Miami Noir

by Les Standiford

  She shook her head.

  “Why not? He can’t hurt you now.”

  “You go on. I did what I had to. Now I’m through. You go on and when they ask, tell it all just like it happened.”

  Speck backed the truck in front of the log wagon. “Marcy, go on and get your things. There’s no time to argue.”

  “My name’s not Marcy,” she said.

  “I know it. But it doesn’t matter now,” Speck said. “Get your things.”

  “I can’t go with you,” she said.

  “If you don’t, I’ll dump him in the swamp where nobody will ever find him.”

  “No you won’t. It’s all over, Speck. You go on.”

  “You wait for me here. I’ll be back and we’ll tell my daddy. We’ll go to St. Louis to the fair.”

  “That’s all over with, Speck. You go on now.”

  She wore the white dress and carried the battered suitcase. She had cleaned up the main shack and then packed everything of hers and gathered Calvin’s things from the helper’s shack. She went outside and built a fire and fed the man’s clothes and finally his sailor’s bag into the flames.

  Alone by the firelight, Marcy took the glass dome from the suitcase and held it out. At first it seemed empty, a void above the dark outline of the miniature city. But then she shook the thing in her fist and held it out again, and the tiny silver flecks caught the light from the fire and glowed there in the night, brief sparks, like stars you glimpse through boughs of pine.

  She set the globe on the table between the two shacks. She picked up her belongings and walked off down the log road, toward the place—she didn’t know where yet—someone was waiting for her.

  PART II

  Wind, Water, and Grime

  BLOWN AWAY

  BY ANTHONY DALE GAGLIANO

  Homestead

  The roof was halfway peeled off the house; the Volkswagen was in the swimming pool; and for the past two nights I had fallen asleep watching the stars fade away into my dreams. Now, two days after the storm, I had taken to sleeping with my rifle because the looters were out, and night was their favorite time. The only good thing was that it was my wife’s car at the bottom of the pool and not mine. She had left me a few weeks before the storm, and I was still feeling a little bitter about it. The bad thing was that she had driven away with my car because it could hold more stuff, so it wasn’t exactly a total victory on my part.

  The day after the hurricane, the sky was clear but the world I saw was broken, right down to the streets. I got lost every time I took a walk. Finally, I got my flashlight and dug out an old compass I had kept from the army. I took a bearing on the emptiness of the front door and started rambling around the neighborhood, looking to see what was left. People were creeping around like zombies and digging through the ruins of their houses. I passed an old man bent over like a prospector on a nameless street. He straightened up and looked at me.

  “You got a cigarette?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to scout some out,” I told him. “There a store around here somewheres?”

  He pointed to the north. “I think over that way. See that flagpole? It used to be right by there. Maybe it still is.”

  I looked out across the damage and the distance. The flagpole looked a long way off. In Miami you drive every place, and I wasn’t used to walking.

  “What brand you smoke?” I asked.

  He looked bewildered by the question. “I don’t know. I don’t smoke.” I noticed then that he was wearing underwear—a pair of polka dot boxers and a white tank top that was never going to be white again.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I’m not much of a smoker myself.”

  I started walking, sometimes right through people’s houses, not to be mean or anything but because the houses were all in pieces spread out like a puzzle. It was hard to tell where a thing began or ended. I could see that my place had done better than most. At least my furniture was still inside. I just hoped it was still there when I got back.

  I smelled a barbecue and came up on a group of people sitting in a ring of sofas like they were inside a living room. Some people were laughing. They looked like a big family, except that some of them were black and some of them were white and some of them were speaking in Spanish. A black man was standing over a barbecue made out of a pair of steel drums with a grate over them. He held a pair of tongs and was turning pieces of meat and chicken over with them. He looked at me, and I looked at him. Then he waved me over. The fire and the heat made him look like a Vulcan. It was the best food I ever had.

  I finally found the store. Where, I don’t know. It was a 7-Eleven. The windows were shattered and people were climbing in and out of the place, carrying armloads of cans and boxes of cereal and cases of beer. I had never done anything like this before and for a moment I just stood there looking. Finally, I stepped over the jagged sill and into the store, feeling like I was crossing some kind of line, which I was, except it was a little hard to see exactly what kind of line it was. At least I wasn’t a cannibal, I told myself. So far, I had only made it down to shoplifting.

  I was behind the counter looking for smokes when the squad car pulled up, lights blazing like wild Indians. Everybody started to run like roaches. The cop came in through the window with his hand on his gun. I stood up. I put my hands up. He was a black kid—not much more than a rookie, I thought—and everything about him said soldier. He pointed his eyes and his gun at me at the same time, shook his head, and holstered the automatic.

  “Turn around and put your hands behind your back,” he said calmly. His voice was edgeless, as though he had said, Give me a cup of coffee

  “Officer—” I started to say.

  “I know,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I got no choice. This shit has been going on all day and the captain wants to make a statement. Sorry, man.”

  I rotated and he bound my hands with a plastic tie. It was like an episode of Cops

  “I’ve never been arrested before,” I said, more to myself than to the officer.

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be out in the morning, maybe even later today.”

  The cop seemed tired, though not physically; his movements were crisp and professional. He was tired in another way. I could feel it coming off him. He reminded me of a teacher who had made it to the end of a long day at a bad school. He walked beside me without holding my arm, as though we were a couple of buddies heading to the bar for a beer or two. Sometimes he even walked a little bit ahead of me, as though he had forgotten that he had a prisoner. I guess I didn’t seem that dangerous.

  Right before we got to the cop car, he bent over and picked up a photograph that had blown in from another life. He stared at it for a moment, then held it up so I could see. It was the picture of a young woman, very pretty in a Nebraska sort of way: big smile, corn hair, gray eyes—innocent. I looked at the picture of the girl for a moment and nodded. Then, very gently, almost reverently, he placed the picture back on the ground on the exact spot where he had found it, as though it belonged there. Neither of us said anything. I felt a strange, indefinite sadness rise in me all the way up to my neck until I felt as though I were wearing a heavy curtain over my shoulders.

  “You find stuff like that everywhere,” the cop said. To me he sounded like a tour guide in a ruined temple who knew the tale of ancient disaster so well that he had learned to tell it without words.

  “I wonder where it came from,” I said.

  “Somewhere,” the cop replied aimlessly.

  He opened the door of the patrol car and gently pushed my head down as I crouched. I was glad there were no cameras around. We drove slowly, both of us looking from side to side.

  “You live around here?” the cop asked.

  I told him my address. He said he knew where it was. Then he asked me what I did for a living.

  “I’m an English teacher,” I told him. “Edgewater High. Richard McManus.”

  He looked at me through the re
arview mirror. “That’s where I went,” he said. “I thought you looked familiar.”

  “Were you one of my students?”

  “No, my sister was though. Maybe you remember her? Her name was Taisha Duncan.”

  The rolodex that is every teacher’s brain rolled, and a face appeared from a few years back.

  “Sure, I remember her,” I said. “Nice kid. Very good writer. Said she wanted to be a reporter someday. I wrote some letters of recommendation for her. Last I heard, she had gotten a scholarship to Georgetown, I think it was.”

  “That’s right; that was her. Hey, you know, I think she kind of had a crush on you.”

  “That’s because I’m so debonair. Where we going, officer? I think the station’s on the other side of the canal we just passed.”

  “You in a hurry to get to jail, Mr. McManus?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But these plastic cuffs are cutting into my hands.”

  He was silent for a few moments, then stopped the car suddenly and got out. I didn’t know what to expect, and it seemed to me, judging from the landscape, that I wasn’t going to know what to expect for a long time. I had a morbid vision of being thrown to the ground and kicked repeatedly in the stomach. There was fear and a weird kind of excitement that I didn’t understand.

  The cop came around and opened the door. “Come on out,” he said. “This is bullshit.”

  I got my legs over, stuck them through the door, and stood up. He told me to turn around and then, much to my surprise, he undid the plastic ties and threw them over his shoulder. He smiled at me as I rubbed my wrists.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “What were you doing in that 7-Eleven?”

  “I wanted to buy some cigarettes.”

  “This might be the omen to quit you been waiting for,” he said. “You want to take a ride with me? You know, just drive around, check things out, look for adventure.”

  I must have appeared dumbfounded. He laughed.

  “Sure,” I said lamely. “Why not?”

  “You want to drive?” he asked.

  “I think that might be against regulations,” I offered.

  “The whole fucking world is against regulations. Look at this place. He spread his arms and peered around. I looked with him. He had a point. God had poured the city of Homestead into a blender and dumped the contents onto what was left of the street, and in that world nothing was impossible. In that world English teachers could be shoplifters and shoplifters could drive police cars.

  “Okay,” I said. “What the hell.”

  We drove around for about an hour, talking about everything and nothing. The young cop’s name was Robert Paulson, and he told me he had been in the Gulf War over in Iraq. I asked him what it was like.

  “Not much,” he said. “We sat in the desert, doing squat for six months. Then we rolled. There was a lot of smoke and fire, but it was all over quick. I never even fired my gun. We were lucky; nobody I knew got killed or anything. You had to be careful of mines though.”

  “You been out long?” I asked.

  “It’s, Have you been out long? You’re not forgetting your stuff, are you, Mr. McManus?”

  “Well?”

  “A few months. Not long. It seems long though. It’s funny: You come back from a war and something like this hurricane happens. Shit,” he said. “This place looks worse than Iraq.”

  “Maybe I should be getting back now,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

  “Okay, but we got to make a stop first.”

  “Where to?”

  “My old place. I’ll tell you how to get there. Are you cool with that? It won’t take long.”

  “What happens if another cop sees me driving you around?” I asked.

  “Man, don’t you know? You’re undercover.” He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.

  We drove west for a few miles. The sun that had seemed so high earlier in the day was plummeting now, dragging the day down with it behind a row of broken trees. With all the lights in the neighborhood out, the coming darkness affected me in some primeval part of myself, and for a moment something akin to panic began to overtake me. I wanted to go home. Even my house with its gone wife, its ripped-off roof, and its drowned car was better than the sprawling mess the world had become. I began to talk to dispel my nervousness.

  “How’s Taisha doing? She must be in college now.”

  For a moment the cop said nothing, and I wondered if he had heard me.

  “Taisha’s dead, man. Didn’t you know?”

  “Dead? What are you talking about?” I couldn’t turn to look at him. I had to keep my eyes on the darkened road.

  “Drunk driver. You know how it is. About a year after she graduated from Edgewater. It was up near Gainesville, near her aunt’s house. Maybe that’s why you didn’t hear about it.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “A young kid like that. I can’t believe it.”

  “Maybe you heard about it but forgot. You must have had a lot of kids in your class over the years.”

  He was right. They came and they went. Some students you would remember for better or worse for the rest of your life, while others left barely a trace of memory behind them when the semester was over.

  “No, I remember Taisha,” I said, wishing in a way that I was lying. I didn’t want that sweet young face floating around in my head with night coming on, not in this shattered world.

  “Turn here,” the cop said. “I recognize that tree.” He pointed to an uprooted banyan tree lying on its side.

  “Where are we?” I asked. “What is this place?”

  “My old crib. Go on down this way. I’ll tell you where to stop.”

  I soon saw that we had entered a cul-de-sac. The houses were small wrecks of wood and lopsided roofs. At the end of the street I saw the silhouettes of a man and a woman sitting on the front steps of their house. I drove slowly. When my beams from the headlights hit them, they stood up and went into the house, shutting the door behind them. They had moved so quickly, I thought they might be looters. I glanced at the cop. He was looking straight ahead.

  “Stop in front of the house,” the cop said. “That’s where I used to live.”

  “You know those people?” I asked.

  “That’s my wife, or rather she used to be my wife.”

  “Who’s the guy?” I asked.

  “A friend of mine, used to be. Since I got back, everything is used to be, seems like. I asked him to keep an eye on Doris when I was over in Kuwait. Sources say he got a little bit too dedicated to the mission. You know what I’m saying?”

  I looked at him. He was still staring straight ahead. He was locked in position. There was a sphinxlike quality to his profile that I didn’t like.

  “We had better leave,” I said. I put the car in reverse and turned around to see where I was going. That’s when I saw the pump action shotgun lying on the backseat, or rather, I saw its shadow. I didn’t like the look of it. Without warning the cop reached over, grabbed the steering wheel, and with his other hand shifted the car back into park. We jerked to a stop. We stared at each other. The next thing I knew, I was looking at his gun, its small triangular sight lined up quite nicely with the middle of my nose.

  “That’s my house,” he said.

  I got as close to the driver’s side door as a person could get without actually merging my atoms with the metal and pulled my hands way back behind my head like an extra set of ears.

  “I can walk home from here,” I said. “I could use the exercise.”

  “Not yet, professor. I want you to do me a favor.”

  “Look,” I said. “Just put the gun down so we can talk for a minute, okay?”

  He set the gun on his lap with the barrel still pointed in my general direction and his finger still on the trigger. I think he was afraid I might try to take it away from him. Little did he know how much like distant Pluto that thought was from my mind.

  “I like you,” he said seriously. “
But don’t try and do anything stupid.”

  “If you take a look at where I am, I think you’ll see that it’s a little too late for that particular bit of advice, but thanks anyway.”

  He smiled, but the gun stayed where it was. “You’re all right,” he said. “I wish you had been my teacher. I had some bitch named Ms. Duncan.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “You need to get the hell out of here. We both do. There’s nothing here for you. I know it’s easy for me to say, and I know how I would feel if I were in your place, but I’m telling you, I can read your mind like a fucking book and it’s crazy. This too shall pass, but if you go in there tonight, I’m telling you, you will regret it. Let her go. She isn’t worth it and neither is he. You know I’m right.”

  “I know you’re right, but that’s my house; that’s my wife.”

  “Let the lawyers handle it. Fuck them both. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I bet you were a pretty good teacher,” he said.

  “Maybe I was—once. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know anything anymore. I just know we need to get the hell out of here before I have a heart attack.”

  “I’ve been driving around all day, looking at everything,” he said in a voice that was half anguish, half wonderment. “Everything’s gone, teach. It’s all gone. I can’t do it no more. Go to work, act normal, do my job knowin’ that they’re in there together in my house. Where’s the respect in that?”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said: “You’re a cop. Think about that. Respect that, Officer Paulson.”

  “I tried, but it’s not enough. Stay here. I’ll be right back. Got to get a few of my things. Don’t go driving off now.”

  “Why don’t you leave the gun with me?” I said.

  “You think that’s a good idea?”

  “I know it’s a good idea,” I told him.

  “All right.” He handed me the automatic. I set it down on the floor between my feet. Officer Paulson got out of the car, straightened himself, and stared at the house for a long moment. Then leaned down, looked at me through the passenger’s side window, and smiled.