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By Root 639 0

had gone to hell and the tourists never came anymore. Albury’s neighbors were servicemen from the Navy base, fishermen, bartenders, store clerks, and newlyweds. Albury’s trailer, as far as he knew, had been sitting on the same set of concrete blocks for twelve years; it was largish, for a mobile home, and in its own way comfortable, like a dusty old coat. There were three bedrooms, separated by tissue walls of phony wood. At one end was Ricky’s; the largest was where Albury and Laurie slept; and the one in the middle was a study, up for grabs. Breeze agonized over his accounts here, Ricky his homework, and, when the fancy struck, this was where Laurie laboriously pecked out the poetry she never sold.

The place was empty. Albury twisted the dial on the air conditioner and held his face to the grill until the air turned cold. He imagined a shower, but two notes on a coffee table intercepted him. Neither was signed. Neither had to be.

The first came right to the point, scrawled in big, half-forgotten schoolgirl letters on the back of an envelope: “I took them glass flawers, and that pink ashtray that was mine.”

The second note, written cursively in blue felt-tip, was equally blunt: “She also took my watch and seventy-six dollars of my tips from the dresser. ‘Them weren’t hers.’ Get them back, please.

“And for the LAST FUCKING TIME, CHANGE THE GODDAMN LOCK!”

Albury groaned, threw the notes away so Ricky wouldn’t see them, and stormed into the tiny bathroom. He jerked three of Laurie’s panties and a pair of support stockings from the shower rod and let the water run cold.

It was too early for Peg to be in the shack she shared with the Conch Train driver, so Albury went looking for her in the crowd of tourists and freaks who gathered nightly at Mallory Docks to watch the sun drip into the sea. Peg wasn’t there, but Albury found her by a strip of beachfront at the island’s tip that was a magnet for tourists.

When Albury had married her, she had been a good-looking woman, a little hefty maybe, but solid; blond and solid. Her family had never been much good, but—well, Albury hadn’t paid much attention then. He parked the Pontiac a half-block away and walked back to where Peg sat on a three-legged campstool, fingers running idly through the coarse sand. Next to her was a canvas bag, a pile of bleached conchs, and some woebegone starfish. “Southernmost Queen Conchs $3,” read the hand-scrawled sign jutting from the sand at her feet.

Time had been cruel to Peg Albury. She was only forty-three or forty-four, but sitting there alone in a shapeless housedress, waiting for a sucker from Michigan or Pennsylvania to buy her shells, she looked twenty years older. Her eyes under the floppy straw hat were dead. Sun and whiskey, a lethal combination, and in Key West an epidemic. Albury felt sorry for her, as though for a stranger.

“Evenin’, Peg,” Albury called softly.

She rose to her feet, wheezing. Sand cascaded from her lap. “Don’t you go beatin’ on me, Breeze Albury. I only took what was mine.”

Albury almost smiled. He had never beat her, even when he should have. It had been almost four years since she’d left. Now she was a sandy and pathetic stranger.

“The watch wasn’t yours, Peg. Neither was the money.”

“How do you know? Is that what she said, your tramp? Who do you believe, your wife or a tramp?”

“The money and the watch, Peg, now.”

“Now, now, now,” she snarled. “Like you were boss.” Her eyes drilled him from under the brim of the hat. “What are you gonna do if I say no? Go to the cops? They’ll believe me, not you, Mr. Convict.”

Albury suppressed a sudden gout of anger.

“I won’t go to the police, Peg. I will tell Ricky.”

“Trash,” she hollered. From somewhere in the folds of her dress she extracted Laurie’s Omega and dashed it into the sand. She might have stepped on it, but Albury nudged it aside and stooped quickly to pick it up.

“Tell Ricky? Tell my baby? Why don’t you tell him his daddy’s a convict? Gonna tell him his daddy was in jail when his sister died? Tell him that, Breeze.”

“He already knows, Peg.” Just, Albury