“I call her Liza,” Stranahan said. “Liza with a z.”
Tina nodded as if she thought it was a perfectly cute name. She asked if she could try a toss.
“You bet.” Stranahan got the last pinfish from the bucket and placed it carefully in the palm of her hand. “Just throw it anywhere,” he said.
Tina leaned forward and called out, “Here Liza! Here you go!”
The little fish landed with a soft splash and spun a dizzy figure eight under the dock. The barracuda didn’t move.
Stranahan smiled. In slow motion the addled pinfish corkscrewed its way to the bottom, taking refuge inside an old horse conch.
“Wh at’d I do wrong?” Tina wondered.
“Not a thing,” Stranahan said. “She wasn’t hungry anymore, that’s all.”
“Maybe it’s just me.”
“Maybe it is,” Stranahan said.
He took her by the hand and led her upstairs. He turned on the lights in the house and vented the shutters on both sides to catch the cool night breeze. On the roof, the windmill creaked as it picked up speed.
Tina made a place for herself on a faded lumpy soda. She said, “I always wondered what it’s like out here in the dark.”
“Not much to do, I’m afraid.”
“NoTV?”
“No TV,” Stranahan said.
“You want to make love?”
“There’s an idea.”
“You already saw me naked.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Stranahan said. “The thing is-”
“Don’t worry about Richie. Anyway, this is just for fun. We’ll keep it casual, okay?”
“I don’t do anything casually,” Stranahan said, “This is my problem.” He was constantly falling in love; how else would you explain five marriages, all to cocktail waitresses?
Tina peeled off the tropical T-shirt and draped it across a barstool. Rockette-style, she kicked her way out of her bikini bottoms and left them in a rumple on the floor.
“How about these tan lines, huh?”
“What tan lines?” he asked.
“Exactly.” Tina pulled the rubber band out of her ponytail and shook her hair free. Then she got back on the sofa and said, “Watch this.” She stretched out and struck a smokey-eyed modeling pose-a half-turn up on one elbow, legs scissored, one arm shading her nipples.
“That looks great,” Stranahan said, amused but also uneasy.
“It’s tough work on a beach,” Tina remarked. “Sand sticks to places you wouldn’t believe. I did a professional job, though.”
“I’m sure.”
“Thanks to you, I got my confidence back. About my boobs, I mean.” She glanced down at herself appraisingly. “Confidence is everything in the modeling business,” she said. “Somebody tells you that your ass is sagging or your tits don’t match up, it’s like an emotional disaster. I was worried sick until you measured them with that carpenter’s thing.”
“Glad I could help,” Stranahan said, trying to think of something, anything, more romantic.
She said, “Anyone ever tell you that you’ve got Nick Nolte’s nose?”
“That’s all?” Stranahan said. Nick Nolte was a new one.
“ Now the eyes,” Tina said, “your eyes are more like Sting’s. I met him one time at the Strand.”
“Thank you,” Stranahan said. He didn’t know who the hell she was talking about. Maybe one of the those pro wrestlers from cable television.
Holding her pose, Tina motioned him to join her on the old sofa. When he did, she took his hands, placed them on her staunch new breasts, and held them there. Stranahan assumed a compliment was in order.
“They’re perfect,” he said, squeezing politely.
Urgently Tina arched her back and rolled over, Stranahan hanging on like a rock climber.
“While we’re on the subject,” he said, “could I get the name of your surgeon?”
Even before the electrolysis accident, Chemo had led a difficult life. His parents had belonged to a religious sect that believed in bigamy, vegetarianism, UFOs, and not paying federal income taxes; his mother, father and three of their respective spouses were killed by the FBI during a bloody ten-day siege at a post office outside Grand Forks, North Dakota. Chemo, who was only six at the time, went to live with an aunt and uncle in the Amish country of western Pennsylvania. It was a rigorous and demanding period, especially since Chemo’s aunt and uncle were not actually Amish themselves, but fair-weather Presbyterians fleeing a mail-fraud indictment out of Bergen County, New Jersey.
Using their hard-won embezzlements, the couple had purchased a modest farm and somehow managed to infiltrate the hermetic social structure of an Amish township. At first it was just another scam, a temporary cover until the heat was off. As the years passed, though, Chemo’s aunt and uncle got authentically converted. They grew to love the simple pastoral ways and hearty fellowship of the farm folk; Chemo was devastated by their transformation. Growing up, he had come to resent the family’s ruse, and consequently the Amish in general. The plain baggy clothes and strict table manners were bad enough, but it was the facial hair that drove him to fury. Amish men do not shave their chins, and Chemo’s uncle insisted that, once attaining puberty, he adhere to custom. Since religious arguments held no sway with Chemo, it was the practical view that his uncle propounded: All fugitives need a disguise, and a good beard was hard to beat.
Chemo sullenly acceded, until the day of his twenty-first birthday when he got in his uncle’s pickup truck, drove down to the local branch of the Chemical Bank, threatened a teller with a pitchfork (the Amish own no pistols), and strolled off with seven thousand dollars and change. The first thing he bought was a Bic disposable safety razor.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that it was the only bank robbery by an Amish in the entire history of the commonwealth. Chemo himself was never arrested for the crime, but his aunt and uncle were unmasked, extradited back to New Jersey, tried and convicted of mail fraud, then shipped off to a country-club prison in north Florida. Their wheat farm was seized by the U.S. government and sold at auction.
Once Chemo was free of the Amish, the foremost challenge of adulthood was avoiding manual labor, to which he had a chronic aversion. Crime seemed to be the most efficient way of making money without working up a sweat, so Chemo gave it a try. Unfortunately, nature had dealt him a cruel disadvantage: While six foot nine was the perfect height for an NBA forward, for a burglar it was disastrous. Chemo got stuck in the very first window he ever jimmied; he could break, but he could not enter.
Four months in a county jail passes too slowly. He thought often of his aunt and uncle, and upbraided himself for not taking advantage of their vast expertise. They could have taught him many secrets about white-collar crime, yet in his rebellious insolence he had never bothered to ask. Now it was too late-their most recent postcard from the Eglin prison camp had concluded with a religious limerick and the drawing of a happy face. Chemo knew they were lost forever.
After finishing his stretch for the aborted burglary, he moved to a small town outside of Scranton and went to work for the city parks and recreation department. Before long, he parlayed a phony but impressive resume into the post of assistant city manager, a job that entitled him to a secretary and a municipal car. White the salary was only twenty thousand dollars a year, the secondary income derived from bribes and kickbacks was substantial. Chemo prospered as a shakedown artist, and the town prospered, too. He was delighted to discover how often the mutual interests of private enterprise and government seemed to intersect.
The high point of Chemo’s municipal career was his savvy trashing of local zoning laws to allow a Mafia-owned-and-operated dog food plant to be built in the suburbs. Three hundred new jobs were created, and there was talk of running Chemo for major.
He greatly liked the idea and immediately began gouging illegal political contributions out of city contractors. Soon a campaign poster was designed, but Chemo recoiled when he saw the finished product: the four-foot photographic blowup of his face magnified the two ingrown hair follicles on the tip of his otherwise normal nose; the blemishes looked, in Chemo’s own distraught simile, “like two ticks fucking.” He ordered the campaign posters shredded, scheduled a second photo session, and drove straight to Scranton for the ill-fated electrolysis treatment.