Joey had not been able to remember the retreat through the laundromat. The first thing he recalled was standing on the sidewalk, watching the low red sunlight bounce off his smashed windshield and throw rainbows onto the Caddy's old upholstery. He reached for his sunglasses, and when he pulled them out of his shirt pocket, the hundred and twenty dollars fell onto the street. He hesitated a moment, thinking that it would be a suave gesture to let the money lie there. Then he bent down and plucked the bills off the hot asphalt, hoping no one would notice.
Back at the compound, he'd made a rum and tonic, sat down with it near the pool, and noted in himself a dangerous desire. It was the desire just to sit there and do nothing. When things went badly, it made sitting near water with a cocktail seem absolutely heavenly, saner than any possible action. Then, too, there was the tropical thing. Up north people kept busy to keep warm, kept moving so as not to get trampled. Here it was pleasantest to stay still. This was not something you decided but something you realized through your pores. The air was the same temperature as your skin. It felt good. Soft breezes whispered of the timeless appeal of being a lazy bum.
The only problem was the money.
That, and the way Sandra looked when she got home from work-pale, dressed in long-sleeved business blouses that were too warm, her light eyes tired behind the big square glasses, her fingertips gray- green from counting out fresh twenties. He'd greet her, tan, in a bathing suit, and after hello there'd be a pregnant silence. Problem was, anything Sandra said-What's new? How was your day? — sounded to Joey like a reproach. Not that Sandra meant it that way. She'd sit down on the edge of Joey's lounge chair and pull her skirt primly over her knees. She'd take deep breaths of the jasmine and frangipani, getting the stale aftertaste of air-conditioning out of her lungs, and she'd try to make civil conversation. Joey, like a sulky teenager whose true frustration is that he has nothing to hide, would seem to be hiding behind one-word answers. His day was fine. Nothing was new.
The thing was, Joey would have liked to talk to her, but where he was from, there were a lot of things you just didn't discuss with your girlfriend. What's new? Well, I tried to take over the numbers racket today. How was your day? Lousy-a three-hundred-pound Cuban spit fruit on my shoe. No, this was not stuff you told your girlfriend, only your pals. But that assumed you had pals, and who were Joey's buddy-boys down here? Peter and Claude? So Joey mostly kept mum. As soon as he could, he moved the conversation away from himself.
"Sandra," he'd say, "those clothes, they're too hot. You must be like sweltering. Why don't you buy your-self some new ones?"
By reflex, Sandra would run her hand along the fabric of her skirt. "This is O.K. for now. After I get a few paychecks, maybe I'll go shopping."
"And then we gotta get you tan."
Sandra gave a little laugh. "Never happen." Then she looked down at the still blue water of the swimming pool, looked at it as if it were a thousand miles away instead of at her feet. "I wouldn't mind some time to lay around, though."
There it was, thought Joey. Not an accusation, not even a complaint. Just the truth. Joey was not holding up his end, and he knew it.
So, a couple of evenings after his meeting with Carlos, he went downtown to look into the pimping business.
He wasn't going to be a pimp. He had standards about that kind of thing-though it was true that, under the pressures of idleness and exile, he could already feel his standards beginning to erode. Still, pimps (by which Joey meant New York pimps) were an unseemly and amateurish lot. They took drugs and wore idiotic hats, they squandered assets and drowned themselves in after-shave, their business acumen was in their dicks and they had no feel for detail work. They badly needed organization, and that's where Joey would come in-as a sort of pimp's pimp, to discipline them like they disciplined the women. It could be a good thing for everybody, Joey thought. Territory could be fairly assigned. Arguments and slashings could be kept to a minimum. Everyone would earn more and the public would be guaranteed a quality product.
Assuming, of course, that Key West had pimps.
So Joey went down to Duval Street to interview some whores. But they weren't where he expected them to be. Key West, being a place that is literally on the edge, out of sight of neighbors and off limits to embarrassment, is a town where people go to misbehave, a tax haven for the libido. The misbehavior, or attempted misbehavior, is focused near the harbor: the edge of the edge. That's where the tourist bars are, where college students hurtle out of Sloppy Joe's, bravely trying to reach the curb before they barf, where bad music from weather-warped guitars spills through the glassless windows of Rick's, The Bull, and Margaritaville. By all logic, that's where the hookers should have been, ambushing sports made frisky by tequila.
But the streetwalkers had apparently been moved out of there, in deference, no doubt, to the more sedate visitors off the second-rate cruise ships and the occasional parents who had read the wrong brochure and brought their kids along. So Joey cruised Duval toward its quiet end, the ocean side, where souvenir shops closed at six p.m., where people sat on rocking chairs on the porches of guesthouses, and where on nights of south wind you could hear water splashing on the rocks. It seemed a strange place to look for hookers, but that was where they were.
There weren't many of them. On his first cruise down the street, in fact, Joey spotted exactly one. She was so skinny that the tendons in back of her knees stuck out like bridge cables, and from the way she walked, jittery and woozy at the same time, Joey decided she was probably too strung out to talk to. So he parked the car, sat down on the seawall, watched the pelicans move in and out of the glow of lamps on the pier, and waited. The air smelled of iodine and wet stone. Joey, to his surprise, became more rather than less patient the longer he sat, and he dimly realized how thin the line could be between waiting for something and waiting for nothing.
After twenty minutes or so, a tall redhead came sashaying down the street. Her wig was done up in a modified beehive, her short skirt followed the curve of her hips like the skin on a banana, and her big earrings glinted under the streetlamps. There was professionalism and even grandeur in her slightly knock-kneed gait. Joey approached her.
"Wanna party, handsome?" she asked him. The voice was breathy and suitably lewd, and it issued forth from a full, bowed mouth to which a purplish lipstick had been applied with a surprising degree of measure and restraint.
"I wanna talk," said Joey. "Buy you a drink?"
"For starters," cooed the hooker. She had a beauty mark stenciled onto her right cheek, and her eyebrows were tweezed into a steep arc that suggested constant astonishment.
"Where do you like?"
By way of answer, she took Joey's elbow and led him down Duval Street. They walked in silence for a block and a half, and Joey tried not to notice that he was greatly enjoying the rub of her bust against his arm. She was wearing a magenta brocade blouse that fit like a corset and gave her a cleavage like a baby's ass. Also, she smelled good; her perfume was citrusy and clean. She had style, Joey decided. And poise. In New York she'd be at least a two-hundred-dollar piece.
She maneuvered him into a place called Workingman's Tropic. Dim, without music, it was not a tourist joint. At one end, two guys were shooting pool in a golden cone of light. The bar itself was dark wood bristling with beer spigots. Here and there, unkempt ferns dangled from the ceiling. Joey and the hooker sat down at a wicker table, under a plant. Leaves trailed down and tickled Joey's neck.
A waiter came over and the hooker ordered a Kir Royale. Joey asked for a scotch.
"You have great-color eyes," she said to him, clinking glasses. "Almost like Liz Taylor. I've always thought bedroom eyes should be dark brown. But that dreamy violet-I'll have to reconsider." She lapped her drink. "So what would you like to talk about?"
"I wanna talk about what you do."
She scanned his face for a moment, and then a look of deep concern crossed her features. Poor puppy, the look said. Can't function? Just want to hear? Then the kind look was replaced by a mock scolding one and accompanied by a wag of the finger. "I never tell tales on other clients," she said.
"No, no, no," said Joey. "You don't understand. I don't mean what you do, I mean how you do it."
The hooker giggled, rounded her shoulders to show off her collarbones, and managed a serpentine squirm in her chair. "That's an art, baby. That's not something that can be explained over one drink."
Joey took the hand that was cold from holding his glass and ran it through his hair. "Look… what's your name?"
"Vicki," said the hooker, managing to make the word sound like some forbidden body part.
"Look, Vicki, we don't seem to be connecting here. What I'm talking about is the business side. You see?"
Vicki's mouth came out of its bowed smile, collapsed for a moment into a confused pout, then hardened to a thin line; her tweezed eyebrows fell from their inquisitive arc to parallel the narrowed lips. "No," she said, "I don't see."
At that moment there came an unfortunate ebb in the noise level of the bar, and when Joey spoke again it seemed as if he was addressing the room at large.
"What I'm asking," he said, "to put it simply, is, well, do you have, you know, a pimp?"
"A pimp?" said Vicki, not softly.
The pool players put down their cues. Guys at the bar pricked up their ears.
"A pimp? What're you, crazy? You little piece of shit, what do you think I am? You think I'm a common whore, you little limp-dick shitass?"
Joey reached a conciliatory hand toward Vicki's wrist, but she yanked her arm away. Then she stood up, knocking over her chair and spilling the remains of her Kir. "I'm an artist, you little scumbag. You heartless, gutless, sexless… oh sweet Jesus, how I hate people like you."
A thick blue vein was standing out on Vicki's neck, and her lips were quivering in the effort to shape more words. None came, only a ferocious exhalation that seemed to rattle her teeth. Finally, with a green flame of loathing in her eyes, she reached into her blouse, pulled out a tit, and threw it at Joey. It was made of hard rubber, and it hurt his ribs as it bounced off them. The tit landed on the table, wobbled a moment like a twirled coin, and came to rest nipple side up. The red-tinted nub stared at Joey like a blind but accusing eye.
" Marrone," he said.
The bouncer had arrived. He had a shaved head that was a smaller outcropping of his neck, a single sapphire earring, and he cleaved to the notion that the regular customer was always right and the firsttime visitor always wrong. He lifted Joey out of his chair with such deftness that Joey almost didn't notice he'd been levitated.
"Hey, bubba," he said, casting a sad glance at the ersatz bosom on the table, "can't you see you're upsetting the lady?" His face was close to Joey's and his breath smelled of nachos.
"Little misunderstanding is all," said Joey. His arms were pinned to his sides.
"It happens," said the bouncer, and he gave Joey a sympathetic squeeze that made him burp up some scotch. "So why don't you just apologize, then go away and never come back."
Joey looked across the table at Vicki, half of whose bosom was still heaving with rage. Apologize? Apologize in public? Apologize in public to a transvestite whore? He, the son, albeit illegitimate, of Vincente Delgatto? In New York this would never happen. But this was not New York, and it had gotten through to Joey that not one person in Workingman's Tropic was on his side. In a flash of pained and utter befuddlement, he was not even sure that he was on his side. "I'm sorry, Vicki," he managed to say.
The bouncer eased his grip and Joey filled his lungs.
Vicki straightened her wig, stuck out her chin, and mustered as much dignity as her empty bra cup allowed. "I accept," she said regally. "But only because you've got such pretty eyes. You little douchebag."