Men in Miami Hotels Read online

  “Would you get me a Coke?” he says to Marcella.

  He can tell Marcella wants to sit beside him but neither of them want to deal with Jimmy. I don’t want to, Cot thinks, and then he does.

  “Can you move him?” he says. Marcella ignores him, gets the drink, opens it, sets it on the console. “Can you move him to the back?” he says.

  She asks Jackie to help but he won’t. He looks steadily out the window where little green islands float like bobbers in the wide clear bay. The water is so shallow it looks like tapwater running over a sandy brown floor. In the channels the water is blue. Farther out in the deeper channels it’s a stronger, steadier blue, but then abruptly it’s shallow again. You can see the pleats and patterning of the sand. It’ll be like that most of the way across.

  Marcella and Ella manhandle Jimmy to the back, prop him half–lying down on the back bench and cover him with the Florida beach towel. The arrangement looks not like respect for a dead man but a poor game Jimmy’s involved in. His face is under Daytona Beach where a woman rides a surfboard over a high-curling wave.

  Marcella slides in beside Cot. “When I’m with you I get stretched pretty quick way out past where I intended to go.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Only rarely. And then only briefly.” She hooks a straggle of black hair away from her face. Her wide forehead is clear, unmarked by trouble. Only around her eyes, netted in fretting lines of capture, can you tell living’s getting to her.

  “I never met anybody as worried as you,” he says now.

  “I have cause.”

  “That you do. How’s Ordell?”

  “Weirdly evasive.”

  “About what?”

  “In general—and particularly—about all this business.”

  “Us?”

  “CJ—and those gems.”

  “You told him?”

  “I had to. He didn’t seem very surprised. He said he knew it was some foolishness.”

  “I wanted to pay Mama out of trouble.”

  “You said that.” She looks out the window. “How high are we?”

  He studies the dials: RPM, Torque, Oil Pressure, Fuel Flow—he understands Air Speed, Fuel Quantity—ah, there: “1200 feet.”

  “I’d feel safer if it was . . . maybe four feet.”

  “We’re going eighty-five miles an hour.”

  “Who were those people?”

  “Poachers.”

  “Tell me. The ones firing guns at us.”

  “There was only one shooting.” He knows him. Buster Brane, originally from Tampa, son of a cigar roller, ex-semi-pro ballplayer, now an Albertson machine gun artist who lives at the Tradewinds Hotel out at the beach and likes to sit out front with the old folks on his days off and make remarks about the tourists. “I don’t know. For sure.”

  “Who maybe?”

  “Don’t pressure me.”

  “Pressure you? For Christ sake, Cotland. All the hoodlums in Miami are after you, and you don’t know who they are?”

  “Why are you talking this way? I told you Albertson was after me.”

  She slumps in the seat. “This paradise,” she says.

  “Don’t pity yourself.”

  “I can express an opinion.”

  “You’re my panacea. Mi querida. That’s what I meant to say.”

  “When?”

  “Just now. Every time I look at you.”

  “You probably can’t see how disappointing that is.” She has always loved his dash, his stubbornness even, his hesitancy most, but not his tendency to see her as saving him. “I can’t,” she says.

  He looks at her as if he understands. “I know.” But she knows he doesn’t, not quite.

  They fly over the tip of Summerford and over the kidnap camp. It looks deserted. The crew already on the way back to Miami. The land dribbles out into the bay, the scrub pines giving way to buttonwood scrawl and wax myrtle bushes, then to mangrove. The original flora has never been anything much. Even the Indians probably hadn’t been proud of it. Once there’d been a little topsoil, just enough for sweet potatoes, peppers, melons, other truck crops that could grow between the cracks in the rock, but storms scoured it off the coral bed. His mother used to plant tomatoes and bell peppers in buckets on the front porch. Like a country person, his father said. She wanted him to let her cut down one of the big trees in the backyard to put in a garden but he had shrunk at the possibility. After he returned to Cuba she could have done it, but she didn’t have the heart to then.

  The view opens up to the north, clear skied all the way. There’s hardly any breeze over the water. He laughs out loud.

  “What?”

  “I thought I’d come down here and . . . well . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.

  “Lord, and you were born here.”

  “Hilarious, ain’t it?”

  The fuel is draining too fast. He touches the black-faced dial, lets his fingers rest on the glass. Brane must have hit one of the tanks. She looks at him, her blue eyes more smokey than blue, just right, for him, he’s always thought, just his color. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. I’m just plotting.”

  “A course. Or an escape?”

  “Is there any difference?”

  She leans in and kisses his cheek. Her lips are thin but soft. Her breath smells of oranges. “You’re scared,” she says.

  “That’s not unusual.”

  “What is it?”

  “If you haven’t noticed yet I can’t explain it.”

  He glances back. His mother is reading one of her books, her pamphlet of stirring passages, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Browne, and the like. She doesn’t look frightened. Jackie has his head leaned against a rolled-up shirt pressed against the window, pretending to himself that he’s asleep. “It’s going to be all right,” Cot says, the words passed back like stale snacks.

  “For everybody but Jimmy,” Jackie says without opening his eyes. “For everybody but us,” he adds more softly.

  “You were always the brainy one,” his mother says smiling her slightly off-center smile, the one where you can’t tell exactly what she’s thinking but have hopes, and drops her gaze into the remarks of the great. Time was he would have spoken sharply to her, time was he would have blamed her for his father leaving, for predicaments raised like corpses from a marly deep, time was the savagery between them was like a sickness in them both, their words cutting and forced in like knives, but now there are only slurs and asides, quirky bits the other can only half make out. They go by feel, by memorization, by heartbeat. It’s getting late, he thinks to resolve things. He’s been thinking this for years. Sometimes you wake up and what’s capsized has righted itself. Sometimes the other way around. Hope like grease on your hands if you even can bear to hope. What a crock. Nobody can ever tell for sure what’s coming, he’s sure of that.

  Then the big islands are behind them, trailing off to the right, hazy in the morning sunlight. The bay is clear mostly, little islet stubs every few miles, then these peter out and they’re over open water. Nobody talks much. Cot holds the plane steady. After a while he can make out the mainland, a thin yellowed strip ahead, then, soon enough, the shapes of the swamp, humped trees pushing up out of the grass. The fuel is still draining, but maybe they’ll make it. He turns toward Chokoloskee, toward Naples and the highway north, the plane sliding, sinking and rising again in a mushy, reluctant way, and leveling out.

  As they fly over the first of a string of coastal islands the engine begins to cough. He jiggles the fuel switch, tips the wings and the engine fully catches again, but they’re losing altitude. He doesn’t want to say anything about it, but the look in Marcella’s face makes him. “We’re going to have to set down.”

  “Lord God,” Jackie says, pressing his hands flat against the ceiling. “I’m like a crab stuck in a shell.”

  Cot looks at Marcella. She smiles like somebody with nothing else to offer. He smiles back, but he can feel the skin
of his face tight as if it won’t go along. She told him once that he had the face and body of a squat man who got stretched. He’s taking the plane down. The engine keeps running, whacking and kicking a little. He knows to keep the nose up. Then they’re right over the water. The country looks deserted off to the right. A few tall native palms stick up out of scrub, a few big trees front a shallow bay below a beach and a large, listing, empty-windowed house. They’re a hundred yards out. The plane seems to be settling, drifting down, time inside the cabin holding back, expanding into an apartness and stasis that seems filled with a quiet movement of some other section of him, even as he watches the water, black as pitch, stained by roots, rush along beneath them.

  Then they hit and then they are skiing across the flats. He pulled up with one hand on the wheel and one on the yoke just as they hit. He presses back in his seat hard and he can see Marcella out of the corner of his eye pressing back too. He can hear Jackie moaning. The plane continues in a straight line, slowing as it goes, and then, without his hands moving the wheel, turns slowly all the way around so they are facing the stretch of ocean already passed through, and comes back to itself, and stops. They rock like a baby in the waters.

  An instant of faintness gives way to exhilaration. He yells. Marcella leans over and presses her face into his chest. His mother bangs on the back of his seat; he can’t tell at first whether in anger or relief. It’s relief. He leans forward and presses his head against the dash. Half saved, maybe more than half. On a re-dump into the deep—the shallows, little numbers in his head spinning by as he thinks this, rushing over cliffs and plunging into the dark, numbers of the dead he knows them as.

  Passing it along through the shallows they’re able to hand-walk the plane in to shore, to a little hump-backed leafy island with a broken-down house on it.

  5

  Spane drove back from Channel Haven Gardens where through his big Nikon Monarchs he’d watched transient birds just returned to the trees—redstarts and warblers, even an oriole—and had lunch at Sappy’s with Albertson who was trying to pin back a waitress’s ears with complicated repartee when he walked in. Albertson was scary and he was tall and massive like Spane, but he was no good at repartee; he was too concentrated. The waitress as she veered toward the kitchen was laughing at him, something Spane hoped Albertson didn’t notice. “So where is he?”

  “Trying to scrap his way out of the Keys.”

  “Shit. I’d a’been in California by now.”

  “Not Cot. He always thinks he can fix things.”

  Albertson laughed his croaky, sharp-witted laugh. “For a smart boy, he’s awfully stupid.”

  “Persistent though.”

  Albertson had a big shovel face and sharp black eyes placed a little too close together like an athlete’s. Spane was thinking about Cot. He’d started on the run finally. But there was no telling what he was really up to. Spane ordered a drink and talked with Albertson about the shipments coming in over on the west side of the Everglades. It was spring outside, a remarkably subtle and unconvincing season in Miami. He wanted to take another walk in the gardens and look at the little buds of frangipani and court St. Susan flowers just coming out, maybe drive down to the Everglades and sit in the car looking at the grass prairies that always made him think of Africa. This girl—this woman who’d left him sorted and frazzled, bit down to the quick—he would think about her too and about what he could do. Albertson droned on about business and then the food came and they ate and Albertson tried again with the waitress but she told him she would call the manager if he didn’t shut up.

  “Something’s wrong with me,” Albertson said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My groin. I got some kind of growth.”

  “Like a tumor.”

  “Probably not only like.”

  “I hear these days they have robots can cut those things out in two seconds.”

  “That’s as terrifying as a tumor.”

  “What you doing eating a steak?”

  “I don’t want to give in.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Where the hell is Sims?”

  “We got the eyes on him.”

  “Bug eyes? Fish eyes?”

  “Mortal eyes.”

  Last week he’d tried to explain to this woman about how he loved the flowers in the gardens around the city, about how the big gobs of orange blossoms popping out in the poincianas looked like the flower cloaks of Aztec kings thrown up into the trees, about bloodflowers and tickseed, sea daisies all coming into bloom on the dunes, but she wasn’t interested. “I came up here to get away from flowers,” she said.

  On the way to Spane’s hotel she said she’d decided to start making other plans.

  “About us,” Spane said in his dry voice.

  She didn’t answer.

  “That’s the end of this then,” Spane said. Secretly he called her Ceci—his favorite name for a woman—and he almost called her Ceci now.

  “I didn’t say that,” she said.

  “I don’t know any other way to take it.” But he didn’t believe her. It was a quirk with her, such declarations, a stabilizer that cut the nervousness. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  On Dixie Highway traffic was backed up, so he took another route, dodging in among the neighborhoods around Kendall. A guy was selling shrimp from a sky-blue van, and Spane stopped to get a couple of pounds. Pink sweet-smelling shrimp the man shoveled into a plastic Walgreen’s bag. He recognized Spane and asked him for a tip on the horses.

  “If I could give you something like that I wouldn’t be buying shrimp out of a truck.”

  “These shrimp you would,” the man said. He had salt marks on his forehead and spoke with a slight Jamaican accent.

  “Ceci” sat in the car working on some papers. She looked like a dark-haired, specious, aging princess, but she was a workhorse and sharp as a whip, and she was disappointed that somebody as smart as Spane had become such a dud. She was tired of herself and tired of vegetation and maybe even of life, and she didn’t yet know what to do about it. Maybe Spane could tell her back at the hotel where he lived in a suite overlooking Government Cut. She liked being up high in hotels. It made her think that the world had opportunities she’d never considered, fresh approaches like the big cloud reefs piling up in the west. She dreamed all the time of a new life. It was the kind of dream you could put anything into: love, children, wrestling matches on late drunken midnights, kisses like flower petals falling from a tamarind tree, friendly usages, complicated plans taking years to come to fruition, the smell of rain on a sunny beach. In any version of it she would hate to be called Ceci.

  Albertson looked Spane straight in the eye. The look was like a bar of black steel connecting them. Neither of them had to say a thing.

  It was late afternoon and they were still on the island. The old wooden house, half fallen in, stood among pines back from the little wrinkled beach. Scarred level patches, places where hunters built fires, railroad vines stretched out to their skinny full length dotted with blue blossoms, excavation holes, stacked moldy boards. A place of history maybe that you would have to be local to know about. The gray sand beach ran up into grass, then scabby pines and a couple of tall cabbage palms, then the house facing the cut, then the heavy bristle of the Everglades. The house’s front galleries, top and bottom, were intact, as were the front rooms on both sides of the door, but the back had been torn off, a single bite for the right hurricane. Visitors had built fires and part of one of the rooms was burned. They set their belongings on the porch and Ella went off walking around the property. His mother was good at outdoor business, business Cot had never learned very well. His ambition, he had told her when he was eight, was to be a city boy, discrete, he meant, solitary on a street corner, unknown by the populace. The back of the house looked into myrtle scrub that a few twisted poisonwood and caper trees poked up out of and a few senna bushes too, bent down with brushy flowers. Old outbuildings now mostly
bits and haphazard piles of sandy sticks were knocked back against the bushes.

  Ella returned after a while with a couple of papayas big as dopp kits. She gave him one of her offhanded smiles he could see the weariness in. He was impatient with her, as he’d often been as a child, such old times were back, for a moment. He put his hand on her arm and as she folded around, hugged her. She hardly hugged him back, and that was familiar too, both of them disjunct and shy, waiting for some indecipherable impossibility to relent. Suddenly ashamed he grabbed Marcella who was walking by, aloof, spying maybe. She swung around in an old cartoon skidding and leveling way she had, smiling at him, and attacked him with a hug. For a moment he clung to both women at once; it was like a picture, in life and in his mind, a gallantry, a needfulness that was both aggrandizing and humbling. The women broke away, separately, looking as if they didn’t know each other. Marcella stayed closer. “I got to . . . ,” she said and threw up a smile that was tinged with regret or something like it, fatigue maybe, this strange askew way of her lately. He thought he understood. “My phone . . .”

  His was still back in KW, but Marcella had one. She hadn’t been able to get a signal over the water and the one she got now—stepping back from him to make a call as if he might interfere with reception—was weak—calling who? he wondered—but he took the device from her and got through like a charm to Tommy in his room at the Orange Blossom in the Grove. When he answered Cot abruptly didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t ask for retrieval. He listened to Tommy’s voice speaking from the barrel of distance asking what he wanted. “Come get us,” he wanted to say anyhow. He wanted to go on in his ordinary rapid-fire way throwing out ideas and pointers, laying down a handline of talk, but he didn’t have a turn now. Tommy, in a few chopped sentences let him know what was up: there was no longer anybody he could trust in Miami, including him. He broke off the call.