I take care of Chavez for Mr. Vee and come home to stale tangled sheets. Jonda’s been gone nine days.
I’m not whining. Last night in the parking lot of the mall a swami with blond dreadlocks treated us to a levitation. We spied him on the roof of a discount clothing store, nudging his flying mat into liftoff position. We were the usual tourists and weirdos and murderous cubanos. First he played his sinuses OM-OOM-OOMPAH-OOM, then he pushed off from the roof in the lotus position. His bare feet sprouted like orchids from his knees. We watched him wheel and flutter for maybe two or three minutes before the cops pulled up and caught him in a safety net.
They took him away in handcuffs. Who knows how many killers and felons and honest nut cases watched it and politely went back to their cars? I love Miami.
This morning I lean on Mr. Vee’s doorbell. I need money. Auguste, the bouncer he picked up in the back streets of Montreal, squeezes my windbreaker before letting me in.
I suck in my gut and make the palm trees on my shirt ripple. “You’re blonder than you were. Blond’s definitely your color.”
“Don’t start with me, Marshall,” he says. He helps himself to a mint from a fancy glass bowl on the coffee table.
Mr. Vee sidles into the room; he’s one hundred and seventy-five pounds of jiggling paranoia.
“You look like hell, Marshall,” is the first thing he says.
“I could say the same to you, Haysoos,” I say.
His face turns mean. I scoop up a mint and flip it like a quarter.
“The last job caused me some embarrassment,” he says.
My job, I try to remind him, is to show up at a time and place of his choosing and perform a simple operation. I’m the gunship Mr. Vee calls in. He pinpoints the target, I attempt to neutralize it. It’s all a matter of instrumentation and precise coordinates. With more surveillance, a longer lead time, a neutral setting, mishaps can be minimized. But not on the money Mr. Vee pays. He’s itchy and impulsive; he wants a quick hit, publicity, and some sort of ego boost. I served under second looies just like him, and sooner or later most of them got blown away, after losing half their men.
The story was, Chavez had been sampling too much of Mr. Vee’s product line. He was, as a result, inoperative with women. He lived in a little green house in a postwar development on the fringes of Liberty City, a step up, in some minds, from a trailer park. By all indications, he should have been alone. I get a little sick when wives and kids are involved, old folks, neighbors, repairmen—I’m not a monster, except when I’m being careful.
I gained entry through a window—thank God for cheap air conditioners. First surprise: he wasn’t alone. I could hear that drug-deep double-breathing. Even in the dark before I open a door, I can tell a woman from a man, middle age from adolescence, a sleeping Cuban from a sleeping American. They were entwined; it looked like at long last love for poor old Chavez. She might have been fourteen, brassy-haired with wide black roots, baby-fat-bodied with a pinched, Appalachian face. I did what I was paid for; I eliminated the primary target and left no traces. Doc Healy used to teach us: torch the whole hut and make sure you get the kids, the grannies, cringing on the sleeping mat—or else you’ll meet them on the trail with fire in their eyes.
Truth be told, I was never much of a marksman. My game is getting close, working the body, where accuracy doesn’t count for much. We’re the guys who survived that war.
The carnage at Chavez’s cost me, too. You get a reputation, especially if young women are involved. You don’t look so good anymore to sweatier clients.
I lean over and flick an imaginary fruit fly off Haysoos Velásquez’s shiny lapel. Auguste twitches.
“What did you do that for?” he shrieks.
“I could get you deported real easy.” I smile. I want him to know that for all his flash and jangle and elocution lessons so he won’t go around like an underworld Ricky Ricardo, to me he’s just another boat person. “You got something good for me today?”
A laugh leaks out of him. “You’re so burned out, Marshall, you couldn’t fuck a whore.” He extracts limp bills from a safe. Two thousand to blow town for a while, till it cools.
“Gracias, amigo.” At least this month the trailer’s safe, if not the car. Which leaves me free to hotwire a newer model.
Where did America go? I want to know. Down the rabbit hole, Doc Healy used to say. Alice knows, but she took it with her. Hard to know which one’s the Wonderland. Back when me and my buddies were barricading the front door, who left the back door open?
And just look at what Alice left behind.
She left behind a pastel house, lime-sherbet color, a little south and a little west of Miami, with sprinklers batting water across a yard the size of a badminton court. In the back bedroom there’s a dripping old air conditioner. The window barely closes over it. It’s an old development, they don’t have outside security, wire fences, patrol dogs. It’s a retirement bungalow like they used to advertise in the comic pages of the Sunday papers. No one was around in those days to warn the old folks that the lots hadn’t quite surfaced from the slime, and the soil was too salty to take a planting. And twenty years later there’d still be that odor—gamey, fishy, sour rot—of a tropical city on unrinsed water, where the blue air shimmers with diesel fumes and the gray water thickens like syrup from saturated waste.
Chavez, stewing in his juices.
And when your mammy and pappy die off and it’s time to sell off the lime-sherbet bungalow, who’s there to buy it? A nice big friendly greaser like Mr. Chavez.
Twenty years ago I missed the meaning of things around me. I was seventeen years old, in Heidelberg, Germany, about to be shipped out to Vietnam. We had guys on the base selling passages to Sweden. And I had a weekend pass and a free flight to London. Held them in my hand: Sweden forever, or a weekend pass. Wise up, kid, choose life, whispered the cook, a twenty-year lifer with a quarter million stashed in Arizona. Seventeen years old and guys are offering me life or death, only I didn’t see it then.
When you’re a teenage buckaroo from Ocala, Florida, in London for the first time, where do you go? I went to the London Zoo. Okay, so I was a kid checking out the snakes and gators of my childhood. You learn to love a languid, ugly target.
I found myself in front of the reticulated python. This was one huge serpent. It squeezed out jaguars and crocodiles like dishrags. It was twenty-eight feet long and as thick as my waist, with a snout as long and wide as a croc’s. The scale of the thing was beyond impressive, beyond incredible. If you ever want to feel helpless or see what the odds look like when they’re stacked against you, imagine the embrace of the reticulated python. The tip of its tail at the far end of the concrete pool could have been in a different county. Its head was out of water, resting on the tub’s front edge. The head is what got me, that broad, patient, intelligent face, those eyes brown and passionless as all of Vietnam.
Dead rabbits were plowed in a corner. I felt nothing for the bunnies.
Then I noticed the snakeshit. Python turds, dozens of turds, light as cork and thick as a tree, riding high in the water. Once you’d seen them, you couldn’t help thinking you’d smelled them all along. That’s what I mean about Florida, about all the hot-water ports like Bangkok, Manila and Bombay, living on water where the shit’s so thick it’s a kind of cash crop.
Behind me, one of those frosty British matrons whispered to her husband, “I didn’t know they did such things!”
“Believe it, Queenie,” I said.
That snakeshit—all that coiled power—stays with me, always. That’s what happened to us in the paddyfields. We drowned in our shit. An inscrutable humanoid python sleeping on a bed of turds: that’s what I never want to be.
So I keep two things in mind nowadays. First, Florida was built for your pappy and grammie. I remember them, I was a kid here, I remember the good Florida when only the pioneers came down and it was considered too hot and wet and buggy to ever come to much. I knew your pappy and
grammie, I mowed their lawn, trimmed their hedges, washed their cars. I toted their golf bags. Nice people—they deserved a few years of golf, a garden to show off when their kids came down to visit, a white car that justified its extravagant air conditioning and never seemed to get dirty. That’s the first thing about Florida; the nice thing. The second is this: Florida is run by locusts and behind them are sharks and even pythons and they’ve pretty well chewed up your mom and pop and all the other lawn bowlers and blue-haired ladies. On the outside, life goes on in Florida courtesy of middlemen who bring in things that people are willing to pay a premium to obtain.
Acapulco, Tijuana, Freeport, Miami—it doesn’t matter where the pimping happens. Mr. Vee in his nostalgic moments tells me Havana used to be like that, a city of touts and pimps—the fat young men in sunglasses parked at a corner in an idling Buick, waiting for a payoff, a delivery, a contact. Havana has shifted its corporate headquarters. Beirut has come west. And now, it’s Miami that gives me warm memories of always-Christmas Saigon.
It’s life in the procurement belt, between those lines of tropical latitudes, where the world shops for its illicit goods and dumps its surplus parts, where it prefers to fight its wars, and once you’ve settled into its give and take, you find it’s impossible to live anywhere else. It’s the coke-and-caffeine jangle of being seventeen and readier to kill than be killed and to know that Job One is to secure your objective and after that it’s unsupervised play till the next order comes down.
In this mood, and in a Civic newly liberated from a protesting coed, I am heading west out of Miami, thinking first of driving up to Pensacola when I am sides wiped off the highway. Two men get in the Civic. They sit on either side of me and light up cigarettes.
“Someone say something,” I finally say.
They riffle through the papers in the glove compartment. They quickly surmise that my name is not Mindy Robles. “We know all about this morning. Assault. Grand theft auto.”
“Let’s talk,” I say.
I wait for the rough stuff. When it comes, it’s an armlock on the throat that cuts air supply. When they let me speak, I cut a deal. They spot me for a vet; we exchange some dates, names, firefights. Turns out they didn’t like Mindy Robles, didn’t appreciate the pressure her old man tried to put on the police department. They look at our names—Robles and Marshall—and I can read their minds. We’re in some of these things together and no one’s linked me to Chavez—these guys are small time, auto-detail. They keep the car. They filch a wad of Mr. Vee’s bills, the wad I’d stuffed into my wallet. They don’t know there’s another wad of Mr. Vee’s money in a secret place. And fifty bucks in my boots.
Instead of an air-conditioned nighttime run up the Gulf coast, it’s the thumb on the interstate. I pass up a roadside rest area, a happy hunting ground for new cars and ready cash. I hitch a ride to the farthest cheap motel.
The first automobile I crouch behind in the dark parking lot of the Dunes Motel is an Impala with Alabama license plates. The next one is Broward County. Two more out-of-staters: Live Free or Die and Land of Lincoln. The farther from Florida the better for me. I look in the windows of the Topaz from New Hampshire. There’s a rug in the back seat, and under the rug I make out a shiny sliver of Samsonite. Maybe they’re just eating. Clothes hang on one side: two sports jackets for a small man or an adolescent, and what looks to me like lengths of silk. On the rear-view mirror, where you or I might hang a kid’s booties or a plastic Jesus and rosaries, is an alien deity with four arms or legs. I don’t know about borrowing this little beauty. These people travel a little too heavy.
The Dunes isn’t an absolute dump. The pool has water in it. The neon VACANCY sign above the door of the office has blown only one letter. The annex to the left of the office has its own separate entrance: SANDALWOOD RESTAURANT.
I stroke the highway dust out of my hair, so the office won’t guess my present automobileless state, tuck my shirt into my Levis and walk in from the parking lot. The trouble is there’s nobody behind the desk. It’s 11:03; late but not late enough for even a junior high jailbait nightclerk to have taken to her cot.
Another guest might have rung the bell and waited, or rung the bell and banged his fist on the counter and done some swearing. What I do is count on the element of surprise. I vault into the staff area and kick open a door that says: STRICTLY PRIVATE.
Inside, in a room reeking of incense, are people eating. There are a lot of them. There are a lot of little brown people sitting cross-legged on the floor of a regular motel room and eating with their hands. Pappies with white beards, grammies swaddled in silk, men in dark suits, kids, and one luscious jailbait in blue jeans.
They look at me. A bunch of aliens and they stare like I’m the freak.
One of the aliens tries to uncross his legs, but all he manages is a backward flop. He holds his right hand stiff and away from his body so it won’t drip gravy on his suit. “Are you wanting a room?”
I’ve never liked the high, whiny Asian male voice. “Let’s put it this way. Are you running a motel or what?”
The rest of the aliens look at me, look at each other, look down at their food. I stare at them too. They seem to have been partying. I wouldn’t mind a Jack Daniels and a plate of their rice and yellow stew stuff brought to me by room service in blue jeans.
“Some people here say we are running a ‘po-tel’.” A greasy grin floats off his face. “Get it? My name is Patel, that’s P-A-T-E-L. A Patel owning a motel, get it?”
“Rich,” I say.
The jailbait springs up off the floor. With a gecko-fast tongue tip, she chases a gravy drop on her wrist. “I can go. I’m done.” But she doesn’t make a move. “You people enjoy the meal.”
The women jabber, but not in English. They flash gold bracelets. An organized raid could clean up in that room, right down to the rubies and diamonds in their noses. They’re all wrapped in silk, like brightly colored mummies. Pappy shakes his head, but doesn’t rise. “She eats like a bird. Who’ll marry her?” he says in English to one of his buddies.
“You should advertise,” says the other man, probably the Living Free or Dying. They’ve forgotten me. I feel left out, left behind. While we were nailing up that big front door, these guys were sneaking in around back. They got their money, their family networks, and their secretive languages.
I verbalize a little seething, and when none of the aliens take notice, I dent the prefab wall with my fist. “Hey,” I yell. “I need a room for the night. Don’t any of you dummies speak American?”
Now she swings toward me apologetically. She has a braid that snakes all the way down to her knees. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” she says. She rinses gravy off her hands. “It’s our biggest family reunion to date. That’s why things are so hectic.” She says something about a brother getting married, leaving them short at the desk. I think of Jonda and the turbaned guy. He fired her when some new turbaned guy showed up.
“Let’s just go,” I say. “I don’t give a damn about reunions.” I don’t know where Jonda ended up. The Goldilocks doll wasn’t delivered to Laguna Vista Estates, though I had a welcome planned for it.
This kid’s got a ripe body. I follow the ripe body up a flight of outdoor stairs. Lizards scurry, big waterbugs drag across the landings.
“This is it,” she says. She checks the air conditioning and the TV. She makes sure there are towels in the bathroom. If she feels a little uneasy being in a motel room with a guy like me who’s dusty and scruffy and who kills for a living, she doesn’t show it. Not till she looks back at the door and realizes I’m not carrying any bags.
She’s a pro. “You’ll have to pay in cash now,” she says. “I’ll make out a receipt.”
“What if I were to pull out a knife instead,” I joke. I turn slightly away from her and count the balance of Haysoos’s bills. Not enough in there, after the shakedown. The fifty stays put, my new nest egg. “Where were you born, honey? Bombay? I been to Bombay.”
“I’ll just bet you’re not. Neither am I. But who says I’m leaving tomorrow. You got some sort of policy?”
That’s when I catch the look on her face. Disgust, isn’t that what it is? Distaste for the likes of me.
“You can discuss that with my father and uncle tomorrow morning.” She sashays just out of my reach. She’s aiming to race back to the motel room not much different than this except that it’s jammed with family.
I pounce on Alice before she can drop down below, and take America with her. The hardware comes in handy, especially the kris. Alice lays hot fingers on my eyes and nose, but it’s no use and once she knows it, Alice submits.
I choose me the car with the Land of Lincoln plates. I make a double switch with Broward County. I drive the old Tamiami Trail across the remains of the Everglades. Used to be no cars, a narrow ridge of two-lane concrete with swamps on either side, gators sunning themselves by day, splattered by night. Black snakes and mocassins every few hundred yards. Clouds of mosquitoes.
This is what I’ve become. I want to squeeze this state dry and swallow it whole.
ORBITING
ON Thanksgiving morning I’m still in my nightgown thinking of Vic when Dad raps on my apartment door. Who’s he rolling joints for, who’s he initiating now into the wonders of his inner space? What got me on Vic is remembering last Thanksgiving and his famous cranberry sauce with Grand Marnier, which Dad had interpreted as a sign of permanence in my life. A man who cooks like Vic is ready for other commitments. Dad cannot imagine cooking as self-expression. You cook for someone. Vic’s sauce was a sign of his permanent isolation, if you really want to know.
Dad’s come to drop off the turkey. It’s a seventeen-pounder. Mr. Vitelli knows to reserve a biggish one for us every Thanksgiving and Christmas. But this November what with Danny in the Marines, Uncle Carmine having to be very careful after the bypass, and Vic taking off for outer space as well, we might as well have made do with one of those turkey rolls you pick out of the freezer. And in other years, Mr. Vitelli would not have given us a frozen bird. We were proud of that, our birds were fresh killed. I don’t bring this up to Dad.
The Middleman and Other Stories Page 5
