sound was almost like brushes on a snare drum. The closed flowers had lost their individual perfumes and gave off a generic sweetness like that of wet paper. Joey sipped from his mug and thought about the last time he'd been out by the pool at three a.m. It was only ten weeks or so ago. His prospects had been zero and a sense of failure was keeping him awake as stubbornly as a toothache. He'd had no job and he was running out of money. Sandra was getting fed up and the one person he could talk to was a resurrected mafioso who talked to his neurotic dog. He was trying to concoct a way to pull a living out of Florida, and all he could think of was baby alligators, suntan lotion, pencil sharpeners in the shape of oranges.
He shook his head and laughed softly into the night. From baby alligators and pencil sharpeners to real estate and emeralds. O.K., Joey admitted, he wasn't home free yet, not every last piece was in place. Still, at three a.m., everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, and Joey indulged in the rare pleasure of paying himself a compliment. It was an unusual compliment for Joey in that it was not bullshit, it was not bragging, it was not meant to impress anybody. He took a sip of his coffee, put his head back against the hard webbing of the lounge, and basked in the belief that, for a kid from the neighborhood, he wasn't doing too bad down here in Florida.
— 38 -
At 8:55 a.m., which felt to Joey like the middle of the afternoon, he walked into the Parrot Beach sales office, wearing his pink shirt, his by now broken-in khaki shorts, and his confident watchband that told the world he frowned on flash. When Zack Davidson showed up a few minutes later, Joey handed him nine hundred and seventy-three dollars in cash. It was what was left from Gino's thousand after the rowboat and the nautical chart had been paid for.
For Zack, however, nine a.m. was not afternoon, it was first thing in the morning. His sandy hair was still damp from the shower, he hadn't even had his second cup of coffee, and he glanced down at the wad of bills as if they were a face that looked familiar, but only somewhat. 'What's this about?'
'The little motor?' Joey said.
Zack tilted his head expectantly. Yes, he knew the little motor.
'I lost it.'
Zack sat down in his desk chair and drummed his fingers on the blotter. He had a fair amount of experience with outboard engines. Many things went wrong with them. Their spark plugs got gummed up. Their water pumps crapped out. Their propellers fell off, their starter ropes came away in your hand, their shifters jammed so you could only go backward. Outboards were a plague, an affliction. But how did you lose one?
'You lost it,' he said, plucking a dark thread from the sleeve of his pink shirt. It was not a question. He just needed to hear it in his own voice.
Joey nodded.
'I don't imagine you wanna tell me how it happened.'
Joey shook his head. 'Sometime maybe. Zack, I don't know what they cost. If that isn't enough…'
Zack waved away the offer. Nine hundred and seventy-three dollars was in fact more than the old motor was worth, less than a new one would cost- in that gray area where insurance adjusters quibble and gentlemen do not. 'You get done what you needed to do?'
'Yeah, I did,' said Joey, and though he hadn't meant to smile so soon after telling Zack of the loss of the motor, he couldn't help it.
Zack slipped into sales manager mode. It was something he could comfortably do while half asleep. 'So the cockin' around is over? You're gonna get out there now and sell some goddamn real estate?'
'Bet your ass. Tons. But Zack, listen, Sandra and me, we'd like you and Claire to come over for dinner on Saturday night. Can ya do that?'
Zack hesitated just an instant, and Joey felt suddenly shy. A strange and basic thing, the courting stage of friendship. The offers of alliance and the gestures of warmth got passed back and forth like wampum. 'Pretty sure we can,' Zack said. He hoped it didn't sound like he was reserving himself an out. 'Sounds real nice.'
'Florida,' said Joey. 'Sounds like Florida. Grilling steaks. Eating outside with shorts on. How sweet it is, huh, Zack?'
Zack rubbed his reddish eyebrows, and Joey headed out, pausing for a second to contemplate the Parrot Beach scale model with its Saran Wrap pool and miniature residents on beach chairs. Boating, barbecues, company-his life was getting to where it could almost fit right in with that ideal of ease under sunny skies and Plexiglas.
At around eleven, with two commissions in the bag, Joey took a break and called Perretti's luncheonette on Astoria Boulevard in Queens. He could picture the old maroon phone booth at the back of the green-painted store, with the pebbled metal walls that were always cold to the touch and the accordion door that always fooled you about whether you should push or pull. Joey asked for Sal Giordano, but his buddy wasn't there. He said he would call back in a couple of hours, and if Sal came in, he should leave a number and a time he could be reached. This meant that Sal would organize his afternoon around getting down Northern Boulevard or over the Gowanus Bridge in a timely fashion, before rush hour if possible, and hoping that when he got there, his public telephone had not had its coin box chiseled out by a crack addict or its metal- sheathed wires yanked apart by an aggravated patron who had lost his quarter.
When Joey called back at two he was given a number where Sal could be reached at four, and when he called at four Sal picked up almost before the phone had rung. The first thing Joey heard sounded like the screaming whine of jet engines close enough to blow your hat off. 'So Sal,' he screamed, 'you're at the Airline Diner?'
'Nah,' Sal shouted. 'Outside the Midtown Tunnel. That's buses. Airline Diner, some dumb fuck in a U- Haul backed up and crushed the booth. How the hell are you, man?'
'Good,' yelled Joey, 'real good. How are things up there?'
'Quiet,' hollered Sal. 'Makin' a living. With Gino gone, ya know, it's pretty much business as usual.'
'Well,' Joey hollered back, 'Gino ain't gone no more. This is why I'm calling, Sal. He should be in New York by now.'
There was a pause, and Joey heard a truck laboring through its gears as it lumbered out of the tollbooth and started up the incline on the Queens side of the tunnel, the Empire State Building in its sideview mirrors. 'He's back?' Sal shouted, and Joey had the feeling that maybe he was a little bit surprised that Gino was still alive. 'What's with Ponte? What's with the stones?'
Joey was speaking from the far end of the lunch counter near the Parrot Beach office, the place where short-order cooks with shaved heads whipped up mango smoothies for young women in undershirts to suck through straws. This was not New York, where you couldn't even talk on your own phone for fear of being listened in on. This was Key West, where you could scream about gangsters and emeralds in a public place and no one bothered to turn around. 'The stones are innee ocean,' he shouted. 'And Ponte, well, I'm like tryin' to work out a way to smooth things over with him.'
'You?'
'Whaddya sound so fucking surprised for, Sal? Ya sound like my goddamn brother.'
Sal waited for an ambulance to go careening past. 'Hey, Joey man, don't get touchy. I didn't know you were involved, is all.'
'Well, I am. Didn't wanna be, but there it is. But Sal, here's the thing. Right now I'm playing for some time. Ponte's goons, I don't think they know it yet that Gino slipped 'em. If they find out before I get things organized-'
Some jerk burned rubber coming out of the toll booth, and Sal Giordano interrupted through the screech. 'Joey, whoa, I don't like the sounda this. I don't like you fucking with these guys.'
'Sal, man, who's fucking? I'm just tryin' to straighten things out. You worry too much.'
Sal considered this. He was a street guy from New York; of course he worried. 'O.K., Joey, maybe you're right, maybe I do. But maybe you worry too little. Warm weather, sunshine-maybe it's makin' you calmer than is good for you.'
Joey yanked his mind away from that possibility like a hand from a hot stove. 'Sal, listen, right now there's
