Double down, p.28
Double Down, page 28
“Hey, man, that’s okay. Been me, I’d’ve dropped a load and a half.”
“He took me from behind.”
“Yeah, I know. I know. But we fixed his ass good.”
D’Marco elevated his chin. “How’s my neck look?”
Like somebody took a paintbrush and drew a burgundy-colored line around it, was how it looked, but Sigurd said, “Not so bad, little raw yet.”
D’Marco touched at it gingerly. “Think it’ll leave a scar?”
“Nah, shit, be gone, day or two.”
“You think?”
“Sure.”
“Y’know,” D’Marco said, a trace of wonder in his croaky voice, “I almost took the thump back there.”
“You come close,” Sigurd affirmed.
D’Marco stared at him levelly, curiously, as if he were seeing him for the first time. Behind that baffled gaze he seemed to be wrestling with emotions strange and foreign, aberrant to his nature. There was a space of silence. At last he said, “Guess I owe you one, Chubbo.”
“Forget it, man. Nothin’. I’m slidin’ down the same pole you on, hey.”
“Call you Burt, now on.”
Sigurd’s face creased and wrinkled in sublime joy. A sudden inspiration came to him. “Listen, you think we could bag it tonight? Them marks, they ain’t goin’ noplace.”
“Fuck ’em. I had enough tonight.”
“Awright! Tellya what. You wait here. Unwind.” His glance fell on D’Marco’s stained trousers. “Maybe get yourself cleaned up a little, you can.”
“Where you going?”
“Got a surprise for you, chief. This one you’re gonna like. Bring you back to life real quick.”
“Look at you,” Caroline was teasing. “That’s what they call a grudging smile.”
No denying that. The souvenir photo she held up for his inspection revealed the two of them posed on the gangplank, his face full of tight, strained vigilance unrelieved by the slight tuck at the corners of the mouth, and hers, in contrast, wreathed in an exhilarant smile. “Must be I don’t photograph well,” Waverly said. “Certainly it’s not the fault of the evening. Or the company.”
“It’s been a beautiful evening, Tim,” she said quietly.
“That it has.”
In the silence that followed, they seemed to mourn its passing, both of them.
The features of this Caroline, the one examining their likenesses, wore a drowsed, stroked-out look, as if she had ascended to another sphere. A natural serenity softened the eyes. Even the fluttery hands were still. She contemplated the photo a moment longer, then slipped it back into her purse.
“You’ll want to be careful with that,” Waverly cautioned gently. “Prying eyes, you remember.”
“Careful is what I’ve been all my life,” she said, gazing out to sea.
They occupied chairs by the pool at the extreme rear of the ship. The sounds of a dying revel reached them from the lounge on the deck directly above, some feeble laughter, an occasional spiritless shout, the calypso trio, with “Lulu” again, but wistful now, almost desolate: “Lulu gone away…” Walking the song home, putting it to bed. Somewhere far below them the ship’s propeller churned, opening a whirly seam of foam in the calm black water. A fat yellow moon hung in a sky splashed with stars shimmery as a cluster of jewels scattered on the velvet fabric of the night.
After a while Caroline said, “When am I going to see you again, Tim?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s really not for me to say.”
“Anymore, I’m not so sure about that.”
“Well, you know where to find me. I’m not going anywhere.”
As though it had just occurred to her, she said, “That game you asked about? With the Arab? I heard Robbie say they’re planning it for next week sometime. Monday, if they can arrange it.”
Monday. And the period of grace expired Wednesday night. It was going to be a run right down to the wire. And on the other side of that wire, who could tell? No good trying to look past it, get there first. “Thanks,” he said. “That helps clarify things.”
“It was as much as I could get.”
“You did fine.”
“You’re intending to play?”
“More than intending. I’m counting on it.”
There was another small silence. Waverly stole a sideways glance at her. The serenity was gone out of her face. Her eyes, puzzled, troubled, were fixed on the trail of foam unzippering the sea in the wake of the ship. Finally she said, “Can I ask you something, Tim?”
“Ask away.”
“Those scars on your body. How did you get them?”
Earlier, lying beside him in the cabin, she had run a finger along one of those scars, looked at him curiously, but said nothing. And he had volunteered nothing. Now he said lightly, making light of it best as he could, “In the argot of the world I inhabit, I got my melon thumped a few times. More than a few, I guess.”
“And the trouble you’re in now. This game coming up. They’re all somehow a part of that world?”
“There’s a connection, yes.”
“After it’s over, the game, then what?”
“After that, I honestly don’t know.”
She turned and faced him, and in her distressed rising voice there was an echo of the emotional civil war sundering her heart. “I want to see you again, Tim. I need to. Once more, anyway.”
I want, I need, I must have: Grant me just this one want and I’ll be happy, content; well, maybe that one, too, maybe one other, one more. What a bundle of urgent wants we are, Waverly was thinking, all of us. And he heard himself replying, “I want the same thing.”
And as they sat there nurturing their wants, the ship came through the Lake Worth Inlet, passed under the looming shadow of Peanut Island, and steamed toward the port. “Let’s watch,” Caroline said, and so they stood at the rail, staring at the garish blaze of lights on shore. The ship eased laterally into the pier, nudged it. Casually, almost as a kind of throwaway mention, Caroline said, “I think maybe I won’t be going back to Houston next week. Maybe I’ll be going with you instead.”
Waverly looked at her searchingly. “You ‘think’?”
“That’s what I think tonight.”
“Even without your children?”
“Even then.”
In the depths of those luminous eyes of hers Waverly saw, or thought he saw, realms of vast possibility, infinite hope. He was crowded with feelings for which there were no words. And curiously, when his own eyes scanned the lot behind the port entry building, as they instinctively did, the black Mustang was nowhere to be seen. He felt suddenly as if he had been gifted with a peculiar prescient vision of moving toward some event, as yet undefined, but monumental and inevitable and outside the boundaries of his control, still another surprise ahead in a life full of turmoil and ambushed dreams and terrible, terrible surprises. “I promise nothing,” he said.
“Neither do I.”
D’Marco was drunk. First time in longer than he could remember, years. Head inflated, skin prickly, face flushed, eyes whiskey-glazed, speech slurred, limbs slack, a lazy warmth seeping outward from his chest to his farthest extremities, scalp, fingertips, toes—no mistaking it, he was surely drunk. In evidence was the seriously tapped jug of Jim Beam sitting on the table beside him, half of Sigurd’s—Burt’s—surprise. Sitting all squirmy sexy wiggly on his lap, nuzzling his neck, was the other half: Miss Rhode Ass Island, if not this year’s then last—some recent vintage, anyway. Look at her: spill of platinum hair, jade green eyes shadowed in violet, round red targets of rouge on cheekbones cut with the precision of a diamond, pouty mouth large and glittery with lip gloss—holy Christ, looked like a rich confection there, three-layer cake drenched in frosting and topped with a puff of whipped cream. Like your wildest, most forbidden, most deeply buried pornographic dream sprung to life. Come true. With a woman, he didn’t even want to try remembering how long it had been. Long.
“Ooh, such muscles,” she cooed, honeyed voice. One of her hands was inside his shirt, stroking the deep cleft between his pecs; the other clutched at a partly flexed bicep. Spectacular hands she had, the fingers practiced, nimble, sure, the nails scarlet talons. Ball-squeezer hands. Pud-pullers.
D’Marco gave in to her satiny touch, to the delicious, wondrous sensation of being still alive. Instead of dead. He brought the bicep to a tight swelling peak. “Yeah, I got pretty fair set a cannons on me,” he allowed modestly, sloshing the words. His tongue felt furry, too thick for his mouth.
“But your neck,” she murmured, brushing moist and slightly parted lips over the raw welt, “what happened to it?”
“Uh…that…uh…”
He was rescued from a reply by Burt’s voice booming in off the deck behind them, trailed by Maylene’s squealy giggle: “Yo, Jake, we havin’ any fun yet?”
Without looking over his shoulder—neck still much too tender for that—D’Marco lifted a leaden arm and polished the smoky air in response. “Fun,” he repeated. “Yeah, right, fun. Gettin’ there. Gettin’ close.”
“How come he calls you Jake?” asked Miss R.I. “Thought you said your name was D’Marco.”
“Nah, it’s Jake. Was jus’ pullin’ your leg.”
She licked his ear. “I like D’Marco better,” she said. “Sounds so strong. Hard.”
Too late to go back on it now. Too bad. For tonight, at least, he was Jake. Sigurd’s idea—Burt and Jake. Another of his fuckin’ theories. And she was Brooke or Belinda or Brigitte, something like that, something with a goddam b in it somewhere. She had her slim elegant legs draped provocatively over the arm of the chair, Brooke-Belinda-Brigitte did. Now she brought one knee up near his chest, exposing even more of both creamy thighs, barely covered anyway by the denim mini already riding perilously high, barely clearing the crotch. “Speaking of leg-pulling…” she said.
Or started to say, for just then Maylene, announced by her vile perfume, came tromping through the slider, proclaiming in hog-caller bray, “Gotta pee.” Maylene wore a mini-skirt, too, revealing elephant thighs, ponderous, thick, shapeless, and mottled on their backsides with fat bubbles that, in Sigurd/Burt theory, gave away her insatiable lusts. She wagged her head at Belinda (D’Marco had settled on that one, liked the silky melody of it) and said, “You wanna come along, honey?”
“I’ll just freshen up a little,” Belinda whispered in his ear, and she slid off his lap, ran a meaningful lingering hand over the bulge in his pants, and addressing it directly, said, “Don’t go away, now.”
The pair of them, elephant and sleek gazelle, a study in polarities, disappeared behind the door to the can.
Sigurd lurched into the room. All the buttons on his shirt were undone. His sun-toasted belly swelled over his belt. A film of sweat slicked his forehead. His eyes were fogged, mouth set in a lopsided grin, pinch of a cigarette dangling rakishly. In his hand was a water glass full of Beam. With inebriate caution he lowered his rump onto a bed. He said, “So whaddys think so far, big Jaker?”
“ ’Bout what?”
“Rhode Island. I give you the straight goods on that one, or what?”
“That one you got straight,” D’Marco affirmed.
“Some set a hooters on her, hey. You road-test ’em yet?”
“Yeah, sure, course I did,” D’Marco mumbled, though in fact he had yet to make contact with any of the Belinda treasures. Even loosened by drink, some natural reserve, the distancing imposed by the iron edicts of the mythology of his life, forestalled him.
“Tonight’s the night, my man,” Sigurd declared with a slow-motion wink. “Fuck, suck, and run amok.”
D’Marco motioned impatiently at the bathroom door. “What’s takin’ so long?”
“Give ’em time,” said the worldly-wise Burt. “They gettin’ themselves primed, way twats always gotta do. Be out, minute. Then it’s quick as a wink you’re in the stink, hey. Get the job done right.” He gulped some Beam. Made a whistling noise through his teeth. His brow furrowed in what appeared to be the effort of thought. He snapped a finger. “Oh yeah, job talk, almost forgot. When I was out on the deck there I seen the mark come in across the street. Squeeze dropped him off. So we still doin’ ours. Job, I mean. Little sideline squiffin’, that don’t hurt none.”
D’Marco nodded. A remote corner of his bleared brain took in this intelligence, processed and recorded it, but he didn’t say anything. The whole night was so bizarre, so inverted, he didn’t want to think about it right now. Didn’t really give a fuck, actually. He was grateful just to be alive, still walking around inside his skin. For now, this moment, the one upcoming soon as that door swung open and the Rhode Island vision came gliding through it—for now that was enough. Plenty.
Maylene and Belinda suddenly appeared. And wordlessly, as if on signal, everyone moved somewhere, purposefully and, through D’Marco’s eyes, eyes of the unseasoned drunk, at a suddenly accelerated pace, fast-forward blur: there was Maylene, stripping off her blouse and plopping onto a bed, legs twin pillars in the air as she tugged at her skirt; there was Sigurd, fumbling with his belt, dropping his pants and his boxer drawers and falling across her; and there was Belinda approaching him, slipping gracefully out of her skirt and halter top, clasping his wrist and drawing him out of the chair and leading him to the unoccupied bed and reaching behind her and dousing the light, and then drawing him down, down, into a tangle of limbs and a swamp of moist steamy aromas, urging him on, directing him by touch—go here, go there—uttering pleasured yips and crooning, “Now baby sweets honeydip now yes now now…”; and there he was, D’Marco Fontaine (or Jake), thinking What’ve I missed—Where’ve I been?
Later, he lay on his back, arms flung out, head whirling, senses reeling. Stuporous, numb.
Sigurd’s sly, slushy voice filtered through the dark and the silence settled over the beds. “Anybody up for little switch meat?”
Nobody answered.
Sigurd gave it a moment and then tried again. “Y’know how the song go: ‘Pig knuckles and rice, / You eat it once and you want it twice.’ ”
Both girls giggled.
D’Marco heard rustling sounds, felt movement on the bed. Hands pawed at him, groped in secret private places alien hands had never before intruded and penetrated. He was too emptied to speak, or protest. And then a mass of panting flesh descended on him, and astonishingly a fresh surge rose through his loins. He grasped doughy grinding buttocks and the backs of two lumpy thighs, and discovered, to his amazement and utter disbelief, at least one of Sigurd’s (Burt’s) loopy theories was right after all.
TWENTY
Waverly woke early the next morning, hauled by Bennie’s roupy snores out of a slumber dream-riddled, unsatisfactory, and brief. Off and on, mostly on, for the next thirty hours he listened to the sotted memories and deepening alarms of a partner sinking fast into a doom-struck torpor, offering sterile assurances where he could, and watching a phone that stubbornly refused to ring. Sometimes, nodding at appropriate junctures in one of the wandering B. Epstein chronicles of the past, Waverly found himself concocting fanciful visions of escape, a bold flight to some remote outpost somewhere outside the reach of shadowy, vengeful shooters, a life with Caroline Crown (make that Vanzoren; his fantasy—why not?) of bland routines, predictable patterns, small happy commonplace problems with agreeable resolutions. Till his eyes refocused on this desolate pouchy fellow rooted to a La-Z-Boy in a corner of a scummy beach apartment, this man by nature and experience possessed of a shrewd, unclouded, elementary, and yes, ultimately benign view of the world, this benefactor and unlikely friend, caught in a crosshatched web of low schemes and deceits and paybacks none of his own making, and reduced now to inertia and despair—and seeing him that way, Waverly’s enchanted vision of another life dissolved like the filmy disjointed imagery of a fantastic dream.
At about two o’clock Sunday afternoon the telephone finally rattled, and Waverly, long past dissembling, bolted off the couch and picked up the receiver on the second ring and heard with a mix of disappointment and relief the blustery voice of Robbie Crown demanding, “Tim, that you?” Waverly confirmed that it was. Robbie told him the game was definitely on. Waverly said fine. Then in a tone studiedly neutral, all the bluster gone out of it, Robbie said they really ought to get together today, run by time and venue and arrangements, details like that, and “some other business.” He knows, Waverly thought; Where and when? he asked carefully. Somewhere out of the way, Robbie suggested, where they could pop a couple, talk; away from The Island, he specified. Waverly proposed the Crazy Horse on North Lake. He started to give directions, but Robbie said he knew the place, could be there in an hour. It was settled: three o’clock, the Crazy Horse.
Bennie was dozing. Just as well. One fewer not-so-happy problem to deal with. Waverly scribbled a vague note and left it on the counter. He slipped across the room and lifted the keys to the Seville from the pile of change on the coffee table. Outside, first time in two days, he was assaulted by a corrosive heat, and he had to pause a moment and adjust his eyes against a violent glare of sun in a white sky. Consequently, he missed the prying gaze leveled from behind the partly cracked open door to Oh Boy O’Boyle’s unit.
Fifteen minutes later, well ahead of the appointed hour, he swung the Seville into the near-empty Crazy Horse lot. He took a table in a corner by a window. Ordered a ginger ale. It had been a while, three months or more, since the last time he was in here. He looked around. The walls were adorned with Crazy Horse T-shirts and framed photos of nubile young ladies in Crazy Horse tank tops. There was lively piped-in music, but it seemed to have no brightening effect whatsoever on the handful of morose Sunday-afternoon drinkers anchored to their bar stools. None of them looked familiar, or threatening. He thought about rehearsing some responses for this upcoming exchange, but when nothing came to him he gave it up and simply waited.
