82 Desire

to be a very eligible bachelor.
    If he went out and had a drink and happened to encounter female companionship, how could that hurt? He wasn’t married. Well, actually he hadn’t quite thought that out yet. He had simply left. He hadn’t thought about whether he was now dead or merely missing for a while. Anyway, he was separated. That called for a babe.
    He’d seen a place on the Intracoastal Waterway where there were several extremely popular restaurants all bunched up together. He could just take the sloop there, tie it up, and go get some strange Florida drink like a Fuzzy Navel. He set sail, as they said in the old days.
    The establishment with the largest dock bore the unpromising name of Bootlegger, and, something he’d never noticed, most of the boats there were cigarettes—long, skinny, loud, megapower racing vessels absolutely unsuitable for leisurely jaunts on the ICW unless you were a drug dealer who thought they were phat.
    Still, he’d come here and he was going to have his damn drink.
    Immediately, he classified it: a T-shirt—not a polo shirt—kind of place. (He himself wore neither, having opted for a slightly fancier blue chambray number—the better, he thought, to entice babes.) Nonetheless, polo shirts were the shirts of sailors, from hired crew on up. These people weren’t sailors. From the looks of things, they were football fans—there were at least a dozen TVs in the place, maybe as many as eighteen. And they were undoubtedly beer-drinkers—he should probably forget the Fuzzy Navel.
    Dean Woolverton didn’t fit in too badly. He was older than most, though not all by any means. There were a few lined, leathery faces scarfing beer above the T-shirts, many fringed by beards. Aha, he thought—a beard would be a very good thing instead of the stupid blond hair. Why hadn’t he thought of that in the first place? It was much more Russell—more like a sea captain than some asshole beach bum. He made a mental note to reverse his new persona as soon as it seemed safe.
    No sooner had he gotten settled—ordered a beer, sipped it, begun a serious TV count—than a woman started talking to him. A young woman, good-looking, with dark hair and white skin—Cuban, maybe. She wore some kind of white shirt with no sleeves—not exactly a tank top, maybe just a sleeveless T-shirt tucked into a pair of very brief blue shorts. As for the T-shirt, it was tighter than a corset, intended to show off her assets, which were worth showing.
    He felt old and somewhat dowdy in his crisp shirt and pants.
    “Nice boat,” she said.
    He said, “Uh… thanks,” hesitating because he couldn’t figure out how she knew which boat was his. He realized she must have watched him come in. How about that?
    She had watched him, and now she was talking to him. This had promise. He said, “Do you sail?”
    She turned to her margarita, rather shamefacedly, he thought. “No. I never learned how.”
    They swapped a few more sentences, during which he got a chance to try out his ex-lawyer routine on her, which at least didn’t meet with huge guffaws, and he learned that she had some low-level job at an insurance company. He was searching around for a topic of mutual interest when, out of the blue, another woman joined her, probably fresh from the ladies’ room. “Ready?” she said.
    “Ready,” said Russell’s babe, and they departed.
    So much, Russell thought, for babes.
    He looked around and found he could honestly say he didn’t find a single woman in the whole place attractive. They were too young, too blond, too busty, too scantily clad, too Florida.
    Old fart, he thought. You sound like your father.
    And the thought stabbed him like a needle in the neck. Everything about it hit him at once: that he could be like his father in any respect; that he could even have a father so arrogant, so judgmental, so uncaring. That his father was dead.
    The Fortiers had done well in New Orleans. Because of his father, Russell’s father had had no trouble getting a job with a shipping line that could have taken him as far as he wanted to go. Yet, from the first, at age twenty-six, he had insisted on trying to tell his father’s friend, the president, how to run the company. When his suggestions weren’t taken, he leaned more heavily on the president, criticizing him personally. Eventually, he was let go, on grounds of “personality conflict.”
    Russell knew all this from his father, told just about like that, but