Mangrove Squeeze (2 page)

This wild and abrupt upheaval—did it make any sense at all? Any less than staying where he was? Aaron had always been a rather sober fellow; by temperament and education, he was a man who thought things through. So he analyzed; he agonized; he bolted.

And now he was smiling at practically the only guests in his tumble-down guest house. He sneaked a look at the brief reservation list beneath the counter. "Ah," he said, "you must be the Karrs. From Michigan."

The tourists nodded eagerly, extravagantly grateful at being recognized, confirmed.

Aaron started reaching out a hand, then pulled it back when he remembered it was filthy. He was forty-one years old and the clean-hands, clean-shirt part of his working life was over. He was doing something on his own. He said, "Welcome to the Mangrove Arms. I'll show you to your room."

Six miles north, in the big glassed-in dining room of a modern waterfront house on Key Haven, Gennady Petrovich Markov crammed a hunk of rare roast beef into his broad and floppy mouth, bit down with enough gusto to shake the arc of blubber beneath his chin, and said with appreciation, "Keppitalism. Is werry good seestem."

His friend and business partner, Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky, visiting from a somewhat less grand dwelling on the next canal, sipped his Clos de Vougeot and agreed enthusiastically. "With brain," he said, "with nerve, you can improve your seetooation."

Markov put down his knife and fork just long enough to emphasize a point with the raising of a fat and dimpled finger. "Not improve it only, but control it. To control it—is key to everything."

He turned to a young man sitting on his right, a handsome fellow in blue jeans and with a hairdo from the fifties, a little bit Elvis, a little bit James Dean. He stroked the young man's wrist and said, "Remember this, Lazslo. Control. Is key."

Lazslo Kalynin stared briefly out the window at moonlight on the waters of the Gulf, then gave a bored and noncommittal nod. He was Markov's nephew and his ward; he owed his uncle his very existence in America. He owed him his job; all his jobs. He owed him his classic Cadillac convertible, Fleetwood '59, red with white interior. He owed him his Old Town bachelor pad, decorated with posters of gangster movies and Harley-Davidsons; the half-dozen Gibson guitars that he could barely play; the large amounts of folding cash he always carried in his cowboy-style wallet.

But gratitude was not in his nature—he'd never learned it, didn't see the point—and he hated giving up an evening of his downtown life for the shut-in, suburban dullness of Key Haven. He had even less patience for the endless and obsessive political musings of these old men with their embarrassing accents, their stretched-out vowels and phlegmy hs and rs with too much tongue.

Communism. Capitalism. Who cared? Why couldn't they just forget about Russia? Why couldn't they just grab and squeeze the promise of America like he had—without looking back, without comparing it to something else?

Markov had paused in his eating, expecting a reply; Lazslo had to say something. He glanced at his uncle's monumental stomach, which had been stuffed and prosperous for as long as anyone could remember. He said, "You controlled things pretty well in the old days."

His uncle, flattered, smiled but disagreed. "Enjoyed, yes," he said, as the housekeeper silently refilled their glasses. "Controlled, no. For scientist in Soviet Union, life was comfortable, true. Caviar. Trips to Asia, trips to Cuba. Women. Good. But problem? Any time they can take away. Why? Because never is it really yours, never you really own it. In America, you own. You pay money and you own."

Happy in his certainty, he went back to his red and bleeding roast beef. Juice glistened on his chin.

Lazslo, drawn despite himself into the discussion, said, "But even here, plenty of people, the money runs out, they lose everything, just as easy."

Ivan Cherkassky, the family friend, leaned forward in his chair, propped himself on sharp skinny elbows. He had a doleful scooped-out face, pockmarked and lumpy, like what was left when a wedge of melon had been spooned, with scrunched-together features arrayed between a pointy chin and a high but narrow forehead. He wagged a finger and said, "Is not the same. Here, when people they are losing things, is because they have been stupid."

"Exectly," Markov concurred. "Stupid. Which is why," he added gravely, "we must always plen."

Lazslo could not quite stifle a cockeyed smile nor keep a needling tone out of his voice. "Plan?" he said. "That's a tactful way of putting it."

The comment worried Ivan Cherkassky. Everything did. His slippery eyes flashed left and right, he glanced behind himself. He chided in a whisper, "Lazslo, please, be careful how you say."

"The KGB is listening? The commissars, the generals? They come with Geiger counters maybe? Still looking for certain missing state property when there isn't even a state?"

"This is funny?" said Cherkassky. "No."

"Luzhka," said Gennady Petrovich, using his favorite diminutive. "Soviet Union—you make jokes but you really don't remember, do you?"

Lazslo pecked at the French wine that he did not enjoy. He liked American beer. He liked American cars and American music, American cigarettes and American cheese, and he wanted to be down on Duval Street, chasing some American tail. He was twenty-six. He'd been seventeen when he got out of Moscow. With the facility of the young, he'd shed his accent and his beginnings almost perfectly. He said, "I
can
remember. But why bother?"

"Why bother," said Ivan Fyodorovich wistfully. The eyes went distant in his hollow face. "The cupolas, the snow on fur hats, so fresh you can see each flake—these you never miss?"

"Cut me a break," said Lazslo.

"And your parents?" said his uncle. "You think about your mother, your father?"

Lazslo thought it over, not for long. His parents, still troweling potatoes and knocking worms off cabbage on the other side of the world, were frightened round-faced peasants wearing coarse wool scarves. He said, "Only when you ask me if I do."

Markov put down his knife and fork, and patted his nephew's hand. He turned with pride toward Ivan Fyodorovich. "You see, Ivan," he said, "is solid, this boy. No reason to worry about this boy."

Softly but immovably, Cherkassky said, "I wish he is more careful—"

The doorbell rang, and Cherkassky fell silent before a single indiscreet syllable might perhaps be uttered. A moment later the housekeeper approached the table. "It is the mayor," she announced.

Markov frowned, produced a napkin, wiped his greasy chin. "Barbarian," he muttered, pushing back with effort from the table. "A man cannot enjoy his dinner?"

The handsome Lazslo could not hold back a smirk. "Be nice, Uncle," he whispered. "Smile at the dog turd."

The fat man rose, motioned to the others to keep on eating. "I come back," he said, "as little time it takes to reach into my pocket."

They weren't bums, exactly, and they weren't exactly homeless. Their names were Pineapple and Fred, and they lived inside a giant hot dog.

They didn't own or rent the hot dog, but for all practical purposes it was theirs. It used to be a vending wagon, a novelty item that plied the trade on Smathers Beach. When the former owner got sick of selling wieners, he unhitched the wagon from his truck and abandoned it in the no-man's-land just east of the airport, in an expanse of mangroves that had been closely guarded military property back when Key West was a more important, more strategic place. Now they were simply unimportant mangroves, and in the mangroves the rule was finders-keepers.

Fred and Piney had lived in the fiberglass frank for three years now, and had made it rather homey. Below the curving sausage, the bulbous yellow roll was roomier than it looked, with a big window that had been the service counter, and an unlikely little door between the twin swellings of the bun. Fred could lay his sleeping mat full-length along the side of the roll that held the sink and the sauerkraut steamer. Pineapple's bedding fit neatly against the little propane fridge and underneath the rotisserie where the pronged wieners had gone round and round, getting redder, sweating as they went. Lying on their backs, the two men, by candlelight, could trace out squiggles of mustard molded in the ceiling. It was not a bad place to live.

On this particular January evening, they were lying there, when Pineapple broke a long silence. "Ya know what I sometimes wonder about?" he said.

Fred sucked his beer. Then, in a here-we-go-again sort of tone, he said, "No, Piney, what do you sometimes wonder about?"

Pineapple scratched at the sparse and scraggly beard that made a ragged frame for his long thin face. It was an archaic face, medieval, with an ascetic slot for a mouth, and nervous simmering eyes sunk deep in bony sockets. "I sometimes wonder," he announced, "if I was invited to the White House, would I go?"

Fred guffawed so that he sprayed a little beer and had to wipe his nicotine-stained walrus moustache on the back of his hand. "Piney," he said, "why would you be invited to the White House? You're a fuckin' dirtbag."

Pineapple squirmed against the scratched chrome door of the little fridge. He said, "Let's leave that on the side for now. My question is this. I'm invited, do I go?"

Fred stared up at the ceiling. The ceiling was rough from the mold of the fiberglass, he could see fabric on the inside of the frank. "And whaddya wear?" he asked. "Shorts with the ass out and no shoes on your stinking feet?"

Piney said, "What's the difference what I wear? Besides, don't call me a dirtbag. I got a job."

His job, which he went to fairly often, was holding a sign downtown, on the corner of Whitehead and Rebecca.

There was an ordinance against billboards for parking lots, but there was no law saying a person couldn't sit on the curb, holding a sign on a stick. The sign said
parking,
painted inside an arrow. The only hard part of the job was making sure the arrow pointed in the right direction. Piney sat in the shifting shade and looked around. Sometimes, if people gave him paperbacks, he read. Mostly he watched the town go by and framed questions to consider.

Fred said, "Plenty a dirtbags got jobs. And if you're talking White House, it does matter what you wear. Fancy place, it matters."

"Okay, okay," said Piney. "But what I wear, that comes after. First question is, I'm invited, do I go?"

"And the answer is," said Fred, "of course you go." He crunched his beer can, tossed it into a sagging paper bag propped up in the corner, popped another. "Everybody invited goes. Astronauts, football teams."

Pineapple raked his scraggly beard, said with satisfaction, "Me, I wouldn't go."

"The president would be all broke up," said Fred.

"Ya go, it's like sayin' y'approve."

"Piney," said Fred, "have a beer." He knew that Piney hadn't had a drink in years. Have a beer—this was just something he said when his friend was launched on a flight of screwball tangents and strong opinions, some inquiring ramble that, in other men, would probably be powered by alcohol. But then he added, "Approve a what?"

"You're on TV," said Piney, "the whole world looks at you, says, there's one more smiling idiot that approves... But not me, nuh-uh, no way. Me, I don't approve."

Fred said, "Approve a what, is what I'm asking?"

Pineapple didn't answer right away. A plane came storming up the runway, which ended about 150 yards from where the hot dog sat in the mangroves. The noise got louder every second as the engines revved and the propellers whined, until the craft became airborne and the clatter changed over to a screaming whoosh. When the plane passed overhead—so close that, in daylight, you could count the rivets in its belly—the clamor seemed less a sound than a pressure, a downward crush of air that flattened the candle flames and seemed to squash the fiberglass wiener deeper into its roll.

As the racket was subsiding, Pineapple said, "Just, ya know, approve. In general. Like everything is hunky-dory."

Fred thought it over. Something had shifted when the plane went by, his sodden bag of beer cans and stew cans and soup cans tipped over in the corner and spilled some nameless residue on the floor. "Ya mean," he said, "it isn't?"

"I know what you're thinking," Aaron said, as, with a suitcase in each hand, he led the tourists across the lighted courtyard to their room. A light breeze rattled the palm fronds, a hint of chlorine wafted from the pool. "You're thinking, the man's delusional, he shouldn't work front desk."

In fact the couple from Michigan weren't thinking that at all. They were thinking, mostly, about how tired they were. They watched their feet as they took cautious steps along the unfinished brick path, and they wondered vaguely about the piles of dirt and stacks of lumber scattered here and there, the bound-up shrubs whose roots were balled in burlap, waiting to be planted.

"He's perfectly with-it a lot of the time," Aaron went on. "Comes and goes. You know. Besides, he wasn't supposed to be working the desk, just sitting. So he could call me. With the power tools, I guess I didn't hear."

The tourists nodded. The husband, a weekend putterer himself, said, "Must be a lot of work, this place."