Julia decided she needed a break. Though it was July, she had her mind made up on Miami Beach. Harry went along with it, figuring the town would be dead. He pictured himself on an empty beach, Julia rubbing oil into his shoulders, but they landed in a neon-charged netherworld combusting with flashy hipsters untroubled by a single thought and a Eurotrash factor that made Soho feel like a mall in Topeka. There were a bunch of them in on it, this goofy road trip. Julia’s whole circle was there.
It started in a Mexican restaurant. Harry was picking at a plate of quesadillas, and Julia was drinking margaritas and doing blow with a friend of hers named Yves. It would be just like Julia to trot out her boarding school French for this frog, and he corrected her when she needed it. Frequently. They giggled and played knees-y on the banquette.
Harry wasn’t drinking, but when they got to Lefty’s, a velvet rope dive, he ordered a double Dewar’s and a beer, and lost Julia and Yves in the crowd. An hour and two doubles later, he found them. Yves with his hand up her skirt. Julia’s tongue in the Frenchman’s mouth.
He shoved his way across the dance floor and said, not to one or the other, “What am I, some kind of fucking asshole?”
Yves made Julia step away, like he had an idea he was going to get tough. He started to say something in his fractured English, and Harry popped him with a left and a right and followed with a hook that missed because Yves was on his ass, looking up.
The big difference between the South Beach fight and the brawl at Sailor Randy’s was this: Harry got beaten like a borrowed mule.
He held his own against the bouncers, who were big and slow and didn’t know how to fight, but they pinballed him out the door, which is where he laid nine months of time on the jaw of Officer Kenneth Simms, then half the Miami Beach police force used him as a punching bag. This was the way he lost his teeth, if Aggie was wondering.
The weeks before his trial felt like one long day. He kept hoping Julia would appear, serious and sorry, a cashier’s check in her purse, but Julia and that moment never arrived, and before long he was pulling nine months of a year bid, including time served, twenty-three days.
The judge would’ve let Harry slide on the bullshit possession rap if he hadn’t punched Simms into the X-ray room, but his public defender, whose angry African-American-ness didn’t help Harry at all, refused to plea him out. This pissed off the judge like a charm, and when he handed down the sentence, he wasn’t even looking at Harry. He burned slow, shaking his head at the black PD.
“This is the problem,” he told Aggie. “My entire life has been getting fucked up and stealing and fighting, but it’s starting to feel less and less like me. You know what I’m saying? That fight at Sailor Randy’s? Last thing I wanted to have anything to do with.”
“That’s what Bryce pays you for,” Aggie said. “You were doing your job.”
“That’s what I mean. When I was moving blow, I was doing my job. When I was stealing TVs, I was doing my job. I don’t want to do jobs like that.”
Which presented a dilemma. He didn’t know anything else.
One thing he made sure Aggie understood, he never walked in anywhere behind a gun, and he never threatened to hurt anybody if they didn’t give up their wallet or their watch. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t lift a wallet on a rush-hour bus, but that was a different kind of crime. Any job that involved a gun, it wasn’t for him.
Using the gun, that is. He sold lots of guns. There was a good buck in that.
Sometimes he thought he might actually do something to change his life, but what? Unlike a lot of hoods, Harry never dreamed of the Big Score. His thinking didn’t run like that. The hustle was just to get him through one day and into the next. Harry Healy was textbook small time, and he knew it.
“What about your family?” Aggie said. “Your brother, the one on TV?”
Harry was a mistake, born when his mother was fortythree. He had two brothers, ten and fifteen years older. Ernie lived in North Carolina, and Arthur, the big Wall Street man, owned a house on Long Island that Harry used to visit on Christmas.
His mother worked forty years at the phone company, right up till the time she got sick. Diagnosed with liver cancer, she was gone, goodbye, six months. Harry was sixteen.
The old man was a trumpet player. Never had any kind of job besides playing trumpet. He still worked, or anyway was working off and on the last time Harry talked to him. Harry James was the old man’s idol. Harry didn’t get that one. Harry James was a suck-ass trumpet player if you asked Harry.
He hadn’t talked to his father, or his brothers, since, well, he didn’t remember, but it was a good long time.
What Harry had been doing all this time was waiting for something to save him. He didn’t know what. An event, a person, something, some vague thing, was going to pull him up and turn his life around. He usually caved in for the rich-chick-as-savior scenario, which is where he supposed Julia fit, but just look at how that one turned out.
Like after he read that Brooke Astor was dissolving her Foundation, giving away the last of her money before she went down for the long count, Harry thought, If she only kicked a million or so my way, I’d be set. He pictured himself above the fold of the Times, beaming, flanking an Ed McMahon-sized check with the ancient Mrs. Astor. Harry had it spec’d out to the shoes he was going to wear.
Maybe he’d waited long enough.
“My family,” Harry said. He let out a breath.
Every time Harry saw her, Darlene was looking better and better. The dermatologist gave her some pills that knocked out that skin condition, and she was coming off trashy and sexy in her cut-offs and halter, her baby-fine hair pulled back like a schoolgirl’s. He waved to her from his end of the driveway as he was letting himself into his room.
Harry had chipped a hole in the wall behind the hot water pipe, covered the hole with masking tape, then slapped some paint that almost matched over the tape. His money was in a Marlboro box in the hole. Winding some small bills around the fifties and hundreds, he stuffed the knot into his jacket and buttoned the pocket flap.
He packed his duffel bag and folded the promotional t-shirts he’d accumulated at Sailor Randy’s. He left the shirts in a stack on the bed. Darlene could help herself to them, cut them in half, some brand new halter tops for the siren of the Wind N’ Sand.
He stuck his head through the window that opened on an alley. All clear. He dropped his bag and climbed out feet first. Cutting through the alley, he walked into some weeds still wet with a rain he didn’t remember, and came out in a parking lot, where Aggie was waiting at the wheel of her Miata.
She wasn’t talking, so Harry went over his story one more time. Leo, Manfred, the Surfside two. What happened, he had no idea, but he didn’t shoot Manfred. Were they clear on that? Because there was a great chance the police were going to want to talk to her before too long.
“And you think you got set up,” she said.
“No,” Harry said. “No extra information. Don’t do their job for them. Let them do it. You don’t know anything. Nothing. You got it?”
She stared at the road, the wind sculpting her short hair into a quiff. Harry had her drive him to Boynton Beach, and when they found the bus station, Aggie went in and bought him a ticket to Philadelphia.
Without the highway to distract them, and with a halfhour wait yawning, the tension was like a bug-zapper crackling over the wheezing of the buses. It attacked Harry’s neck, that tension, but he didn’t want to be the one who spoke first. He didn’t know what to say.
Aggie said, “All I want to know is, where do I fit in?”
Harry flipped his cigarette to the asphalt and said,