Lawnboy (15 page)

I chalked up good grade after good grade. I was the only one Sid and Ursula ever talked about. I felt fat with their pride, unbearably rich, as if I’d consumed an entire loaf of pound cake. They made no secrets of their love or their favor. But there was my older brother, who was cutting classes now, stumbling around the house with the harsh glare of speed in his eyes.

We started swimming. We swam every day, in the moments before twilight, at the house of his friend Javier Rodriguez, whose parents had the largest pool on Avenida Bayamo. Each of us had our respective routines, but our last five minutes together always culminated in a race that involved swimming ten laps. It goes without saying that he always lurched ahead of me at the finish. I didn’t care. He was the natural athlete between us—the older, the stronger. But this day, when the air smelled curiously of clematis, datura, and burning charcoal, when it seemed all but apparent that I’d be the victor, Peter hefted himself out of the water mere seconds before my forehead slapped the tile.

“Winner!” I cried, gulping air.

He sat on the edge of the pool. In his boredom, he inspected a cut on the ball of his foot.

“What are you doing?”

“I hurt my foot.” He dangled his leg in the water, watching the trails of broken blood turning rusty in the chlorine.

“You mean you couldn’t wait five seconds?”

He stood, then dropped his Speedo to the concrete. I tightened inside. I looked away. He routinely did such things in my presence, trying to provoke me. “I’m taking a shower.”

“You did that on purpose,” I said, and slapped at the water.

“What?”

“You did that on purpose. You didn’t want to finish because you knew I’d win. I scare you.”

“You scare me all right.” He hobbled to the outdoor shower enclosure. His blood left stains on the bleached concrete like drops of rosehip tea. “You have a complex.”

I didn’t have a complex. All I know was that we stopped swimming together from that day forth.

The following morning, after I’d unpacked and settled in, I got the tour of the 55-acre King Cole property. Peter’s manner was formal, almost distant, as he led me around. Had he gotten enough sleep? His voice was hoarse and whispery as if he’d stayed up all night.

It was hard to stay cheerful. My face felt tired from smiling too much. The place was a pit. Not only was it a good thirty miles from Naples, but it was situated in a battered glade with such a high water table that it needed a sump pump to keep the parking lot dry. Still, the place practically shimmered with its history. Here’s the story: in 1964, Clem Thornton, the big Florida developer, platted a city called Boca Palms on the surrounding land. Two years into the project, the whole thing was halted, after several of the buyers—senior citizens from Massachusetts, laborers from Detroit—learned that their lots were under six inches of water. But who could have blamed them for buying? They got a free trip out of it, after all. Flown to Miami, they were bused across the Everglades by a cheery driver who called them by their first names. Upon arrival, though, things heated up. The pitch took place in the conference room, a spiel laced with threat, guilt, and the possibility of wealth. Salesmen (undercover, of course) cried out for the lots, creating the illusion of demand. It goes without saying that 75 percent of the detainees bought property out of fear and confusion, not even balking when they were told they couldn’t tour the place beyond the fenced-in resort.

We walked farther. Peter’s face was drawn, a little chapped, fixed upon the ground, as he pointed out the various wings of the building—Solar, Nurmi, Seven Isles, Bontona—all named after the fanciest lagoon streets in Fort Lauderdale, where Clem Thornton had spent his halcyon years before landing in jail. Peter kept chatting up the property, promising improvements, but I couldn’t help noticing its inadequacies: the cracked parking lot, the sudsy pool with its algae-coated walls. Past the deserted golf course and the landlocked marina were a set of burnt-out buildings. They hulked there with their charred walls and broken windows, separated from the nicer part with a makeshift wall.

Fortunately, none of this was visible from the highway. On balmy winter nights, it still looked nice enough to lure that certain kind of guest, retirees on their way to the Gold Coast, charmed by the jungly landscaping, the golden gas lanterns, the curved driveway leading to the on-site mineral spring—all the symbols of a more innocent, unfettered era. I couldn’t help but feel both affection and pity for it.

After the tour I was put directly to work. Immediately I was shown the correct way to answer the phone, a veritable mouthful: “Good Morning, King Cole. It’s 82 degrees and sunny. This is Evan speaking. How may I help you?” I was told how to log reservations in the black book, how to run applications and utilities on the computer, how to process traveler’s checks, how to swipe a credit card through the ZON. I was told how to smile. I was told to look all prospective guests directly in the eye—“not intrusively, but gently. They’re friends, after all.” Once I passed Desk Duty with flying colors, I moved on to Housekeeping 101, a post I was assigned to for the remaining three days of the week. I was shown how to make beds, how to fold bath towels, how to tuck in the sheets to make crisp hospital corners. I was shown how to Windex mirrors and windows. I was shown how to wrap glasses, how to apply the sanitary paper strip to the toilet seat. I was shown how to run the mighty washers of the laundry room, how much bleach, Sta-Puff, and soap to use, with severe instructions not to overburden the delicate, malfunctioning septic system.

It all seemed a bit much, especially since I’d never had a real job, unless you could count the two traumatic days I spent working at Dairy Queen when I was sixteen. Not to mention the fact that nothing was said about any days off. But the truth was that none of these tasks took a Ph.D. I imagined completing my duties early every afternoon, spending the rest of the day reading, swimming, or landscaping, my raw hands working the loam.

That night the three of us ate in the northwest corner of the banquet hall, the huge 60 × 20 ft. room in which the Boca Palms sales staff had unloaded thousands upon thousands of underwater lots 25 years before. Our voices echoed off the walls. Beyond the closed curtains was the golf course, its waist-high weeds shrouding its once-molded fairways.

My favorite childhood foods had been lovingly prepared by Peter: corn on the cob, hamburgers, sliced tomatoes, watermelon. I pointed my fork to the chain of leaping blue marlins on the outer wall.

“What was this about?” I asked. “The Clem Thornton fishing tournament? All-expense-paid trip to the Riviera?”

I hadn’t even noticed that Peter had stepped out of the room. I glanced up at Hector, his sleeveless T-shirt, the vaccination print on his upper arm. I jiggled my foot, slumping my shoulders until my chest caved in. Did he enjoy my shyness, my foolishness? I had the unsettling sense that he knew what I was thinking, that all my thoughts were broadcasting from some golden transmitter planted inside my brain.

“You have the same speech patterns,” he said blankly.

“What?”

“You and Peter. You both have the same speech patterns. It’s funny, I’ve never heard it in anybody else. The way you cluster your words.”

“Really?” I said.

He nodded.

I nodded back, but I didn’t quite agree with him, and for the first time, I noted an odd, lilting turn, an accent of sorts, in his own speech.

***

Could fifteen years have passed since I almost did myself in for him?

Peter and I slipped past a security guard, scampering out onto the roof of Miami Beach’s Shelborne Hotel. Sid and Ursula were dressed to the nines, oblivious of our whereabouts, still smoking Lucky Strikes in the restaurant twenty-some floors beneath us. We laughed at their ignorance. The sun beat the strength from our backs. I walked to the side, poised myself on the ledge, breathing, vertiginous. We gazed out over Miami, its deep aqua water, the patterned beach umbrellas like hard Venetian candies.

Peter stepped beside me. “Would you jump for me?” he whispered in my ear.

He stood to my left, his hand firmly weighted on the small of my back.

“Would you? Would you jump?”

I sat down on the ledge. I began easing my butt over the side, watching my legs, as if they were someone else’s legs, flailing in the air. Already I pictured the people watching on the street. I saw the rescue-squad truck, heard the megaphone, saw the young mother covering her mouth with her palms. I would put on a show for them, but I would flourish, thrive.

“Don’t. I didn’t mean that. We better go.”

I didn’t say anything back to him. But he had his answer, and his face reflected that, though it was shadowed and unassuming.

***

Something soon became clear to me. Our guests were so few and far between that working the front desk became downright tedious after a few hours, and once I finished my book (
The Life and Trials of Angie Dickinson,
a paperback that I’d retrieved from the library), I found myself staring at the phone, willing it to ring. I talked for a while to a lady from Scotch Plains, New Jersey, who wanted to know what particular measures we took to keep the local mosquito population under control. Once she seemed dissatisfied with my fabrication, I hung up on her, then gazed at the brass arms of the starburst clock. Ten-forty-five. I stepped to the front window, hands pushing deep in my pockets, staring out at that hot mossy swamp of a pool, where a girl in an orange life jacket snorkeled within sight of her father. My breath fogged an oval on the glass. I transmitted a mental message to the girl:
Don’t put your head under that water. You might as well be swimming in liquefied lead.

I had to set some projects for myself or I’d go nuts.

After Peter dismissed me from my duties, I wandered through the halls for a while, admiring of and appalled by the vastness of the place, its tributes to ball-breaking work, its misguided faith in a corrupt future. There was something especially deathly, yet beautiful, about this kind of silence in the middle of the day, when it seemed all but natural that everything should be revving in highest gear. At the RoadStar Inn ten miles down the Trail, I imagined just the opposite—soda machines knocking, ice machines humming, teenagers gossiping by the pool, people driving back from the Gulf beaches, the sand still hot inside their sneakers.

There was no way Peter wasn’t losing tens of thousands of dollars per week.

I returned to the confines of my little room. I couldn’t have been lying on my bed more than ten seconds when someone started rapping on the door. I sat up at once.

Hector said, “Are you busy?”

I rubbed some grit from my eye. “No, I was just taking a rest.”

“I have to drive to Cape Coral, bank stuff. Want to come?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just stay here. I’m kind of tired actually.”

“Oh come on. It’ll do you good to get out.”

His face was lively, yet glum, as if he’d wanted to be anyplace else in the world. He was again wearing cutoffs and 18-hole workboots, a look which, though essentially ludicrous, especially worked for him, calling attention to a pair of the most alarming and voluptuous calves I’d ever seen. I saturated myself with the most deadening facts imaginable: the latest NASDAQ average, the current price of gold, the winners of the American League pennant. Anything to distract myself. I wouldn’t look at him. Too long, at least. It would be a mark of my growing up: I didn’t have to see every attractive man as a potential sex slave.

“You sure you want to do this?” he said, stopping midway down the hall. He grinned demonically.

“Why not,” I said, and shrugged.

Outside, Peter stood with a big-bellied workman, choosing sites for a well out near the old golf course. Complaints about the water quality had risen. Only recently the guests had caught onto something as if it were part of some national trend, blaming the water for a whole host of ills, from stomach flu to night sweats to yellowed dentures. One woman had even insisted upon showing us the crystallized salt upon her liver-spotted wrists, as if it were an emblem of our inherent disregard and incompetency. “What if somebody sues you?” she’d said merrily. Peter glanced up at us and sighed, then waved us on, as if he were sorry he couldn’t join us.

We were speeding through the glossy subdivisions on Rattlesnake Hammock Road, a former country lane converted to a four-lane parkway. Blue tile roofs sparkled behind walled yards. Stopped at a traffic light, Hector turned to me and said, “So tell me all about William.”

“What?”

“Your old boyfriend, William.”

“You’re kidding.”

He wagged his head. “Word has it that you’ve been around the block once or twice.”

My chest tightened. I might have been pushed facedown into cement. “Who told you about William?”

The left half of his face smiled. He shrugged smugly as if to indicate he wasn’t telling me.

The blood hummed between my shoulder blades. I felt a peculiar combination of vulnerable, betrayed, destabilized, and pissed off. I didn’t think he was at all funny. Was it that the mere mention of William’s name still managed to trigger a whole host of feelings when I wasn’t prepared for it? Or was it that I thought my privacy had been walked on, disregarded? It was one thing that Peter knew about William; it was quite another if his business partner knew the details of my personal life. I thought about packing my bags, handing over my money to the ticket clerk, taking the last bus back to Miami.

“God, are you burning up. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No,” I mumbled, as if talking to myself. “I’m sure you didn’t.”

“What?”

I turned to face him with a mocking, fabricated smile. “Do you always like to make fun of people you don’t even know?”

His eyes widened a bit. “I said I didn’t mean anything.”

“Just forget it,” I said testily.

He mumbled, “Drama queen.”

It would have been too easy to dismiss him at that point, for I had every right to. But he wasn’t worth it. Instead, I made a pact with myself: I wouldn’t trust him. I could learn to work with him, I imagined, even like him to some degree, but I’d never fully trust him. He was too much about himself. I thought of a ten-year-old splashing around in a puddle, throwing cinders, doing anything to get a rise out of passersby. I should have listened to my gut. It would have been better had I not gone alone with him.