Tropical Freeze (6 page)

“I’m a little drunk,” he said. But he didn’t release her hand.

She brought her other hand up slowly and touched his face. Fingertips reading the stubble on his cheeks, braille, a message there. Then a slow tracing of his eyebrows, nose, upper lip, up the cheekbone, and brushing the hair at his temples. Thorn felt a flood of warmth rise inside him. His eyes swimming. The muscles in his neck relaxing as well. He gave himself over to this ticklish tour.

Her hand circled his neck, back-combed up through his hair, and cupped his head. He let her have some of its weight. Holding there, cradling his skull.

“Are you drunk?” he said. Drowsy, his head floating in her palm.

“No,” she said. “Stone cold sober.”

“Good.”

After a time he opened his eyes, looked at her now, at the moonlit face, sideburns of down. He lifted a finger, brought it to that dust of hair on her cheek, ruffled it against the grain of the light till it was a milky powder.

He brought his face to hers, their mouths aligning, but not a kiss. Holding off the hunger. Their lips grazed, adjusting, making the slightest calibrations of angle and shape as if they were whispering into each other’s breaths. Both of them trying to make this first kiss, this one which Thorn did not even realize until now that he had been waiting for for a very long time, to make it as close to perfect as possible.

And it was.

“I didn’t kill anybody till I was twenty-eight,” Papa John said. “What’s your hurry?”

Ozzie said, “I’m thirty-two, for christ sakes.”

John lit another Camel and rubbed the thumb of his smoking hand across the beard stubble on his throat. He eyed Ozzie through the smoke. Ozzie was wiping down the bar with a wet, greasy rag, putting a fleeting shine on the mahogany. The guy wasn’t at all what Papa John had had in mind. He was a Florida Cracker for one thing. Worse than an ordinary redneck. You couldn’t teach Crackers anything. They had undescended brains.

It was three o’clock in the morning. It’d been another slow Friday night. Used to be that the Bomb Bay Bar was the axis of the universe in Key Largo. You didn’t come to this island and not squeeze into Papa John’s place some time or other.

But something had happened. Some tilt he couldn’t quite figure out. Now just an occasional tourist might stick his head in Papa John’s place, maybe even step inside, but then he’d stop and give him a little embarrassed wave and he’d leave. Was it some smell he couldn’t smell? Fuck if he knew.

It wasn’t the money that bothered him. He still had enough scams going down, enough cash stacking up out on his boat. No, what bothered him was the lie of it all. Here he was, the original thing. A Conch, sixty-three nonstop years on the islands. Half of that he’d spent running Papa John’s Bar in Key West, the rest of it bouncing around the Keys, making some smuggling runs, pot, rum, Uzis once, always on the lookout for a place with the fishing camp feel that Key West had lost. And then fifteen years ago he’d found it in Key Largo.

Now Key Largo was losing it. The hot tubs and wooden decks, pastels had arrived. Fancy stores were festering along the highway, full of plastic geegaws you wouldn’t believe. Turning shit to chic. Everybody trying to snag the tourists on their way to Key West. Now the island was full of fern bars with brass railings and speakers seven feet tall. Bars with names of tropical fruits, Mangoes, Pineapples, Papayas. And the tourists dancing the night away while some guy did his Jimmy Buffet calypso imitation. All of them thinking this is the real Key Largo. Hey, let’s boogie. It bothered the fuck out of him.

And then just this week John had heard talk that the Rotary Club was looking around for another Captain Kidd, the honorary king of Old Pirate Days. Papa John had had a lock on that for the last twelve years. He’d ride at the head of the parade, toss out gold foil-wrapped candy, while he swigged from his rum bottle.

For a lot of the last decade Papa John had Monroe County by the balls. He’d made decisions right there on that barstool that had changed the island, shit, the whole chain of Keys forever-fucking-after. His photo had even been in the Chamber of Commerce brochure. Colorful local characters. Now look at him, at this place.

“When I was thirty-two, I’d already done a ton of living,” John said, looking around at the photos on the walls of his bar, trying to find 1953, tickle his memory a little. He pointed his Camel toward a photo near the women’s bathroom. “There it is.”

The photo showed Papa John standing on the docks in Key West next to Ernest Hemingway and one of Hemingway’s pals, some guy from New York, an editor or agent. Behind them, hanging from the rack, was an 388-pound blue marlin. Papa John was standing a foot to the right of the great man, holding the 40-pound rod that Hemingway had used. Papa John had led them to the spot, walked Hemingway through the whole thing, had practically swum down there and stuck the rigged ballyhoo in that marlin’s face.

Papa John said, “You don’t kill somebody soon, you could wind up like that guy, blowing his head off with a shotgun. Guy had a lifetime hard-on to kill somebody. Kept going to war, never got a shot in. Best he ever got around to was on safari, water buffalo or some shit.”

“Who is it?” Ozzie was using that greasy fucking rag to wipe the sweat from his forehead. John groaned to himself.

“Who is it?” Papa John said. “Good God, boy. You made it to the what grade?”

“Fifth,” Ozzie said, a hint of anger showing.

“That’s Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway. The great man. The guy who made me rich, people looking to sit on the barstool where the great man farted. He was a farter, too.”

“I know who fucking Hemingway is. I’m not stupid.” Ozzie wiped at the bar. He looked up and said, “I
did
kill a colored man once. But I just left him for dead, so I don’t count that.”

John sipped his beer and dragged some more smoke in on top of the cool burn. Maybe he was wrong. He’d kept Ozzie around for the last few weeks ’cause of this feeling that the kid was capable of something bigger. It would come and go. About the time Ozzie seemed hopeless, he’d come out with something like this, and Papa John would go, well, maybe he’s got potential after all.

Ozzie told his story. How he’d been out driving and he came up behind this black man in a pickup and got the black man to pull over. Out on one of those farm roads around Tallahassee you can’t believe they ever bothered building in the first place ’cause it doesn’t go anywhere. So he gets this black guy alongside the road and he gets out of the car and he goes over to him and the black guy is all, yes sir, no sir. And he’s got a yappy white dog with him, never stops barking. So Ozzie, and he’s with some other guy, another loser, tried to go to Vietnam but his arrest record was too long, so this guy is pissed at everybody, and Ozzie starts getting pissed at this little dog, yapping.

“How’d you get a nigger to pull over like that out on some country road?”

“I used the siren and the lights.”

“What siren?”

“I was driving a police car.”

“What!”

“Billy Dell’s, that’s the boy I was with, his stepdaddy was deputy sheriff. We took his car and we’re out chasing people. Spooking the spooks.”

“Jesus Christ, Ozzie, a police car.” Now that’s why he kept the kid around.

So Ozzie reached across this black man and grabbed that dog. What else was the kid leaving out? The dog a pit bull? The black guy six feet seven? Papa John made a note to work on the boy’s storytelling. I mean, that was what this was all about anyway, wasn’t it? John wanted to leave behind somebody to sit where John was sitting and talk to the tourists late at night, holding them by the lapels like the Ancient Mariner in that poem, dragging them back to when men were full-size.

So Ozzie had the guy in the ditch by the time John got back to it. He and his buddy were holding the black man’s face down into a little ditchwater. The other guy was going a little berserk, talking Klan talk, kill talk. And Ozzie was holding on to the black man, sounded like just for more or less symbolic contact. The other guy found a Coke bottle lying nearby the ditch and gave the black man a blast to the back of the head. Then another one and a few more. And he handed it to Ozzie, and Ozzie was scareder of his buddy by that time than of the bleeding body, so he took a couple of turns.

“And we got back in the car and drove off,” Ozzie said.

“You mean you got back in the police car. Were the lights still flashing the whole time? Did you turn them off while you were killing this guy? You still holding the fucking dog or what? There’s some details here, some shit that you need to say to set the stage.”

Ozzie looked at Papa John, eyes blank and watery as soap bubbles.

“The fuck difference does it make, the lights were on or off? We left this guy for dead. That’s the story. That’s the point. We drove off and left the guy and his dog. I broke the dog’s tail just as we were leaving.”

“Holy shit,” Papa John said, and he stubbed out his Camel in the mother-of-pearl shell. “That’s what I mean. You broke the dog’s fucking tail. That’s a detail. That’s a weird fucking fact should be in the story. In the main part of it. Not some afterthought. You broke the dog’s fucking tail. I mean, I never heard of that before. Never seen it, heard of it, nothing.”

Ozzie said, “So what? I’m supposed to tell every little diddley-squat thing that happened? The guy had garlic breath, I’m supposed to say that? He was wearing a gas station shirt, his fingernails were greasy, shit like that?”

This wasn’t going to be easy. Papa John finished his Bud. He gripped the longneck bottle by the throat and smacked it against the bar. Ozzie took a step back. Papa John held up the jagged remains like it was a microphone and he was about to interview this Cracker, see what made him so stupid.

“What? What?”

Jesus, the kid’s eyes got slimy when he was scared, like oily tears were building up in there.

Papa John stood up, walked a few steps so he was just across from Ozzie, the bar between them. He lunged the bottle at the kid, drove him back against the cash register. He took another swish at him. He didn’t know if he really wanted to cut the kid or not. Probably yes.

Ozzie was panting. His eyes sparking. Probably a little curl of shit appearing.

His voice came to him finally. “So, I don’t tell stories as good as you think I should. That what’s got you so pissed?”

Papa John held that ragged bottle out, making his face take on a crafty look, feinting a little with that hand. He felt as if he had a direct line to the boy’s pulse. Up, up, up, up.

“Is it so fucking important I broke the dog’s tail or didn’t? It’s my story, ain’t it? Can’t I tell it how the fuck ever I want to, can’t I?”

“No,” Papa John said, getting every bit of bass he had into his voice. “You got to know how to tell a goddamn story. The right way. You can’t learn that, then forget all the rest of it. You’re no use to me. I can get any cripple covered with weeping sores in off the highway to sell my pot and do B and E for me. You think that’s what I want you for, that petty shit?”

Ozzie held that rag, stared at John, a hazy smile coming and going.

Papa John said, “You got some of the skills you’ll need to work with me. But you haven’t got them all. Sooner you just admit to that, sooner we can get on with your fucking education. Is that goddamned clear enough for you?”

“It is,” Ozzie said.

John put the bottle down and sat back on his stool. Ozzie finished wiping everything down, glancing over at John and that broken bottle. He put all the beer steins back on the shelves behind the bar. He got everything just like Papa John had shown him and shown him again. Ozzie was learning the rules even if he was about as bright as an escapee from the moron farm.

When he’d finished cleaning the bar, Papa John was still sitting there smoking his Camels, drinking another beer, watching the dark spaces around the rafters.

Ozzie stepped up behind him, holding his guitar.

Ozzie said, “I know who it is I’m going to kill. I picked him out.”

John closed his eyes. Maybe if he counted to ten thousand, his blood pressure would go down. He opened his eyes and looked at Ozzie. His personal albatross. He’d been looking for a son, and the gods sent him this poor doofus.

“Yeah?” Papa John said. “You going after a poodle this time. St. Bernard?”

“He’s that blond guy, lives around here. Shacking up with the TV lady.”

Papa John smacked his open hand on the bar; then he caught himself, took a breath. Was the kid joking him with all this murder talk?

“Look, Oz,” John said, letting more smoke out as he spoke, “you want to earn a merit badge with me? Then keep your old lady quiet, OK? I’m getting nothing but complaints from the trailer park. It’s the fucking noise from your place, the screaming and bitching. They can’t hear ‘Hollywood Squares’ ’cause of the noise. You want to kill somebody so bad, kill Harriet.”

“Her name’s Bonnie.”

“Harriet,” Papa John said. “It’s a joke. Ozzie and Harriet.”

“I don’t get it.”

Papa John sucked a deep drag on the cigarette, let it drift back out his nose, squinting at Ozzie the whole time, not sure if the boy was putting him on or not.

Ozzie said, “So, now I can play, right?”

Ozzie switched on all the spotlights first, got them aimed just like he liked them. He climbed up on the four-by-four stage where back a few years ago the topless dancers had wiggled all night. Ozzie hitched his guitar on and spent a minute tuning it up. John shook his head. Jesus, the kid was twelve years old.

Ozzie pretended to switch on an invisible mike, lowered it a few inches, and screwed it tight. Tapped it. The mood was coming on him now; all the shit he’d taken from John just seemed to whoosh out of his head. He strummed that opening C, then found G.

It was forty years ago, he came to town riding on a shrimp truck through the middle of the night, looking for a fight, smelling like a hound, driving through the dark to that neon bright. That neon island in the sea, the dark dark sea. It was forty years ago, he came to town riding on a shrimp truck in the middle of the night, a lover of whores, a fighter, and a clown. …