'While I'm running I'm living.' Ari's slogan floated back over the sand as he trotted on. The sun eased itself higher. The ocean was unoccupied except for a cargo ship moving indolently towards Port Everglades. Bruce climbed the ladder to the lifeguard platform.
'Busy?' he asked.
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'Nope. But you never know in these parts,' drawled Ossie. His matted grey hair hung over his brown forehead. There was a hole in his antique hat. 'Could be an out-of-season hurricane. Could be an invasion from Cuba. Or Mrs Blum could make another run for eternity. You just never can tell, man.'
They stood on the platform and turned from the shore to the grass and the sea-grape trees. The multi-coloured costumes of the old folk of South Miami Beach were coming from many directions, from the lateral streets and the steps of the cramped hotels, many of them carrying flimsy fold-up chairs. Groups were already forming on the grass. Greetings were called, newly arrived letters were waved ('I got word from my son, the sailor'), musical instruments were tuned, cards were shuffled. On the small enclosed terraces and balconies of the hotels others sat looking wistfully at the activity on the ocean front. They did not move very much. They just sat and watched and if anyone could think of something to say they said it and the others were grateful. A discussion of whether a walk was possible that day might occupy half an hour.
'Something new every day,' shrugged Ossie, looking out over the people. 'Non-stop excitement, man. Ever seen anything like this?'
'Not till now,' admitted Bruce shaking his head. 'What the hell are you doing here, anyway?'
'Now that's what I was going to ask you,' said Ossie.
'I heard the sun was out down here,' replied Bruce. 'I just didn't realize what it was shining on. Is there anybody under sixty for miles?'
'Pompano, Fort Lauderdale,' said Ossie nodding his head along the shore towards the vague, warm distance. 'Daytona Beach, that's the place. Plenty of chicks up there, so I hear. The kids drive around in cars on the beach. Or Key West.' He revolved and nodded in the other direction towards the unseen Florida islands. 'They got all the hippy people down there. That's where all the flowers have gone. You can smell the grass burning.'
'Maybe I'll head that way. Down the Keys.'
'It's nice, so they say. A guy told me there's a lot of hot,
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wild screwing goes on and people have iguanas and frogs as pets. And they all sit on the quay and watch the sun set, and they clap when it goes down. It's different, I guess.'
'What the hell are you doing here?' repeated Bruce.
"Well, it's kinda peaceful. The one thing that old folks are - they're kinda peaceful.'
'Mrs Blum didn't seem so peaceful. I still got the bruises.'
'Right. But she's the exception. The rest keep good and quiet. I was in Vietnam and when I got back I didn't enjoy getting the blame for it, you know? Sometimes I got blamed for losing and sometimes I got blamed for not losing sooner, and sometimes I got blamed for not losing, and sometimes I got blamed for being there at all. Christ, I didn't know what the hell it was all about. I just went and I came back and every bastard's throwing shit at me. So I figured that down here it would be peaceful and it sure is.'
'Sure. But there don't seem a lot of future to me. Where d'you live?'
T got an apartment. It's okay. I was sharing with a girl from Omaha who kinda wandered in this direction, just like you. But she's gone. She went off with one of the old guys. One with a lot of dough. I guess she saw more future in that.'
'So what d'you do?'
'I just sit here and then I go home. There's a diner next to the place I live so I eat there. I get drunk pretty regular and last week I went to the burlesque. They got big boobs those chicks there.'
'It's the food, the nourishment,' said Bruce knowingly.
'Could be. There's a broad does things with a snake. It's real neat. But it ain't like doing the genuine thing. Going there, I mean. There's no future in that either.'
'How old are you?' said Bruce.
'Just about thirty-five,' said Ossie.
'You look older, pal. It's this place growing on you.'
They stood looking out over the grass. The people now numbered more than a thousand. 'We ought to think of something they could do,' decided Bruce. 'Maybe organize a revolution.'
'Right,' nodded Ossie. 'Lead them on Washington. All the
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old biddies and the old guys, burning and raping and pillaging on the way.'
'There ought to be something,' said Bruce thoughtfully.
As they watched, a heavy red motor cycle eased down as it cruised throatily into Ocean Drive. It came to a stop outside Sunny Gables and Bruce and Ossie stopped speaking and stood on the watchtower admiring its bright powerful form. 'Gee, it's not too often you see a sight like that down these parts,' said Ossie. 'Beautiful.'
The rider, slight in black jacket and jeans, pulled away a vivid orange helmet and visor. At a shake of the head a sunlit cascade of fair hair rolled down. Bruce grabbed Ossie's binoculars. 'A Yamaha Mama,' he breathed as he looked. 'And beautiful, so beautiful.'
Ossie forced the return of the glasses and turned them on the girl. He felt the breeze of Bruce going past him. 'I'll tell you what she's like later,' the younger man called as he stumbled hurriedly down the ladder. Ossie was quickly after him, sliding expertly on the wooden rail. They landed in a heap on the sand and then ran towards the street, dodging through the assemblies of old people, and braking a few yards short of the girl who was looking towards the entrance to Sunny Gables. She heard their breathing and turned and saw them.
'Nice little runabout you got there,' said Bruce, looking patronizingly at the broad red back and silver shoulders of the machine. It glistened like a sweating horse in the sunshine.
'It gets me from A to B,' she answered evenly. 'And I take my grandma on it. I'm waiting for her now.'
'Molly,' said Bruce, pleased he had remembered. 'Molly Mandy.'
'Mrs Manders, that's right,' said the girl. 'You know her?'
'Well, in a way. We're fellow guests.' He nodded at Nissen-baum's hotel.
'There? You?'
'I like old folks.' He smiled winningly at her. 'And younger folks. I just have no firm preferences. Look at my friend here. He's old.'
'I'm Ossie,' said Ossie stepping forward modestly. 'Old Ossie.'
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'And me, I'm young Bruce. Loose Bruce they call me,' Bruce grinned with boyish assurance.
'You should get somebody to tighten you up with a wrench,' said the girl.
'I'd sure like to ride that bike,' said Bruce easily.
Surprisingly she nodded. 'Okay. Get on the back. I'll drive.'
Bruce's eyebrows went up with pleasure. 'You wait and keep grandma glad,' he said to Ossie. 'We'll be back next week.'
'Five minutes,' forecast the girl. She eased her tight backside across the saddle and Bruce climbed on behind. He rubbed his hands with brief chivalry on his jeans and placed them with careful enjoyment around her waist. 'Not too tight, Loose Bruce,' she called over her shoulder. 'I'm not going to leave you, sonny.'
She kicked the starter and the motor cycle growled like an animal. It strained to be off and she did not contain the urge for long. They roared south on Ocean Drive and were gone in a moment into the Miami dust. Ossie sat down on the grass and waited.
Molly Mandy appeared on the steps of Sunny Gables wearing a purple motor cycle outfit and a green crash helmet. Ossie introduced himself and told her what had happened.
'And this young guy's gone off with Gabby, has he?' she said, looking concerned. 'Poor fellow.'
She and Ossie exchanged comments on the heat of the Florida day. Although they had never met before he had seen her with her metal detector on the beach and she had seen him sitting above in his watchtower and they had exchanged waves. 'Glad you came down to earth,' she said with a smile. 'You looked like some kind of angel sitting up there.'
Within five minutes Gabby was back, curving
in dust along Eighth Street and guiding the thick wheels along the sidewalk. Loose Bruce, pale down to his shoulders, dismounted unsteadily. The girl pushed back her visor, kissed her grandmother, and glanced back at her passenger.
'I guess you really enjoyed that, didn't you, Bruce?' she inquired. 'I certainly did.'
'Yes,' muttered Bruce uneasily. 'Very different. I'm glad we
26
missed the ocean liner on the quay. I don't go for collisions with ocean liners.'
Gabby smiled fully at Ossie. 'Maybe you'd like a little ride someday?' she suggested.
'Thanks,' replied Ossie with great care. 'When I dice, I like to dice with dice.'
'Okay,' she said easily. 'Get aboard grandma.'
Molly laughed with delight and got into her helmet. The old lady clutched the young waist and the machine eased forward picking up speed as it drove once more south of Ocean Drive.
'Some experience, I guess?' suggested Ossie.
'Great,' breathed Bruce. 'Just getting your legs around something as special as that is just great.'
Ossie shrugged. 'You didn't seem to appreciate it too much.'
T wasn't talking about the motor bike,' said Bruce.
K-K-K-Katy was preparing to go to the weekly twenty-five cent dance at the South Miami Beach Community Centre. It was always an event to which she looked forward and she sang short snatches of old stage songs, the words adorned by her attractive speech impediment. On occasions, years ago, she had used it to devastating effect. Allied to a baby face and flawless blue eyes, the stutter had made men tremble.
She had been a chorus girl in the wanton days of the thirties in Buffalo, and she still had the long legs and the urchin grin. She was proud of both and decided gratefully that they were now with her for good. All the charms you were going to lose, she calculated, you lost by the time you were sixty and she had just seen that birthday off.
The weekly dances had recently taken on a new significance for now she was escorted by her one-time strong man, Lou the Barbender. He had toured every state and had even astonished the populace in Cuba and Mexico. Their paths, they decided, must have touched at times in their respective heydays because , they remembered many of the same names. They had fallen into conversation one morning beneath the sea-grape trees and now they were in love. It was strange, K-K-K-Katy reflected, how love reverted in these late days to the childish extremes
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of holding hands and stealing kisses. Lou still had immensely strong hands, and he could still bend thin iron bars and tear two thirds of a telephone directory down the middle, and she still had the lips that had been desired by so many in the past years. Occasionally she wondered where all those suitors had gone.
The room was small and overburdened with Katy's worldly goods. There were trunks and suitcases, hundreds of smiling dead photographs, faded paper flowers, press cuttings, knick-knacks she had accumulated over the years and two dozen dresses hanging from the picture rail around the walls. These included the wedding dress that she had never worn. She had been ready and eager to marry a nice Jewish financier in Chicago in 1941 when he was called, not to the war which had opened only a week before, but to gaol for frauds that kept him there for the next twenty years. When he came out he said he had thought about it and changed his mind about marriage and so the dress remained unused. She wondered if, perhaps, after all, it was not too late for the dress. Lou would look remarkably fine in a tail coat (she knew he had one because he had mentioned he had kept such a garment from the days of his act). And she knew for sure that the dress would still fit her because every year, on her birthday, she tried it on.
She had bathed in the one bathroom on that floor of the Sunny Gables Hotel where she had lived for the past five years, and had been delayed because, as occasionally happened, one of the other guests, a fat man, had become wedged in the narrow bathtub and needed to be levered out by some of the stronger male residents.
Now she selected a fine lavender dress that swept down her long legs and put a saucy flower in her ear. She could still do a shoulder high kick and she performed several of these, standing facing down the narrow room with the window wide open in case of miscalculations. She sang a few bars of a song, worked up a movement, and then flung the leg spectacularly towards the ceiling one, two, three times. She smiled with satisfaction and then waited for the banging downstairs. It came on schedule, one, two, three, four ill-tempered thumps on
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their ceiling with a rubber-ended walking stick. They always did that when she kicked. In her youth, when she could really kick high, people used to complain from the room above.
Cheerfully she went downstairs and on to the confined balcony in front of the hotel. Several of the inmates were sitting out there staring in the direction of the setting sun as though wondering why and where it was going. She said a bright word to them and two nodded kindly but the others did not take much notice. She was still considered a flapper.
She timed her exit excellently, for as she went out with the paling daylight, Lou the Barbender, uncomfortably resplendent in his tailed suit, appeared on the porch of the Waving Palms Hotel only a few feet away. She smiled and he grinned shyly but they did not speak, and would not do so until they were two blocks away. The rival Nissenbaums appeared a minute later, both having suspicions of the alliance, and confronted each other truculently over the wooden fence that divided their dominions.
'Fraud,' said the Sunny Gables Nissenbaum.
'Skinflint,' replied her sister-in-law.
That was all. They sniffed the South Beach air and, their salvos fired, turned and retreated into their doors. They did it every evening.
Two safe blocks away, Katy held on to Lou's great hand. She sniffed at the warm evening, smiled at the calm palms, and felt that there were possibilities abounding. She allowed her dancing shoes to sound loudly on the sidewalk and did a short, complicated triple step between some ornamental trees. Lou smiled his admiration. She felt very good; like a young girl going to a college ball. She had a strong intuition that something was going to happen to her soon. She could not have realized just how much.
Loose Bruce had wanted to go to the burlesque show, but Ossie had dissuaded him, saying that at the weekly dance in the Community Centre there was always complimentary food and plenty of it and some of the old guys carried whisky flasks in their pockets. They lined up at the door without attracting a great amount
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of interest. Old folk have generally seen everything and one more surprise is not surprising. Bruce towered over the line for the pay booth and Ossie was only just shorter. Behind them among the elderly chatter they heard the girl's voice talking to her grandmother. They turned simultaneously, their heads almost colliding as they twisted inwards. She looked up and regarded the two hopeful faces coolly.
'Wow,' the girl said to the old lady. 'Old folk get younger all the time.'
'Never did see two of them fellows here before,' said the grandmother.
'Maybe they're a cabaret act,' the girl whispered loudly. 'They look kinda strange, like that.'
Bruce and Ossie paid their twenty-five cents each and hung about inside the door.
'Why don't you go to the washroom?' suggested Bruce watching for the girl to enter.
'I never do," replied Ossie coolly. 'The old guys ask you to zip them up.'
They loitered beside a dusty indoor palm until the girl and the old lady came in.
'Hi,' said Bruce with what he believed was a long smile.
'Hi,' said Ossie touching his forehead with what he imagined was a sign of good manners.
'Good evening,' said the girl soberly. She looked superb in a cool blue dress. Her face was lovely but her eyes without encouragement. 'Come on grandma, let's find you a chair," she said briskly.
Bruce and Ossie followed behind as they walked. They watched the graceful loop of the girl's backside alongside the little plodding bumps of the old lady. 'Man,' said Bruce thoughtfully,I su
re don't care for your date.'
'How much does that job of yours pay?' asked Bruce. 'Being a beach guard?'
Ossie picked his teeth carefully. 'About enough,' he drawled. 'And expenses.'
'Expenses! Jesus, how can you get expenses? You can't spend anything. You just sit there on your ass all day looking
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at the goddamn ocean. Christ, you don't move unless Mrs Blum makes a run for it.'
'And bonuses,' continued Ossie. They were sitting on the Community Centre chairs watching the old folk dancing in a large revolving oval, moving as if they were some substance in a slow mixer.
'Now I've heard it all! What kind of bonuses?'
'Ten dollars for a rescue. That's the rate.'
'Ten bucks. Did Mrs Blum rate ten bucks?'
'Sure.'
'Well, what about my fifty per cent? I rescued half of Mrs Blum. The heavy half.'
'Twenty per cent,' offered Ossie easily. 'It's my pitch remember. When I get paid, you get paid. Okay? Two bucks.'
'Cheapskate,' said Loose Bruce. But his face brightened. 'Say, you're real slow man. Why not get a few of the old women to make like they're drowning. Give them a dollar a time. You'd be nine bucks in profit every time! Ten rescues a day would be worth it. Ninety bucks, seven days a week, that makes ...'
'They get suspicious,' Ossie pointed out solemnly. 'The authorities. The guy I took the job from tried that. Got his own folks to be like they were drowning. Come to remember it, his ma really did drown. While he was pulling out his sister, his ma drowned. So it don't work.'
'You've got a negative outlook,' complained Bruce. 'According to you nothing works. Something's got to.'
He looked about him. Again it came to him that he was in an unreal world. The old folks performing their polkas and other odd ancient dances as if some time machine had projected him to a past age. Ossie, who had seen it before, sat munching free sandwiches and drinking sarsparilla, his grey head nodding to the music as if he at least partly understood it. The women heavily outnumbered the men and many ladies danced together, some clutched to each other as if they were in danger of sinking. At that time of life, however, they had abandoned any feminine shyness and soon two plump and beaming sisters advanced upon Bruce and Ossie and demanded that they get to their feet and dance.
That Old Gang Of Mine Page 3
