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By Root 1092 0

but my torso is white. Just like I don’t follow baseball or talk about my cat, I don’t take my shirt off in front of other people. They would kind of notice the livid scar that starts at my left hipbone, wraps around my side, and stops a couple inches from my spine. I took a bad beating up in New York and my kidney almost ruptured and had to come out. Later, some guys wanted some information from me and got the clever idea that I might be encouraged to tell them what it was if they started ripping out my staples. It was a really good idea because I would have told them anything, except that I didn’t know anything. Yet. Anyway, I keep the scar covered around people because if I didn’t, and anyone asked them if they knew anyone with a big kidney scar, they could happily say yes and I’d be a step closer to dead.

I leave the music on and walk down to the water. I usually do this naked, but I keep my shorts on tonight because of the girls right over there sitting around their fire. The water is perfect. It’s always perfect. I wade out, lean back, let my legs drift up and my arms float out until I am bobbing on the surface of the Caribbean, looking up at the stars. And for half a second I almost forget the Russian backpacker who set up his tent at the opposite end of the beach. The one who might be here looking for me and the four and a half million dollars that the New York Russian mafia thinks is theirs.

I have that money.

But it’s mine.

I killed for it.

BACK THERE at the bar, he sat and waited, the baseball question floating between us while I took another sip of seltzer.

—No, never got into baseball much. Just the football really.

Pedro comes over with some ribs for me. The backpacker is mostly quiet while I listen to the Dolphins actually hold onto a fourth-quarter lead and win the game. Of course, the radio tells me that the Jets have just beaten Buffalo, so we’re still locked in a death march to the last game of the season. But hope springs eternal after every win. And next week the Jets have to go to Green Bay, where come December the Packers treat opposing teams the way Napoleon got treated once the Russian winter hit him. Meanwhile, Miami gets to play 2–11 Detroit, at home. So you never know. God, I’m such a sucker.

I light a cigarette. The backpacker points at the pack.

—Benson Hedges.

—Want one?

—No. Don’t smoke. You know, only Russian doesn’t smoke in whole world.

—Huh.

—Father smoked Benson Hedges.

—Oh.

—Died, lung cancer.

—Yeah, it’ll get ya.

—No smoking for me.

—Good call.

It’s late afternoon. People are packing up on the beach after baking all day. Pedro is sitting on the far side of the bar with his guitar, strumming almost silently, whispering a song to himself. No one else is at the bar. I take a paperback from the rear pocket of my shorts, bend it open till the spine cracks a little, and lay it flat on the bar in front of me. The backpacker turns around on his swing to face the ocean again, still sitting right next to me. I read the same sentence a few times. He cranes his neck and tries to see the title of the book printed at the top of the page I’m staring at. I hold up the book, show it to him. East of Eden.

—Good book?

—Yeah.

I flatten the book on the bar again and stare at the sentence, waiting.

—Vacation here?

I surrender, flip the book facedown, light another cig, and turn to face him.

—Nope, live here. That’s my place up at the end of the beach. What about you, been on the road long? Doing the whole vagabondo thing or just on a quick vacation?

Which is how I end up spending the next hour chatting with Mikhail the Russian backpacker who really likes to be called Mickey.

He’s in his early twenties and has a round face and the kind of patchy beard and scraggly hair that all backpackers aspire to. He tells me that his family is originally from Armenia, but was in Russia for five generations, how his father was an importer/exporter of some kind who moved the family to America in ’95, which is where the Benson & Hedges caught up with him. He tells me about his four years in Jersey