Men in Miami Hotels (17 page)

She took a step and touched his face, upturned to gaze at her. He pushed up the front of his hair with a hand she hadn’t realized was (recently) scarred across the knuckles. Rumbling, growling, screeching, the morning flight from Miami passed overhead, a heavy jet that seemed to wobble and sway as it went. The plane disappeared beyond the buildings and trees and he waited for the crash that didn’t come. He leaned back, away from Marcella’s dry fingers. Her hand hung a moment in the air and then went away. He cupped his hand over his mouth. Grasped his lips softly between finger and thumb and let go. He slid to the ground and curled up in a ball on his side. Then he relaxed his legs and turned facedown into the grass. He could smell the chalky coral earth, smell the juice in the grass. As a child he had imagined embracing the earth in this graveyard, this largest open field on the island, and somehow swinging the planet in his arms. Everywhere around him all his life had been a vastness—of sky or ocean, wildernesses that were continuously running changes. No two days ever the same. But here, in this place, was some sort of unification, of lastingness. One of his grandfathers here—one of the great greats—had been a pirate, before, during the War of 1812, being commissioned in the US Navy as a captain running the British blockades. He had lived to 106 and was buried under a stone that praised him for finally going straight. Cot didn’t care about that. Through a haze he looked up at Marcella. He wanted to thrust his hand right through her body into the sunlight on the other side. You could tear through the fabric of the universe if you wanted to they said and knew how. But he didn’t know how. Ah, dog. He turned on his back, a movement that took every bit of his strength. He would have to be moved from now on by derrick, raised by davits and lowered into whatever mischief was ready for him. The thought made him laugh out loud, a short bark.

Marcella looked half at him, half startled. She was afraid of what he might do. She wanted this to go away, wanted
all
this to go away, even as she pitied him. Him too. It was okay to leave a bare patch. A raw, rubbled patch where nobody could remember what had been there before. Same for her. And for Ordell. For Ella Sims, the former Ellarese Jax. From space you could see little patches rubbed bald by grief. She knelt beside him. She wanted to touch him, to calm him, help him, but she didn’t dare to. Her hand went out, her fingers brushed lightly over his chest. Nobody knew how brave she was—except Cot, and now he didn’t anymore know.

He smiled at her. Her face, eroded by what he took to be sadness, looked expressionless, as if the whole array of feelings had been erased and now there was only a single, thin, and diminished specie left, a faint denomination that made her face seem the face of an over-corrected child. He pushed up on his arms, turned over and got to his knees. Marcella touched his hair. Her fingers slid down along his neck, found his face, his lips. He opened his mouth. She slid her fingers in, and he sucked them. The taste was of mangoes, and faintly of hand lotion.

He pulled away and got up, snapping off glances, looks, regards like a ticket punch. “You were about to say?”

“We have to get out of here. Get out of the daylight.”

“Where’s Ordell?”

“He’s in his car, riding around the island.”

In a cotton sack with a picture of a chimp in a pirate’s hat on it Marcella had brought a change of clothes, a sandwich (egg salad), a ripe mango, an apple, a copy of the Rule of St. Benedict, a box of .38 caliber bullets, a thousand dollars in fifty dollar bills, and his mobile phone. “I have another idea”—which he told her about as they walked back through the grave plots. They stopped at CJ’s family vault. The sun caught in the leaves of the almond tree above it. “Would you rather come home with me?” she said.

“I don’t see how we can work that.”

“Maybe I can think of something.”

“The funeral will probably be tomorrow.”

“Yes. Ella left instructions with me.”

“Are you—were you—her lawyer?”

“You know that.”

“I forgot.”

“A day for the funeral home business, the viewing—home style now—”

“Jeeze—”

“ . . . viewing . . . and contemplation—”

“Contemplation?”

“That was her word. She wanted people to have time to think about her, maybe sit with her awhile as they thought.”

“Is that contemplation?”

“Don’t start that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You haven’t gotten much sleep.”

“I wish you’d brought an air mattress.”

“My innards feel hand-wrung,” she said smiling bleakly.

Beyond the far end of the cemetery a man was raising a Florida state flag in his small front yard. The man ran the flag smartly up the silver pole, tied it off, stepped back, saluted, whirled, his blue shirt opening off his pale belly, and ran into the house. Every movement he’d made had been with the rapidity of anxiety, of alarm. But he hadn’t looked their way and anyway they were too far off for him to be sure who they were. Over there was where Marcella and Ordell lived, their yellow, biota-embraced house hidden behind its huge trees, its crowding shrubs. You couldn’t know for sure what people were seeing or what they thought about it, until later.

8

H
e mostly spends the day inside the mausoleum reading by flashlight, sleeping and burrowing into feelings he doesn’t have a name for, sunken, louring, caved-in-on, spumed up out of deep vents and seeps, those feelings. Twists and false appellations, a meandering spirit, chilled and shrunken, and a sense of the looseness of time, the unavailability of recompense, of shallowness in desire, of the trivialization of all things through calling them by names and even spending time with them are upon him. He wants everything to just stand there. He doesn’t even want to touch it. The close air of the dead world is all around him. This pseudoeternity. He gets up and lies by the door, breathing in, but not enough outside air gets through. He cracks the door slightly, letting in a sliver of light. He sits in this light nodding and patting his face, leaning forward like a drunk man at a bar, talking silently to CJ, to the faded dead, to his father in Cuba bearing down on his big pages at his table, to the surroundings themselves and the appetites and calamities he draws small reckonings upon as they pass through his mind, but not to his mother. I’m crazy now, he thinks but that isn’t the word for it. He knows no word that will do and leans back into the darkness as if into the cupped hands of absence itself.

J
ust after dark Marcella slips into the cemetery and calls to him, and he staggers out into the sweet-smelling world and they lie on the grass inside the little family compound where his maternal grandfathers and grandmothers are buried. She has brought a blanket to ward off the bugs. Clouds hide the moon but they can see by the leftover starlight. From out in the streets murmurs of living passersby drift in. He feels a loneliness as if they’re on a big dark ship sailing silently past the resting fleet. World of business and affections, of focused intent. They don’t comment on what she said back in the Big Cypress prairies about leaving; she’s spoken such as that many times before. She lies on top of him in the grass and they work their clothes loose enough to hook up. They often fucked without looking at each other’s bodies, the smells, the broad range of being and pressure enough. The stars wobble in their sockets. Bats tack the night into the heavens. He cries for his mother, at one point gets up and starts dumbly off. He wants to disappear into one of the big wildernesses, not this one of weeds and dirt, but he comes back.

He doesn’t mention desires of this nature to Marcella, but in the afternoon he goes out and stands with the gravediggers as they scratch out his mother’s grave with a little backhoe. He looks out beforehand to make sure he doesn’t know them, and then walks around and comes on them from past the little rusted loggia of the Floret’s Cubano graves. Two men work there. One scrapes and cleans the grass off the rough coral marl the backhoe brings up. The cemetery is the highest point on the island, Solares Hill, the place people will flee to if a hurricane blows the ocean over everything else. A real Cayo Hueso island of bones. He stands there looking into the hole. The backhoe’s big dinosaur teeth are streaked gray. “Precious spot,” he says to the man working the shovel. The man, short with stubby, strong arms, hasn’t looked at him until he speaks.

“How’s that?” he says.

“Last resting place.”

“One hole’s about the same as another on this island.”

“Unless it’s yours, huh?”

“I won’t let them deposit me in this rock, no thank you.” He plans, he says, to be buried back where he comes from, in a farm cemetery out in Kansas. “We got a little rise among some cedar trees where you can look out and see the house and the fields. Got little groundcherry bushes planted all around.”

A pang that’s more than a pang, a new condition, robust and dry, sweeps across his consciousness, takes up its motion, banging at him, and this is not so bad. Even a punch is life, even calumny and persecution—still life. He feels slightly faint—or as if he is entering a new state, a queasy wakefulness without precedent or alteration. A panic surges and subsides. I take everything back, he silently says, touching with the tip of his flip-flop the little tufts of hawkweed and cumberland daisies by the grave. Flowers like sports, show-offs, as if they were encouraging life, the dead surrounded by uncaring really. With one finger he knocks a tear off his face, turning away as he does so and catching sight of a large high-flown hawk dipping a wing into breeze. What’s next?

He takes up a shovel—“May I?” “Sure, sure, buddy.”—and helps the man shape the scattering of dirt odds and ends into a pile on a blue scrap of tarp. The grave looks more like a slot than anything else. He’s been to many funerals, it’s one of the rituals in his line of work. When he was younger he’d been on the crew sent to clean out the dead man’s domicile, usually in a hotel, often at the beach. He sorted the cheesy and futile remains of lives lived in single rooms. Into cardboard boxes picked up behind grocery stores he placed the starched shirts and carefully hung pants, the trinkets and pornographic tracts. Men kept odd and familiar things. Varnished chicken feet and statuettes in contorted poses, calendars with the dates inked out—key rings holding keys abandoned by their locks, smeared wine glasses, a copy of the US Constitution once, rusting electric razors, an empty hornets’ nest, shoes with curled up toes, brassieres, trusses like bits of parachute harness looped over coat hangers, studs, medals, coins on which were stamped the faces of kings. The oblate, rounded phraseologies of the funeral services, the blatting words written out on a piece of paper or memorized or come up with on the spot, the preacher’s or priest’s or rabbi’s issuing of the sanctified confidentialities, were lessened, pushed into trivia before the sturdy facts of the photos and rusted diving trophies and the carved coconut doorstops he had placed into cardboard boxes and taken to the Goodwill store (that took them only because he insisted). As far as he was concerned the words were an insult to the gummy razors and the cowboy boots with their tops folded over and the lists of emergency numbers taped to the little refrigerator door. He thinks of this now, these stipulations of grief, and they don’t really make much sense. It doesn’t matter what you say or don’t say, doesn’t matter how seriously you do or don’t take the bleak mementoes of lives no longer in this world. He wants to explain this to the grave diggers but he knows it’s trivial, not much to tell anyone, certainly not a grave digger.

The other shoveler and he—both soon to go, if the little man’s cough and his own . . . jam,
I’m in a jam, Ma
, are any indication—work silently for several minutes. Cot stops and picks up a clod of the crusty earth. “You guys must have run most of the dirt in this place through your fingers, at one time or another,” speaking like a tourist, like a man without depth, the clustered clod falling apart in his hands, his face flushed; he can feel the blood moving in him—as if it wants to get away.

“Not me,” the man says. “I just started here last week.”

After a while the men load the little backhoe on a trailer behind their pickup truck, cover the grave with another scrap of blue tarp, and drive off. Cot squats by the grave and reaches in under the tarp, pats the accurate side. The man working the hoe had been a craftsman. Yes, and he, Cot, the Finisher, knows graves that are only a bed of leaves, a saltwater ditch, a slough, ocean deeps. He feels as if he’s suffocating. Tiny yellow bees buzz among the foamy blossoms of a little geiger bush. He offers his hand. A single bee, tiny as a pumpkin seed, lands on the back, between the knuckles. It walks around, its skinny legs lifting and lowering the velvety body. The bee dips its rear end and stings him. He flings his hand out, shaking the bee loose. It leaves a dab of guts on the head of the stinger, a dot of fire pinned to his skin. He feels lightheaded, then this passes. He rubs the back of his hand on the grass. Clouds to the south look like white reefs before the invisible continents of space.

M
arcella returned shortly after dark to tell him she had a boat. They left the cemetery and walked in the darkness down Custard and turned up Windsor and then into Cutpurse Lane to the little duck-by and entered the house. She said she didn’t know where Ordell was. “Just riding around,” she said. She had spoken to him on the phone, a few phones. All landlines. He was still in the Keys. “Looping around,” she said.

“How do the police know to come after him?”

“Jackie. He saw him run out of the house.”

“Jackie was the one found Mama?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes. And he ran down to the store and called the police. They’d already figured out about CJ. Or knew Ordell had put them on a false lead—I’m not sure. It’s going to be a big scandal.”

“Maybe I’ll be the hero.”

“Except for your shooting Isabella, yeah.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

“She’s got a big pain in her shoulder, but umm, yes, they say she’ll be good as new.”

“Except no one ever is.”

“I’m surprised you know that.”

“I need to make amends to her.”

“I’d say so. You can do it as soon as you get out of Raiford, if you ever do.”

She explained about the boat and he said it’s just the ticket—just saying it was—but before they got started he wanted to be there for the funeral.

“They’re pretty committed to running it without your participation.”

He made a mocking face. They were up in the orange and yellow second bedroom that she had taken to sleeping in since she and Ordell stopped having sex. (
Completely?
Without prejudice.
) She went downstairs to get drinks and he lay back on the bed. The room smelled of apples. She liked to keep them around, an exotic fruit in the tropics.
If she had money to give me, why didn’t she give it to Ella?
But even as he thought this he knew the answer:
Ella wouldn’t take it.
She probably wouldn’t even acknowledge the offer. So as not to be the agent of embarrassment to Marcella for having made it. She wouldn’t have taken it from him either.
Which was why I had to steal the emeralds.
Only something irreducible like gemstones, something too pretty, would have worked to pry the inspector—what was his name?—away from his principles—his scaredy-catness.
Mama would have looked up from whatever challenging moment she was passing through to find the deed done, her son bustling around the kitchen making breakfast.
He’d wanted to see the look on her face. His act of meretricious special pleading she would have seen through as who wouldn’t. He had other motives.

When Marcella reappeared at the door carrying a tray with a pitcher of fresh gin and tonics on it she was crying. He jumped up from the bed and took the tray from her, set it on the big table at the foot of the bed, and eased her into his arms. They lay down together on the bed. She turned away from him, but he drew her back, almost roughly, moving along the edge of what was permissible. He pressed his nose deeply into her intimate, unwashed smells; she had been too busy, too distracted to bathe, and this touched him. They rolled and jolted, whispering their smudged enchantments. Afterwards he opened the two big bedroom windows and let the natural air come through the screens. Tiny birds flitted around the big traveller’s palm off the gallery. He thought of
The
Georgics
, that kept, each one, circling around through planting and breeding, through star charts and rolling hills and honeyed comforts to the fearsome deadly world and the crash of battles, to chaos and trouble that this life in the ruralities was supposed to be a shelter from.
Help me, help me
was the undercry. Everybody, since the beginning, so Virgil knew, crying it.

He lay back in the bed and slept. When he woke he didn’t at first know where he was. He lay on his back remembering a dream: of the time the Albertson company drove out to the Everglades in two cars and fought the Campos—or intended to—a family of car thieves and disassemblers who had tried to break into the drug smuggling business. In the dream the gangmen were all there, as they had been in life—the shooters and the grim-reaper types and the clowns, the steady hands—all ready to gun down the Campos. But there’d been no shooting. Not by Albertson’s troop. As they pulled up in two Land Rovers before the big unpainted house, old Mr. Campo had come out on the porch. They had sat in the vehicles, waiting to see what he would do. What he did was this: he walked down the wide plank front steps, knelt in the yard, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. This was in life. In the dream the old man didn’t even have a gun. In the dream he drifted down the steps on light feet and in the yard, instead of kneeling, lifted off the ground and flew away. Cot stood by the car watching him dwindle into the clear sky. He wanted to rise too. An anguish, harsh, unpulverized by time, poured through him as he watched the old man dwindle until he disappeared. He felt as if his heart was being crushed.
Oh no
, he cried in the dream,
oh no
. He slept again and in another dream Marcella appeared in a pointed green hat like the one Robin Hood wore. She didn’t seem to know him. He fled into tall golden bushes and fell.

He waked with her lying beside him clothed in soft white pants and linen shirt, kissing his face. He told her about the Campo dream. “What happened in real life?” she said.

“Mr. Campo cleared the matter up.”

“I’ll bet.”

He touched her face. Every part of it, subtle shelving, patch and stain, was beautiful to him. Nowhere on her body was an ugly spot. Still, he always saw her imperfections. The abraded nest of acne scars on her left cheek. The dent in her long nose. The tiny healed-over rip in her left earlobe. She was getting older and age was not being kind to a face raised in tropic sunlight. He sensed the sadness she felt about this. She wasn’t like his mother who moved through her life as if there was nothing beyond the passing lashes of loved ones that could harm her. Cot knew that Marcella often stood in front of the long mirror on her back porch appalled and overcome by her disasters. Bursting squalls of disillusionment and failure. They were both like that and both shied from admitting it.