Gold Coast (6 page)

* * *

“I said to her, ‘Are you all right?’ She didn’t answer me,” Marta said. “She went to the telephone and began to speak to Mr. Grossi.”

“You could hear it?” Jesus Diaz, her brother, asked.

It was dark now. They were in the street in front of the house on Isla Bahía, standing by Jesus’ car, Jesus holding the cassette tape she had given him.

“I could hear it because she was making her words very clear, not in a loud voice but with force, saying, ‘I don’t want to see him here again. Keep that animal away from here.’ Then saying, ‘Why didn’t you tell me yourself? I have to learn it from someone like him.’ Then listening to Mr. Grossi for a long time. Then saying again, ‘Keep him away from here.’ But she didn’t tell him everything,” Marta said.

“What didn’t she tell him?”

“Your friend Roland said he wanted to help her in the situation, do something for her to relieve her being tense. But she didn’t mention this to Mr. Grossi—I don’t know why—only that she didn’t want to see Roland again. Very disturbed, but cold in the way she said it, not screaming or shouting. I thought of the time she came home with her car smashed in front and Mister came home with his same car smashed in the side.”

Jesus said, “All of that with Mr. Grossi is on this tape?”

“Yes, of course. Every phone conversation today.”

“I give it to Roland, he’ll hear it,” Jesus said. “He’ll know she told Mr. Grossi.”

“Then don’t give it to him,” Marta said.

“You crazy?” Jesus said.

Roland heard about it the same evening, in Vivian Arzola’s office. Vivian telling him he was lucky Ed Grossi had already gone home. Roland looking out the thirty-ninth floor window at all that night glitter over the Beach.

“Why?” Roland said.

“Because maybe this time he would have killed you he was so angry.”

Roland said, “Lady, I’m the boy didn’t testify in court against somebody, and went to Butler. You remember? I just got
back
yesterday. He puts me on a job, I do it the way I see fit to. Does he want another boy? That’s up to him. But don’t start talking about him doing me harm. There’s an old Cuban saying, you fuck with the bull, you get a horn in the ass.”

“Where’d you get that suit?” Vivian said.

Roland grinned. “You like it?”

“It’s the worst looking suit I ever saw.”

“That’s my sweet girl,” Roland said, coming away from the window to put a leg up on the edge of Vivian’s desk, “your old self again. What else he say?”

“He’s going to tell you himself. Keep away from Mrs. DiCilia.”

“But not taking me off it.”

“Do what you’re told. Nothing more.”

“You listen in and hear her talking to him?”

“It’s recorded here,” Vivian said. “I can listen if I want. You try to lie to him, he’ll play it for you.”

“I got nothing to hide. I told her her old man set up the deal, that’s all. So everybody understands each other. I asked her if there was anything I could do for her.”

“I can hear you,” Vivian said, “the way you’d say it. Did she scream for help?”

“She was nice about the whole thing. What I’m surprised at, she went and called Ed.”

“Well, stay away from her, that’s all.”

“Sure, that’s how he wants it. What I better have, though, are all the back tapes. You think I come to see you, it’s the tapes I need most.”

“Why?” Vivian said.

“You want me to do the job or not?”

Vivian, sitting at her desk, studied him, trying to catch a glimpse of how his mind was working.

“See, now the woman knows she’s being watched, she’s gonna be more careful,” Roland said.

“Thanks to you.”

“No, it’s better this way, let her know where she stands. But I got to listen to the back tapes. See, get
to recognize voices if any of ’em call again and don’t use names. You understand?”

“I understand that,” Vivian said, “but I think I better talk to Ed first. He’ll be back in a few days.”

“He went out of town?”

“He’ll be back.”

“Meanwhile,” Roland said, “we’re sitting here humping the dog, huh? What I could do is return ’em before he gets back. Otherwise, something happens, Ed sees the work wasn’t done properly, he looks around for who’s to blame and, like that, you’re back in your overalls picking oranges.”

Roland walked out with a cardboard box full of cassette tapes. Fucking Cubans, he hadn’t met one yet you couldn’t hold their job over ’em like a club and get whatever you wanted.

IF PORPOISE WERE REALLY SO SMART,
Maguire would think, how come they put up with all this shit?

The porpoise could ask Maguire the same question. Or Lolly the sea lion.

In the cement-block room off the show pool, Maguire and Lolly would look at each other. Maguire holding the mike to announce Brad Allen and the World-Famous Seascape Porpoise and Sea Lion Show. Lolly waiting to go on, the opening act. Maguire wondering if Lolly ever played with her beachball when no one was around. Lolly wondering—what? Looking at him with her sad eyes.

Maguire would announce the show, hearing his voice outside on the P.A. system as he looked through the crack in the door at the people in the grandstand.

“And now . . . here’s Brad!”

After the show Brad Allen would say to Maguire, “Look, how many times? You don’t say,
‘Here’s Brad,’ for Christ sake. You ever watch Johnny Carson, the way they do it? You say, ‘And now . . . heeeeeeeeeeere’s Brad!’ ”

“I don’t know why, but I have trouble with that,” Maguire would say.

Brad Allen was show director, star, working manager of:

SEASCAPE
PORPOISE SHOW
SHARKS * SEA LIONS
S.E. Seventeenth Street Causeway
At Port Everglades
TURN HERE!

He would say to Maguire, “Are you stupid or something? I don’t think it’s that hard, do you?”

“No, it isn’t,” Maguire would say.

“I believe you’re supposed to be experienced—”

“The thing is, down at Marathon we didn’t have the same kind of show,” Maguire would try to explain. “I mean it wasn’t quite as, you know, showy.”

“Down there, did you know the names of the dolphin?” Brad always got onto that. “Could you identify each one by name?”

“Yeah, I knew their names.”

“Then how come you don’t know them here?”

“I know them. There’s Pepper, Dixie, Penny, Bonzai—”

“Robyn says yesterday you were trying to get Penny to do a tailwalk. Penny doesn’t do the tailwalk, Pebbles does the tailwalk.”

“I get those two mixed up.”

“The other day you thought Bonnie was Yvonne. Bonnie’s got the scar from the shark—”

“Right.”

“—and Yvonne’s at least two hundred pounds heavier, ten feet long, you can’t tell them apart. Work on it, okay? Take Robyn over the tank with you and see if you can name them for her. Then come back to the show pool and do the same thing. Is that too much to ask?”

Or, Brad Allen would say:

“The Flying Dolphin Show, you keep leaving out the Mopey Dick part.”

“I forget.”

“He lays up on the ledge on his side, doesn’t move a muscle. Wait for the laughs. Then you say, ‘And that’s’ pause ‘why we call him
Mopey
Dick.’ ”

“I’ll try to remember,” Maguire would say.

Five months of it, January through May.

Brad Allen waiting for him when he first walked in, pale, a Wayne-County-Jail pallor, carrying his lined raincoat and suitcase, right off the Delta flight. Brad Allen glancing at a letter the Seascape
Management Company had sent him, holding the sheet of paper like it was stained or smelled bad.

“It says you’ve had experience.”

“A year at Marathon,” Maguire had said, adding on five months.

“What’ve you been doing since?”

“Well, traveling and working mostly,” Maguire had said. “Colorado, I worked for the Aspen Ski Corporation, also at the Paragon Ballroom. I worked at an airport, a zoo, a TV station. I was the weatherman. I tended bar different places. Let’s see, I was an antique dealer. Yeah, and I worked a job at a country club.”

“Well, this is no country club,” Brad Allen had said. The serious tone, making it sound hard because he had to hire the guy. “How old are you?”

“Thirty,” Maguire had said, subtracting six years—after walking in and seeing how young the help was. Like summer-camp counselors in their sneakers and white shorts, red T-shirts with a flying-porpoise decal and seascape lettered in white. (Brad Allen wore white shorts and a red-trimmed white T-shirt with the porpoise and seascape in red. He also wore a white jacket and red warmups and sometimes a red, white, and blue outfit.)

“How long you been thirty?”

What was Brad Allen? Maybe thirty-two, thirty-three. The guy staring at Maguire, suspicious, wanting to catch him in a lie. For what?

“What difference does it make?” Maguire had said. “I’m an out-going person, I like to be with people, I don’t mind working hard and”—laying on a little extra—“I’m always willing to learn if there’s something I don’t know.”

It took him a few days to get used to the white shorts and the red T-shirt—thinking about what Andre Patterson would say if he saw the outfit; like, man, you real cute. Within two months Maguire was as brown as the rest of them, and his sneakers were beginning to show some character. He did believe he could pass for thirty. Why not? He felt younger than that. He was out in the sunshine. The work was clean, not too hard. He was eating a lot of fruit. Smoking a little grass now and then with Lesley. Not drinking too much. The pay was terrible, two-sixty a week, but he was getting by. Living in a one-room efficiency at an Old-Florida-looking stucco place called The Casa Loma, fifty bucks a week, next door to Lesley who lived in the manager’s apartment with her Aunt Leona. What else? Air-conditioned, two blocks from the ocean—

The people he worked with—R.D. Hooker, Chuck, Robyn and Lesley—reminded him of high school.

Hooker, a strong, curly-haired Florida boy, twenty-three years old. A clean liver, dedicated. Hooker would go down into the eighteen-foot tank, Neptune’s Realm, with a face mask and air
hose and play with the porpoise even when he didn’t have to,
between
shows. One time Hooker said to Chuck, the custodian-trainee, “I don’t know what’s wrong with Bonnie today. First she won’t let me touch her, then she butts me. Then she comes up and starts yanking on my goddarn air hose like to pull it out of my mouth. Knowing what she was doing.”

Chuck listened to every word and said, “Yeah? How come she was doing that?”

Maguire said, “It sounds like she’s getting her period.”

Hooker said, “What’s it got to do with her acting nasty?”

Maguire would listen to them talk, amazed, nobody putting anybody on or down. Maguire said, “R.D., you ever talk to them? I mean understand them?”

“Sometimes,” Hooker said. “Like I’m getting so I can understand Penny when I ask her a question?”

“No shit,” Maguire said. “What do you ask her?”

“Oh, feeding her I might say, ‘You like that, huh? Isn’t that good?’ ”

“And what does she say?”

“She goes like—” Hooker did something with the inside of his mouth and made a clickity-click, kitty-cat, Donald Duck sound.

“Oh,” Maguire said.

Hooker came on his day off and worked with the two young dolphins in the training tank, hunkered down on the boards for hours, talking to them gently and showing them his hands. Dedicated.

Chuck was on his way to becoming dedicated. He personally wrote two hundred post cards to Star-Kist Tuna, Bumble Bee, VanCamp, Ralston Purina, and H.J. Heinz, telling them to quit murdering dolphin or he would never eat their products again.

Robyn was dedicated, though didn’t appear to be. She was a serious girl and didn’t smile much or seem to be listening when you said something to her. Unless it was Brad Allen who said it. Brad Allen could tell Robyn to dive down to the bottom of the show pool with Dixie, shoot up over the twelve-foot bar and do a tailwalk across the pool, and Robyn would try it. When Brad Allen told her she was doing a good job, Robyn became squirmy and maybe wet her white shorts a little. Nice tight shorts—

Though not as tight or short as Lesley’s. Lesley’s showed a little cheek. She never pulled at them though, the way Robyn did when she got squirmy. What Lesley got was pouty. She’d put on her hurt look and say, “It’s not my turn to feed the sharks, it’s hers. If you think I’m going in there every day you’re out of your fucking mind.” Lesley was dedicated, but not to nurse sharks. She didn’t think it
was funny when she was standing hip deep in the pool trying to feed a hunk of bluerunner to a shark, and Maguire, on the platform above, would say to the crowd, “Let’s give Lesley a nice hand”—pause—“she may need one some day.”

Lesley had a pile of wavy brown hair she combed several times an hour. One night, during Maguire’s fourth month, Lesley said to him, “I think I’m falling in love with you.” She looked so good lying there in the dim light with her hair and her white breasts exposed, Maguire almost said he loved her, too. But he didn’t.

Brad Allen was
very
dedicated. Brad Allen was also serious and tiresome. He made Maguire tired. Maguire wondered why Brad Allen didn’t get tired of being Brad Allen. Once, Maguire took a couple of puffs on a joint before announcing the show and said, over the P.A. system, “Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Brad,” holding the “here’s” almost as long as he could. And after the show Brad Allen said to him, “Now that’s a little better.”

Seascape, the layout, reminded Maguire of a small tropical World’s Fair; round white buildings, striped awnings, and blue and yellow pennants among shrubs and royal palms.

There was Neptune’s Realm you could walk into and look through windows to watch the porpoise
and sea creatures glide past, underwater. Topside they put on the Flying Dolphin Show.

There was Shark Lagoon, a pool full of brown nurse sharks and a few giant sea turtles.

There was the Porpoise Petting Pool, where you could touch Misty and Gippy’s hard-boiled-egg skin and feed them minnows, three-for-a-quarter.

At the Grandstand Arena Brad Allen put on the main event, the World-Famous Seascape Porpoise and Sea Lion Show: “where these super-smart mammals perform their aquatic acrobatics.”

Back in the Alligator Pit a Seminole Indian used to wrestle twelve-foot gators, but the Seminole quit and went to Disney World, and R.D. Hooker only tried it a couple of times; so the alligators and a crocodile were there if you wanted to look at them.

Yellow- and white-striped awnings covered the refreshment stand and gift shop. A fifty-cent Sky Ride in two-seater gondolas gave you a low aerial view of the grounds, the tanks and pools of blue water, the white cement walks and buildings among the imported palm trees: a clean, manicured world just off the S.E. 17th Street Causeway.

“If you don’t like it, why don’t you quit?” Lesley said, getting a little pouty.

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it, I said it wasn’t
real
,” Maguire said, Maguire driving Lesley’s yellow
Honda, heading home to the Casa Loma. “It’s like a refuge. Nothing can happen to you there, you’re safe. But it’s got nothing to do with reality. It’s like you’re given security, but in exchange for it you have to give up your
self
. You have to become somebody else.

Lesley said, “Jesus, what’s safe about getting down in the water, feeding those fucking sharks? I’ve done it every day this week, you know it? Robyn’s off probably giving Brad some head.”

Maguire said, “Come on, the sharks feed all night. You jiggle a piece of fish, it’s for the tourists. I’m not talking about that kind of being safe. I mean
here
, you live in a little world that’s got nothing to do with the real world. You’re sheltered—”

“
I’m
sheltered?”

“
We
are, working there. What’s a really big problem? Misty eats some popcorn, gets constipated. Pebbles is grouchy, won’t imitate the Beatles. Everybody’s going, ‘Christ, what’s the matter with Pebbles?’ Spend
months
, maybe a year training a dolphin to jump through a hoop, come up seventeen feet in the air and ring the school bell.”

Lesley said, “Yeah?” She still didn’t get it.

“They’re doing something that dolphins don’t normally do, right?”

Lesley thought a moment. “Yeah—but they jump. Out in the wild they jump all the time.”

“They shoot baskets? They bowl out there?”

“It’s to show how intelligent they are,” Lesley said, “how they can be trained.”

“Here’s the point,” Maguire said, wishing the Honda was air-conditioned, wishing the lady in front of him would turn, for Christ sake, if she was going to turn,
turn
. “They don’t normally, the dolphin, they don’t pretend they’re playing baseball out in the ocean or jump up and take a piece of fish out of somebody’s mouth, right?”

“If you don’t like it,” Lesley said, “what do you do it for?”

Jesus, Maguire thought. He said, “Just follow the point I want to make, okay? I’m not saying I don’t like it. I’m only saying it’s like playing make-believe. The dolphin wouldn’t be here, they wouldn’t be doing the tricks if we didn’t teach them. You see what I mean? They’d be out there doing something else, we’d be doing something else. But no, we made this up. The dolphins and us, we’re playing with ourselves. We’re going through the motions of something that doesn’t have anything to do with reality.”

“So?”

Oh, Christ. “So—if they’re not real dolphins doing all that kind of shit, what’re we? Reciting the canned humor, throwing them pieces of codfish—what’re we?”

“I was a waitress, a place on Las Olas,” Lesley said. “That was real, real shit. You like to ask me what I’d rather do?”

“I’d like to borrow your car this evening,” Maguire said. “What’re the chances?”

He poured himself a white rum with a splash of lemon concentrate, left the venetian blinds half closed and sat for awhile, the room looking old and worn-out in the dimness. Fifty bucks a week including black and white TV, it was still a bargain. He could hear the hi-fi going next-door, Lesley boogying around the apartment to the Bee-Gees, ignoring her aunt, who was a little deaf. A nice woman, Maguire would sit and talk to her sometimes, listen to episodes from her past life in Cincinnati, Ohio, until he’d tell her he had to go to bed, wake up early. Lesley never sat and listened even for a minute. Lesley would roll her eyes when she saw an episode coming and get out of there. Lesley had no feelings for others; but she sure had a nice firm healthy little body.

Maguire showered and had another rum and lemon while he put on his good clothes. Pale beige slacks, dark-blue sportshirt and a skimpy dacron sportcoat, faded light-blue, he’d got at Burdine’s for forty-five bucks. He loved the sportcoat because, for some reason, it made him think of Old
Florida and made him feel like a native. (A Maguire dictum: wherever you are, fit in, look like you belong. In Colorado wear a sheepskin coat and lace-up boots.) He got the
Detroit Free Press
clipping out of the top drawer, from under his sweat socks, and slipped it into the inside coat pocket. He then went next door and asked Lesley’s aunt if he could use the phone; he’d be sure to get the charges and pay for it.