Men in Miami Hotels Read online

  “I don’t believe that’ll do any good,” Marcella said. She fingered back her hair that had blown around her face during the trip. Even with air-conditioning she liked to ride with the windows open. Her eyes were as blue as the sky, slightly singed by storms. Getting darker, Cot thought, beginning to lose himself in a reverie. He brought himself back. “What was the name of that guy who issued the order?” He knew but wanted to ask.

  “That was Wilkins Pollack,” Ordell said.

  “I have to find him,” Cot said.

  He’s nervous, skittish, feels as if he doesn’t know his way. It’s a feeling—or a style—that’s come over him recently. He thought KW would snap him out of it but it hasn’t, not so far.

  He peddles his old bike around to New Town looking for the inspector but he can’t locate him. Pollack resides in a handsome wooden bungalow with a wooden incline ramp running from the street to the front porch. He lives with his mother who’s crippled by palsy. She’s out on the front porch sitting in a big upholstered rocker. Cot gets off his bicycle and walks up to the porch by way of the ramp. Mrs. Pollack eyes him with a rotund, fishy glare. Her big arm waves languidly; of its own volition, Cot knows. Like many crippled people she carries a lot of weight. She won’t say where Pollack is. “Would you tell him I’m looking for him?”

  She doesn’t answer the question.

  A few buzzards have gathered out in the street. They’re bobbing for a run-over cat. Cot and Mrs. Pollack stare at them.

  On the way up to Jimmy’s Air Service in her Range Rover—same color as Ordell’s—he leans over and kisses Marcella’s cheek, sniffing her like a dog, drawing in the fragrance of cinnamon and citrus, the famous old business rising between them with the scent, elaborations, and additions to an alliance still sailing along, the two of them like a country vaudeville act, refreshing to watch, easy to dismiss, the days of their lives adding up still to this, no matter what, as he sees it, no matter family or Ordell or time or hurricanes or men dead in the streets of Miami, Florida, capital of the Caribbean Archipelago.

  “I’m breaking down,” she says and runs her hand along his thigh, erasing the words as she says them, but this seems now almost an act of carelessness like a carpenter in a failing business slicing his hand with a saw, because he’s not even looking at her and she’s looking at the road that is white concrete choked with traffic, studying something she’ll never speak of. He could say well I’m a dead man and you will soon be dead too, but he doesn’t. The sky’s streaked with long trailers of white cloud. Over the back end of Cudjoe he can make out the glassy seaward-facing sides of houses in what seems to be a kind of fog but is maybe only pollution not yet blown out to sea. “I’m running on squibs and burps myself,” he says.

  “Rumors of squibs.”

  “Fossilized burps.”

  “Dreams.”

  “That’s something else.”

  “What isn’t?”

  At Bastion instead of turning left to Jimmy’s they turn right and run along the old county road between high banks of buttonwood scrub out to the point where, parked in the brush near Oscar Bottom Jut, they make love in the car, thrashing like two squirrels in a gunnysack, famished, springing disartfully again and again at each other. After a while they quit and eat the peanut butter and fresh pineapple sandwiches she’s brought and then head to the airport. The hollowness he carried down by bus has been momentarily replaced by a coziness he knows is an illusion, the sexual practice that they are only barely game for, the gesture or reflex gone slack and desultory, its progenitor, both of them daydreaming of the silver backs of fishes or some such—this, mentioned as they lay sweating across each other’s bodies, a kind of mad circumstance that once would have been a bindery of what they called love but is now only barely acknowledged; it’s happened before, many times. “I don’t much care,” she said and he tapped on the window glass as if to a jailer who’s supposed to take him back to his cell after visiting hours. Still, she gasped as she spoke and he himself was breathing hard.

  “Weather’s coming,” she says.

  “I see it.”

  They are sea children, children of the islands, they know weather, know ocean, know sky, you could make a list of what they know and pay only subliminal attention to.

  She reaches up and taps the windshield for a yellow butterfly that’s lighted there. The butterfly doesn’t get the message and then does, wobbles into flight and is caught in a breeze and blown off toward the scrub they’ve just come out of. “At night,” he says, “I stretch out my hand, reaching for you.”

  “You’re lying,” she says lightly.

  “I got an old cat so I would have something to stroke.”

  “That too’s a lie.”

  “You already got an old cat.”

  “That’s a worse lie.”

  “Ordell—”

  “Don’t start lying about him.”

  “I can’t help myself.”

  “That’s a worser lie.”

  “Devilment is my nature.”

  “Lie. Freakish and unanchored speculation is your nature.”

  “I’m a very practiced liar.”

  “I myself lie like a rug.”

  “Like a sea grass tide. I lie like hot sun on the Gulf Stream.”

  “I lie like snow on the Andes.”

  “Like ice on the Ross Ice Shelf.”

  “I lie like the chemical fogs of Venus.”

  “I lie like the mists on the fields of Antietam.”

  “Like rats in the tunnels of Paris.”

  “Like daisies in Hartz Mountain meadows.”

  “You get me going one way then you go another.”

  “I’m cruel like that.”

  “Merciless.”

  “Savage.”

  “Plus kind, sympathetic, and humane.”

  “Oh, I’m a show all right.”

  Behind her eyes is a land of shadows and misinformation, slivers of gleaming material withheld, perceptions balanced like birds on a clothesline, reclamations and unalterable facts, the proofs of engagements never spoken of, blueprints from old houses of the heart long since torn down and the lots grown up in paspalum grass. The usual, he tells himself. But there’s something more he can’t put his finger on. He’s already told her what he plans to do, about the house, Pollack, the gems, about CJ’s part to come. Used to when he called from Miami he’d tell her about his adventures, but she made him stop. You’re a defense attorney, he’d said. Not yours. He understood. It made her feel frail, unfit, at a loss. He’s the same way. They both go around crackling and clicking, popping off, snapping their fingers, sticking a word in, a sentence, a lifetime of quick talk, just so they won’t have to be alone with the cudgeling, clumsy world. You ought to leave CJ out of it, she said. And her saying it already nags him.

  They bump over the high crown and speed down the paved road around the wide curve through the tall casuarina trees and on the half mile to Jimmy’s Air Service where he gets out, leans back across the wide seat, kisses her as if the kiss is a language of fevers, and, like a schoolboy, whirls and dashes away, thinking I see into the deeps of her but I can’t make out what it is I see.

  Rattling and clattering, the big red pontoons making a rushing, gurgling, perilous sound, they lifted off the surface of the bay and were airborne. As always when skyward Cot looked back at the island he was born on, the compact chunk, stuffed like a Sunday chicken with its apparatus, its selfdom and clutter. “Where we going?” Jimmy asked. He had filed a flight plan with the Navy for Seminole Town on the tattered edge of the Everglades.

  “I’ll show you,” Cot said and gave him a set of coordinates that would put them up at West Bird Key. His face was wind-burned from lovemaking. In the middle of things she had lifted her head to say, “There you still are, in the exact spot where every night you used to cry yourself to sleep—” meaning his gangster life and all that. “Not the exact bed,” he’d said, and they both laughed. But at Jimmy’s he had turned away f
rom her as if he didn’t know her; she hadn’t gotten out of the car, hadn’t even looked at him or had already stopped looking at him and turned to jotting something into a little notebook she pinned against the steering wheel as she wrote. She’d already forgotten the real him, he saw that.

  “Marcella’s my brother’s lawyer,” Jimmy said. He wore a red baseball cap and shades so dark the lenses looked black. He hunched his narrow shoulders as if flying was an unwelcome surprise.

  “That the one went over to the judge’s house and tried to dig up his banana trees?”

  “That’s him. A fool and three quarters.”

  They flew half an hour north and east until they came in sight of a string of islands like green slathered rocks set in blue and then veered west again and flew another ten until they came in sight of the small uplift of greenery Cot was looking for. He had Jimmy set down along the east side and pull up to the rickety pier. The island was about as wide and maybe three times as long as a football field, mangrove hedged and piled with cassia trees and buttonwood. A few wind-shredded coconut palms stuck up like brooms. Cot told Jimmy to wait and took a path in through the scrub to a clearing by a short—it could have been a runway, or just a raw place. Near a tin shed just past a small clump of redly blossoming hibiscus bushes he uncovered a steel facing set into and covered by the dusty coral sand. He unlocked it with one of the two keys he’d taken off Spane’s ring, copied and replaced, lay facedown in the coral dust, reached into the squared rock hole, unlocked the safe, and lifted out the small, square green strongbox, opened it, and took out a hand-sized yellow envelope and emptied the emeralds into his palm. He put everything but the gems back as it was, re-covered the place with the foot of gray sand and sat on the ground looking at the emeralds. Big trapiche stones, uncut, they had been flown up from the mines in Muse, in Colombia. This place here—squat, centric Florida Bay island—was Albertson’s bank, one of them. He felt the enormous, subsuming weight of what he was doing, but the exhilaration of holding the stones in his hand—or pocket—nearly canceled it out. A heat like a hot thumb pressed between his shoulder blades. The sky, except for a few balled-up clouds low in the west, was clear.

  “I’d appreciate if you didn’t mention this,” he said on the flight back.

  “You don’t have to say that,” Jimmy said jerking his hand at a fly that had gotten into the cabin.

  “I know. I’m sorry. Thanks.” The exhilaration was being steadily replaced by a slipping, emptying sensation, bits breaking off and sliding into a foggy inscrutability.

  They came in low over the fish works off Chicken Leg Key, banked in over the cove and set down just past a headland grown up in casuarina trees. Cot could remember when that piece of ground had been a grassy spot where he and Jimmy and Jimmy’s deaf brother Wheeler had thrown a football around as kids, before the weed trees took over. “I’m feeling pretty good,” Cot said.

  It was true. Suddenly, and despite everything, for a second he was.

  Cot bikes over to Connie’s and asks him if he knows anyone who wants to buy an emerald, or some. Connie is more liable to know someone—so he tells himself—and more willing to keep his mouth shut, than anyone else. He lives in a big open loft on the second floor of a half-renovated building just behind Duval. From his bedroom he can hear, only slightly diminished, all the caterwauling and dumb shrieking that goes on most nights on Duval as jakes from the states cut loose. But he likes it. It makes him feel, he says, as if his particular detachment of the human race is not about to be overrun.

  “I could grope my way to it,” he says, speaking of the gems.

  “You know somebody?”

  “I expect I do. Why don’t you leave the merchandise with me?”

  “I don’t know if that’s best.”

  “You afraid I’ll lose ’em?”

  “No. I don’t want any burn scars on your precious flesh.”

  “I’m a lover of pirate treasure. That’s my whole thing.”

  “Mine too.”

  He hands over the Cambo’s candy-box tin he’d put the stones in. CJ presses the box to his heart then holds it next to his ear and rattles it gently. The box is bound around the edges with adhesive tape.

  “You want to open it?”

  “I’d rather picture them.”

  “How’s Dover?”

  “Dover’s out looking for the . . . bluebird . . . of paradise.”

  “Me too, man. I been looking for that bird all my life.”

  “We already know that about you, dear.”

  Later, in bed at the Constance Hotel where he is given a quarter-priced room by Aldy Tillman, hotel owner and former cheerleader from their high school gridiron days, he sits in bed reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries. “All the formulas are now a mere surface for gangsters,” she says. He feels queasy, dislocated, a foolish person following wisps and stinks down blank-sided alleys. He gets up, washes his face and drinks water from the tap, gulping it down before he remembers he’s in KW where the local water tastes like Milk of Magnesia. Jeez. He wipes his mouth. In the mirror he gets a glimpse of a partially rectified soul whose face retains blips and streaks of a confusion as yet not completely erased. He throws on his discarded clothes and walks down the street to the harbor. Lights are on over at the Coast Guard docks; they are readying a boat to go out, paid fetchers and rescuers, men in trimmed beards sporting tattoos on their legs like South Sea Islanders. Somewhere way out there in the dark somebody lost and wallowing in a big distant rolling trough, and he thinks: no, I still wouldn’t go, why would I ever have thought I might.

  By the Flagler monument, in a spot where the streetlights don’t quite reach, he runs into Dup Randle, a sporting goods salesman from Miami. He’ll remember this moment: it’s like an ice cube down the back of his shirt. He flinches or thinks he does, he’s not sure and catches himself; a thin twist of . . . not panic—discombobulation—slips along his spine. Dup fronts baseball gloves and scuba gear, but he’s also a Business contract man. He says he’s glad to see Cot—“Man, as I live and breathe . . .”—and offers him a Tums that he accepts but hesitates a sec before putting in his mouth as if it might be poison. The flat, chalky taste of what’s left when everything else is eliminated. Dup actually seems glad to see him. He’s been walking around alone over by the old turtle pens. “Kraals,” he says. “Corrals. I never knew what that meant until just this minute.” Waving vaguely back toward the docks. “I thought it was just the name of some guy, Kraals.”

  “Nope.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  Cot’s sure then something’s up, has to be. “She took the late ferry to Fort Myers. Gone to see her buddies in Tampa.”

  “I met her several years ago. She’s a nice lady. Snappy sometimes.”

  Dup passes a hand over his forehead as if he’s wiping away sweat. He has a round plain face that creases into a translation of happiness when he smiles. He once told Cot he was born in a tent behind a tobacco warehouse in Virginia. It was part of a joke he was telling. Cot thinks of those video games where what you shoot disintegrates as if it never existed. He thinks of walking Dup over to the little byway near the Coast Guard compound and throwing him off one of the floating docks, cuffed with the set of handcuffs Dup always carries, but he decides not to. He doesn’t feel up to it just now. Maybe I never existed, he thinks. He knows everything about what’s happening here; it’s not that much of a mystery.

  “I’ll see ya on the turnaround,” he says.

  “You going my way?”

  “Which way you headed?”

  Dup waves halfheartedly toward town.

  “Too bad. I’m going over here.”

  But as he turns away from Dup, whose disguise is accessibility, in that instant, he wants to give him another chance, give him a lead, let him in on secrets that’ll help him along. Maybe we could get your house out of hock too, buddy, old duplicitous Dup. The thought startles him, and he knows Dup can see this in his face. Dup starts to say something,
then stops. It’s not because he’s letting Cot off. He wouldn’t do that. The street lamp shines in his eyes that gleam with a dark avidity. The situation’s one notch too public.

  Halfway down the street Cot turns—Dup’s still standing there pretending not to watch him—and says, “I liked that song you made up for the party over at Hal’s hotel.”

  Dup doesn’t say anything.

  “It was funny.”

  “Thanks,” Dup says.

  He walks slowly around the corner and then scoots up Grinnell, cuts over on Thompson Lane and up Francis across Fleming and on to Regent and his mother’s house. He stands in the street. No one’s about; the lights are off under the house. But he knows his mother is lying awake. She’s lying there making up her life, fiddling with the pieces, fragments and unraveled bits, knitting fresh strands of ridiculous makeshift into the fabric, a living example of how crazy we all are. He crosses the yard to the porch, but nobody’s under there. Nobody either in the backyard in the little pup tent Jackie’s set up under the almond tree. He tells himself they’ve found a more restful place to sleep. But he really thinks they’ve been caught by wrongful men. Help me. What’s the name—the inspector? Pollack—that’s it. Like the fish. Or was it Fish? Wilkins. He’s known him too all his life—hasn’t he? A slow-moving boy (become a slow-moving man) with a ragged purple wen on the back of his neck and a black mole above his upper lip like a beauty spot. Cot used to see him years ago at semi-pro football games. He carried the chains for the yardage markers. He remembers his earnestness, the way he smiled when somebody looked at him. He wants to smash him to the ground and makes a plan for it, the plan wobbling as he makes it. No matter, in the dark ironworks the instruments are already being forged. He knows this. He can smell the burning metal, even at a distance; it rides on a breeze that’s found him again.

  All this in seconds as he cycles over to New Town. Two short fat bare-chested old men wearing tattoo sleeves walk by laughing softly. The moon’s drowning in a small cloud pool. Around a corner he comes on two men in dark caps beating another man on the ground. He stops, wades in and batters the assailants back and forth, knocking one into a tree stump, the other onto his face on the pavement. “You okay, Pop?” he says to the man who was already down. The man’s propped on an elbow looking at him. “What do you know?” he says. “What the fuck do you know about it?” Cot remounts his bike and pedals off. The moon has risen from its pool and sails unobstructed across the sky. He pedals past the darkened houses, past the cemetery where he used to lie out at night with Marcella under a bitter orange tree near the graves of sailors who had gone down with the battleship Maine. They could hear the chains on the flagpole above the sailors clanking as if the dead were being raised and lowered, for what reason you couldn’t tell.