Men in Miami Hotels (12 page)

Cot mentioned this situation to Rough, told him a little of what had happened. “Maybe hunters,” he said. “No way of telling—or just fools.” Everybody knew about Cot. Anyone, in any circumstance, could see in his face that he didn’t really want to say anything. But he had to say something. A harshness now in his look, a waywardness too; he didn’t want to inform, even on loss, even on death. Rough looked off toward the darkness of the cross-channel woods. The false dawn, gray as if already tired of the day, had tracked up, and was already going, slick and inapplicable, brushing the shoulders of the real thing as it went out.

“You want to bury him?” Rough said.

“Ah. Not really.”

“I guess we can haul him out.”

Cot could tell Rough didn’t want to get any of Jimmy on him. Cot knew about this. You had to protect yourself—from the slow shell-shocking that life was giving you. Death brought it on in leaps sometimes. People sensed this and backed away. Even the police, and the doctors, the surgeons who wore suits and big crumpled green hats and masks—to keep it off, the dizzy spin and crumpling, the waking in a lost place without a clue, somebody yelling at you to
come on, come on
, it was like that.

But they were too many for a small boat.

“I’ll set with him,” Jackie said, his hair spiked around his head, his eyes still gummed with sleep, come up as if just revived from the dark floor.

“You don’t know who’s coming,” Cot said.

“Ain’t nothing but the rangers,” he said. “They always show up down along here. They got rounds to make.”

They agreed, Cot agreed. It bothered him that somebody was left dangling, dead or alive, but he was careful not to let the others see.

He walked back into the house with Jackie and thanked him. “You got everybody in a mess,” Jackie said, his arm tense under Cot’s fingers.

“I know.” There was a ringing in his ears, something new or fairly new, circles of flat sound like an alien surf.

“That’s only
almost
the worst of it,” Jackie said.

T
he cell towers in Everglades City as usual weren’t working, and Marcella wasn’t able to make a call to the Collier County sheriff until they were already inside the Naples city limits. She told the 911 operator that a man lay dead in the islands, his plane abandoned. She called Ordell and asked him to go speak to Jimmy’s wife. She began to cry as she hung up the phone. She looked at Cot who was talking to a woman. He had a tense mouth and he seemed to be trying to convince the woman of something. They were standing in front of a curio shop on Merrywood Road. One side of the road was stuffed with housing developments, the other a sprawl of raw and skimpy-looking, neglected woods. Down here it was like that, she thought, looking at a couple of brown cows standing under a big lime tree: development or nothing. Cot crossed the bit of concrete apron and took her in his arms. She could feel the hardness in his back muscles, the stiffness she took as a refusal to mourn, thinking: Why would I think that?

Over her shoulder Cot could see his mother sitting on a bench against the shop’s front wall. She was writing in a small notebook. Maybe working up a story, maybe putting together one of the island bulletins she published occasionally in the KW paper.
Been on a murder party and a plane ride. Retrieved from the swamp by an able young poacher whose mother I once had over to the house to trade stories with. The dead continue to speak to us from every bush and patch of shade. They remind us that we are never free to do what we want. There is only affection and service to a higher . . .
and all such as that.

6

A
ll the live oaks in the yard lean toward the water. The little clearwater spring Mayrene’s dammed with a single concrete wall to form a pool makes a faint gurgling noise where the runoff exits through an algae-stained gutter into the canal. Beyond the pool the canal widens in one direction into a baylike area. Boats and houses sweltering under big oaks and cabbage palms are parked along it. The other end passes out of sight in a jumble of old warehouse buildings over which on this afternoon big piles of cumulus gather. The afternoon is like a familiar stranger, someone you observe taking walks in the neighborhood who nods as he passes, whom you wonder about without nervousness. Thin gray squirrels chatter in the tops of the palm trees.

Mrs. Stanford, the next-door neighbor, an eighty-year-old widow and fortune-teller, comes over bearing a plate of freshly baked cornbread. She reads his mother’s and Marcella’s palms, but Cot won’t let her read his. “Shoot,” she says, “I can read yours from across the room.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I wouldn’t either.”

“Hey,” Marcella says wagging her finger.

She’s talking on the phone to Ordell. The fortune-teller has said a number of items are fading from her life and—nervous, spindly in her heart—she wanted to call home to check, ha ha. Ella sits at the kitchen table (they’re in the big kitchen that opens onto the screened back porch) writing in her notebook.

“I expect my fortune rides before me carrying a sign,” Cot says.

“That’s a way of putting it,” the old lady says sourly. She has faded orange hair from the special old people’s dye only they can get, you see it everywhere. Her hands look like knotted rope stained purple—with leukemia, Mayrene’s said. He wonders what fortunes she tells herself. Likely they blare at her from the dark, cocksure and smug. He feels a faded, estivating sadness for her, irritation too. They are wearing bathing suits, he and Marcella, both of which, men’s and women’s, belonged to Mayrene and (that is) to her deceased husband, a former bandleader on the Cornwallis circuit. Mayrene, his mother’s older sister, had been his chanteuse. “My girl singer,” Harry called her. “My canary.” He’s buried in a cemetery over in Cape Coral, under a cement slab with a clarinet stuck bell down in it. The clarinet, Mayrene says, looks like an erect penis.

They walk in the shade of the big live oaks that never drop a stitch leafwise, winter or summer, feeling on their bodies the cool shade buffed by a sea breeze. Cot knows they aren’t particularly safe, but maybe they will be as soon as he leaves. “You need to run north,” Marcella says. “Or west.”

“I don’t shine particularly to being tracked.”

“That one of your sayings?”

“Half and half.”

She twirls a papaya leaf, frog-footed and yellow, in her left hand.

“It was because you were crippling my nerves,” she says.

“That you married Ordell,” he says picking up the thread. “I know. It was a good idea.”

“The fact you think so’s always bothered me.”

“It’s just another way of my refusing to accept responsibility.”

“That and a host of other things.”

“I get bogged down.”

“Most people call that living.” She makes a motion with her hand across her eyes, involuntary but characteristic, as if wiping a small gathering of gnats away. “You’d overworry about me.”

“I’d sit up nights.”

“Don’t you worry about me now?”

“Off and on.” It’s already crossed his mind that he’s traveling with people he might have to die for. He’s not really been in that situation before.

She waves the leaf at him, almost a swat, that misses. “I don’t really want you to worry about me at all.”

“Likewise, sugar.”

Ordell tried a case against her only once. She beat him so soundly the judge dismissed the charges. Cot doesn’t like to try anything against her either, even though he knows he has a jimmy, an in: she loves him.

“But I love Ordell too,” she said when he told her this.

“I know you do,” he answered. “I love him myself, but it would bother me if I went up against you and you gave me a break, and it’d bother me if you didn’t.”

“I already figured that out,” she’d said.

As they reach the pool a boat, speedboat, appears from behind a large ocean cruiser upstream, and begins to run down toward them. Cot watches it come. It’s blue, open-hull and he can see three men in town clothes. “Get in the water,” he says.

“————”

He shoves her into the pool, crosses the little forecourt to the oak tree nearest the canal, and as the boat comes up at speed raises the pistol from under the towel he carries. The boat roars right at them, at the last moment swinging broadside. Two of the men rise, and as they level their little Belgian machine guns he fires. His shots catch one in the throat, catch the other in the shoulder. Both men go down, but not before one of them fires a burst into the top of the oak tree. The shots scatter some grackles among the glossy, almost black evergreen leaves. The boat continues down the canal. Cot kneels and fires a shot at the driver, but he doesn’t really want to hit him. He wants the boat to be able to leave the area. All this in choked seconds. The clouds over the warehouses haven’t moved. The day continues in its brightness.

He pulls Marcella by her arm out of the pool and gives her a moment to gather herself. She sits on the concrete shivering.

“This isn’t my end of things,” she says.

“It’s pretty alarming, yeah.”

“Alarming? Jesus, Cot.”

He puts his hand on her sleek black hair. “I know.”

He helps her up and they jog back to the house. There they gather their things. Mayrene tries to laugh it off, but she’s just faking it. He tells her to pack a bag. She doesn’t want to, but his mother quickly convinces her. She wants to stop long enough to make a thermos of limeade, but Cot tells her she better not. A solemnness, like a sticky shellac, covers everything. They lock up the house, take her two goldfinches over to Mrs. Williams’s, and leave for the airport in Mayrene’s big Lincoln.

On the way to the airport his mother talks on the mobile phone, something unusual for her. “Who is it?” he asks. She is sitting in the back seat, turned away from them as they pass a line of muscular royal palms before a huge pink mansion. “Your father.”

He wants suddenly to speak to him. He holds out his hand for the phone, but she doesn’t give it to him. “Mama,” he says. “Come on.”

She hands the instrument over. A big red pickup passes. In the back a gang of Latino boys yell and shake their fists at them. Have they done something they don’t realize? “Papa,” he says. There’s silence on the line. “Papa.”

“You need to slow down, son,” his father’s faint reedy voice says, as if he’s been watching him.

“I will soon.”

“Won’t you come to visit?”

His accent, urban, Cubano, has deepened, and he sounds weary, distracted, caught maybe by his lifelong contemplation of his troubles—
mis affliciones
—always unnamed. The last time Cot visited he had been weighed down, his thin arm waving to him from the floral armchair like a man waving from a bog. “I’ll come soon,” Cot says.

“You come soon,” his father says. “Mrs. Sobales will make some of the stew you enjoy.”

Would he become like this—or could he if his life were only slightly different—like this fey wanderer among the possibilities? He doesn’t believe so, believes as he has since he was eleven that he has evaded his father’s life. He knows this isn’t really true, but it helps him to think it. “Do you remember your father—
mi abuelo
?” He’s asked this before. His father’s father, the ship’s captain from the English Midlands, a seaman who knew the names of all the flowers that grew among the hills there, went to sea, and washed up in Cuba. “You take care of yourself—and take care of your mother,” his father says.

“She’s doing fine.”

The phone goes dead; maybe he hung up, maybe the connection, always feeble over the strait, had been doused.

At the airport he puts Mayrene and his mother on a flight to their—to his—great aunt’s house in west Texas.

H
alfway across the state, at a spot she once measured by odometer, riding in a cab on Alligator Alley, I-75, the longest piece of perfectly straight road east of the Mississippi (so she believes), Marcella makes him stop and gets out. She hurries across the parking lot of the little pull-off and vomits over the barrier into the grass. Beyond the barriers on both sides of the road empty grasslands stretch vastly away. They could be in Africa. Tawny, currents of breeze circulating like rivers among the grass, hawks riding thermals high up like they have not a care in the world, its spaciousness has always loosed something in her, something daunting and encouraging and shapely. She retches again, violently, shaking, her face white as paste when she looks up at him. He’s holding her by the shoulders. A black-water canal runs alongside the barrier, a few Miccosukee boats are tied up. Otherwise there’s nothing human about but them, except for the cabbie.

“You got too much strain on you,” he says.

“Who wouldn’t have?”

“Some don’t notice it.”

He sits on the barrier, a silver steel fluted railing. He wants to lean back, fall into the strip grass by the canal, and sleep his life away. Time, time. He can feel it slipping away. The past gurgles in the gap it leaves. Some while ago the slippage started getting to him. He hates it like a limp. So what if he can remember when in KW you could address a letter to “Marcella Cord/City” and know it would reach her?

“It’s this sense of imperfection bugs me,” he says now.

“I know.” She licks a smear of yellow effluvium off her lower lip. Her tongue is greenish. She looks to him—white-faced, weary—like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel.

She says, “I don’t want to go on with you anymore.”

“Yeah.”

“No,” she says. “I mean it.”

“Yeah.”

He helps her to her feet, and they stand with their backs to the highway looking out across the great expanse of seemingly untouched terrain. It’s a national park. The political version of a sacred place. But they both know people won’t keep from putting their hands on it. Like them, like who they are together, like them to each other: sacred places they can’t keep from poking and tromping through. It irks them both.

“Still a ways to go,” she says.

“Yeah.”

T
he cabbie lets them off behind the courthouse in Lauderdale and they walk upstairs to the sheriff’s department where, after she follows a deputy into a corner office, Marcella returns to say she inquired about the disposition of the boys caught in CJ’s killing. She’s got a funny look on her face. She’s holding her phone.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know what to say.” The look isn’t funny, it’s sad—a look you could call
infinitely
sad, as if she’d been shown one of the black mysteries, the submerged and lifeless facts at the bottom of things—and she’s working her jaw in the way she has, chewing on nothing. Two deputies, who look like twins, sit at side-by-side desks eating sandwiches. “Who you think you fooling?” an African American voice from down the hall says loudly.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re holding—not for CJ—they’re holding two men for burglaries up here. They don’t know—”

“About CJ?”

They look at each other. It might really be nothing he thinks but doesn’t believe. Her eyes hold a blankness like a film, and she’s squirming internally he can tell.

“Didn’t Ordell come up and talk to them?”

“He talked to Pickens—the sheriff—but it was just to pass on information. He wondered—the sheriff wondered—why he didn’t just phone.”

She sits down on a long upholstered bench against the wall. The upholstery—black plastic—bulges like muscles.

He catches the drift from the look on her face.
Unusual, how even the looks you’ve never seen before, you get, when it’s like this.
He checks with the desk sergeant who tells him they aren’t holding anybody concerned with a killing in Key West—or anything else down there.

He sits down beside her. “Maybe he was just making inquiries.”

“They said he didn’t ask about it.” She scratches the back of one hand, hard.

“What was he doing?” He already knows. A sudden rage catches in his chest and sputters there, burning.

He pulls her up, and they hurry down the stairs. They take another cab down I-95 to Miami. The cost of cab rides is mounting, but Marcella says she doesn’t mind paying, even the two hundred dollars to get them across the state she didn’t complain about. He wants to take her to the airport, send her back to Key West, but she says no. “Then I’ll just have to throw you out of the car,” he says. “I’ll open the door and kick you out to the Redcaps.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I’m going to kill Ordell.”

She gives him a hard look, her blue eyes like stones. Looks, dips in scale, poses—it’s one of the ways they fight. He doesn’t say anything back. It isn’t that kind of fight.

They check in at the Castaway Hotel in the Grove and ride the elevator up to the seventh floor. When he first got money fifteen years ago he stayed there for a year, living quietly. He swam laps in the pool with Billy Brent, the writer, both of them young and mad about the women in their lives. He saw Billy around town sometimes now, across the floor maybe at Swan’s Show Room, Billy, his eyes popping as if a noose around his neck had just pulled tight, who never seemed to recognize him.

They don’t speak going up. Don’t speak until they are in their clean yellow room.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Okay,” he answers. They’re both beat.

She walks out onto the balcony and stares down at the pool in the big courtyard two floors below. He follows her out and stands beside her. They don’t touch. Large silver palms grow in big pots back from the pool and flimsy orange-striped cabanas are set along one side. There’re only a few people around the pool.

“You want to swim?”

She says yes.

He wonders if she’s pretending about Ordell; he knows she holds special info to herself, she always has, and something’s not right. He makes himself stop thinking about it. On the way down in the elevator he strokes her hair, kisses her expertly on the cheek. They’d almost stopped to make love in the room but held off. They both wanted to be in the water. With them, making love’s sometimes a contrariness they can’t overcome, a shadow on the floor in a sunny room (and vice versa), an instance, insistence, a raillery posing as the genuine article, and sometimes only the brisk notion they sup from; occasionally it’s all they have to hold on to, at other times, nothing much; mostly it’s an essential, like salt, humble and tasty. They’ve never had the easy swing of routine life, the ordinary days piled with coffee mugs and laundry, dinners sitting before the TV. There’re times when this has bothered them, times they see what they’re doing as ridiculous, as strange and cowardly, but they don’t hold each other to any set of principles.