk, and that was as close as he'd come to owning a boat. Now he reached into the yellowtail and felt its gelatinous organs turn to a warm paste between his fingers.
"Whole or fillet?" he said to the tourist who owned the gutted fish.
The tourist was short and sunburned and had white cream on his lips. "Lemme ask the wife," he said, and he turned away to find her.
Jimmy Gibbs stood there, the hot sun on the back of his neck, his nicked fingers smarting from the salt and the drying fish blood, and the hand that held the filleting knife was twitching as he waited.
"How 'bout you, cap'n?" he asked the next know-nothing fisherman down the line. It seemed that Jimmy Gibbs couldn't wait to plunge his blade back into something. "How you want them snappers?"
6
"It's as good a system as any other," said Ray Yates, stepping gingerly through the kennel area at the Stock Island dog track between the evening's sixth and seventh races.
"It's asinine," said Robert Natchez. Natchez, a fastidious man, picked his footfalls even more carefully than his friend. He was wearing black sneakers, black jeans, black T-shirt, and black blazer.
Around the two men, nervous greyhounds, their limbs taut as frogs' legs, their gleaming fur given a hellish orange cast by the strange stadium lights, were being led out of their pens. Handlers stroked their lean flanks and petted their bony heads while fitting on their numbers. The dogs pranced, high-stepping as carousel horses frozen in the glory of full gait. Now and then one of the animals would pause, sniff the ground, lower its elegantly rippling haunches, fix the nearest human with a gaze of sympathetic candor, and take a dump.