And Mrs Lamb, if I’m reading her right, will then say: So what is it you do}
Honestly, I’m not certain.. ..
The conversation, over bacon and French toast, didn’t go precisely as Augustine had anticipated. At the end of his story, Bonnie Lamb looked over the rim of her coffeecup and asked: “Is that where you got the scar-from the plane crash?”
“Which scar?”
“The Y-shaped one on your lower back.”
“No,” said Augustine, guardedly. “That’s something else.” He made a mental note not to walk around without a shirt.
Later, clearing the kitchen table, Bonnie asked about his father.
“Extradited,” Augustine reported, “but he much prefers Talladega to the Bahamas.”
“Are you two close?”
“Sure,” said Augustine. “Only seven hundred miles.”
“How often do you go to see him?”
“Whenever I want to get angry and depressed.”
Augustine often wished that the plane crash had wiped out his memory of that last visit at Fox Hill Prison, but it hadn’t. They were supposed to talk about the extradition, about lining up a half-decent lawyer in the States, about maybe cutting a deal with prosecutors so that the old man might actually get out before the turn of the century.
But Augustine’s father wanted to talk about something else when his son came to see him. He wanted a favor.
-Bollock, you remember Bollock? He owes me a piece of a shipment.
-The answer is no.
-Come on, A.G. I got lawyers to pay. Take Leaker and Ape along. They’ll handle Bollock. Not the money, though. That I want in your hands only.
-Dad, I don’t believe this. I just don’t believe it….
-Hey, go down to Nassau harbor. See what they
done to my boat! Ape says they stripped the radar and all the electric.
-So what. You didn’t know how to use it anyway.
-Listen, wiseass, I was taking fire. It was the middle of the goddamn night.
-Still, it’s not easy to park a sixty-foot long-liner in nine inches of water. How exactly did you manage that?
-Watch your tone, son!
-Grown man, hangin’ out with guys called Leaker and Ape. Look where it got you.
-A.G., I’d love to keep strollin’ down memory lane, but the guard says we’re outta time. So will you do it? Go see Henry Bollock down on Big Pine. Get my slice and stick it in the Caymans. What’s the harm?
-Pathetic.
-What?
-I said, you’re pathetic.
-So I’ll take that as a “no,” you won’t do this for me?
– Jesus Christ.
-You disappoint me, boy.
-And I’m proud of you, too, Dad. I bust my buttons every time your name comes up.
And Augustine recalled thinking, as he sat in the Beechcraft on the runway at Nassau: He’s hopeless, my old man. He won’t learn. He’ll get out of prison and go right back to it.
A son looks a man square in the eye and calls him pathetic, pathetic, any other father would curse or cry or take a punch at the kid. Not mine. By God, not when there’s drug money needs collecting. So how about it, A.G.?
Fuck him, thought Augustine. Not because of what he’d done or what he’d been hauling, but because his stupid selfish greed had outlived the crime. Fuck him, Augustine thought, because it’s hopeless. He was supposed to raise me, god dammit, I wasn’t supposed to raise him.
And then the plane took off.
And then the plane went down.
And nothing was ever the same about the way Augustine saw the world, or his place in it. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if it was the accident that had changed him, or the visit with his father at Fox Hill Prison.
At FBI headquarters, Bonnie Lamb spent an hour talking with maddeningly polite agents. One of them dialed her answering machine and dubbed Max’s queer kidnap message. They urged her to notify the Bureau as soon as she received a credible ransom demand. Then, and only then, would a kidnap squad take over the case. The agents instructed Bonnie to check her machine often and be careful not to erase any tapes. They expressed no strong views about whether she ought to remain in Miami and search for her husband, or return to New York and wait.