Florida Straits (4 page)

He hadn't made a nickel, and it was a damn
good thing Sandra had right away found a job. Seems there was a
shortage of bank tellers in south Florida, and considering what
they were paid, that was not surprising. Her salary at Keys Marine
was just enough to halve the pace at which they were going
broke.

Meanwhile Joey had a lot of time to himself,
to think, to organize, to set things up. But all he'd really
accomplished was laying down the base coat for a glorious tan.
That, and meeting the neighbors.

The neighbors were very Key West, and Joey,
who was not, had a tough time figuring out how he was supposed to
feel about them. Take Peter and Claude. They couldn't have been
nicer or more welcoming, but they were, after all, queer. Claude
was blond, very tall and thin, and walked like he was modeling mink
coats. Peter had bleached his hair but kept his eyebrows dark, as
if trying unsuccessfully to look sinister. They worked late, and
would emerge from their cottage around two P.M., wearing sarongs.
They'd offer Joey herb tea and cookies that didn't snap, they bent:
Key West was a humid place. Then they'd ask him questions about the
theater, the opera, downtown clubs, stuff like that. Questions
about New York, but not the New York Joey knew. Joey couldn't deny
that he appreciated the company, the chitchat, but he also couldn't
deny that there was something faggoty about herb tea, about a drink
where you could see the bottom of the cup. He couldn't tell if he
was pretending to like Peter and Claude but didn't, or pretending
not to but did.

With Wendy and Marsha, it was the opposite.
They were cordial enough, but Joey had the distinct impression they
didn't like him. They made him feel like he was intruding from a
distance. They had a cat they took for walks, and they held each
other's arms while they walked it. They always seemed to be deep in
conversation on deep subjects—art, politics, whatever. Wendy, or
maybe it was Marsha, had the hairiest legs Joey had ever seen, legs
with ringlets. His eyes were drawn to them as to the stump of a
missing arm, and this made conversation awkward.

With Luke the reggae musician, conversation
was awkward for a different reason. Luke didn't talk. He lived with
a Walkman clipped onto the waistband of his shorts, and would
sometimes sit for hours with his feet dangling in the pool and his
eyes narrowed in concentration. When Lucy the mailman came home
from work, she'd plop down next to him on the cool tiles, still
wearing her post office shorts, slate blue with a navy stripe at
the side. Lucy was extremely beautiful, for a Fed, with huge dark
eyes widely spaced and skin as even and inviting as the morning's
first cup of creamy coffee. But even this caused Joey some unease
because he hadn't been raised to find black women, or letter
carriers, attractive.

So the compound, all in all, was diverting,
a relatively inexpensive form of foreign travel. But Joey hadn't
come to Florida in search of the exotic, he'd come to make his
fortune, and the fact was that three weeks into his new life, he
was no closer to a payday than on the morning he'd bolted Queens.
Not that he'd been lazy. No. Especially in the first ten days, two
weeks, he'd been enterprising as hell. He'd really put himself out
there. But nothing had worked. He'd been laughed at, kissed off,
insulted, threatened, and if he hadn't caught a beating, that was
only because of his well-developed feel for the moment when he
should back off and scram.

First, there was the disaster of the numbers
game, what the Cubans call
bolita
. It was a nice little
operation, pegged to the track at Hialeah but locally run, and Joey
didn't see why he shouldn't have a piece of it. He wasn't looking
to muscle in, and he wasn't looking for a handout. He wanted a
partnership, and he'd give value for his cut. Numbers was something
he knew; he knew it big-city style. So he'd bring some
sophistication to the racket, expand it up the Keys. It would be
good for everybody. More cash flow for the Cubans, and for Joey a
natural recruiting pool for some solid soldiers.

So he went to a cafe on Virginia Street, sat
down at the counter near a fan whose grille was matted with
streamers of greasy dust, and ordered up a Cuban sandwich. He
watched the
patron
slap it together; it wasn't pretty. Fatty
pork. Some kind of gray lunch meat with big globs of lard stuck in
it. Limp onions sodden with oil. Thick smears of warm, off-color
mayonnaise on both sides of the spongy bread. Joey started feeling
queasy before he'd had a bite. From his Sicilian father he'd
inherited a certain finickiness about all foods not invented,
cooked, and served by Italians; from his Jewish mother he'd
acquired the phobic belief that anything not kept tightly wrapped
in the refrigerator, then overcooked would instantly turn to
poison. But Joey had a job to do. He started the sandwich.

"I wanna buy some
bolita
numbers," he
said softly to the
patron
.

The man was overweight, unshaven, his teeth
looked soft, and one of his shirttails was hanging out. But stupid
he was not. He looked at the gringo suffering through his lunch.
The gringo wore a stiff white shirt like no one wore in Key West,
except maybe to a wedding, and he carried his sunglasses like a cop
who was toying not to look like one. "We no sell numbers here."

Joey gave him a knowing wink. "Come on. This
is my neighborhood now. I'm right around the corner. You're telling
me I gotta go all the way to where I useta live to buy my
numbers?"

"Where you use to live, my friend?"

Joey stifled a belch. "Bertha Street." That
was near where Sandra worked.

"Ees not so far, my friend. You like the
bolita
, you buy your numbers there."

A week and four nauseating lunches later,
Joey had acquired enough credibility to be allowed to buy some
losing numbers, and to meet the
bolita
runner for Virginia
Street. His name was Hector. Hector was sixteen, didn't walk right,
was cross-eyed behind thick glasses, and went to Catholic school.
Joey decided he wouldn't recruit him as one of his boys, just use
him for one little errand.

"Hector," he said, "hold out your hands.
Here's twenty dollars. That's for you. Here's a hundred dollars.
That's for your boss. Give it to him and tell him to arrange a
meeting between me and his boss. Tell him a gentleman with friends
in New York would like to discuss some business with him. You got
that, Hector?"

Next day, Hector told him that Senor Carlos
would see him at four o'clock at a laundromat on White Street. This
allowed Joey to get up from the lunch counter without having to
finish his glistening pile of greasy fried bananas.

—

He pulled up in the Eldorado and saw three
men sitting on mesh beach chairs under an awning, playing dominoes
on a cardboard box. "I'm looking for Carlos."

The men stood up, and the one in the middle,
who was a head shorter and fifty pounds lighter than either of the
other two, said, "I'm Carlos." He was clean-shaven and very wiry,
with black hair swept straight back. He'd been born in Florida,
went to college for a year, and had no accent except when he wanted
one. He wore frameless glasses that gave him the nervously studious
look of an early Bolshevik. "Nice car." He lifted his chin toward
the smashed windshield.

"Coconut," said Joey.

"Happens a lot down here," said Carlos.
"Makes you look like a local."

Joey was duly flattered. Newcomers to Key
West always liked to be taken for locals. This changed after they'd
met a few.

"Come on," said Carlos, "we'll talk in the
back."

He led the way through the laundromat. It
was full of old Cuban ladies in black dresses and had the yeasty
smell of warm lint. A girl in tight jeans seemed to be having a
nervous breakdown on the pay phone. Carlos's men filed behind Joey,
giving him the uneasy feeling that someone was about to step on his
heel. He felt his shoulders hunching up as if in preparation for
the blow.

At the back of the laundromat, a vacant
doorframe gave onto a garden. A big four-sided picnic table had
been built around a lime tree, and on this table was a basket, a
basket big as a tire, filled with unidentifiable fruits. Carlos
motioned Joey into a chair, and he himself sat on a picnic bench.
His two huge and hairy men perched on the table on either side of
the gigantic fruit bowl; the effect was of a still life by a
painter who had lost his mind.

"So, Mr. . . ."

"Goldman. Joey Goldman."

"Yes. Mr. Goldman. What can I do for
you?"

"I admire your operation," Joey said.

Carlos looked utterly bored by the
compliment and made no answer. One of his men picked up a fruit
that resembled Sputnik and started peeling it with a knife
considerably larger than was strictly necessary for the job.

"I'd like to work with you," Joey
continued.

Carlos frowned. "You Jewish?"

"Half. You got a problem with that?" Vague
memories of disastrous Yom Kippur fistfights cropped up not in
Joey's mind but in his stomach.

"Me?" said Carlos. "Not at all. You know
what the Puerto Ricans call the Cubans?
Los judiós del
Caribe.
They call us that because they're jealous. Because we
work hard. We know how to do business. Whadda they know how to do?
Cook beans and talk about pussy. Me, I have no problem with Jews. I
just like to know who I'm dealing with."

"I'm also half Sicilian," Joey said.

"Ah," said Carlos. He balanced his chin on
his knuckles; the pose made him look more than ever like an
earnest, aging student. "Half Sicilian. Friends in New York.
Cadillac. Goes around flashing hundred- dollar bills. So what are
you trying to tell me, Mr. Goldman? Are you telling me things are
so bad up north that the Mafia has to send a guy all the way down
here to fuck with my little
bolita
game?"

Carlos's goon had finished peeling his fruit
and was sucking out the flesh. It had slimy seeds in it, and the
goon started spitting them out closer to Joey's black loafers than
seemed respectful.

"Did I say anybody sent me?" Joey said. "All
I said is I got friends up there."

"Well, good for you," said Carlos, and
without raising his voice a single decibel he managed a crescendo
of irritation. "I got friends too. I got friends in Miami and I got
friends in Havana and I got friends in city hall. And in case you
haven't looked at a road map lately, those places are all a lot
closer to where you're sitting than fucking New York is."

The spray of slimy seeds came closer to
Joey's feet, so close that he couldn't help examining them. They
consisted of tiny black pits surrounded by globes of yellowish
ooze. He slid his shoes back a couple of inches and didn't realize
until later that by that small retreat he had in effect
surrendered.

"Carlos, I been looking at road maps plenty.
But listen, I'm coming to you like a gentleman, to see if we can
work together. You got no reason to get mad."

"That's where you're wrong. I do have a
reason. You cost me a hundred twenty dollars already. Fredo, give
the man his hundred twenty dollars."

The goon who was not sucking fruit lumbered
down from the picnic table and approached Joey. He reached deep
into his pants pocket, seemed to be scratching his gonads, then
produced a pair of bills.

Joey waved them away. "Hey look, I don't
want that money back. That was an investment."

"You don't understand," said Carlos. He
shook his head sadly at the ignorance of outsiders. "It's a
cultural thing. You don't give my people money. To give people
money, that's an honor. You haven't earned that honor, Mr. Goldman.
I give them money. And I never take anything away from my people.
Never. So you know what that means? It means that money you spread
around so you could look like a big shot, with your fucking
Cadillac, your New York plates, that was my money. And now I got a
reason to be mad at you."

"Carlos, listen ..."

"Fredo, give 'im the fucking money."

The goon approached, a hideous, blubbery
smile on his face. He reached out his fat fingers and put the bills
in Joey's shirt pocket, the same pocket as his sunglasses. The
gesture was actually rather gentle, yet it felt to Joey that talons
had snapped out and were clawing at his heart.

"There," said Carlos. "That's what you've
cost me, just by coming down here. So do yourself a favor and don't
ever cost me one more dollar. You got that, Mr. Goldman?"

—
6 —

Joey had not been able to remember the
retreat through the laundromat. The first thing he recalled was
standing on the sidewalk, watching the low red sunlight bounce off
his smashed windshield and throw rainbows onto the Caddy's old
upholstery. He reached for his sunglasses, and when he pulled them
out of his shirt pocket, the hundred and twenty dollars fell onto
the street. He hesitated a moment, thinking that it would be a
suave gesture to let the money lie there. Then he bent down and
plucked the bills off the hot asphalt, hoping no one would
notice.

Back at the compound, he'd made a rum and
tonic, sat down with it near the pool, and noted in himself a
dangerous desire. It was the desire just to sit there and do
nothing. When things went badly, it made sitting near water with a
cocktail seem absolutely heavenly, saner than any possible action.
Then, too, there was the tropical thing. Up north people kept busy
to keep warm, kept moving so as not to get trampled. Here it was
pleasantest to stay still. This was not something you decided but
something you realized through your pores. The air was the same
temperature as your skin. It felt good. Soft breezes whispered of
the timeless appeal of being a lazy bum.