Men in Miami Hotels

by Charlie Smith

  He has half stood up to talk and then sunk back down on the lounger, an orange plastic affair, but now he leaps bent over to his feet, articulating a small series of gyrations and spins, all in slow motion like an old basketball player driving through a transfixed crowd to the basket; it’s pitiful to see, sad, sure, but Cot’s thinking as he watches that it’s a pure act of true love for such a tall man to live under four-foot ceilings. “I got to go,” Jackie says.

  “You want to ride up to Summerford with me?”

  Jackie doesn’t want to, but he says he will. They stop at the Bangladeshi’s for Jackie to run in and get a beer. Cot gets out and peers into one of the art papers he pulls from a box at the curb. Delphine Curtis has won another beauty prize, in her forties still racking them up. Bill Butler is running something called the Improvisational Fisherman’s Crew. Dottie Harris heads up the Mosquito Control that, so an article says, is being overrun by criticism of their handling of the latest dengue fever crisis. All the old tropical diseases are back. You don’t need to go to Africa anymore to catch them. He wonders where Jackie is. The Bangladeshi, a new man, short, in heavy frame glasses, says he’s just stepped out the back. Cot finds him sitting on a crate drinking his beer.

  “I can’t go,” he says. His eyes are baffled, a man looking for the key to the lamentation closet.

  “That’s all right, bro.”

  He drives through the morning traffic that’s still heavy, past the Naval air station and all the way to Big Coppitt. Jets pour out of the Navy confines, rising into the cloudless south. A nervousness is in him. He calls Tommy again but he can’t get him. Maybe he’s sitting on his little hotel balcony watching the tankers out in the roads waiting for their turn to enter Government Cut. He tries Ordell again, but Ordell isn’t answering. Two boys in cut-off jeans and dusty-looking T-shirts wait at the turning beyond the Snapper Channel bridge for a bus. They say sure they wouldn’t mind earning twenty bucks. Apiece? Yeah. Cot buys a warmed-up pizza at Harry’s. He drives to Cuthbert and turns west on the old road that runs through the pine woods.

  He parks down the road from the Sea Farm in some bushes and walks up through the woods. The farm’s a former fishing camp that became a county park and then, during the recession, went back to being a camp, this time for general touristic purposes. It has ten solidly built pineboard cabins in side-by-side semicircles behind a double set of docks. Cot sends the boys to deliver the pizza. They get the number from a cabin that has OFFICE painted on a small wooden sign by the door. An old woman in shorts and a flowery halter gives it to them. One of the boys, tall and slope-shouldered, indicates with his head where the cabin is and the two of them stroll down to it, the shorter boy carrying the pizza box on his fingertips like a waiter. Cot follows after, sneaking along behind the cabins. The bay is still as glass, only a few pelicans, just returned from their winter roosts in South America, sailing low over the water. One of the pelicans rises into the air and drops, suddenly, as if its strings have been cut, plunges headfirst into the drink—thunk!—and comes up with nothing. Unperturbed, it climbs into the air and rows off toward the west. Cot comes sneaking along the cabin row. Big ficus bushes separate the cabins from one another. A man he only knows by sight sits out on the back deck of the one they are headed to. Cot gets close and waits until he hears the boys knock on the front door. The man, heavy with thick hairless forearms, turns his head and gets up. As he does Cot swings onto the deck and before the man can react gets a gun on him. The man makes a face, as if he smells something unpleasant. Cot puts a finger to his mouth. He smiles and comes close to the man who’s looking steadily at him out of black, intelligent eyes. Cot walks the man through the sliding glass back doors into a combination kitchen and living room that has a door off to the side. A skinny man in a purple stained shirt is watching a boy with long peroxided blond hair deal with the pizza. Nobody else is in the room. The skinny man turns, dragging a pistol out of a shoulder holster, and Cot shoots him. As the man crumples the blond boy sags and goes to his knees, the pizza sliding out of his hands to the floor. Cot calls for Marcella.

  “They have us locked up in here.”

  “Anybody with you?”

  “I’m here,” Willie Rollins says. “Fully armed.”

  “Shit, Willie. Come on out.”

  “No thanks.”

  The pizza boys have hightailed it.

  A momentary paralysis, stasis, stagnation like cloud shadow stalled upon the surface of an inlet, comes over them. Time falls unchallenged through ten thousand years of struggle and stubbornness. The heavyset man grins savagely at him. I should ask him to dance. I should ask how his mother is. She probably died in a terrible way and it hurts to think about it. Cot whips the pistol across his face. The man goes down backwards and hits his head on the floor. The fall makes a big noise, slightly crackling, as if his head has broken wood. The floor is pale blue tile. Maybe laid over wood, Cot thinks.

  “Y’all fighting?” Willie calls.

  “Dancing,” Cot says.

  “Who’d you shoot? It better not be Brooks. Brooks!” Willie cries. Brooks is the blond boy, gunless it looks like, Willie’s brother from Okeechobee, Cot recognizes him, little birdie flown down to the Keys, shivering now.

  “I’ll trade you Brooks for the crew in there.”

  “You doing all right, Brooks?” Willie says.

  “I’m fine,” Brooks says smiling foolishly, “as long as he don’t slap me with his pistol.”

  “ ‘D’jou hit him?” Willie says.

  “That was Coover stubbing his toe.”

  “Let me think a minute,” Willie says.

  “You faithless shit,” Brooks says in a loud reedy voice. “Come the damn on.”

  Another moment of near quiet, only the damp complaining of gulls out over the water, the sound of Brooks’s toe scuffing at the pizza box on the floor. We are surrounded by an ancient world and all of time. “Mind if I dig out a slice?” Brooks says.

  Cot watches him scoop a slice, fold it in half and start to eat.

  “Everybody okay in there?” Cot says.

  “I’m still thinking,” Willie says.

  “I mean my party.”

  “We’re still healthy,” Marcella says.

  “You okay, Mama?”

  “Pretty nearly,” his mother says in a quiet, firm voice. She has a faint, only slightly Cuban accent, developed, she says, in honor of his father, a memorial, or homage, sustained, more or less, since his early childhood. Sometimes in dreams as a child he remembered her speaking in another accent, rich and sea-blown, an island tone, clement and knowing, sun deepened. It sounded good on her, Cot thinks, the dream accent, overtaken suddenly by a dense and knowing nostalgia, as if a truth has come clear though it has not, tears springing to his eyes.

  “He’s out here crying,” Brooks, the blond, says.

  “You got scorpion tendencies,” Cot says and looks the boy in the face. A twitch of anger. He could crack him across the skull too.

  The boy sees this and chokes on a mouthful of pizza. He tries to get the dough out of his throat but can’t, smothering.

  “You all right?” Willie calls. Maybe he knows even the sound of his brother choking. As Cot crosses the room, stepping over the still out-for-the-count figure of Coover Miller, he wonders about the sort of closeness that could make that possible. Is it what we’re supposed to yearn for, tightness like that? Albertson runs the Harvard of gangs, he once said to Marcella, meaning, he tried to get across to her after she slapped him, a home, a refuge, a querencia, but she snorted in the way she did and sneered, saying it was not a home he wanted but a pinnacle.

  “I got you, buddy,” he says to the blond boy who’s bent double on his knees gagging and trying futilely to hit himself on the back. Cot straightens him up, wraps his arms around him from behind and squeezes. A muffled, half croupy sound. Cot squeezes again, harder. Crush. The dough, a surprisingly small wad, ejects from his mouth in a pretty arc and hits the baseboard at the bo
ttom of the wall. The boy lurches to his feet and away, and stands, bent over again, puking.

  “What’d you do?” Willie says, his voice easing down a register.

  “Pizza went down the wrong way.”

  “Y’all got pizza?”

  In another minute Willie comes out with his pistol at his side. He flips the gun and slides it across the floor at Cot. It catches on a tile, spins, and comes to rest against the leg of a chair. Cot makes him pick it up and drop it out the front window.

  “I never had much confidence in none of this anyway,” Willie says smiling amiably.

  They head down the Overseas Highway to Jimmy Lawrence’s airport on Sunset Key. Jimmy, so says his wife, a short freckle-faced woman, is down at the dock. “The other dock,” she calls when Cot starts toward the plane, tied up at a short square platform bobbing just the other side of a stand of casuarina trees. He walks down the little coral path and finds Jimmy standing among tick runner vines casting a line in—after grunts, he says. He says he doesn’t know if he will ever want to go flying again. Jimmy gets that way. It usually isn’t difficult to make him change his mind, but this time a wariness, a sense of the futile and ineffective, has settled on him. It’s part of life, Cot thinks, to from time to time feel betrayed by your heart’s delight. But Jimmy looks off from Cot in a lying way, his gaze off-loading misery. He’s been reached. “I’ll give you a gemstone when I get my stash back.”

  “I can’t do business on promises. Especially with the shape I’m in.”

  “That how you get when you cross-run your friends.”

  “Shit, Cot.”

  “I got to carry my mother up to the mainland.”

  “I just don’t feel like it.”

  Cot doesn’t want to do it, but he doesn’t think he has a choice. “Jimmy,” he says, “I could put a gun on you—and maybe I should, you weasel—”

  “Cot, I got to live—”

  “Okay—or I could beat you. Or I could tell Doris about that time up in Homestead. But I won’t.”

  Jimmy looks out at the bay snapping and clicking with light under a fresh breeze, little rips showing the white underneath. The islands like beginners too small to make much of themselves lie shaggy with green life in the stupefying sun. “You don’t even have to mention such a thing,” he says.

  “I know and I’m sorry.”

  “It really bothers me that you would.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t really cut it.”

  “The Christian thing would be to forgive me.”

  “Now you’re trying to use the church against me. Nothing after that but a gun.” Jimmy’s puffed up now and high on his righteousness. “It doesn’t become you, Cot.”

  Cot feels latches and loosened hinges give, just slightly. “I need your help here.”

  Jimmy lets a moment of silence fume up between them. The jointed needles of the casuarinas whistle softly in the background’s breeze. “Okay.”

  Jackie—who is again a member of the crew—who has thrown up out the window on the ride up from KW—helps Jimmy gas up and generally prepare the plane. He isn’t coming, he says, and he is both sad and glad about it. “I can’t be of any real help,” he says. “I want to make that clear from the beginning.”

  “You’ve been awfully good company and I’m sure grateful for that,” Ella says.

  Marcella says she isn’t coming either.

  “Well, damnation, May.”

  “I’m an officer of the court,” she says, ducking her head as she speaks. “I can’t be riding around the skies with a fugitive.”

  “I just saved you from the damn fugitives.”

  She’s pulling Coca Colas out of a big ice chest as she speaks—ice slivers crusted to her hands, fingers wet so they gleam in the tropic light—and carries on a conversation with Doris who wants to know where she does her shopping when she goes up to Miami. Cot’s uncomfortable talking to her with Doris there. “Let’s walk outside,” he says.

  “That won’t change anything.”

  He knows she’s scared of flying, especially scared of flying in planes where she knows the pilot. I picture his inadequacies, she once said to him.

  “I think I can get the stones back.”

  “Those emeralds? What did you want with them in the first place?”

  “I thought I told you.” The wind skips across the tops of some mangroves up the shore, picking at leaves and letting them go. She’s dressed in black rodeo clothes with bits of orange highlights here and there like a cowgirl villainess.

  “You didn’t tell me anything that I can remember.”

  “I wanted to pay Mama’s house out of hock to the city. I still plan to do it.”

  “If you didn’t give all your money away at the horse races you’d have a little.”

  “I know that already. I don’t have to be shamed by you to know it.”

  “I’m not the one shaming you.”

  He wishes his whole life could simply stop—so he could sneak around behind it, work on it and if he couldn’t fix it escape out the back. “My appetite,” he says as old desires crawl on his skin, spiral up from the inside, circle his heart like an abashed tribe that’s lost everything, and he can’t remember what he wanted to say.

  “Appetite?”

  “Agreed. Yeah. Foolishness. I still need you to come with me. And I expect—I’m sorry, sweetie—I expect Albertson’ll look at you as a part of all this.”

  She squinches up her face in aggravation, in sadness, in several other load-bearing ways, but says only, “Yes, I guess so. Maybe so.” She looks out at the bay where the breeze is chopping bits of light off the wave tops. “I keep meaning to say good-bye to you, but I forget.”

  He laughs his crackly, off-key laugh, his jokey, shamed laugh.

  She says “I wasn’t saying it to be funny,” and turns away leaving the words like tiny signals or remnants cast aside as one walks off down a path. He can tell something else is on her mind, maybe Ordell, maybe the whole rattled beadbasket of her life, the one with him. “All right,” he says, knowing anyway—by osmosis, telepathy, by spirit consciousness or the cast of her eyes, by her face and the movements of her body, by guesswork or deduction, by the tiny, loosely shaped stillness in her—that she’s already agreed.

  The pilot—wearing a Cincinnati baseball cap and rally gloves—hurries everybody along as if it’s been his project from the start, which is his way. Cot and Jackie haul a small ice chest and some clothes stuffed in plastic bags and put them on the plane. Jimmy skips along behind jotting a flight plan in his little blue book as he comes. “Where we going?” he calls to Cot who stands on the dock looking vaguely out at the water.

  “Anywhere you like—no, how about Madeira, or Joe Bay?”

  “Okay, I got you. But where are we going? Just so I’ll know. We going to the mainland, or just up the islands?”

  “The mainland. West side.” Naples, he thinks—where they can catch a bus up to Fort Myers—but he’s feeling vague, feeble, and doesn’t want to say. “We need to get there in a hurry, if you don’t mind.”

  And sure enough Marcella comes along too, and Jackie who wouldn’t desert his mother, and his mother who has her own reasons; they troop up the steps, enter the cabin, and settle in.

  As the plane lifts smoothly off the light chop, the sound of the rushing water ending as if they have flown off the edge of the world, he sees from his seat in the copilot’s chair a boat veer out from behind a small, tousled island in the bay. They’re going to be too late, he thinks, but he doesn’t say anything. The plane rises, climbing steadily as the little white boat comes on at high speed. A man gets up in the bow and raises a small machine gun. “Better turn,” Cot says.

  “What’s that?” Jimmy says looking up from the dials in front of him. “You know them?”

  “Just barely.”

  As the plane comes suddenly upon them the man in the bow opens up with the machine gun. A string of holes smack through th
e bottom of the plane and into the cabin. One of the bullets catches Jimmy under the chin. He sits back in his chair with his eyes suddenly red and bulging in his head, still pulling on the wheel. Cot can see he’s dead. The plane starts to slip to the right but Cot straightens it out with his wheel and continues with the take-off, already almost complete. He calls out, a sudden grief saturating his voice, asking if anybody’s hurt. The answer comes back in bleats and shouts that they are all right. He glances back at Marcella; she’s gnawing at the inside of her left cheek, looking out the window, but not down, just out.

  They are up high by now, rising into the clear blue sky. Behind them the man with the gun stands in the boat watching them go. There’s blood on Jimmy’s chin and dribbled down the front of his white shirt, but not much. Marcella gets up and squats behind them. “Ah, Cot, look at Jimmy.” She sinks back but immediately reappears, her head and shoulders beside him. “Poor oh nos,” she says in a thin, whistling voice. She looks past Cot’s face. “Can you fly this?”

  “Sure. Sure.” Thinking: about half.

  “I know all your shortcomings. I don’t even have to imagine them.”

  “Don’t fall to pieces.”

  “I’m not.”

  He can get them to the mainland—he figures he can—well enough. He tests the pedals and the plane slides sideways, to the left. “It’s kind of loose,” he says.

  Marcella disappears and comes back with a beach towel she folds up partially under Jimmy’s head against the side window and laps over his head. The towel is one with a big color map of Florida printed on it.

  “Now we won’t lose our way,” he says, but she doesn’t get it and he waves the words off.

  Ella comes up and looks at the situation. She smiles at her son, there isn’t much else to do. “We’re okay back here,” she says, meaning she and Jackie who’s crying mutely into a large blue bandana. He raises his head. “I knew I never should have left home.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Ella says.

  Cot turns the wheel to the right, pressing slightly on the left pedal as he pulls back a little on the throttle. He’s scared but as he pets his fright he senses a clear space opening inside him. He returns the wheel to a steady position and holds his feet quiet on the pedals. The plane levels out and then they are flying north toward the Florida coast. They have a hundred-mile-wide stretch of coast to set as their mark so they should be able to grope their way to it all right. Down in Colombia he has done a little cub flying—taking off, setting down under Johnny Cutler’s steady hand, handling the stick in clear weather—a piecemeal, jokey apprenticeship, only a pastime with him, it’ll have to serve. His hands are shaking so the plane jigs slightly, and he forces his hands to stop and then he’s calm again or half calm and even though he really wants to bring the plane down low enough so he can jump out he makes himself sit steady, feeling the panic heaving and gushing under him, and smiles.