Men in Miami Hotels Read online

  He finds Ella and Jackie up at CJ’s, thinking as he climbs the outdoor stairs that he’s finally coming to know the woman inside him like CJ’s always told him he needs to, coming to love her; it’s almost erotic, he can even picture her, sitting in a wicker chair on the beach, wearing an orange tam, picking at the sand with her toes and cursing softly as if curses are a form of singing, a hymn even. As a teenager he’d push his unit down between his thighs until just the V of hair showed and try to get off on that but it never worked. His imagination wouldn’t hold up to the blunt fact of him, no homemade woman for him. And no CJ around, but they’re sleeping in CJ’s bed in the larger of the two bedrooms, Jackie and his quick-minded mother. He sits on the bed and talks them awake, clucking their names and telling them about a pelican he took away from some boys who were torturing it. He’s at the part where the pelican kept nibbling his fingers as he pedaled it to the little nature rehab on White Street, nipping his skin with its outlandish and delicate beak. “It was nibbling my fingers so gently,” he says. “As if it wanted to let me know everything was all right.”

  “I like that part,” Jackie says, awake but not raising his head.

  “You’ve always been so tenderhearted,” his mother says lifting her hand to stroke his cheek.

  In another hour dawn would be washing its gray hands along the horizon. “You seen CJ?”

  “He’s usually over to Dover’s,” Jackie says. Love never dies, Cot thinks.

  “How come you’re over here?”

  “It’s restful,” his mother says. Her hair spiky, her face drained of color as if dreams have taken everything out of her; she doesn’t ask him why he’s scouting around before daybreak. “I’ll fix some eggs.”

  “That’s okay. I was wondering—did anybody come around the house?”

  “Rajah brought us some candles. It was nice of him—to do a favor on his way to prison.”

  Later they eat breakfast out on the big back gallery. Neighborhood roosters rustle up the dawn and a skinny yellow cat slinks around their feet and shies when they try to pet it. A tiny, ambidextrous breeze pushes lightly at blossoms in the big tamarind tree in the alley. The white flowers look like lights fading. On the wide flat rooftop next door a homeless family wakes and begins to go about its morning routines. I’m loose in the world, aflight without design or motive. This’s something he tells himself sometimes, sometimes when he stays up all night reading and then walks out on the beach to catch the sunrise. “Sometimes,” he says to his mother who is buttering a piece of local bread, “I stay up all night in a laundromat.”

  “The same one?” Jackie says.

  “One of two or three.”

  “You got somebody to do that with?” his mother says.

  Just then a couple of police in detective clothes come up the stairs. One of them’s hand goes to his holster when he sees people up on the gallery. Just as quickly the cop lets his hand fall to his side when he realizes who it is. “Hey, Mrs. Sims.” The other’s also a local fellow everybody knows, Oscar Kazanzakis, one of the Greek boys from Bahama Village. “You looking kinda musty, Cot,” he says.

  Cot’s heart has already caught on a sticker, his sense of things, local agonies fuming. He can tell in every way but words what’s up. A gnatcatcher bird clicks in the top of a skinny palm tree like it’s keeping time. “I’m waiting for the elaborations,” he says and feels the hollowness shift inside him, the desert island landscape rotate slightly until it shows scoured gullies and tidal washes crumbling under a gray sky—he doesn’t want to be where he is, but that’s how it is for most folks most of the time he thinks, and almost says: I feel faint, but doesn’t.

  “Well, uh,” the first police—David Bates—says. He was on the football team with Cot and CJ in high school. “I’m sorry, Cot—Mrs. Sims, Jackie—but CJ’s dead.”

  Though he hasn’t moved Cot loses his footing, sags helplessly, wondering where is the place—what place?—and drops into the chair he has just risen from. His mother, looking David in the face, says, “God almighty,” in a crumpled way.

  Jackie has started for the stairs at the other end of the gallery, but Oscar stops him. “You know about this?”

  “I hardly know my own name,” Jackie says.

  “What y’all doing over here?” Bates says.

  “Resting up,” says Ella.

  They want to know the whyfors and hows of the killing, the police do, and they aren’t the only ones, it’s a mystery. Cot puts his head on the table, closes his eyes and says no to everything. No I don’t know where he went, no on what he was up to, no on his real name, on his height and weight, on his capacity for love, his great human beauty, no on the shriveling and wasting under way in us all. As children they’d walked around town holding hands; it caused a half scandal among the conchs. Later CJ was captain of the football team, then he began to wear dresses in public. He was a good singer, a performer now of old songs. Cot can see his face, slanted a little sideways, the half-rubbed-out pockmarks on his cheeks like tiny excisions, his blueblack eyes taking everything in. He wipes his cheeks with both hands though there are no tears. Nobody, it appears, knows anything.

  Oscar says Connie was found on the beach near the White Street pier.

  “They’d covered him up with sea grass,” Bates says. “That senator’s homeless daughter spotted him and called us.”

  “Buried?” Jackie says. He gives a shake, writhes in his skin and settles back down. “First Arthur, now Connie.”

  “Arthur?” Oscar says.

  “Natural causes,” Ella says. Dead of a jellyfish sting (or the heart attack that followed), they’d all attended his funeral in the Jewish section of the municipal cemetery.

  The cops look around the place, poking into closets and drawers. They wear white plastic gloves and booties on their feet and they don’t want Cot and the others to go back into the house. Cot knows where he put the emeralds, but he has to wait. Then the cops notice the trapdoor in the ceiling and Cot leads the way up there for Oscar and they look around the attic room that is like the room of a recluse who forgot to move anything in but dust. Through the floorboards they can hear Ella and the other cop talking in CJ’s bedroom. She’s just talking, just yammering. Even at a distance and through flooring it wears him out quick, not for the first time. Sometimes he wants to wring her like a rag. In his city life he walks right by people like her, doesn’t even look at them, or maybe he does, maybe he starts thinking how you can cut loose from the ones you love—how easy it is to do really—and then feel the frayed ends of the rope dangling and flicking and chafing for the rest of your life. Maybe, just catching a glimpse of some neighborhood shouter, he’ll start thinking about her, or about his daddy in Cuba and about all the absent years and who did what to whom and how life just piles on, and how the past is like a bamboo thicket you quit cutting back and just walk around to get to where you’re going—as best you can, he’d say to Solly or Goldberg or Chips or Butler, or to any of them up in Miami, to Spane, to Albertson if he asked, but Big A never does.

  After the cops leave Cot goes into the small bedroom where Connie has an upright piano and a bookcase and an armchair beside a bright blue Iranian rug. He liked to sit in the chair and gaze at the rug that he said was his confidential tide pool. Behind the bookcase is a footboard that comes out. The stones aren’t there. His blood races, he wobbles, catches himself. He sees the little island white and green in a pale blue ocean. Sunshine like a spanking. Now another kind of light’s shining on him, like moonlight through a bullet-riddled door. I’m going to get it, he thinks, meaning more than one thing, two things at least, maybe three.

  He gets up and bicycles over to Marcella’s house and sits on her back steps until she comes out. She brings him a cup of coffee. She’s wearing a pale green silk kimono he’s never seen before, something only somebody who loved her would give her. Even with Connie just dead he wants to interrogate her about this, but he’s ashamed even as he thinks it and makes himself cut i
t out, and then he tells her Connie’s dead—Connie’s dead—and doesn’t know or won’t let himself know whether he’s said it in this straight-out way because he’s jealous or because that’s the best way to say it, or he simply can’t help himself. She winces, her foot turns half over so he can see the ligament stretch and she grimaces and catches herself on the rail and her mouth opens and she gulps air, grunts, and he can see in her face what she’ll look like when she’s old, her eyes without their scleral ring, her skin raked and tissuey, the same look of incomprehension she has now, the melancholic confusion as consciousness retreats along worn pathways into some convenience store of the soul with pickled eggs in a big jar on the counter and a clerk fossicking his teeth with a peppermint toothpick, death standing like a shadow right next to her, coughing quietly into its hand. Plus instant tears she doesn’t bother to wipe off—her tears not death’s. Ordell slides out as if he’s been lurking and asks if he wants some breakfast and Cot says no. Their big tabby cat sidles up and curls around Cot’s legs, but when he reaches to pet it the animal takes a swing at him, claws out. This seems the measure of things.

  2

  Connie was installed two days later in his family’s big coral stone mausoleum that he’d always said looked like the temple of a small, unlikely religion. Standing around on the thatchy yellow grass under the moving shadows of palm fronds, the whole town it seemed had come out, town minus tourist population (or maybe not completely, since CJ was a favorite: Miss Peculiar), the conchs come out to stand in the late afternoon sun and shadow weeping big loose island tears, someone here or there crying out in a strangled voice for Connie, for CJ, for the boy who had run seventy yards once hauling a punt back all the way to win the Marathon game and caught the passes Cot tossed, boy who’d become the dual personalities, maybe the triple or quadruple, or innumerable personalities, like everyone else, only his were public and unafraid to be pegged, this brave boy, man, now already—Cot knew and Marcella knew—growing old in his tracks, his inexpugnable lover Dover standing rigid and straight by the minister who from time to time placed his hand on Dover’s arm to steady him. CJ’s old parents wept. His father who, back at the house when he was told, had laughed out loud like a man gone suddenly crazy, and cried into a huge yellow bandana bought for him by CJ on his one trip out of the country, to Morocco where he’d been detained in jail for three months and hurt. Some went to their knees, Cot among them. He and Brady Overhall, CJ’s former sidelight, leaned over the gold-toned casket, both of them for a moment unable to get back up, both partially stupefied by the enormity (Cot not really, Cot even then watchful), by the calm, the doggedness, the power and intrusiveness of grief and by the thought of CJ’s body stacked in the musty smokehouse under its breadfruit tree that was a descendant of one of the cuttings brought west from Tahiti by Captain Bligh. Cot got up on his own, but Brady had to be lifted up, gone boneless as a cat, so they could go on. White butterflies flittered around the casket and seemed to dance as Childress Purcell sang his special hymn, “See You in the Yonder.” The late afternoon flight from Lauderdale coming in low nearly drowned the words out.

  Cot stared across the assembled at Pollack. Fish, trash fish—pollack. Ah, well, the man probably had problems too. Afterwards he went over and asked him how he was doing. Pollack cringed, stiffened, his long lower lip pursing a little so Cot could see the creases beside it like little healed cuts and said fine just fine. “Sorry about your mother,” he added or remembered to say or tossed in like a piece of meat distraction to a pursuing lion. He was sweating.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Cot had one of his father’s old baseball caps in his hand. It had a New York Giants logo on it. He tapped it against his leg.

  “Nothing I could do,” Pollack said.

  “I know.”

  “It’s regulations.”

  “Meant to benefit the people of the community.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Did you ever find ten thousand dollars on the ground?”

  “I found a frozen turkey once.”

  “Lying around where you could pick it up?”

  “It was in Cleveland. Somebody’d dropped a turkey during a robbery.”

  “D’jou keep it?”

  “I would have but my buddy said he needed it. He was the one actually who spotted it.”

  “Sometimes you find money on the ground you get to keep it.”

  “I don’t know, Cot.”

  “Treasure all over this area.”

  “I don’t know, Cot.”

  “You know my mother’s sleeping under the house.” He didn’t want to take the conversation in this direction, but he couldn’t help it. This showed on his face and Pollack saw it.

  “I’m sorry, Cot,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to lose sleep over it.” Tiniest slip and things could go flying off the rails. Now he wanted to punch the guy. “I’ll see you, Wilkins.”

  “Mama said you came by.”

  “She lives inside y’all’s house, I see.”

  Ordell came up just then with his arm tight around Marcella who was streaming tears. “Would you help me with this woman?” he said, an anguished look on his face. Cot dropped the conversation and took Marcella in his arms. She felt alive and wonderfully intricate. The villains had knocked CJ in the head. Hit him so hard from behind that his skull was broken. A chill jerked Cot; he almost let Marcella go, but he didn’t. He was crying too. Way up, in the heat drafts, buzzards circled. The birds were an embarrassment, if you thought that way, especially in a touristical culture promoting everlasting life. Sometimes the birds came down to the cemetery and walked around. Bobby Johnson wandered up, and he pointed at them. “They could get to you,” Bobby said as if he and Cot had been in conversation. “Though I guess it’s true you never hear of ’em digging anything up.”

  Cot gave him a look and Bobby slid away, beating his white captain’s hat against his leg as he walked.

  “Who was that?” Marcella said. She looked up with eyes that looked like they had glue in them. “Oh—Bobby.”

  Her hair smelled of perfume, as citrusy as ever. Way across the cemetery, beyond the fence, upstairs in the old crumbling house on the corner that was half boarded up and leaning to the side, somebody played music on a machine, gay and heartless and loud. A bony, chlorotic beat stuffed under clash and wail. Then the music stopped, cut off. It was against the law to play loud music next door to a cemetery, maybe somebody suddenly remembered that or had it pointed out to them.

  He tries to get his mother to leave town, but she won’t. She’s one of those old-timers who’ll still be sitting in the living room darning socks when the apocalypse blows through.

  “I’ll leave,” Jackie says.

  They’re out back, eating yellowfin sashimi under the almond tree.

  His mother, tall and rangy, a jabbermouth her students call her, always up on things and alert as a bird, says: “If I had the money to go to Fort Myers”—that was where her sister, his Aunt Mayrene, lived—“I’d be able to begin to do something about turning this house around,” but she’s just talking.

  Last week—just a minute ago it seems like—he lost everything at the track and walked out into the dusk that seemed a different dusk outside the gates than in and stood by his car as two fat men carrying long horn cases walked by. He tried to get them to blow post time once more, but they wouldn’t.

  His mother looks at him as if she, sadly, knows all about his troubles and fuck-ups, which, so he figures she does, and she does. A breeze, fresh born, creeps and struggles in the top of the big mahogany tree a hurricane had snatched bald in the crown three years ago.

  “I’m going to take a nap,” he says and crawls into Jackie’s tent and after spraying himself with bug repellent slips off into sleep. In a dream CJ sits in a folding chair in the shade, eating strips of salted green mango. “What a gyp,” he says, Cot’s not sure about what.

  So next morning he
comes on Dup sitting on Sutler’s Restaurant porch eating shrimp and grits and joins him.

  “You know that’s not the real way to fix it,” Cot says indicating the half-empty plate.

  “So?”

  “You’re not supposed to batter the shrimp.”

  “So?”

  “So I guess you didn’t find what you were looking for.”

  Dup doesn’t answer. Instead he takes out his little Walther PPK knock-off and slips it under his napkin.

  “Mine’s sitting on my knee.” Cot means the little Beretta he bought in a Key Largo gun shop twenty years ago, but he’s lying.

  “I know.” He smiles at Cot, a strangely smoky and acquiescent smile. “Your buddy was smart.”

  “He made a perfect score on his college boards.”

  “You still remember something like that? What exactly are college boards?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I hate when people do that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Say never mind. Shitheads. Like you don’t count.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess it’s your turn to lead the way,” Dup says moving the gun about an inch.

  They drive up the chain to Kaslem Key and park beside a dirty coral road that runs through the woods. They walk along one after the other, Cot ahead. There are little coral-floored clearings in the woods where myrtle bushes and silver buttonwood clump together under skinny pines. They can see little green tufty islands out in the big bay.