Men in Miami Hotels (3 page)

By the Flagler monument, in a spot where the streetlights don’t quite reach, he runs into Dup Randle, a sporting goods salesman from Miami. He’ll remember this moment: it’s like an ice cube down the back of his shirt. He flinches or thinks he does, he’s not sure and catches himself; a thin twist of . . . not panic—discombobulation—slips along his spine. Dup fronts baseball gloves and scuba gear, but he’s also a Business contract man. He says he’s glad to see Cot—“Man, as I live and breathe . . .”—and offers him a Tums that he accepts but hesitates a sec before putting in his mouth as if it might be poison. The flat, chalky taste of what’s left when everything else is eliminated. Dup actually seems glad to see him. He’s been walking around alone over by the old turtle pens. “Kraals,” he says. “
Corrals
. I never knew what that meant until just this minute.” Waving vaguely back toward the docks. “I thought it was just the name of some guy, Kraals.”

“Nope.”

“How’s your mother?”

Cot’s sure then something’s up, has to be. “She took the late ferry to Fort Myers. Gone to see her buddies in Tampa.”

“I met her several years ago. She’s a nice lady. Snappy sometimes.”

Dup passes a hand over his forehead as if he’s wiping away sweat. He has a round plain face that creases into a translation of happiness when he smiles. He once told Cot he was born in a tent behind a tobacco warehouse in Virginia. It was part of a joke he was telling. Cot thinks of those video games where what you shoot disintegrates as if it never existed. He thinks of walking Dup over to the little byway near the Coast Guard compound and throwing him off one of the floating docks, cuffed with the set of handcuffs Dup always carries, but he decides not to. He doesn’t feel up to it just now. Maybe
I
never existed
,
he thinks. He knows everything about what’s happening here; it’s not that much of a mystery.

“I’ll see ya on the turnaround,” he says.

“You going my way?”

“Which way you headed?”

Dup waves halfheartedly toward town.

“Too bad. I’m going over here.”

But as he turns away from Dup, whose disguise is accessibility, in that instant, he wants to give him another chance, give him a lead, let him in on secrets that’ll help him along. Maybe we could get your house out of hock too, buddy, old duplicitous Dup. The thought startles him, and he knows Dup can see this in his face. Dup starts to say something, then stops. It’s not because he’s letting Cot off. He wouldn’t do that. The street lamp shines in his eyes that gleam with a dark avidity. The situation’s one notch too public.

Halfway down the street Cot turns—Dup’s still standing there pretending not to watch him—and says, “I liked that song you made up for the party over at Hal’s hotel.”

Dup doesn’t say anything.

“It was funny.”

“Thanks,” Dup says.

He walks slowly around the corner and then scoots up Grinnell, cuts over on Thompson Lane and up Francis across Fleming and on to Regent and his mother’s house. He stands in the street. No one’s about; the lights are off under the house. But he knows his mother is lying awake. She’s lying there making up her life, fiddling with the pieces, fragments and unraveled bits, knitting fresh strands of ridiculous makeshift into the fabric, a living example of how crazy we all are. He crosses the yard to the porch, but nobody’s under there. Nobody either in the backyard in the little pup tent Jackie’s set up under the almond tree. He tells himself they’ve found a more restful place to sleep. But he really thinks they’ve been caught by wrongful men.
Help me.
What’s the name—the inspector? Pollack—that’s it. Like the fish. Or was it Fish? Wilkins. He’s known him too all his life—hasn’t he? A slow-moving boy (become a slow-moving man) with a ragged purple wen on the back of his neck and a black mole above his upper lip like a beauty spot. Cot used to see him years ago at semi-pro football games. He carried the chains for the yardage markers. He remembers his earnestness, the way he smiled when somebody looked at him. He wants to smash him to the ground and makes a plan for it, the plan wobbling as he makes it. No matter, in the dark ironworks the instruments are already being forged. He knows this. He can smell the burning metal, even at a distance; it rides on a breeze that’s found him again.

All this in seconds as he cycles over to New Town. Two short fat bare-chested old men wearing tattoo sleeves walk by laughing softly. The moon’s drowning in a small cloud pool. Around a corner he comes on two men in dark caps beating another man on the ground. He stops, wades in and batters the assailants back and forth, knocking one into a tree stump, the other onto his face on the pavement. “You okay, Pop?” he says to the man who was already down. The man’s propped on an elbow looking at him. “What do you know?” he says. “What the fuck do you know about it?” Cot remounts his bike and pedals off. The moon has risen from its pool and sails unobstructed across the sky. He pedals past the darkened houses, past the cemetery where he used to lie out at night with Marcella under a bitter orange tree near the graves of sailors who had gone down with the battleship
Maine
. They could hear the chains on the flagpole above the sailors clanking as if the dead were being raised and lowered, for what reason you couldn’t tell.

H
e finds Ella and Jackie up at CJ’s, thinking as he climbs the outdoor stairs that he’s finally coming to know the woman inside him like CJ’s always told him he needs to, coming to love her; it’s almost erotic, he can even picture her, sitting in a wicker chair on the beach, wearing an orange tam, picking at the sand with her toes and cursing softly as if curses are a form of singing, a hymn even. As a teenager he’d push his unit down between his thighs until just the V of hair showed and try to get off on that but it never worked. His imagination wouldn’t hold up to the blunt fact of him, no homemade woman for him. And no CJ around, but they’re sleeping in CJ’s bed in the larger of the two bedrooms, Jackie and his quick-minded mother. He sits on the bed and talks them awake, clucking their names and telling them about a pelican he took away from some boys who were torturing it. He’s at the part where the pelican kept nibbling his fingers as he pedaled it to the little nature rehab on White Street, nipping his skin with its outlandish and delicate beak. “It was nibbling my fingers so gently,” he says. “As if it wanted to let me know everything was all right.”

“I like that part,” Jackie says, awake but not raising his head.

“You’ve always been so tenderhearted,” his mother says lifting her hand to stroke his cheek.

In another hour dawn would be washing its gray hands along the horizon. “You seen CJ?”

“He’s usually over to Dover’s,” Jackie says. Love never dies, Cot thinks.

“How come you’re over here?”

“It’s restful,” his mother says. Her hair spiky, her face drained of color as if dreams have taken everything out of her; she doesn’t ask him why he’s scouting around before daybreak. “I’ll fix some eggs.”

“That’s okay. I was wondering—did anybody come around the house?”

“Rajah brought us some candles. It was nice of him—to do a favor on his way to prison.”

Later they eat breakfast out on the big back gallery. Neighborhood roosters rustle up the dawn and a skinny yellow cat slinks around their feet and shies when they try to pet it. A tiny, ambidextrous breeze pushes lightly at blossoms in the big tamarind tree in the alley. The white flowers look like lights fading. On the wide flat rooftop next door a homeless family wakes and begins to go about its morning routines.
I’m loose in the world, aflight without design or motive.
This’s something he tells himself sometimes, sometimes when he stays up all night reading and then walks out on the beach to catch the sunrise. “Sometimes,” he says to his mother who is buttering a piece of local bread, “I stay up all night in a laundromat.”

“The same one?” Jackie says.

“One of two or three.”

“You got somebody to do that with?” his mother says.

Just then a couple of police in detective clothes come up the stairs. One of them’s hand goes to his holster when he sees people up on the gallery. Just as quickly the cop lets his hand fall to his side when he realizes who it is. “Hey, Mrs. Sims.” The other’s also a local fellow everybody knows, Oscar Kazanzakis, one of the Greek boys from Bahama Village. “You looking kinda musty, Cot,” he says.

Cot’s heart has already caught on a sticker, his sense of things, local agonies fuming. He can tell in every way but words what’s up. A gnatcatcher bird clicks in the top of a skinny palm tree like it’s keeping time. “I’m waiting for the elaborations,” he says and feels the hollowness shift inside him, the desert island landscape rotate slightly until it shows scoured gullies and tidal washes crumbling under a gray sky—he doesn’t want to be where he is, but that’s how it is for most folks most of the time he thinks, and almost says:
I feel faint
, but doesn’t.

“Well, uh,” the first police—David Bates—says. He was on the football team with Cot and CJ in high school. “I’m sorry, Cot—Mrs. Sims, Jackie—but CJ’s dead.”

Though he hasn’t moved Cot loses his footing, sags helplessly, wondering
where is the place
—what place?—and drops into the chair he has just risen from. His mother, looking David in the face, says, “God almighty,” in a crumpled way.

Jackie has started for the stairs at the other end of the gallery, but Oscar stops him. “You know about this?”

“I hardly know my own name,” Jackie says.

“What y’all doing over here?” Bates says.

“Resting up,” says Ella.

They want to know the whyfors and hows of the killing, the police do, and they aren’t the only ones, it’s a mystery. Cot puts his head on the table, closes his eyes and says no to everything. No I don’t know where he went, no on what he was up to, no on his real name, on his height and weight, on his capacity for love, his great human beauty, no on the shriveling and wasting under way in us all. As children they’d walked around town holding hands; it caused a half scandal among the conchs. Later CJ was captain of the football team, then he began to wear dresses in public. He was a good singer, a performer now of old songs. Cot can see his face, slanted a little sideways, the half-rubbed-out pockmarks on his cheeks like tiny excisions, his blueblack eyes taking everything in. He wipes his cheeks with both hands though there are no tears. Nobody, it appears, knows anything.

Oscar says Connie was found on the beach near the White Street pier.

“They’d covered him up with sea grass,” Bates says. “That senator’s homeless daughter spotted him and called us.”

“Buried?” Jackie says. He gives a shake, writhes in his skin and settles back down. “First Arthur, now Connie.”

“Arthur?” Oscar says.

“Natural causes,” Ella says. Dead of a jellyfish sting (or the heart attack that followed), they’d all attended his funeral in the Jewish section of the municipal cemetery.

The cops look around the place, poking into closets and drawers. They wear white plastic gloves and booties on their feet and they don’t want Cot and the others to go back into the house. Cot knows where he put the emeralds, but he has to wait. Then the cops notice the trapdoor in the ceiling and Cot leads the way up there for Oscar and they look around the attic room that is like the room of a recluse who forgot to move anything in but dust. Through the floorboards they can hear Ella and the other cop talking in CJ’s bedroom. She’s just talking, just yammering. Even at a distance and through flooring it wears him out quick, not for the first time. Sometimes he wants to wring her like a rag. In his city life he walks right by people like her, doesn’t even look at them, or maybe he does, maybe he starts thinking how you can cut loose from the ones you love—how easy it is to do really—and then feel the frayed ends of the rope dangling and flicking and chafing for the rest of your life. Maybe, just catching a glimpse of some neighborhood shouter, he’ll start thinking about her, or about his daddy in Cuba and about all the absent years and who did what to whom and how life just piles on, and how the past is like a bamboo thicket you quit cutting back and just walk around to get to where you’re going—
as best you can
, he’d say to Solly or Goldberg or Chips or Butler, or to any of them up in Miami, to Spane, to Albertson if he asked, but Big A never does.

A
fter the cops leave Cot goes into the small bedroom where Connie has an upright piano and a bookcase and an armchair beside a bright blue Iranian rug. He liked to sit in the chair and gaze at the rug that he said was his confidential tide pool. Behind the bookcase is a footboard that comes out. The stones aren’t there. His blood races, he wobbles, catches himself. He sees the little island white and green in a pale blue ocean. Sunshine like a spanking. Now another kind of light’s shining on him, like moonlight through a bullet-riddled door. I’m going to get it, he thinks, meaning more than one thing, two things at least, maybe three.

He gets up and bicycles over to Marcella’s house and sits on her back steps until she comes out. She brings him a cup of coffee. She’s wearing a pale green silk kimono he’s never seen before, something only somebody who loved her would give her. Even with Connie just dead he wants to interrogate her about this, but he’s ashamed even as he thinks it and makes himself cut it out, and then he tells her Connie’s dead—
Connie’s dead
—and doesn’t know or won’t let himself know whether he’s said it in this straight-out way because he’s jealous or because that’s the best way to say it, or he simply can’t help himself. She winces, her foot turns half over so he can see the ligament stretch and she grimaces and catches herself on the rail and her mouth opens and she gulps air, grunts, and he can see in her face what she’ll look like when she’s old, her eyes without their scleral ring, her skin raked and tissuey, the same look of incomprehension she has now, the melancholic confusion as consciousness retreats along worn pathways into some convenience store of the soul with pickled eggs in a big jar on the counter and a clerk fossicking his teeth with a peppermint toothpick, death standing like a shadow right next to her, coughing quietly into its hand. Plus instant tears she doesn’t bother to wipe off—her tears not death’s. Ordell slides out as if he’s been lurking and asks if he wants some breakfast and Cot says no. Their big tabby cat sidles up and curls around Cot’s legs, but when he reaches to pet it the animal takes a swing at him, claws out. This seems the measure of things.