Here he comes. Along Green Street, from the direction of Whitehead, rolling like the Pilar in a beam sea. Wearing shorts and a grimy T-shirt fouled with gurry and blackish stains of blood. He turns into the door on the street floor of the clapboarded white house on the left side of the alley. Dimly lit within, but enough light, as he bellies up to the curving bar, so anyone can see that he looks pleased with himself Watch out, if you know that look.
“What you say, Josie?”
“Not much” Russell says.
“Hello, Skinner.”
“All right,” the bartender says.
“Did you fix me a coconut?”
“Yessir.”
Skinner leans over his ice cooler and lifts out a coconut with a hole bored in it.
“When did you put the gin in?”
“Five o’clock, like you said.”
“Let’s have a try.”
Skinner puts a straw in the hole and hands the coconut to him.
“This coconut fresh?”
“Yessir.”
“Tastes like piss.”
“Which of course you know the taste of,” Josie Russell says.
A charming laugh. Watch out.
“My friend Charlie Thompson tells me you’re quite the amateur.” This comes from a big guy sitting a couple of stools down the bar. Legs crossed. Wearing a Brooks Brothers cotton shirt with a button-down collar and immaculate white flannels with wide cuffs.
“You can’t be much of a friend. He hates being called Charlie. Amateur what, by the way?”
“He says you split your finger on his punching bag.”
“Who is this, Josie? Some more of that Matecumbe trash?” The CCC workers from Matecumbe Key, bottomed-out war veterans, who used to come in here before the hurricane drowned them all. Always asking for trouble.
Last night he was on his first drink, talking with Russell at the bar, when the middle-aged St. Louis woman came in with her two grown kids. Said they were curious about the name Sloppy Joe’s. Girl, Marty, long blond hair, a hoity-toity accent with fake Englishy r’s; turned out of course she’d gone to Bryn Mawr. The boy, Alfred, very handsome. They called their mother Omi. Marty did a thing with her nostrils when she saw the blood on his T-shirt. He talked softly. Said both his wives had gone to school in St. Louis; he knew the city well. Marty got around to saying she, too, was a writer. You could see she was impressed; she’d caught on who he was. “I used a quote from you for an epigraph for my novel,” she said. He didn’t ask what it was. Just the one book? No, there was a collection of stories, The Trouble I’ve Seen. “Good title” he said. Before they left, he said he’d show them the town. “Like you to meet Pauline,” he said. Where were they staying?
“My name is Apramian,” the big man says.
“Sounds Armenian,” he says. “You sell rugs?”
“I see you’re the kind of guy gives his sparring partners bloody noses” the big man says, aiming his chin at the stains on the T-shirt.
“Only if they misbehave.”
“Like pop you too hard?”
“Oh? You talk like you think you can box.”
“Heard of Farnham’s gym? In Queens. I work out there a little.”
“You trying to give me a message?”
“Charlie said you have a short fuse.”
“Wrong. I’m fast at calculating the odds. On Bimini I offered two hundred fifty to any Negro on the island who could win against me. This monster named Saunders, they said he could carry a piano on his head. Wanted to go without gloves. I said yes right off. He only lasted a minute and a half.”
“Oooh,” the big man says. “No; I sell commodity futures.”
He’s had the T-shirt on for two days. Fact is, the blood is from that opalescent sailfish yesterday, wounded when he’d had to use the gaff or lose it. Sacker was trying to get it up over the roller at the stern. It wasn’t huge. It had taken only twenty minutes to bring it alongside. Six glorious jumps. The sail erect—the pride of an aroused peacock or wild turkey. Sacker had ahold of the bill, tugging at the trembling weight on the roller. It thrashed out of control and threw the hook too. He’d had to resort to the gaff. Had to. Fast. He hated doing that. Such beauty should be given back to the sea intact.
Now he has his arm around the broad shoulders of the man in white flannels. “Sure,” he says. “How about three rounds of four minutes each, two minutes between?”
“If that’s what you want,” the big man says.
“My gloves are on my boat. We can walk over. Josie, would you bring your Reo around? We’ll need the headlights.”
Russell gives the man in white flannels the once-over. You can tell he’s thinking, That guy is big. “You go along,” Russell says. “I’ll be there with the car.”
The Pilar is tied up stern-to. “You wait here,” he says to Apramian. “I don’t like strangers on board at night. I’ll get the gloves.”
He jumps down on cat feet, goes forward to the con, and turns the lights on. He drops through the hatch into the engine room and switches on the overhead light there. The submachine gun is up there on its slings, in its oil-soaked case. He reaches up and pats it. That’s all he wanted to do. Just pat it. He turns out the light and climbs above. He decides to call the girl Marty after the fight. The gloves are in the upper starboard locker, in the passageway to the head. He hangs both pairs around his neck on their laces and heists himself up onto the wharf.
He spent nearly three hours on the one paragraph this morning. He makes it a rule to quit the day’s work while it’s going well. So he can always pick right up the next morning and move along. Standing, working longhand at the tall podium, in the almost empty second-story room in the guesthouse in the place on Whitehead surrounded by its fortress wall made of the paving stones left over from when the streetcars were junked and the tracks removed. It was sunny out this morning. He took his time. He’s pretty much finished up the have-nots; Harry Morgan is mortally wounded. Now it’s back to the haves. Here’s this grain broker in his bunk in the master cabin of his elegant black brigantine, thinking—but not really worrying—about the people his greed has ruined. Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare….
Yes. Yes, indeed. Good place to stop for the day.
The important thing is to keep the headlights mostly behind him, to have as much light as possible full on the other man. Those pretty flannels are going to be soiled when he goes down. Josie Russell has the stopwatch. The fellow’s big, all right, probably got three or four inches advantage in reach. If he tries a haymaker, duck and get in under there with an uppercut. Give a jolt to the Armenian-American dream. A kayo is a miniature death. Must be careful on the uneven footing.
“Are you ready?” Russell asks. “All right. First round. Start!”
It doesn’t take long to find out he’s strong. A cruncher on the cheek. But it doesn’t take long, either, to find out he’s…oh, God, he’s so slow. This should be easy. His shoulders relax, and even though he’s paying attention to the moves the slowpoke is making, a line comes into his head for tomorrow morning. Somebody has to lose, the grain merchant could think, and only suckers worry.