Mangrove Squeeze (3 page)

Aaron blew air past dusty lips. "If I'd only known how much."

The wife said, "The older gentleman. He's your father?"

"Brilliant man," said Aaron. "Inventor, engineer. Self-taught. Still holds a couple patents. But let's face facts, seventy-six, he's slipping pretty bad."

The wife said, "How nice you've kept him with you."

"We've always been close," said Aaron. "Usually he worked at home. Had lots of time for me. Made lunch together. Omelets. Taught me baseball in the driveway. Grounders on hot asphalt. Other kids were jealous, fathers working in the city all the time."

The husband said, "Plumbing. Electric. Landscaping. Lot of aspects to a place like this."

"Tell me about it," Aaron said.

"It's nice when families stay together," said the wife.

"Most days," Aaron said.

"Contractors down here, workers," said the husband. "Can you get good help?"

Aaron tried to smile. He said, "You're on vacation. Why talk about depressing things?"

"Age doesn't have to be depressing," said the wife.

Aaron tried to smile once again. It wasn't easy. He'd been up since five that morning, because the woman who was supposed to do the breakfast called to say her tattoo had started bleeding underneath her skin and she couldn't work that day. So Aaron made the muffins and then he toiled with the gardener till noon, but then the gardener had to meet his parole officer to have a new transmitter fitted to his ankle. Aaron wolfed down some lunch then mixed up a batch of mortar for the bricklayer who was supposed to be finishing the path, but by the time the bricklayer appeared, drunk and bellicose, the mortar had hardened in the bucket, become geology.

The husband, looking off toward the half-painted clapboard building he was being led to, now stubbed his toe against that very pail. Catching his balance he said, "Guidebook says recently refurbished."

Aaron said, "Probably means the
last
refurbishing.

Climate eats buildings. Sun. Termites. Mildew. Old owners went broke."

"How sad," said the wife.

"They got happy again at the closing," Aaron said.

They'd reached the porch steps of the back building of the Mangrove Arms. Moonlight rained down on gingerbread trim that had been scraped but not yet refinished, on louvered shutters stacked up in a crisscross pattern on the veranda, waiting to be rehung. In the clearing, Aaron's coated hair and skin gleamed morbidly. He said, "Be careful, the banister isn't bolted down."

"Our room," said the wife. "It's finished?"

The suitcases were heavy, Aaron strained to lift them high enough so that they wouldn't bump the stairs. "Your room," he huffed, "is beautiful. Everything brand new. Sconces, headboard. Carpenter just hung the door today."

They entered the building, which had a wonderful and complicated smell, a smell of many layers: of oldness and newness, of work and hospitality. Toasted sawdust cut through potpourri, lavender soap overlay the tang of drying varnish. Aaron motioned his guests to precede him to the second floor, then steered them down a hallway to the right. He stopped just shy of the door to their room, put down the luggage, and fished in his pocket for the key.

But as he moved to unlock the door, it struck him, very distantly at first, that something wasn't right. He knew how to open a door. It didn't take thinking about. But in his exhaustion nothing came easy, nothing flowed, even automatic gestures had to be conceived anew. So he stared at the door as he brought the key closer, and finally, squinting, he puzzled out, still disbelieving, what was wrong. The lock was where it should have been but there wasn't any keyhole. Instead, there was a lever you worked with your thumb.

Aaron froze, the futile key suspended in midair.

After a moment the husband said, "Asylum-style. Lock 'em in 'stead of out."

"Asshole locksmith," Aaron hissed, then caught himself. "Excuse me. Let's try a different room."

Suki Sperakis hated making sales calls.

But it was a weekday morning; and making sales calls was her job; and it was no worse, she told herself, than other jobs she'd had in the course of twelve years in Key West.

It was no worse than waitressing. No worse than being a line cook, shuttling in a sweat between the griddle and the deep-fat fryer. No worse than driving a taxi in a town where lost tourists in pastel convertibles were always careening the wrong way onto one-way streets.

Sometimes—not often—Suki thought about those jobs, the grimy work for scrape-by pay, and wondered if she should have finished college. Three more semesters, she could have had a psych degree from Rutgers. But then what? Marry the dull, reliable college boyfriend and start a career that would require thirty years of pantyhose. Save up for a little house in a development so new that there'd be no grass to hold the mud in place. Scratch ice off windshields while waiting to deal with the equal terrors of fertility or the lack thereof ... The snare would build up season by season, and for better or worse, Suki was one of those people who could see the whole completed trap before the first piece of it had been nailed down; who understood, moreover, that the first piece was the trap.

So, precociously, at the age of twenty-one, she'd headed south. What made it harder was that she hadn't known what to call herself for doing so. She wasn't a hippie—born too late, and too much of a loner. She was not rebelling against anything in particular, nor fleeing anything more than typically gloomy. She didn't think of herself as especially artsy or original. She was just determined, simply and implacably, to live a pleasant life. She'd given back the scholarship, ditched the boyfriend.

Regrets? Sometimes, sure. Strangely, though, the heaviest regrets could be outweighed by tight and airy clothes. Open shoes. Warm breeze on her face. Besides, her current job—selling space for the
Island Frigate
—wasn't really so bad. It was nowhere near as obviously dead-end as most Key West employment; it might conceivably lead to something that could actually be interesting.

So she wrapped a skirt around herself. She did her eyes. They were wide-spaced, big, and blue—surprising against the blackness of her thick, unruly hair. There weren't many blue-eyed Greeks around, and her eyes made people notice and remember; they were an asset she'd learned to live with. She grabbed her satchel with its rate card and ad samples, and she rode her bike downtown.

Today she was making cold calls on potential new accounts. There were new ones all the time, because the turnover in Key West businesses was phenomenal. Duval Street rents were extortionate, pushed way up by the boom in T-shirt shops, mostly owned by Russians who didn't seem to care about the cost. The tourist market was notoriously fickle, rattled by everything from last year's hurricane to this week's murder in Miami. And many Key West proprietors were flaky as well as undercapitalized, had a mantra in place of a business plan. Sunglass shops, towel stores, cafes—no wonder so many of them went belly-up before a single season had run its rocky course.

Then there were the guest houses. Havens of heartbreak. Bankruptcies waiting to happen. How many of them had come and gone during the years Suki had lived here? Fifty? A hundred? All those fantasies exploded, all those nest eggs squandered. Gay guys too in love with wallpaper to notice that their cash flow was from hunger. Marriages stressed to the breaking point by stuffed toilets, bounced checks; sex preempted by a dread of the jingle of the front-desk bell. Why would anyone want to run a guest house?

She didn't think it was the money. More, maybe, just to have a place—a place to go, a piece of the town. An address where life could find you.

But other people's reasons—that was not her problem. The rent on her apartment was problem enough. So she hustled through the morning, sold a one-eighth page to a cappuccino joint that might or might not survive long enough to pay the bill, a sixteenth to a dim shop that offered custom goods in leather.

At around eleven-thirty she hopped back on her bike and rode from Duval Street down to Whitehead. It was shadier there, and quieter. Enormous banyan trees and strangler figs tunneled the street; their canopies had been hollowed out to make way for telephone and electric wires, and still the waxy leaves were dense enough to baffle sound. Homes mingled with businesses; black people from Bahama Village rode their bikes amid the pinkened tourists. After the relentless contrivance of Duval Street, Whitehead seemed like a real place in a real town. Besides, there was a promising account down there. The forlorn old Mangrove Arms had recently changed ownership yet again.

So she pedaled to the corner of Rebecca Street, where she saw a ragged man with a scraggly beard, holding a sign on a stick. Longtime locals in Key West all knew each other's faces if not their names. Suki vaguely smiled at the man; he vaguely nodded back from his perch atop the curb.

She stepped off her bike and took a moment to contemplate the troubled guest house. It was never going to be a showplace, yet it was clear that this most recent owner was no mere passive dreamer but a thrashing and ambitious one.

Emblems of work and hope were everywhere. Boards had been unsnaggled in the weathered picket fence. Rotten planks had been replaced; the new ones were a slightly different color, like the skin around a healing wound. The runaway hibiscus had been pruned into some semblance of a hedge; sun-shy impatiens, the dirt around them fresh as birth, had been tucked in among the stems. A hand-routed sign, tastefully funky, hung nearly straight from a beam on the porch. Suki saw the changes, felt the urge behind them—the urge to salvage, to restore—and, in spite of all she'd seen, she thought, who knew, maybe this time the old dump would make it.

She climbed the stairs, followed the wraparound veranda to the office door at the side, and, stepping in, she saw an old man with fluffly white hair sitting behind the desk. She hugged her satchel against her side and said her spunkiest good morning.

The old man said, "What?"

Suki said it again. Then she saw that the old man's hearing aid was in pieces on the desk blotter in front of him, next to a tiny screwdriver. She pointed at it.

He said, "Great gizmo. Voice activated. Picks out certain frequencies. Clever."

Suki nodded. "I was wondering if I could see the owner or the manager."

"I can hear okay without it," said Sam Katz. "What?"

Suki, louder, repeated her request.

"Manager?" the old man said. "What manager? You're standing in my workshop."

Key Westers not infrequently made loopy jokes that other people failed to see the humor in. Suki decided the old guy must be kidding. She smiled and said nothing.

The pause forced him to reconsider. He blinked, glanced around at the potted palms, the cubbyholes for mail and keys. "Wait a second," he said at last. "I'm not in my shop. This is Aaron's place. My boy. Florida."

"Yes, Florida," Suki said, not quite shouting.

Sam Katz shook his head, pointed to his brain. "Worse it's getting. Mornings usually I'm good. So you want to see my Aaron?"

"If he's the owner, yes."

"A real mensch, that kid," said Sam. "His mother and me, I don't know what we did, but something we did right. He was a big deal on Wall Street, ya know. Did great. Picture in the
Journal
, the whole schmear. The way, ya know, they trace it. Then just gave it up. Walked away. Got tired of the pressure, the bullshit. Pardon my French."

"No problem," Suki said. "I'm from Jersey."

"I'm from the Bronx, whaddya know . .. Sometimes I think... ah, never mind."

"What?" said Suki. "What do you think?"

Sam looked down at the tiny pieces of his hearing aid. "Sometimes I think maybe he gave it up, partly anyway, to have more time for me. I shouldn't 've let him do it."

There was nothing Suki could say to that.

Sam drummed his fingers lightly on the desk blotter so that tiny screws and washers danced. "You'll wait a minute, I'll find my son."

The old man was gone a long time, long enough for Suki to wonder if maybe he'd forgotten what errand he'd set out on. Outside, bees buzzed, warblers cheeped.

Finally Aaron Katz appeared, alone, in the doorway behind the counter. Today he'd been wiring telephones, crawling under beds and nightstands to chase elusive dial-tones in and out of walls. It was frustrating work but relatively clean; without the plaster dust, his hair was curly brown, his face the ruddy color that comes not from lying on the beach but working in the sun. He wore a shirt from a past life—a business shirt of rich fine cotton, but now wrinkled along the placket and fraying at the collar, the French cuffs rolled up past the elbows. Reaching a hand across the counter, he said, "Hi, I'm Aaron."

"Suki," she said as she clasped. "With the
Island Frigate
."

"That's a paper?" Aaron asked.

It was not a great start, and Suki searched for a way to save face for her employer without offending a potential customer. She said, "You're new in town."