Tricky Business (2 page)

THE CAPTAIN PUNCHED IN A NUMBER AND HELD the phone to his ear. He looked out over Biscayne Bay, which was choppy, toward the sky over the Atlantic, which was dark.

“What,” said a voice in the phone.

“It's me,” said the captain.

“Yeah?”

“Have you looked out the window?” said the captain.

“What about it?”

“It's getting worse,” said the captain. “It's a tropical storm now. Tropical Storm Hector. They're forecasting . . .”

“I don't give a rat's ass what they're forecasting. I don't care if it's Hurricane Shaquille O'Neal, you understand? I told you that last night.”

“I know,” said the captain, “but I'm just wondering if we could do this another . . .”

“
No.
It's set up for tonight. We do it on the night it's set up for, like always.”

The captain took a deep breath. “The thing is,” he said, “these winds, it's gonna be rough out there. Somebody could fall, a customer could get hurt.”

“That's why we got insurance. Plus, weather like this, probably won't be no customers.”

“That's where you're wrong,” said the captain. “If we go out, we got customers. These people, they're
crazy.
They don't care about weather, they don't care about
anything.
They just want to get out there.”

“Then we're giving them what they want.”

“I don't like it,” said the captain. “I mean, it's my ship; I'm responsible.”

“Number one, it ain't your boat. Number two, you wanna keep working, you do what I tell you.”

The captain gripped the phone, but said nothing.

“Besides,” said the voice, “that's a big boat.”

And the captain thought:
So was the
Titanic.

 

WALLY HARTLEY AWOKE TO THE SOUND OF HIS mother's knock, followed by the sound of his mother's voice through the bedroom door.

“Wally,” she said, “it's your mother.”

She always told him this, as if somehow, during the night, he might have forgotten.

“Hi Mom,” he said, trying not to sound tired and annoyed, both of which he was. He looked at the clock radio. It was 8:15 A.M. Wally had gone to bed at 5 A.M.

The door opened. Wally squinted his eyes against the light, saw his mom in the doorway. She was dressed and had fixed her hair, as if she had somewhere to go, which she never did, unless you counted the supermarket. She'd gotten up, as always, at 5:30.

“Did you want some waffles?” she asked.

“No thanks, Mom,” he said, as he had every morning since he had, in shame and desperation, at age 29—29,
for God's sake
—moved back in with his mother. Wally did not eat breakfast, but he had given up on trying to explain this to his mother. She'd gotten it into her head that she would make waffles for her son. She was not one to give up easily.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“I'm sure, Mom,” he said. “Thanks.”

Wally waited for her to tell him that she had made some fresh.

“I made some fresh,” she said.

“Mom, thanks, but really, no.”

Now it was time for her to tell him that she hated to see them go to waste.

“I hate to see them go to waste,” she said.

“I'm sorry, Mom,” said Wally, because it would do no good to yell, IF YOU DON'T WANT TO WASTE THE DAMN WAFFLES, THEN DON'T
MAKE
THE DAMN WAFFLES.

“OK,” she said. “I'll save them for later, in case.” And she would. She would wrap them in aluminum foil and put them in the refrigerator. Later today, when she was cleaning the kitchen for the fourth time, she would take them out of the refrigerator, throw them away, fold the aluminum foil (she had pieces of aluminum foil dating back to the first Bush administration), and save it in a drawer, for tomorrow's waffles.

“I'm sorry, Mom,” said Wally, again.

She sniffed the air in his room. Wally hated that, his mom sniffing his room, his b.o.

“It smells musty in here,” she said. Everything always smelled musty to his mother; everything looked dirty. Show her Michelangelo's
David,
and she'd want to get after it with some Spic and Span.

“It's fine, Mom,” he said.

“I'm gonna vacuum in here,” she said. She vacuumed his room every day. Some days she vacuumed it twice. She also did his laundry and straightened up his belongings. She
folded his underwear.
Wally had to keep his pot in his car, or she'd find it.

“Mom, you don't need to clean my room,” he said.

“It has a musty smell,” she said. “I'm gonna vacuum.”

Wally lay back on his bed and closed his eyes, hoping his mom would close the door, let him drift back to sleep. But no, she'd been up for more than two hours, and she'd had two cups of coffee, and there was nobody else for her to talk to, and Regis did not come on for another hour. It was time for the weather report.

“Bob Soper said there's a storm coming,” she said. Bob Soper was a Miami TV weatherman, her favorite. She'd seen him at the Publix supermarket on Miami Beach once, at the deli counter, and she'd said hello, and—as she always said when recounting this historic event—he couldn't have been nicer. This was one of the highlights of her life since her husband, Wally's father, had died.

“Tropical Storm Hector,” she said. “Bob Soper said it could be fifty-five-mile-an-hour winds. Very rough seas, he said.”

“Huh,” said Wally, keeping his eyes closed.

“So the boat won't go out, right?” she said. “You won't go out in that?”

“I dunno, Mom,” Wally said. “Probably not. I have to call. But not now. I'm gonna sleep some more now, OK? I got in kind of late.” He turned his body away from the light, from his mother's silhouette.

“Fifty-five miles an hour,” she said. “They won't go out in that.”

Wally said nothing.

“I saw him at Publix that time,” she said. “Bob Soper.”

Wally said nothing.

“He was at the deli, waiting just like everybody else,” she said. “He couldn't have been nicer.”

Wally said nothing.

“He got the honey-baked ham, a half pound,” she said. “Boar's Head.”

Wally said nothing. Ten seconds passed; he could feel her standing there.

“I just thought you might want some waffles,” she said.

Another ten seconds.

“I'm definitely gonna vacuum in here,” she said, and closed the door.

Wally, now totally awake, rolled onto his back, stared at the ceiling, and thought, as he did pretty much every waking minute that he spent in his mother's house,
I have got to get out of here.
He willed his brain to think about
how
he was going to get out of there, and his brain, having been through this many times, responded with: despair.

Wally was broke. His only assets, other than his clothes, were his guitar, an Ernie Ball Music Man Axis worth maybe $800 if he sold it, which he never would; and his car, a 1986 Nissan Sentra that ran but was probably not salable, as its body was riddled with some kind of car leprosy. As a professional musician, Wally was currently making $50 a day, playing with the band on the ship, but that was only on days that the ship went out, and that money was usually gone within hours for the necessities of Wally's life: food, gas, a cell phone, and pot.

Wally was more than $5,000 in debt to three credit-card companies; he did not know the exact amount, because he threw the statements away without opening them. Wally had gotten the credit cards a few months earlier when he'd gotten his first-ever real day job, a short-lived attempt to leave the gig-to-gig life of the bar musician. He'd gotten the job through his fiancée, Amanda, who had grown tired of paying most of the rent on the apartment they shared. Amanda had also grown tired of the band lifestyle.

“No offense,” she'd said one night, “but I don't want to spend the rest of my life sitting at the bar getting hit on by creeps and listening to you play ‘Brown Eyed Girl.' ”

“I thought you liked ‘Brown Eyed Girl,' ” Wally said.

“I did,” she said, “the first three million times.”

“You think we need some new songs?” he said.

“I think you need a new job,” she said. Lately this had become the theme of many of their conversations.

“You're almost thirty years old,” Amanda said. “How're we supposed to get married on what you make? How're we supposed to raise a family if you're out all night all the time? Do you even
want
to get married?”

“Of course I want to get married,” said Wally, who was not one million percent sure, but also was not stupid enough to express any reservations now. “But the band, I mean, those guys are my best friends. We've been through a lot.”

“You've been through a lot of pot, is what you've been through,” she said. This had also become a theme. She used to happily partake in the doobie-passing back when they started dating, when she liked the idea that her guy was a musician, an
artist.
But she didn't smoke weed anymore, didn't even drink beer. When she came to gigs, which she did less and less often, she drank Perrier and looked bored.

“What do you want me to do?” Wally asked her. He really meant it. She was changing, and he wasn't, and he didn't want to lose her, and it scared him that he didn't know what she wanted anymore.

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course I love you.”
I do love her. That's the truth. I love her, and I don't want to lose her.

“Then talk to Tom about the job,” she said.

“OK,” said Wally. “I'll talk to Tom.”

Tom was Tom Recker, Amanda's new boss, who was starting a new company and was hiring. He'd hired Amanda away from her job as a secretary in a law firm to be his administrative assistant. As far as Wally could tell, administrative assistant was the same thing as secretary, but with more syllables.

Recker was 26 and had an MBA from Wharton, which he would let you know if you gave him an opening. He lifted weights and Rollerbladed and—although he did not tell people this—believed he looked like Keanu Reeves. His company was called Recker International; he was financing the start-up (Amanda confided this to Wally) with $3 million he got from his father.

Wally's job interview consisted mostly of a lengthy explanation by Recker of what a great concept Recker International was. It had to do with investments, but Wally really didn't understand it because every other sentence Recker said had “paradigm” in it. Later on, Wally looked “paradigm” up in the dictionary, but that had not helped.

The actual interview part of the interview had been brief.

“So,” Recker said. “Mandy tells me you play the guitar.”

“Yeah,” said Wally, thinking,
Mandy?

“She says you're in a band,” said Recker.

“Yeah,” said Wally.

“What kind of music do you play?” asked Recker.

“Mostly covers,” said Wally, “but we try to . . .”

Recker interrupted. “I used to fool around with the guitar,” he said.

“Huh,” said Wally. Sometimes it seemed like everybody he met used to fool around with the guitar.

“Tell you the truth, I wasn't bad,” said Recker, making an air-guitar move that told Wally, in an instant, that Recker had been bad. “I wish I'd kept up with it, but I'm trying to run a business here. Not much time for fun, I'm afraid. Somebody's got to be the grown-up.”

Right, with Daddy's money,
thought Wally.

“You have any business experience, Wally?” asked Recker.

“Well,” said Wally, “I handle the bookings for the band.”

Recker laughed out loud at that—a hearty, Wharton-man laugh.

“That's not
exactly
the kind of experience I'm looking for,” he said, still chuckling at the thought—
bookings for the band!
—“but I'm going to take a chance on you.” He leaned forward and pressed his fingertips together, a 26-year-old Rollerblader talking to Wally like he was Wally's dad. “Mandy tells me you're a fast learner and a self-starter. Is that true, Wally? Would you call yourself a self-starter?”

“Yes, Tom, I would,” said Wally, who, as Amanda well knew, rarely started anything, including breakfast, before 1 P.M.

“Welcome to the Recker International team,” said Recker, reaching across his new desk to give Wally a manly handshake.