Men in Miami Hotels (4 page)

2

C
onnie was installed two days later in his family’s big coral stone mausoleum that he’d always said looked like the temple of a small, unlikely religion. Standing around on the thatchy yellow grass under the moving shadows of palm fronds, the whole town it seemed had come out, town minus tourist population (or maybe not completely, since CJ was a favorite: Miss Peculiar), the conchs come out to stand in the late afternoon sun and shadow weeping big loose island tears, someone here or there crying out in a strangled voice for Connie, for CJ, for the boy who had run seventy yards once hauling a punt back all the way to win the Marathon game and caught the passes Cot tossed, boy who’d become the dual personalities, maybe the triple or quadruple, or innumerable personalities, like everyone else, only his were public and unafraid to be pegged, this brave boy, man, now already—Cot knew and Marcella knew—growing old in his tracks, his inexpugnable lover Dover standing rigid and straight by the minister who from time to time placed his hand on Dover’s arm to steady him. CJ’s old parents wept. His father who, back at the house when he was told, had laughed out loud like a man gone suddenly crazy, and cried into a huge yellow bandana bought for him by CJ on his one trip out of the country, to Morocco where he’d been detained in jail for three months and hurt. Some went to their knees, Cot among them. He and Brady Overhall, CJ’s former sidelight, leaned over the gold-toned casket, both of them for a moment unable to get back up, both partially stupefied by the enormity (Cot not really, Cot even then watchful), by the calm, the doggedness, the power and intrusiveness of grief and by the thought of CJ’s body stacked in the musty smokehouse under its breadfruit tree that was a descendant of one of the cuttings brought west from Tahiti by Captain Bligh. Cot got up on his own, but Brady had to be lifted up, gone boneless as a cat, so they could go on. White butterflies flittered around the casket and seemed to dance as Childress Purcell sang his special hymn, “See You in the Yonder.” The late afternoon flight from Lauderdale coming in low nearly drowned the words out.

Cot stared across the assembled at Pollack. Fish, trash fish—pollack. Ah, well, the man probably had problems too. Afterwards he went over and asked him how he was doing. Pollack cringed, stiffened, his long lower lip pursing a little so Cot could see the creases beside it like little healed cuts and said fine just fine. “Sorry about your mother,” he added or remembered to say or tossed in like a piece of meat distraction to a pursuing lion. He was sweating.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Cot had one of his father’s old baseball caps in his hand. It had a New York Giants logo on it. He tapped it against his leg.

“Nothing I could do,” Pollack said.

“I know.”

“It’s regulations.”

“Meant to benefit the people of the community.”

“What’s that?”

“Did you ever find ten thousand dollars on the ground?”

“I found a frozen turkey once.”

“Lying around where you could pick it up?”

“It was in Cleveland. Somebody’d dropped a turkey during a robbery.”

“D’jou keep it?”

“I would have but my buddy said he needed it. He was the one actually who spotted it.”

“Sometimes you find money on the ground you get to keep it.”

“I don’t know, Cot.”

“Treasure all over this area.”

“I don’t know, Cot.”

“You know my mother’s sleeping under the house.” He didn’t want to take the conversation in this direction, but he couldn’t help it. This showed on his face and Pollack saw it.

“I’m sorry, Cot,” he said.

“I don’t want you to lose sleep over it.” Tiniest slip and things could go flying off the rails. Now he wanted to punch the guy. “I’ll see you, Wilkins.”

“Mama said you came by.”

“She lives
inside
y’all’s house, I see.”

Ordell came up just then with his arm tight around Marcella who was streaming tears. “Would you help me with this woman?” he said, an anguished look on his face. Cot dropped the conversation and took Marcella in his arms. She felt alive and wonderfully intricate. The villains had knocked CJ in the head. Hit him so hard from behind that his skull was broken. A chill jerked Cot; he almost let Marcella go, but he didn’t. He was crying too. Way up, in the heat drafts, buzzards circled. The birds were an embarrassment, if you thought that way, especially in a touristical culture promoting everlasting life. Sometimes the birds came down to the cemetery and walked around. Bobby Johnson wandered up, and he pointed at them. “They could get to you,” Bobby said as if he and Cot had been in conversation. “Though I guess it’s true you never hear of ’em digging anything up.”

Cot gave him a look and Bobby slid away, beating his white captain’s hat against his leg as he walked.

“Who was that?” Marcella said. She looked up with eyes that looked like they had glue in them. “Oh—Bobby.”

Her hair smelled of perfume, as citrusy as ever. Way across the cemetery, beyond the fence, upstairs in the old crumbling house on the corner that was half boarded up and leaning to the side, somebody played music on a machine, gay and heartless and loud. A bony, chlorotic beat stuffed under clash and wail. Then the music stopped, cut off. It was against the law to play loud music next door to a cemetery, maybe somebody suddenly remembered that or had it pointed out to them.

H
e tries to get his mother to leave town, but she won’t. She’s one of those old-timers who’ll still be sitting in the living room darning socks when the apocalypse blows through.

“
I’ll
leave,” Jackie says.

They’re out back, eating yellowfin sashimi under the almond tree.

His mother, tall and rangy, a jabbermouth her students call her, always up on things and alert as a bird, says: “If I had the money to go to Fort Myers”—that was where her sister, his Aunt Mayrene, lived—“I’d be able to begin to do something about turning this house around,” but she’s just talking.

Last week—just a minute ago it seems like—he lost everything at the track and walked out into the dusk that seemed a different dusk outside the gates than in and stood by his car as two fat men carrying long horn cases walked by. He tried to get them to blow post time once more, but they wouldn’t.

His mother looks at him as if she, sadly, knows all about his troubles and fuck-ups, which, so he figures she does, and she does. A breeze, fresh born, creeps and struggles in the top of the big mahogany tree a hurricane had snatched bald in the crown three years ago.

“I’m going to take a nap,” he says and crawls into Jackie’s tent and after spraying himself with bug repellent slips off into sleep. In a dream CJ sits in a folding chair in the shade, eating strips of salted green mango. “What a gyp,” he says, Cot’s not sure about what.

S
o next morning he comes on Dup sitting on Sutler’s Restaurant porch eating shrimp and grits and joins him.

“You know that’s not the real way to fix it,” Cot says indicating the half-empty plate.

“So?”

“You’re not supposed to batter the shrimp.”

“So?”

“So I guess you didn’t find what you were looking for.”

Dup doesn’t answer. Instead he takes out his little Walther PPK knock-off and slips it under his napkin.

“Mine’s sitting on my knee.” Cot means the little Beretta he bought in a Key Largo gun shop twenty years ago, but he’s lying.

“I know.” He smiles at Cot, a strangely smoky and acquiescent smile. “Your buddy was smart.”

“He made a perfect score on his college boards.”

“You still remember something like that? What exactly are college boards?”

“Never mind.”

“I hate when people do that.”

“Yeah.”

“Say never mind. Shitheads. Like you don’t count.”

“Yeah.”

“I guess it’s your turn to lead the way,” Dup says moving the gun about an inch.

They drive up the chain to Kaslem Key and park beside a dirty coral road that runs through the woods. They walk along one after the other, Cot ahead. There are little coral-floored clearings in the woods where myrtle bushes and silver buttonwood clump together under skinny pines. They can see little green tufty islands out in the big bay.

“You went to a lot of trouble,” Dup says.

“Not really.”

They come to a long low house, a concrete shell abandoned years ago when the money to complete it ran out. Beyond the house a shattered boardwalk leads to a spindly dock built out through the mangroves. “Where we going,” Dup says, “Exactly?”

Cot points out to the water. In the distance a couple of small white-lipped islands among their heaped greenery. Even now he feels like he’s drifting, floating along.
I’ve been trying to buy my own head back.
Trying, he thinks, to buy back his soul and time and a few curious memories stacked on back shelves, and situations, arrangements, circumstances, old follow-throughs; rushing out to the track to put money on big horses about to break into their future too, carrying baskets of money still sporting their rental tags.
I’m going to inflate bags under it and float it to the surface
, he says, talking about his soul. But the ghostliness stands with him.
I’m on a fade. I’m being rubbed out.
He wants everything to be a joke and makes jokes with his cohorts, but nobody laughs much. He walks out on the beach after midnight and stumbles over nomads sleeping in the sand.
Perdóneme
, he says. Always he knows somebody who can fix things. But he can’t get to them in time. “Circumstances have changed,” the doctor says, the one Albertson made him go to. “Whose?” Cot asks, but the doctor won’t tell him. He hears the wind in the pines, and even the wind, so simple, has a complicated too much to say.

“You’re as suicidal as a bee,” Dup says.

Everybody knows what’s up with Cot but Cot, it appears.

Here and there a coconut palm sticks up like a flagpole. A small boat with a canvas-covered motor is tethered to the dock. This is Sam Seller’s place, a lobster fishing rig he keeps operational this time of year. Cot takes the key from its cubby under the dock and gets into the little boat.

“That ain’t a very likely boat,” Dup says.

Cot thinks of those round boats Indians used on northern lakes. What’re they called? Bull boats.

“I don’t want to ride in that,” Dup says.

“Me either, but it’ll carry us to the stones.”

“Let’s get a bigger boat.”

“Hard to do that without anybody hearing the news.”

Dup rubs his gun against his thigh. He’s had the pistol out all the way from town. He’s a big man with caramel colored hair and sideburns several shades darker. “Let’s go slow,” he says.

“Fine with me.”

“Hold the boat.”

As Dup steps from the short board ladder into the boat Cot pumps the gunwale and tosses him into the water. A trick he’s done a hundred times since he was a boy. No, not that many; he’s no slyboots character. Dup comes up thrashing, gasping, and without his gun. Cot has his pistol out and he keeps it on the big man as he dog-paddles to the dock. Cot follows him back along the trail and then he makes Dup drive the rental car to the courthouse where he turns him over to the sheriff.

“Any witnesses to this, Cot?” the sheriff says.

“The waitresses at Sutler’s saw him put a gun on me. Otherwise it’s just me and my word. But is this the sort of thing you’d expect from me if it wasn’t true? I’m known for my candor.”

With the flat of his hand the sheriff pushes the front of his blond crew cut back. “I’ll lock him up, but you going to have to swear before Judge Mannix.”

“Anytime.” Some soft thing in him now indurate and losing its luster. But everybody knows about that. You can’t see a gangster without hearing about that at least once or twice a day: the dull, inevitable, unenviable stoniness. Yet a softness remains, supple, slowly undulating, a nexus like a jungle bridge flexing in breeze, a worry and substantiation, anchored in coral rock, humanness, spotty and reeking, still apparent—that’s another way of putting it—
Hey, Sheriff, don’t you know me?

He calls Marcella on her cell; it turns out she’s in the courthouse and looking for somebody to have lunch with. They drive in her car to the Rumba Room and have snapper salad and iced tea. From the main room they can see the lagoon, sparkling and winking in the bright sunlight. Out on the beach European tourists in flimsy bathing suits lie in the sun as if shot. The Americans are all fat but energetic; whatever’s for rent they rent: paddleboats, boogie boards, huge transparent spheres you get inside of and walk across the waves with, contraptions that leave them stalled in the lagoon making signals for rescue. All the picnic tables have been commandeered by the homeless who gabble and sputter, laughing with a sound as if their throats are being ripped out. At a card table in the shade, Hollis March, the writer, scribbles furiously in his notebook. After his stroke he no longer makes sense, but that hasn’t stopped him. Marcella wants to know what the fracas with Dup was about, but Cot’s cagy.

“Where’d you hear about it?”

“Buster Goins was filling me in on it as it happened.”

“The deputy? I was being observed?”

“Somebody’s always watching.”

“I owed him money. Or I owed his boss money.”

“Doesn’t he work for Albertson?”

“Does he?”

“I see.”

“Yeah. What was the name of that inspector?”

“Pollack.”

“Like the painter.”

“And the fish.”

“You want to get married?”

“Once is enough for me, thanks.”

He rubs the back of her hand with his knuckles. She smiles at him, her old enigmatic smile that isn’t so enigmatic anymore. Her face is being recultivated by time.

“I been thinking about farming,” he says.

“You would.”

It’s as if there’s now a skin between them, something flimsy but regenerating whenever it’s torn and too much trouble to keep trying to rip through.

“You want to duck over here into this little botanical garden and cut us off a piece?”

“I love your way with words. I can’t get enough of it.”