Men in Miami Hotels Read online

  “We got to bury Jimmy,” Cot said.

  They had an argument about that. They had walked the plane around through the shallow water to the stobs where the old pier had been and tied it up, but they’d left Jimmy propped in the seat.

  “They won’t like it back in town,” Marcella said, meaning Key West, meaning culture and life, and his mother agreed.

  “We can’t just leave him lying out.”

  “Someone’ll probably be by here soon,” Marcella said.

  They agreed to leave him in the plane overnight but then Cot thought that would be a bad idea, and he talked them into getting him out. He and Jackie carried the body up onto the porch and wrapped it with one of the crinkly silver blankets in the plane’s emergency kit. Near dark they saw a boat far out in the bay and tried to hail it, but the boat didn’t stop. The twilight filled in around them. They sat by a fire built in a three-sided brick fireplace out in the front yard. Supper was the sandwiches Ella had prepared, onion and chicken, and banana with mayonnaise. Jackie wanted to sing songs and they did that. They had only a couple of six-liter bladders of water from the plane, but there was a catchment in back of the house. Cot walked with Marcella along the shore. The beach wasn’t wide and gave way to mangrove scrub and bushes before they could go far. Lines of trickley vine ran down from the grass. A little brown-backed plover skipped along the waterline and was gone, headed for the roost. After a while Marcella asked what he was going to do.

  “Deliver you to Aunt Mayrene’s in Fort Myers, I guess.”

  “As soon as we get up to town we’ll be all right,” she said rubbing her arms.

  “I don’t mean you need me to haul you. But I’m nervous about who might be lurking between here and Mayrene’s.”

  “You’re always nervous.”

  “I know about these things, matters, frolicsome killers, you know, all that.” The words like used-up chewing gum he was hooking out of his mouth.

  “Your kidnapper buddy said they were going to make you say where those jewels are.”

  “Rollins—Jeez.” He looked sideways at her. “I’d tell ’em in a flash if I knew.” He wanted to say that won’t be the end of it, but he didn’t, the words in his head poised to take on weight if issued to the air.

  “I’m not going to criticize you.”

  “That’ll be a first.”

  She swayed against him, cocked her head to look at him, looking barely up; she wasn’t a lot shorter than he was. “You used to have freckles on your face, but now you don’t have any.”

  Standing before the slithering quiet surf they kissed, not deeply. Little blinks and cohorts of darkness, of something that promised an endless supply, skipped and went on by. They sat down on the sand. There were lights far out in the Gulf—shrimpers probably. “At night,” he said, remembering something his father told him, “when it’s really dark—”

  And then he forgot what it was and stalled in the gathered dark. He thought of himself in that moment as simply waiting, but there was something else.

  “What?” she said. Her voice was changed in some way. A hollowness, a new channel cut down into her heart through which came sounds and alarms almost too faint to hear.

  “I don’t get you,” he said.

  “Get what?”

  “You.”

  “I’m glad you finally admit it.”

  Even her face, oblong of un-sun-changed whiteness in the edging-away twilight, like some apparitional aspect revealed now, as if she had all along been a ghost. He looked away, not wanting to see.

  “You already know everything,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About me.”

  This too was contrary.

  She leaned over and spit in the sand. “You’re still getting up in the middle of the night, aren’t you?”

  “I ever was.” Since he was a child he’d waked restless in the dark, wanting to get into things.

  A nightbird called, maybe a chuck-will’s-widow, checking something that’d stuck in its mind, the cry slipped like a note under dark’s door. The moon this night had come up while it was still light. Now it westered out over the Gulf, leaving a splashed-in trail to follow if you were fool enough. He figured everybody at one time or another wished he was.

  She got up and stepped away from him, listing, edging, sidling, and straying, her head up as if sniffing a scent on the breeze, like somebody trying to disappear before they got out of sight. He watched her go. Each footprint laid in sand was sculpted, a faint chinked line. She sang under her breath, something personal, only for herself. Across the channel the mainland, the sprawled and tangled swamp, was as black as absence itself. It chittered and rustled, setting itself up for night work. Then a scuttling, thrashing sound from bushes across the strip of water only as wide as a country road. Then something else—the cry of an animal, unfamiliar and scary, a scream, set in opposition, whining, thin at first. They both knew what it was: a panther, letting loose a complaint that slithered and coarsened as it came, breaking into a scream that was almost a howl. It was a noise set against the weave and busyness of the swamp. It stopped them both, stopped hearts everywhere nearby probably, stopped breath, stopped everything but the faint undersound of breeze. It was a fresh take on things. He could feel his blood draw up.

  She could feel hers too that had already shivered. There’s nothing to do about it now. The thought came to her fully formed, like a new law. She swayed and would’ve fallen, but a breeze, the same old one, caught her—so it seemed—and held her, just enough for her to catch her balance. She saw again how thin he’d become, tightly and muscularly composed, but pared down, hardly, even now, looking to be much more than a boy. She had noticed the lines in his face, the harrying.

  Small waves, fresh born, chipped at clearings, soughed in the mangrove banks. “Cot,” she said under her breath. “You don’t know, Cot.” The panther—it could be her screaming out in the dark. She said his name again, softly; and again: she wanted to see how long it took him to hear her. But he was looking straight at her. He had caught her right off.

  He got up and crossed to her, the sand squinching and shifting under his bare feet, and took her in his arms. They embraced hard. A nightbug banged against his arm and he brushed it off without thinking. She let go and side by side they looked westward out over the Gulf. The moon had been there all day, like the panther, waiting behind the blue. Half of it was gnawed out. Brane, he thought, and who else had been in the boat? Albertson scattering men like seeds he spewed from his pockets as he walked. They should have stayed in KW. This thought like a dab of unwanted color in a picture. He rubbed it out in his mind. We’re where we are—that’s it.

  A breeze trailing smells of distant burning oil wells passed by. She’d been talking all the time, in a low troubled voice like a shuffling noise. He wanted to accuse himself. But he only rubbed against her, ran his hand up and down her bare arm.

  “I can hardly even feel the mosquitoes,” she said.

  “That’s something.”

  “Don’t be glum.”

  “How can I help it?”

  “Mental gymnastics.”

  They laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “What were you saying?”

  “When?”

  “Just now.”

  Her eyes that even in the dimness he could see, angry for just a second. “Other things.”

  “We’re supposed to be sitting on Aunt Mayrene’s screen porch, drinking Long Island iced teas. Sorry, Sweetie.”

  “I don’t mind that much.”

  “Well, I expect you do. But thank you for saying it.”

  They watched his mother coming along the beach toward them.

  “She’s still a sport,” Marcella said.

  He didn’t say anything. His mother, slight—wiry you could say now, lean like a deer in the woods, ready for most anything, but not everything, not so much anymore.

  “Did you hear the panther?” his mother said.


  “Yessum.” He kissed her on the cheek.

  “It’s got Jackie scared to death.”

  “I’ll go speak to him,” Cot said. He wanted to get away.

  “I’ll go,” Marcella said.

  Ella smiled at them. “Both of you go.”

  But he stayed behind. Guilt held him, close like a crippled brother. I’m sorry was the first thing he said.

  Ella just looked at him. Strange how you went on loving what was hurting you, she thought, what was twirling misery up out of the ground onto you. As she loved her husband, loved Rafael sitting at his kitchen table working on his stories, neglecting everything else. “We make mistakes whatever we try to do,” she said.

  “That’s pretty philosophical.”

  “It’s hard to forgive ourselves,” she said, gazing out at the Gulf that moved toward them in long smooth swells that changed to nubbin waves flopping over like weariness itself at their feet. She was barefoot.

  “I hate it about Jimmy,” he said, words from the formula you used with civilians, but words that now had some feeling pumped into them, just a little. Sorry, sorry, sorry scratching over the other words, brute sounds. “It was bad.”

  “All of us will have to grieve on that a while.”

  “I didn’t expect any other group to come at us.”

  “You should have, son.”

  “I was just saying that, Mama.”

  The panther cried again. A low, moaning sound, halt at first then almost liquid, flowing under the scrawled brush, oozing from dark cuddies. Yet this time it was a little easier to listen to. The cry sometimes, so Cot had read, meant the panther was coming to get you. He said this, and added, “I find that hard to believe.”

  “You sure, honey?”

  They both smiled. Something between them was always tipping slightly one way or the other. “You get old,” she said, “and pains—bald aches—rise up in ways, in styles, you never imagined. Aches like memories.”

  “Memories?”

  “Catcalls from death.”

  “Mama.”

  “—and whatall. If you hadn’t already got a means to calm yourself, it can be kind of difficult to start trying to find one.”

  He said you’re all right—or didn’t say it—and felt the rasp of an old shame that sometimes took hours to pass. He wanted to plunge headfirst into the dark. She stood beside him, her weight on one leg, like a woman waiting at a bus stop. Time was, her familiarity grated against him, the private knowingness, the burden of attachment enraging him. Silent now, he endured the burning of his own recklessness. Times past he couldn’t have stayed in silence near her. Now he could, just barely. Then he couldn’t.

  “You’re all right, aren’t you?” he said.

  “In the way you think, yes.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  “It’s not really something you can be sorry about.”

  Stars to the south, a jumble, straight overhead the double wings of the Milky Way, prickly like the sore spot a patch was just ripped off of. In the west, lying low, clouds in gray bunches. Just another few feet farther south and they could see the Southern Cross, now less than itself Spane had told him once, as one of its point stars died. The Indians here—the old Indians, the Calusas, the Tequestas—what would they have called it? Not a Cross. The Crisscross. He used to know some of the Native American constellations, but he’d forgotten. Marcella told him that to the Australian Aborigines the Southern Cross was Two Brothers Sitting Around a Campfire Eating a Fish They’d Caught. A couple of local boys.

  The cat cry came again. Now it didn’t seem to be a panther. No cat or critter. A human cry—not just in its style or mimicry, but actually. He didn’t say anything. His mother stood silently looking out at the Gulf. The waves made faint sizzling, then flopping sounds. In KW they lived too far up the hill, with too many structures in between, to hear the ocean. “Let’s walk up to the house,” he said.

  There he told Marcella about the false cat cry.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Near ’bout.”

  It was full dark now. They had the light of a couple of candles they’d found in the plane’s emergency kit, the only lights outside those of the dying fire.

  “How could anyone be after us out here?” she said.

  “Maybe it’s a fresh group.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Local freelancers.”

  “Cot. Gee.”

  “I know.”

  They decided to let Jackie and his mother sleep. They would take turns keeping watch. “First or last?” she said.

  “Which do you want?”

  “Either one.”

  They flipped for it; a quarter that seemed as he showed it to her an artifact from a vanished civilization. She got first. He walked with her to the beach where she snugged herself up under a soursop tree, in its long, glaucous night shade. He gave her one of his pistols, the one he had taken from the boys at the camp. He knew she already knew how to use it, but he showed her anyway. It was easy. He lay on the sandy ground beside her for a while. “I get itches all over me,” he said, “when I stay outside.”

  “I wish we had some bug repellent.”

  “Well, you’re in luck on that one,” he said drawing his mother’s little bottle of bug juice from his back pocket.

  “At last my love has come. You sweetie.”

  She turned her whole body to him, put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him. He had been waiting—it felt as if for months—for her to do that. He drew her nigh, and closer. Her body still felt like some kind of map he’d chanced on, his good luck, proof that the world wasn’t just a mixed-up lostness.

  “See you later, agitator,” he said getting up.

  “After while, crock of style.”

  He waked before the alarm he’d set on Jimmy’s phone went off. In the darkness there was only the slow, poised sound of the surf. A stillness behind this. Then a nightbird call, low, interrogatory, unsure. “ . . . bless the rains down in Africa,” he whispered. Words from a song, one of his favorite non sequiturs. He felt good. It was odd but not unusual. He had slept on the ground, a little ways from the house, in shadow under a senna bush. He had waked knowing just where he was, no strangeness, or none extra.

  He walked down to the plane. It bobbed lightly on its tether. He put his hand flat on the surface of the water: cold, spring still a ways to go before the Gulf was really warm. Someone from up north would remark on how warm the water was. You got used to your own gradations, fluctuations. Truth was you could die of hypothermia even in warm water. Eighty degrees, given a few hours, would bring your temperature down to ninety and then you were gone. A screech owl over on the mainland whinnied, a small, woeful sound, childish almost, trying to strike the right note, the one that would settle things. The moon was down already. Above the earthly night that had contracted to a closeness the stars were full-bodied, eloquent, spewing; he could see the shape of the islands, the smoothed-off tips of the little waves winking.

  He found her asleep, her head lying on her arm. She woke as he reached to touch her, coming to even out here in the bush country with an ease, a lack of elaboration, that impressed him. “Sorry,” she said.

  “It’s a pretty night.”

  “Up until a minute ago I was enjoying it.”

  She couldn’t find the pistol. With a hand on her wrist he stopped her searching for it. Her face, even in star gloom, looked stricken. A grimace, a cast-off look, returned to her, her thin eyelids drooping.

  “Stay here.”

  He stepped from under tree shadow into the shadow of yaupon bushes piled crooked and more than head high along the inner shore. He had his own pistol out, but he didn’t think about it. He ran along under the darkness around behind the house and crouched beside two large jumbie bean bushes at the edge of the backyard. Scent of the decayed remains of an outhouse. A little breeze, careful and shy, circulated and dropped off. Under it the faint sounds of the night: a bird, rustle of s
mall beings, shurrs, loose wavering pickup of breeze, a coon maybe off to the right, worrying some reluctant bit. The coon sound—what was it exactly?—checked him. Off ahead, at the grassy edge of the yard, he made out a shape: someone crouched. He pulled back, sank further into shadow, and ran low through sandy grass toward the shape. Whoever it was had his eyes on the house. He reached a low bush just behind the watcher, stopped there and held still. He could smell the leathery odor of the man—it was a man—saw the dark hair sticking out from under a bandana, the collar of his shirt, jut of bony jaw, the rifle cradled in his arm. All in a second. He took a step and put his pistol under the man’s ear. The man, loose, lean, jerked forward, wincing as if the gun burned him, and fell on his side. He tried to squirm away but Cot was quickly astride his back, pressing the pistol into his cheek. He had man and rifle both pinned. “Awk,” the man said and coughed.

  “Take your time.” He pointed the pistol in the man’s eyes.

  The man held his tension close, squeezing it; in his eyes a guilty knowledge. “Okay, mister.”

  Cot slid the rifle away and got up. The man raised himself on an elbow. He coughed, hacking, and spit to the side. “Flu,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come out.”

  “For what?”

  “For what what?”

  “Did you come out?”

  “Bats.”

  “Don’t kid me.”

  “Yeah, bats, sho. Fruit bats.”

  “I’m from around here. I’ve never seen that.”

  “Must not have been around here for a while.”

  “Yah?”

  “Exotic pets—you don’t know about them?”