I started getting worried. A little angry too. That bastard Cruz was right—I ought to get a life, or at least preserve the little life I had. Why was I letting it go down the tubes? Well, I wouldn't let it, not without a fight. I would grab a piece of it and hold on, do something wherein I'd recognize myself. I slurped down the last of my coffee and decided, exhausted or otherwise, I would go and play some tennis.
So I rode home, threw cold water on my face, tucked myself into my jock. By the time I made it to the park, it was around eight-thirty and the usual idiots were assembling. Including, of course, Ozzie Kimmel. He was holding forth in the shade of the players' enclosure, and when he saw me he sang out, "Aha! He's here!... You've been dodging me."
I loved this about Ozzie. A more marginal person could hardly be imagined, and yet he kept right on believing that everything referred to him. "Don't be ridiculous," I said.
"Come on," he said. "You stiff me, what, like three, four times already, then you show up on a day I drive. I'm usually not here."
This reminded me that I no longer knew what day it was, still less what days Ozzie Kimmel worked. Vaguely I said, "So where's the cab?"
"Fuck the cab. I didn't wanna. You got a game?"
"No," I said. "I don't."
At that he brightened, but cautiously. He'd been kicked before. But he couldn't quite keep his tail from wagging at the prospect of a ball to fetch. "We gonna play?"
"Come on," I said. "Let's do it."
So we played a set, and, boy, did I stink up the court. Served like hell, volleyed worse, and couldn't find my forehand. This was humbling but salubrious. Reminded me that leisure too was serious, required discipline, even passion. Do it half-ass and it was a thinner, poorer thing by far.
Ozzie picked up the ball after my final errant shot and said, "Another set?"
Slow and hangdog, I walked toward the net. "Oz," I whined, "I haven't slept, I got pancakes churning in my stomach like cement, and I think I'm gonna barf."
"Excuses, excuses. What kinda weenie plays one set?"
I put my racquet in its case.
Ozzie still didn't believe I was quitting. "One more lousy set. You're nauseous, I won't use the drop shot."
I draped a towel over my shoulder and started walking off the court.
In a tone of compromise, he said, "Okay. Three games."
Still moving away, I half turned to look at him. "Oz, you know anything about smuggling?"
He didn't miss a beat, and of course he referred the question to himself. "I've done a little of it. Why?"
"You've done a little of it?" I echoed stupidly.
"In the seventies. Sure. Everybody did. Marijuana from Jamaica, Mexico, Belize. Came in in bales. Mother ships brought 'em almost to the reef, transferred 'em onto fishing boats. Which is where I worked. Sometimes bales fell overboard. Or guys got paranoid and ditched 'em. People found 'em on the beach. Called 'em square grouper. It was good. Everybody made some money."
Seeking shade, I continued walking off the court. And tried to hide that I was slightly shocked. Was I Key West's last puritan, the last bourgeois? Here I was, supposedly hard-boiled and all that stuff, and everybody but me seemed so cool and so blasé about the various and sundry crimes they had committed.
Ozzie might have read some disapproval in my posture. Or more likely he just felt like talking. "Hey," he went on, "smuggling is the whole story of this town. Rum-running, drugs—I mean, what's the point of living on a dinky island at the edge of nowhere if you're not gonna smuggle shit in?"
Some assertions are simply too peculiar to argue against. So I just said, "And it still goes on?"
"What are you, a newcomer? 'Course it does."
"What gets smuggled now?"
Ozzie blew a dismissive, farting sound between his lips. "Aah, it isn't what it was. No demand for reefer. Hard shit's all moved up to Miami. What's left? Haitians? Cuban cigars? I don't really know."
We reached the peeling wood enclosure. Ozzie produced a frayed rag with which he began to dry his hairy chest.
"Well, let me ask you this," I said. "Other than smuggling, can you imagine why a pair of Jet Skis would approach an anchored boat at four a.m.?"
"You saw this?" he said. "Jet Skis at four in the morning?"
"Let's just keep it hypothetical."
He didn't answer right away. He daintily picked lint from the rim of his navel, then gave in and really reamed the thing. "Jet Skis. That's interesting."
"Why?"
"No real room to stash stuff on a Jet Ski. What they're smuggling would have to be something really small."