“You went to a lot of trouble,” Dup says.
“Not really.”
They come to a long low house, a concrete shell abandoned years ago when the money to complete it ran out. Beyond the house a shattered boardwalk leads to a spindly dock built out through the mangroves. “Where we going,” Dup says, “Exactly?”
Cot points out to the water. In the distance a couple of small white-lipped islands among their heaped greenery. Even now he feels like he’s drifting, floating along. I’ve been trying to buy my own head back. Trying, he thinks, to buy back his soul and time and a few curious memories stacked on back shelves, and situations, arrangements, circumstances, old follow-throughs; rushing out to the track to put money on big horses about to break into their future too, carrying baskets of money still sporting their rental tags. I’m going to inflate bags under it and float it to the surface, he says, talking about his soul. But the ghostliness stands with him. I’m on a fade. I’m being rubbed out. He wants everything to be a joke and makes jokes with his cohorts, but nobody laughs much. He walks out on the beach after midnight and stumbles over nomads sleeping in the sand. Perdóneme, he says. Always he knows somebody who can fix things. But he can’t get to them in time. “Circumstances have changed,” the doctor says, the one Albertson made him go to. “Whose?” Cot asks, but the doctor won’t tell him. He hears the wind in the pines, and even the wind, so simple, has a complicated too much to say.
“You’re as suicidal as a bee,” Dup says.
Everybody knows what’s up with Cot but Cot, it appears.
Here and there a coconut palm sticks up like a flagpole. A small boat with a canvas-covered motor is tethered to the dock. This is Sam Seller’s place, a lobster fishing rig he keeps operational this time of year. Cot takes the key from its cubby under the dock and gets into the little boat.
“That ain’t a very likely boat,” Dup says.
Cot thinks of those round boats Indians used on northern lakes. What’re they called? Bull boats.
“I don’t want to ride in that,” Dup says.
“Me either, but it’ll carry us to the stones.”
“Let’s get a bigger boat.”
“Hard to do that without anybody hearing the news.”
Dup rubs his gun against his thigh. He’s had the pistol out all the way from town. He’s a big man with caramel colored hair and sideburns several shades darker. “Let’s go slow,” he says.
“Fine with me.”
“Hold the boat.”
As Dup steps from the short board ladder into the boat Cot pumps the gunwale and tosses him into the water. A trick he’s done a hundred times since he was a boy. No, not that many; he’s no slyboots character. Dup comes up thrashing, gasping, and without his gun. Cot has his pistol out and he keeps it on the big man as he dog-paddles to the dock. Cot follows him back along the trail and then he makes Dup drive the rental car to the courthouse where he turns him over to the sheriff.
“Any witnesses to this, Cot?” the sheriff says.
“The waitresses at Sutler’s saw him put a gun on me. Otherwise it’s just me and my word. But is this the sort of thing you’d expect from me if it wasn’t true? I’m known for my candor.”
With the flat of his hand the sheriff pushes the front of his blond crew cut back. “I’ll lock him up, but you going to have to swear before Judge Mannix.”
“Anytime.” Some soft thing in him now indurate and losing its luster. But everybody knows about that. You can’t see a gangster without hearing about that at least once or twice a day: the dull, inevitable, unenviable stoniness. Yet a softness remains, supple, slowly undulating, a nexus like a jungle bridge flexing in breeze, a worry and substantiation, anchored in coral rock, humanness, spotty and reeking, still apparent—that’s another way of putting it—Hey, Sheriff, don’t you know me?
He calls Marcella on her cell; it turns out she’s in the courthouse and looking for somebody to have lunch with. They drive in her car to the Rumba Room and have snapper salad and iced tea. From the main room they can see the lagoon, sparkling and winking in the bright sunlight. Out on the beach European tourists in flimsy bathing suits lie in the sun as if shot. The Americans are all fat but energetic; whatever’s for rent they rent: paddleboats, boogie boards, huge transparent spheres you get inside of and walk across the waves with, contraptions that leave them stalled in the lagoon making signals for rescue. All the picnic tables have been commandeered by the homeless who gabble and sputter, laughing with a sound as if their throats are being ripped out. At a card table in the shade, Hollis March, the writer, scribbles furiously in his notebook. After his stroke he no longer makes sense, but that hasn’t stopped him. Marcella wants to know what the fracas with Dup was about, but Cot’s cagy.
“Where’d you hear about it?”
“Buster Goins was filling me in on it as it happened.”
“The deputy? I was being observed?”
“Somebody’s always watching.”
“I owed him money. Or I owed his boss money.”
“Doesn’t he work for Albertson?”
“Does he?”
“I see.”
“Yeah. What was the name of that inspector?”
“Pollack.”
“Like the painter.”
“And the fish.”
“You want to get married?”
“Once is enough for me, thanks.”
He rubs the back of her hand with his knuckles. She smiles at him, her old enigmatic smile that isn’t so enigmatic anymore. Her face is being recultivated by time.
“I been thinking about farming,” he says.
“You would.”
It’s as if there’s now a skin between them, something flimsy but regenerating whenever it’s torn and too much trouble to keep trying to rip through.
“You want to duck over here into this little botanical garden and cut us off a piece?”
“I love your way with words. I can’t get enough of it.”
“Do you?”
“I’m vice president of the garden club.”
“Then you probably know the nooks.”
“None on this island.”
When they were children the road just outside the Rumba Room had been a dusty half-paved track running through scrub past a scoured and depleted beach, only a whistle-stop among beaches, of the kind that once you’re away from you try not to develop a wistful affection for, now sandy and planted with palms and sea grass.
“I got the fidgets,” he says.
“I first noticed that when you were twelve.”
“Yes. Up till then I was steady as a rock.”
“Let’s stop bantering.”
“All right.”
He bends down and kisses the back of her hand. Each touch lets loose a mental fibrillation and each one’s an excitable Stag-O-Lee ready to knife whatever gets in its way. Or it used to be like that. Now everything between them smells musty, it’s stacked haphazardly, it’s like old clothes and habits and partial caps and somebody sitting on the side of the bed paring his toenails with a penknife. He can’t keep thoughts like these out of his head. It’s been going on for a while—since he got back—since she got back (from what place and arrangement of circumstance?). “You were—” he says.
“When I’m around you,” she says, “people can tell what I’m thinking.”
He warms, bristles, falters, and says nothing.
They sit just out of the sunlight watching some tourists in Indonesian wrap-around skirts playing volleyball. Down the way a man in very white skin makes gestures at the ocean. Carleton Jiggs who runs the little refreshment stand out in the sunlight looks their way. Cot nods at him, but Carleton doesn’t see him or does and won’t acknowledge.
“I feel as if I am going crazy,” she says.
“I know. It’s the same for me.”
They’ve broken up half a dozen times, once for four years. That hiatus ended one afternoon when they ran into each other at a fruit stan
d up the Keys where Cot was buying a basket of Georgia peaches. She’d come up to him from behind some casuarina trees and without a word exchanged they’d walked away down a dusty white road and made love under the raised first floor of a beach cottage. They hadn’t had to fight to get out and they didn’t have to fight to get back in. “It’s like we got vaporized and then reconstituted,” he’d said. “We’re just mercilessly hopeful,” she’d said. They’d sat a long time on the little beach behind the cottage looking out at the ocean, not speaking. It seemed that they were the absentee landlords of a great property, an inexplicable vastness.
“I’ve got to go,” she says.
He walks her out and pulls his bike out of the back of the Range Rover. “Meet me tonight,” he says.
“All right.”
“At Smathers. Across from where they dump the sea grass.”
He doesn’t look back as he pedals away under the poinciana trees, he never looks back—or says he doesn’t but usually does—so can’t see her glance at him and turn quickly away and touch the face of her phone, look at it for a second and put it to her ear.
He spends most of the afternoon with his mother around the corner from the house, at the laundromat. They sit on folding chairs out front listening to Jazz Hour on WCCL in Miami. Jackie has his sketchbook and offers to do portraits of passing tourists for ten dollars per. He rarely gets anybody to pay for what he comes up with. A few mercy bucks, a few insults. Ella writes in her notebook. A journal, she says, of her predicament. “Day 147 Under the House,” she scribbles at the top of the page, a number not entirely accurate. She scribbles rapidly and then stops, goes back and crosses everything out, taking care not to make the words unreadable.
Cot wants to discuss the gem situation with his mother and Jackie, but he puts this off a little while because he doesn’t want to have to explain anything.
He calls his Business buddy Tommy, his pal, on the phone he bought out at the airport, but Tommy says he doesn’t know what’s happening. “I heard Dup is in jail,” he says. “A’s not too pleased about that.”
“Is Spane headed down this way?”
“I thought Spane was in Tampa.”
Albertson has a cigar operation in Tampa, and Spane sometimes goes up there to smooth out problems.
“We’re sitting ducks down here,” Cot says. He’s having this conversation later as he sits in the Pumper family’s bower swing in their garden at the corner of Southard and Fiddler, hidden by foliage he can see through to the street. Tiny anole lizards sporting slick red cravats stare both ways from nearby branches.
“Ducks a’sittin’,” Tommy says.
“That’s it.” Out in the street Mrs. Arey Bonita pedals her three-wheel bike along. It’s piled with groceries. Among them her little boy Harrell sits singing his song, “O Beautiful for Specious Skies.”
“I’m going to head down to St. Thomas,” Cot says.
“Don’t tell me.”
“Or I might run back up the Keys. Or slip a boat out to Mexico. Maybe I’ll take the ferry up to Fort Myers and scoot up into the contiguous states.”
“I don’t want to know.”
Cot calls Albertson, but Albertson doesn’t answer. He uses an airport phone and wonders if it’s unregistered, wonders if Albertson is sitting in his bedroom staring at the number on his screen wondering who could be calling him on his private line. Pick up, Gus, slap yourself in the face and pick up. But he doesn’t. And it’s as if the room is buzzing with wasps, as if he’s in a huge warehouse-like space but all around him a buzzing of alert insects, contrivance of dream and some kind of hurtness he can’t describe—but he ignores this and concentrates on the folks sitting on a second-floor balcony across the street. He can hear what they’re saying. They’re talking about God and how God, as they see him—as one of them sees him—is like a foolish waiter or a boat salesman on a spree, and another voice says you goon and then laughter breaks out. A breeze keeps turning over the leaves of an aurelia bush on the corner, exposing their blood-red undersides and flipping them back.
About eight he rides his bike over to the First Baptist church and waits outside the fellowship hall for Ordell to come out of his deacons’ meeting. “Listen,” he says when Ordell, burnished and newly slim, comes out of the front door lighting a cigarette. “I was wondering if you could provide a little police protection for my mother.”
“Who’s after her?” Ordell looks him straight in the eye. It’s something he does with everybody. Cot knows, as everybody does, that it’s just a ploy or attempted saving grace or a tic or something he does simply to divert attention from how nervous he is.
“Boys from Miami.”
“I ought to lock you up.”
“You did that already, thanks. Hey, Franklin.”
Franklin Purl, scion of Purl Auto Repair owner Marty Purl, gives him a wink and a passing nod of his curly red head. “I thought Franklin had drunk himself to death by now.”
“Naw. He’s doing very well since he went to AA. Been sober over two years.”
“Everywhere I look people are pulling themselves together.”
“After a certain age it’s either that or the undertaker.”
The prosecutor stretches his arm out in the way he does when he’s nervous, making and releasing a fist.
“What’s bugging you?” Cot says.
“Marcella’s pissed at me.”
“That all it is?”
“What? She left this morning and she said she wasn’t coming back home. You know where she is?”
“She didn’t say anything to me.” He steps back, as if to give this news room. The freshening breeze edges along in the big camphor tree by the church schoolyard, looking for something it hadn’t found yet.
“You brought trouble.”
“I know.”
“You always do.”
“Not always.”
“I’ll see if I can get them to keep an eye on your mother’s place.”
“I really do appreciate it.”
“You don’t know where Marcella is?”
“I haven’t seen her.”
He pedals over to her family house on Monitor Street, the old coral stone mansion once the biggest and fanciest house south of Miami, if not by much. It has double galleries around all four squared sides. The galleries, and especially the big overhanging roof, make the house look much larger than it actually is. Her mother and two of her sisters still live in it, wandering around the rooms hooting and waving scarves at bugs and ghosts. Marcella’s up on the second-floor gallery shooting at bats with a pellet gun. Cot spits into a ficus bush as he passes. The spittle catches and hangs like a star in the bush’s firmament. “That’ll get you arrested,” he calls from the big yard.
“Home defense. Get on up here.”
Her voice is soft and lilting. One day we will be old and skinny and talk in squeaks and yips about silly things. Was it Virgil said that? Anyway now he won’t have to stand around on Smathers’s smelly beach waiting for her tonight.
When he gets up there she’s sitting on the edge of a chaise with her forearms propped on the gallery rail. The gun is balanced on the rail too. Her older sister, square-bodied and defeated, edges away around the gallery corner. “Hey, Mindy,” Cot says.
“Don’t tell me anything about it,” Mindy says and looks back with a mixed startled and risible look. She has always thought him a ridiculous character, but then so have most folks. The difference is she seems to like him that way.
“Mindy’s been keeping score,” Marcella says. From where he stands, her face, foreshortened into heaviness, looks like a man’s, a sporting and lively man’s.
“I can’t believe you can hit a bat.”
“Look down on the lawn.”
In the dark on the lighter lawn lie black items like small balled rags. Maybe they’re bats.
“So you’re off Ordell?”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“I wouldn’t either.”
/>
“How’s your mother.”
“Still pretty hard on life.”
“I asked her to come over here to stay but she wouldn’t.”
“Nobody likes a scold.”
“Shut up with that.”
“Except me.”
They walk down to Dell’s and get a couple of canned iced teas. Moths loop and waver in the big capped light over the front door of the store. Down the street the old ice plant that’s been converted to a storage warehouse looms. A rooster feebly crows; it sounds exhausted, depressed. Houses poke out of tall bushes like outposts in a jungle. Cot thinks he sees somebody, some dark shape, duck in among the bamboo behind the old Friedlander place—not thinks, does. Whoever it is has the size and shape, the shunted able directed movement of a no-good. “I got to go,” he says.
“Oh stay the night.”
“I have to check on something for Mama.”
He takes off down the street. He doesn’t look directly at it but he has the place the shape slipped through locked in his mind. He cuts in under a big grapefruit tree beside the old Cooper house, now broken up into apartments and stops under the outdoor stairway and listens: no sound, nothing unusual. He has his pistol out. A nearby radio softly plays Herbie Hancock’s “Testament of a Sinner.” A crackling sound comes from the ficus hedge separating the Cooper place from the house next door. Cot waits. He feels like a ghost haunting a house where the slightest weight, the slightest lean toward corporeality, will break him through into sordid life. A shape slips out from behind a big heaped bush and tracks across the lawn right by him. As it passes Cot steps out and hits the shape hard behind the ear with the butt of his gun. Down the shape goes in a pile. It’s Bert Lewis, an operator Albertson employs for special jobs, out cold. Without hesitating, Cot pulls the man’s clothes off, drags him around to the street and leaves him attached to the lamppost with the handcuffs he took off Dup. Then he walks back to the store, uses the pay phone to call the police station to tell them a naked man is passed out in the middle of the 800 block of Retention Street. He walks back to Marcella’s and rejoins her on the upper gallery. She’s still drinking her iced tea.
Men in Miami Hotels Page 4
