The larger issue was that I could see Fiona walking up behind Davey, which meant that I was about thirty seconds from being in a situation beyond my control.
“What do you do these days, Westy?”
If he called me Westy again, there was going to be a problem.
“Kill people for the government,” I said.
“Can you imagine? Be like James Bond, back when he was cool? I just got the whole Connery DVD set a couple weeks ago. My opinion? Lazenby could have been the best Bond.”
“Look, David,” I began, but Davey cut me off with a dismissive wave, which made me think breaking his wrist would be a favor to a lot of people.
“Davey. Everyone calls me Davey still.”
“Right. David. No offense? But I don’t remember you. I don’t remember Gordon or Coop or DeWitt or any of the other guys you mentioned. I trust we went to school together, I really do, but I’m drawing a real blank here.”
“We went to school together for twelve years, Mike. How can you not remember me?”
I could’ve told him the truth. I could’ve said that I’d probably replaced him in my mind with weapons training manuals for every gun produced foreign and domestically for the last twenty years. I could’ve told him that I needed the brain space occupied by all the memories of him and Coop for the schematics concerning how one best uses duct tape as a weapon. Or I could have told him that I’d forgotten him because I’d spent the last two decades trying to forget all I could about this place.
But then Fiona walked up and solved all of my problems.
“He’s had a traumatic brain injury,” she said. She swept around Davey, grazed him with her hip, which actually got him to move his cart a couple inches, something I’d been completely unable to manage, and then stood next to me. “He probably hasn’t even mentioned me, has he?”
“No,” Davey said, “he hasn’t. A brain injury, Westy?”
“Traumatic brain injury,” I said.
“Your mom didn’t mention that. Man. That’s awful.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Fiona said, “but I need to get… Westy… home before his medication wears off.”
“Are you his nurse?”
This would be one of those days that would take me years to live down.
“Of a sort, I guess you could say,” Fiona said, and then she shook Davey’s hand in a very busi nesslike manner. “A pleasure to meet an old friend of… Westy’s. But we must get going so… Westy.. can have his fun time taking apart kitchen appliances before his darkness takes over, as I’m sure you know.”
Davey had no idea what Fiona was saying, but by the end of the day, I suspected that anyone I went to high school with would have a fairly strong mental picture of me.
“Let me give you my card,” Davey said to Fiona, his voice just above a whisper, as if I couldn’t still hear him, as if he wasn’t standing directly in front of me, “in case he ever needs any help planning for his future. Does he have any kind of retirement set up?”
2
You have two choices when facing a hostile interrogation: Tell the truth or tell a lie. The problem here is that if you’re being interrogated by hostile forces, the end result is that you’re likely going to be killed regardless. So in the event that you find yourself on the pointed end of a knife, or looking down the barrel of a gun, or are simply sitting in a bathtub filled with water while one guy wearing a mask holds a video camera and another a plugged-in hair dryer, each awaiting your confession, well, you give whatever answer you think will buy you a few more minutes to formulate an escape plan.
“So, you didn’t have any friends, Michael?” Fiona asked.
“Not that I choose to recall,” I said. We were in the Charger but not moving, traffic in midtown Miami having come to a complete stop. Now would be a good time to have an extraction team.
“Who did you eat lunch with?”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“You didn’t eat, or you didn’t eat with people?”
“I mostly did sit-ups.”
“And who do you blame for this, your mother or your father?”
“Combination of both,” I said. “What’s with all this traffic?”
“After school, you didn’t play with anyone?”
“No, I didn’t play with anyone. I built a lot of things. Small explosives. My own BBs. That sort of thing.”
“And where was Nate?”
“Causing problems somewhere,” I said. I turned on the radio and searched for a station with a traffic report, but all I found were stations playing hip-hop and Gloria Estefan. Doesn’t matter what station you listen to in Miami; they all play Gloria Estefan.
“Was I your first kiss, Michael?”
“Fi,” I said.
“It occurs to me that Sam is the only friend of yours I’ve ever met,” Fiona said.
“You met Larry,” I said.
“Who wasn’t really your friend,” she said.
“He was for a while,” I said.
“He was an assassin,” she said.
“Well, before that, he had good points.”
“Being an efficient killer doesn’t count.” I gave Fi a look. “Normally, anyway.”
“You met Ricky,” I said. “My friend Andre’s kid brother.”
“That’s right. And where is Andre now?”
“Doing twenty-five,” I said. “And now you have Davey. The five of you should go out and swap stories about me. Let me know what you find out.”
We were on our way to South Beach to meet my mother-Fiona kindly phoned her from Target and told her we’d decided gifts just wouldn’t do, and that I’d like to buy her dinner, as well-but the 195, the causeway we’d need to get on to get across the water, was frozen in front of us, too.
I made a left turn off Miami Avenue and wound around Roberto Clemente Park. Used to be this part of town was all working-class Puerto Rican families, but now it was this weird mix of big-box stores, high-rise condos, art galleries, coffeehouses, dollar stores, empty warehouses, boarded-up houses, chain-link fences, jungle gyms on broken pavement, cops parked window to window under trees and teenage gangsters trying to look hard, but mostly looking like they were bothered by the humidity and just wanted to be inside. I doubted any of them knew who Roberto Clemente was.
“You take me to the nicest places, Michael,” Fiona said. The pleasant thing about being with Fiona is that you drive through a bad neighborhood with her and she doesn’t lock the doors and scream for you to find the closest Quiznos. She just takes it all in. Cereal-box gangsters and graffiti scare her about as much as a guppy scares a shark. She was looking out the window and smiling at the corner boys, periodically waving at them as we passed.
“You want to know what I did when I was a kid?” I said. “I came down here and stole cars. Half of them were already stolen or had fake plates as it was. Sometimes, Nate and I would steal a car here, drive it to the Pork ’n’ Beans Projects, steal another car there, drive it back over here and then catch the bus back home before my dad even knew we were gone.”
“And that was fun?”
“That was the best time,” I said. “Better than being home, Fiona. Better than being home.”
We wound back through 34th Street, picked up the 195 and circled back to the MacArthur Causeway, which was a longer trip, but I didn’t mind too terribly much. I’d already seen my mother five times that week-once to unclog her sink, which it turns out was backed up with a compound of cigarette ash and animal fat, which had turned into a marcite-like substance in her disposal; once to take her to see her podiatrist in order to get her troublesome ingrown toenail cut out; once to assure her that her neighbors were not using their DirecTV unit to bug her conversations; once to show her how to operate her DVD player and once to dissuade her from making me go to family therapy with her again.