The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [138]
She touched his hand briefly. “Or maybe worse would have happened to you in Havana. You might be dead. You never know.”
“The readiness is all,” he agreed.
Slowly they made their way back to her rental car in the empty parking lot. Every few feet he stopped to sigh a long soft sad sigh. “But I’m not a physicist and I’m not dead. I’m a spot-the-pigeon, do-the-chisel, hasta la vista flopper. That’s me, Annie. Except when I worked with Jack. Because with Jack it was never the score, it was the insubstantial pageant.”
“Make one of your own.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can. I saw you.”
He shook his head. Anything but the simplest scam was too stressful for him to bear. For instance, some floppers made extra money working with accomplices who pretended to be doctors and would validate the injuries of the supposed victims, to scare the elderly into higher payoffs. But the risks posed by partners were too anxiety-producing for Raffy to endure.
“I bet you could do a shell game,” Annie said to cheer him up.
“Never had the hands.” He held his out; they were unsteady.
She opened her car door. “I bet you could do sob stories. ‘I’ve got five kids and my wife’s dying’ type thing? You’d be good at that.”
He shrugged, morosely emptying a discarded bag of potato chips at the feet of a seagull in the parking lot; the bird seemed to know him personally and to dislike him. “To be honest with you, Annie, the flopper bit you saw me do on Joyce Weimar, that’s about all my nerves can take.”
He looked pensively at the cloudless blue sky, then into his water bottle, but there was no solace to be found in either place. “So I’m hoping to give my mama the Holy Thorn—that woman loves Jesus so much and He honestly has been a better Son to her than I have, and so has my oldest brother, to hear him tell it, which he will, like twenty-four-hour talk radio.” He blew a mournful foggy note on the bottle’s mouth. “Not that I’m defending the failure of my life. Maybe for such a success as yourself, it’s not so easy to see how someone could…what?…inhabit so much…insignificance. Except, I think, with an education I could have done a little better.”
Annie felt oddly urged by some unspecified impulse of human sympathy to kiss Raffy Rook and in an uncharacteristic impulsiveness, she did so. “It’s okay. You’ve educated yourself.”
“You think?” he asked softly.
“Yes.” She kissed him again. The full warmth of his lips gave her an unexpected, deeply sweet feeling, strangely reminding her of the healing ointments Sam had heated in her hands before rubbing them on Annie’s chest when she was a child, ill with a cold.
It had been some time since Annie’s lips had touched someone else’s lips. The pleasure of it surprised her.
Obviously touched, Raffy stepped back, reaching for her hand, kissing it in the same gentle way. “Thank you,” he said. “Your heart goes out to me. It’s very kind of you.”
“I mean it,” she said. “You know a lot of things. You’ve taught yourself.”
“Don’t think the worst. And don’t feel bad. Sometimes these ladies I flop on? These ladies and myself, at Golden Days, we get to be friends. We go to the salad bars, botanical gardens, zoo, IMAX. They get a senior’s discount, I play them a song on my guitar. It’s a connection. And in this sad fast life, how many do we make time for?” He spoke wistfully into the water bottle, as if he were depositing his confession inside and then quickly screwing the cap back on to keep it there.
Not until they were on their way back to the Dorado, and caught in a morning traffic jam caused by a fender bender at a big intersection, did Annie announce her intention of driving right now to the Miami police department headquarters on Second Avenue to find Sergeant Hart. She explained her conviction that the best way to keep both Raffy and her father out of jail was for her to make a deal with the police as quickly as possible. Tell Hart everything. So that’s what they were going to do. Right now.
The closeness they’d established at the track vanished. Raffy refused to let her take him to the “son-of-a-bitch cops.” Asked