He beamed and gave me a high five. We said our final goodbyes and Garfield and Markus slapped low fives, and then we wheeled our luggage inside. I tapped my pockets for tickets and passports. Then I stopped dead. I had bought Markus a ticket with Richmond’s money, and as we lined up to check in it occurred way too late that the boy would need a passport to get into the US.
“Oh, man. You need a passport. I completely forgot.”
Markus smiled and held up a blue book, with the words Caribbean Community at the top, a coat of arms, and Jamaica Passport at the bottom.
“We need it when I run for Jamaica in interisland race meets, mon.”
“You’re way ahead of me.”
“I tol’ ya, mon. I’m dead fast.”
We got our tickets and grabbed a sandwich each for breakfast, then our flight boarded and we did that sad shuffle across the tarmac to the plane, folks getting the last rays of sunshine, before getting into a tin tube that would deliver them back to whatever frostbitten part of the world they came from. For us, it was business as usual. We would leave the sun in MoBay and find it waiting for us in Fort Lauderdale.
There was another problem with my plan. Danielle and I had left my car in the long-term lot at FLL, but it was a Porsche Boxster, designed for two people and their pet hamster, and no more. Our luggage size had not been dictated by the airline like most folks, but by what the little car could hold on the ride down. But three doesn’t go into two in a stick shift, so I had called Ron. He stood by the carousel as we wandered out. He looked the same as he had when we left—thick silver hair, tanned with blotches of removed skin cancers giving his face character, and gleaming blue eyes full of life. He was wearing blue trousers and a red Helly Hansen polo shirt. I had only been gone a week, but he was still a sight for sore eyes, whatever that meant.
I introduced Markus, and Ron shook his hand like an old friend and took the boy’s bag. Despite being a good forty-five years older than Markus, Ron’s view was that guests don’t carry their own luggage. Folks in Florida are like that. I fished out my keys and Danielle took them from me with a smile. She took the Boxster. I didn’t see her leave the lot but I knew the top would be down before she even took off. Markus and I and the luggage got in Ron’s old Camry, and we chugged up I-95 while I gave Ron the rundown on our adventures in Jamaica. We got back to Riviera Beach by midafternoon, and Ron dropped us off at my house on Singer Island and headed back to the office. He told me not to come in until Monday, and I told him I did my best work away from my desk.
I showed Markus the spare bedroom and he wandered around my sparsely furnished home. The kitchen was orange Formica, and the living room had a deep shag rug and wood paneling that led out to a paved patio overlooking the Intracoastal waterway. Singer Island, like most places around the Palm Beaches, had seen all the waterfront properties razed to the ground and rebuilt as grotesque minimansions that required three air-conditioning units on the roof to keep cool. My place was a seventies original, just like me, and I was okay with that. My neighbors, one a faux-Tuscan villa and the other a massive Greek wedding cake, didn’t agree. But there’s plenty of proof in South Florida real estate that money doesn’t equal class.
I asked Markus if he was hungry and he said no, and I told him we would probably go out for dinner since we didn’t have much in the house, and he said he was fine with that. He went and unpacked his things, which would have taken all of one minute, so after ten minutes I went to check on him. I found him with a medal in his hand, commemorating University of Miami’s win in the College World Series baseball in my senior year. The spare room was my repository of sports paraphernalia. There were two CWS medals, a framed Oakland A’s jersey that never got dirty, trophies from high school and college, an old Hurricanes football helmet and a poster of me pitching on the mound for the Modesto A’s. Lots of guys have rooms like this—they called them their dens or man caves. The place they go to watch the big game or drink a bourbon alone and reminisce about the glory days. But this wasn’t that kind of room. I watched big games at Longboard Kelly’s, or one of the sports bars on City Beach, and I didn’t drink bourbon. It wasn’t that I was hiding the stuff away, it just wasn’t who I was now. Nothing in the room—not the posters, not the trophies, not the old uniforms—could beat the memories I had stored in my head.
“You won all these?” Markus put down the medal and looked up at a framed photo of me in Oakland garb, my official team photo, taken at the Coliseum before I left to join the team for twenty-nine days.
“I did,” I said.
“You wasn’t kiddin’,” he said. “You went pro.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t a story. I played in college, like I said. Baseball and football. And I still had time to graduate.”
“What was dot like, playin’ professional?”
“It was hard work. Honestly, the toughest thing I’ve ever done. For fifteen years, most days I hurt. Somewhere. I trained hard, I played hard. It was tiring, mentally and physically. I’ll never do anything harder, not that I can think of.”
Markus frowned at the photo, and then at me.
“What was it like, playin’ in front a’ doze big crowds?”
“I never really played in front of big crowds.”
“But Oakland? Dot’s major league, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, it is. I was a backup, for one of the starters who was injured. I was with the team for a month. But the guy I was backing up got fit, and then the season ended and I got traded.”
Markus bowed his head. “Sorry, mon.”
“Don’t be. This is what I’m saying. It was rough at the time, I’ll admit. But eventually I realized that it is what it is. I gave it my all, and that was as far as that adventure was meant to go. I was lucky to meet a guy who kind of took me under his wing, and helped me find a new adventure.” I looked up at the poster, and then around the room, and I realized I didn’t have a photo of Lenny Cox in here. I thought about my former mentor often, more often than I thought about the baseball career, so I didn’t need a picture to remind me of everything he did for me. I looked at Markus, and wondered if there was a little bit of Lenny in me. The idea made me smile. I looked back to the baseball poster that had captured Markus’s attention.
“But it was a great time in my life. My body worked the way it should, and I pushed it to the max and when I did the right thing by it, it saw me through. I had the best teammates, and my fair share of success. Good times.”
Markus moved to a photo of the team that won the College World Series in my sophomore year. We all looked so young. Faces without lines, foreheads covered with hair, limbs yet to flesh out into muscle.
“But they end, you know.” I laughed to myself. “No, you don’t know. That’s okay. I didn’t either. And you shouldn’t worry about it. Time will catch up with you soon enough. Doesn’t warrant worrying about. Just enjoy what you are doing, and give it everything you’ve got, whatever it is.”
“I love to run.” He smiled and nodded to himself, and I could see he meant it literally. Not like I love ice cream or I love that TV show. He loved to run. It was why he was put on this earth, if you believe that kind of thing. His raison d’etre.
“So Saturday, you do that. Run. Don’t worry about it. Just do what you do.”
“My mudda really wants dis, don’t she?”
I nodded. “Your mother wants you to have a better life than she had. That’s all. She doesn’t care if that is running or mixing drinks in a bar like Garfield. She just wants you to be happy and have a good life. And this is the best of both worlds. You get to run, you get the best training, and you get to study toward something that might be good later. Trust me, after college, you’ll never have so much free time ever again. College isn’t a chore, it’s the best opportunity you’ll ever have to chase your dreams. Whatever they are.”
I felt myself laying it on thick, like I was a college recruiter, or some rich kid’s father, demanding they understand that the Ivy League is the only good
option they have. I slapped Markus on the shoulders and walked out. He followed me and wandered around the living room. I went into the kitchen and heard the Boxster pull into the drive.
“Dis is a normal American house?” asked Markus.
“I guess. Pretty average.”
“Where’s da TV?”
I smiled. “I don’t have a television.”
Markus turned and gave me a look of disbelief. “I thought everyone had a TV in America.”
“Yeah, pretty much everyone but me.”
“Are you poor?” He didn’t mean anything by it. He was just having trouble connecting the dots.
“No, I’m not poor. I’ve just got better things to do.”
Markus watched me, looking to see if I was pulling his leg. Satisfied that I was on the level, he nodded as if this was an acceptable answer, and he turned back to look through the sliding door out to the patio.
Danielle came in through the front door and gave me a wink. I don’t know where she had gotten to in the Boxster, but she should have beaten us home, not been an hour behind.
“Nice drive?”
She nodded. “Just got some fresh air. How are you guys doing?”
“All good.”
She came into the kitchen and kissed me. “What’s the plan for dinner?”
“I figured we’d go to Longboards.”
“We should go early. He’s got a big day tomorrow.”
So we went early. The colored party lights were strung up in the back courtyard as usual, but with the sun still up they hadn’t yet come on. I watched Markus take it in. The tables with beer logo umbrellas, the palapa shade over the outdoor bar, the surfboard with a shark bite taken out of it hanging on the back wall. There was no view, and that was just how I liked it. Views are for tourists. All the view I needed was Muriel, standing behind the bar in her tank top, shoulders back so her breasts thrust at the seams, as if making a break for it. She nodded as we walked in and started pouring a beer. The stools under the palapa had indentations that matched Ron’s and my butts, but with Markus in tow we decide to take a table under an old Miller High Life shade. I went to the bar.
“Long time no see,” said Muriel, handing me a vodka tonic for Danielle.
“Back at ya.”
“How’s Jamaica?”
“Like Florida, without the freeways.”
“Looks like you brought some of it back with you,” she said, nodding at Markus.
“Yeah, kid’s a runner. He’s gonna visit UM tomorrow.”
“Nice. Does the runner want a drink?”
“Do you have cola?”
“This is a bar.”
“It’s Mick’s bar, which means you do beer and vodka tonics. That’s all I know for sure.”
“Ever heard of rum and cola?” She poured a cola from the post mix gun and handed me the glass. “Sans rum,” she said.
I took the drinks back, and we sat for a while and chatted about the differences between Florida and Jamaica. I said there weren’t as many uncompleted homes in Florida, but then I thought about it again and conceded I might be wrong on that. Markus said there were a lot of white folks. I told him that was the Palm Beaches.
“Just wait until we get you to Miami.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
WHEN YOU GROW up in New England, go to college in South Florida and play ball in California, you realize that the United States is not some homogenous mass of people. They might share a currency, a love of football and an inherent distrust in government, but the towns across the nation have little else in common. Take NFL towns. Seattle, Green Bay and Jacksonville share almost no common traits: not size, not population, not favorite foods or even political leanings. But they are all as American as apple pie, in their own way.
So it is with Miami. There’s no city in the US like it, and within it, not a campus like University of Miami. The UM campus found itself adjacent to an area that had become the biggest Cuban community in the world, outside of Havana. The campus was tropical, a sporadic mix of buildings, from sixties whitewashed structures with coral inlay to the space-age architecture of the new student activities center. There were palms of staggering variety, and long-leafed grasses that were like small ferns. The Latino and Cuban restaurants and cafes lined Route 1, separating the tony houses by the coast from the student community on the other side of Ponce De Leon Boulevard.
I parked the Boxster in the small lot by the tennis courts off San Amaro Drive, and we wandered into the Hecht Athletic Center. It was deja vu all over again for me. I’d spent some of my best years in and around this building: sweating in the gym, throwing up in the heat on the training fields behind it and pitching our way to the College World Series on Mark Light Field further on. We wandered in like we belonged, even with Markus wide-eyed at the size of the college and its facilities. We went straight to the office of the athletic director, and I told the assistant who we were. Aaron Katz came out to meet us. He was tall and lean, and looked like a runner himself, but he wasn’t. He had been a champion tennis player in his undergraduate days at Stanford. Now he was a damned good administrator, brought in after the school had suffered through NCAA sanctions brought about as a result of improper benefits provided to student-athletes by school boosters. The events had taken place after my time there, but even in my time, I had seen some things happen between players and boosters that were more than questionable, but those things were going with me to the grave. Aaron ran a good show, and was getting things back on track.
And the track was where we went. Aaron shook hands with Markus and welcomed him to the school, took copies of his school report cards, and then took us straight outside and around to the ambitiously named Cobb Stadium. It was really a running track with a small set of bleachers. There was a grass soccer field on the inside, and equipment set up at either end for things like high jump and pole vault. Some kids were running drills, and a muscular guy with a whistle was directing the traffic in a booming voice. Aaron took us to the big guy.
“Allan, this is the guy I was telling you about. Miami Jones, Allan Lombardi.”
The big guy shook my hand hard. I wasn’t sure where the Lombardi had entered the family, but he looked about as Italian as Swiss cheese. He was dark and heavy, skin the color of coal and eyes with a hint of yellow, like he stayed up too late, for twenty years. I gestured to Markus.
“This is Markus Swan. Markus, meet Coach Lombardi.”
“Good to meet you, son,” said Coach. Even his regular talking voice hit me in the chest.
“Suh,” said Markus.
“I’m not your sir, son. Call me Coach.”
“Yah, mon. I mean Coach.”
“Mr. Katz tells me you like to run.”
“No, suh. Coach.”
“You don’t like to run?”
“No, Coach. I love to run.”
Lombardi gave a snarl that might have been an attempt at a smile. “Good answer. Get your spikes on, and let’s have a run.”
Markus smiled. “Yah, Coach.” He jogged to the grass, dropped his duffel, and sat down and slipped on his old running shoes.
“You got spikes, son?”
“No, Coach. Dis all da shoes I got.” Markus glanced at me.
“Alright, we can work with that,” said Lombardi. “Let’s go.” He turned to me. “We’ll take it from here. One of my guys will take him on a tour this morning, and then I got a student set up to show him, you know, the other side. He’ll stay on campus. You got any problems, call me.”
“You’ll get him to the race tomorrow?”
“We will.”
“Then I’ll see you there.”
I wished Markus all the best, and told him not to worry about what anyone else was doing or saying, and just run.
“Don worry, Mista Jones. Dees boys din’t invent smack talk.” He smiled like he was in his element, and I hoped his insides were as confident as the veneer he was projecting.
“Just remember, they’re not looking for
perfect, they’re looking for talent they can train. You’re a smart kid, and your mother brought you up right, so show them that and you’ll be just fine.”
I walked back to the parking lot with Aaron, and I told him to call if there were any problems. I got in the Porsche and headed to the marina to see a man about a dog.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
THE MARINA AT Miami Beach is home to some of the biggest boats ever built for non-military and non-freight purposes. Dot-commers, media moguls, sport stars, drug runners and heads of state all held their megayachts in Miami Beach. I stopped by the office and found a young kid taking orders from a Russian customer who was barking like a drill sergeant. I nodded to the kid and he saw me, left the Russian ranting to himself and came over. It didn’t seem to improve the mood of his customer, but he tossed me a key card attached to a float and told me to go to B14. I left and wandered out into the sunshine. The marina sat on the Intracoastal side across from South Beach, tucked in behind the island from the hurricane winds that came through as and when they chose. I found Lucas polishing the glass on the sliding door of a speedboat shaped like a spear.
“I need to see a man about a dog,” I called.
Lucas didn’t look up. “A mongrel for a mongrel, eh?” he returned in his broad Australian accent. He finished polishing the window until it was practically invisible, and then turned, rubbing his hands with the rag. Lucas didn’t just manage a marina. He had been close to my mentor, Lenny Cox. The two of them had met when they were both doing goodness knows what for their governments, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and goodness knows where else. Now he lived the quiet life by the water, except, it seemed, when I came calling.
“How are you, mate?” He leaned over the transom and shook my hand.
“Not as good as you. Nice boat.”
“Yeah, she’s a beaut. Owned by that Mexican fella who’s got all them Spanish language TV stations.”
“Nice. Looks big enough to cruise down to Cuba,” I said with a wink.
Dead Fast Page 15
