“Naw,” he says, rubbing his grizzled chin. “You don’t wanta go buttin’ into other people’s fights. Sonofabitch better not’ve banged up any of my stuff, though, I’ll tell ya. I had some kids there once that punched a buncha holes in the walls one night when they was drunk.”
“Maybe we better just go on over and check on Elaine, make sure she’s okay.” Allie takes a step off the grass onto the road.
“Naw. She can always call the cops on the bastard if she’s scared of him. Besides, he ain’t the type to shoot or cut anybody. He might knock her around a little, but he ain’t the violent type.”
“You think so?”
“Oh, yeah,” Horace says, and he turns and starts heading back to his own trailer. “Men can tell these things about each other,” he says. “He’s harmless. Just screwed up is all. See you later,” he says, and goes inside.
Allie stands by the road for several moments, arms crossed below her breasts, hands cupping her elbows. Then she turns and slowly walks back to her trailer, where she sits down on the stoop and smokes a cigarette and watches Bob’s trailer until the lights come on inside it. Then she stands, opens the door and goes in.
By the time Bob crosses from Upper Matecumbe to Moray Key, it’s dark, and the shrimpers are already out, dozens of them leaning over the rail of the catwalk along the bridge, men, women and children with lanterns hung from the catwalk and long-handled dip nets stuck down into the channel. Bob drives by barely noticing them and does not remember that a few hours earlier he was planning to join the shrimpers tonight. Without intending it, without particularly desiring it, almost without being aware of it, he has momentarily severed the connection between his past and his future. During this moment and the several that will immediately follow, Bob is floating free of time, a man without memories and without plans, like an infant, conscious only of the immediate present. If you stop him and ask where he is going on this tropical winter’s eve, he’ll blink and look down the hood of his car at the piles of sand, cinder block and steel, and recognizing the marina and the apartment building beside it and the Clam Shack, he’ll say, “To Moray Key.” If, when he parks the car in the lot behind the apartment building, you ask him where on the key he’s going, he’ll blink again, and noting that his car is next to Avery Boone’s van, he’ll say, “To Ave’s.” And if, as he climbs the narrow iron stairs to the second floor and pauses on the terrace before Ave’s door and raises his hand to knock, you ask him what business he has with his old friend and new partner Avery Boone on this lovely, breezy, moonlit evening, he’ll blink a third time, hold his hand in the air and say, “Why, no business at all.”
Honduras answers the door. She swings it open and stands there on one foot, like a stork resting, except that she’s not resting, she’s been painting her toenails and has hopped on her right foot from the low, blond sofa over to the door, afraid the shag rug will mess the wet paint on the toes of the left. She’s got a cigarette clamped between her lips and a tiny maroon-tipped brush in one hand.
“Oh, hi, Bob,” she says, her lips not moving, the cigarette bobbing up and down as she speaks. “C’mon in.” She turns and hops back to the couch and puts the cigarette into a conch shell and resumes painting toenails. She’s wearing a man’s pale blue dress shirt, Ave’s, and tight cut-off jeans with raggedy Daisy Mae cuffs. The gold hoops on her wrists clank against one another as she lovingly lays down the paint. “Jesus, I hate doing this,” she says, but she does it with delicate, slow, affectionate swishes, licking her lips each time she completes a swirl on one toe and moves on to the next. “What brings you out on a night like this?”
Bob doesn’t answer. He’s entered the room, closed the door behind him and is looking around him, as if it’s the first time he’s been here, though he’s been here many times, has sat at the table in the dining area off the kitchen drinking beer and talking into the night with Ave, has peered out all the windows, even bedroom windows, and admired the view of the marina, the boats tied up there, the channel and the bay beyond, has listened to the thump of the jukebox in the bar below, has used the bathroom at two in the morning before leaving to drive home to Elaine, asleep alone on the sofa in the dilapidated yellow trailer five miles away on Upper Matecumbe Key. He has said to himself, though he does not now remember it, that he would be content with an apartment like this, larger, of course, with bedrooms for the kids, and maybe two baths instead of one, but no fancier.
Honduras looks up, peers at Bob through frizzy red hair, her hand poised over the little toe of her right foot. “Ave’s not here,” she says. “Left with Tyrone this afternoon, for the Caymans, I think. Won’t be back till … Thursday? Yeah, Thursday, I think.”
