The need within him was rising, building like steam, his need for sex-plus. Sex-plus was a fulfillment that, he knew, average men never dream of; but it was his ultimate gratification. It came at a price, though, and the price was the need itself — the wanting — which was like hunger and thirst and a drug craving rolled into one. It was time to mark this territory and move on. He was first out in the shift rotation tonight and would be packed up and headed for Colorado in a few days, disappearing back into the floating world of the seasonal waiter. The time was right, like planets aligning in his favor. He would have to find the right one. He would try tonight.
“Robert?”
It would be Holcomb, the day-shift manager; the only one who addressed him by his real name. Hands on hips, Holcomb was standing just inside the doorway. He said, “You think you might dust the paddle fans anytime soon?”
Because he was tall, this was one of Waitron’s side-work duties. He dead-eyed Holcomb for a beat or two. “When I finish this,” he said, ashing his cigarette on the plank floor.
Holcomb went back inside.
There was nothing else Holcomb could say and they both knew it — the season was ending. Waitron turned his attentions back to the beach. How many between the ages of twelve and twenty-four? How many with the correct hair? The right body?
Now a hammering noise broke his reverie — a man replacing shingles atop the main building of the restaurant. Waitron watched him with detachment. The roofer was one of those construction worker types that, a few seasons ago, were everywhere in Destin. Scruffy hair and beard, shirtless and tanned impossibly dark, one of the numberless rabble drawn from the rural areas of the Southeast by the building boom now fizzling out along the Emerald Coast of the Florida Panhandle. He was just under medium-sized, monkey-built, a creature of sinew and vein. He wore a tool belt over cutoff jeans and a pair of filthy tennis shoes. To Waitron, he was a perfect specimen of his class: a cracker, a variety of Georgia/northern-Florida white trash whose life revolved around semiskilled labor, cheap beer, and trailer park squabbles. It must be 120 degrees up there, Waitron mused — how does he stand it?
As if he could feel someone staring, the roofer stopped work and eased into a squatting position against the low slope of the roof, forearms resting on his knees, hammer dangling from one hand. He stared back at Waitron. The roofer had a crude tattoo — an eye — on his left triceps. A warning floated up from Waitron’s memory. The roofer continued to stare at him with pale eyes set in a hawkish face. Waitron turned away.
Oakley paced the balcony, grinding on the mood he was in. “They call us trailer trash,” he said. “And because the world has tarred us with this appellation, we are condemned to a brutish existence.”
“I reckon what we’re called is an accident of our births,” Sparrow responded mildly. “I don’t feel like trash.” He’d been pounding nails since five a.m. in the broiling heat. Now freshly showered and in clean clothing, all he wanted was to relax with this beer while the sun set on the beautiful Gulf below. “You read some Hobbes when you were up in Fountain?”
“Yeah, I read Leviathan. I read that copy of The Peloponnesian War you sent. I read a lot. Ain’t nothing changed: you do your forty-cent-an-hour job, you do your reps at the weight pile, you go to chow when they call you, and you sleep when it’s lights out. There’s still lotsa time left over to advance your education.”
“You didn’t go Mao-Marxist on me did you?” Sparrow joked.
“Nah. I’m just saying...”
Oakley had been out for three weeks. His doomed fascination with a jewelry store up in Dothan had bought him a stretch of two years and ten months.
Sparrow and Oakley had been best friends since grade school in a nameless, sun-struck tract of Section Eight housing on the outskirts of Mary Esther, Florida — itself a strip mall of a town that owed its existence to neighboring Eglin Air Force Base. They had shared the highs as well as the misery, looking out for each other in stir and out.
They were on the balcony of Oakley’s second-floor crash in the old Spindrift Motel, a fifties-era relic, now condemned — pilings washed out by a June hurricane had destabilized the western wing. By this time next year, the pastel high-rise depicted on the billboard out front would take its place. Oakley was living there on the sly through the beneficence of Two-Eleven, the Spindrift’s onetime handyman, now caretaker-cum-watchman pro tem and old jailing buddy to them both. It was no big deal to Two-Eleven, as he figured to be let go when the developer sent the dozers in — which might be any day now.
With two hundred feet of sand-covered extension cord, Oakley was stealing enough electricity from the absentee owners of the condo next door to power a refrigerator, a fifteen-gallon hot water heater, and a couple of lamps. There was no A/C, but it was late September, so the heat was tolerable for sleeping — just. Money for the necessities came in from day trips as a deckhand on the charter boats out of East Pass, baiting hooks for tourists, cleaning their catches, swabbing the decks and gunnels, lugging ice — the flunky work of a nautical factotum. But Oakley, not one to take direction in the first place and chafing at the dictatorial manner of the charter captains, was gaining a reputation as a malcontent on the marina. His other source of income, he’d told Sparrow, was “odd jobs.”
They watched a young couple stroll out to the water’s edge and settle onto a blanket. For Sparrow, the girl added a carload of black chips to the quality of the beachscape. She was a stunner, a corn-silk blonde not older than twenty. In defiance of a municipal ordinance laid down by the local guardians of social order, she was wearing a thong — coral in hue, a mere afterthought in terms of beachwear. Sparrow shivered. “You get laid since you got out?”
“Went and saw Amber a couple of times while that sheriff’s deputy she moved in with was on duty, but she’s turning into a candidate for Girls Gone Wild.”
Sparrow remembered the hot-and-haughty Amber. He emitted a dry laugh.
Oakley studied the thong girl for a moment and then looked away, as if the sight of her caused him pain. “I got money on my mind, bro. I lack funding. A man can’t be who he really is without money. Which brings up my next point: I need to find Davy Redstone.”
“Davy Redstone the fence?”
“Yeah. He owes me three dimes from that pawnshop B-and-E that I pulled before I went in. I heard he’s hanging out at a bar north of the 331 Bridge, a slop chute called the Owl’s Eye. I need you to go with me. I need you to watch my back.”
“That was four years ago. Redstone’s gonna balk on you.”
“I will stress to him that a debt is a debt. He gives me any shit, I’ll have to tune him up.”
Sparrow nodded. He did not doubt that the prospects for violencia were distinct, if not imminent. Along with the alpha-dog precepts of your seasoned convict, Oakley had the muscle and the martial portfolio to back up a volatile nature. Problem was: Redstone traveled with an entourage. If it came to a dustup, they would be bucking the law of superior numbers.
“He’ll have his homies cheek by jowl,” Sparrow said.
“I got no choice.”
“I’m there for you, bro.”
Watch my back was the undeniable — the unquestionable — call for support between them. And Sparrow’s response was gold-standard true, true at the risk of incarceration, true past the point of injury, true unto death. It was his duty to a bond forged out of old hard limes.
Duty. At one time, Sparrow would have greeted violent confrontation in service of this bond with gritty cheer. But he had turned thirty-three in March. Somewhere, Sparrow had read that thirty-three is an introspective watershed for even the thickest of men: they come to the sit-up-in-bed realization that times are flying. Like the tolling of a giant bell, it had been no different for him. He had been into some kind of criminality since the age of twelve — all of it larcenous, some of it violent, most of it with Oakley. But during his latest left-handed endeavor, Oakley had been behind bars. It was in collusion with an Atlanta-based counterfeiter — a former penitentiary colleague — that Sparrow spent two months passing bogus twenties in the Caribbean. The Feds were waiting for him at the gate at Miami International. On a half-dozen surveillance videos, he starred as the prosecution’s witness against himself.