'It's onna chart.' Joey was leaning against the Osprey's stern, steering with the stem of the engine.
Gino made no response. He didn't much care what a chart was and he didn't want to give Joey a chance to show off what he knew. So he kept quiet and fantasized. He pictured what a sport he'd be when he cashed in his three million dollars' worth of rocks. He saw himself in an immaculate mohair suit, spreading smiles and fifties around crowded restaurants and nightclubs. He'd buy Vicki something nice. Discreetly, he'd lay some money on the widows of Vinnie Fish and Frankie Bread.
Joey steered the boat and watched his half brother swelling into the role of big shot.
Gino gave a self-contented little smile. He seemed to be imagining the pride and affection he'd bask in when he presented some of the stolen money to his father. He liked money, Vincente Delgatto did; he liked the rituals of people forking it over. And Gino liked when his father patted his cheek.
But then Gino frowned. With a flash of secret shame such as assails a person who has somehow forgotten a dear old friend at Christmas and knows deep down there's a reason why, he realized he had left out Joey. Jesus. Without Joey, he'd still be in his hotel room with his gums wrapped around a bourbon bottle; the emeralds would still be sitting at that falling- down dock with nothing but mosquitoes and rats for company.
'Kid,' he began. After the long interval of silence but for the whine of the motor, the sound seemed out of place, intrusive. 'Listen, I gotta give credit where credit is due. Ya did good, Joey. The way ya thought things through, I got a lotta respect for that. And I wanna show my appreciation.'
Joey looked off at the glinting water, the steady stars. Gino didn't exactly sound like his old self, and Joey figured he was rehearsing his role as the bigger cheese he was about to become. But now Gino had put himself in a position where he had to name a number. A guy like Gino, if he talked about appreciation, gratitude, he couldn't just leave it vague like that, he had to make it a specific amount. And this was difficult. It wasn't that Gino was cheap. It was more complicated than that. Whatever he gave to Joey didn't only mean there was less for himself; it also meant that Joey would be a little bit of a big shot on his own, and the real question was, how much of a big shot could Gino stand for him to be?
The older brother cleared his throat and ran a hand over his chin. Then, in a gesture he'd seen his father make in similar situations, he yanked down on the collar of his shirt as if to give it a military straightness. 'Ten thousand, Joey. For you. For helpin' out. Howzat sound?'
Some questions just cannot be answered, and this was one of them. Besides, Gino wasn't asking it to open a discussion but only as a set-up to be thanked. Joey was not inclined to thank him. He was neither surprised nor unsurprised by the paltriness of his brother's offer, and he decided he would not regard it as an insult, just as a matter of bookkeeping. That's what it came down to with Gino, after all-bookkeeping, the totting up of gyps and bonuses, the usual disappointments and very occasional windfalls of regard. 'That's fine, Gino. Whatever you think.'
Gino started to speak again, but just as the air was pushing past his throat, he realized he had nothing to say. In some dark recess of his mind he suspected he was being a cheap and jealous son of a bitch. He filtered this suspicion through his well-developed machinery for making himself seem right, and it came out looking like Joey was being very ungrateful in the face of his largess. But then, Joey had always been like that-grumpy even, or especially, when Gino was trying to help him out. The kid just couldn't accept generosity.
The Osprey plowed on slowly through the Florida Straits. Behind it, the land had fallen away until the mangroves looked like nothing more than dead spots on the ocean, and the dim lights of U.S. 1 appeared as stars bellied down to the horizon. The moon was nearing its zenith and its light was now a stark white that seemed to throw a sphere of steam around it. The breeze came in soft warm puffs from the south; ahead, the water was nearly flat, and then, perhaps a half mile away, just beyond a buoy that blinked a mesmerizing red, it broke into curious moonlit ripples, as if whipped by some unfelt freshening wind. Gino yawned. Joey dodged the contagiousness of it by looking away and taking a big breath of salty air.
Now, it has often been observed that in the midst of a terrible accident, time slows down and disaster unfolds with an almost pornographically explicit sense of close-up detail. When a boat runs up on coral, just the opposite is true. Everything that has been quietly humming along to the languid rhythm of calm water is instantly, bafflingly accelerated, as if the entire racing violence of the ocean were sluicing through the crazy currents in the shallows.
The Osprey was laboring along at a three-knot crawl when she first hit bottom.
Even so, her momentum carried her forward so that the stern came up like the backside of a bucking horse and the suddenly airborne propeller revved like a jet. When the creaking hull came back down, it listed to starboard, took a groaning bump, then turned its nose broadside to the chop.
'What the fuck?' screamed Gino, spreading out his arms and trying desperately to hold on to a gunwale.
'Fuck,' said Joey. He was still trying to steer, but his efforts counted for nothing. The eddies carried the soft wooden boat from one coral head to another. The doomed craft slammed, caromed, and flew on helplessly toward the next blow; it was as if giant, stone-hard hands were playing volleyball with it. Overhead, the stars wheeled as the boat was tossed. Gino's thin shoes gave him no purchase on the slimy boards, and he slid around the deck as if on skates. The Osprey reared up, dove nose first, then, on the return bounce, slammed the shaft of the little outboard into unyielding coral. The force cracked the already rotten transom; it sheared off like wet cardboard. The motor, still attached, still running, dove backward like a scuba diver, punched a hole in the water, and vanished.
'Gino, man, we're fucked.'
'My stones,' he yelled. 'Jesus Christ, my stones.'
The older brother scrambled forward toward the pilothouse. A vicious, twisting collision with the bottom sent him sprawling, his face against the slimy planks, his ribs compressed against the side. He took a breath that burned, then got up on his hands and knees and tried crawling toward his fortune. He was hallway over the threshold of the roofless cabin when the Osprey came crashing down onto a spike of coral that poked into it like a drill. Water came spraying up through the pierced deck like oil from a gusher. Gino crawled over the rupture, and the hissing water seared his skin. He groped toward the loose plank, and a head-on crash sent him skidding face first into the base of the console where the rat had nested. Lying there, smelling brine and rodent, Gino heard or rather felt a profound and ungodly noise. It was a slow but all-encompassing vibration, a loose rumble as from the bowels of the earth. The boat was breaking in half.
Still pinned on his belly, Gino strained to look back over his shoulder. Through the pilothouse doorway, he could see that the back half of the Osprey was at a different angle. The craft was folding, like it was on a hinge. He pushed off with all his strength and scuttled backward like a crab. He made one last desperate grope toward the plank that hid his millions, but came away with nothing except a pencil-size splinter that tore through a waterlogged finger. Then he felt his ankles being grabbed. Joey pulled him backward, yanked his rigid body over a widening fissure in the middle of the boat and launched him toward the stem, where warm salt water was already pooling, welcoming the Osprey to the bottom of the sea.
'Quick,' said Joey. 'Inna rowboat.'
Without quite knowing how he got there, Gino Delgatto found himself over the side, his hands clinging to the sundering timbers, his feet groping for the dry boards of the dinghy. A moment later, Joey followed. He took the oars just as the Osprey was going down. The bow went first. Like a dying animal, it seemed to give its head one final shake of defiance or supplication, then slid silently into the deep water at the far side of the coral canyon. Somewhat anti-climactically, the stern had yet to follow. Thinly attached by the few boards still intact, it had to be pulled down like a ham actor reluctant to leave the stage, and gave off an unseemly sucking sound as it finally submerged.
Joey needed to row only a couple hundred yards to escape the ferocious turbulence of the reef, and the instant he'd done so, the water was again so placid, the night air so still and coddling that it would have been easy to imagine that the wreck of the Osprey was only a quick nightmare, a hellish vision from a brief and otherwise pleasant nap.
Except the boat was gone. The motor was gone. The emeralds were gone.
Joey rowed in silence past the buoy blinking red.
Gino looked back in disbelief toward the empty place where his fortune had been. Moonlight twinkled on the ripples, and that was it. He pulled in a deep breath that added weight to the unhappy suspicion that he had cracked some ribs. Then he grabbed his hair and pulled. 'Ah fuck, Joey,' he said. 'Fuck, fuck, fuck.'
Joey put his back into his rowing. He hadn't wanted to thank Gino for his offer of a measly ten grand, and he
