Virgin Heat (8 page)

Then there was . . . what? What else did Louie have to lose? He looked up at the slow mesmeric turning of the ceiling fan, sniffed the ripe and complicated air, and concluded there was nothing else. His life's entire wealth consisted of a very so-so marriage and a crummy business on its last legs anyway. Maybe it wasn't much to wager; what mattered, though, was not the size of the bet, but its completeness.

And now that Louie was back in Florida, now that he'd taken the unprecedented and irrevocable veer away from custom and reliability, the thing that he was betting on—that his niece Angelina was in Key West—suddenly seemed a ridiculous long shot, the baseless hunch of a lunatic. Out of all the places she might be? Out of all the things that might have happened to her?

Louie exhaled, let his soft and stumpy body settle deeper into the motel bed. He felt heavy, daunted, slightly suspicious of his sanity. But then he almost giggled. He'd been keeping a secret from himself, and now, between one breath and the next, the secret stood revealed: He had no idea if his niece was here. He hoped she was but he had no idea. He'd come to find her, but finding her fell into that vast gray zone between reason and excuse. Lying there, smelling tropic air, feeling his pores grow lush with the beginnings of candid sweat, he realized that his hunch hadn't been about Angelina. It had been about himself.

He'd been waiting a long time to take that first calamitous or saving veer, to let the steering wheel turn itself for once and put him on a different path, one with a whiff of recklessness.

*

Paul Amaro had never learned the tender art of looking to his wife for comfort, and now that he needed her he was clumsy and ungracious, his questions soured into accusations, and the kindness he was asking for was smothered before it could speak.

It was early evening and they were standing in their cold white kitchen. Dinner stood uncooked on the counter. A cadaverous steak; broccoli still pinched in its wire tie. Paul drank bourbon from a big glass, Maria absently sipped at coffee that had long been cold.

"Is it possible, Maria? Is it possible she ran off with that scum?"

Angelina's mother didn't answer. Her daughter's disappearance had made her less sad than irretrievably bitter, grimly vindicated in her ready sorrow. Her husband's violent life would fold back someday and destroy them all—that was a bleak belief she'd lived with for decades. Now that the bill was coming due, she was unsurprised and strangely calm, as helplessly resigned as though the devil himself had appeared on her doorstep to claim his half of the bargain.

"I'd almost rather believe ..." her husband said, and then he fell silent. What he was thinking was unspeakable, and the part of him that was beyond the death grip of his pride knew he didn't mean it anyway. He stoppered his mouth with the glass of liquor, then tried again. "Was there any contact, Maria? Were they in touch?"

Husband and wife stared at each other a long second, there was hope and a pale conciliation in the look. Then Paul Amaro squared his shoulders and went to the phone, hearing in his mind his daughter's quiet hello.

It was not his daughter. It was his sister-in-law Rose. She sounded drunk and she was crying.

"It's Louie," she sniffled. "Louie, he's not here. Last night he didn't come home. I called the store, it rang and rang. Today, no Louie. Again no Louie. I'm calling the police."

"You don't call the police," said Paul. He said it by reflex though his head was spinning. "Now pull yourself together, Rose, and tell me what happened."

"What happened? I don't know what happened. He left the house, he didn't come back. That's what happened."

Paul Amaro leaned against the counter, closed his eyes, held the phone a few inches from his ear. His chest hurt and his bowels burned. His whole life had been a crude campaign against ever feeling helpless, ever being the sucker, and now helplessness was ripping up his insides like a fast disease. Was someone out to get him, out to get his family? And if they were, what kind of craziness made them start with the few relations who were innocent?

"He'll come back, Rose," said Paul, his voice not feeling like his own. "We'll find him."

"We won't find him," snuffled Louie's wife. "He's dead. I know he's dead."

For a moment Paul stared at the telephone, then he quietly hung up. He took a pull of bourbon and looked down at his shoes. He needed to think. He'd been weak and foolish to imagine he'd get any solace from Maria; a silly sloppy broad like Rose just complicated things. He needed to think the way he always thought, alone.

"Louie's missing," he said to his wife, and then he turned his back on her and headed for the door.

Even in Key West, people's schedules sometimes got cluttered, and the next time Ziggy was summoned to meet with Carmen Salazar, the appointment made him late for work. The meeting, fortunately, was routine and brief, dealing with the distribution of certain bribes to assure the smooth operation of Salazar's lap-dance joint on Stock Island. Still, Ziggy was in a big hurry when he left, and as he barreled through the dim and narrow chute of the candy store, he almost collided with a short and stocky man on his way in. He noticed a broken nose and beautiful shoes and almost nothing else.

By the time he reached Raul's he was in a lather, his shirt splotched before he'd even gone around to the professional side of the bar. He endured a snide look from the guy he was late relieving, and then he started making drinks for the early crowd already edgy to get their sunburned hands on some alcohol.

What happened to the years, he wondered, when season had a beginning and an end, when places got mobbed in mid-December but relative sanity returned by April? Now it was nonstop; month after month the desperate hordes flocked in, hungover, blistered, crudely raucous, acting like they'd never act where the neighbors might see. Their boobs showed; they laughed at their own ill-told dirty jokes. Was there anything less dignified on earth than a human being on vacation?

He made drinks. He hustled for twenty minutes, half an hour, then, when there was finally a lull, his mind flicked briefly back to the guy he'd almost run into at Salazar's. Something had been bothering him about the guy, and only now did what it was come into focus: He didn't seem local. His pants had a crease down the front, and Key West pants lacked creases. His hair was neady combed, something about him smelled expensive. Plus which, Ziggy now remembered that when he'd retrieved his ancient Oldsmobile, he'd noticed a big car, dark and shiny new, parked nearby, probably a Lincoln. Unease tweaked him; just below the threshold of conscious wondering, he wondered if Salazar was as small-time and small-town as he claimed.

But the fret ended almost before it registered. Two guys rattled empty mugs and Ziggy, a good bartender and even, sometimes, a charming one in spite of himself, sprang forth to refill them, dowsing the worries of his other life in a foamy spray of someone else's beer.

*

"Michael? Michael, you ready yet?"

"Just a second, hon," he said from behind his door at Coral Shores.

Angelina was standing on his tiny patio, cowering in the crosshatched shade of an oleander. The sun, though very low, was just barely relenting in its heat, slipping from broil to bake; it threw purple shadows in distended shapes of languid palms and overhanging roofs. Angelina tapped her foot.

Then the door opened, and Michael stood there in shorts and a tank top and sandals.

"I don't understand it," Angelina said. She herself wore a pearl-gray camisole, a blue blouse chastely buttoned over it. Her hair was neatly poufed, her eyes were on, pale lipstick smoothed the shallow crevices of her slightly sunburned lips.

"Understand what?"

"I wear all this stuff," she said. "You put on a couple shreds of clothes. You have like half an inch of hair. And I'm always waiting for you."

They wove through the courtyard, around scraps of hedge and groups of lounging men, past the Jacuzzi where naked people sipped champagne from plastic cups. At the gate, they turned left, toward the noise, the crowds, the bars.

It was a ritual by now, the kind of thing that old friends did without having to make plans. They convened at six or so, they drank and talked till nine or ten. They watched men's hands together, analyzed them. They'd been served by gay hands and straight hands, lean hands and pudgy hands, hairy hands and smooth hands, hands whose fingernails were dirty and one hand that was missing a pinky, ended in a shiny stub. They'd drunk margaritas and frozen daiquiris and Mai Tais—drinks that were sometimes a little sickening, but that gave them a chance to appraise the bartender's style. They'd been in bars with guitar players, bars with pianos, bars with karaoke and bars with giant speakers hanging from the ceiling. Maybe thirty bars so for, with no sign of the hands Angelina had come to find.

They crossed Truman Avenue; the crowd began to thicken. She said, "Michael, would it be okay, I mean, would you think it's really stupid, if we held hands?"

He stopped a second, looked at her. Then he held out his hand, she took it, and they moved on toward the crush.

*

Uncle Louie sucked like a kid at a mango-flavored sno-cone that was melting as fast as he could eat it.

He wove through the sunset crowds at Mallory Square, among guitarists and magicians and a flag-draped man on stilts, and admitted to himself, a little guiltily, that he hadn't felt so alive in many years. He'd enjoyed his vacation with Rose, sure, but that was different. That was . . .
vacation
, an allowed and strictly bordered break between vast tracts of duty and routine. Besides, being with Rose—well, she made him nervous. Little things—was his hair messed up, his bald spot showing? Did he sound wimpy, unsophisticated, asking for a table in a restaurant? It was a nervousness he put on himself, he knew that, but still, it was nicer not to feel it. And it was strange—now, in the face of the overriding dread that he was ruining his entire life, all small nattering worries vanished and he felt marvelously light and unconstrained; the relief was like the profound and secret pleasure of reaching under the table and undoing the top button on a too-tight pair of pants.

So he strolled among the musicians and performers, and he lapped his liquefying sno-cone, and everything delighted him. He held the edge of the paper cone between his teeth and clapped as house cats leaped like miniature tigers through flaming hoops. He dipped and swayed in communion with the tightrope walker silhouetted against the setting sun. He dropped dollars into the hats of jugglers and bagpipe players.

Then the sun slipped into the Gulf, slow and stately as a king entering his bath. People applauded.

The sky behind Tank Island went striped with jagged slabs of pink and purple that every moment compromised toward bluish gray. The colors faded; the show was over; the tourists left the pier.

Louie lingered a while, watched the dimming sky, walked in aimless little circles among discarded rinds of fruit, pieces of waxed paper smeared with mustard. Freedom tickled him, but with the noise gone and the light going, the beginnings of loneliness whispered gloom in his ear. But he would not be gloomy. No! He would smile, he would stroll, he would revisit places that amused him. And he wouldn't worry about a table for dinner! He would eat as he walked, and he would eat what he wanted. Ice cream. Pie. Conch fritters and Italian sausage if he felt like it. Just why the hell not? Could anyone tell him, could he tell himself, just why he should not for once do exactly as he pleased?

He left the pier, headed for the crowded streets with their colliding bodies, their winking signs, their carnival smells of beer and grease and perfume. He would walk and smile and maybe even talk to strangers; he would remember what it was like to be a person with fewer worries, without responsibilities.

As for finding Angelina, that high goal hadn't left his mind, but had for now become invisible. It was something he would think about tomorrow. Tonight, he thought, was just for Louie.

"I've gotta get out of here," said Angelina, already shouldering her purse and sliding off her barstool as she said it.

It was the third place they'd hit that evening, and before the after-sunset throng had been added to the happy-hour contingent, it hadn't been too bad. But now butane and phosphorous and cigarette smoke were fouling the air already turbid with the vapors of skin cream and libido; management had seen fit to crank up the music with its jackhammer bass. The bartender's hands had been futilely examined, and it was time to leave.