| Writing Samples - Novels "Temptation Key" Chapter One - Robbie |
Temptation Key Copyright © 2006 by Glenn A. Bruce, All Rights Reserved 1. Robbie From his sagging twin mattress with the scurfing pineapple bedposts, on the same mattress he'd had since first grade when he stopped wetting the bed, Robbie Mann stared up at the glossy 1966 calendar on his wall. It featured a red hotrod '54 Chevy panel-wagon with the hood open—lots of chrome—and a busty brunette named Sunny who wore pig tails, a yellow crinoline bikini and red high heels. She had a grease smudge on her left cheekbone and a blue Levi Strauss engineer's cap tilted jauntily off to one side; both had been applied with great care. Robbie squinted his eyes in thought, wondering why car models always wore engineer caps. Why not mechanic’s caps? In her right hand "Sunny" held a shiny new ¾-race camshaft and, in her left, an equally unmolested 12-inch crescent wrench; both were chromed and had their manufacturers' logos facing out, of course. She didn't look particularly comfortable and it appeared that maybe her arms were tired. Robbie wondered if she was a real bitch as soon as the last flash popped. The car-parts calendar had come from Robbie's friend Dan who had procured it from the Pure station on Tavernier, where he worked, the Christmas before, as a gift. (Stolen being the better description for Dan's standard M.O.: "Don't worry, RJ, Five-Finger Discount!" Wink and a smile. Or, "Midnight Auto Supply!" Same wink, same smile, neither bringing Robbie any comfort, though that was the clear intention—if anything was ever really clear in what Dan said or did.) Staring up, Robbie imagined Sunny without the yellow two-piece (though still with the red pumps), and quickly came to the conclusion that she looked ridiculous bent over the open hood of a hotrod Chevy, naked, holding a camshaft in one hand and a crescent wrench in the other, engineer cap or not. So, he put the suit back on her, got rid of the car, the car parts and the tools, laid her out on a blanket down at Bahia Honda (the only decent sand beach he knew of in the Keys) to eat black grouper sandwiches and bar-b-cue Lays with her—tall RCs in a cooler high with ice. Much better. Robbie got up. Almost three months had passed since Graduation, yet nothing seemed any different; 1966 was two-thirds over and Time was simply standing still. Robbie had expected more: fireworks, drunken orgies, someone shouting, "Congratulations, Graduate! Welcome to the World! Go get 'em!" Something. But there was nothing. No one even sent a card; not even his Aunt Vida Mae in Orlando. Instead, Robbie had awakened that morning in early June to discover: 1) He had a wicked hangover; and 2) He was still 18, still living at home, still single and childless (thank God), still horny as hell most of if not all the time, and still broke. He had no plan for The Future, no perspective on The Past, and The Present felt just as dull and arrested as ever. Now here it was August, late August, and nothing had changed. Summer was almost over—his last summer as a non-practicing adult. Which, was the same thing as his last summer. By the time Robbie got to Mandalay Marina and Boat Storage forty-five minutes later, still nothing had changed, except the heat. It was now 90, headed for 94 or 95, with 96-percent humidity. The thick air clung, mercilessly stagnant, to the mirror-slick surface of the marina basin with few signs of life other than the occasional mangrove pod bobbing vertical and listless. The slender black-tipped green pods seemed not to move at all on days like this; but you'd look back fifteen minutes later and they'd be somewhere else, travelers of the tide—except for that half- hour at mean high- or low-tide when absolutely nothing moved; the heavy stench of creosote, gasoline and sea stink so overpowering it could gag a dead whale. (Fortunately, there were no whales in Florida.) About once an hour a disgruntled mullet would flop up out of the water with a gah-loooop, then all was quiet again. If Robbie was bored, he'd follow the concussion rings with his eyes as they ran silently to the seawall under an undulating miasm of seaweed, outboard motor oil and fish sludge, then bounced off and ran back to the center. If he was really bored, he'd time them. By eight or eight-thirty every morning but Monday, when his boss, Malcolm, closed the marina all day, Robbie could usually be found atop his favorite perch: a bed of coarse fishnets piled a foot thick on lobster traps stacked two high and deep against the office wall. He'd lie there in the shade of the wide overhang for hours if uninterrupted, listening to his tan plastic portable radio—or “plantastic” as Robbie called it—staring up at the thousands of spitballs he'd launched with a paper straw at the peeling eave over the years, sometimes meditating on life past and present (and rare occasion, future), but mainly just lolling in a swirl of nondescript, comfortable thought, no particular beginning, middle or end, gliding smoothly like a deep-v in a protected canal. Today was no different. He launched thirty spitballs. Twelve stuck. Not bad. Inside the office—really just a cinder block cave stocked with fishing provisions, cigarettes, sodas, beer, ice and snack food—Robbie's boss and owner of Mandalay, Malcolm Teague, smoked a Swisher Sweet, looked at pictures in fishing magazines, sipped at a Regal beer (brewed in Miami from water out of the Miami River, the locals claimed), and thought about nothing in particular. Even though he wasn't born in the Keys, Malcolm was a Conch through and through. He was the darkest, leatheriest, most grizzled old-timer around with the exception of old Old Peru Temple, who was 99 and still hanging on strong. (Pronounced PEE-rue, he was said to be a direct descendant of Black Beard. Legend had it that, during his rum-running days, Old Peru once hid out on Temptation Key, off Largo, for seven months; until the disembodied ancestral spirit of his famous forebear came to tell him the coast was clear to go home.) But how many years could Old Peru have left? Ten, at best? Fifteen? if he held off on the red whiskey? At 78, Malcolm had 21 years on him and a sizable backlog of personal folklore, himself. He had survived rattlers as big around as a man's thigh, skeeters as thick as coal smoke, hammerheads as long and wide as a 1936 Deusenburg, six- foot saltwater croc's, seven foot 'cudas, eight major hurricanes, nineteen lesser ones, and endless hard times. He was as tough as a leatherback, nearly as old, and twice as ornery. "Mean as a crocogator," they said. "A crocogator's got a crocodile head at one end and a alligator head at the other and eats all the time. Don't do nothin' but eat." "Well, how's he go to the baffroom if he ain't got no tail?" "He don't. That's what make him so mean." Robbie alone—except perhaps for Malcolm's seldom-seen wife of 42 years, Enida—knew it was all an act. He had been the only other person in the last fifty years to get close enough to discover that Malcolm was really a uniquely kind and generous old gnome. His misanthropic mask and accompanying warts were just part of the special-effects makeup which kept the safe and desired distance between Malcolm-the-soft-touch and anyone who wanted anything. Because he knew, Malcolm did, that if anyone ever got past the defacto, ugly early-warning facade, he was in trouble; he couldn't look them in the eye and turn them down. Just couldn't. So, in a lesson learned early-on (a two hundred dollar loan he made to his own brother, Eddie, and never got back), Malcolm developed the Grunt-and-Run, as Robbie dubbed it—not to Malcolm's face, of course, just to Buddy. Buddy, who was fourteen, took Robbie's word for it—as he did most things Robbie told him—though he was never sure he really believed it, no matter how many times Robbie nudged him, pointed at Malcolm in mid-spin, and whispered, "Grunt and Run." Buddy only saw the brusque facade, accepted it at face value, and gave Malcolm plenty of leeway. And, as long as everyone else followed suit, which they generally did, Mandalay ran like a top— an old, frayed-around-the-edges, in-constant-need-of-upgrading-and-repair top, granted; but this place was a little slice of heaven—in it's own shabby, odoriferous way. Robbie just didn't know it, yet. Inside, Malcolm stood up and stretched. He then went to the sliding window above Robbie's head, opened it, leaned his elbows on the sill and looked out from under his impenetrably-stained broadbill cap, surveying his empire of sagging outbuildings, decaying docks and sinking boats. Neither one looked at the other as Robbie continued blowing spitwads up at the eave. They had an unspoken respect for each others' reveries. Time passed slowly in the Florida Keys of 1966, and you didn't want to rush another man's journey. It just wasn't done. Once the requisite period of regard had run out, Malcolm sucked his tooth, squinted across the water as if trying to see his ship coming in for gas, beer and ice and said, "You like that nigger music?" It wasn't spiteful or full of meanness. Just a question. "I guess, yeah," was all Robbie felt he needed to reply. Malcolm nodded as if that was a fair response. And more silence passed between them. The over-energized WFUN radio jingle came on, replaced by the fast-talking Miami DJ giving out sunglasses to the first ten people who called in with Elvis's middle name, then went to a commercial. "Tan, Don't Burn,Use Coppertone." Robbie put his straw down. "It doesn't rhyme." Without looking anywhere but out, Malcolm asked, "Hmm?" "Doesn't rhyme. Coppertone/burn. I never understood why they make such a big deal out of a slogan if it doesn't rhyme." There was a question trolling about in there, somewhere, so Malcolm nodded again, considering the validity of the question, then answered the best he could with, "Beats the hang outa me." Then he said, "It's Aaron, you know." Robbie said, "Yeah," then shook his head in disgust at advertisers who apparently thought they were very clever but in point of fact couldn't rhyme two key words in an advertising campaign if it killed them. He didn't need free sunglasses, anyway. "The girl with her bathing suit pulled down is funny," he allowed, "but it should rhyme." Malcolm nodded again and continued to squint. Well out beyond the mangroves and turtle grass, a 22-foot Glastron cranked hard into the end of the channel. It jerked from side to side before getting centered, then lunged forward and back, on and off the throttle, then side to side again and finally just sagged as the throttle was killed, surging forward, bow down—further, when the wake raced up from behind and shoved hard. Muffled shouting could be heard from that direction as a father scolded his son. Malcolm's expression never changed. "Waxman," was all he said. Robbie closed his eyes and said, "Don't tell me when." Malcolm nodded ever so slightly and continued watching the boat idle up the channel into the marina for the gas pump dock. A long minute passed, during which Robbie's concentration was riveted to the sound of the boat's gurgling Volvo/Mercruiser inboard/outboard stern-drive—the popular setup for runabouts up to 25 feet—as Big Al Waxman, a carpet dealer from Miami, piloted the boat from around his son's shoulders and hollered instructions: "Turn right. Left. More to the left! No the right, now! The other right, Allie! That's it. Easy. Ahead. Back. Right. Right! Now left. Back right. Easy. Left. LEFT DAMMIT!" Robbie listened intently, his eyes closed. When the boat was just inches from the old tires which hung down on ropes to protect boats and dock from mutual damage, Robbie said, "Now." A split-second later, Waxman's Galstron nudged the dock. Malcolm let out a short snort of a laugh, shook his head and credited, "Ya got a good ear, kid." "It's a gift." "Well, it's somethin'.” "I hear the air move between the gunwale and the tires." "I've heard bigger lies." "Haven't missed one in seven days." "Don't count on it makin' ya rich." "I won't." Robbie stood up to go attend to the Waxmans. "Try not to stare at his wife's tits," Malcolm said, knowing the impossible when he saw them. Robbie nodded and started out toward the dock where Waxman was directing Albert to tie the lines on the cleats. "No, Allie. Around the thing. Around it! Right. And again." While snarling the line into something a cat couldn't match, Albert protested, "Dad, don't call me that! It's a girl's name. God!" "I won't call you it when you can learn to tie a rope!" Little Al huffed and made a bigger mess of it. "Around the thing, Allie, not over it! The boat floats away if you just lay it on top! Around!" He made large circles with his arm and hand. Albert fought the yellow nylon as if it were alive. In the back of the boat, Al's busty, bronzed wife Abby was enjoying a good searing by the sun—as if it was sealing in all her best, primal juices. Closing her eyes, she said, "Al, let Little Al do for himself." "Mom!" Little Al whined, "don't call me that! God!" He apparently wanted to distance himself from his father, already. Understandable. Big Al turned back. "What? He's supposed to learn on his own? from thin air?" "Well, he'd have a better chance of that than you schlumping all over him all the time," she said without opening her eyes. "And what? you're gonna hang all over him with those? and teach him what? He's a little old for that, doncha think?" Big Al enjoyed poking fun at his wife's ample bosom almost as much as he enjoyed nuzzling into it and moaning like a grown baby. Waxman's already top-heavy 17-year-old daughter Angela, of the teased hair out to here Waxmans, cried out, "Daaaaddy!" She made an appropriate face of disgust then stared at her feet; but her look didn't linger, because they were large for her age, too—something her father told her she had also inherited from her mother. He warned Angela when she was twelve and her breasts started growing that big feet also ran in the Weisenberg side of the family and to be prepared. Angela was petrified. What were the goyum girls going to think in gym? In the shower? Angela with her bloating boobs and foot-long dogs? Shiksas had notoriously flat chests and dainty feet as far as she could tell. Abby said calmly, "Just ignore your father, dear. It's the best thing." "That's right, ignore me. For 23 years, she ignores me. Like mother like daughter," Waxman said, shaking his head, seeing his solitary future flashing before his sun-reddened eyes. "What does he mean by that! I hate it when he does that!" Angela said, verbally stomping her large foot. Abby Waxman opened her eyes and pulled her daughter to her. Though she acted as if she was resisting, Angela still liked being mothered. Abby said, softly, "It's the carpets, honey. Daddy has to smell that schmootz all day long." "Mom, don't say schmootz. It's too Jewish." "Honey, we're Jewish. Anyway, I'm just making a point. Your father smells that glue…schmootz all day long, it gets in his brain, like a car exhaust, and makes him a little crazy." She resisted saying meshuga. "You should ignore it and read your book." Angela rolled her eyes and pulled away, having just cause. "It's a magazine, Mom. A fan magazine. It's not a book. I don't read books, okay? God!" "Don't say God, dear. He might strike us all dead." "You didn't say that when Albert said it." "Little Al, don't say God. He should strike us all dead." Little Albert bleated, "Mom, God! Don't call me that! How many times do I have to tell you! God!" "I don't know, dear. Just don't tempt Him." The moment his mother closed her eyes again, Albert stuck his tongue out at his sister. Angela snapped, "Allie, shut up! I swear!" Her brother went red. "Don't call me that! God!!!" Big Al saw the fight coming so he told his daughter to do what her mother said and "Go read your book." Angela rolled her eyes even bigger to indicate her complete frustration, curled her lips in disgust and jerked her entire body in an anguished walk up to the bow to be alone with her "Tiger Beat" as Robbie walked up and gave a friendly, "Hi, Mr. Waxman. Hot enough for you?" Then, he turned to Albert: "Here, let me help you." "Here, let you do it yourself," Albert said with a nasty face in his voice. He was a little bastard, all right. Big Al's acorn hadn't fallen far. Robbie knew better than to let Little Al Waxman get to him and just took over the job, securing the line quickly and neatly to the cleat in a figure-eight with a tuck. That was revenge enough. It worked. Albert scowled and got back in the boat. Waxman went passive-aggressive on his kids. "Mr. Waxman, ya hear that? Mr. Waxman. Abby, you hear that?" "I heard, Al." "You don't get that in Miami, anymore. Mr. Waxman. It's 'Hey Al, can ya get me twenty-percent off?' And, 'Hey Al, I don't like this color. Can ya change it for free?' 'Hey Al, this don't work, this don't fit.'" "Right, Al." "Big Al this, Big Al that." Angela chimed in with a snide laugh, "Fat Al is more like it, Daddy." Albert snapped nastily, "Shuttup, Angie." "Mom! Allie told me to shuttup!" "Don't tell your sister to shut up, Allie." "She called dad a fatso!" "I did not!" "Don't call your father a fatso, Angela." "I didn't!" "Liar! You did, too!" "Did not, ya little twerp-off." "Eat it, blob queen!" "Mom!" "Don't refer to your sister's endowments in a derogatory way, Allie. She can't help it if she inherited my best asset." "Well put, dear," Waxman grinned as he sucked his cigar and pulled a white, short-sleeve shirt on over his shoulders, leaving the buttons open, presumably so his protruding sun-baked belly wouldn’t burst them on contact. Angela wanted to throw up. She searched on her pink portable for WQAM in Miami, found it and "The In Crowd" and emulated her mother's search for solar nirvana, eyes closed. All breast references were lost on Albert. He had no idea what any of them were talking about, so he just sat down extra hard, threw on a stiff sulk, mined a nose nugget, ate it and felt much better. Not being able to sit with her eyes closed for longer than ten seconds, mostly because she was afraid of the dark, inside, Angela glanced up and saw what Little Al was doing. "Mom!" she shrieked. "Allie's eating his boogers again!" Again, she looked ready to vomit. "Albert," was all his mother had to say. He pouted and looked at his left foot, which was also large for his size. However, it was a full size smaller than his right foot, which he refused to look at, ever. Waxman turned to Robbie. "My kids, huh. Doncha love it. They adore their old man, though." He turned to Angela. "Doncha dear?" Angela writhed dramatically and headed to the back of the boat to be with her mother again. Waxman's eye fell on his spelunking son, who answered with a body consuming shrug of indifference. Waxman turned again to Robbie. "Whatever happened to respecting your elders, huh kid?" "I don't know, sir." "Sir! Did you hear that?!" He spun around to his family. "Sir! They know my name, they call me sir! That's why I come here, Abby. Not the beer. Not the gas. The service!" Robbie said, "That's why we call it sir-viss, Mr. Waxman." If Angela's eyes had rolled any higher, they would have become bumps under her hair. Waxman thought a second, then a burping laugh escaped him, followed by a few more, and finally a hearty salesman's laugh—the kind a retail man gives you if he thinks it will help get you to buy something, say carpet. Waxman was so accustomed to giving that laugh it had become his real laugh. But Robbie smiled as Waxman chortled, "I'll have to use that one, kid. Who's your writer?" "Malcolm, sir. You want it filled up?" "To the top. Spare no expense!" he said, boisterously. So, Robbie went and zeroed out the old Texaco pump. "See?" Waxman said quietly to his sole male heir. "That's how you get good service, son. You make people think you like them." Little Al shrugged and went below. Such professional advice, such nuance, was wasted on him—probably always would be. He didn’t care if people liked him, didn’t really understand why they should—was pretty sure they didn’t anyway—and had no clue how to make them think otherwise. At the back of the boat, Robbie knelt down behind Mrs. Waxman. She rolled her head to the side and watched as Robbie popped open the gas cap and inserted the nozzle into the filler opening. At that precise moment, she moaned slightly. Caught him staring at her tits. "My, what big eyes you have,” she said, smiling, then turned her face back to the sun and closed her eyes. Angela had missed the moan—not so, the smutty implication. "God, Mom! Cover up! He's a gas station guy!" With that, she grabbed a towel, flung it onto her mother's chest, glared at Robbie and stomped up to the bow again, running into her father. "God, Daddy! Look out!" she barked at him, and shoved past. Unaware of anything that had transpired in the last minute, Al moved aside, only then noticing that his son had made a mess of the bow line on the boat end, as well. "Ah, Christ, Allie," he grumbled, to no one in particular. "It's rope. How hard can it be?" Al moved forward to untangle it; though he had no luck, either. In back, Abby removed the towel from her ample chest, wiped some Florida sun sweat from her forehead with it and dropped it on the deck. She then took an ice cube from her screwdriver and ran it over the small dark freckles that filled the shadowy crevice of her best asset, then put it in her mouth and sucked it, eyes closed. Robbie swallowed quickly, locked-out the nozzle and fled forward. Abby Waxman smiled at her handiwork. Up front, Big Al was staring at Malcolm up in the office window, wondering if the old codger was secretly rich or just a fish-stained little Conch with a dying boatyard business. Malcolm looked back a moment, across the 150 feet or so between them, then leaned back into the shadow of the office and slid the window shut. The last Waxman saw was the back of Malcolm's greasy hat disappearing into the darkness—a long-distance Grunt and Run! Robbie grinned to himself, stooped next to Big Al on the bow, trying to be as dapper and respectful as possible in hopes of impressing the scantily clad Angela, and said, "Here, let me help you with those lines, sir." Waxman relinquished the line and looked at Angela with a look that said, See? Sir. She glared at Robbie, the pervert, and turned away with a huff, increasing the volume on her pink transistor radio. I'm in with the In Crowd; I go where the In Crowd goes. Waxman watched Robbie twist the line into a neatly coiled yellow pile. "I don't know why they got so goddam many ropes on a boat, anyway," Big Al grumbled. There were two, not counting the ski line. He then asked, "How is Maynard doin' these days?" managing to sound almost concerned. "Malcolm's good, sir. Little slowed down with the heat." "Goddam, it is hot, isn't it," Waxman said, wiping sweat, ready to move on to a new subject for the moment. It gave him a chance to grouse and boast at the same time. "If I was home, I'd be sitting in front of my new 25” console television in the Florida room right now, watching a ball game and drinking a cold one with the a/c on sub- arctic chill." "Sounds good to me," Robbie said, diplomatically, though he had no actual concept of living such a life of luxury. "Hell, I'd settle for a shower right now; but the kids wanna go see that cement Jesus at Pennekamp. Sure, they'll be nice and cool in the water, but I'm gonna die up here in this damned sun." "Maybe you could raise the Bahama top." The white canvas roof was in its stowed position, bunched down over the windshield. "Now, there's an idea. Maybe you can show me how the damn thing works. I can never get it up," Al said with his genuine fake laugh. From the back of the boat, his wife said, "What was that, dear?" Waxman grimaced. After a moment, he told Robbie, "The wife wants to go skiing off Temptation Key, later. Frankly I don't see the fascination." Robbie shrugged. "The stories I guess. Pirates and all. Just looks like mangroves from the water, though." Dense mangroves, too—so interwoven of limb and root as to be inviolable. Waxman looked at him a long, uncomprehending beat. "I meant skiing. I don't see the fascination of having your arms ripped out behind a boat going 50 miles per hour." Robbie felt a little stupid. Angela's blankly condescending stare didn't help. "Fifty's a little fast for regular skiers, sir," was all he could manage, doubting that this runabout could get anywhere near that speed, or that even if it could, Little Al, Angela or Mrs. Waxman would want to water-ski so fast. Waxman stared at the neatly coiled rope. "It's a mystery to me how you do that." He chomped on his cigar and yelled at the cuddy cabin. "Allie! Bring me my lighter, son." No response came back. Waxman waited a beat, then put his arm around Robbie and turned him away from Angela. He spoke in a quiet, conspiratorial way. "You're a sharp kid, Rod. Lemme give ya some advice that's got me through it all, and pretty nicely, too, I must admit." His daughter sighed heavily and looked back to where her mother was still smiling up at the sun, eyes closed, letting drops fall from the ice cube down into the scorched crevasse of her bosom. Angela wondered if she would be so pathetic when she was her mother's age. "It's like this," Big Al said to Robbie, sotto voce. "Life's a shit sandwich. The more bread you got, the less shit you have to eat." He winked as if this came directly from the Mount. Robbie didn't want to use any of his valuable air to reply, but his honest streak required one. "I thought it was 'the more bread you have, the less you taste the shit.'" Waxman chewed that one over a beat, then sighed heavily. "The point is, you can either eat shit all your life or you can end up with a boat like this and a wife with tits like the ones you were staring at before." He said it like it was a good thing. Robbie's air was running out. He had counted thirty six hairs in Waxman's left nostril and was starting on the other side when Big Al suddenly let go of him, reached into his pocket, pulled out a coin, pressed it into Robbie's palm, then stepped onto the dock, stabbing the cigar into his mouth and staring at the cinder block office with the flat, gravel roof. "That's for you," he said back. Robbie took a thankful deep breath and looked at the quarter in his palm. Then he looked at Angela. She looked away. Waxman took one step in the baking sun, then spun back. "Maynard got a lotta dough?" Robbie was caught off guard by the directness of the question. Being a Conch, it struck him as…unaskable! "Excuse me, sir?" Waxman was not deterred. "From this place. Is it the money-sucking death camp it looks like, or is he really a shrewd little WASP bastard, sockin' it all into the bank for fifty years?" Waxman had a way of drilling right through someone with intense interrogative energy when he wanted answers. The technique made most everyone, including Robbie, very uneasy. "I wouldn't know, sir. He doesn't show me the books." "I knew it!" Waxman bellowed. "Any man won't show you his books is makin' a killing: Waxman's Law." He stuck the dead cigar back in his mouth and yelled, "Allie! My goddam lighter!" around the nasty thing, pacing a few small steps as he did. "He's a goddam millionaire livin' right here in this shitheap that's just a shitheap on the outside because inside the front door, inside the cash register, is a goddam goldmine. A goldmine! The bastard!" He seemed angry at the notion; and took it out on his son. "Allie! Did you fall in the goddam toilet down there?" Some muffled protest arose from below-deck. Robbie wondered which of the Waxmans was going to expire first: Big Al from envy and a self-induced hypertensive heart attack or Allie from heat stroke in the fiberglass sweatbox below. Robbie thought it all over. "I don't know, Mr. Waxman. He doesn't own a car. Lives in the same little house he's always had. Never fixed it up or anything. Never painted it until last year, and then only the south and west sides. He's got that old Dodge truck 'needs a new first gear and he won't put one in it. Seats are torn. I don't know. He doesn't strike me as a millionaire." "Well, you know him," Waxman conceded, then continued with added vigor, "but I know money. And I can smell it at two hundred yards." He nodded, confidently. "He's got a stash somewhere," he said, wondering where that might be and if Malcolm was really a genius anti-Semite who had put it all in hog futures and made a fortune. After a moment, he advised Robbie that, "It's easy to bluff the uninitiated." He meant Robbie. Robbie didn't really take it as an insult. "But I see," Waxman nodded. "I see." After drifting off a moment, Big Al suddenly snapped out of his reverie as if he'd never been on another subject and said, "Hot as a sumbitch down here though, i'n'it?" He shook his head at the heat, flipped his dead butt into the mangroves, and started for the office. Robbie watched him go, wondering for a moment whether Waxman was right about Malcolm or Malcolm was right about Waxman when he dismissed Big Al as someone to ignore, and placate only as much as necessary; just "a crazy old rich Jew bastard, is all." A moment later, Albert popped up with his father's lighter. It had to be at least 130 degrees down below, but he hadn't broken a sweat; wasn't even breathing hard! Robbie looked at him with wonder as Albert squinted into the sun, his face looking like a hand puppet on a palsy sufferer. Seeing that his father had gone, Little Al made a farting sound and retreated down into the hotbox for more torture. The gas nozzle clicked off. Robbie headed back. On hearing the nozzle come out of the filler tube, Abby Waxman groaned again, then looked over and smiled. "Did my husband offer you a job or just some bad advice?" she asked pleasantly. "Just the advice, ma'am," Robbie answered politely. Abby nodded knowingly and shifted slightly for a better basting. "He's a pig, don't you think?" She closed her eyes a moment as if savoring the thought as much as the sun, then opened them and looked directly at Robbie. "You don't think I'm a pig, do you?" Robbie could remember feeling so awkward few times in his life. Finally, his mouth came open, forced by his stuttering brain which seemed to be in the midst of a petit mal. Some words were about to come out, though he wasn't sure what they would be or if he would have any control over them once they started. "Mom, GOD! You're so GROSS!" Angela was back, and just in the nick of time. Robbie was delivered from shame. He said a quiet prayer of thanks and turned away to note the amount of the gas sale. Pleased that she had such a satisfying effect on him, Angela said, "I want a Pepsi," and turned to stare out across the marina at the mangroves—as if mangroves were anything she found even remotely interesting. Mrs. Waxman knew the look without looking; she had owned it, herself, at sixteen. "Allie, get your sister a Pepsi," she called toward the hatch, then smiled demurely or seductively or psychotically at Robbie as Albert yelled from below, "Tell 'er to get it herself!" Robbie wondered how it was that he was still alive down there. Albert's mother only had to say two words: "Albert," and "now." She didn't even raise her voice. There was only silence from below; apparently, the men in the Waxman and Weisenberg families knew that tone and what it meant. Angela would develop her own, personalized version before she was twenty. Though it would have been appropriate for Angela to thank her mother for interceding on her behalf, she instead looked at her mother splayed out, dark as a Yemenite, right under the nose of the peon gas station guy, and the whole scene finally became more than she could handle. She let out an explosive sigh of the worst kind and thudded gawkily back to the bow where her pink transistor was now playing "These Boots Are Made for Walking" as if Nancy Sinatra had intuited through space and time that Angela needed help making a point to Robbie: "One'a these days these boots are gonna... walk-all... o-ver... you." She looked back with a smug huff and splayed out gracelessly on the front cushions, apparently attempting her own sex tease; but Angela Waxman clearly wasn't pinup material and all three of them knew it. So, she closed her eyes, and her legs, and laid back so that her head was behind the pilot console and she couldn't see anyone! Abby Waxman smiled, kicked her head back, feeling youthful, full of sexual power, and absorbed more cancerous rays. Robbie took the moment to flee forward. He pretended to be adjusting the bowline and gave Angela a simple, "So, you're going diving"—the kind of opening that would get you a dance, a walk past the auditorium and probably a pretty decent make-out session behind the gym from a local girl. But Angela Waxman was not a local girl, not by a long shot. "Screw off," she said hatefully. And turned up her radio. Robbie hung in—even recovered nicely. "What'd I do?" "Only drooled over my mother, for God's sake," Angela snarled, sitting up, "as disgusting as she is." She shoved white vinyl-covered boat cushions around, roughly, to make her point. On realizing that this had no effect— Robbie was still there—Angela yelled, "Bertie, where's my Pepsi?!" When all else fails, yell at your brother. Robbie took it all in stride. After all, she looked pretty good in a bikini, and he had nothing to lose. "Oh, that," he chuckled with good nature. "No, she just—“ "Look," Angela cut him off, spinning around with a look that could stop Hesbollah. (Were her eyes actually glowing red?) "I've got three boyfriends who can all kick your butt and every one of them already makes more than you'll make in your entire lifetime, so like I said, screw off, okay?" She spewed it out like one long German word then spun away from him, bullying the cushions some more. Angela was tough, all right—just not tough enough to stick around and chance seeing that her hard-hitting tactics had no effect, again. Robbie let her remarks, and the attendant concepts, soak in for a long moment. In that gap, Albert popped out of the forward hatch, slammed down a Pepsi and a bottle opener, looked at Robbie and said, "And they're all queers, too." He snickered happily. Robbie eyed the Pepsi; the thin bottle had a conspicuous absence of sweat for such a hot day, and Albert had really hammered it onto the deck. "Dammit, Bertie! Go away! You're the queer!" Albert wasn't taking any more crap from the Waxman women. "Screw you!" he said with as much nasty as he had in him. "Screw you!" Angela spit venomously, sitting up again—Waxman women didn't take such insolence lying down— then yelled, "MOM! ALBERT TOLD ME TO SCREW OFF!" red with rage, veins popping out from her neck, face and chest, looking like she might explode. Literally. Gulls would be picking pieces of Waxman tease out of the mangrove tops for weeks. Abby Waxman said in a controlled sigh, "Albert, don't tell you sister to screw off. Your father doesn't like that." The postscript was really unnecessary. After an exaggerated display of nasty juvenile histrionics behind Angela's back, Albert retreated back down into the oven, still not a drop of sweat showing. Angela didn't notice. She was too busy looking out across the water, revving up her barbed-response-generator, preparing to hurl an outrageously cruel, heinously cutting put-down at Robbie; one that would reduce this gas station zero to mere rubble; one that would be so brilliant, so final, that he could not possibly form even the kernel of an idea of a response. And… She had it! A classic. Clear as day. A confident smile widened her lips; sinister intent lowered her brow; Angela Waxman was ready! She spun back. "So, like I said…" That was it. The four words that, when uttered by a top of the food chain soash girl, had a piercingly finite ring which, without exception, put an end to any thought of verbal retaliation by the thunderstruck boy with the clothes from Penney’s. Zing! She encountered only one problem: Robbie was already halfway back to the office. He'd given up on her and left! Angela's jaw dropped. Her head bobbed. Had he actually walked away before she could nail him with the Final Putdown? Had she really been defeated by a guy? Humiliated by a GAS STATION GUY?! Good Christ the Hebrew. Angela shook all over for several seconds, then angrily grabbed up her Pepsi and popped the cap with the authority and flair of angry Waxman royalty. Hot Pepsi—shaken by Albert, below, for a good minute and half before he brought it up—blew off like Vesuvius. Tan froth covered his sister from big hair to big feet. "ALLLLL-BBBBEEERRRRRT! MOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMYYYYYYYYY!!! Halfway up the dock, Robbie heard Little Al's hysterics from deep within the furnace-hot bowels of the big runabout—and smiled. Inside the office, Robbie gave Malcolm the fuel total and Malcolm rang it up, adding the $9.60 to Waxman's other purchases. Big Al paid with a hundred like he always did. At that moment, Robbie remembered Malcolm telling him to put oil in Arnold Finster's ancient Evinrude Ranger horse-and-a-half (which was more like an electric mixer than an outboard motor), out in the shed (which was more like a large carport than a shed) and which Malcolm often referred to as the "dry dock" (even though half the boats in it had several inches of standing rainwater in them because the shed really had no sides and therefore the drydock really wasn't dry). So, Robbie spun on his bare heel and left. All the way out and around the mildewy once-white CBS "Ofice" to the back room, where Malcolm kept the oil, and on to the shed, Robbie thought about that hundred dollar bill and wondered why on earth it made him think of adding oil to Arnold Finster's old Evinrude. As he poured 30-weight into the little outboard which hung over a sawhorse which had been constructed by the original owner of Mandalay back in 1928 out of Dade County Pine (the stuff was nearly indestructible and the only good thing to come from anywhere north of Jewfish Creek, according to Malcolm), Robbie finally decided that his synaptic blip was just one of those mysteries in life that would have to remain unsolved, maybe until he was as old as Old Peru Temple; he thought maybe everything would make sense a few seconds before you died, everything in your life that you hadn’t understood before that moment; and he thought how that would be a shame since you really wouldn't have much time to enjoy having finally figured it all out. For instance: Why had Dan's crackly loud belch in the restroom at Ducky's last month made Robbie think of Richard Nixon's Checkers speech? That one stumped him for a full week before he finally gave up. And why did seeing his old girlfriend Theresa's beaver the first time make him think of Ireland? And did they even have beavers in Ireland? (The kind with flat tails that ate trees, that is.) And why would he be walking along the coral, watching some pelicans skim between the waves with nothing more than sun on his mind, when suddenly, clear as day, he had an image of himself at age twelve eating a cheese sandwich at his grandmother Lotty's; or skating with Augie Treadwell in front of The Market; or getting caught in the back of the carport playing doctor with little Ginny Anatole from Maitland's apartments on the Bayside when he was seven; or seeing snow for the first time on TV? What did any of it have to do with any of the rest of it! Robbie felt strongly that something which happened so frequently should not, could not, be such a complete mystery. But it was. Inside the office, untroubled by such desultory thoughts, Malcolm looked at the hundred and shook his head. He knew exactly what hundreds made him think of and why: making special trips to the bank on a regular basis just to keep enough change in the safe for rich Miami people who liked to flaunt their wealth, real or pretended. He had had to get the safe to keep the change for his supercilious clientele. Before they started coming in droves, some time in the mid-Fifties, he'd done very well with a cigar box under the counter. Malcolm counted out Waxman's change and thumped it on the counter with his characteristic roughness and accompanying grunt. Waxman always took pleasure in the act, today more so than usual after his conclusion that Malcolm was really rich and just acting poor. He chuckled and pocketed his change, picked up his beer and cigars, chips and sodas for the kids, orange juice for Abby's screwdrivers, ice for the cooler, and tucked the new Playboy magazine under his arm for later, when the rest of the family would be suspended in the clear, warm waters of Pennekamp park admiring the concrete image of Christianity's Number One Son, twenty feet down. Al was loaded up pretty well; Malcolm would make the power bill this week on Waxman alone—a fair trade for his fat-assed loud- mouthed six-minute presence every other week in summer. But the equanimity ended abruptly the moment Waxman turned back and opened his mouth. "How much you net on this little pop-n-pop operation you got here, Melvin?" he asked cordially—one businessman to another, just wondering. "Not enough to worry yourself over," Malcolm said flatly—and closed the register with a resounding ping. "My guess is you're up in mid-five figures, annually," Waxman persisted, figuring the direct, bullish approach was best with a cagey type like Malcolm. "You do a lot of figurin' on other peoples' business?" Malcolm countered as he sat back on his well-worn bar stool (salvaged from Pookey's Tavern after the fire in '52), and looked bored. "Only when it fascinates me," Waxman said with no embarrassment whatsoever. "And you, Marvin," he grinned and winked, "fascinate the hell outa me." Malcolm looked blankly at Waxman a long moment, then opined, "Well-sir, you must lead a pretty goddammed dull life." Waxman's grin retarded. Malcolm then let go a crackly howl of laughter so loud that it startled Big Al and sent him for the door. Malcolm continued cackling until tears flooded his old, rheumy eyes so bad he couldn't see. Robbie heard the hacking laughter all the way out in the dry dock and, done with oiling Finster's Evinrude, headed back to find out what he’d missed. Stepping into sunlight, he saw Waxman scurrying down the dock, shaking his head and sneaking looks back at the office as if something in there was about to come after him. Suddenly, Malcolm picked up the yard mic' and cackled into it at full volume! Waxman literally jumped, then stood there staring back in horror at the office loudspeaker from which Malcolm's tinny phlegm-infested guffaws spewed out like happy klaxon on a homeward bound carrier. Waxman broke into a run—or as close to running as his 260 pounds would allow—and yelled for his son to prepare to make way. Or as Big Al put it, “Allie, get the fuckin’ ropes off the thing!” The muffled response he got back from the hell-box below was: “Don’t call me that! GOD!” As he went inside the shop, Robbie had to laugh as well, even though he had no idea why he was laughing; but the sight of his old boss chortling until he just about coughed himself into the afterlife was reason enough on its own. After Malcolm hacked up something nearly the size of his fist and the approximate color of death, and relieved himself of it in his trashcan, he sat back down on his stool and shook his head, tickled with himself to no end. "What was that all about?" Robbie asked, still grinning, as he grabbed himself a cold SunDrop. "Waxman." Malcolm chuckled and shook his head again. "When God created assholes, he looked to that man for inspiration then broke the mold." "What'd he do now?" "Nothin'. The same. Just struck me as funny today. That an' me tellin' him he was about as fascinatin' as a clam fart." "You said that?" Robbie was amused and astonished at the same time. "Well, more or less," Malcolm half-lied. The effect of this exchange was to reduce his mirth substantially, close to the level of his usual mirthless self. He jerked his shoulders in a half-shrug as if trying to rearrange his bones and shake off the whole experience at the same time, then, to get onto something new, he asked Robbie which theory on life the old blowhard had graced him with today. "Shit sandwich." "Did he get it right?" Malcolm asked. Robbie shook his head no and Malcolm shook his in pity. "I'll tell you what, though," Malcolm said after a moment, "'I had his money, I'd buy myself a place in the Bahamas and retire before this place gets completely run over with the likes of him." He continued to stare outside at Waxman, then a vague smile returned. "That is one mendacious sonofabitch, ain't he?" Robbie didn't know what that meant, but nodded anyway, mainly because, when it came to assessing character, Malcolm was generally right as rain. His gift. "Tip?" "Quarter," Robbie said, his voice low but not harsh. "Well," Malcolm said with some satisfaction, "it's nice to know some things never change, I guess. Gives some consistency to life. Keep yer money for the SunDrop." "Thanks," Robbie said. A dime was a dime was a dime. Though a 35-cent tip for all that Robbie had had to endure at the hands of the Waxman tribe still seemed at least half lousy. Malcolm stood up and stretched. He felt good; but since he didn't like to show it, he sat back down. Then he took off his hat, examined it and put it back on. "Jews are behind the niggers, ya know," he said and nodded, as if this was a well-known fact. "No, I didn't," Robbie said honestly. Malcolm nodded confirmation, but it was hard to tell if he believed it or was just repeating it because he thought he was supposed to. Being white and all. Robbie had heard this theory espoused on a few prior occasions, usually in some geographic proximity to the VFW bar; but it never made sense to him then, or now. What did they, the Jews, have to gain by rilin' up the coloreds? Still, he wasn't the kind of kid to question his boss, or elders in general, so he just let silence state his position: No yes, no no, no challenge. So, Malcolm stood again and headed for his cluttered backroom office. "Too much money for their own damn good," he decided to add, clarifying his position on rich Miami people in general and Waxman in particular. "He thinks you've got a fortune hid away, somewhere," Robbie said. Without looking back, Malcolm then said something that seemed very odd to Robbie. He said, "Takes one to know one," nodded, then closed the door on his inner sanctum sanctorum and didn't come out for three hours and three Regal beers, exactly. Robbie grunted his puzzlement, shook his head once or twice, because that's what you did when you were mildly confused but not enough so to do any more thinking about it, then went to the window with his SunDrop. Outside, he could see Waxman and his family all arguing and gesturing at once in the boat as they put away the ice and sodas, fighting over the bar-b-cue Lays and who would have to get out of the boat to undo the lines so they could go skiing on the calm, leeward side of Temptation Key like the Mrs. Wanted, or go dive the cement Jesus as the kids preferred. Robbie took a slow swig of his SunDrop, shook his head slowly and muttered, "If I had his money, I'd buy myself a new family." |
| Novel by Glenn A. Bruce |
