Mangrove Squeeze (30 page)

By reflex he'd started getting up from the settee to answer it. Suki's arms and eyes had sought to hold him where he was. For a heartbeat he was unsure what he should do. But by his next breath several things had been not so much decided as finally understood. They were lovers and had been for a while. The tardy act of making love would be not the initiation, but an unhurried catching-up, a celebration of what already was; and there was nothing in the world important enough to delay that celebration further.

Death itself could be ringing the bell—he didn't have to answer.

They'd trundled off to Aaron's bedroom then. Their arms were wrapped around each other, faces close, pulse singing in their ears; they would not have heard the dainty vandalism, if that's when it was done. And only now, the morning after, did it occur to Aaron to wonder if this pointless invasion was the work of the rude caller with the careful diction and the foreign cadences.

He went back to the kitchen. The woman who did the breakfast discreetly watched him fill a second coffee mug and move back toward his bedroom. Confirmed in her instincts that something large had happened in the old hotel, she dried her hands and went back to her bicycle with the bits of mirror on the fenders.

"Fred," said Piney, "ya know what I sometimes wonder about?"

It was late morning and they were wandering through the mangroves back behind the airport. Strung from one shrub to another, the tiny trampolines of spider webs bounced in a light breeze. Hot sun evaporated puddles, you could almost hear the gray water being sucked into the air like soda through a straw. Fred didn't answer.

Piney said, "Songs."

Fred said nothing, just stopped walking long enough to light a cigarette. The cigarette fit neatly in a notch in his walrus moustache, and around the notch nicotine had stained the hair like oiled oak.

Pineapple said, "The words and the tunes. The way they go together."

Without interest Fred said, "Yeah, Piney. That's why they call it a song."

"But ya think about it," said Piney, "it's a miracle. The tune's just a tune, the words are just words. Totally different things. A bird and a fish."

Fred smoked, kicked at porous rocks. "Fuck's a bird and a fish got to do with it?"

"Then someone puts the words and the tune together," Piney said, "and all of a sudden it's like they had to be together, like they were together from the beginning of time."

They walked. On their left, the airport runway showed now and then through gaps in the foliage; smears of rubber on the pavement testified to the violence of landing. Ahead and on their right, the ancient missile platforms loomed, fences rusted, concrete cracked. Fred said nothing.

Hound-like, Piney sang, "Blue-oo moon ... You don't think that's amazing?"

Fred flicked his cigarette into a gray puddle. "Yeah, Piney. Real amazing."

Farther on, beyond the platforms, the scrubby pyramid of the archaic fallout shelter broke through the relentless pancake plane of Florida. A cloud blew across the sun and a shadow slithered up one side of the pyramid and down the other.

"And another thing," said Piney. "Ever notice how, even when you just whistle, you're still hearing the words?"

"I don't whistle."

"Hum then," Piney said. "Same thing hum—"

He broke off because a mildly uncanny sight had caught his attention. Uncanny sights were a feature of the mangroves, after all; the tangled choking greenery cried out for the peculiar. Ospreys landed in the mangroves with crushed terns in their talons; drunks fumbled through their knotted roots, groping after lost prostheses.

The present strangeness was more subtle: a fat man, furtive and well-dressed, carrying a shovel and pulling a little red wagon. His big pants were of expensive cloth that billowed into perfect pleats; his shoes were much too good to be covered as they were in limestone dust. The wagon's handle was too short for him, and its front wheels dangled pointlessly a few inches off the ground as the back tires labored over broken stones.

The mangroves were a neighborhood, and, as with any neighborhood, there were people who belonged and people who did not. This fat man who did not belong seemed to be approaching the earthen pyramid from the part of the wetland called Little Hamaca Park. He was on a collision course with Pineapple and Fred. He saw them and he slowed. He'd been carrying the shovel on his shoulder, as if it were a rifle, and he himself a deranged campaigner who'd lost track of where the war was. Now he dropped the shovel to his side, tried to hide it with his torso.

Pineapple, bold in his own neighborhood, walked on and reached out for the fat man's eyes. They slid away.

The stranger hesitated just a moment and then he turned his back. His shirt was glued with sweat against his spine. He walked off the way he'd come, the red wagon waddling after him like a duckling.

Fred said, with a soft and general defiance, "I don't whistle and I don't hum neither."

Piney said, "That guy. Whaddya think he's doin' back here?"

Uninterested, Fred said, "Stealing plants. Too cheap to buy 'em from the nursery."

"I don't think so," Piney said. "Stealing plants, ya don't put on good shoes."

"Burying a cat then. Who gives a fuck?"

"No cat in the wagon," Piney said.

"Buried already."

"Buried already, why'd he still be walking farther back?"

"Fuck you ask me my opinion then?"

"'Cause you're the expert digging holes," said Piney. "He was walking toward the shelter."

"Nothin' in the shelter but rat shit," said Fred.

"Useta be stuff in the shelter."

"Useta be stuff lotsa places. What's your point?"

"I don't know," admitted Piney. "But a guy with nice clothes with a shovel..."

"My guys," Fred conceded, "we dig holes, we don't dress that nice."

"A wagon. It's a little off is all I'm saying."

"It's kind of strange," said Fred. "I grant you that."

Tarzan Abramowitz was pacing, but the energy he burned with each deep flex of his thickly muscled knees was insufficient to work off the anger that was building in him every moment. He was being scolded.

Ivan Cherkassky, sitting at his desk in his dim and narrow office, was giving him a dressing-down. The criticism was calm, even polite, but the young thug resented it bitterly. In the old country he would have taken it better, would have felt he had to take it; but this was America, South Florida, and there was something in the air that defeated hierarchy and encouraged insubordination, that fostered a scrappy independence whose first premise was that you shouldn't have to take any shit from anybody, ever.

"Going in person," Ivan Cherkassky was saying. "This I did not want. Draws attention."

Abramowitz paced, stretched the wide suspenders that bit into the ropy sinews between his bare shoulders and his neck. His pacing was mostly turning, he was like a fish in a too-small tank.

There was a knock at the front door.

Cherkassky would not have been inclined to answer it, but Abramowitz heard in the knock an opportunity of escape. He said, "Is probably Gennady," and bounded into the hallway.

He sprinted down the corridor, lunged across the living room, undid the locks and yanked open the door. To his bafflement, he saw, framed by a brilliant rectangle of sunlight, two old men, perspiring and flushed, one of them wearing a lime-green pullover and holding a half-dead dog with cataracts.

For a moment no one spoke. Sam Katz, looking for he knew not what, tried to peek around the young man's hairy chest. Abramowitz shifted just slightly this way and that, guarding empty air. Then Bert said, "Hi. We live around the corner."

Abramowitz said, "So?"

Sam said, "Neighbors."

Abramowitz said nothing.

"We've met your father," Bert took a guess.

"My father's dead," the young man said.

"So's mine," said Sam. "I'm sorry."

Bert said, "The dog. I was wondering if the dog could have a little water."

Abramowitz was shifting foot to foot, his long arms bobbing from their sockets. "If only you live around corner—"

Bert held up the limp chihuahua. It sagged in his hand like an under-stuffed sausage. "Long way for a little dog like this. Little dog like this could drop dead 'tween here and there."

There was a brief standoff. Then Sam saw a waferish form slip around a corner from the hallway. "What is it, who's there?" Cherkassky said.

The young man turned. Sam saw an opportunity and leaned in through the doorway. "It's us. Sam Katz, remember?"

"Ah," Cherkassky said resignedly.

"Want water for dog," Abramowitz sourly explained.

"Dried out from the sun," said Bert. "Eyelids stuck. Nose all cracked."

Cherkassky looked at the ghostly pet. Then he said to Abramowitz, "Yes, of course, of course, you see this dog, bring bowl of water."

Tarzan, feeling scolded once again, clenched his fists and bounded off.

Sam and Bert stood, trying to look friendly, in the doorway that had lost its sentinel.

Ivan Cherkassky made a token attempt at a smile. His mouth corners twitched and there was a flick at the edges of his eyes. "Forgive me I cannot invite you in," he said. He pointed at the dog. "Allergic."

Making conversation, Bert said, "Same allergies in Russia?"

"You think we are that different?" said Cherkassky.

Tarzan Abramowitz came back from the kitchen. He carried a shallow bowl of water and he had to walk slowly so it wouldn't spill. Walking slowly stymied his athleticism, made him strangely awkward but gave him unaccustomed time to think. Tentatively, he stepped across the front door threshold, then bent to put the bowl down on the welcome mat. Straightening up, he said to Sam, "Did you say your name was Katz?"

"Katz. Sam Katz. And yours?"

Abramowitz stepped inside and closed the door.

Aaron leaned back against a stack of propped-up pillows and watched Suki brush her thick black hair. Her shoulder dimpled when she raised her arm. Her scalp moved ever so slightly under the tug of the brush. There was breathtaking privilege in being allowed to lie there, watching her. Love meant looking closely: being invited to, daring to. He watched her and felt a patient excitement that came full circle and melded with serenity. It was the primitive, solemn, and arousing peace of having taken a mate.

But having a mate gave a person a great deal more to lose, and Aaron was uneasy. "Suki," he said, "d'you remember last night, when we were sitting on the couch—?"

"The front desk bell?" she said. Their eyes locked in the mirror. She kept brushing her hair; with each stroke her eyebrows lifted just a tiny bit, then fell.

"There was a mess out in the office. And yesterday ... somebody called a couple times. Asked for you. Hung up."

The brush dropped to her side. She turned around. "You didn't tell me."

"I didn't see the use," he said. "But now—there can't be secrets now."

She bit her lip, the upper one. Her eyelids came down to shade her unlikely blue eyes. "I have to leave," she said.

"No you don't"

"Sneak out of town, go far away."

"I want you here."

"So everybody's life gets turned upside down?"

"My life," Aaron said, "you just turned it right side up."

"No," she said. "It isn't fair."

"Fair?" he answered, and opened up his arms. "Come here, Suki."

She moved to him, lay down on the rumpled bed. Knees and ribs and tummies found facets and locks tike puzzle pieces. Her face against his chest, she said, "If we weren't making love last night—"

"I would've answered the bell, and who knows what the hell would've happened."

She nuzzled his neck with her chin. "Making love," she said, "sometimes it really does stop the world."

He ran his hand through her thick black hair, undid the careful brushing. "Sometimes it really can."

On Key Haven the door clicked shut, and Ivan Cherkassky sneezed. It was a clipped sneeze, abashed and joyless, stopping short of real release. He covered his scooped-out face with his hand, then reached for his handkerchief and fussily wiped his nose.

When the ritual was over, Tarzan Abramowitz said, "Katz."

"No," said Cherkassky testily. "The dog. Allergic."

"Katz," the shirtless man said again.

"Dog!" insisted the boss.

"The name," said Abramowitz, starting once again to pace, easing into it the way a sprinter loosens up. "Same name as reservation. Same name as at hotel."

"Ah," Cherkassky said. Cautiously, like a small plane at a busy airport, he cut across the path of his goon's accelerating step. He settled himself on the very edge of the living room sofa. "Perhaps is common name."

"Or perhaps they spy on us," said Abramowitz. "Dog so bad needs water three hundred meters from home?"