panic that the red sauce was scorching. It was not. She stirred it anyway. 'Joey, why's he here?'
He leaned against the sink and hid his face in his glass of orange juice. His answer, when it came, sounded harsher than he meant it to be. 'Sandra, get real willya. You think my big shot brother tells me why he does things?'
Or maybe Joey meant the answer to be harsh. Maybe he wanted to goad Sandra into pressing him. If she pressed, maybe he would tell her more, and could persuade himself he wasn't violating the code that made him wrestle with things alone but was only giving in to a woman's nagging. But Sandra didn't nag. She had her code too.
'I didn't even know your brother was such a big shot,' she said.
'Well, he is,' said Joey, and even as he was mumbling out the words, he was thinking how ridiculous it was: standing up for Gino practically in the same breath he was saying what a louse he was, still trying to make him a big brother instead of a big pain in the ass. Ridiculous. This whole business with family was ridiculous, and to stop himself from saying anything more, Joey filled his mouth with orange juice and walked out of the kitchen.
— 18 -
'Hello, folks, how ya doin? Crummy day, ain't it? Barely eighty-one degrees, I'd say, and hey, where'd that one little cloud come from, Cuba? Yeah, that's some kinda Commie cloud. Havana's only ninety miles away, ya know, twice as close as Miami. Yeah. Think about it. We're practically, ya know, in South America. And this beautiful condo, Parrot Beach, it looks right at downtown Havana. You think I'm kidding? Hey, get a good pair of binocs, you can watch Castro trim his beard inna morning. Really, take a tour. Takes an hour or so, and we give ya champagne, free food, a paira passes to…'
Joey was having a good day. He'd chalked up two commissions and it wasn't even noon. Moreover, he was gradually discovering what tens of millions of working people already knew but would not publicly admit: that going to your job was a great way to forget about your life. Patrolling his street corner, giving his spiel, he didn't have to think about the dinner he and Sandra would be having with Gino and Vicki that evening. He didn't have to worry about why Gino was in town. He could imagine himself beyond the long reach of circumstance. On these few squares of sidewalk, he was in control of things. He was confident, and more so all the time. He knew how people would react to him, knew how to play off the drunks and the yogurt eaters and the kids. Like anyone who's any good at anything, he could at moments drop out of time and move into the blessed and utterly private realm of his skill.
He was in that realm when the dark blue Lincoln pulled up.
It had come down Duval Street slow and heavy, as if it were leading a funeral, overflowing its fair share of the pavement like a fat man in an airplane seat. The car stopped in front of a fire hydrant, its tires squeaking against the curb. Two men got out. They exuded menace like a bad smell, and an open space instantly appeared around them on the crowded street. They wore blue suits that almost matched the car and almost matched each other. They were beefy in a way that made them walk with their feet wide apart because their thighs rubbed together, making wrinkles in their groins and shiny places on their pants.
'Yo, fuckface,' the taller of the two said to Joey. He had the pink upturned nostrils of a pig, and his hair was raked, swirled, and peaked like something you'd see in the window of a fancy bakery.
'Me?' Joey found himself strangely unsurprised to be confronted by these thugs, who, he realized in an instant, worked for Charlie Ponte. But unsurprised is not the same as not terrified. The bone seemed to melt out of his knees and he wanted to sit on the john. Having grown up with thugs, he was both more and less afraid of them than the average person. More, because he knew they were killers. Not by rumor, not from the movies; he knew it. Less, because he also knew what fakers they were. They had to act scary like doctors had to act concerned. It went with the job. It didn't mean they meant it.
'Yeah, you, dickhead,' said the thug. 'We wanna talk to you.'
'So talk.'
'Take your sunglasses off,' said the shorter thug. His lower lip was creased by a deep off-center scar, and he wore a very bad toupee. It was the color of a wet brown dog, and where it was parted there was a fissure as between two strips of badly laid sod. 'So we can see if you're lying.'
'They're prescription,' Joey lied.
'I should give a fuck they're prescription?' said the shorter goon. 'I don't give a fuck if you're blind. Take 'em off.'
'Go fuck yourself.'
Joey had only an instant to savor this flash of bravado. The shorter goon stepped behind him with the practiced quickness of a high school wrestler and pinioned his arms. The taller goon reached out and plucked the sunglasses off his face. In a moment of excruciatingly slowed-down time, Joey watched them tumble to the sidewalk. They landed eyebrow-side down, bounced once, and did not break. They cast twin blue shadows onto the pebbled sidewalk. Then the taller goon lifted his foot. His shoe was shiny and tapered like a missile, and it came down heel first on the sunglasses Sal Giordano had given him. The lenses were reduced to tiny blue beads as from a thrown bottle.
'So now, douchebag,' said the taller thug, 'we talk. You in on this with your brother?'
'In on what?' said Joey. He tried to look past the two sets of massive shoulders to remind himself there was still a world beyond the blue suits. Traffic continued going by on Duval Street, bending around the parked Lincoln. Pedestrians gave wide berth, as they might around someone throwing up, but showed no particular interest.
'Don't be cute, shitbird,' said the goon with the terrible rug. 'You know what we're talking about.'
'Sorry, guys, but I really don't.' As if to prove his innocence, his uninvolvement with anything rough and dangerous, he gestured delicately toward his own pink shirt and down at his wholesome tennis shoes. 'I live here. I got a job. My brother's here on vacation. I really don't know what you want from me.'
The two goons glanced at each other. They seemed to be straining to maintain their aspect of menace, but mostly they just looked confused. They were not long on ideas, and they had come to the end of their morning's worth. If Joey had given them one single thing to grab on to, they could have clubbed him with it. But he hadn't. Play as dumb as you can for as long as you can.
'You gonna be seeing your brother?' asked the taller thug.
'Course. He's my brother.'
The thug wagged a thick forefinger under Joey's chin, but it was an unimpressive gesture, a shot in the air by an army in retreat. 'Tell him to watch his ass.'
The thugs stepped around the ruins of Joey's sunglasses, got into the Lincoln, and drove away. Almost immediately the life of Key West surged back into the space they'd emptied, the way water finds the only dry spot on a piece of cloth. Joey bent down and picked up his shades as one would an injured bird. The frames at least seemed more or less intact. He put them in his pocket. Then he walked gingerly into the Parrot Beach office to use the bathroom.
'Did I ask you if they were worth fixing? I mean, did I come in here and ask your expert opinion, or did I just say I'd like 'em fixed?'
The young woman behind the optician's counter was wearing tinted contacts in a startling shade of copper. She leaned back slightly in the face of Joey's vehemence, but held on to her pleasant and relentlessly helpful tone. 'It's just that, with the cheaper frames-'
'Did I ask if they were cheap frames? Did I ask what any of this costs?'
Zack Davidson, his sandy hair falling in a perfect arc across his forehead, his pink shirt immaculately draped, intervened. 'He's a little upset. The glasses have sentimental value. So if you could just fit them with new lenses…'
The woman behind the counter lifted the frames, wiggled the loosened hinges of the earpieces, and said, 'Sure. O.K. What color?'
'Blue,' said Joey. He said it like a little boy who's fallen down, is being bribed into feeling comforted, but owes it to himself not to come around too soon.
