He crouched against the foliage; sweat ran down his spine, trickled past his belt. He watched the door and riffled through his options. He could run back to the Olds, but what then?—he had no cash, no bank account, and besides, he'd be in the open, an easy target, as he ran. So he waited. He sniffed the air for smells of threat, listened for wrong sounds. There weren't any. The house seemed innocent, benign, just a funky bungalow. His fear leveled off. Maybe he had forgotten to lock his door.
He decided on a stratagem. Staying low, beneath the level of the windows, he started crawling through the yard to check his place out room by room. Lizards fled before his slow and cumbersome advance. He dodged the leavings of feral cats; half-buried shards of coral pocked his hands.
He came around a corner of the building and lifted his eyes to the level of the windowsill. He peered into his living room. No goombahs were glutting up the furniture; the place looked undisturbed.
He pressed on toward the kitchen, found it as grimy and lonely as he'd left it.
The bathroom window was frosted, he could only scan for telltale shadows.
His knees bruised, his lower back complaining, he kowtowed onward toward the bedroom. He contorted himself to avoid brittle fronds that might crack beneath his weight; he landed now and then with a hand against a thorn lurking in the camouflage of unraked ground. At length he reached the bedroom window, stretched his aching limbs before lifting up his head to peek inside.
At that moment, Angelina was lying peacefully, silently, dreamy in the doughy warmth of her longed-for lover's bed. Suddenly she saw a pair of eyeballs clicking upward through the louvers of the drooping shutter then sliding into place between two slats. She pulled the sheet up tight beneath her chin, and she screamed.
Ziggy, freshly terrified at the piercing howl, screamed right back. Then he tumbled over his heels and landed prostrate in a pile of damp and decomposing leaves.
His first impulse was to run like hell, but for a time he was paralyzed with fright, could do no more than pathetically wave his ungrounded limbs like a flipped turtle. Then his mind began to clear, to process what he'd seen. It was a woman. A woman in his bed, covered, mostly, with his sheet. He blinked, rolled over on his side.
He took a breath, then crawled back to the bungalow, slowly raised his head and took a long look in. He said, "Angelina."
She said, "Sal. I mean Ziggy."
His knees hurt pretty badly, it was a scraped-up hurt like something from boyhood. He said, "What the hell are you doing here?" His nerves were shot, it came out more unfriendly than he meant it to.
She didn't answer right away. Sorry now that she was naked, she tried to make the sheet into a tent to hide the contours of her body. Dimly, reluctantly, she admitted to herself that Ziggy's place had seemed much sexier before Ziggy had returned. Finally she said, "Do we have to talk about it through the window?"
* * *
Uncle Louie had fought it for as long as he could fight it, but he couldn't fight it anymore.
He was bored, pure and simple, and, worse, he knew that he was bored. He'd come to feel he had no purpose here, and in the absence of a purpose, the touristy amusements, the mango this and Key lime that, had quickly lost their novelty. He mocked himself; his fantasies of heroism seemed wretched to him now, ridiculous. And yet he stayed on in Key West, pinned by obligation, and a fear of having to explain his actions, and a sort of timorous defiance of giving in and going home.
He'd settled into a routine. He left his dreary motel room very early every morning. He walked Duval Street, wandered the beach, and the days seemed very long. So he'd taken to drinking in the afternoons. He was more or less indifferent to the alcohol, it was mainly that he needed a pretext to sit somewhere, a way to justify his presence. He drank sweet things with rum in them. He talked to bartenders; he talked to other tourists, every bit as bored as he, every bit as determined not to let it show.
One afternoon he was sitting at an outdoor bar at the Flagler House hotel, a slushy pink drink in front of him. He was helping a couple of fellow travelers gloat about how cold it was back in Minneapolis, when, at a distance beyond the clear focus of his eyes, silhouetted against the tinted glass that enclosed the lobby wing, he saw a man who bore an odd resemblance to his brother Paul. The same mane of wavy silver hair. The same pushed-forward chest and proud aggressive jaw. But this man had his jacket off, and from the shimmer of his shirt it seemed that he was sweaty, and Louie knew his brother Paul, a formal man, a slave to dignity, would not appear that way in a fancy hotel lobby.
Still, he squinted toward the man; he had nothing better to do. People talked about April blizzards, hailstorms in May, and Louie watched the stranger leave the front desk in the company of a bellman, although he had no luggage. He watched him stride around the pool to the tiki wing where the freestanding cottages were, the most expensive rooms. The bellman opened a door, and Louie watched the guest reach into his pocket to produce a tip.