Ladies and Gentlemen (8 page)

Donato could have been fifty-two or sixty-two; it was difficult to tell. He was broad, his height mostly torso, with long arms that ended in monstrous hands. His white hair was cut razor short in a sort of tonsure that grew down from his sideburns to a thin beard and moustache, all of a piece. He had two duplicate rows of dotted scars down his neck, which looked to Thane like they’d been made with a cigarette. He was friendly and quick with a joke, almost roguish with the women of the department, secretaries and professors alike. They seemed to respond to something in his physical confidence, a comfort in his own skin that put them at ease—and Thane as well. He’d begun to dread going home, so they’d fallen into the habit of talking in the evenings. Tonight, Donato had already launched into one of his stories.

“And I hadn’t had a lick of sailing experience before this job,” he said.

“What year was this?” Thane asked.

“Eighty-one?” Donato was sitting across from Thane now.
“Maybe a couple of years later.” He patted his chest pocket for his cigarettes. It was illegal to smoke in the building, but not to be left out, Thane cracked his window and lit up himself. “The guy I was first mate for, this army buddy of mine, Tuck Ralston, he owned this seventy-foot boat, the
Du-Tell
, that he used as a private charter. Took couples out for a week and sailed them up and down the Exuma islands or all around the Bahamas.”

“That sounds like a good gig.”

“Oh, yeah. So good you forgot you were in paradise. Ralston was into all this crap with the Cuban underground, so sometimes we’d smuggle cigars into Miami, small-time contraband like that up from Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, which wasn’t hard because Ralston was down with the Coast Guard.”

“Down how?”

“He went out of his way to help them if there was a distress call in our vicinity that they couldn’t get to, or a boat that needed a tow. Let them know he was a good citizen. Especially if we were up around Andros Island or Bimini and heading toward Florida. They appreciated this, so they left us alone.”

“Got it.”

“Which is the story. I mean, how this thing happened. We’d just picked up all of this cocaine off Port-au-Prince—like a lot more than either of us was comfortable running—and were pretty jumpy about it. We’re at sea, within a few days’ sail of Miami, in the process of, I shit you not, packing kilos into the gaff-sail boom and rewelding it to the aftermast, when we get a call from the Coast Guard asking for a report on our position. And we’re like,
Fuck
. What do
they
want? We’d come up through
Haiti hauling ass in perfect conditions and were about fifty miles west of Andros Island. We tell them our position and they say, Perfect, can you check in on this old woman who lives on a private island ten clicks to your north? Neither she nor the two servants she’s got have answered radio calls. Coast Guard says they don’t have the manpower right now to check it out for themselves, she’s an American citizen in kind of a Bahamian jurisdiction, et cetera. So Ralston’s like, Roger that, not a problem. Which in my mind was a
big
fucking problem. We’ve got ten years’ worth of dope aboard, and I just want to get it off the boat, you know? But Ralston’s policy was to help the Coast Guard no matter what, so we do it.

“The island’s this small, off-the-map place—there are dozens of cays like that down there—and it’s maybe a half mile around. Big white stucco house you could see from the water. Red tile roof, a pen for livestock. Even a stable off the main house, but there’s no horse, no nothing. The place looks completely deserted from offshore. And Ralston says to me, ‘What we’ve got here,’ he says, ‘is an old lady dead of a heart attack or a robbery, and a couple of servants who bugged out.’ Which seemed like a solid theory because there’s not another boat in sight and it doesn’t look like there’s a soul around.

“So we anchor, launch the outboard, drag the Zodiac onto the beach, and head up to the main house. The front door’s wide open, so we call out. No one answers. We walk into this huge great room, marble floors, beautiful furniture, a bazillion-dollar place. All the windows are open, curtains blowing, a small secretary’s desk by the door with all the letters and correspondence and shit warped from
the rain and scattered by the breeze. A couple lights are on, but there’s no people.”

“Nothing?”

“Zippo. The kitchen’s immaculate, the fridge is cleaned out. The garbage can got knocked over, but there’s no garbage in it to speak of—even the opened aluminum cans are clean. There are empty dog bowls, but no dogs. And no sign of a robbery. There’s art on the wall, china on the mantel, a stereo, a television, even some cash in the secretary. It’s like the fucking Bermuda Triangle. So we go upstairs to finish our sweep.

“And it’s a total horror show up there. There are three bedrooms, and in each one there’s been a fucking massacre. Like something you hear about in Africa, Hutu and Tutsi shit. The floors are covered with blood, the walls all sprayed with it. There are bloody handprints everywhere, bloody footprints on the floor. Psycho stuff. Like the victims had been liquefied. The beds are bloody, the sheets coagulated into crazy shapes. The furniture’s all smashed up. But no bodies.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We didn’t either. We didn’t know
what
to think. And it’s the same thing when we check out the livestock. The chicken coop looks like a bomb went off, and there’s not a carcass in sight. We find three goat’s collars and bells in the pen—but no goats. The stable’s covered in blood, like the horse blew up, but there’s not so much as a hoof.”

“So then what?”

“Game over. We’re both so spooked Ralston’s like, ‘Marines, we are
leaving
.’ We come out of the stable, checking our backs for
whatever demon came flying through the place, when Ralston grabs my shoulder and points down the beach. And maybe a thousand yards away, we see these two black things just hauling ass at us. We can’t make them out at first. There’s glare and heat haze, and these things are rippling and elongated, tall as horses. They looked like they’re made of smoke—coming so fast that we stand there and wait, like a couple of fucking morons, until they’re within maybe three hundred yards.

“They’re two enormous Dobermans. But it doesn’t compute at first, you know? We’re just fiddling with our dicks watching them run like we’re at the dog track. Like, ‘Look at ’em go!’ And Ralston says to me, ‘Sons of bitches must be hungry.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, they must be
starving
.’ And I look at Ralston and he looks at me …

“And then it’s a foot race. The lightbulbs go on in our heads and Ralston and I start
sprinting
to the Zodiac. We’ve got maybe seventy-five yards to the boat, the dogs two hundred to us, and we’re all headed for a collision …

“We get to the raft first, shouldering it into the water like a blocking sled. The dogs
dive
in after us. I mean they
leap
into the sea full stretch—
pow!
—like those Labs you see on ESPN. They swim after us, ears back, chugging along. And they don’t
stop
swimming until after we get the outboard going and
really
put some distance between us. And even after that, after we pull away and they swim back to shore and shake off, they sit down on the beach, calm as kings, and just watch us. Like maybe we’ll change our minds and come back to be their dinner.”

Donato started to laugh, coughing productively. Thane rocked back in pleasure, amazed. “So what happened?”

“So we called it in once we got back to the boat. The Coast Guard updated us a week later. Apparently the woman ran out of food, her radio was out, and the dogs turned on her and the servants. Ate everything. Most of the indigenous animals on the island too. Even the bones. And Ralston and I, after delivering, like, ten kilos of cocaine to Miami, we get a commendation from the Coast Guard for exemplary service.”

The man seemed to have an endless supply of these stories. Thane didn’t care if they were invented or exaggerated. They had the ring of truth. Of real experience. What Thane had learned of Donato’s family history was just as colorful. He was Sicilian, his father Cosa Nostra in New York. Donato claimed to have run numbers for the Mob as a boy. “Nigger pool,” he called it. “You’re telling me you’ve never heard of the nigger pool?” He was constantly amazed at Thane’s ignorance; he’d often pause to look around the office at some imaginary audience or sidekick, someone to acknowledge how little the professor knew about the world. He told Thane about his two tours of duty in Vietnam, missions with Special Forces in Khe Sanh and Quang Ngai, about his stints in prison after the war: one year in Tennessee for aggravated assault, four years’ hard labor in Alabama for gun running. Surely the professor knew that the primary couriers of illegal firearms in this country were motorcycle gangs. No, he didn’t know this. Like the Dobermans streaking down the beach, images from Donato’s tales stayed with him long after the telling, and he found himself thinking about them on his dark drive home.

There was a chirping in the office, and Donato produced an impossibly small cell phone from his hip pocket. Thane checked his watch. It was almost nine o’clock.

“This is Mike,” Donato said. He looked at Thane while he listened to the caller and pointed to the receiver, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “Right. Right.
All right
. Slow down already.”

Donato sat forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees while he scratched his forehead. “Where are you?” He looked at his watch. “Give me a few minutes.” He flipped the phone closed and smiled at Thane warmly. “The weekend has started.”

He stood up. Thane stood too.

“You should get out a little, Professor. All week I’m here, you’re burning it at both ends.”

Thane glanced at the copy of
Us Weekly
on his desk. “You have no idea.”

Donato turned to leave.

“Hey, Mike?”

“Yo.”

“We should do this again.”

“We will.”

“I mean we should organize this material.”

Donato look puzzled. “What material?”

“Your stories.”

Donato pointed to himself. “You mean my life?”

“We could make a book out of it.”

Donato checked with his audience again, then smiled crookedly. “C’mon.”

“I’m serious,” Thane said. “This stuff is fascinating. Give it the right treatment and who knows?”

Donato processed this, squinting at Thane. “You’d really want to do that?”

“Think about it,” Thane said.

Donato offered his hand, and they shook.

Later, driving home toward Troutville, Thane wondered how long the whole process might take—from interviews to transcription to manuscript, from editing to first printing. He and Donato would sit down weekly with a Dictaphone. He would organize the narrative as a series of tour de force chapters: “In New York.” “In Vietnam.” “In Great Inagua.” He would call it
Tales of an Anonymous Life
. The book’s effect would be like a man walking in place against a moving background, each setting supercharged with meaning, the protagonist surviving at ground level, unaware of his part in this larger American tapestry. He envisioned critical and commercial success, appearances on the talk circuit, interviews on NPR. It would be a chance to pay off debts and move back to New York, where he’d grown up, maybe start writing for one of the major magazines or get a job at a topflight university. He could feel the power of the project surge through him, like it had its own destiny.

He was proud of himself for being so opportunistic. His ex-wife, Ashley, would have been pleased too, having always encouraged him to write things that weren’t just scholarly. Thane was suddenly seized by a vivid memory. He and Ashley were in their car, parked alongside a dozen others on a ferry, everyone facing forward during the dark bay crossing. They were headed from Boston to Long Island during one of Ashley’s breaks from law school, and the two of them were arguing bitterly. He couldn’t even remember now what they’d been fighting about. He’d been yelling so hard that
his neck hurt. Ashley reached back to where the windshield met the corner of the dash—he wasn’t sure at first what she was doing, but realized a second later it was to wind up—and then struck him across the face. The blow was quick, and much harder than he’d expected. He went silent, holding his hand to his cheek. Ashley pressed herself against her door and pulled her legs up, ready to kick him if necessary. She looked terrified and furious, and Thane was on the verge of retaliation until he noticed the couple in the next car over. They’d been watching this whole exchange, both of them wide-eyed, motionless, astonished, waiting to see what would happen next …

Instead of turning off the interstate, Thane took the next exit and headed for downtown.

He pulled into Billy’s Ritz, a bar and restaurant that was always crowded on the weekends. When he’d started teaching at the university this past fall, the department had taken him there for dinner. Besides the refurbished hotel down the street, it was the only public place he’d been to in Roanoke. The bar was three-deep with patrons, and after Thane ordered a drink he tried to look like he was waiting for someone. He watched the basketball game that was on TV, nodding at the group of guys in front of him whenever they turned to high-five each other, everyone else also paired off, tripled off, grouped.

Standing behind them all, Thane quickly drank three whiskeys and finally approached the hostess. “Where’s a good place to hear music?”

At Corned Beef & Co., a band played on a stage with its back to the front window, the red klieg lights shining down from the
second-level balcony and casting the room aglow. The club was packed wall-to-wall with kids from Hampden-Sydney, Washington and Lee, Roanoke College, and with plenty of Thane’s own students from Hollins. He felt out of place, absurdly old, but he ignored it, pushing forward to the bar and yelling for a beer. The music was terrible, unforgivingly loud. Then someone tapped his shoulder.

“Professor?”

It was Ramelle Foster, one of his seniors, a beautiful girl from South Carolina. She had the same eyes as Ashley, green and wide set, and a number of times during his seminar he’d caught her staring at him. He’d warned himself to be careful around her.