Read Online Middle Men by Jim Gavin - Free Book Online Page B

starting to settle there, hating it less and less. She went on and on about the water. Apparently it was very blue. Now when I talked about visiting after Christmas, she said only if I wanted to, and only if I could afford it. I picked up more shifts at work. Three weeks passed without a letter. Finally, she wrote to say that she couldn’t live in two places at once. There was no return address on the envelope. I thought this was a little too dramatic, like Maria Recoba declaring her wish to die.
    A couple weeks before Christmas, Mark agreed to come with me to Maria’s house. She still hadn’t sold the piano. Mark explained to her that if she had papers for it, his guy would advance her a fair sum of money and they wouldn’t even have to arrange to move the piano into his pawnshop.
    â€œHe just needs the papers,” Mark said, “and then you get cash right away, while he looks for a buyer.” Mark tickled the keys with his fat, troll-like fingers. “This is a beautiful piano and he says he knows people. For most things he’ll just sit onit, but this is high-end for him and so he’ll actively pursue a sale.”
    â€œThe papers are in the bench,” she said.
    As I sat down next to her on the couch, dust billowed up from the cushions.
    â€œMaria,” I said, “since I’m kind of arranging everything, I was hoping you could give me a percentage of the sale.”
    â€œThe money goes to Blessed Sacrament.”
    â€œI need money for a plane ticket. I’m going to visit Karen.”
    She gave us the papers. My cut was exactly the price for a round-trip ticket to Bermuda. I didn’t take a penny more. But two weeks later my supervisor called me into her office. Maria, quite innocently, had mentioned our arrangement to one of the caseworkers. I got fired on the spot.
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    A few days after Christmas Javier and Gilbert and the photo booth girl dropped me off at LAX.
    â€œWhat if you can’t find her?” Javier asked again. He was not a proponent of this trip, which upset me. I was doing something highly poetic, fighting the twin beasts of reality—logic and finance. I wanted to be congratulated.
    â€œIt’s a small island,” I said.
    â€œYou’ve got no money, man.”
    I was bringing twenty bucks and a disposable camera.
    â€œI’ll be fine,” I said. “Karen’s got money.”
    â€œGood luck,” said Gilbert, holding the photo booth girl’s hand. “If you see her, say hi.”
    I had never flown before, and Javier’s twenty-first birthday in Tijuana was actually the only time in my life I had set foot outside of California. It was a clear morning and when theplane took off it circled over the ocean. For a moment I could see the entire coastline. Then we turned slowly and flew east over the quilted sprawl of Los Angeles. After five minutes I got over the novelty of soaring through the heavens and fell asleep.
    During my layover in Boston, I called my mom to tell her I had made it. She too was not a proponent of this trip. She had refused to loan me money for a plane ticket. “What the hell are you doing, Brian?” she asked me for the hundreth time, and I hung up on her.
    I boarded a small plane for Bermuda. Sitting to my right, in the window seat, was an older man, a retired banker, who wore a blue blazer with khaki pants and a pair of leather sandals. We talked the entire flight. He went to Bermuda every Christmas to golf and seemed pleased that I was also traveling alone. I told him I was there to do some snorkeling. As the jet came down through the clouds, he let me lean across him and see the island.
    â€œIt looks like a hook,” I said.
    It was probably beautiful, probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen—the hills green, the water turquoise—but it was too small and precious to be an actual place with roads and people. It seemed