Chapter 2: Heading things off at the pass

Getting the crew on the grove paid wasn’t that difficult. There were only five permanent employees: Bubba, two other men who did a variety of grove maintenance functions and two ladies who tracked the financial and production accounting, i.e. how many boxes of fruit we sold and to whom, how much did we pay the temporary crews who worked the groves, and the like.

I called up the payroll service people and transferred the money that was needed from an out of state account, and they would take care of the rest. I knew I had to do this quickly, since most ag workers tended to be living paycheck to paycheck. Our people were better off than most, but they needed their steady cash flow. I made sure they were taken care of, and they, in turn, had a surprising loyalty to us.

I opened up my laptop and saw that Pete had sent me drafts of the letters he was going to send out for approval. I signed off on them and Pete sent them out, officially severing our relations with Bruce McWilliam’s grove management firm and letting the real estate people know that they had to shut the fraudulent sale down. The final letter, stating our position, could be sent out to all interested parties who had previously delt with Bruce, letting them know (if they were creditors) that they would be paid, and if they were customers, that they would still be sending their checks to our grove address.

We only had one grove credit card, and as Pete had predicted, it was maxed out. I stopped any additional charges from being made, but that was a case of closing the barn door after the horse was out. Luckily, the card had a limited credit amount, as well as a daily maximum that could be taken out as cash. I might be able to retrieve something out of it.

The immediate things that needed to be done, were completed.

Clair had left me a message that she was going out to dinner with several of her friends from the club, and that I was on my own for dinner.

Since I had a couple of hours by myself, I got a glass, put in a large cube of ice, and went to the liquor cabinet and poured myself a shot of Scapa — a single-malt Scotch from the far north of Scotland, in the Orkney Islands that was so light the flavor burst in my mouth, setting off all my taste buds. It always seemed to inspire my thought processes.

Sitting down in my recliner, I leaned it back, and reflected on Bruce and me growing up together.

For a long while, we did everything together. We captured that 4-foot alligator and put it into the reflection pool in front of City Hall. Another time we added laundry detergent and some dye into a fountain in front of one of the high-end hotels out on the barrier island. Both places put up surveillance cameras after that, so that ended our fun with fountains.

We sometimes would sneak into a grove and fire up one of the tractors or other pieces of equipment and move it from where it had been to somewhere else on the grove. We never damaged them or took them off the grove, that would have been theft not just ‘mischief,’ so we drew a line there.

It was with Bruce that I had my first alcoholic drink, my first (and only) cigarette. I was with Bruce the first time I got drunk and the first time that I smoked a joint. I learned a few lessons from those first times. Having puked my guts out that night, only to have my father, the next day, drag me out of bed, and make me work out in the grove all day the next day, I kept my drinking limited after that. Smoking the joint left me feeling detached from myself and paranoid, both of which were uncomfortable for me, so I passed on Mary Jane after that.

To be clear, not everything that we did as kids was bad. We were both Cub Scouts, we went out deep sea fishing with our dads, when they would charter a boat with a professional captain. We both got good, if not stellar, grades. I usually did significantly better than Bruce, but I wasn’t going to be the class valedictorian. We did extracurricular activities, Bruce playing football and other sports, me playing in the band, cross country and track.

On the whole, I never thought that our earlier lives were likely to lead us into criminal careers. Events like this issue of the attempted sale of the grove, made me look back at some things with a more critical eye.

As we got older, Bruce and I went further out on a limb, being more daring, but closer to the line of illegal and dangerous. And I confess, although Bruce would come up with the ideas, I was willing to go along with him. Bruce was bigger than I was, and slightly older, and I knew that he was doing riskier things without me when I wasn’t with him. He always seemed to get away with things. He was my closest friend, and I guess that I was always unconsciously seeking his approval.

After our other friend. Pete, joined us, he was maybe wiser than I was, because he would refuse to get involved with some of Bruce’s crazy ideas. He would tell us that his ambition was to be a lawyer, and that people, even juveniles, who had a criminal record, would have a tough time getting into a top ranked law school. We accepted that and didn’t blame him. We did continue to invite him along on our ‘adventures,’ as we thought of them. Sometimes he came, other times not. I understood Pete’s long-term thinking about his life goals, but even though he did it with a laugh, Bruce would call him a wimp or a pussy for avoiding the worst of our stupid stunts.

When we were in our mid-teens, there were a couple of times when we went down to the harbor and took some absentee owner’s boat out deep-sea fishing, without permission. I don’t know if he had friends in the marina, but he could get keys to open the locked gates intended to keep people away from the boats. Bruce always knew when the owners weren’t around anywhere to notice that their boats were missing for a day, and we always kept them clean and immaculate after we brought them back. We’d also refill the fuel tanks to where they had been when we took the boat, so that someone would discover that a boat that they had left fully fueled suddenly only had a quarter of a tank left. Similarly, if they had left the boat with less than a full tank, Bruce would carefully refill it just to where it had been. That should have been a red flag to me that Bruce was thinking a lot about how to cover up what was, in reality, a crime. Perhaps not a huge crime, but a crime none-the-less.

Worse, as I reflected, there were times when Bruce would have things that I suspected might have come from boats at the harbor.

Once we were out on Bruce’s father’s boat, and Bruce suddenly had a pair of binocs that I had never seen before. They were clearly expensive ‘marine’ binocs, not new, seemingly used, but in great condition. Bruce, being Bruce, always had an explanation ready: one of the grove owners had taken Bruce out on his boat, and when Bruce complimented him about his binocs, the owner gave them to him. Well, what could I say? It could happen, even if it wasn’t the most plausible explanation. When you hear hoofs, think horses, not zebras.

Another time, I witnessed Bruce selling a handgun that I had never seen before to a known low life from Fort Pierce. When I quizzed him about THAT transaction, he told me that he was just being an entrepreneur, that he knew someone who wanted to sell one of their guns, and he also knew that the guy from Fort Pierce wanted to buy one. He was just making a dime when he bought the gun at one price and sold it at a higher price.

He was over 21 at the time, so a personal transaction like that was legal in Florida, but I still had my suspicions that Bruce wasn’t above taking a five-finger discount on things, if he thought he could get away with it.

Hanging around with Bruce had some other advantages for a young guy like me. As a star player on our football team, Bruce seemed to have his pick of a lot of women.

One afternoon, after a game against the team from Port St. Lucie where Bruce had scored three times, including the winning touchdown, he asked me if I wanted to get some pussy. I think that he suspected that I was still a virgin and wanted to introduce me to the world of sex.

I told him, “Sure, who wouldn’t want some good gash?”

He asked if I could get some booze, Tequila, I think he asked for, and then bring it to one of the local parks.

I lifted a bottle from my parent’s stash (they weren’t big drinkers and never noticed that it was gone), and he showed up with a couple of women.

I had already realized that Bruce had a taste for the Latinas, so I wasn’t surprised when the two women who were with him at the park, Connie Lopez (no relation to the real estate Lopez’s) and a gal named Eva, whose last name escapes me. Both were Latinas. Connie’s family had escaped from Cuba, and as I recall, Eva’s family were of Mexican origin; her dad worked on a grove and her mother worked in one of the packing houses. Connie was pretty well known around town, since she was one of the Varsity Cheerleaders at Vero Beach HS. Eva didn’t go to the same school — she may have gone to the Catholic school that served Vero as well as Fort Pierce. Maybe she worked and didn’t go to school. I wasn’t interested and didn’t ask.

Bruce always claimed that Latinas were the best because they had big tits, they knew they had to suck cock, and take cocks up their culos if they want to go out with the popular men.

We sat on one of the benches in the park a long way from where anyone else was sitting or playing, and we started doing some Tequila shots; the classic, lime juice on your hand, dipped in a plate of salt, lick it off and take a shot of Tequila. Of course, this wasn’t high class, great Tequila. It was the stuff that my parents would use for margaritas or other mixed drinks.

After we’d knocked back most of the bottle, we drove over to one of the somewhat sleezy hotels, away from the beach, and I got a room. I thought about that, too; most of the time I bought the booze and paid for the rooms. I guess that Bruce was taking financial advantage of me even then.