“You sure? We can’t cook ’em in our motel rooms, Cap.”
“No, thanks,” Bob says. “I’m sick of fish.”
“Are you, now? I’d say you’re in the wrong business, then, Cap. What would you say?” The man swings open the door of the restaurant and takes a step inside.
“I’d say you’re right,” Bob answers, and he slides into his car and slams the door shut. Now, he thinks, let’s hope this sonofabitch starts. He turns the key in the ignition, and the engine kicks over easily and catches. Thank Christ for something.
The Chevy wagon shudders and rattles slowly away from the marina, passes out of the parking lot and cuts behind the blond, three-story apartment building and pool, and Bob looks automatically up and sees Ave Boone standing on his tiny terrace overhead, shirtless in cut-off jeans, a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other. Champagne-colored fiberglass drapes swell through the sliding glass doors behind Ave, and behind those drapes, Bob knows, the girl Honduras lies naked or nearly naked on the king-sized bed, her wet belly cooling under the slow-turning overhead fan. It’s a little past noon, Ave and his girlfriend have been awake for maybe an hour, and they’ve probably fucked twice, made each other gin and tonics, smoked a couple of cigarettes and listened to a new Willie Nelson tape, and now Ave has come out for a bit of air and sunshine before he showers, shaves, dresses, has lunch at the Clam Shack and strolls down the pier to his Tiara, which he’s named Angel Blue, after a famous movie star, he explained to Bob.
He’ll hose down the decks, check the fuel tanks, and when Tyrone has finished filleting the two dozen fish caught by the insurance men from Missouri and has cleaned up the Belinda Blue, he and Ave will leave Moray Key, heading south by Teatable Key Channel under the bridge, southeasterly to the reef and then west, across open sea toward the Bahamas, Andros Island, Nassau. Bob has asked him why he makes these trips with only Tyrone aboard, and Ave has explained that he is “getting into gambling a little lately.” He wrapped his arm around Bob’s shoulder and added, “Also, pardner, I’m getting to know a lot of the big-time fishermen over there. I’m trying to get a shot on American Sportsman, that TV show. Maybe take Jerry Lewis or Kenny Rogers out for marlin. You got to know the right people for a shot like that. Publicity like that, pal, you’re set for life.”
It makes sense, as do most of Ave’s easy, confident explanations of behavior that, to Bob, is often puzzling. What he, Bob Dubois, does every day of the week — take out in the Belinda Blue whoever will pay him for it, and when there’s no one to pay him for it, hang around the marina waiting for customers, putter around the boat, clean and oil tackle, study and memorize charts, drink beer and gossip with the other idle fishermen — that makes sense. But what Avery Boone does every day of the week — sleep till noon, play with Honduras and her friends, disappear on the Angel Blue with Tyrone every few days for a day and a night and sometimes more — that frequently does not make sense. Not to Bob. A man likes to be able to explain the things in his life that puzzle him, because if he can’t, he may have to accept his wife’s explanations for them, which in this case means that Bob would have to accept Elaine’s often-voiced, worried explanation of Ave’s behavior. “He’s in the drug business, Bob, don’t you realize that? Can’t you see the obvious, for heaven’s sake?”
Bob lifts one hand from the steering wheel and flips a wave at Ave on the terrace above. Ave makes a signal for him to stop, and Bob brakes the car and gets out. The sun is behind Ave’s head, and Bob visors his eyes with the flat of his hand. “What’s up?”
“You have a party this morning?”
“Yeah. Four guys.”
“How was it?”
“Okay. Buncha trout and redfish from out by Twin Key Bank.”
“No bonefish?”
“They wanted stuff they could land. You know.”
“Assholes.”
“Yeah.”
Ave takes a sip from his drink. “We gotta talk soon, Bob,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You’ve been going out — what — three, four half days a week, maybe a full day now and then?”
“Yeah. Now and then.”
“This time of year, we should be booked solid three weeks in advance, seven days a week.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s the recession, I guess,” Bob says in a low voice. “The fucking Arabs.”
“How’re you making it, buddy?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Dollar-wise.”
“Oh, okay,” Bob says. “Fine, actually. Listen, I gotta get home. Ruthie’s been sick.”
“Okay, sure. We’ll talk, though, right?”
“Yeah, sure. We’ll talk,” Bob says, and he slides back into the car, closes the door and slowly drives away, out the sandy, unpaved lane toward the highway, past the piles of steel rods and mesh, cinder blocks, sand and building materials stacked for the second condominium building. The developers from Miami have plans for a half-dozen buildings, forty apartments to a building, and a shopping center, a much improved and enlarged marina and restaurant, a nightclub, a nine-hole golf course, until the entire island has been stripped and laid out, covered over from the bay to the gulf with buildings, pavement and small plots of cropped grass kept fresh and minty green by slowly turning sprinklers.
Bob turns left onto Route 1, crosses the bridge onto Upper Matecumbe, and a few miles down the road, just south of Islamorada, turns right onto a bumpy dirt road not much wider than a path. He drives through clumps of shrubby saw palmetto trees and bitterbrush for a quarter mile, to a clearing near the water, where he parks his car in front of one of three rusting, flaking house trailers situated on cinder blocks in no discernible relation to one another or the landscape. All three trailers have tall, wobbly-looking rooftop television antennas with guy wires staked to the ground. Scattered around the trailers are several rusted car chassis, old tires, tossed-out kitchen appliances, children’s toys and bicycles, a broken picnic table, a dinghy on sawhorses with a huge, ragged hole in it, a baby carriage with three wheels.
When Bob gets out of his car, a mangy German shepherd tied on a short rope to a cinder block under one corner of the trailer across the road stands and barks ferociously. Leaning down, Bob picks up a small chunk of coral rock and tosses it feebly in the direction of the dog, and the animal slinks back to the trailer and crawls underneath it.
A paunchy, middle-aged woman sitting on the stoop of the third trailer drawls, “Don’t let ol’ Horace catch you doin’ like that, Bob. He’d as soon you tossed rocks at his wife instead of his dog.” She’s wearing a wavy ash-blond wig, a pink cotton halter, and aqua shorts that cut into the flesh of her thighs. She’s smoking a cigarette and sits spread-legged, her elbows on her knees, a king-sized can of Colt 45 on the step next to her. “Hot,” she says. “Ain’t it.”
“Yeah, for January.”
“Inside, I mean. Wait’ll you go in. Elaine and the girls, all of ’em, they went swimming up the beach early, so your place’s been closed up all morning.”
Bob thinks, That’s good; he’ll be alone. He can drink a cold beer, maybe make himself a sandwich and take a nap. The trailer is small, thirty-three by ten feet, with one bedroom in the back and a closet-sized cubicle off it for Bob junior, or Robbie, as they’ve started calling him. Bob and Elaine sleep in the living room on a convertible sofa, and from the foot of the sofa, when it’s pulled into a bed, Bob can reach over the kitchen counter and open the refrigerator, turn on the propane stove, run water in the sink.
“She say when they was coming back?” Bob asks the woman, whose name is Allie Hubbell. She’s divorced, makes her living selling beadwork and shell jewelry to tourist shops along the Keys, lives alone and sometimes reminds Bob of his old New Hampshire girlfriend, Doris Cleeve, although Allie is about ten years older and, according to Elaine, may be a lesbian. “Why else would a nice, attractive woman her age live like that, all alone?” Elaine said impatiently, as if offering him a self-evident truth. Lots of reasons, Bob wanted to answer, but he didn’t say anything, because he was thinking of Doris Cleeve.