long-sleeved business blouses with the built-in shoulders that made even Joey forget how radically compact she was. Now, for work, she wore pale blue cotton knits that nicely set off her version of a tan. Her skin, it seemed, had not changed color, but the tiny hairs on her arms had been bleached an almost tinsel silver, which offered much the same effect. Also, Sandra had greeted the warmer weather by going on a salad binge, a veritable orgy of roughage. Joey would open the refrigerator door and be confronted by a jungle of romaine, an impenetrable forest of spinach, watercress, endive. 'Sandra,' he'd say, 'how come there ain't no food in heah?' And Sandra would smile. The heat made her softer-spoken but no less immovable. 'There's a steak in the back somewhere. Probably behind the cottage cheese.'
Certain other routines were also changing around Key West, although for different reasons. Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia, for example, no longer took Don Giovanni to the beach across from the Paradiso condominium to watch the sun go down, but had moved a third of a mile or so down the shoreline, closer to the Flagler House. He brought with him on these excursions his wife's old opera glasses, ladylike things encased in mother-of-pearl and trimmed in silver, and he looked quite eccentric if not perverted, fondling the chihuahua as he peeked through the oleanders and buttonwoods that fringed the beach. Joey had asked him to study up on the habits of Charlie Ponte's thugs, and Bert, while he hemmed and hawed at getting involved in any way, was still pissed off enough at Charlie Ponte to do it. As far as the old man could tell, two guys in one Lincoln were always stationed at the near end of the self- parking area, with a clear view of the hotel entrance. At around seven o'clock this watch was relieved by the two soldiers in the other car. The second car would take over the same parking space as the first one drove away. It didn't appear that all four thugs were ever employed at once. And it didn't seem that Charlie Ponte had thought to place a lookout on the ocean side.
–
'So Joey,' said Zack Davidson, 'you ever run a boat before?'
Joey looked down at the water, wiggled the earpieces of his shades, and tried to choke back his long- standing impulse to bullshit, to make it sound like he'd done more than he had and knew more than he knew. 'Well, uh,' he began, 'this one time, up at Montauk, well, uh. No.'
It was after work, around five-thirty, and they were at City Marina, a decidedly no-frills establishment for people with yacht club tastes and a rubber ducky budget. A very democratic place, City Marina was. Very Key West. Clunky houseboats with vinyl siding and TV antennas lay in berths next to dainty sloops whose polished hulls reflected every glint in the water, and also next to the staunch craft of working fishermen, where razor-beaked gulls scraped slime off moldy planking. The marina was nestled in a well-protected cove known as Garrison Bight, whose location underscored Key West's status as an intersection at the end of the world. On its south end, the Bight lapped quietly against the embankment of Highway 1. To the west, narrow channels wound through mangrove flats toward the open Gulf of Mexico; to the north and east, the long arced chain of the Keys stretched away under its freight of bridges and pylons.
'No.' Zack repeated the single syllable, briefly puffed his cheeks out like a trumpeter, and ran a hand through his unvarying hair. He looked down at his little boat, which had never before appeared so frail. It was an eighteen- foot fiberglass skiff with a dark blue Bimini top. A perfect flats boat, it did less well in the ocean swells, where it bounced from wave to wave like a skipping stone and skidded down following seas like a riderless surfboard. The skiff had a sixty-horsepower outboard and an eight-horse auxiliary that was propped next to it on the transom, seeming to nestle up like a duckling to its mother.
'What's the little motor for?' Joey asked.
'Emergencies,' said Zack. His mouth twisted up as if the word tasted bad. 'But hey, first things first. You know how to tie up?'
Joey gave a nonchalant shrug. He told himself that, in his pink shirt and khaki shorts, he at least looked like he belonged at a marina. 'Sure,' he said. 'I mean, I guess so. Well, not really.'
Zack showed Joey how to make a clove hitch around a post, whtle pelicans banked by and cormorants dried their spread wings on top of pilings. On board, he showed him how to tilt the engine down, hook up the extra gas tank, and close the choke. 'You know what the buoys mean, right, the green and the red?'
'Yeah, sure,' said Joey. 'It's, like, the red ones are stop and the green ones are go.'
Zack leaned back against the gunwale and played with an ear. His boat was insured, but only for liability, not for being totally trashed by a guy who had no idea what he was doing.
'Joey, you sure there's no way I can go with you?'
The novice looked down at the fiberglass floor of the cockpit, toyed with his sunglasses, and shook his head. 'Zack, listen, if you're having second thoughts, I understand. I really do. But like I said, this is something I hafta do alone. Believe me, it's not fair to involve anybody else.'
Zack hesitated, though there was really nothing to hesitate about. He'd offered Joey the use of the boat, no strings attached, no explanations demanded, and it would be too undignified to back out now. 'Well, let's take 'er out for a test drive, at least. Ya know, once you're away from the dock, it's mostly just like driving a car.'
'Yeah,' said Joey, 'that's what I figured, like driving a car. That I can do.'
'And swim,' said Zack. 'You can swim, right?'
Joey choked back his impulse to bullshit, but not quite soon enough. 'Sure,' he said. 'I can swim. Sort of. Like, a little. Not really. Nuh-uh.'
— 29 -
Zack told Joey many things, but he failed to get across how different water looks at night. Mainly, it disappears.
Joey realized this while edging the skiff out of Garrison Bight, just after ten P.M. on an evening without a moon. The shadings and dapplings had vanished from the surface, and all that remained was a featureless blackness shot through here and there with green flashes of phosphorescence. Was Joey even seeing those green flashes? He couldn't be sure, because they looked so much like what happened inside your head when you pressed on your eyeballs. Another thing Joey couldn't be sure of was where the coastline was. In daylight it had been so clear; now the boundary where land met water seemed unhealthily approximate. That flasher over there-was it a buoy or a traffic light? That dark bulk getting closer to him- was it another boat or a stray shred of North America?
Joey Goldman squinted, leaned so far forward that his head was almost caught between the top of the windshield and the front edge of the Bimini, and squeezed the steering wheel in his sweaty palms. Go under the bridge and hang a left, Zack had told him. It sounded so easy, as easy as driving the Caddy to the grocery store for a carton of milk. But Joey hadn't figured on the eddies that formed near the bridge, the swirling rushes that rendered the wheel almost as useless as if it had come off in his hands, and that spat him broadside, as though in distaste, between the stanchions.
Stay between the red and green markers, Zack had instructed, but Joey hadn't realized that at night, with only starlight on them, red and green channel markers look very much alike. Joey had expected two ranks of beacons, pointing the way as clearly as the reflectors on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. What he found was a seemingly random array of unlit pilings hammered into muck, winding through grass flats and scattered coral heads. He throttled back, rubbed his eyes, and took a thin comfort from the sound of his engine. The motor noise sounded a lot like a car; it had become the only thing still linking him to the world of the familiar.
He picked his way to the mouth of the harbor, where the vast Atlantic collides with the huge gyre of the Gulf, and the clapping currents raise ripples whose foamy tops stand in the air like cake frosting. Joey didn't understand why the boat was bouncing so much all of a sudden, why every instant his knees had to find a different angle to stand at. He didn't grasp why he was going more sidewise than forward. He fed more gas to plow through the rip; warm spray hit him in the eye and a big splash soaked his sneaker.
Then he was past the harbor entrance and out into the Florida Straits.
Here the water was empty and the shoreline black with the drooping shapes of the Australian pines. Small waves were pushed toward Joey by the breeze, and the boat did belly flops over them, the hull taking off like a low- launched rocket, then smacking back down with a spanking sound, the engine whining as the prop lifted into the foam, then stabbed back into the solider water below.
