Virgin Heat (5 page)

"Off to sightsee?" Michael asked her.

"Happy hour," said Angelina, and could not hold back a cockeyed smile at the perverseness of the phrase. "Gonna check out a couple bars."

Michael's sandy eyebrows moved the slightest bit closer together; he fingered his three stud earrings; he looked at her. Her imperfectly pouffed-up hair was translucent behind the passé headband; her bra strap showed haphazardly under a sleeveless blouse that was not quite red and not quite pink; she was wearing brand-new sandals that would surely hurt her feet after a few hundred yards of sidewalk. She did not look to Michael like a person who started doing bars at five P.M.

"Have fun," was all he said.

"You too," said Angelina.

But Ziggy wasn't working happy hour that evening.

As Angelina was heading out into the libidinous tourist clutter of Duval Street, he was half a mile away, driving slowly through a locals' precinct that tested the line between tropical funk and simple squalor. His archaic hulking Oldsmobile passed squat cinder-block houses that were painted pink and green, and through whose open doorways babies wailed and televisions blared. Plastic tricycles and cracked coolers stood in weedy yards strewn with the husks of fallen fronds; unseen chickens burbled behind a fence of woven reeds.

Ziggy parked on Bertha Street and climbed the single cracked step to the candy store from whose hidden garden Carmen Salazar ran his operation.

The store itself was gloomy and a mess, a graveyard for soggy pretzels and stale chocolate. Cobwebs fluttered in the corners; flies circled and sometimes stuck to gooey bottles of brightly colored Cuban syrups. The guy whose job it was to look like he was running a business sat behind the counter in a yellowed undershirt, baring his wet armpits to an oscillating fan matted with beards of dust.

Ziggy silently went through to the open doorway at the rear.

Carmen Salazar, as always, was sitting, alert but not tense, in a lawn chair. His back was to the door, he was gazing past tangled shrubbery to a light-blotting curtain of vines, yet as always he knew who had arrived. Without turning his head, he said, "So Bigtime, how goes it?"

Ziggy sort of liked it when Salazar called him Bigtime. He vaguely knew it was sarcastic, but a sarcastic compliment was better than none at all. He moved around so that he faced his boss, and said, "Goes fine".

"Goes fine," Salazar repeated. He was small and elegant, with hollow cheeks, a sharp chin, and thick black hair so short and glossy, it looked like it was painted on. On an island of damp skins, he never seemed to sweat; in a town of sloppy dressers, his sky-blue and mint-green guayaberas were always crisp, their pleated fronts immaculate. "You northern guys," he went on. "With you it always goes fine. Why? Because once you're in the south, you assume you're overqualified, smarter than the locals. This ignorance, it makes you confident."

Ziggy chewed his gums a moment but couldn't swallow back the words. " 'Cept I am overqualified," he said.

"Of course you are," Salazar agreed. "Much too smart to be just a bagman in a little numbers racket. Far too sophisticated to be an errand boy for a whorehouse. I only wish my humble enterprise offered greater scope for your talents."

Ziggy said nothing, just looked around the garden at monstrous flowers and bulbous fruits he didn't know the names of.

"Then again," Salazar went on, "if I was into bigger things, I would have to deal with bigger people, and they in turn would be doing business with bigger people still, and soon it might involve the kind of people I don't think you want to work with anymore. Isn't that right, my friend?"

Ziggy didn't answer, tried with limited success to keep his face as smugly placid as his boss's. He couldn't figure exactly how much Salazar knew of his past, but it was clearly more than he ought to; and that, Ziggy realized, was his own damn fault, the result of certain ill-advised boasting—references to New York friends, associates with broad connections, that kind of thing. Had Ziggy imagined it, or did Salazar stare a little too closely at his altered hairline the first time the two had met in private?

"But Ziggy, hey," the little boss resumed, and his voice seemed very abrupt as it bit through the other man's thoughts. "I'm a small-time guy, I'm gonna stay a small-time guy, so what's the problem? Pablo, bring the bag."

With only the slightest rustling, the vine-curtain parted, and Salazar's bodyguard appeared. He was always there, Ziggy knew he was there, and yet it never stopped surprising him that someone so big could hide so totally behind those slender vines. Pablo reached out an enormous hairy hand and passed along a briefcase.

"The usual place," said Carmen Salazar. "Gordo counts it, gives you a thousand. I'll call you in a few days."

*

So Ziggy headed up the Keys.

Long before he reached his destination, Angelina had had two margaritas and a glass of Chardonnay and was feeling very blue.

In each bar men had approached her; the wrong men, always—obnoxious, leering, or just plain wrong. Sunburned vacationers had imposed on her their noisy, trivial, and irritating fun. She'd had smoke blown in her face, her breast had been elbowed, someone had stepped on her foot as he lumbered toward the bathroom.

Through it all, she had tried to smile as she dragged herself from tavern to tavern and carried on an intimate study of bartenders' hands, an exercise perversely delicious in its secrecy, sadly exquisite in the singularity of its goal. As cocktails were assembled, she examined palms and wrists, her eyes measured the weight and warmth of them against her shoulders. As beers were drawn, she studied fingernails, felt them lightly scratching at her neck. She scrutinized forearms for antic, looping, roundly ardent gestures. She contemplated knuckles, imagined their wisps of down tickling her lips.

But she did not see Sal Martucci's hands, nor, following arms upward to shoulders, faces, hair, did she see even the remotest recognizable trace of the man who'd stamped her with his image—an image gone forever except in her recalling. It was strange to think that his solid flesh could be altered, reinvented so much more easily than the ethereal impression he had made on her.

After three bars—not even the beginnings of a dent in the number Key West offered—she was ready for her room, and darkness, and quiet. She pushed her way past elbows and glowing cigarettes toward the door; unwelcome bodies surged against her as she sought the open evening.

But the street she emerged onto was, at that just-past-sunset hour, as loud and jostly as the saloons— was, in fact, a long extension of them. Neon mixed with dusk to produce a grainy, unnatural, and vaguely nauseating light. Drunks weaved and belched in strangers' faces. Motorcycles rumbled, brain-stunning bass thumped forth from convertibles. On feet that were chafed and blistered by the straps of her brand-new sandals, Angelina struggled back toward the quiet end of town. By the time she pushed open the picket gate of Coral Shores and slipped into the relative tranquility of its courtyard, all she wanted was a bath, some Band-Aids, and a pair of earplugs.

She took a deep breath that smelled of jasmine and chlorine, and headed for the outside staircase that led up to her room.

On the way, she once again saw Michael, now sitting on the little private patio that attached to his poolside cottage. He was dressed for evening, wearing a green silk shirt that shimmered softly in the failing light. His face gleamed too, seemed to give back some of the heat of the day.

He said hello, and Angelina said, "I figured you'd be going out."

"Nothing starts for me till ten, eleven," he said.

Angelina nodded, tried to smile, then felt oddly incapable of continuing the conversation. Words wouldn't come, but nor did her feet want to carry her away.

After a moment Michael said, "Are you all right?"

Alcohol and emotional exhaustion converged on Angelina, moved together like big dark knobby clouds closing in from different quarters of the sky. Feeling safe behind the picket gate, feeling safe with Michael, she gave in and let the clouds roll over her. She shook her head.

She raised her head then, got her eyes to focus. Michael's sandy brows were drawn together, his chest leaned forward and his arms were poised as though to catch someone who was falling. "Why are you so kind?" she asked him.

He blinked, he didn't answer. Though the answer, had he been able to frame it for himself, would have been that he was kind because in his deepest heart he hoped that it would be his kindness and not his green eyes and his stomach from the gym that would win him romance, that would make somebody love him.

"Let me change my shoes," said Angelina.

Paul Amaro got back home around nine o'clock that evening, and the first thing he felt upon opening the door was a small sharp hurt that his daughter hadn't run down to the entryway to greet him, that it was no longer the way it was when she was small, when the sight of her violet eyes and feel of her cool and carefree forehead would cleanse him of the rage and filth of the day and remind him what he was living for.

Now the entryway was dim and silent. Paulie hung his hat on a peg, draped his topcoat over the rack, walked slowly toward the living room. No TV was on, no stereo. The quiet might have been serene but that wasn't how it felt. It felt sepulchral and chilling, it made Paulie want a bourbon and some noise—clattering dishes, distant sirens, anything.

But before he could get his drink, his wife approached him. She stood in the semidarkness of the living room; behind her, the doorway to the kitchen was jarringly bright with a flat and cold white glow. She had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She looked old and tired—was he that old and tired?— and she didn't kiss him. She said, "Angelina didn't go to work today. She hasn't come home."

Paulie said nothing. This was an old habit, an old technique. First you listened, then you thought, and only then you answered.

"I called," continued Angelina's mother. "I called, she wasn't there. She hadn't told them, they didn't know she wasn't coming in."

You listened so you would learn; you thought so that your answer would not return to humiliate or harm you, because, in Paulie's world, once something was said it could not be called back or explained away.

"She's not like this," his wife went on. "If she's going to be late, she calls. She always calls."

Paulie thought, choked back the clammy taste that was the beginning of fear, said evenly, "She's a grown woman, Maria."

The comment, the unearned certainty with which it was said, made Maria angry. Her hands went to her hips. The kitchen light behind her made her outline look ferocious. "Who knows that better than me? Who was here with her, seeing it happen? I know her, Paul. She's considerate, she calls."

He sighed without a sound, walked right past his wife, moved through the dimness toward the dining-room sideboard with its stash of liquor. Maria followed, harrying him like a sparrow chasing off a crow.

"Animals!" she said. "People are animals. The people you deal with, Paul. Your friends. Your enemies. They'll do anything. You think your family's safe? You think your daughter's safe?"

With the bourbon bottle in his hand, he said, "No one would dare to touch my daughter." He said it faster than he wanted to, without a pause for thought. But some things, you could no more hold back an answer than stop a nerve from twitching at a shock. "She's out," he said, more softly. "She's at the movies, she's having dinner. She'll be home right away."

"Animals," Angelina's mother said again, and Paulie understood that the insult was meant to hit him first, before it went spattering outward to soil others.

He drank deep of the whisky, shut out his wife's voice but heard instead the voice of Funzie Gallo. The world had changed. The rules had changed, and people broke them now without shame or fear. Was it conceivable that someone had done something to Angelina? Why? Who were his enemies now? What would they want of him? He swallowed bourbon, thought as best he could, and in his silent, bitter way, he prayed.

*

When Angelina had told him the story, had revealed, in her tipsy loneliness, far more than she'd intended to, Michael said, "Jesus. And I thought I stuck it to my father."

"Whaddya mean?" she asked.

They were sitting at a beachside restaurant on flimsy plastic chairs. Lingering nighttime heat pulled salt vapor out of the surfless ocean, smells of garlic and parsley wafted up from plates of seafood. Michael sipped beer, studied her a moment for some sign of the coy or the facetious. Finding none, he said, "What do I mean? I mean, all I did, ten, twelve years ago, was come out at Thanksgiving dinner. My old man, military, Air Force, he about choked on chestnut stuffing. But loving the guy that sent your father to the slammer—"

Angelina interrupted with a slight impatience, as though what she was explaining should be obvious. "Yeah," she said, "but that was
after
."

"After what?" said Michael.

Angelina put down her fork, drank some water. Food was settling her tummy; talk was easing her mind; she felt the fragile well-being of a second wind. "After I was already in love with him," she explained.

Michael thought the comment over, watched a moonlit pelican do a brain-first dive into the shallows. Then he folded his hands, put his elbows on the table, and leaned close to his companion. "And once you were in love with him, it didn't matter what he did?"

To Angelina the question seemed rhetorical, she didn't see the point of answering. Michael thrilled at the realization that he'd met someone even more desperately romantic than himself.