Tricky Business (16 page)

“I don't see no drink in your hand, Pop,” said Arquero.

“I ain't your pop,” said Arnie.

“Easy, Arnie,” said Mara, putting her hand on Arnie's arm. “Mr. Arquero here's right, OK? We gotta get to work.”

“That's right,” said Arquero, turning, striding away.

“Asshole,” said Arnie.

“True, but he's the boss asshole,” said Mara.

“Why do you got to get into it with
everybody
?” said Phil.

“Not everybody,” said Arnie. “Just the assholes.”

“Right,” said Phil, “but to you, practically
everybody
is an asshole.”

“True,” said Arnie.

“Nice to meet you gentlemen,” said Fay. “I gotta go upstairs.”

“Our pleasure,” said Arnie. “I'm only sorry Mara here claimed my heart first.”

“We came this close, Arnie,” said Fay, holding her fingers an inch apart. “I'll always treasure what we had.” She turned and went upstairs.

“Classy lady,” said Arnie.

“I know,” said Mara. “I can't figure out what she's doing here.”

“Hey,” said Arnie, “you got class, and you're here.”

“Thanks, Arnie, I appreciate the thought, but I know what I am, which is a high-school dropout. This is all I ever did, hustle drinks. But Fay is . . . I dunno. She doesn't belong here.”

Fay was thinking pretty much the same thing when she got to the second deck and surveyed the crowd waiting to gamble. Most of the males were gathered around Tina, the tall and abundant roulette croupier. She was putting on a demonstration of how roulette was played. Almost all the males watching her knew exactly how roulette was played—it is not a complex game—but they were watching Tina intensely, the way a dog watches a hamburger being carried across a patio, in case maybe, somehow, you never know, the dog is going to get some.

Fay's job was to go up to these people and ask them if they wanted anything from the bar. It was her experience that, on average, two out of every three of them would respond to this simple question by making basically the same joke, which was:
Yeah
(looking down at some specific part of Fay's body),
I want something all right, heh heh.
And that was the subtle version. Sometimes they'd point at what they wanted; sometimes they'd try to touch it.

The first time this happened, Fay was unprepared. She asked a guy—middle-aged, clean-cut, not obviously drunk—if he wanted anything, and with no hesitation he put his right hand on her left breast and said, “This'd be nice.” She whacked his hand with her drink tray. He grabbed his hand and yelled what do you think you're doing you bitch. Manny Arquero, always on patrol, was there instantly asking what happened, and Fay said this guy grabbed me, and the guy said I was just kidding around and this psycho bitch tries to take my hand off, and Arquero said to the guy, look, she's new, no harm done, next drink's on the house, and the guy said yeah well that's fine but you oughtta fire that psycho bitch. Then Arquero took Fay aside and said what's wrong with you, and she said what's wrong with
me
? This slimeball gropes me and you want to know what's wrong with
me
? And Arquero said that guy is a customer, happens to be a very
good
customer, and you don't hit a customer again, ever, if you want to keep your job, you understand? And Fay said nothing, because she needed to keep this job.

So now, whenever she approached a male customer she didn't know, she held the drink tray between them, her body tense, ready to step away quickly. She'd also learned, when men said things to her, how to put on exactly the right smile—just enough to let the customer know she got that he was making a joke, ha ha, but not so much that he'd think it was OK with her for him to take it any further, or make a grab. Fay had to make these calculations, recalibrate her expression and posture, hundreds of times a night, which was one reason she almost always went home with a headache.

She felt one starting already as she picked up her drink tray from behind the bar and headed over to the crowd of dedicated roulette aficionados surrounding Tina. She circled the perimeter, searching for somebody relatively noncarnivorous-looking to ease her into the evening. She settled on a seventy-ish, gray-haired, grandfatherly man wearing neatly pressed chinos, loafers, and a button-down shirt, his reading glasses hanging from his neck.

Fay approached, put on her fake perky cocktail-waitress smile, and said, “Would you like anything from the bar, sir?”

He gave her a grandfatherly smile and said, “I'd like a cranberry juice on the rocks, please.”

“You got it,” she said, her fake smile melting into a genuine one.

“And a blow job,” he said.

 

SOMEWHERE ON THE DARK SEA BETWEEN THE Bahamas and Florida, Frank peered out at the alarmingly large waves. He was now seriously seasick, his clothes soaking with cold sweat, his gut churning from the boat's relentless rolling and lurching, his head pounding from the
thrum-thrum-thrum
of the engines.

Frank had been making a conscious effort not to think about how lousy he felt. Unfortunately, this got him to thinking about how much water there was out there, all around him, beneath him. It was a
lot
of water, he was thinking. A
shitload
of water. It was starting to bother Frank that the only thing between him and all that water was this boat, which to Frank now seemed small and frail, especially compared to these waves. It occurred to him that he didn't really know how boats worked. It didn't make sense, the more he thought about it, that if he dropped, for example, his car keys into the ocean, they'd sink immediately, even though they weighed far less than this boat. Frank wondered—he couldn't help himself—
What was keeping the boat up?
And what if it suddenly stopped working, out here? Wherever the hell
here
was.

Frank looked over at Tark, at the helm. Tark, who always seemed to sense when Frank was looking at him, looked back and grinned, clearly loving how much Frank was clearly hating this.

“Are we on time?” said Frank, trying to sound businesslike, in control, unafraid.

“We're good,” said Tark. “Timewise, anyway. You don't look so good, though.”

“Don't worry about me,” said Frank.

“Who said I was worried?” said Tark.

“I appreciate your concern,” said Frank.

“Some people just can't get used to it, the rough water,” said Tark. “Me, I love it. Rougher the better, far as I'm concerned.”

Frank said nothing.

“Probably gonna get a lot rougher,” said Tark. “Storms like this, I've seen 'em capsize bigger boats'n this.”

“Shut up,” said Frank.

“You're the one started this conversation,” said Tark.

Frank looked at his watch, saw it was time to check on Juan. Bracing himself against the motion of the boat, he moved toward the ladderway. Just before he reached it, the boat lurched violently. Frank almost fell, caught a railing with his non-gun hand, hung on. He looked back at Tark, who was spinning the wheel, grinning.

“Better watch yourself,” Tark said. “You could get hurt.”

“Next time that happens,” Frank said, “I shoot you in the knee, you got that? Hurts like a bitch, and you'll never walk right again. But you can still drive the boat, unless you want me to shoot the other knee.”

“Hey,” said Tark, “you can't blame me for what the ocean does.”

Frank aimed his Glock at Tark's left eye, so Tark could see right down the barrel, which Frank had always found to be a strong attention-getter. He said, “You can't blame me for what my gun does.”

Tark tried to keep his grin up, but it faded just a hair, enough to make Frank feel momentarily better as he turned and headed down the ladder. He immediately felt worse when he got into the cabin, which stank of large, unhygienic bodies radiating their odors into stale, humid air. Tark's three friends—Kaz, Rebar, Holman—were still sitting at the table, staring at Juan, who was still facing them, his back to the counter, gun in hand. He didn't look good. His eyes were glazed, his face slick with sweat.

“You OK?” Frank said.

Juan responded by handing Frank his gun—Juan
never
let go of his gun—then whirling to the sink and vomiting copiously. Frank jumped back, trying to avoid the splatter. At the table, Kaz, the one on the left, with the big arms, said “Oh
shit
” and started to rise.

“Don't move,” said Frank.

“Come
on,
man,” said Kaz, sitting back down. “You can't keep us in here with
that.
”

“I said
don't move.
”

The acrid stench of puke was hitting Frank now, and he knew his stomach was close to open revolt. Juan, between heaves, looked up from the sink and said, “Ag sagg manng”—Frank took this to mean
I'm sorry, man
—then went back to retching. Frank fought to regain control of the snakes writhing in his gut so he could figure out how to play this.

Rebar, the fat guy next to Kaz, said, “I'm gonna puke.”

Kaz said, “Oh man, no DON'T . . .” but this is not one of those areas where people take directions, and even as Kaz spoke, Rebar blurted onto the table what had at one time been an abundant seafood lunch, now transformed by Rebar's digestive system into a rancid sloshing horror. At that instant, the boat hit a wave trough and pitched violently forward, dumping Rebar's spewage into the lap of Holman, who responded milliseconds later by launching his own lunch in a gush that shot across the table and splashed onto the floor. Kaz was now scrambling sideways, away from his two puking cohorts, trying to stand up but getting only partway to his feet before the chain reaction reached him and
BLARRRGGHH,
he, too, released a mighty river of ralph.

Frank was now in a small enclosed space with four men who were actively regurgitating, their stomach contents mingling on the pitching, heaving floor, forming a reeking gumbo from hell. The stench was unbearable, and at that moment, Frank, normally the ultimate professional, did not care about making the rendezvous or keeping an eye on Tark or anything else except getting out of there
right now.
He lunged toward the cabin door, but as he did, the boat lurched again, and he stepped on some unspeakable, slippery thing and lost his footing. With a gun in each hand, he was unable to grab for support, and so he went down, backward, cracking his head against the counter, landing on his butt, which continued to slide out from under him until he was lying on his back, momentarily blacked out, regaining consciousness to feel wetness on his back and . . .
Oh no . . . Oh God no, it's in my hair . . .

And then Frank lost it, too, joining the chunk-blowing chorus, the barf brigade, five men in a tossing boat who might have reasons to kill each other, but who, for the moment, could think about nothing except when the next retch would come, and what it would bring up.

 

“IS EVERYBODY HAVING A GOOD TIME?” SAID Wally. “Is everybody ready to
party
?”

Wally surveyed the dance floor on the third deck of the
Extravaganza of the Seas.
This did not take him long, as there was nobody actually on the dance floor. There were a dozen or so passengers on the deck, but most of them were at the far end of the room, buying drinks at the bar or picking warily through the buffet.

The buffet was included in the
Extravaganza
's $8.95 admission price ($5.95 for seniors). It was advertised as the Sumptuous All You Can Eat Gourmet Buffet, but nobody ever ate much of it. Experienced
Extravaganza
passengers did not even approach it.

The Sumptuous All You Can Eat Gourmet Buffet consisted of a row of dented industrial chafing dishes, each containing an unidentifiable entrée, generally random lumps of something that could have, at one time, been part of a living thing, but not a healthy thing—medallions of weasel, perhaps—soaking in semi-coagulated gravylike liquid, generally a yellowish-brown in color, sometimes with a tinge of gray or green.

The buffet was tended by a hatchet-faced, hostile-looking man wearing a chef's uniform with large permanent stains. This man never spoke. The band called him “Emeril.” Emeril did not appear to actually cook anything. At the start of the night, he produced the chafing dishes and lit the burners. During the cruise, he sat behind the counter on a stool, arms folded, glaring into the distance, refusing to answer customers' questions (the most common question being, “What
is
this?”). At the end of the night, he removed the chafing dishes.

It was Ted who had proposed the theory that Emeril was setting out the same food, night after night.

“Why not?” Ted said. “Hardly anybody eats it. It could last for months.”

“I think some of it is actually getting larger,” said Johnny. “On its own.”

Ted had decided to test his theory that Emeril was recycling the food. He'd gone through the buffet, pretending to be selecting his dinner, and slipped a baseball card—Cliff Floyd, long-ball-hitting outfielder formerly of the Florida Marlins—under one of the weasel medallions. The next night, plate in hand, he'd searched the buffet, dish by dish, poking through the mystery lumps. He thrust his fork triumphantly into the air when, in the fourth dish, he uncovered the gravy-soaked but still-smiling face of the Marlins slugger.

This discovery led to the creation of a betting pool among the band members, five bucks a man to see who could predict how long Emeril could keep the Cliff Floyd dish alive in the Sumptuous All You Can Eat Gourmet Buffet. Each night, Ted had gone through the buffet; each night, sooner or later, he'd turned up the baseball card.