Mangrove Squeeze (29 page)

"So what you wanted—?"

"Had no idea," she said. She put her fork down, picked up her wine. She gestured. Her arms moved wide, her neck bobbed. Space became elastic to accommodate her. "And something I figured out: What you want matters a whole lot less than what you don't want."

Aaron drank wine and pondered that a moment. Then he said, "That make you a pessimist or a mystic?"

"No, really," Suki said, as though he'd contradicted her. "You get rid of the ugliness, the annoyances, the discomforts, the stupid pointless worries... and it's really almost enough."

Aaron watched her. She'd put her plate onto the coffee table and she was half-reclining. Candlelight traced her side, the arc of her tilted hip and the sleigh-ride slope of her torso as it rose up toward her shoulder. His eyes grabbed for hers. He said, "Almost?"

Outside, beyond the porous, slatted walls, fronds were rustling, and cats were scuttling under porches, and Tarzan Abramowitz, suspenders spread around his thick ropy neck, was working his way through his list of suspect addresses, looking for someone to hurt. He cruised Key West's dusty streets, the molding of his electric blue Camaro barely clearing the still-warm pavements.

Suki got suddenly shy. She met Aaron's gaze but then her eyelids came slipping down, her mouth tightened at one corner and her voice had trouble turning breath to sound. "Yes," she said at last. "Almost."

He leaned a little toward her then. His face forgot the habit of appearing self-sufficient, it softened to reveal the true and simple thing that people trembled to admit—that they were lonely, that their own sealed skins did not satisfy as their only home. He didn't mean to whisper but he whispered. "What's missing, Suki?"

She didn't answer and she didn't have to. Her chin lifted, her shoulders opened. Her disconcerting upper lip gave a small slow undulating twitch, and he took her in his arms.

They were still kissing, there on the settee, with burned-down candles sputtering, and wavy shadows clutching at the walls, when a bounding step was faintly heard on the old boards of the office stairs, and a heavy hand smacked down on the little silver bell, its bright and singing tone now turned imperious, infernal.

Chapter 40

The woman who sometimes did the breakfast at the Mangrove Arms had tattoos on her ankles and her shoulders, studs through her nose and at the edges of her navel, and bits of mirror glued to the fenders of her bicycle. She believed in ghosts and spirits, cherished unusual beliefs about causes and effects, and saw things that other people didn't see. But in her own way she was very disciplined, even conventional, and when it came to work she had a policy: Some days she showed up, other days she didn't; but she never showed up late.

On the days she went to work, she left her Stump Lane bungalow at a quarter of six. In winter it was still full night. Cats owned the streets. In quiet alleyways, raccoons tested the tops of garbage cans. If it had been windy, broken-backed brown fronds would drape the tops of fences; when it was especially humid, she needed to dry her bike seat with a sleeve.

This particular predawn, however, was dry and still and clear. Street lamps still buzzed, and the crisp stars, like people fated to the young and suddenly, revealed no inkling of their imminent eclipse. She pedaled toward Whitehead Street and thought about the morning's menu. The papayas were a little green; she'd slice kiwis and oranges instead. Banana walnut muffins. Key lime marmalade.

She crossed Duval Street, drained and embarrassed at the end of its nightly debauch. Drunks as trusting as dogs lay stretched full-length in doorways. Transvestites strutted, wigs askew. A tourist woman leaned against a lamppost and wept, grown maudlin and ashamed over something she had said or done or seen her boyfriend say or do, some bleak thing that a too-long evening on Duval had proved about her life.

Whitehead, on the other hand, was peaceful. Tunneling banyans softened the night, as they would soon soften the day. People who worked the early shift at the Aqueduct or the electric company drank coffee on the sidewalk in pools of light in front of countered windows.

The woman who did the breakfast locked her bike and climbed the porch steps of the Mangrove Arms.

She found the front door open, which at that hour it should not have been, but which wasn't that unusual. Guests had keys and guests were careless. Even Aaron, lax like many ex-New Yorkers, as if all crime and danger had been left behind, didn't always bother locking up. She went inside.

The office, over-bright in lights that should have been turned off, was just very slightly, even daintily, trashed. A couple of potted plants had been turned onto their sides, not smashed but tipped; they lay pathetic as flipped turtles, soil spilling on the floor. Papers and brochures were scattered here and there, and the counter itself had been scarred with a jagged, spiteful slash of a knife. Yet, as far as the woman who did the breakfast could tell, nothing had been taken. Random mischief, she decided. An angry kid; a blackout drunk. An unfortunate and unmeaningful visitation.

Bewildered but not yet afraid, she went through the doorway behind the desk, which led on toward the kitchen. In the sitting room that no one ever seemed to use were the remnants of a not quite finished meal. There was something disturbing, something pending and glum about the abandoned dinner. Low pools of wine sat in the bottoms of two glasses; sauce streaked plates like brush strokes. Knives and forks were arrayed in gesturing positions, as if the hands that had put them down had planned on coming back, and were prevented.

The rumpled settee spoke of sudden absence, of weightless abduction. Beyond the curtained window it was still dark, and the stubbornly lingering night called up the primitive terror that there would come a time when the mechanisms of the world would stall, and the sun would fail to rise.

Spooked now, the woman who did the breakfast went into the kitchen, put the lights on as bright as they would go, and tried to beat down her unease with work. When she filled the coffee urn with water, the sound was mournful and hollow, like a splash from deep down at the bottom of a well.

In the mint green tiled house on Key Haven, Bert the Shirt also woke well ahead of dawn. Propped on pillows, he listened to the cooing of doves, the more distant squawk of seagulls. He wanted to get up and make his oatmeal. That was his routine, and routine was vastly important to him; but he was afraid he'd wake his housemate.

He needn't have worried. Sam, lying in a narrow bed on the other side of a thin wall, had been awake for quite a while, or at least he thought he had. Sleeping and waking—for him the states grew ever less distinct. Sleep gained in truth as waking lost the arrogance of certainty. Dreams, three-D and portentous, sported a logic no less satisfactory than that of what, by mere consensus, was called the real. Categories dissolved; things floated free of their names, and a kind of geriatric Buddhism became ever more unquestioned and serene.

At length it was the sound of the dog's paws clicking on the tiled floor that made the two old men confess they were awake.

They got up, put on their baggy bathrobes, and had their cereal. Breakfast eaten, they waged slow and labored campaigns in their respective bathrooms. By the time they were ready to venture out to walk the dog, the clouds had burned away and the sun had topped the trees.

Outside, the streets were bright and vacant. Bert carried a thin pink leash but he didn't put it on; the old chihuahua wasn't going anywhere. It ticked along stiffly, very near its master's shuffling shoes, stopping now and then to lift a leg just slightly. White eyes squinting, the dog toiled to pass urine; mere drops, slow and pendant as the outfall from a runny nose, formed one by one at the tip of its wizened pecker, then broke and dribbled down a blade of grass.

Bert shook his head. "Fuckin' age," he said. "Dog used to be quite the little stud."

Dubious, Sam said nothing.

"Jaunty," Bert went on. "Confident. Did he know he weighed t'ree pounds? Did it stop 'im that his wang was smaller than a cocktail frank? Bullshit. He humped Rottweilers, this guy. Chased away Dobermans. In his heart he was Rin Tin fuckin' Tin."

Don Giovanni knew when he was being talked about. Slowly, creakily, he raised his head. His hoary whiskers drooped in their dry and scaly follicles, his smeared and futile eyes panned through glare and shadow.

They strolled. At the end of their block, they took a low bridge that crossed over the canal. In the thick green water, bits of weed floated dreamily on sluggish current.

On the opposite side, Sam looked down the street and saw a snazzy blue car in the driveway of the dull gray house where the unfriendly Russian lived. The house and the car just didn't match, and Sam fiddled with his hearing aid. "Our neighbor," he said. "You think he'd drive a car like that?"

Bert sized up the Camaro. Tinted windows, extra chrome, tire skirts. The only excuse for having a car like that was youth. "Son, maybe."

Sam pushed out his lips. "Or maybe somebody who works for him."

"Works for him, like cleans, like gardens?"

"Works for him like works for him," said Sam. "Who knows? Maybe, like, a criminal guy, he has to report to headquarters."

"Headquarters," said Bert, and gave an indulgent little smile. Sam tended to get carried away. Also, people who lived together came to mimic one another, and Bert just barely noticed that Sam was beginning to talk Brooklyn. "You don't think Markov's place is headquarters?"

Sam tugged his Einstein hair. "How should I know? You're the one says don't trust how it looks."

Don Giovanni started sniffing the ground and moving in a tiny circle, like he was dancing on a beach ball. "I did say that," conceded Bert.

Heightening sun beat down. The dog hunkered into a hopeful, straining squat, tail lifted, sides pumping like a bellows. Sam said, "I think we gotta try again to get to know our neighbor."

The dog squeezed. Its skin sucked in around its ribs like leather on a drying carcass. It crouched down lower, nearly scraping its chapped asshole on the pavement. Nothing happened. Bert said, "We just go barging in his house? I don't see it, Sam."

The two men stood over the clogged chihuahua like doting uncles above a newborn. The dog lifted up its blind eyes toward them. Looking for help? Sympathy? A miracle? Sam said, "An excuse. An excuse is what we need."

The dog made one last push, then gave up, embarrassed and exhausted. Disingenuously, it pretended to kick some dirt on its nonexistent leavings. It panted. Moved to pity, Bert bent low and swept the little creature into his hands.

Sam said, "Dog looks very, very thirsty."

"No he don't," said Bert. "Just tired, disappointed."

Sam glanced off toward the dull gray house with the snazzy blue Camaro in the driveway. "Thirsty is what I'm saying. I'm saying he needs some water right away."

At the Mangrove Arms, daylight quelled the ancient fear of a night that stuck forever in the groove, but did nothing to dispel the uneasy riddles of the gently roughed-up office, the mute puddles of unfinished wine.

The woman who did the breakfast had put hot muffins on a table near the pool, had rolled out the urn of coffee and the pitchers of juice. Now she was back in the kitchen, cleaning up—and cleaning up more slowly than she needed to, because a voice was telling her she shouldn't leave. Something wasn't right. Aaron was always up by now, making lists, looking for a hammer, losing his coffee in odd places as he bustled around.

His bustling was important, thought the breakfast woman; it somehow neutralized the sort of ghosts that lived in old hotels, that took the form of molds and mildews and creaking doors but whose true substance was failure and sorrow and heartbreaks past remedy. Aaron's bustling subdued those ghosts, shamed them into silence. Without his activity, they clamored, hummed, and the woman who did the breakfast didn't like the sound at all.

So she stood at the sink and made bustling noises of her own, washing mixing bowls and muffin tins. Water rang on metal and she didn't hear the footsteps coming up behind her.

She scoured, she rinsed; the steps grew nearer until, less by hearing than by some vaguer sense of closeness, she became aware of them and swiveled. Her breath caught, her fingers sprang open, a muffin tin clattered to the floor.

"Jeez," she said, "you scared me."

"Sorry," Aaron said.

She looked at him. She was the sort of person who noticed odd details she couldn't always put into words. She noticed that Aaron's arms seemed longer because his shoulders had dropped down farther from his ears. His eyes seemed farther apart because his forehead was less crinkled. She said, "Hey, what happened here last night?"

Aaron blinked at her, had to suppress an unbecoming adolescent grin. He didn't see that it was any of her business. He said, "Excuse me?" He poured himself a cup of coffee.

"The office," said the woman who did the breakfast.

"Office?" He went to look.

He stood mystified before the mess—the toppled plants, the tossed papers just dense enough to grab the eye. A weirdly considerate malice seemed to have been at work; or perhaps the invasion was at bottom a message. Aaron righted the pots, noted the mean damage to his beautiful varnished counter—and only then remembered last night's sharp insistent ringing of the front desk bell.