Tropical Depression (15 page)

"How come you didn't finish?" Franny asked.

Tommy shrugged, waited for the accustomed bitterness to grab him by the throat, was surprised to find its grip was not so suffocating now. "Something happened. Not interesting. Something happened and I quit." He tossed his napkin on the table, leaned back in his chair.

"So what happened?" Murray asked.

"I said it isn't interesting."

'Yeah, but if it made you quit—"

"There he goes again," Tommy said to Franny.

*****

On the sidewalk Murray said, "Lift home?"

Tommy said he'd like to walk. He went to shake hands with Franny. Franny hugged him, then he wobbled off into the mild night.

Driving back to the Paradiso, Murray said, "The way you draw people out, Franny, it's amazing. I'm like the guy's best friend, me he tells nothing. The way you do it, it's really great."

"Don't butter me up," she said. "I'm sleeping in a guest room."

The Bra King let that pass. "It's your face," he said. "The way there's a lot of open space between your features, places where a person's eyes can rest. To look at you is very restful."

"Great," she said. "Some women are exciting, stunning, sensual. Me, I'm restful."

"Restful lasts longer," Murray said. "Besides, you're all those other things too."

Franny started to laugh but the laugh caught in her throat. Her face flushed, her eyes burned, she squirmed in her bucket seat. Then she said, "Damn you, Murray. You've still got this, this doglike charm. Droopy eyes. You always miss someplace when you shave, you know that, Murray? And you say these crazy things, these lunatic attempts at compliments ... You're like this big sloppy, shedding, drooling dog."

They were riding up A-1A by now. The moon was high above the Florida Straits, its light on the water was a silver arrow that tracked them as they drove. Murray whimpered ingratiatingly like a retriever pup, gave a softly growling little bark.

"Cute," said his former wife. "Adorable. I'm still sleeping in a guest room."

*****

Tommy Tarpon made his way through quiet streets, saw cats skulking under porches, their haunches higher than their heads, heard tree toads murmuring, contentedly nested in people's orchid boxes. The air was moist enough to put a pearly coating on windshields, an opal smear of halo around the streetlamps. The Matalatchee sovereign was tired beyond thought, his brain hummed with edgeless impressions of ceremonies and hypocrites and enemies and friends.

He reached Caroline Street, absently ran his hand along the chain-link fence that corralled the parking lot. He crossed toward Toxic Triangle, did not take special notice of the dark Lincoln parked against a crumbling stretch of curb on the far side of the road. He walked the rocky path to the dock, kicking pocked pieces of limestone. Chickens squawked as a raccoon sneaked through the weeds. Music from downtown rolled around the harbor, arrived sounding cottony and baleful.

He strolled to the end of the pier, peed in the ocean; his stream called forth little sparks of phosphorescence. Then he stepped onto his half-sunk houseboat, climbed along its tilted deck, went down the companionway ladder to the dark funhouse of a cabin. He climbed into his hammock, almost serene or at least exhausted, and was asleep before his bed of net had stopped its swinging.

The Bra King, still hoping that things might turn out otherwise, dropped his ex-wife's heavy luggage in the bedroom next to his, while she poked around the penthouse with the cool eye of a realtor.

He found her in the kitchen, peeking into cupboards. "Nice place," she said, with no particular enthusiasm. "For a rental unit. Heavy Scotchguard, dishes that bounce. But pretty nicely done. Too big, really. Of course, you always had to have a bigger place than you really needed."

The Bra King didn't take offense, he was too pleased to have his wife within his own four walls. With pride he swept open the mostly empty refrigerator. "I shopped today," he bragged. "I got some fruit, wouldya like some fruit?"

Undaunted, Murray led the way to the living room, parted the curtains that gave onto the balcony and the ocean view. "Sit on the couch?"

She eyed him like he was selling Turkish rugs, then moved sideways toward the sofa with the nautical stripe. Murray followed, they sat down at the same moment. They weren't kids, their buttocks had gone a little soft, and flesh spread when they sat, the spreading made their hips touch. Murray put his arm not quite around her but behind her on the back of the settee.

But, to his amazement, she tucked her head against his chest, rested her face in the soft place between his shoulder and his ribs. Her earring traced an imprint in his skin, he felt her warm breath through his shirt. Cautiously, tentatively, he reached toward her short brown hair, stroked it, smelled rosemary and peaches. He closed his eyes, absorbed her nearness, and almost all of him would have been perfectly content, ecstatic, to go no further, to leave things just exactly where they were, to sit there clothed and on the couch, forever.

*****

Hanging plumb in his hammock, snoring softly, Tommy barely felt the boat rock. Very faintly he heard the squeak of stretching dock lines. The dangling mirror clattered softly on its peg, disturbed water gurgled briefly at the stern. A woozy puzzled moment passed; the Indian shifted slightly and fell back into a deeper sleep.

In the next instant, a splintering crash, an intimate explosion, brought him wide awake.

Something had gone very wrong, his boat was caving in on top of him. The pilothouse seemed to have been lifted off its shims as if by a tornado; glass shattered in its one remaining window, sun-peeled timbers came raining down the companionway. By the time Tommy had spun out of his hammock and found his footing on the sloping floor, the bulk of the ruined structure had tumbled down and wedged itself tight in the hatch, blocking off the only exit. Tommy shouted; there was no one near enough to hear him, no one who could have heard him above the sudden orgy of demolition on the deck. Sledgehammers rang off metal fittings, the sound was like the bells of hell. Rotting boards, soft and spongy as decayed teeth, were stove in by murderous iron.

The doomed craft listed now to starboard, Tommy struggled for balance. In the tumultuous gloom of the cabin, he saw a faint and sickening gleam as an ax-blade bit through the bruised skin of the hull, just below the waterline. The weapon was withdrawn and instantly the ocean started sluicing in, gushing crazily, as from a ruptured hydrant. More blows fell; lewd gashes scarred the houseboat's sides, an infernal hiss of water drowned out even the hard smack of the axes. Tommy felt warm but clammy liquid lapping at his feet, covering his ankles, crawling up his calves. The intruding sea floated the table with the two short legs and two long ones; Tommy's gas ring became a weird memento, a piece of flotsam, his old chipped basin bobbed madly on the monstrously displaced tide.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the attack was over. Tommy felt adrift, understood that the dock-lines had been chopped, the sinking boat set free to wallow some yards out.

In the cabin, clamor gave way to deathly silence, the airless silence of the ocean floor, as the subsiding craft settled down below the level of its gashes. There was no more hissing now, but rather an inexorable ooze—less the boat sinking than the ocean rising, less the ocean rising than the ceiling coming down, heavy and relentless as an apple press. Choking back panic, Tommy floundered through water climbing quickly past his groin, up his torso, rib by rib. He waded to the ladder that, mockingly, led upward to the dead-end passage of the blocked companionway. While ocean flowed through glassless portholes, he dragged his sodden body up the rungs, his few possessions floating past and his hammock lolling like a bank of seaweed. Pressing his back against the heavy snaggled boards that glutted the hatch, he strained upward with all his might, bent nails and bits of glass clawing at his skin. He stared down at the black water coming up to meet his face, and savored bitterly the insanity of drowning in your living room, ten feet out to sea, in a sea that wasn't even ten feet deep.

Suavely, with exquisite gradualness, Murray was moving his right index finger toward what he remembered as an especially arousing place on Franny's neck, when the phone rang.

The phone was on a table right next to the sofa, it sounded very loud. Franny twitched as though in answer to a fire alarm, her head sprang off his torso.

The Bra King muttered, "No one ever calls me," as the instrument rang two times, three times. Irritably, he leaned over and picked it up. He spit out a grouchy hello and got a response that was brief and to the point.

"Hold on a second," Murray said, and he pressed the phone against his stomach. "His houseboat sank," he said to Franny.

"Oh my God," she said. She was sitting upright on the edge of the sofa, on her somewhat flushed face a look of concern for her new friend, mingled with the ruefully wise expression of a woman who realizes she has narrowly avoided a big mistake. "What'll he do?"

The Bra King raised the phone to his mouth, asked Tommy that.

The sovereign hadn't had much time to think about it. But he'd been neglecting his sales of shells; he had very little cash, and neither bank account nor credit. "I'll guess I'll go sleep on the beach for now."

Tommy paused. Key West nights were mild but not that mild, his teeth were chattering just slightly. "Jesus, Murray, I don't want—"

"It's all settled," said the Bra King. "I'm heading over now."

Tommy paused again, said, "My bike and shells, the cart, it's all I have, can I throw them in your trunk?"

After they hung up, Murray asked Franny if she wanted to come along for the ride. She said no, she was tired, she was going to bed, and Murray knew she meant in a bedroom of her own.

He went downstairs and climbed into the scratched-up Lexus.

The moon was low, the breeze was still, and on the quiet ride crosstown, the Bra King reflected on something Franny had said: that he always wanted a bigger place than he really needed. Well, maybe that had been true when he'd arrived, a lonely refugee with neither friends nor prospects. But now the showplace at the Paradiso was turning out to be just right. A room for him; a room for a former wife who thought it was ridiculous to neck with him; a room for a sovereign but suddenly homeless Indian.

22

Murray had shopped, but he'd done so like a bachelor, sparsely and forgetfully; and of course he hadn't known that they'd be three—or even, confidently, two—for breakfast.

So the morning meal was improvised and incomplete. There was coffee but no tea, which Franny now preferred. There was cereal but no eggs, and to Tommy breakfast didn't really seem like breakfast without eggs. There was toast but no jam, fruit but no yogurt. On the other hand, there were plenty of pills. Franny took A's and E's, and calcium for solid bones, and manganese for healthy hair, and deodorized garlic to keep her memory alert. She offered Tommy C's and beta carotene to counteract the stress that he'd been under. On Murray she urged zinc, and to humor her he ate some with his orange juice but took his Prozac also.

They were sitting at a plastic table—perfect for a rental unit—on the balcony. Unsullied morning sunshine slanted low across the ocean, it lit up just one side of the joggers and walkers and skaters on the promenade. Franny wore a yellow terry robe; her hair was wrapped up in a bright red towel. Tommy was wearing the jeans he'd almost drowned in and a blue tank top borrowed from Murray's dubious assortment of Key West duds.

"We'll have to get you some clothes," Murray said, around a bite of toast.