Men in Miami Hotels Read online

  “You want me?” Billy called from out the back door.

  “Bert.”

  “I’m out here,” Billy called.

  Cot heard a noise, maybe footsteps going down the back outside stairs. He ran through the house to the back side door, opened it—no one there. Maybe a slight agitation in the molecules. Not six feet away a gray-and-white cat gazed at him from a closed window in the house next door. “What now?” he mouthed to the cat who just stared.

  He went back into the house and out through the big back double doors. Billy was sitting in an old rocking chair next to the swimming pool that was covered with brown stained canvas. “D’jou want me?” he said.

  “Did you see him?”

  “Who?”

  “Big guy in an orange shirt.”

  “Nobody came by here. Were you calling me?”

  “Your name Bert?”

  “I thought you were playing with me.”

  They walked back through the house, out the side yard and down the lane that ran through the middle of the block. At the street entrance there was no sign of the operative in either direction. Cot was holding himself back for some reason, trying not to let himself think about anything, a practice he couldn’t sustain for long. The lane sheltered a bower-like entrance to his mother’s backyard. He let himself think about this; no good thoughts. He began sprinting. He dived through the big mass of bougainvillea behind the Colfield place and through the slat gate into his mother’s shady backyard. No Bert there either. Jackie was putting mackerel fillets in an old metal drum smoker. She was over at the garden teaching her class in sortilege, he said.

  “Anybody come around here?” Cot said.

  “Oscar Moreno dropped by to talk to Mrs. Sims.” Oscar was one of his mother’s lawyers.

  “That it?”

  “Yep. Except for the figments and cordial apparitions.”

  Cot felt faint—and depressed, as if the blow had knocked happiness out of him. Billy trailed in through the back gate. He was carrying a clutch of green coconuts. “D’jou catch him?” he said.

  “Catch who?” Jackie said.

  “This misanthrope been running around.”

  “Back here?”

  “Over at the Stampen place.”

  “They were camping on the back porch last week.”

  “Like us.”

  “Poachers.”

  “I got to get my bike,” Cot said.

  When he got back to the library he thought the bike was stolen but the man behind the counter, a skinny man who, Cot knew, liked to stand late at night under streetlights smoking thin aromatic cigars, said they brought it in and put it in the office. When he went to get it the head librarian, a woman with too much emotion for a librarian it had always seemed to him, scolded him and told him to stop leaving his bike unlocked at their door. Cot didn’t try to explain anything to her. He had generally quit that by the time he was ten. “I feel a headache coming on,” he said to nobody in particular as he pushed the bike down the ramp behind the library. Across the street workmen in do-rags were just finishing removing the last remains of the Crawford house. He had known the house all his life and now he couldn’t recall what it looked like. Only an expanse of raked coral dirt containing traces, like an empty gold mine, of what had once been an arena of desire and mortification. He walked over and spoke to Bucky Winters who was pulling a big rake across the surface. Bucky had a small Wake-up Andy doll stuffed in his back pocket. “I found it mashed against the fence over yonder,” he said when Cot asked him about it. “Last significations of habitation.”

  “The Crawfords still in town?”

  “Naw. They left right after the fire. Moved to Titusville.”

  “Fire did this?”

  “Drunkenness and bad behavior did this.”

  “I got you.” Despair and shame—terror at the bone—there was a list.

  “You want this doll?”

  “You don’t?”

  “It just made me feel bad to see it lying there.”

  Cot took the limp, goggle-eyed doll from him. He placed it in the basket on the back of his bike. Up ahead, just ducking around the corner by the Simeon Bros. grocery, he saw the flicker of an orange shirt. “I’ll catch you later.”

  He couldn’t however catch up with whoever it was, with Bert. Southard was as empty as the morning after a parade. Tatters and bits of what looked like flags fluttered in the poinciana trees—as if there had been a parade. Then Marcella came backing her Rover over the hill. She cranked the big car into a parking space, honked, and waited. “How about a snack?” she said when he pulled up beside her.

  “I got to get Mama out of town.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “That man who you stripped and sent to jail got out this morning.”

  “I’m just waking up from where he conked me on the head.”

  She grimaced—from concern or disgust it was hard to tell. “Where’d you get the doll?”

  He told her.

  “Entices us into a life of nostalgia and other misrepresentations,” she said.

  “Not me. I’m strictly a present-moment kind of guy.”

  “Are you going to get in the car?”

  He loaded his bike in back and got in beside her. The leaves of a big kapok tree above their heads rattled and seemed about to break into speech—muddled and distraught speech, he thought.

  “Ordell said you got a phone call from Miami. It sounded, so he said, like someone named Crotch.”

  “Crodge.”

  “The usual desperate character?”

  “We’re all desperate characters.”

  “Existentially speaking.”

  “I thought you weren’t speaking to Ordell.”

  “I’m not. But we talk anyway. Like you and me.”

  People, folks who knew her, who knew them both, who had known everything about them since the day they were born and their parents had put a conch shell out on the front porch rail to tell everybody about it, waved or bopped the horn as they passed. Crook and Countess—that was what they had called them in high school. You could spend a lifetime feeling rosy and accomplished about such matters. He leaned down and placed his head against the dashboard, caught himself, and jerked back. She pressed deeply into her seat, looking at him. A line of tension showed like a scar along her jaw. He was losing his sense of the elaborated moment. Thought this and said it to her.

  “I’m on my way to get some shrimp,” she said.

  They drove out to the docks on Stock Island and she bought three pounds of pink shrimp and half a dozen dorado fillets.

  “Having a party?”

  “An impulse.”

  Jocko Brainard, the counterman, looked at them as he looked at everyone who appeared before him—as if he knew all there was to know.

  “You ever go out on the boats, Jocko?” Cot said.

  “You asked me that the last time you was in here,” Jocko said, pushing against his bad eye with the back of his hand.

  “I can’t think of anything else to say.”

  “You used to be real talkative.”

  “You seen my mother lately?”

  “She comes in here about onc’t a week.”

  “When you see her would you tell her I said would she please go up to Aunt Mayrene’s?”

  “You going to have to tell her that yoself.”

  “I would, but she won’t listen.”

  Marcella had drifted out the big warehouse-style doors onto the docks. He followed her, and they walked along looking at the high-prowed shrimp boats rusting under their painted skins. “They still go out,” Cot said.

  “It’s like the Japanese growing rice.”

  “You mean government subsidy making sure a ritualistic jot of rice—the historic symbol of the outfit’s once great mythos—is still grown in-country.”

  “You bet.”

  “About a washtub full I reckon.”

  “It’s aw
ful. Birds falling out of the sky. Fishes washing up on the beaches—what few fishes there are. Raccoons wandering into the yard coughing like smokers. Manatees sink to the bottoms of ancient springs, never having uttered a single word of protest. Children rock with allergies. Gunmen stagger retching into the undergrowth.”

  Her voice almost gleeful, the energy, the synthesis, like a mixture turning red to blue, making her happy.

  “That’s what’s happening to you,” she said. Brooks Dublin, fat shrimper captain, stood in the door of his wheelhouse looking down the channel where nothing but a few gulls, tough as old prizefighters, wheeled and complained. They both waved at him, but he didn’t wave back.

  “It’s for the best,” he said.

  “You always know the right thing to say.”

  “If only that were true.”

  “Cot—damn.” She dashed a single tear—it could have been a tear—off her cheek, quickly, with her finger tips, as if it were a bug. “You’re in so much trouble.”

  “Ah, honey, it’s not time yet to bring out the fun-destroying facts.”

  She skipped a beat into silence. “I apologize.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be off somewhere lawyering?”

  “There was a bomb scare at the courthouse and Judge Tomlane sent everyone home.”

  “You mean besides the one I called in?”

  “So funny.”

  “I have to find out who robbed CJ.”

  “It was some men from Fort Lauderdale.”

  “How do you know?”

  “One of those little lawbreakers from up the Keys told on them, Ordell said.”

  “That’s a fact for sure?”

  “Mmm.”

  “So’d Ordell call the authorities?”

  “He said he was going to.”

  They watched a slender sailboat, a sloop, sails furled, a sunbrowned man and woman on deck, come sliding along, easing in against the next dock over. It soothed him to see such a beautiful boat. The man’s hair was sun-blond, the woman’s too, they could have been twins, familiar gods from another world. He said, “We get so close, just a step away—you’d think we could make it.”

  “Are you talking about us?”

  “Among other things.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t get portentous—is that the word?”

  “Dystopian.”

  “That’s not quite it.”

  Across the water on the far side of the docks: egrets in the jucaro trees, white fuel tanks belonging to the power station next door, and three cars coming down the unpaved street raising dust—something . . . a feeling as if they were moving smoothly into a silent, secret movie, into still pictures, coming over him. A’s deadline hours ticking, a whole day gone—and more, was it more?—like fingernails ticking on a hardwood counter, on the stock of an AK-47.

  He grabbed her hand, pulling her. “Let’s go.”

  They ran down the docks, cut through an open storage warehouse and out into the power plant grounds where a couple of men on forklifts were moving bales from one place to another.

  She hadn’t spoken, she had only run with him, her head thrown slightly back as if she was running in a parade, but now she said, “Are you going to tell me anything?”

  “Sorry. In a minute.”

  Around a corner among the huge exposed parts of old transformers and uncoiled spools of wire they stopped. She said silently what what what, and he kissed her, putting his tongue like a sly one into her mouth, wishing it was long as a snake, that he could sink into her guts among the placards and ruby necklaces and the gushes of untainted blood. “What?” she said.

  “This guy. This Bert.”

  “The one you depantsed?”

  “The exact same. Plus a couple of recruits.”

  “Because you stole from them?”

  “These islands are dotted with little crosses where they buried treasure.” In his business, he had told her, after you pass the tests, they begin to reveal the locations of these X’s.

  “Does he know the locations too?”

  “No.”

  “That’s his real problem, ay?”

  “Yeah. Envy.”

  “It gets in everywhere.”

  “Like fly eggs.”

  So they spoke as they sprinted across the big rumpled yard and entered the scrub woods. Immediately the smell of sea rot—grasses and tiny fishes, abandoned mollusk housing, shreds and tatters—fumed up. There was a path, winding, gray with bony coral outcroppings, and they followed this through mixed buttonwood and acacia past a little stream, really only a sally of ocean water diverted into the woodland. The water was orange from the buttonwood roots; tiny snapper fry darted and frisked in cloudy schools, shirking danger. The buttonwoods creaked and swayed in a jittery breeze. He knew there wasn’t really anywhere but Coon Channel to get to, but he hoped Bert didn’t know that.

  Dodging faded fabric trash, broken fish boxes and such, they came to a clearing. Off there the reticulated sea vista: the old channel, ruffled along the back by breeze. She waved flies away from her face. “We’re going which way?”

  “Swimming.”

  He was still carrying the shrimp but now he swung it in an arc and sent it sailing into the channel. She made a muffled cry, half laughter, half scooped out of other sorrows. The shrimp hit the water, followed by gulls that began to nip at the plastic bag. “Salt to salt,” she said.

  “You all right?”

  “Don’t I look it?”

  “Only partly.”

  She scowled in a familiar way that didn’t really reassure him.

  They waded into the clear, lightly soughing current. Across the channel a quarter mile off they could see houses poked out from among bushes and palm trees behind a short flat beach. Okay, he said stuffing his flip-flops in the back pockets of his shorts, and they slipped in, not taking time to say good-bye to land or struggle. Behind them nothing at first but halfway across he looked back and saw Bert taking aim. Saw as well the other two abruptly conjured, miscreant experts, one holding his pistol with two hands, the other crouching among refuse carefully drawing a bead. Pop, pop.

  The shots weren’t close, hit the surface like skids, kicking up aught in the sea’s big mitt.

  They were both strong swimmers, but he kept himself between her and the assailants behind who were not getting into the water, were not shouting or threatening, only taking—Bert was taking—a long last look, a steadying and fixing look, and tucking back into the smelly boondocks.

  A bit later they caught a ride out on the highway from Bubsy Mannix, a local woman who’d run off at sixteen to join the rodeo and come back at twenty-five with a permanent limp and witty stories of livestock and cowboys throwing their weight around, now a seller of fruit pies and bakery goods, a woman with pulled-back blonde hair and a cowboy hat hanging behind her head on a string, who stopped by Randy’s Imperial Room and picked them up, two sea-damp escapees, and let them off a few minutes later in front of his mother’s misaligned house.

  Marcella immediately stepped next door and hooked a ride with Delilah Strake, who had her cab parked out front while she sat under the wheel eating a slice of devil’s food cake on her break.

  “I have to fetch my car,” she said as he followed her over.

  “I wouldn’t do that just yet.”

  “I’ll get somebody from the station to pick it up.” Standing under a big flower-filled flamboyant she called the police on Delilah’s phone—hers was wet—explained the situation, and they said they would get right on the problem. Problem of Bert and his confederates. He stood in the shade listening to her talk to the police. It was like somebody talking to one of her feckless and amusing former boyfriends.

  “They already have a cordon—that’s their word—thrown up around Stock Island,” she told him.

  It’s in the paper that night, Internet version: three men, possible assassins, picked up lost in undergrowth and transported to jail. They are all in jail. Cot goes down there, and they
let him in to talk to Bert who as usual is sick with regret.

  “I don’t know what came over me, Cot,” he says.

  “You mean trying to kill me?”

  “Well, that too, yeah. But I mean losing my head about it. I felt so ashamed when you pulled my clothes off.”

  “It was the quickest thinking I could do at the time.”

  “You were always a strange quick thinker, Cot.”

  “So, Spane sent you?”

  “Yeah, well, the first time. Before you had me put in jail. The other time was my own. They say you got to show initiative. Big A’s awfully mad at you, Cot.”

  “I’m getting a little worked up myself.”

  “I mean they told me to leave you alone. At least until four P.M. tomorrow.”

  “That’s what had me confused.”

  “Yeah, I know. Would you tell Mrs. Bakewell that I’m sorry.”

  “She already knows you are.”

  “But if you’d tell her I’m sure it would be a big help. Maybe she’ll take the case.”

  Out the window Cot can hear children shouting. Or maybe they are only childish adults, frolicking. He feels sick to his stomach.

  On the cab ride home he stops to pick up some Chinese food at Chee’s and then he has Slocumb drive over to the botanical garden to help fetch his mother. As usual she doesn’t really want a ride but because it’s him she consents. He explains what the trouble is, more or less.

  His mother, who was once a heavy woman with a light step and is now headed in the opposite direction, leans her head against the doorpost and closes her eyes. She has spent the afternoon talking to local women about flowering vines and fortune telling and is worn down by human contact. They sat in a circle up in the grassy space on the garden’s top terrace. From there the ocean lay spread out flat and fetching, uninflected and blue as a baby’s eye. As always—as almost always—Ella thought of her husband. He was probably lying in his same-time-zone bed in the big tile-floored apartment on Castroneves Street thinking about one of his gráfico predicaments, about conjurations, fated charmers. Everyone in his books was some better-realized version, some prophesied and never-found version, of himself, even the villains. He would probably get up and fix himself a big jar of tea that he iced with chips struck off the block he bought from the ice man on his rounds. It would be mushy hot on his side of the Gulf Stream and he would rub a small chunk of ice against his forehead. She could see the gleaming streak of water on his pale, half-Scottish skin. “It soothes the little molecules of remembrance,” he would say to the air. Her son, this man she had once told never to come around again, was in trouble. She offers a little prayer, by way of her husband who never seems not her husband, and lets it go, like a small bird, out the window. The sky is jammed in the south with clouds, but the clouds have no threat in them. She wishes things like this were a sign—of goodness, of hope. But there are no signs, only imaginings, she’s pretty sure of that. Oh, Rafael.