“ Hijo de puta!” Mike flicks his cigarette across the room and jumps to his feet. There’s a burst of red against the cinder block, and a smoldering ember on the carpet, and Mike’s chair tips back. He points at Carr. “The fuck is up with you? This thing is lined up like dominoes. What’s wrong with knocking it over?”
When he finally answers, Carr’s voice is quiet. “I said we don’t know enough yet.”
“I tell you what’s not enough,” Mike says, and he cups a hand around his crotch.
Bobby has stopped chewing, and Dennis is frozen at his keyboard. The room is silent but for the chugging of the air conditioner and the receding rumble of a jet. Blood rushes in Carr’s ears as he stands. “I don’t recall you ever making quite that argument to Declan, Mike.”
Mike smiles and steps forward. “That’s ’cause Deke had a pair.”
Carr nods. “And most of the time he managed not to confuse them with his brains.”
Mike steps forward until his chest is nearly touching Carr’s. He looks down at Carr and smiles wider. “That’s right, pendejo, I’m just a dumbass chicano. What the fuck do I know? What kinda dumbass thing will I do next?”
Carr forces his breathing down- inhale, exhale, not too fast. He can smell the cigarettes on Mike, and the coffee, and the cologne. He studies Mike’s throat-the pulse in his carotid artery, the soft spot below his Adam’s apple-and tenses his fingers. He nearly jumps at Dennis’s nervous cough.
“I… I know what Valerie would say if she were here.” Dennis’s voice is cracking. “Something like put ’em back in your pants. Don’t you think, Bobby?”
Bobby’s laugh is too loud. “Yeah, or maybe sit the fuck down. Right, Mike?”
Mike shrugs, but his gaze never leaves Carr. “She’s not here now. And what the fuck does she care how long this takes? She’s not living in this shithole. She’s like Carr-got herself a nice apartment with a view of the water and everything.”
“But that’s what she’d say, Mike, and she’d be right.” Bobby tries to catch Carr’s eye and fails. “She’d be right, Carr,” Bobby says. “We got to keep our heads in the work.”
“She’s not here now,” Carr says quietly.
Dennis stands, still holding his sub. “For chrissakes, I didn’t sign up for this kind of thing,” he says, and backs away until he hits the wall. When he does a large meatball is ejected from the end of his sandwich. It lands with a wet thud on the carpet between his feet. All three men turn to look first at Dennis, and then the meatball.
Bobby’s voice is low and grave. “Look at that-you made the kid shit himself.”
And then, suddenly, air returns to the room and the four men are laughing. Carr’s shoulders relax, and Latin Mike rights his overturned chair. “You better clean that up, Denny,” Mike says. “I don’t want to be steppin’ in it.”
“I don’t know,” Dennis says, “I think it goes with the carpet.”
The men laugh again, and Latin Mike lights a cigarette. Carr moves to the door and turns the lock.
“I don’t want this to take longer than it has to,” he says, “but we need to know more. Give it a week-if we don’t turn up anything else, we’ll go with what we’ve got.”
Carr closes the door behind him and hears someone lock it. He walks down the cracked path, through the rusting gate, and it is only when he’s around the corner that he takes a breath.
11
His apartment is in North Palm Beach, on Ocean Drive, and even the parking lot has a water view. Carr locks the Saturn and stops to watch the flashes of lightning on the horizon. The sky is purple, going to pitch-black at the eastern edge. It’s the verge of something that might ripen to a hurricane, or amount to nothing more than rain. The forecast is muddled with conditionals-colliding zones of warm and cold seawater, churning air masses, equivocal fronts from Canada, butterfly wings over Africa-too many variables. Carr can empathize with the weathermen.
Too many variables. Why is Bessemer doing what he’s doing? Will his Russian friends care when he gets burned? Why is Mike such an unremitting asshole, and how does he know about the view from Valerie’s apartment? Carr pockets his keys and pushes through the briny air to the lobby.
Here he is Gregory Frye, investor in distressed real estate, down from Boston for an indefinite stay. The doorman greets him by name and makes a joke about the Red Sox, and Carr smiles and nods and gets on the elevator.
He leaves the lights off in the apartment, pulls six beers from the refrigerator, and settles on the sofa, before the tall windows. He opens a bottle and drinks half in one pull, and he’s watching the distant lightning when his cell phone burrs. Eleanor Calvin’s number appears on the display, and he tosses the phone to the other end of the sofa, where it glows like a ghost light in a theater.
“Shit.” He sighs.
He’s been trying, since he left Stockbridge, to dredge up some warmth for Arthur Carr-to find a happy memory of his father or, barring that, any memory that isn’t tainted by anger, disapproval, or disappointment. Maybe he’s been looking for that for most of his life. The best he’s done lately is La Plata, southeast of Buenos Aires, out in the Rio de la Plata.
They were sailing then, just the two of them, in an eighteen-footer his father had rented for the day. The wind was from the east, the estuary was brown and choppy, and the sun was waning but still bright. Carr was twelve.
He remembers his father in a faded blue polo shirt, shorts, and bare feet, his arms ropy and brown, and his face shaded by a long-billed cap. They’d been running through man overboard drills for most of the afternoon, steering figure eights again and again to rescue an orange life vest that his father kept flinging over the side.
“There goes Oscar,” Arthur Carr would say, and toss the vest again.
His father did the spotting and fished out the vest when they came alongside; Carr was in the cockpit, one hand on the tiller, the other on the lines.
“Bring her around- quickly now-the man is drowning, after all. Now come to his windward side -his windward-that’s good. Now ease up on the sheets. Let them luff, for chrissakes-you don’t want to run by him!” Carr had gone through it too many times to count that afternoon.
For the last drill of the day, his father wanted Carr to do it all-spot, sail, and haul in the victim. “Pretend for a moment that you actually had a friend, and it was just the two of you out here. Now what would happen if your friend went in? What would you do-watch him drown? You can’t just sit there and watch.” And over the side the vest went once more.
“You’re on your own now,” Arthur Carr said.
Carr’s heart was pounding, but he kept his head on a swivel, kept his eyes on the bobbing patch of orange, and kept them off his father, who crouched in the companionway and stared at him like a baleful bird. He guided the boat away from the vest and, when he had enough room, tacked smartly. He panicked for an instant as the bow swept around and he lost the vest in the loping brown swells, but he found it again, and lined up on its windward side. He came in on a close reach, and let his sails luff. As the boat slowed, he scrambled under the boom. He kept low, gripped a stanchion with one hand, and ducked under the lifeline. He leaned out, but the vest was just beyond his straining fingers. Carr slid his hand up the stanchion to the lifeline and leaned out farther. And then a big swell hit.
There was a forward pitch, a sickening drop, scrabbling fingers, rushing, flooding cold, and a blow to the head that ran through Carr’s whole body. There was bubbling and roaring, and no time to call out, and no breath to call with. The shadow of the boat rose above him and began to fall again, and then Arthur Carr had a fist through the front of his life vest-was dragging him up through the brown water, up into the air, and dropping him on the cockpit bench.
Carr coughed and sputtered, and his father wrapped a blanket around him and studied his face. He peered into one eye and then the other, and put alcohol and a bandage over the gash on his cheek, where he’d slammed into the hull. Then he took the tiller, turned the boat back toward the marina, and shook his head in disgust.