Greetings from the Vodka Sea (7 page)

“I'm only saying the truth. You know it as well as I.” He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away. She was thinking of the years ahead, the chubby, pasty children, the women's club, a mistress perhaps, a lover for her, a friend of his no doubt, a protégé.

“Honey, please don't be that way.” He reached for her hands again. She let him hold them but turned her head toward the sea.

“Fancy a bit of company?” McGuffan had rooted them out.

“Actually, we're just going to our room.” Bruce pushed his chair back.

“Splendid! But we've only just ordered fancy coffees. Imperial Room specialty. You must try one.”

“Caffeine doesn't agree with me.”

“Caffeine doesn't agree with you. Did you hear, that Alice? We'll make it decaf, then. You really must try this drink. It has — what's the stuff, Alice?”

“Anisette, dear.”

“Anisette, yes . . .”

“And a splash . . .”

“. . . of vodka?”

“That's right, love. Vodka.”

Bruce looked at Monica pleadingly. She tilted her head and ran her bare foot up his leg.

Bruce collapsed just a little. “One drink, then. Only one.”

“Splendid.” McGuffan rubbed his hands together, excited at the opportunity to play the congenial host. “Ricki! Café spécial, for four.”

“Make mine a —”

“And make one a decaf, for the good doctor here.”

“One drink, and that's it.”

But one drink became two, and two become four, following the physics of alcohol consumption, and soon even Bruce had become dizzy. He remembered singing with Alice (in French? Something from
Cats
?) and parading, almost obscenely close, to Ricki and one of the serving boys in some strange folk dance involving tea towels, bare chests and a kind of frog-hopping two-step.

And at some point the whole crew, the McGuffans and Monica and Ricki and a regiment of servers, made their way to the hot pool, as Bruce took a walk to the beach to clear his swimming head. It was a strategic move; as soon as he hit the sand, Bruce shoved two fingers down his throat and forced himself to vomit. Once. Twice. Three times. He gasped for several moments, his knuckles and knees planted in the still-warm sand. He pushed off his shoes. That was better. His stomach was not so sour, his head clearer. He pulled his shirt off (vomit had drooled across the pocket) and rinsed it in the water. Then he dipped onto his haunches and, sitting like a dog, looked out to sea. There was something out there. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but there — there it was. Not twenty feet from shore, a small whale, poking its head into the air, watching. And there, nearby, another whale, and another and — there were almost too many for a drunk to count. They simply bobbed and stared at Bruce impassively (of course, as Bruce quickly realized, they were whales; they could only be impassive). It was the noise. Yes, that was it. The retching song — that had confused them, attracted them. Bruce reached for a stone. He felt a wide flat one. Perfect. He pushed himself to his feet and flung the stone onto the water. It skipped half a dozen times, jewelling the water with moonlight each time it scratched the surface, stopping finally in the space between two buoyed whales. From across the sea, firecrackers clacked again. Quietly, together, the whales withdrew.

Bruce took the main path back to the hotel. He expected, hoped, to find Monica there waiting for him, perhaps a little worried (where had he been?). But the room was still dark, the bed empty. Bruce went to the window. He looked down into the courtyard. There, near the shadows of the grotto, in the hot tub, Monica, Ricki and John, close but not too close. Alice and McGuffan sat at the other end. She may or may not have been singing. In any case, he was nuzzling (or at least, from Bruce's vantage point, appeared to be nuzzling) her throat. Monica was leaning forward, relaxed (almost overly so); Ricki and John sat motionless, their faces blank, revealing nothing. Ricki tilted his head back and seemed (from where Bruce stood, it was hard to tell) to close his eyes. Aimlessly, Monica turned her gaze toward the window. Bruce stepped back, half hiding behind the curtain. Nevertheless, she seemed to find his eyes. She seemed (though the distance and darkness could have been playing tricks) to be staring right into his eyes. Her arms moved vigorously now under the bubbled surface — Monica made no attempt to conceal what she was doing. The realization that her husband must have been watching (discreetly, that is, from a distance) heightened her excitement. Ricki arched forward as John thrashed in the water (Bruce found himself growing excited despite himself, knowing she must have been watching him watching her), and the tour guide moaned so loudly that Bruce could clearly hear him, three floors up and through the glass. A moment later, the hotel employees had sunk back into their spots, but Monica still looked up to him and, in fact, had never averted her gaze. These eyes, his eyes, she was trying to reach inside them, to dive inside them, find herself in his eyes, look through his eyes and see herself as he saw her. Bruce drew the blind. He went to the kitchenette and opened the drawer beneath the microwave. There were several knives in the drawer, and he selected the long one with the serrated edge. He shut the drawer, then slipped into bed to wait for his wife.

. . .

Monica stood up. She didn't need to towel, the night air was that warm. The breeze, hot as it was, cooled her wet skin. There was that sound again. The firecrackers. McGuffan stopped himself mid-nuzzle to listen.

“Marauders, eh, Ricki?”

The manager grunted and shrugged.

“Marauders?” Monica looked toward the sea.

McGuffan nodded. He'd been through it a couple of times, he said. “Hadn't wanted to mention anything earlier, what with the honeymoon and all.”

“What do we do?” Monica strained to still her voice.

McGuffan ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Remain calm, that's always best. And wait. The government usually reestablishes a safe corridor within twenty-four hours. Isn't that right, Ricki?”

“A day, maybe two. There's an election coming up, so who knows?”

John broke in. “They're like the tide. They ebb, they flow.”

“Who? Who is like the tide, John? The government?”

“The government . . . the marauders . . .” His voice drifted off lazily; they were one and the same for him.

Monica looked to the hills across the water. Several fires were spreading at an alarming rate (almost comical, from this distance). A wave of panic washed through her. She must find Bruce. Where could he be? He'd gone to the beach hours ago. And a different kind of panic overtook her. Perhaps he'd seen? Perhaps he'd been coming up through the path and caught sight of her — the lot of them — in the Jacuzzi. Of course, the idea had struck her before, and, in fact, at the time, it was this idea that appealed to her most. It wasn't so much the foreign men, naked, leading her on (Alice bleating, “Go for it, love, you're on bloody holiday,” but the thought that Bruce might see, would see, and approach in anger (slightly aroused but angry, righteous without being self-righteous) and grab her roughly (but not ungallantly) and, with a few threatening, understated words to the foreigners, whisk her off to the room — this is what excited her. She'd been stupid. A stupid girl. She couldn't blame the men. They were attractive and aroused (not a big deal, really, for her, but it did tip the scales slightly) and so adolescent in the obviousness of their intentions, their earnest, almost pathetic actions (they must have thought English girls were such sluts), tugging her hands towards them (not forcefully, but with such vague and, again, pathetic deference it was almost sad; she pitied them, as people tend to pity foreigners). No. She'd never been so stupid. Not even in school. She was a married woman now, for godsake; and even if she weren't —

Monica hurried off toward the beach to find John, all the way reproaching herself. But you can say only so much, and by the time she reached the sand (there were his shoes, and there, his shirt) she was already repeating herself. It was agreed: she'd been stupid. But now they'd have to live with it and move on. The waves washed almost to her feet. It was the sea, she thought. The damned sea. They'd put it in everything: the sauces, the cocktails, the dessert, the aperitifs. The sea was everywhere. The waves licked her toes. Monica squatted. She dipped her hand into the sea and, almost without thinking, took a sip. It was awful stuff, horrible. How could anyone . . .

She took another drink. From across the water, she heard the shouts of men, some angry, some, it seemed, frightened. Women too were screaming, and children, she thought she could make out the sound of children crying for their mothers. It didn't matter that she couldn't speak the language; the sound of children crying for their mothers was something you just instinctively understood. Now she sat and wondered, where was Bruce? Perhaps he'd gone for swim. Or a long walk along the beach? He liked to do that when he'd had a bit to drink.

There was another
crack
. The gunshots were getting closer. The marauders were sweeping down from the hills, and where was John? She wanted him there with her. She wanted to hold him. She wanted him to be angry at her, to reproach her. She wanted to be hated and forgiven. She rolled onto her hands and knees and reached into the water for another drink, then she bent forward and began to lap the water like a dog. Nearby, a stone's throw, really, a whale surfaced. It was close enough for Monica to look into its eyes, to read the blankness, and she realized for the very first time that these friendly whales weren't friendly at all.

“I know your game,” she said, then lapped another mouthful of water. She felt around for a rock and found one almost the size of her fist. She pulled it towards her, nestled it in her lap, held it tighter. Bruce would come for her soon, she was sure of that. She wanted to be ready.

The Klingon Opera

M
urph found the kit at the back of the basement walk-in, in a plastic storage box stuffed to the gills with memories and other shit. Why he hadn't disposed of the kit years ago, simply thrown it away, he couldn't say. He was a pack rat. You never knew when you'd need something. He'd asked Rudy to help him, but the kid was on his computer and refused to get off. Murph got pissed and started into one of those lectures about allowances and certain teenagers who never lifted a finger to help around the house, but he kept his cool in light of the fact — the irony, hypocrisy even, that he was asking his son to participate — indirectly, in a major felony punishable by up to twenty years in the federal penitentiary.

Leave the kid to his conversational Klingon, Murph decided as he started to reorganize history, one box at a time. “Wedding Stuff” . . . “Misc. Photo” . . . “Xmas '96” . . . “Income Tax” . . . “Marg's Office.” In “Rudy” he found
Baby's Memory Book
. It listed the stats of the boy's birth: weight, 6 pounds 8 ounces; length, 20 inches; hair colour, none; eyes, yes; and on and on. Murph's wife had even updated the book: first tooth, first steps, first haircut, first words. Sometime before First Day of School, Marg had petered out. She was good at that.

Twenty-five minutes into it, Murph reached “PM: Personal.” He peeled back the plastic lid and swept aside the packing of old
Penthouse
and raunchy letters from ex-girlfriends and found the kit still wrapped in a striped tea towel, the way he remembered it, the way it had always been. And once he had reinterred his past, all but the kit, a holographic shard revealing more of Murph than seemed possible, he returned to his study to finish the job. Muffled synthesized music trembled from Rudy's room. He was working still on that damned opera. But such was adolescence, Murph supposed, all about obsession and the creation of tinkly epics never to be heard outside inner space. Besides, it kept Rudy off the streets, away from their wantonness and dangers. The kid, thank God, wouldn't know Colt 45 from a Colt .45.

The product was spread out on the table. While it hadn't exactly cost Murph his live savings — those were somewhat below zero, an ex-wife and a teenaged son would do that to you — it had substantially increased his debt load, the VU meter of his underamplified life. When he got together with his buddies for a drink or some herb, it always came back to that. What's your debt load? How much of a burden are you? How big is your nut? It was the cost of living, in monthly instalments. Everybody had a plan. Moonie sold his truck but blew most of that in a Vegas chicken ranch. He came home, used the leftover money for a deposit on a new truck, and settled back into the faithful, forgiving arms of his debt load. Lloyd lucked out when his mother died. He got the family home, which he unwisely converted into a four-bedroom rancher in the valley, a nice little setup up for his girlfriend and her two brats. Now he's amortized into oblivion. Dicky D did the best of all. He took out a second mortgage, then a third and was working on his banker to spring for the fourth. His plan was always the same: consolidate debt. But every time, the debt wound up consolidating him. Now Dicky hoped to die before he turned sixty-five, having no desire to endure sunset years of cat food suppers in a fixed-income flat.

Murph had already cut the coke into six smaller sections. He'd thought to weigh it, to make sure he'd got a whole kilo, although what would he do if it was light? It's not like there was a complaints department he could go to. Things had changed, but not that much. Murph dabbed a bit of the product with his baby finger and stuck it into his mouth, swishing it around to test the bouquet, just like they did on cop shows. Real life cops never did that. Real life cops never knew if they were getting a finger full of up or down or potassium bromide or Draino. But Murph already knew that this was the real deal. He'd done a line with that kid with the limp, the wholesaler.
Double U
. Not that he'd really wanted to do a line, but he felt he should, to put the kid's mind at ease. Murph was a fresh face in a business that didn't like fresh faces, and an old fresh face at that. His brother had vouched for him — that helped — but it was possible he could have been a narc, a stupid, shitty narc, in the worst look-at-me-I'm-a-narc disguise any narc ever concocted, so he took a line for the cause. It was like he'd never left home. The taste (not sweet, not tart, nothing you could describe because there was nothing else you could accurately compare it to: almondy, barely, that's the best he could do), the sugary burn in his sinuses, the up that came and went with a bang. Kaboom. He'd swore he'd never do it again, back when he'd given everything up and swore he'd never do anything again. But never is a long time, and defeat is often easier to swallow (or in this case inhale) than complete humiliation.

He hadn't quite figured out what to do. His first thought was to process it, make crack. The wholesaler said that that would net him the biggest return; his brother concurred. He could move a point of crack for ten bucks, net five or six times his investment. The downside was that Murph had never made crack before, and he didn't feel he had the wiggle room to fuck around with the product. Plus, he didn't understand the market. Crack was after his time. Up he understood. He understood who used it and why. There was still a measure of respectability to it. Doctors did coke. Professional athletes. Bankers. Crack was something else, and crackheads moved in different (and, as far as Murph could make out, ever-diminishing) circles. It was the Kmart of the drug world, the bad name brand, the unwashed slut who went down on anyone and brought everyone down with her. He'd just cut it with soda and package it in Baggies. Simple. Understated. Hard to trace. A classic.

An electric rhythm kicked from Rudy's room.
Boom-cha, boom-boom ba-cha. The Klingon Opera
was going to be the first ever acid-rap musical.
Boom-cha, boom-boom ba-cha
. It told the story of Kahless the Unforgettable, patriarch of the Klingon Kingdom, who, through a set of complicated and contrived circumstances, is forced to choose between the two Essential Truths: Honour and Duty. The libretto was com-plete. Rudy had read it to Murph over the Christmas holidays. Upside: mercifully short. Downside: Murph woefully untutored in conversational Klingon. Now there was just the music.
Boom-cha, boom-boom ba-cha
. Murph liked that rhythm. It was animal. Angry, in a sexy way, like a good fight, or the way a good fight used to be, years ago, the kind of fight that just happened, where someone'd just look at you wrong and you'd fall together and kick the shit out each other for five minutes, then both collapse at the same time and walk away without even saying a word, like some anonymous perfect macho fuck, and the buzz stayed with you for days; sexy in a fantastic way, a more-gorgeous-than-life sexy, like a beer commercial or
Penthouse
spread. Sometimes Murph would crawl into his bed as the rhythm thumped from Rudy's room, just crawl into bed with a couple of good mags and pull himself off and take himself home listening to that rhythm — it was that kind of sexy. Murph wondered what kind of effect the music had on Rudy. Did it awake the animal in him? Was there an animal in him?

Murph measured out fifty Baggies in ten-, fifteen- and fifty- dollar sizes only. It was more cumbersome that way, but he'd have a level of protection. If the cops caught him — not that they would, but if they did — he'd only ever be carrying enough for himself, they couldn't ding him for dealing. In high school, when he'd really been a dealer and not just some guy trying to make ends meet, he found it hurtfully hypocritical that a society which so worshipped capitalism, and the entrepreneurial spirit so deeply abhorred the dealer. True, dealers didn't pay taxes (neither did IBM) and contributed, in the most theoretical terms, to general human suffering (so did Dupont and Ford and just about every corporation you could name), but dealers also brought pleasure and gratification to many willing, wilful people. Back then, he'd managed to convince himself that he was on a crusade to turn on the world. Now, he didn't give a shite about the big picture. All he wanted to do was get out of the hole and not, repeat not, go to jail. Murph had an itch to try another line, bolster his nerve. But he just kept weighing and cutting, weighing and cutting, weighing and cutting. This was strictly business and would remain so. He had work to do.

. . .

Wilson turned the corner at full trot and crashed into the cans, just like on TV, and it hurt like shit, like it never did on TV, and it wasn't funny in the least, like it always was on TV. He dropped his Glock. Wilson got up right away because the adrenaline was rushing and because he was spiritually, emotionally, intellectually and physically shitting his pants and mainly — mainly — because he didn't, under any circumstances, want to die. Wilson was his real name, but nobody used it. They called him by his street tag, which right now seemed so stupid and pointless, and worse, so utterly unproductive, that he thought of himself only in terms of Wilson. In TV shows — and don't get Wilson wrong, he liked TV shows, he's not blaming TV shows for anything — but in TV shows, no one ever got scared shitless. They were shot at, shot back, chased and were chased, they swore, they threatened, they fought, but no one ever got scared shitless. Afterwards, they might say they were scared, but in a really emotional way that real scared people, people like Wilson, never used. Wilson was scared shitless, and his entire body, his soul, was scared shitless, and he shook and could barely breathe, and if he'd had to talk, say something colourful for the cameras, he wouldn't have been able to say a word. The problem? The problem was simple. There might not be any afterwards. You're always guaranteed an afterwards in a TV show when the drug deal goes bad, if you're the right guy, the good guy. Wilson didn't necessarily have an afterwards, and he knew it.

He ran down the alley, his knees shaking with every step, his bad leg holding him back, and came, just like in the TV shows, to a wire mesh fence, maybe nine feet tall. When this happened on TV, Wilson always thought, how
fucking
convenient. Right in the middle of nowhere, for no fucking point, someone had stuck a fence. That's not contrived, he'd say to Cherry sarcastically. Now here he was, unpleasantly contrived. He jumped and grabbed the top of the fence (whether the sharp unshielded points of metal at the top of the fence dug into his fingers, like they sometimes did on TV, he couldn't tell) and pulled himself up almost whimpering, almost ready to cry like a baby. People never cried like that in the TV shows. Maybe the bad guys or the wimpy guys, the comic relief. But guys like Wilson, the good guys, the anti-heroes, they never cried like that. Maybe if you killed a guy's partner or raped and murdered his wife he'd cry. But then it was such a deep, rooted, tearless, gushing, snot-effusing cry — wrathful almost, foreboding. Not like this. Not whimpering. But Wilson couldn't help it. It went with that feeling he had, growing in half-lives inside him. He wanted his mother. Wilson wanted to be with her right now. He wanted to be four years old and wrapped in her big arms and warm and protected and fucking loved so absolutely that nothing else mattered. He'd felt that way sometimes with Cherry, in a little way, tucked up beside her, his whats pressed up against her big ass, the two of them in tight as one. Now he wanted to feel the comfort again, in a big way. And so he cried, not just because he was scared — he was, shitless — but also because it was comforting, made him feel that if he kept it up, maybe those big arms would reach down from above and pick him up and hold him until it was all over.

Wilson slipped.
What do you think of that, Cherry?
The toe on his bad foot didn't catch in the mesh and he slid two feet back to the ground.
Pretty convenient, huh?
He could have kept going, and he wanted to, he really did — he really didn't want to die. But the gun was in the back of his head. It was so close he could smell it, he could taste it on his teeth, a steel popsicle. Colt Pocket Nine. (“How d'ya like my little dildo, mother-fucker? How 'bout I stick it right up your ass?”) Usually it wasn't like this. It wasn't this intimate. Usually it was anonymous. A shot in a bar. A drive-by. It happened like that because they were scared too, the shooters. Scared in a different way, but scared all the same. Wilson tried to look him in the eye — not move his head, mind you, but roll his eyes far enough to catch a piece in his peripherals.
Homey's got red hair
. He didn't know the kid's name. Maybe he had once, but that was lost in the fog of fear and time. He knew his street tag, but what good was that? That was kid stuff, teenage bravado. This was something different. This was intimate. Man to man. He should at least know the fucking name.
Homey's got red hair.
It was a stupid thing to think. Quite possibly the last stupid thing he would ever think.