From the ferry, Ray and Maddie were limo-driven to the huge ebony doors right under the painting of the cane plant. From there, they and their luggage went into a golf cart and they were motored around to their suite. The driver was a silent islander who seemed disturbed when Ray tried to help out, grabbing his own golf bag – as though the bag was not Ray’s to grab. The suite looked out on a large koi pond with Asian statuary all around and a tall, time-blackened pagoda. The brochure said it had been shipped in pieces from China and painstakingly reassembled. Maddie didn’t wait long – one look at the pagoda, one wedge of pineapple and two sips of rum punch – and she was off and running for a three hundred dollar seaweed wrap. Ray stalked out of the suite in search of the bar.
It was roomy and ostentatious and it didn’t take long to find. The counter and back bar dripped more twisted wood than a Banyan tree, and was emblazoned with brass elephants and apes. Boston-born Ray, who had learned to smoke in a sewer worker tunnel just off the schoolyard – a popular venue for warfare with tire irons - had a quick, crazed impression straight out of his earliest history books. Redcoats drank here, fat-assed lordly colonials who had been told the sun never sets on their empire – and they believed it. And swarming around the bar, little dark men with fast hands grinned and kissed their asses and mixed the bully-boy redcoats their gin and whatevers.
But as he entered there were no such lackeys in sight, and the barman who came over to take Ray’s call for vodka on the rocks could have been a cop or a wharf gorilla from lower Washington Street, the old Combat Zone. He had a proper shirt with epaulets and the cane logo, even on the cufflinks. But he also had construction worker hands and the florid sly face you see at Bruins’ games. He was good slinging the booze, though – every pour, every spritz, eyeballed precisely. Ray watched him concoct pink and green frozen things, garnished with half an orchard, for a couple two seats away who were picking at little mounds of edamame and wasabi peas. It was mid-afternoon but they were still in their golf clothes, colors bold as a mandrill’s ass and matching from head to toe. Listening to them one-up each other on golf brands made Ray wish he had left his clubs at home, but then he remembered the mayor’s priest telling him one night in a prime Fenway field box, “you go to Cane Palace you play golf. It’s Christian charity to animals. The whales swimming right off the twelfth tee box have gotten used to a steady diet of golf balls. They’d starve without shankers like you…”
Ray ordered another vodka just as the woman whipped off her Guccis – with drama – letting the premises know her eyes were still worth a gander, like vintage beads. “Let’s talk about tonight, our first night,” she declared to her companion, “and champagne.”
He popped an answer quick as a ping-pong slap. “White Star. I like that the best.”
She frowned and wrinkled her nose. “But it’s so sweet…”
“Well, I don’t think so. Do you like champagne with orange juice?”
She was miffed, for sure. “Certainly not good champagne. Why would you spoil it?”
The woman paused, and there was a seriousness to it – as though she were deciding whether to spend the rest of her life with this man who killed fine bubbly by turning it into orange punch. “Do you like…Cristal?” she finally asked.
“Not really. What about Dom Perignon?” He had a mastiff brow, too big for the rest of his face, and it was already sun-fried. But now it reddened all the more. He seemed shamed by his own question.
“Dom, not Dom,” she snapped, whipping the air with the Gucci shades. “I really don’t like Dom. It tastes like aspirin. You know that taste – that Tylenol taste?”
The man seemed crestfallen, and said nothing.
“Cristal,” the woman said. “It’s perfect! The bubbles are perfect.”
The crestfallen man signaled for the tab, bringing over the barman, who, for the first time, gave Ray a look that wasn’t just official politeness. When the two of them finished making their exit Ray returned the look and moved his lips, voicelessly, so they formed a single word: “assholes.” The bartender gave a little smirk and said, “they better watch out or they might step on a snake.”
******
It so happened the bartender wasn’t from Southie, or Fields Corner, or any of the places Ray wanted him to be from. But he was from Newark and then Rahway, where, like half the town, he’d worked at the prison, and that was good enough for Ray.
“So here’s the first question,” Ray said, “is that where you learned to mix drinks, in the joint? And the second one: how did you get all the fuck out here?”
The bartender brought over a stainless steel bowl of limes and a small cutting board. He sliced one and said, “maybe the question shouldn’t be how – but why? When I landed here it was the rainy season, which you and your wife will never see, since you’re on the high-season rate plan. I always keep my shirts on those wire hangers, you know, and after two weeks I start noticing these big rust marks inside all my shirts. The weather is eating the hangers, the hangers are eating the shirts…”
“So why do you stay? Free shirts?”
“Hey, there are worse places. Ever been to Lucknow? This is my career, you know. I’ve shaken and stirred all over the known world. Besides, this place lets me play my music. They give me gigs, you know, minor gigs, the Tuesday Pig Roast…”
Ray, who had made his stash distributing liquor to half the Bay State, asked the question he always asked bartenders. “Move much Goldschlager?”
The bartender scooped a new round of limes out of the stainless steel bowl. “You mean the schnapps with the little gold flecks?”
“Eighteen-karat. That’s what they say.”
The smirk again, and much wider. “Not a Cane Palace favorite. They don’t do beer and shooters here. You heard the lady, they drink Cristal. But I like the gold shooters now and then. It’s always been my dream to shit gold. I’m still waiting.”
Cane Palace, as it turned out, was everything the brochure said it was, from the pearl beach to the emerald golf course. It was a place so perfect Bill Gates had gotten married on the greens atop the seaside cliffs, while the dolphins below leapt with glee.
All that remained of the old sugar plantation, and the days of the machete versus the lash, was the great manor house. It was now a five-star resort – for those who had five-star wallets: Maximum occupancy was forty eight people a week.
*******
On the return ferry ride, the Cristal couple toasted each other with champagne from a cooler: the woman’s favorite brand, of course. Every time she raised her glass she flashed an enormous emerald cut diamond. It looked like the prow-browed suitor had passed muster, despite his tacky fondness for polluting top-shelf bubbly with Minute Maid. Ray couldn’t stand to look at them, which made him look all the more.
Maddie tugged his sleeve.” Hey, you could buy them and sell them. Don’t you know that?”
“I don’t want to buy them and sell them. I want to throw them off the boat and let the sharks buy them and sell them.”
Ray fell silent, fixated on his second-day visit to the Cane Island bar – when the real reason he went back was to ask the bartender what he’d meant by that snake remark. The bartender told him about an incident that was rumored to have occurred several years ago, when Cane Palace was a more sketchy operation. There was a kind of fashion show in one of the gardens, which at the time was overgrown and badly tended. The concept of the show was female guests as models, wearing sarongs made by island women.
“In this business,” the bartender had said. “There’s only one thing worse than a guest that trashes the room. It’s a guest that trashes the help. You know what I mean…”
As the rumor had it, one of the “models” was a woman, a lot like the Cristal lady, whose help-trashing was the talk of the back rooms and the villages. “She came down the garden staircase dressed like a bird of paradise,” the bartender said. “But she stepped right on a viper, a little tiny guy, who gave her an unfortunate nip on the toe. Nobody put it there or anything. It was an accident, of course.”
“Of course,” Ray had replied, in that knowing voice. But what did he know about the Cristal lady, or the Cristal man, for that matter – whether they treated the help like shit or like sugar. All he really knew was they were rich and liked to show it.
But so did other people.
“Hey Ray,” Maddie announced. “Maybe you need shock therapy. Maybe you should buy me a rock like that. You could land a plane on that stone of hers.”
“Maybe I need to get drunk,” he said, “till I can’t think about this shit any more. I don’t know who I am…”
Back in Boston at last, Ray had his pilot take him to Teterboro, where his New York driver picked him up and motored him down to Rahway.
Ray had the driver drop him at one of the dive bars where the prison workers go after their shifts. For the first time in twenty years, Ray sucked down Goldschlager until it was coming out of all apertures, until he had to change his seat from the bar to the men’s room. “Fuck,” he said to the occupant of the adjacent stall, whom he could see through a drilled hole you could drive a truck through. “All my life I made gold. Tonight I shit some.”
“Good luck,” the occupant said. “And if you don’t?”
“Then I puke some. This is my lucky night.”
Ray looked away for a minute. When he looked back he saw the dick push through the hole in the stall wall. It made him think of the Cristal lady and the viper. But by now his gullet was a geyser, and he retched until he felt his stomach would shoot right out of his mouth. When it stopped, he was on his knees before the reeking can, and the dick was nowhere to be seen. Vanished, along with its owner, as though offended by the gushing and the stench.
Another eruption followed, but this time it was wild laughter – from an even deeper part of Ray’s gut. And he turned to the more important business of the evening, beaming his eyes into the porcelain bowl of upchuck, mining it for that little fleck of gold.