Virgin Heat (24 page)

"I was afraid," the younger brother said by way of explanation. "That was before." He ducked beneath Paul's arm and scraped into the room.

"Before what?"

Louie didn't answer. The door closed behind him, shutting out the naturalness of day. He swept off his winged sunglasses in the dimness.

Louie glanced around the room, noted the small sad luxuries of the guest who dines alone—the single curling rose in the bud vase, the paper cap atop the streaming glass of water. He said, "Maybe we'll get to that. First we talk."

Paul Amaro was wearing a hotel bathrobe. His barrel chest stretched open the lapels. His breathing came with effort and his skin was splotchy red.

"Don't fuck with me, Louie. My patience is used up."

"I'm not gonna let you spoil things for her."

Paul stared at his brother, surprise and contempt swirling through the look. This runty man in a skirt and a wig, this meddling nobody with tits and wrinkled stockings, was telling him what he would and wouldn't let him do? "If you're gonna be an asshole—"

Louie interrupted him. "Paul, your daughter's in love with Sal Martucci. She came down here to find him. Haven't you figured that out by now?"

Paul Amaro turned his back and clenched his fists. The room, a big room, was feeling very small. Two beds left only narrow open lanes. The mirror didn't double space, it halved it, throwing back hard edges, jutting corners that blocked ways of escape. Angelina's father didn't turn around. He said, "She doesn't even know Sal Martucci, not really, what a piece a shit he is. What she felt for him, that was long ago, childhood, a crush."

"That may be," said Louie, "but she isn't gonna stop feeling it just because you want her to."

Paul half-turned, glanced briefly down at his breakfast table with its cooling coffee, its plate striped with streaks of drying egg. "What that fucker did to me," he said, "that's death. Even you know that, Louie. That cunt put me in jail."

Louie remembered all at once that the wig was on his head, he yanked it off and tossed it away. He ran a hand over his sweaty bald spot but before he could think of what to say he was saying it. "Paul," he told his brother, "for once in your life be honest. He didn't put you in jail. You put you in jail. You're a criminal, Paul. A bully and a crook and a criminal."

For a moment Paul Amaro just glared at him, his eyeballs throbbing and his body churning and heaving in his robe like something being born. At last he said, "You little twat, you have the fucking balls—?"

"Yeah," said Louie, more surprised than anyone, "I do. I do, Paul. Finally I do."

At a loss for logic, Paul Amaro spluttered, "Your asshole video, Louie. This whole mess started with your video."

The younger brother refused to be deflected. He put his hands on the hips of his skirt, leaned forward on his tippy shoes. "Okay, Paul, so say you kill 'im. Big man, you rub 'im out. What then? Your friends respect you more? Your enemies know to be afraid?"

Paul said nothing, stared vaguely at softening butter, hardening toast.

Louie hammered on. "One thing that happens, Paul? I'll tell ya one thing that happens. Kill 'im and your daughter hates ya."

There was a long pause filled with the hum of the a/c and a faint rustling of foliage from the world outside. Then some words leaked out of Paul Amaro. They were words he didn't know he had inside him, and could never in a hundred lifetimes have imagined he would say. He met his brother's eyes in the instant before he said them but then he looked at nothing. "She hates me anyway."

Louie sat down at the foot of a bed. He didn't remember moving, but there he was. He was not a father and he had no answer for what had just been said. He couldn't lift his eyes up off his lap.

After a moment Paul went on like he was talking to himself. "She didn't hate me, why would she be doing this?"

Louie's chest and arms were damp, he rearranged his blouse. Not sure if he was chiding or trying to give comfort, he said, "You think all of this, it has to do with you?"

"You think none of it does?" said Paul Amaro. Moving slowly, heavy, he slipped between the breakfast table and a bed, sat down, shoulders slumped, across the narrow space from his brother. "Of all the guys inna fuckin' world, Louie. Coincidence she's stuck onna guy I hate the most?"

Louie brought his knuckles to his mouth, chewed on them a moment before he answered. "With love," he said, "I don't think you can look at it like that, like there's rhyme or reason."

"And what about wit' family? You think there's rhyme or reason wit' family?"

Louie had no answer, his eyes strayed toward his cast-off wig, which shone with an unwholesome luster like the pelt of something poisoned.

"I tried to make her a nice life," Angelina's father muttered. "Big house. No worries. All I did, I made her ashamed of her old man."

Louie said nothing. He thought of reaching for his brother but couldn't lift his arms to give an embrace that might have been welcomed, might have been pushed aside.

"That's why I gotta kill 'im," Paul resumed, his voice weary, trancelike. "That's the real reason. Businessman, Louie. To my daughter I was a businessman. Not a criminal, not a thug. Went ta work in nice clothes, brought home lotsa presents. Executive, like. Wit'out that fuck I mighta got away with it. To my daughter. Maybe she never woulda known."

"But Paul—" said Louie.

He got no farther. Outside the room there was the scratch of footsteps, a low rumble of knotted voices. Then a knocking on the door, loud, rude, insistent. Someone tried the knob; it turned, Paul Amaro had neglected to relock it.

Lucca said to Paul, "You poor bastard, you're even worse off than I thought." To the fellow in the skirt he said, "Take a hike, sis. Us men, we gotta talk."

Keith McCullough, hidden in deep shade across the street from Coral Shores, did not immediately recognize Uncle Louie; but he could tell a real transvestite from someone merely improvising, and the clumsy walk and crooked wig led him to look a whole lot closer. The stubby build and bowed out knees persuaded him that this was Paul Amaro's brother, and while he had no idea why he was out on the street in woman's clothing, he was encouraged. There was movement, maneuvering; the stalemate was easing.

Once inside the courtyard, Louie drew a couple of facetious whistles from men in the hot tub. But he had too much on his mind, he didn't stop to kid around. He walked around the pool, high sun scorching his wig, heels sliding over damp tiles, until he found his family. Rose and Angelina, in wet bathing suits, were lying side by side on lounges; Michael, in a towel, sat upright in a nearby chair. Ziggy lazed a little distance away, in a sulk as usual.

Rose lit up at her husband's approach, fluffed her hair where the bathing cap had squashed it down. "Louie," she said, "you must be broiling. Sit by me, I'll help you get undressed."

He perched on the edge of her lounge. She took off the wig, unbuttoned his blouse, couldn't help giggling as, for the second time that day, she unclasped the deceiving bra.

Angelina said, "So Uncle Louie, how'd it go?"

For a time he didn't answer. He was sweating, his head itched. His thoughts were going round and round. Too much had happened for one morning, he felt an exhaustion such as an animal must feel when it sheds a skin and wills a layer of wet flesh into a new one. Finally he said, "You hate your father, Angelina?"

He regretted it the instant the words had passed his lips. It wasn't fair to put her on the spot like that. He thought she flushed, but he couldn't be sure, she was very tan by now. In any case, she didn't answer, and Louie tried to erase the question by talking over it. "Try not to hate him," he said. "He loves you very much."

She looked away. At the far side of the pool, somebody splashed. From the street came the buzzing whine of rented mopeds. Rose said, "Swivel a little, I'll unzip the skirt."

She pushed the rayon down over his hips, he shimmied out of the garment like he'd been doing it all his life. He kicked the stockings off. He was so numb, so raw and new, that it seemed almost normal to be sitting on a lounge chair in the tropics in his underwear, discarded women's clothing at his feet.

"You don't
think
it worked?"

Louie nodded. "Had three, like bodyguards. Big. I'm very tired, I think I gotta go lay down." He hitched up his briefs, began to rise. His wife said, "I'm going too then, Louie. I wanna be by you."

Angelina watched them walk away together, honeymooners after thirty years of waiting for the honeymoon. She shifted her knees, then said to Michael, "I'm really sorry, hon, but I think you just got Ziggy for a roommate."

Ziggy glared at the woman he still desired, though his desire was turning each hour more rancid and spiteful and surreal. Then he looked at Michael with an expression that was both nervous and aggressive, a look that the gay guy had seen from certain kinds of straight guys many times before.

Michael met his gaze, said, "Don't worry and don't flatter yourself. I don't like hairy men."

*

"Right in my own backyard," said Tommy Lucca. "I can't believe you're tryin'a fuck me right in my own backyard."

Paul Amaro was still sitting on the bed, his bare toes squeezing the carpet underneath his breakfast table. "Tommy," he said, "you're crazy."

Lucca mugged over at his thugs. "
I'm
crazy? Me? You got a brother wears a dress, a daughter runs and hides, and I'm crazy?"

Quite evenly Paul Amaro said, "Don't say another fuckin' word about my family 'less you wanna have to kill me here and now."

"Who said anything 'bout killing?" The goons shifted foot to foot, arms twitched at the prospect of some exercise.

"You're touchy 'bout your family," Lucca went on. "Okay. Everybody's touchy 'bout something. Me, I'm touchy 'bout being screwed in business."

"For the last time, Tommy, I'm not screwing you.

"Then fuck didn't you call Funzie like you said? One phone call, Paul. That's all you had to do."

Amaro pursed his lips, crossed his arms against his stomach. "The truth?" he said at last. "I didn't call Funzie 'cause I don't give a fuck about your guns and I don't give a fuck about your deal and I don't give a fuck about you."

Tommy Lucca took that in, didn't seem offended in the least. He said simply, "But you said you'd do it."

This was hard to argue with. Amaro had given his word to a colleague and he hadn't followed through. Inaction on a promise was not so different from betrayal.

"The Paul Amaro I know from years ago," said Tommy Lucca, "he wouldn't let a deal sit there and get cold. That he'd fuck the other guy, take the profit for himself—tha'd be more easy t'believe."

Amaro sat before his plate with its streaks of egg and edges of toast and said nothing.

Slowly, Tommy Lucca reached a hand out toward one of his underlings. Almost tenderly, the thug put a gun in his palm.

Lucca pointed it at the forehead of his sometime ally, close enough that the muzzle would scorch skin before the bullet shattered bone. "So tell ya what, Paul," he said. "While we're sittin' here, all together like, why don't you call Funzie right this fuckin' second, before it slips your mind again?"

Later on, when the sun had slid far enough down the sky so that the pool was in the shade and fringed shadows had crept along the gravel walks to climb the clapboard walls on the east side of the courtyard, Ziggy retrieved his extra socks and underwear and pocketknife from what was now Louie and Rose's room.

Like the homeless person he'd become, he brought them in a tattered plastic bag to Michael's cottage, and found his new host doing sit-ups on the floor next to the queen-size bed.

Michael ignored him altogether, just kept bringing his elbows to his knees, a hundred times, two hundred. Secretly, Ziggy admired the striations and pebblings of the gay guy's stomach.

After sit-ups came a string of yoga poses—stretching, folding, standing on one leg. Ziggy sat down in a wicker chair and sort of watched. A master of the sulk, his funks had many aspects, and he was now at the stage where he was feeling very sorry for himself. Michael's vigor mocked him. He felt forever cut off from the kind of self-affection that gave rise to the discipline to work out, to take care of oneself. Also, he was newly oppressed by the realization that he'd become the pariah of the little group of hostages at Coral Shores. Everybody else got along. Everyone else made a show, at least, of keeping up their spirits. Not him. He'd gone into a sulk to push them all away, and now that he'd succeeded, he moped because he felt isolated.