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It wasn't simply a hangover, however. This slip had blown a year of sobriety for me, and in that year of health and sunshine and lifting weights and jogging for miles in the late evening, my system had lost all its tolerance for alcohol. It was similar to pouring a five-pound bag of sugar in an automobile gas tank and opening up the engine full-bore. In a short time your rings and valves are reduced to slag.
"Can I have my wallet?" I said.
"It's under the cushion on the couch."
I found it and put it in my back pocket, then slipped on my loafers.
"You headed for a beer joint?" she said.
"It's a thought."
"You're on your own, then. I'm not going to help you mess yourself up anymore."
"That's because you're the best, Robin."
"Save the baby oil for yourself. I don't need it."
"You've got it wrong, kiddo. I'm going to buy a bathing suit and we're going down to the beach. Then I'm going to take you out to lunch."
"It sounds like a good way to ease yourself back into the bar and keep mommy along."
"No bars. I promise."
Her eyes searched mine, and I saw her face brighten.
"I can fix food for us here. You don't have to spend your money," she said.
I smiled at her.
"I would really like to take you to lunch," I said.
It was a morning of abstinence in which I tried to think in terms of five minutes at a time. I felt like a piece of cracked ceramic. In the clothing store my hands were still trembling, and I saw the salesman step back from my breath. In an open-air food stand on the beach, I drank a glass of iced coffee and ate four aspirins. I squinted upward at the sunlight shining through the branches of the palm tree overhead. I would have swallowed a razor blade for a shuddering rush of Jim Beam through my system.
The snakes were out of their baskets, but I hoped they would have only a light meal and be on their way. I paid a Cuban kid a dollar to borrow his mask and snorkel, then I waded through the warm waves of the lagoon and swam out to open deep water over a coral reef. The water was as clear as green Jell-O, and thirty feet down I could see the fire coral in the reef, schools of clown fish, bluepoint crabs drifting across the sand, a nurse shark as motionless as a log in the reef's shadow, gossamer plants that bent with the current, black sea urchins whose spikes could go all the way through your foot. I held my breath and dove as deep as I could, dropping into a layer of cold water where a barracuda looked directly into my mask with his bony, hooked snout, then zipped past my ear like a silver arrow fired from an archer's bow.
I felt better when I swam back in and walked up on the sand where Robin was lying on a towel among a stand of coconut palms. Also, I had already invested too much of the day in my own misery. It was time to go to work again, although I knew she wasn't going to like it.
"The New Orleans cops think Jerry's in the Islands," I said.
She unsnapped her purse, took out a cigarette and lit it. She pulled her leg up in front of her and brushed sand off her knee.
"Come on, Robin," I said.
"I closed the door on all those dipshits."
"No, I'm going to close the door on them. And like we used to say in the First District, 'weld it shut and burn their birth certificates.'"
"You're a barrel of laughs, Dave."
"Where is he?" I smiled at her and ticked some grains of sand off her k
nee with my fingernail.
"I don't know. Forget the Islands, though. He used to have a mulatto chick in Bimini. That was the only reason he went over there. Then he got stoned on ganja and dropped her baby on its head. On concrete. He said they've got a coral-rock jail over there that's so black it'd turn a nigger into a white man."
"Where's his mother go when she's not in New Orleans?"
"She's got some relatives in north Louisiana. They used to come in the bar and ask for Styrofoam spit cups."
