Jimmy either didn’t hear or misunderstood. He stretched luxuriously, hands high above his naked chest, staring ahead where he knew the orange-and-white buoys would soon be bobbing. He stood like that for what seemed a long time, and then he knew.
Jimmy leaned over the side. “Breeze?” he cried. “Breeze, we’re over the ridge. Where are the fucking traps?”
Albury’s voice snagged somewhere in his throat.
“Breeze?”
“No traps, Jimmy. Not one.”
Jimmy ran to the bow and pressed himself against the rail. “The whole line’s been cut!” His voice cracked. His eyes fanned the water. Under the noon sun, the secret ledge sketched a faint indigo seam, eighty feet down. Albury idled the engine and climbed down to the deck.
“Who?” Jimmy asked. “Marine Patrol?”
Albury shook his head. “This was a legal line. Besides, they’ll just bust the slats out of a few traps, as a lesson. They won’t cut your pots off like this.”
Albury felt sick. Mentally he cataloged a list of his enemies. Nobody hated him bad enough to cut his traps. He couldn’t take his eyes off the water.
“Shrimper,” Jimmy murmured. “Motherfucker probably did it last night. Never looked, just dragged the goddamned nets over the traps.”
Albury slowly guided Diamond Cutter in a wide arc around the ridge, then began tacking back, against the tide, to the north. A shrimp boat is sloppy. The odds of one raking all fifty-five traps were remote. A few of the severed markers should be floating loose, Albury thought. A copper taste rose in his mouth as he scanned the bridge.
“Breeze?”
“It was no shrimper, Jimmy.”
“Shit.” Jimmy sagged back onto the ice chest. “Who? What for?”
“I don’t know.”
They checked four more trap lines on the way back to Key West, all sabotaged. By the time they reached the reef where the last one should have been, Albury had figured out the marauder’s course. He was not surprised to see whitecaps where he should have seen the buoys; he watched unblinking as Jimmy retrieved a single orange-and-white buoy, examined the limp tail of rope, and pronounced it hand-cut with a fishing knife.
“What did you do, Breeze?” Jimmy asked wanly. “Are you screwin’ somebody’s wife?”
Albury shook his head sourly. Jimmy palmed the orphaned buoy like a basketball. “This ever happened before?”
“Years ago when I was fighting with one of the Cubans. He got mine. I got his. But that was only a dozen traps, not three hundred.”
“Three hundred and twenty,” Jimmy said. He hurled the marker as far as he could. A gust of wind caught the styrofoam ball and slapped it gently into the ocean.
They rode home in heavy silence, Albury nipping liberally from a bottle of Wild Turkey he kept on board for times when beer would not do. Was it the twenty-second or twenty-first? he wondered. Didn’t matter, really, the end of the month was now.
Fifteen minutes out of Stock Island, Jimmy could no longer contain himself. “Breeze, I’m scared,” he blurted.
“Well, I’m pissed, but I’m not scared.”
“It’s Kathy,” Jimmy said, embarrassed, fighting tears. Albury stared out the windshield. The island was taking shape on the horizon.
It came with a rush. “She’s pregnant. It wasn’t supposed to happen with the pills, but it did anyway. We can’t have no baby, not livin’ with her folks. Not on what I make. Shit, Breeze, she ain’t old enough. I needed the money from today to take care of it. From the Cobia Hole.”
Albury ran a half-numb hand across the stubble of his cheek. “That was your shopping trip to Miami.”
“Yeah, I got the name of a doctor up there who does the whole thing in his office one afternoon and you go home the next day.”
“That’s the most sensible way to handle it,” Albury agreed.
“But I got no money.”
“That makes two of us, son.”
Jimmy whined, “What am I gonna do?”
“Let me think on it.”
At the fish house, Jimmy cleaned the boat and hauled the iced crawfish onto the scales. Only about two hundred pounds, a quarter of what it should have been. In disgust, Albury joined a small group of fishermen drinking outside the small commissary. There was a tribal likeness among them: faded baseball caps above lined and sunburned faces, slick white fishermen’s boots, powerful legs and muscled torsos betrayed by bellies swollen from too much beer.
“See you got your eight ninety-two fixed,” said a fisherman named Spider.
“Finally,” Albury said with a grimace that told what it cost.
“Do any good today?”
“Started out real good,” Albury replied, popping a Budweiser. “Then it got real bad. I lost five trap lines way down south.”
“Robbed?”
“Cut.”
The fishermen clustered around to question Albury closer.
“How many traps?” demanded a crawfisherman named Leech.
“More than three hundred. Cut by hand.” Albury’s voice was rising. The agony of the day finally was settling in his stomach.
“We got to find out who,” Leech said.
“Little Eddie,” Spider declared. “Didn’t you get in a fight with him over at the West Key Bar?”
“A year ago,” Albury said. “He wouldn’t have waited a year. Shit, he loaned me some tools last week.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know.”
The men fell quiet. The mental arithmetic was familiar; three hundred traps at thirty bucks apiece, not to mention the loss in crawfish catch. By the time Albury spoke, each of the men had figured out in dollars how badly he was hit.
“Well, I better go help Jimmy.”
“How you fixed, Breeze?” Spider asked as gently as he could. A couple of the fishermen looked away, pretending to watch another crawfish boat unload three slips away.
Albury said, “I’ll be OK.”
“I got some old traps at the house. Maybe a hundred,” Spider offered. “A couple need slats, but that’s all.”
“Thanks. I might take you up on it.” Albury slapped Spider on the shoulder. He lobbed his empty beer can into a garbage dumpster.
“If you hear anything about this … I’d appreciate it.”
“For sure, bubba,” Leech said. “Somebody’s bound to talk.”
His friends watched Breeze Albury leave in silence. They were Conchs and they were fishermen. They knew how bad off he was, and they understood his dilemma. They knew he would die before he let the bank or the fish house take his boat. You could usually hold them off for a couple months, especially if it was a Conch you owed. Everybody got behind; that was life on the Rock.
How far behind was Albury? his friends wondered. Not one of them could have survived such a catastrophe, to have nearly half your traps cut in one day. Something terrible had happened, and it was only the beginning. The fishermen understood this. They watched Albury clump to the end of the dock, chat quietly with Jimmy, then wind up his perforated old Pontiac.
The headlights snared the brown men in their white boots and glinted off upraised beer cans. Albury decided he had done the prudent thing by not mentioning the phone call of two days before. He honked at the fishermen sitting in the white penumbra. He wondered how many of them had paid everything off. In one bundle. Wearily, he thought: it must feel so damn good to get it off your shoulders. Too bad there was only one way.
Chapter 2
“ANGLER’S HAVEN,” announced the peeling wooden sign above the gravel drive. Only a few clumps of Australian pines and the occasional tang of the sea made the trailer park bearable. Years ago it had been mapped out as an inexpensive colony for winter tourists, but the trailers had gone to hell and the tourists never came anymore. Albury’s neighbors were servicemen from the Navy base, fishermen, bartenders, store clerks, and newlyweds. Albury’s trailer, as far as he knew, had been sitting on the same set of concrete blocks for twelve years; it was l
argish, for a mobile home, and in its own way comfortable, like a dusty old coat. There were three bedrooms, separated by tissue walls of phony wood. At one end was Ricky’s; the largest was where Albury and Laurie slept; and the one in the middle was a study, up for grabs. Breeze agonized over his accounts here, Ricky his homework, and, when the fancy struck, this was where Laurie laboriously pecked out the poetry she never sold.
The place was empty. Albury twisted the dial on the air conditioner and held his face to the grill until the air turned cold. He imagined a shower, but two notes on a coffee table intercepted him. Neither was signed. Neither had to be.
The first came right to the point, scrawled in big, half-forgotten schoolgirl letters on the back of an envelope: “I took them glass flawers, and that pink ashtray that was mine.”
The second note, written cursively in blue felt-tip, was equally blunt: “She also took my watch and seventy-six dollars of my tips from the dresser. ‘Them weren’t hers.’ Get them back, please.
“And for the LAST FUCKING TIME, CHANGE THE GODDAMN LOCK!”
Albury groaned, threw the notes away so Ricky wouldn’t see them, and stormed into the tiny bathroom. He jerked three of Laurie’s panties and a pair of support stockings from the shower rod and let the water run cold.
It was too early for Peg to be in the shack she shared with the Conch Train driver, so Albury went looking for her in the crowd of tourists and freaks who gathered nightly at Mallory Docks to watch the sun drip into the sea. Peg wasn’t there, but Albury found her by a strip of beachfront at the island’s tip that was a magnet for tourists.
When Albury had married her, she had been a good-looking woman, a little hefty maybe, but solid; blond and solid. Her family had never been much good, but—well, Albury hadn’t paid much attention then. He parked the Pontiac a half-block away and walked back to where Peg sat on a three-legged campstool, fingers running idly through the coarse sand. Next to her was a canvas bag, a pile of bleached conchs, and some woebegone starfish. “Southernmost Queen Conchs $3,” read the hand-scrawled sign jutting from the sand at her feet.
Time had been cruel to Peg Albury. She was only forty-three or forty-four, but sitting there alone in a shapeless housedress, waiting for a sucker from Michigan or Pennsylvania to buy her shells, she looked twenty years older. Her eyes under the floppy straw hat were dead. Sun and whiskey, a lethal combination, and in Key West an epidemic. Albury felt sorry for her, as though for a stranger.
“Evenin’, Peg,” Albury called softly.
She rose to her feet, wheezing. Sand cascaded from her lap. “Don’t you go beatin’ on me, Breeze Albury. I only took what was mine.”
Albury almost smiled. He had never beat her, even when he should have. It had been almost four years since she’d left. Now she was a sandy and pathetic stranger.
“The watch wasn’t yours, Peg. Neither was the money.”
“How do you know? Is that what she said, your tramp? Who do you believe, your wife or a tramp?”
“The money and the watch, Peg, now.”
“Now, now, now,” she snarled. “Like you were boss.” Her eyes drilled him from under the brim of the hat. “What are you gonna do if I say no? Go to the cops? They’ll believe me, not you, Mr. Convict.”
Albury suppressed a sudden gout of anger.
“I won’t go to the police, Peg. I will tell Ricky.”
“Trash,” she hollered. From somewhere in the folds of her dress she extracted Laurie’s Omega and dashed it into the sand. She might have stepped on it, but Albury nudged it aside and stooped quickly to pick it up.
“Tell Ricky? Tell my baby? Why don’t you tell him his daddy’s a convict? Gonna tell him his daddy was in jail when his sister died? Tell him that, Breeze.”
“He already knows, Peg.” Just, Albury reflected, as he certainly knew what his mother had become.
“Now give me back the money.”
“No!” She lurched in the sand, dislodging with one foot a near-empty bottle that had been hidden by the canvas bag. “I need the money, Breeze. Charlie’s sick. Can’t work.”
“Drunk, you mean.”
“He ain’t. You think everybody’s drunk, don’t you? Charlie’s sick. It’s his heart. Doctor says he’s got to go up to the VA in Miami. It’s true, I swear it.”
Albury knew she was probably lying, not that it mattered. To get Laurie’s money he would have to wrestle her. It wasn’t worth it.
“OK, Peg, you keep the money. Just keep it.”
“It’s for Charlie, goddamnit.”
“Yeah. And stay away from the trailer. I’m changing the locks tonight, so your key’s no good anymore.”
Peg’s hand moved tremulously to her neck, where the key hung like a charm from a rusty necklace.
“God, Peg, you’re a mess,” Albury said in a whisper.
She was scrabbling in the sand for her bottle as he turned away.
ALBURY HAD a couple of stops to make, one at a sporting goods store, the next at the grocery. Then he parked at Key Plaza and hurried, six-pack under arm, across to the ball park. The lights were on already, and Albury was afraid the game had started. He arrived just in time to see Ricky walk to the mound.
It was a game of no particular consequence, and it had attracted only about a hundred people, mostly parents and girl friends. Albury slid into the bleachers behind home plate next to an angular black man in sandals and a white cotton shirt.
“Evenin’, Enos. How about a beer?”
“Thanks, Breeze. You cut it pretty close tonight, uh?”
“Been a poor day.” Albury gave a half-embarrassed wave to Ricky, who rewarded it with a big grin and a doff of his maroon cap.
Ricky didn’t look sharp. Some of his deliveries were higher than they should have been, the ball not moving as well as it might. Still, the first three batters went out weakly, and Albury felt himself beginning to relax. He leaned back, elbows propped on the bleacher behind him, savoring a tentative breeze that had sprung up off the Gulf.
“God, that feels good.”
“Yeah,” Enos said. “You know, that boy of yours is some kind of pitcher.”
“I think he can go all the way.”
“I believe you’re right.”
In the second, Buddy Martin, Enos’s son, stung Ricky with a sharp single off a curve nobody else on the field would have hit. Albury snorted.
“Maybe they could go all the way together. I’d rather have Buddy on the same team than hittin’ against Ricky.”
Enos laughed politely at the compliment.
“As long as he goes, Breeze. I don’t really care if it’s to baseball, to college, or to the Army. As long as he goes.”
“You and your boy fightin’?”
“Hell, no. I just don’t want him to grow up in this town, that’s all. There’s nuthin’ here, Breeze. It’s all the same as when we was kids, only less of it. And there wasn’t nuthin’ then. I don’t know why you came back. You had a good job.”
“Several,” Albury said.
“All places change, don’t they? It ain’t like we were still kids, fishin’ for grunts all day. You could live in this town then, Breeze. That was why I stayed. That was why you came back, too. At least you could live here, then. Now, well…”
“Now we got no excuse, Enos. No fucking excuse.”
They watched the game while they talked. Buddy Martin stole second, but died there as Ricky got the last out on a rifling fastball.
“You’re lucky, Breeze. You go out fishin’ every day. That’s all right. I wouldn’t mind that. But if you want to know what’s really happened to the island, come with me for a day, hauling the U.S. mail. Just one day. You’d see shit you wouldn’t believe.”
“I’m sure.” Albury felt like telling Enos about his traps, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it.
They drank another beer in companionable silence as Ricky’s team, the Padres, scratched two runs off the chunky rival pitcher, a lefthander.
&
nbsp; “You know the Fletcher place on Frances Street?”
“Near the cemetery.”
“Yeah, right,” Enos said. “Garrett sold it for a hundred and thirty thousand yesterday.”
Albury sat up.
“Cash,” Enos whispered bitterly.
“Shit. It’s full of termites. They couldn’t get seventeen five for it eight years ago.”
“The guy that bought it was twenty-two.”
Albury shook his head. “Say no more.”
“I hate all this, Breeze.”
“Yeah.”
“I want out. If I can’t leave, then my boy will. I swear.”
In the fifth inning, Ricky’s control deserted him briefly. He walked the leadoff batter and lost the second man to a crisp single. Then it was time to face Buddy Martin.
“Low and away,” Albury yelled.
Ricky threw a fastball, letter high on the inside corner. The bat slashed forward, and Albury felt the “crack” in the fillings in his teeth. The ball rocketed into the alley in left center and smacked the Merita Bread sign on the first bounce. Both runners scored, and Buddy Martin cruised into third with a stand-up triple.
Enos beamed. “Way to stroke, Bud,” he called to his son.
Ricky called time, and Albury winced in shame when he saw Ricky and his coach yoking Ricky’s right spike together with a piece of friction tape.
“Damn,” Albury said, “I got a new pair for him in the car. Be right back.”
“I’ll watch the beer,” Enos said.
Albury strode across to Key Plaza, where he had parked the car. He broke into a trot when he saw the figure inside the Pontiac, stretched across the front seat, probing the glove compartment. The man never looked up until he felt the huge hands around his left leg. Albury yanked once and spilled the thief onto the pavement, his shaggy head hitting the asphalt like a brick.
Dazed, the young man foggily surveyed his attacker: sharp, angry green eyes; nut-brown face capped with short salt-and-pepper hair; the mouth a thin, icy slash; the neck thick, veined with rage.
“Easy, grandpa,” said the kid. His long hair was thick, flicked with dirt and leaves. His face was milky and pocked. Albury scowled down at him.