Virgin Heat (31 page)

For the first time he could remember, he was free, and the freedom nearly wrecked him. The low roof was lifted from his world, he panicked at first at the lack of dark corners. Then he grew manic at the thought of his options. Exotic destinations whose names he'd evoked as impossible havens now in fact seemed real to him; they beckoned. He flew to Mexico, bummed around Belize, Honduras, sleeping in hammocks slung between palms. He told himself he'd come back to the States when he was ready, but ready for what, he did not know.

Angelina stayed in Key West for the summer. Having decided to live no longer on her father's money, she moved out of Coral Shores, found a small apartment and a job waiting tables. Quite often, she visited her aunt and uncle, ate Rose's lousy cooking. Once, they watched that first vacation video again, and laughed, a little smugly, at how different the town looked to a tourist, how little the tourists saw.

As April passed, then May, the weather got hotter and hotter, the breezes sputtered and died. Sometimes, after work, late, Angelina walked on the beach, to watch the moon and maybe find some scraps of moving air. One night she passed a man whose crunching footsteps were moving in the opposite direction. They smiled at each other. He had a nice smile, shy, and Angelina felt something that amazed her, felt in the ripeness of her body that her heart was also free. She sensed that they would meet again.

####

ABOUT THE AUTHOR— Laurence Shames has set eight critically acclaimed novels in Key West, his former hometown. Now based in California, he is also a prolific screenwriter and essayist. His extensive magazine work includes a stint as the Ethics columnist for
Esquire.
In his outings as a collaborator and ghostwriter, he has penned four
New York Times
bestsellers, under four different names. This might be a record. To learn more, please visit
http://www.LaurenceShames.com
.

ALSO BY LAURENCE SHAMES—

FICTION—

Florida Straits

Scavenger Reef

Sunburn

Tropical Depression

Mangrove Squeeze

Welcome to Paradise

The Naked Detective

NON-FICTION

The Big Time

The Hunger for More

Not Fade Away (with Peter Barton)

IF YOU LOVED VIRGIN HEAT, BE SURE TO CATCH LAURENCE SHAMES'

NOVEL, MANGROVE SQUEEZE

ONE

"Reservation?" said Sam Katz. "Whaddya mean, you have a reservation? This is my house."

The tourists looked unhappy and confused. It had been a long day and full of disappointments. Up north the roads were icy; they'd had to get up before dawn to make the first flight out of Lansing. Miami was not as warm as they'd hoped; they'd lied to themselves, pretending it was warmer than it was. The traffic on Key Largo was as annoying as the traffic anywhere else, and the sun had set before they reached the pretty part of the drive, south of Seven Mile Bridge. A fatiguing and deflating start to a vacation; and now the husband leaned across the counter with its registration book, its heavy silver bell. "You're telling me," he said, "this isn't a hotel?"

"Hotel?" said Sam Katz.

He was tall for an old man, with dark and soupy eyes that turned down at the outside corners, making him look sad sometimes, other times amused. His fluffy white hair, translucent at the edges, burgeoned out and back like Einstein's, and his shoulders sloped down at a steep angle from his neck. He wore a hearing aid except when he was listening to Mozart or Glenn Miller on his yellow Walkman. "Don't be ridiculous, young fella. I grew up in this house."

The wife glanced furtively around the office. There was a black metal rack stuffed with promotional brochures for snorkel trips, sunset sails. There was a cardboard stand that held applications for credit cards. Meekly she said, "But the sign outside—"

"Sign?" the old man said. "Who puts a sign? My parents built this house. They came from Russia."

The husband had a book with him, a guidebook. He put it on the counter and started riffling through it.

Sam Katz paused a moment, then continued. "Okay, Poland. The boundaries back then, who knows? A mishmosh, Europe. They came in a wagon. I was seven, eight years old. I had no coat, they had me wrapped in a tablecloth."

The tourist had found his page. But then he sneezed. He was wearing shorts. He'd changed into them in a men's room at Miami airport. His leg hair had been on end the whole way down the Keys.

Sam Katz said, "Gesundheit. Whaddya think, it's summer?"

The tourist turned the book around and pointed it at Sam. "Look, it says right here. Mangrove Arms, 726 Whitehead Street, corner of Rebecca. Charming Victorian, recently refurbished ..."

Now Sam looked unsure, abashed, unsettled by hard evidence. He blinked at the guidebook and his skinny shoulders sagged, his shrunken neck shifted in the neatly buttoned collar of his yellowing white shirt. He bit his lip, cleared his throat.

He had his father's soft brown eyes, downturned at the corners. He was smallish, wiry, and it seemed at first that he had bluish hair and some appalling skin condition that made him look like a cheap garden statue come to life. On closer examination, he proved to be totally covered in fine gray dust, a residue of plastering or of sanding or of grout. Renovation; physical labor—he was getting to love it because it wasn't what he was used to and it wasn't what he was good at. A loose staple had ripped the elbow of his shirt. He had Band-Aids on four fingers, and he wore them proudly—emblems of the awkward joy of change.

Until just a few months before, he'd been a very well-paid desk guy, a rising star in the arcane Manhattan world of mergers and acquisitions. Then a few things happened. These things did not seem obviously connected, yet in Aaron's mind they were joined by mysterious ligaments such as held together the stanzas of an Oriental poem.

At work, his department shrank, and Aaron, himself secure, a bigger fish, was told to do the firing of his junior colleagues. At home—over takeout Thai, as he vividly remembered—he came one evening to the simple and sickening realization that he and his wife were not working toward the same life, after all. And his father—a widower for six years and a man with one son only—started running stop signs, losing the keys to the house in Merrick, confusing one decade with another. Either Aaron took him in or he would soon end up in a pale green room playing Colorforms among demented strangers.

Somehow these strands wound together in a noose, and quite suddenly it had seemed to Aaron that his only choice—not the decent choice or the honorable choice but the only choice—was to fire himself as others had been fired, to leave his marriage and bundle up his father and try to build a different life from the soggy boards and salt-rusted nails of an old compound in the tropics.

This wild and abrupt upheaval—Did it make any sense at all? Any less than staying where he was? Aaron had always been a rather sober fellow; by temperament and education, he was a man who thought things through. So he analyzed; he agonized; he bolted.

And now he was smiling at practically the only guests in his tumble down guest house. He sneaked a look at the brief reservation list beneath the counter. "Ah," he said, "you must be the Karrs. From Michigan."

The tourists nodded eagerly, extravagantly grateful at being recognized, confirmed.

Aaron started reaching out a hand, then pulled it back when he remembered it was filthy. He was forty-one years old and the clean-hands, clean-shirt pan of his working life was over. He was doing something on his own. He said, "Welcome to the Mangrove Arms. I'll show you to your room."

*

Six miles north, in the big glassed-in dining room of a modern waterfront house on Key Haven, Gennady Petrovich Markov crammed a hunk of rare roast beef into his broad and floppy mouth, bit down with enough gusto to shake the arc of blubber beneath his chin, and said with appreciation, "Keppitalism. Is werry good seestem."

His friend and business partner, Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky, visiting from a somewhat less grand dwelling on the next canal, sipped his Clos de Vougeot and agreed enthusiastically. "With brain," he said, "with nerve, you can improve your seetooa-tion."

Markov put down his knife and fork just long enough to emphasize a point with the raising of a fat and dimpled finger. "Not improve it only, but control it. To control it—it key to everything."

He turned to a young man sitting on his right, a handsome fellow in blue jeans and with a hairdo from the fifties, a little bit Elvis, a little bit James Dean. He stroked the young man's wrist and said, "Remember this, Lazslo. Control. Is key."

Lazslo Kalynin stared briefly out the window at moonlight on the waters of the Gulf, then gave a bored and noncommittal nod. He was Markov's nephew and his ward; he owed his uncle his very existence in America. He owed him his job; all his jobs. He owed him his classic Cadillac convertible, Fleetwood '59, red with white interior. He owed him his Old Town bachelor pad, decorated with posters of gangster movies and Harley-Davidsons; the half-dozen Gibson guitars that he could barely play; the large amounts of folding cash he always carried in his cowboy-style wallet.

But gratitude was not in his nature—he'd never learned it, didn't see the point—and he hated giving up an evening of his downtown life for the shut-in, suburban dullness of Key Haven. He had ever less patience for the endless and obsessive political musings of these old men with their embarrassing accents, their stretched-out vowels and phlegmy
hs
and
rs
with too much tongue.

Communism. Capitalism. Who cared? Why couldn't they just forget about Russia? Why couldn't they just grab and squeeze the promise of America like he had—without looking back, without comparing it to something else?

Markov had paused in his eating, expecting a reply; Lazslo had to say something. He glanced at his uncle's monumental stomach, which had been stuffed and prosperous for as long as anyone could remember. He said, "You controlled things pretty well in the old days."

His uncle, flattered, smiled but disagreed. "Enjoyed, yes," he said, as the housekeeper silently refilled their glasses. "Controlled, no. For scientist in Soviet Union, life was comfortable, true. Caviar. Trips to Asia, trips to Cuba. Women. Good. But problem? Any time they can take away. Why? Because never is it really yours, never you really own it. In America, you own. You pay money and you own."

Happy in his certainty, he went back to his red and bleeding roast beef. Juice glistened on his chin.

Lazslo, drawn despite himself into the discussion, said, "But even here, plenty of people, the money runs out, they lose everything, just as easy."

Ivan Cherkassky, the family friend, leaned forward in his chair, propped himself on sharp skinny elbows. He had a doleful scooped-out face, pockmarked and lumpy, like what was left when a wedge of melon had been spooned, with scrunched-together features arrayed between a pointy chin and a high but narrow forehead. He wagged a finger and said, "Is not the same. Here, when people they are losing things, is because they have been stupid."

"Exectly," Markov concurred. "Stupid. Which is why," he added gravely, "we must always plen."

Lazslo could not quite stifle a cockeyed smile nor keep a needling tone out of his voice. "Plan?" he said. "That's a tactful way of putting it."

The comment worried Ivan Cherkassky. Everything did. His slippery eyes flashed left and right, he glanced behind himself. He chided in a whisper, "Lazslo, please, be careful how you say."

"The KGB is listening? The commissars, the generals? They come with Geiger counters maybe? Still looking for certain missing State property when there isn't even a state?"

"This is funny?" said Cherkassky. "No."

"Luzhka," said Gennady Petrovich, using his favorite diminutive. "Soviet Union—you make jokes but you really don't remember, do you?"

Lazslo pecked at the French wine that he did not enjoy. He liked American beer. He liked American cars and American music, American cigarettes and American cheese, and he wanted to be down on Duval Street, chasing some American tail. He was twenty-six. He'd been seventeen when he got out of Moscow. With the facility of the young, he'd shed his accent and his beginnings almost perfectly. He said, "I can remember. But why bother?"

"Why bother," said Ivan Fyodorovich wistfully. The eyes went distant in his hollow face. "The cupolas, the snow on fur hats, so fresh you can see each flake—these you never miss?"

"Cut me a break," said Lazslo.

"And your parents?" said his uncle. "You think about your mother, your father?"

Lazslo thought it over, not for long. His parents, still troweling potatoes and knocking worms off cabbage on the other side of the world, were frightened round-faced peasants wearing coarse wool scarves. He said, "Only when you ask me if I do."