Men in Miami Hotels (19 page)

“I think we’re backpedaling,” he says. He’s just come in from out in the bluster.

She leans over the console peering into what looks like nothing but spray. “Get wet?”

Water drips into his eyes. “Hope we don’t get runned over.”

She starts to say something but stops and to Cot it’s as if her brain’s been jerked up thrashing, her mind that is, and he sees her fighting, losing ground, hating the loss and holding on, her hair that has no gray in it matted against the side of her head, her long nose shiny and red, her hands gripping the wheel as if it’s the rim of a chalice holding the one true elixir. He wants to move up behind her, to spell her, relieve the press and stall of whatever it is nagging through the storm, but he doesn’t, knows she won’t take it. The squall whines and squeals, emptying itself.

B
y the time the storm lets up they’re rounding the western tip of the long, Lepidosaurian island and pressing on beyond, heading south. She realizes they’ve gone too far, or thinks she does. Dark’s coming on. The squall has burned itself out, and now the ocean lies before them, slowly rising and falling in a long-distance breath, shining and white streaked. They’ve both been sick, Marcella more so.

“Let me take it,” he says.

She bangs her palm against the wheel and bares her horsey teeth. “Take it how? Take it where?” She’s near to cursing him, to flinging down responsibility like an offending appliance. “These fucking reefs run forever.”

Los arricifes de coral
, he says silently to himself, backing away, coming up close again.

“Fuck this,” she screams and elbows him.

In her mind she shades him out like she would shade a puppy out of the sun with her hand. The world all around her is dotted now with shaded places. She hates herself for what she’s done, but she doesn’t want to stop doing it. Coverts and hideouts and caves hidden by bushes and forts set up in a world turning to wilderness—that was life, and you took it under your wing as best you could. She makes a noise like a cat would make denying rumors.

He wants to touch her but he knows not to. She leans against the wheel, turning it slightly, shading a little more to the east, maybe the southeast, heading into the dark out of which Judgement Day will come, the sun already climbing hand over hand through the big troughs and valleys of the wild Atlantic. She puts speed to the boat.

Now he can touch her.

He slips behind her and takes her shoulders in his hands. Her hands on the wheel are strong, blotched. There’s nothing much he can say right now. They can smell the land, murky and feculent, a smell like rotting fruit—mangoes maybe—and trash fires. “You’re tired,” he says. The tension in her shoulders begins to give way under his fingers that dig gently in.

“You’re the smart one,” she says and angles herself away from him. He lifts his hands off her. “No,” she says.

He can hardly tell what she means, everything between them is so spare, harsh, splintered.

He puts his hands on her again, with just two middle fingers pressing the long muscles in her back. He senses her giving in; senses the coarse, repellent grief, surrender of armies. He lets his hands rest lightly on her. They can go days sometimes without her allowing any touch. He’ll say I thought I was the brutal one, and she’ll only stare at him as if he’s a ruiner of children and pets. He kisses her backbone, following the strung dice downward, touching just enough for the touches to be kisses. It’s as if he’s lifting tiny particles off her body. She says, “I can’t see what’s ahead of me.”

He knows what she means and wishes she hadn’t spoken.

“I never can.”

“You don’t have to.”

He knows what she means there too. “It doesn’t come as naturally as you might think.”

“I don’t think that. But you don’t know.”

“Know what?” The last time he asked
what?
she said he didn’t know how hard it was to be a woman. That isn’t the only thing, he told her.

“I don’t know,” she says now, which he understands to mean that she knows exactly. He winces, but so deeply inside that it doesn’t show on the surface of his body.

“Everybody gets confused around here this time of night.”

She snorts, bends her head toward the big wheel, turns quickly and kisses him on the lips. “I saw Muncie Baker holding up his hand that was covered with blood. There was a look in Mrs. Tillman’s face that I’d never seen anywhere—so much pain. And Estelle, the ranger at the fort?—she was lying on the ground holding her arms up.”

“Everybody letting go.”

“No, Cot, that wasn’t it.”

Unnerved, something come loose in his mind, he begins to wander around the boat. Three steps down into the big combo living room, kitchen and sleeping compartment. He fiddles with taps, turns on the water, washes his hands, pokes into the refrigerator, pulls out a bottle of seltzer and drinks from it. The refrigerator smells of turnips and faintly of rotten meat. A fold-down table releases rolled-up charts and the red plastic-bound ship’s log.

He sits at the little fold-out seat and reads the log, Ordell’s rushed and twitchy script:

“Hazards of hope and duplicity. Rained all day. No fish in the ocean, we ate cold hamburgers and sat in the stern bay arguing. She won’t give in about anything that is important to me. She senses what matters most and takes that as her own and won’t let me have a sip of it. She treats me like a burglar who’s begging to be let off. I could throw her into the ocean and explain her away like indigestion. Christ. The ocean is so blue you’d think that was the only color God loved. I hate the fucking ocean. Here they come the big swells swollen like a sickness. I might kill her yet.”

That’s for January 18th, this year.

For January 2nd, Ordell wrote:

“Her infidelity’s like a goiter. You ignore it but really you can’t stop thinking about it. rain all day. the Ocean’s gray as ashes. Gulls followed us all the way out crying like the betrayed. they know something we don’t admit to. She says she’s giving up the old life, the one she’s stretched out like a series of bedsheets she tied together to let herself down from a prison—that’s the way she talks—but I don’t believe her. Near Doomsday Shoal the water’s clear as a bell a hundred feet down to a sandy bottom. I would swim down to it and sit all morning resting my nerves. Or maybe screaming.”

December 16th, off Big Elbow Light:

“She dived in and swam a circle around the boat. We were anchored over a coral shelf at the edge of a deep drop-off into blue water. I called to her to get out but she wouldn’t. Then I saw a shark—maybe eight feet long with a white-tipped dorsal—swimming around her. It swam slowly at a distance. I started to call to her again, but i didn’t. I turned back to the book I was reading, a biography of Disraeli—thinking I am the center of this circle—thinking I am trapped like her. But it was a kind of enticement—I knew I could break out. A little later I heard her climbing the ladder. My heart was thumping. I don’t know why—or do—”

December 2, Lat 23.15 Long 81.08:

“All day rode the swells with the engine off. I felt what it is to be flotsam, jetsam, rising and falling with the tremendous weight of the Gulf stream under us. Once I would of thought of this big river of water as infinitely replenishing, as self-cleansing and pure but I can’t believe in such things anymore. You see the trashiness of the ocean, the stains and grease patches riding on it. She came topside and stood there yawning, so beautiful like a lovely horse in the shade. I slapped her across the eyes after she told me she was in love with”

The bottom half of the page and all of the next one back are torn out. He carefully closes the book and tucks it under a small stack of books and folds up the desk. He goes into the forward cabin, lies down but gets quickly up. He starts back out into the big room but that feels too proximate to her, to her kinetics. He can hear her cursing, shouting. There’re no words in what she’s saying, and he tells himself it’s this that keeps him away, repels him. He lies down again. A panic catches him, but he makes himself stay still. Abruptly his mother’s presence is all around him—and not only around: He’s become porous: she sluices in and out of him; maybe leaving a residue, maybe not. For a time he has no memories of her. He has—call them sparks, flashes of a drained, ascetic face, torn by wind; fingers touching chess pieces in a room lit by candlelight; lips washed by a fat, gray tongue. Warm spots and cold spots pulse in his chest. Not far behind his eyes a breeze shakes the red flowers of an achiote bush. A sense of give and take, like a philosophy, rises to power and ebbs. He smells roasting hamburgers, followed by an anguished feeling of emptiness. On the stinging surface of his cheek he feels his mother’s ancient slap. Where she is can she still feel his? He’s sure he believes in a continuing presence. A poke-around, nosy apparitional something, prodding and pausing to fiddle with useless matter, maybe caress it, trying to recall some stumped and useless business that no one else on Earth at this moment has in his mind. Many are thinking about her tonight, but day by day the number will diminish until no one is. They’re thinking of others too this night. Funerals to come. Eventually each of us will lie in an unmarked grave. Spane said that, morbid fellow combining this with that to make a murder. What gives? Cot had quit the football team midseason of his senior year—he didn’t know why. And then quit school just before the Christmas vacation—he didn’t know why—and took the bus to Miami and got a room out at the beach for fifty dollars a week and sat on his little balcony lonely as a gull reading
Parsifal
and thinking of the bitterness in his soul. He shopped in a Cuban market on Washington and sat in the park eating a papaya with a plastic spoon. Marcella found him there. She brought him a Christmas present of a rolled-up Brueghel print, Isaac Babel’s collected stories, and a plastic pack of jockey shorts. I got a mama for that last, he told her, and she said that woman doesn’t want to speak to you. And she didn’t. Not for years. But after a while things changed. Life was just long enough to wear most folks out. Marcella hadn’t criticized him or asked him to come home. She lay on the bed naked, looking at him. I’ll do anything you want, he said. But she said she didn’t have a thing on her mind.

T
ipped left, then left again, fumbling in the dark past Juventud, past Cantiles, Rosario, and Largo del Sur, left turn at the lights of Giron, up the Bahia des Cochinos onward to the
playa
where the invasion museum sports a Hawker Sea Fury loaded with rockets and on to the narrow strip of sand sloping down from the concrete trenches—unmanned now, going back to grass—where a hundred yards out they drop anchor, row the dinghy in to shore and sleep the sleep of the almost dead among the weeds beyond the tide line.

I
n the early morning two old men carrying a couple of small throw nets wake them. Cot speaks to the men in Spanish and for some reason shows them his Cuban passport, the one he first got years ago and renews through his father since, even though he can tell they aren’t officials and don’t ask to see it. He’s jumpy and overfriendly and the men say OK, OK, and murmur, not to each other but to some secret listener in their hearts and Cot can see this, and he sees too the future dwindling ahead of him, flattening out like whirled-up dust settling from a passing car. He thinks maybe I’ll shoot these guys but doesn’t; he goes on grinning, turning the pages of the passport, showing the stamps for Peru and Martinique and Belize and Trinidad where in Port of Spain in a gunfight in the middle of Constitution Street he took the lives of three Indian gangsters who had cheated Albertson on a rights question. The passport has a blue plastic cover and contains stamps of entry and exit. No current entry stamp, but he doesn’t show the men that. One of them has a glossy gray beard. The other is slender with an old man’s slenderness that doesn’t look like good health. Cot asks what they are after. Bait, the bearded one says.
Anzuelo.
His eyes glisten with excitement.

“We’re traveling,” Cot says. Marcella, kneeling in the sand behind him hasn’t spoken. The men wave discreetly at her, their old-man hands almost limp.

They follow the men up to the village that’s a collection of small tin-roofed houses along a dusty coral street among breadfruit and mango trees and seems essential to something he’s got no good idea of. Frayed tufts of banana trees stick out from behind the houses. There’s a store with a screened front tacked on and in the yard under a big mamey tree benches where you could sleep away your life. He’d like to do that; he’s always felt that way he thinks and knows this isn’t true. They buy bread and Egyptian peanut butter and eat breakfast under the dark green leaves of the old tree, from time to time pointing out little features of life around them. An old woman smokes a huge cigar; a man with a cheek filled with something elastic, maybe bubblegum, maybe betelnut, chews steadily; a child holds up the hem of her frilly dress revealing frayed khaki shorts underneath.

Marcella looks up into the tree where on the nearest limb ants march in double rows and says “I want something to get a grip on me.” She laughs. “That’s not what I mean. I mean the other way.”

“Maybe both at once.” His mind skips, jumps along for a sec, then pauses and he thinks:
time to rest now
, but then it skips ahead again not really lighting on anything.

The store proprietor, a fat man in a glossy blue shirt, directs them to a man who drives them in his dog-nosed Ford pickup to Playa Giron where they catch the jitney to Havana. His father is out when they get to his apartment, but they sit in a little park on the other side of the street and wait for him. Some old men are repairing a small electric motor under the almond trees. The trees are in full white bloom. After a while his father comes down the street. He doesn’t see them sitting, half slumbering, in the warm breeze under the trees. His father looks frail and Cot’s heart goes out to him but he doesn’t get up. He watches as his father walks carrying over his shoulder his patched guitar. At the door to the apartment building—three stories around a courtyard with galleries along all three floors—his father turns and looks at him. He has known he was there, Cot thinks. He gets up and the two men meet in the street that’s streaked with tar patches and almost empty. He takes his father in his arms. He can feel the boniness and this alarms him, but he holds his father as tightly as he can allow himself. His father smells of bacon, old sweat, and alcohol. He kisses Cot’s neck with dry, tender kisses. Then Marcella comes up, and his father kisses her too. They go together into the building and climb the stairs that are wet as if from a rain—from leaks, his father says.