Men in Miami Hotels (11 page)

He got up and crossed to her, the sand squinching and shifting under his bare feet, and took her in his arms. They embraced hard. A nightbug banged against his arm and he brushed it off without thinking. She let go and side by side they looked westward out over the Gulf. The moon had been there all day, like the panther, waiting behind the blue. Half of it was gnawed out. Brane, he thought, and who else had been in the boat? Albertson scattering men like seeds he spewed from his pockets as he walked. They should have stayed in KW. This thought like a dab of unwanted color in a picture. He rubbed it out in his mind.
We’re where we are—that’s it.

A breeze trailing smells of distant burning oil wells passed by. She’d been talking all the time, in a low troubled voice like a shuffling noise. He wanted to accuse himself. But he only rubbed against her, ran his hand up and down her bare arm.

“I can hardly even feel the mosquitoes,” she said.

“That’s something.”

“Don’t be glum.”

“How can I help it?”

“Mental gymnastics.”

They laughed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What were you saying?”

“When?”

“Just now.”

Her eyes that even in the dimness he could see, angry for just a second. “Other things.”

“We’re supposed to be sitting on Aunt Mayrene’s screen porch, drinking Long Island iced teas. Sorry, Sweetie.”

“I don’t mind that much.”

“Well, I expect you do. But thank you for saying it.”

They watched his mother coming along the beach toward them.

“She’s still a sport,” Marcella said.

He didn’t say anything. His mother, slight—wiry you could say now, lean like a deer in the woods, ready for most anything, but not everything, not so much anymore.

“Did you hear the panther?” his mother said.

“Yessum.” He kissed her on the cheek.

“It’s got Jackie scared to death.”

“I’ll go speak to him,” Cot said. He wanted to get away.

“I’ll go,” Marcella said.

Ella smiled at them. “Both of you go.”

But he stayed behind. Guilt held him, close like a crippled brother.
I’m sorry
was the first thing he said.

Ella just looked at him. Strange how you went on loving what was hurting you, she thought, what was twirling misery up out of the ground onto you. As she loved her husband, loved Rafael sitting at his kitchen table working on his stories, neglecting everything else. “We make mistakes whatever we try to do,” she said.

“That’s pretty philosophical.”

“It’s hard to forgive ourselves,” she said, gazing out at the Gulf that moved toward them in long smooth swells that changed to nubbin waves flopping over like weariness itself at their feet. She was barefoot.

“I hate it about Jimmy,” he said, words from the formula you used with civilians, but words that now had some feeling pumped into them, just a little.
Sorry, sorry, sorry
scratching over the other words, brute sounds. “It was bad.”

“All of us will have to grieve on that a while.”

“I didn’t expect any other group to come at us.”

“You should have, son.”

“I was just saying that, Mama.”

The panther cried again. A low, moaning sound, halt at first then almost liquid, flowing under the scrawled brush, oozing from dark cuddies. Yet this time it was a little easier to listen to. The cry sometimes, so Cot had read, meant the panther was coming to get you. He said this, and added, “I find that hard to believe.”

“You sure, honey?”

They both smiled. Something between them was always tipping slightly one way or the other. “You get old,” she said, “and pains—bald aches—rise up in ways, in styles, you never imagined. Aches like memories.”

“Memories?”

“Catcalls from death.”

“Mama.”

“—and whatall. If you hadn’t already got a means to calm yourself, it can be kind of difficult to start trying to find one.”

He said you’re all right—or didn’t say it—and felt the rasp of an old shame that sometimes took hours to pass. He wanted to plunge headfirst into the dark. She stood beside him, her weight on one leg, like a woman waiting at a bus stop. Time was, her familiarity grated against him, the private knowingness, the burden of attachment enraging him. Silent now, he endured the burning of his own recklessness. Times past he couldn’t have stayed in silence near her. Now he could, just barely. Then he couldn’t.

“You’re all right, aren’t you?” he said.

“In the way you think, yes.”

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

“It’s not really something you can be sorry about.”

Stars to the south, a jumble, straight overhead the double wings of the Milky Way, prickly like the sore spot a patch was just ripped off of. In the west, lying low, clouds in gray bunches. Just another few feet farther south and they could see the Southern Cross, now less than itself Spane had told him once, as one of its point stars died. The Indians here—the old Indians, the Calusas, the Tequestas—what would they have called it? Not a Cross.
The Crisscross.
He used to know some of the Native American constellations, but he’d forgotten. Marcella told him that to the Australian Aborigines the Southern Cross was Two Brothers Sitting Around a Campfire Eating a Fish They’d Caught. A couple of local boys.

The cat cry came again. Now it didn’t seem to be a panther. No cat or critter. A human cry—not just in its style or mimicry, but actually. He didn’t say anything. His mother stood silently looking out at the Gulf. The waves made faint sizzling, then flopping sounds. In KW they lived too far up the hill, with too many structures in between, to hear the ocean. “Let’s walk up to the house,” he said.

There he told Marcella about the false cat cry.

“Are you sure?”

“Near ’bout.”

It was full dark now. They had the light of a couple of candles they’d found in the plane’s emergency kit, the only lights outside those of the dying fire.

“How could anyone be after us out here?” she said.

“Maybe it’s a fresh group.”

“What does that mean?”

“Local freelancers.”

“Cot. Gee.”

“I know.”

They decided to let Jackie and his mother sleep. They would take turns keeping watch. “First or last?” she said.

“Which do you want?”

“Either one.”

They flipped for it; a quarter that seemed as he showed it to her an artifact from a vanished civilization. She got first. He walked with her to the beach where she snugged herself up under a soursop tree, in its long, glaucous night shade. He gave her one of his pistols, the one he had taken from the boys at the camp. He knew she already knew how to use it, but he showed her anyway. It was easy. He lay on the sandy ground beside her for a while. “I get itches all over me,” he said, “when I stay outside.”

“I wish we had some bug repellent.”

“Well, you’re in luck on that one,” he said drawing his mother’s little bottle of bug juice from his back pocket.

“At last my love has come. You sweetie.”

She turned her whole body to him, put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him. He had been waiting—it felt as if for months—for her to do that. He drew her nigh, and closer. Her body still felt like some kind of map he’d chanced on, his good luck, proof that the world wasn’t just a mixed-up lostness.

“See you later, agitator,” he said getting up.

“After while, crock of style.”

H
e waked before the alarm he’d set on Jimmy’s phone went off. In the darkness there was only the slow, poised sound of the surf. A stillness behind this. Then a nightbird call, low, interrogatory, unsure. “
. . . bless the rains down in Africa
,” he whispered. Words from a song, one of his favorite non sequiturs. He felt good. It was odd but not unusual. He had slept on the ground, a little ways from the house, in shadow under a senna bush. He had waked knowing just where he was, no strangeness, or none extra.

He walked down to the plane. It bobbed lightly on its tether. He put his hand flat on the surface of the water: cold, spring still a ways to go before the Gulf was really warm. Someone from up north would remark on how warm the water was. You got used to your own gradations, fluctuations. Truth was you could die of hypothermia even in warm water. Eighty degrees, given a few hours, would bring your temperature down to ninety and then you were gone. A screech owl over on the mainland whinnied, a small, woeful sound, childish almost, trying to strike the right note, the one that would settle things. The moon was down already. Above the earthly night that had contracted to a closeness the stars were full-bodied, eloquent, spewing; he could see the shape of the islands, the smoothed-off tips of the little waves winking.

He found her asleep, her head lying on her arm. She woke as he reached to touch her, coming to even out here in the bush country with an ease, a lack of elaboration, that impressed him. “Sorry,” she said.

“It’s a pretty night.”

“Up until a minute ago I was enjoying it.”

She couldn’t find the pistol. With a hand on her wrist he stopped her searching for it. Her face, even in star gloom, looked stricken. A grimace, a cast-off look, returned to her, her thin eyelids drooping.

“Stay here.”

He stepped from under tree shadow into the shadow of yaupon bushes piled crooked and more than head high along the inner shore. He had his own pistol out, but he didn’t think about it. He ran along under the darkness around behind the house and crouched beside two large jumbie bean bushes at the edge of the backyard. Scent of the decayed remains of an outhouse. A little breeze, careful and shy, circulated and dropped off. Under it the faint sounds of the night: a bird, rustle of small beings, shurrs, loose wavering pickup of breeze, a coon maybe off to the right, worrying some reluctant bit. The coon sound—what was it exactly?—checked him. Off ahead, at the grassy edge of the yard, he made out a shape: someone crouched. He pulled back, sank further into shadow, and ran low through sandy grass toward the shape. Whoever it was had his eyes on the house. He reached a low bush just behind the watcher, stopped there and held still. He could smell the leathery odor of the man—it was a man—saw the dark hair sticking out from under a bandana, the collar of his shirt, jut of bony jaw, the rifle cradled in his arm. All in a second. He took a step and put his pistol under the man’s ear. The man, loose, lean, jerked forward, wincing as if the gun burned him, and fell on his side. He tried to squirm away but Cot was quickly astride his back, pressing the pistol into his cheek. He had man and rifle both pinned. “Awk,” the man said and coughed.

“Take your time.” He pointed the pistol in the man’s eyes.

The man held his tension close, squeezing it; in his eyes a guilty knowledge. “Okay, mister.”

Cot slid the rifle away and got up. The man raised himself on an elbow. He coughed, hacking, and spit to the side. “Flu,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come out.”

“For what?”

“For what what?”

“Did you come out?”

“Bats.”

“Don’t kid me.”

“Yeah, bats, sho. Fruit bats.”

“I’m from around here. I’ve never seen that.”

“Must not have been around here for a while.”

“Yah?”

“Exotic pets—you don’t know about
them
?”

Everybody knew about strange species that hurricanes had let loose from their cages. Maybe bats too. He’d read about fruit bats. Big as cats, roosting in leafy trees, snacking on papayas and mangoes. “Good eating,” the man said.

He was an Indian, Cot had seen that right off. From one of the walled and padlocked villages probably. The Seminoles were like everyone else down here: driven to the hot areas by government, by clamor, by a need to get a little peace. They too weren’t really native to these parts. He used to call up Marcella and talk to her about it.

“A hunter,” he said.

“You done hit right on it.”

“What’d you swim the channel?”

“Got my boat.”

First he took Marcella’s pistol back, “Hunting, huh?” and broke the breech of the rifle that was not a rifle but a bolt-action shotgun, an old Colt.

“I come on her sleeping—that your wife?—and took that gun. It scared me, her having it, so I took it.”

“I’d have done the same thing.”

“What y’all doing out here?”

“Camping.”

He had the man walk ahead of him to the place where Marcella waited. He didn’t see her at first and his heart tightened. But there she was, down at the water, sitting on the gunwale of the man’s boat. The boat was a little canoe with a small outboard raised above the squared-off stern; a paddle propped against it. Marcella got up, listing a little as if cramped, bent. “Hello.”

“Hidy, Mrs. Bakewell.”

“You know him?”

“I do,” Marcella said, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. “How’s your family, Choky?”

“They’re just fine, ’cept for Mama’s rheumatoiditis. And Jimmy’s got him a hernia from baseball practice, and Lorene, she broke her foot running from some police wanted to talk to her about a still or something.”

“How’s Longman?”

“He says he’s gon go to college.”

As she explained now, she had gotten Choky Rough’s older son back from the state for him, some years ago, when people were still being arrested for alligator poaching. “Well that’s a mighty fine thing,” Cot said.

He shook hands with the man.

“I saw y’all’s plane,” Choky said.

“Local charter,” Cot said. He still didn’t trust the situation, still held his frets close. A breeze trickled through the brush, stroking leaves. “You really hunting bats?”

“Sure. Why not?”

They walked around to the house and sat on the front steps talking. Choky said he would get a larger boat and ferry them over to his house on Cold Press Island and carry them to Fort Myers. Everybody seemed delighted. Like real castaways. His mother had waked and she sat in an old rocker on the porch listening to the conversation. Her streaked gray hair was loose, and it swung against her face in a way Cot remembered from years ago. “What about James Lawrence?” she said. Jimmy, wrapped in a crumpled survival blanket, unsurviving, who this day would begin to smell. Cot could
already
smell him.