Men in Miami Hotels Read online

  Everybody knew about strange species that hurricanes had let loose from their cages. Maybe bats too. He’d read about fruit bats. Big as cats, roosting in leafy trees, snacking on papayas and mangoes. “Good eating,” the man said.

  He was an Indian, Cot had seen that right off. From one of the walled and padlocked villages probably. The Seminoles were like everyone else down here: driven to the hot areas by government, by clamor, by a need to get a little peace. They too weren’t really native to these parts. He used to call up Marcella and talk to her about it.

  “A hunter,” he said.

  “You done hit right on it.”

  “What’d you swim the channel?”

  “Got my boat.”

  First he took Marcella’s pistol back, “Hunting, huh?” and broke the breech of the rifle that was not a rifle but a bolt-action shotgun, an old Colt.

  “I come on her sleeping—that your wife?—and took that gun. It scared me, her having it, so I took it.”

  “I’d have done the same thing.”

  “What y’all doing out here?”

  “Camping.”

  He had the man walk ahead of him to the place where Marcella waited. He didn’t see her at first and his heart tightened. But there she was, down at the water, sitting on the gunwale of the man’s boat. The boat was a little canoe with a small outboard raised above the squared-off stern; a paddle propped against it. Marcella got up, listing a little as if cramped, bent. “Hello.”

  “Hidy, Mrs. Bakewell.”

  “You know him?”

  “I do,” Marcella said, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. “How’s your family, Choky?”

  “They’re just fine, ’cept for Mama’s rheumatoiditis. And Jimmy’s got him a hernia from baseball practice, and Lorene, she broke her foot running from some police wanted to talk to her about a still or something.”

  “How’s Longman?”

  “He says he’s gon go to college.”

  As she explained now, she had gotten Choky Rough’s older son back from the state for him, some years ago, when people were still being arrested for alligator poaching. “Well that’s a mighty fine thing,” Cot said.

  He shook hands with the man.

  “I saw y’all’s plane,” Choky said.

  “Local charter,” Cot said. He still didn’t trust the situation, still held his frets close. A breeze trickled through the brush, stroking leaves. “You really hunting bats?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  They walked around to the house and sat on the front steps talking. Choky said he would get a larger boat and ferry them over to his house on Cold Press Island and carry them to Fort Myers. Everybody seemed delighted. Like real castaways. His mother had waked and she sat in an old rocker on the porch listening to the conversation. Her streaked gray hair was loose, and it swung against her face in a way Cot remembered from years ago. “What about James Lawrence?” she said. Jimmy, wrapped in a crumpled survival blanket, unsurviving, who this day would begin to smell. Cot could already smell him.

  Cot mentioned this situation to Rough, told him a little of what had happened. “Maybe hunters,” he said. “No way of telling—or just fools.” Everybody knew about Cot. Anyone, in any circumstance, could see in his face that he didn’t really want to say anything. But he had to say something. A harshness now in his look, a waywardness too; he didn’t want to inform, even on loss, even on death. Rough looked off toward the darkness of the cross-channel woods. The false dawn, gray as if already tired of the day, had tracked up, and was already going, slick and inapplicable, brushing the shoulders of the real thing as it went out.

  “You want to bury him?” Rough said.

  “Ah. Not really.”

  “I guess we can haul him out.”

  Cot could tell Rough didn’t want to get any of Jimmy on him. Cot knew about this. You had to protect yourself—from the slow shell-shocking that life was giving you. Death brought it on in leaps sometimes. People sensed this and backed away. Even the police, and the doctors, the surgeons who wore suits and big crumpled green hats and masks—to keep it off, the dizzy spin and crumpling, the waking in a lost place without a clue, somebody yelling at you to come on, come on, it was like that.

  But they were too many for a small boat.

  “I’ll set with him,” Jackie said, his hair spiked around his head, his eyes still gummed with sleep, come up as if just revived from the dark floor.

  “You don’t know who’s coming,” Cot said.

  “Ain’t nothing but the rangers,” he said. “They always show up down along here. They got rounds to make.”

  They agreed, Cot agreed. It bothered him that somebody was left dangling, dead or alive, but he was careful not to let the others see.

  He walked back into the house with Jackie and thanked him. “You got everybody in a mess,” Jackie said, his arm tense under Cot’s fingers.

  “I know.” There was a ringing in his ears, something new or fairly new, circles of flat sound like an alien surf.

  “That’s only almost the worst of it,” Jackie said.

  The cell towers in Everglades City as usual weren’t working, and Marcella wasn’t able to make a call to the Collier County sheriff until they were already inside the Naples city limits. She told the 911 operator that a man lay dead in the islands, his plane abandoned. She called Ordell and asked him to go speak to Jimmy’s wife. She began to cry as she hung up the phone. She looked at Cot who was talking to a woman. He had a tense mouth and he seemed to be trying to convince the woman of something. They were standing in front of a curio shop on Merrywood Road. One side of the road was stuffed with housing developments, the other a sprawl of raw and skimpy-looking, neglected woods. Down here it was like that, she thought, looking at a couple of brown cows standing under a big lime tree: development or nothing. Cot crossed the bit of concrete apron and took her in his arms. She could feel the hardness in his back muscles, the stiffness she took as a refusal to mourn, thinking: Why would I think that?

  Over her shoulder Cot could see his mother sitting on a bench against the shop’s front wall. She was writing in a small notebook. Maybe working up a story, maybe putting together one of the island bulletins she published occasionally in the KW paper. Been on a murder party and a plane ride. Retrieved from the swamp by an able young poacher whose mother I once had over to the house to trade stories with. The dead continue to speak to us from every bush and patch of shade. They remind us that we are never free to do what we want. There is only affection and service to a higher . . . and all such as that.

  6

  All the live oaks in the yard lean toward the water. The little clearwater spring Mayrene’s dammed with a single concrete wall to form a pool makes a faint gurgling noise where the runoff exits through an algae-stained gutter into the canal. Beyond the pool the canal widens in one direction into a baylike area. Boats and houses sweltering under big oaks and cabbage palms are parked along it. The other end passes out of sight in a jumble of old warehouse buildings over which on this afternoon big piles of cumulus gather. The afternoon is like a familiar stranger, someone you observe taking walks in the neighborhood who nods as he passes, whom you wonder about without nervousness. Thin gray squirrels chatter in the tops of the palm trees.

  Mrs. Stanford, the next-door neighbor, an eighty-year-old widow and fortune-teller, comes over bearing a plate of freshly baked cornbread. She reads his mother’s and Marcella’s palms, but Cot won’t let her read his. “Shoot,” she says, “I can read yours from across the room.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I wouldn’t either.”

  “Hey,” Marcella says wagging her finger.

  She’s talking on the phone to Ordell. The fortune-teller has said a number of items are fading from her life and—nervous, spindly in her heart—she wanted to call home to check, ha ha. Ella sits at the kitchen table (they’re in the big kitchen that opens onto the screened back porch) writing in her notebook.
r />   “I expect my fortune rides before me carrying a sign,” Cot says.

  “That’s a way of putting it,” the old lady says sourly. She has faded orange hair from the special old people’s dye only they can get, you see it everywhere. Her hands look like knotted rope stained purple—with leukemia, Mayrene’s said. He wonders what fortunes she tells herself. Likely they blare at her from the dark, cocksure and smug. He feels a faded, estivating sadness for her, irritation too. They are wearing bathing suits, he and Marcella, both of which, men’s and women’s, belonged to Mayrene and (that is) to her deceased husband, a former bandleader on the Cornwallis circuit. Mayrene, his mother’s older sister, had been his chanteuse. “My girl singer,” Harry called her. “My canary.” He’s buried in a cemetery over in Cape Coral, under a cement slab with a clarinet stuck bell down in it. The clarinet, Mayrene says, looks like an erect penis.

  They walk in the shade of the big live oaks that never drop a stitch leafwise, winter or summer, feeling on their bodies the cool shade buffed by a sea breeze. Cot knows they aren’t particularly safe, but maybe they will be as soon as he leaves. “You need to run north,” Marcella says. “Or west.”

  “I don’t shine particularly to being tracked.”

  “That one of your sayings?”

  “Half and half.”

  She twirls a papaya leaf, frog-footed and yellow, in her left hand.

  “It was because you were crippling my nerves,” she says.

  “That you married Ordell,” he says picking up the thread. “I know. It was a good idea.”

  “The fact you think so’s always bothered me.”

  “It’s just another way of my refusing to accept responsibility.”

  “That and a host of other things.”

  “I get bogged down.”

  “Most people call that living.” She makes a motion with her hand across her eyes, involuntary but characteristic, as if wiping a small gathering of gnats away. “You’d overworry about me.”

  “I’d sit up nights.”

  “Don’t you worry about me now?”

  “Off and on.” It’s already crossed his mind that he’s traveling with people he might have to die for. He’s not really been in that situation before.

  She waves the leaf at him, almost a swat, that misses. “I don’t really want you to worry about me at all.”

  “Likewise, sugar.”

  Ordell tried a case against her only once. She beat him so soundly the judge dismissed the charges. Cot doesn’t like to try anything against her either, even though he knows he has a jimmy, an in: she loves him.

  “But I love Ordell too,” she said when he told her this.

  “I know you do,” he answered. “I love him myself, but it would bother me if I went up against you and you gave me a break, and it’d bother me if you didn’t.”

  “I already figured that out,” she’d said.

  As they reach the pool a boat, speedboat, appears from behind a large ocean cruiser upstream, and begins to run down toward them. Cot watches it come. It’s blue, open-hull and he can see three men in town clothes. “Get in the water,” he says.

  “————”

  He shoves her into the pool, crosses the little forecourt to the oak tree nearest the canal, and as the boat comes up at speed raises the pistol from under the towel he carries. The boat roars right at them, at the last moment swinging broadside. Two of the men rise, and as they level their little Belgian machine guns he fires. His shots catch one in the throat, catch the other in the shoulder. Both men go down, but not before one of them fires a burst into the top of the oak tree. The shots scatter some grackles among the glossy, almost black evergreen leaves. The boat continues down the canal. Cot kneels and fires a shot at the driver, but he doesn’t really want to hit him. He wants the boat to be able to leave the area. All this in choked seconds. The clouds over the warehouses haven’t moved. The day continues in its brightness.

  He pulls Marcella by her arm out of the pool and gives her a moment to gather herself. She sits on the concrete shivering.

  “This isn’t my end of things,” she says.

  “It’s pretty alarming, yeah.”

  “Alarming? Jesus, Cot.”

  He puts his hand on her sleek black hair. “I know.”

  He helps her up and they jog back to the house. There they gather their things. Mayrene tries to laugh it off, but she’s just faking it. He tells her to pack a bag. She doesn’t want to, but his mother quickly convinces her. She wants to stop long enough to make a thermos of limeade, but Cot tells her she better not. A solemnness, like a sticky shellac, covers everything. They lock up the house, take her two goldfinches over to Mrs. Williams’s, and leave for the airport in Mayrene’s big Lincoln.

  On the way to the airport his mother talks on the mobile phone, something unusual for her. “Who is it?” he asks. She is sitting in the back seat, turned away from them as they pass a line of muscular royal palms before a huge pink mansion. “Your father.”

  He wants suddenly to speak to him. He holds out his hand for the phone, but she doesn’t give it to him. “Mama,” he says. “Come on.”

  She hands the instrument over. A big red pickup passes. In the back a gang of Latino boys yell and shake their fists at them. Have they done something they don’t realize? “Papa,” he says. There’s silence on the line. “Papa.”

  “You need to slow down, son,” his father’s faint reedy voice says, as if he’s been watching him.

  “I will soon.”

  “Won’t you come to visit?”

  His accent, urban, Cubano, has deepened, and he sounds weary, distracted, caught maybe by his lifelong contemplation of his troubles—mis affliciones—always unnamed. The last time Cot visited he had been weighed down, his thin arm waving to him from the floral armchair like a man waving from a bog. “I’ll come soon,” Cot says.

  “You come soon,” his father says. “Mrs. Sobales will make some of the stew you enjoy.”

  Would he become like this—or could he if his life were only slightly different—like this fey wanderer among the possibilities? He doesn’t believe so, believes as he has since he was eleven that he has evaded his father’s life. He knows this isn’t really true, but it helps him to think it. “Do you remember your father—mi abuelo?” He’s asked this before. His father’s father, the ship’s captain from the English Midlands, a seaman who knew the names of all the flowers that grew among the hills there, went to sea, and washed up in Cuba. “You take care of yourself—and take care of your mother,” his father says.

  “She’s doing fine.”

  The phone goes dead; maybe he hung up, maybe the connection, always feeble over the strait, had been doused.

  At the airport he puts Mayrene and his mother on a flight to their—to his—great aunt’s house in west Texas.

  Halfway across the state, at a spot she once measured by odometer, riding in a cab on Alligator Alley, I-75, the longest piece of perfectly straight road east of the Mississippi (so she believes), Marcella makes him stop and gets out. She hurries across the parking lot of the little pull-off and vomits over the barrier into the grass. Beyond the barriers on both sides of the road empty grasslands stretch vastly away. They could be in Africa. Tawny, currents of breeze circulating like rivers among the grass, hawks riding thermals high up like they have not a care in the world, its spaciousness has always loosed something in her, something daunting and encouraging and shapely. She retches again, violently, shaking, her face white as paste when she looks up at him. He’s holding her by the shoulders. A black-water canal runs alongside the barrier, a few Miccosukee boats are tied up. Otherwise there’s nothing human about but them, except for the cabbie.

  “You got too much strain on you,” he says.

  “Who wouldn’t have?”

  “Some don’t notice it.”

  He sits on the barrier, a silver steel fluted railing. He wants to lean back, fall into the strip grass by the canal, and sleep his life
away. Time, time. He can feel it slipping away. The past gurgles in the gap it leaves. Some while ago the slippage started getting to him. He hates it like a limp. So what if he can remember when in KW you could address a letter to “Marcella Cord/City” and know it would reach her?

  “It’s this sense of imperfection bugs me,” he says now.

  “I know.” She licks a smear of yellow effluvium off her lower lip. Her tongue is greenish. She looks to him—white-faced, weary—like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel.

  She says, “I don’t want to go on with you anymore.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” she says. “I mean it.”

  “Yeah.”

  He helps her to her feet, and they stand with their backs to the highway looking out across the great expanse of seemingly untouched terrain. It’s a national park. The political version of a sacred place. But they both know people won’t keep from putting their hands on it. Like them, like who they are together, like them to each other: sacred places they can’t keep from poking and tromping through. It irks them both.

  “Still a ways to go,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  The cabbie lets them off behind the courthouse in Lauderdale and they walk upstairs to the sheriff’s department where, after she follows a deputy into a corner office, Marcella returns to say she inquired about the disposition of the boys caught in CJ’s killing. She’s got a funny look on her face. She’s holding her phone.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know what to say.” The look isn’t funny, it’s sad—a look you could call infinitely sad, as if she’d been shown one of the black mysteries, the submerged and lifeless facts at the bottom of things—and she’s working her jaw in the way she has, chewing on nothing. Two deputies, who look like twins, sit at side-by-side desks eating sandwiches. “Who you think you fooling?” an African American voice from down the hall says loudly.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re holding—not for CJ—they’re holding two men for burglaries up here. They don’t know—”