She pushed the rayon down over his hips, he shimmied out of the garment like he'd been doing it all his life. He kicked the stockings off. He was so numb, so raw and new, that it seemed almost normal to be sitting on a lounge chair in the tropics in his underwear, discarded women's clothing at his feet.
He looked over his shoulder at Ziggy, said, "I tried to talk 'im out of killing you."
"Thanks," said Ziggy, without conviction.
"I don't think it worked." Ziggy tried to sound blasé.
"You don't think it worked?"
"We didn't really get to finish talking. A guy came in, seemed pretty mad."
"He have a name this guy?"
Louie said, "I think my brother called him Tommy.
"Short guy? Sideways nose?"
Louie nodded. "Had three, like bodyguards. Big. I'm very tired, I think I gotta go lay down." He hitched up his briefs, began to rise. His wife said, "I'm going too then, Louie. I wanna be by you."
Angelina watched them walk away together, honeymooners after thirty years of waiting for the honeymoon. She shifted her knees, then said to Michael, "I'm really sorry, hon, but I think you just got Ziggy for a roommate."
Ziggy glared at the woman he still desired, though his desire was turning each hour more rancid and spiteful and surreal. Then he looked at Michael with an expression that was both nervous and aggressive, a look that the gay guy had seen from certain kinds of straight guys many times before.
Michael met his gaze, said, "Don't worry and don't flatter yourself. I don't like hairy men."
* * *
"Right in my own backyard," said Tommy Lucca. "I can't believe you're tryin'a fuck me right in my own backyard."
Paul Amaro was still sitting on the bed, his bare toes squeezing the carpet underneath his breakfast table. "Tommy," he said, "you're crazy."
Lucca mugged over at his thugs. "I'm crazy? Me? You got a brother wears a dress, a daughter runs and hides, and I'm crazy?"
Quite evenly Paul Amaro said, "Don't say another fuckin' word about my family 'less you wanna have to kill me here and now."
"Who said anything 'bout killing?" The goons shifted foot to foot, arms twitched at the prospect of some exercise.
"You're touchy 'bout your family," Lucca went on. "Okay. Everybody's touchy 'bout something. Me, I'm touchy 'bout being screwed in business."
"For the last time, Tommy, I'm not screwing you.
"Then fuck didn't you call Funzie like you said? One phone call, Paul. That's all you had to do."
Amaro pursed his lips, crossed his arms against his stomach. "The truth?" he said at last. "I didn't call Funzie 'cause I don't give a fuck about your guns and I don't give a fuck about your deal and I don't give a fuck about you."
Tommy Lucca took that in, didn't seem offended in the least. He said simply, "But you said you'd do it."
This was hard to argue with. Amaro had given his word to a colleague and he hadn't followed through. Inaction on a promise was not so different from betrayal.
"The Paul Amaro I know from years ago," said Tommy Lucca, "he wouldn't let a deal sit there and get cold. That he'd fuck the other guy, take the profit for himself—tha'd be more easy t'believe."
Amaro sat before his plate with its streaks of egg and edges of toast and said nothing.
Slowly, Tommy Lucca reached a hand out toward one of his underlings. Almost tenderly, the thug put a gun in his palm.
Lucca pointed it at the forehead of his sometime ally, close enough that the muzzle would scorch skin before the bullet shattered bone. "So tell ya what, Paul," he said. "While we're sittin' here, all together like, why don't you call Funzie right this fuckin' second, before it slips your mind again?"
41
Later on, when the sun had slid far enough down the sky so that the pool was in the shade and fringed shadows had crept along the gravel walks to climb the clapboard walls on the east side of the courtyard, Ziggy retrieved his extra socks and underwear and pocketknife from what was now Louie and Rose's room.
Like the homeless person he'd become, he brought them in a tattered plastic bag to Michael's cottage, and found his new host doing sit-ups on the floor next to the queen-size bed.
Michael ignored him altogether, just kept bringing his elbows to his knees, a hundred times, two hundred. Secretly, Ziggy admired the striations and pebblings of the gay guy's stomach.
After sit-ups came a string of yoga poses—stretching, folding, standing on one leg. Ziggy sat down in a wicker chair and sort of watched. A master of the sulk, his funks had many aspects, and he was now at the stage where he was feeling very sorry for himself. Michael's vigor mocked him. He felt forever cut off from the kind of self-affection that gave rise to the discipline to work out, to take care of oneself. Also, he was newly oppressed by the realization that he'd become the pariah of the little group of hostages at Coral Shores. Everybody else got along. Everyone else made a show, at least, of keeping up their spirits. Not him. He'd gone into a sulk to push them all away, and now that he'd succeeded, he moped because he felt isolated.