Panama (16 page)

The first thing Jorge said was, “I wait and I wait and you never get back to me.”

“I had an egg on my head.”

“I wait and I wait.”

“Egg.”

“I see the egg in the paper. I see your discharge from Florida Keys Memorial. Still I wait.”

“Will you play for our family?”

“On one condition.”

“Which is?”

“That the weeds are cut down at the Casa Marina so that my orchestra is not driven crazy with chiggers.”

“It's a deal.”

“You hurt my feelings when you didn't call. I thought it was my music.”

“I neglected you. Accept my apologies.”

“But I will, of course.”

I let go of Jorge's handlebars. He rolled up Lopez Lane and disappeared behind a car body. The haze from City Electric brought its air of extraordinary romance. Each filling station seemed like a cheerful island with the bright pumps standing bravely in the tropical smoke. Through the open doorways of old homes came the anomalous ring of cash registers or piping television serials. I was transfixed by a beauty beyond the hideous. My heart was a song. Nothing hugs the road like a garbage truck.

I am enclosed in here, in my reflecto Ray-Bans. Look at me and what do you see? Yourself.

Peavey is in his office. I'm relieved that he's out of Roxy's Florida room with that girl, though I see her behind the water cooler, huge bubbles rising through her visage. She's changing a column of those little one-swallow paper cups. She looks up at me and for an instant a bubble enlarges her left eye to the size of a melon.

I wave and she turns to Peavey, who's turned to me.

“Counselor,” I say.

“Chet.”

“What's the word?”

“Beats me, Bubba.”

“The hell you say.” I grin.

“What can I do you for?”

“I got Jorge Cruz lined up.”

“Fabulous.”

“Tell you though, the guy laid a condition on me. He wants the weeds down.”

“We'll get them down but not because he said so.”

“Who do I call?”

“Southernmost Lawn. They got a big Weed Eater, go right through that junk. Got four Bahamians with grass whips. Put the place right in shape.”

“There are a lot of cats in that deep grass,” I say, starting to lose it already. Peavey fixes me and raises a Benson and Hedges to his lips.

“Well, they're going to have to get out.”

“That's the heck of it,” I say. Peavey knows I'm going down for the count. Might just as well face that.

“You seen that boat off White Street pier?”

I start around the desk and he says,
“Get out.”

“Relax,” I tell him. “This is no clambake and you are among friends.”

I left Peavey balling the jack with bubblehead and all the lights on his phone shining like a southern constellation.

*   *   *

I stopped to see my uncle Pat. He used to be in American Intelligence and he has a tremendous amount of stuff from the Germans, including a phonograph and a stack of Nazi 78's, which he often plays while working. Pat's practice has gotten to where there's no need of an office. He works on the dining-room table listening to Nazi songs—he's not a Nazi—adding codicils and revising bills of grievance which he sometimes circulates free of charge. I told him two o'clock Sunday; no dresses. Pat wasn't making any promises. Also, and I can't be emphatic enough about this, he's no Nazi.

*   *   *

And then—then!—it was raining. Rain in Cayo Hueso can be a rare thing, as you streak over the cracked sidewalk under the awning of trees, a curtain of translucent rain, the endless hiss of traffic. The watery green leaves turn up and the dust on the Spanish limes rinses down till their dark, vivid forms stand out in their own clouds of green. I step to the left and the cloud water, the ocean rain, goes straight to my skin and I picture that my own form is as vivid in this fatigue shirt and jeans and Sonia sandals as a Spanish lime tree, soaking energy from the rain and getting ready to drop seeds on those roofs until everyone inside is crazy from not sleeping. Rain is one thing that will make you feel you can go on.

*   *   *

Roxy is being fitted, standing on the aqua carpet with bright veins in her bare feet. A girl sits cross-legged on the floor, pins in her mouth, and says, “Iv vat about vight for lengf?”

“Just right. I want only the ends of my slippers peeping out. I have stringy calves, which do not go with my pot belly.” I think I'm the only one who sees Roxy as a comedian. Remember, she'd already died once. It fascinates me.

“O Miff Hunnicutt!”

Looking at Roxy, I felt a tingle of family comfort. You become a soft warm object and the brain slowly shapes itself to the facts. For a blessed moment, you are totally lacking in views.

When the little girl headed out, Roxy said she was a bit peckish and would I be a dear and take the Imperial and get us a couple of Big Macs?
Pour quoi non,
I chuckled. I headed for Roosevelt Boulevard. I never object to making a burger run. In Baby America, a fellow wants to know his fast-food inside and out. I bought Roxy and me two mid-range burgers and one large fries, with napkins and ketchup-paks to go.

And Roxy sure had eyes for the little dickens, sinking her teeth through the cheese shields with sudden fury, cupping her left hand underneath for drippings. Holding our hamburgers, we were both living in the present.

She was sitting in the green silk chair, threads poignantly snagged by cats over the years, as though by design.

“Tracked Ruiz down.”

“Oh?”

“Hand-lining grunts for Petronia Street.”

“I thought so,” I said.

“He had a heck of a deal here. Could've been a sinecure. But he couldn't keep his hands off my grapefruits.”

“Seemed like there was enough to go around,” I said.

“Criminals don't think that way,” said Roxy.

“No,” I crooned with boredom. “I don't suppose.”

“Peavey and I don't plan on children.”

I thought, I wonder if this is hilarious.

“Fine with me.”

“He felt you might think we were going to soak up your inheritance with babies. Have no fear. Anyway, most of it is going to that Jerry Lewis disease.”

“Muscular dystrophy?”

“Yes.”

“That's fine.”

“Otherwise it ends up in the hands of dope peddlers, dishonest professional athletes, and corrupt disc jockeys.”

“Really!”

“I think so, don't you?”

“I imagine I do.”

“As to the wedding, I'll be there,” she assured me.

“Me too.”

“Pat wants to be maid-of-honor.”

“I told him no dresses.”

“I asked that you not interfere. He's having a dreadful time with his practice and there's little enough for him that brings any pleasure. Besides, she's already started by now.”

“Who?”

“The seamstress, the
seamstress
who just left here.”

“What about her?”

“She's fitting Pat.”

“He'll never wear it. World War II and life in our family have ruined his nerve.”

“Now, I am contributing to the bar three cases of my precious absinthe that Pat brought back from France when he was with Intelligence. It's for the family and you'll have to ask for it. Watch it. I have seen people get very ugly on absinthe. I have seen them be unkind to household pets and behave in every respect as though they hadn't all their buttons.”

“Yes…”

“As you once did for a living? It's disturbing that you were in such demand.”

“The theory was that I was a visionary and that I was certainly playing with a full deck.”

“I'll just bet.”

“Roxy, please, if you would.”

“The other day your father told me he thought it was all a really good gag—”

I gave her the blankest of blank stares. Roxy stared back.

“Oh, that's right, you've decided he doesn't exist. In the father and son game, I guess that's the best stunt of all. Well, let me tell you something, you prize boob, the world is full of things that are not awaiting your description. And your father is one of them.”

I felt panic.

“You and Peavey deserve each other for the aimless cruelties you commit, you evil shitsucker. I ought to kill you.”

I bounded out.

*   *   *

When I left Roxy's, I promptly met the writer. He was looking at me and simultaneously pressing thumb and forefinger into his eyes.

“I thought you were going home,” I said. I needed to know someone had one to go to.

“It's a matter of composure. It's like walking out of a bar after you've lost a fight. I'll go when I'm ready.”

We strolled past La Lechonería toward the synagogue. He knew all the little streets and stared up and down with sad affection.

“I want to show you something,” he said and took me down a sandy lane that passed through an open field to the sea. Even I didn't know it went to the sea. We pushed through litter and saw grass until the edge of the water; where I saw something which I took for a bad sign: six dead greyhounds rolled in the wash, eyes swollen shut with sea water.

“Losers from the track,” he said. “I'm getting off the rock. I love the rock but it's a bad rock.”

“Good luck.”

“On what?”

“On getting shut of this place.”

“Thanks. I'm going to need it.”

*   *   *

Don and I walked downtown. Each time I go there something has changed. Today an old family jewelry store had become a moped rental drop; a small bookstore was a taco stand; and where Hart Crane and Stephen Crane had momentarily coexisted on a mildewed shelf was now an electric griddle warming a stack of pre-fab tortillas. From the gas dock I could see the flames from the Navy dump, burning at the base of a steeply leaning column of black smoke. When you sail around Fleming Key, passing downwind of the dump, the boat fills suddenly and magically with flies, millions of them, it seems, for when the fire is out, they fill the air downwind like a cloud. “You see,” I said to Don. “I'm capable of noticing and remembering.”

“Some things. Until you remember like you're supposed to, you're bad for the world.”

“All right now, Don. You're starting to bore me. So, on your way.”

“No,” said Don. We were in the middle of one of those sourceless browsing mobs, the origin of my own mystery; and I wanted to move with them and feel for the moment when, on the average, they forget the highway and wherever it is they come from.

I asked Don once more to detach himself from me: it seemed that he was acquiring some suppurating need for studying me. Still, he hung on. So, right at him, in that crowd, I began to shout odd snatches from Smithsonian Institute animal records. He couldn't stand the pressure and beat a hasty retreat right up the street where I'd tried to buy that parrot. I smiled to the crowd; they soon forgot and I was once again among them, moving toward our dream of forgetfulness.

Past the Little Charles Guest House, there is a concrete house with flamingos cut in the foundations, and on that street many of the blacks speak only Spanish. There are people throwing coins against the curb and leaving the doors open on their parked cars so they can hear the radio. A couple of houses down, you can look through the lattice at the bottom, under the house, and you can see the cats all under there, kind of tortoiseshell, kind of related-looking. I began to think of the cats at the Casa Marina, in the deep grass. I began to wonder if they would be safe from the Weed Eater and those Bahamians with the grass whips.

When I went out there, the cats were arrayed against a spangle of sea light, watching the Bahamians destroy their homeland. They were in a row and rather self-possessed. It was my opinion that they would find another way of life; and the white man at the borders with the Weed Eater failed to alter that conviction.

I called Catherine at home. The little burst I'd had, feeling the cats would find a way, I wanted to spend on her.

“May I come over?”

“What can I do for you, Chet?”

“May I come over?”

“Masturbate with a crucifix?”

“I know I am a Catholic. At the same time there are other ways of viewing my conduct. I ought to strangle you.”

“That's my way of saying that you have a rotten little Catholic heart, which is my privilege as a veteran of the Catholic wars, do you hear me?”

“There is no rotten little Catholic heart. There is only the Sacred Heart of Jesus and I have seen it shine in a Missouri tunic, a cane in the scabbard, on a horse named Stonewall Jackson.”

“Do you know what I'm doing this very minute?”

“What?”

“I'm looking at a photograph of Jesse James in his coffin.”

I slammed that phone down good. Liar, liar, liar. I know he lives.

*   *   *

A person I trusted at the time said it was time for me to go home, because home was a controlled environment, and that I was having a destructive effect on all and sundry out in America. It is time, he said, to leave the Sherry-Netherland and to go home; the dog is eating everything.

*   *   *

On the sides of the Casa Marina, there are fire escapes which are like metal stairways except that the last section is lowered from above so that the stairs can only be used going down, by someone capable of letting down that last section. Furthermore, this prevents types who might be abroad at odd hours from ascending the fire escape into the hotel. Also, on the sides of the hotel are brown ventilator exhausts which look like carp. Beyond this, I can hear the furor of my aunt's wedding from within.

On the east side, you can peer through the steel mesh at an old courtyard which lies before the sealed arches of the front of the old hotel. From here, you can barely hear the wedding. One more block and I could have lost touch entirely. I didn't have the nerve for that.