He just lifted his chin.
"You gay?"
He crinkled up his brows and looked at her. "No. Why?"
"Ya know," she said. "Key West and all."
Arty said nothing. Bait shops and seashell stores slipped past.
"You seem like such a nice guy," Debbi went on. "Funny. Nice manners. Ya pay attention. I was wondering why you're not, ya know, involved with someone, married."
"How about: because I was?" he said.
Having got her answer, Debbi now felt qualms at having asked the question. "Listen, I don't wanna pry"
"No problem," Arty said. The reluctant fellow felt suddenly eager to talk. "Nothing terrible to hide. I was married six years. Most of that time was OK. Toward the end I couldn't help thinking my wife thought I was a failure. I didn't like that part."
"She said that?"
"Never in as many words. She didn't have to."
Debbi pursed her lips. "Wha'd she do?"
"Lawyer."
"Smart, I'll bet."
"Oh yeah," Arty said. "But there's city-smart and then there's life-smart. Ya know what I mean?"
Debbi's slender eyebrows zigged up at the middle of her forehead. "I'm not sure I do."
"I'm not sure I do either," Arty admitted. "But I think it has to do with being able to be happy."
The Caddy barreled up U.S. 1. In the rearview mirror, the pulsing orange sun seemed to be picking its way among the mangrove islands, looking for a clear path to the sea.
After a while, Debbi said, "That's shitty, how she made you feel."
Arty looked at her, not sad, not smiling, just with the straight gaze you turn on someone when they've got it right. "Yeah," he said. "It was."
At Big Pine Key he turned off the highway onto Key Deer Boulevard, and beyond the prison and the Little League field he took the right that led to No-Name. The road sliced through low gray scrubby woods; the big dark car still stalked, a hundred yards behind.
Debbi looked out at the stunted and distorted pines, the spiky bleached palmettos, the stony earth scarred with veins of scabby limestone. "Not as pretty as Key West, is it?"
"It's the real Florida," Arty said. "No color. Either bone-dry or a swamp, itchy either way. Spiders the size of your fist, leaves that give a rash, alligators that eat Dobermans."
Debbi crinkled up her nose.
They wound through a clot of suburbs, then over the little rainbow bridge to No-Name Key. From the top of the short span they saw the last full daylight; behind the scrub and mangroves on the other side, it was already dusk. A straight road maybe half a mile long dead-ended at a rank of limestone boulders.
"This is where they are," said Arty. He was driving very slowly now, and his tone was that of whispering conspiracy. "Sometimes they come right onto the pavement. Other times you have to find them in the woods."
Debbi nodded. She leaned far forward, her red nails splayed out along the dashboard. Her sunglasses had been put aside; her ardent eyes reached out for deer.
The Cadillac crept on. No deer appeared. Arty looked in the rearview mirror and finally noticed the dark car following behind them. He made nothing of it. They were on a dead-end road where people came to look for deer at dusk.
From moment to moment the light was getting dimmer. A sudden rustling in the undergrowth made Arty and Debbi suck in breath; a raccoon stared back at them and ran away. They peered beneath shrubs, through tall gray grasses, but they heard or saw no other movement, and as they neared the limestone boulders Arty said a little sheepishly, "Ya can't always find them."
Debbi wanted to be a good sport, didn't want to show her disappointment. Besides, she wasn't giving up. "I think we will," she whispered.
At the big rocks, Arty put the car in park, crossed his arms against his belly, and gave his companion an apologetic shrug.
"Can we get out and look?" she asked.
"Be buggy," he said, but he turned the car off and the two of them got out.
They closed their doors very quietly behind them, skirted the limestone barricade, and stood at the indistinct shoreline of No-Name Key. All around them grew tangled mangroves whose roots arced up like tepees and trapped small rank puddles that smelled of sulfur and rotting seaweed. In what had once been a waterfront clearing, an abandoned cistern stood crumbling; tormented casuarinas grew up in it. Lizards scampered; mosquitoes buzzed; frogs croaked. Amid the animal noises came the faint, unnoticed sound of two more car doors opening and closing. Unseen, two more visitors moved furtively beyond the limestone boulders.
Debbi strolled to the far side of the ruined cistern, and there she saw two deer.
They were does, with enormous eyes and beautifully napped brown coats, and they were browsing on a thorny shrub with dusty mottled berries. They really were the size of dogs. Debbi clapped a hand over her mouth to contain a yelp of wonder. With the other hand she pointed. Arty followed the gesture, came along beside her.