Men in Miami Hotels (14 page)

Bales smiles, half abashed, half murderous.

Sailors at the bow and stern have already called for the dockside boys to cast off the lines. The gangsters clumsily unwind the heavy gray ropes from the concrete bollards, fumbling and joking and squeezing the rope as if it’s the sliding muscles of a pet snake. Through the open windows Cot can see across the salon to the bay blue as a blue eye and beyond it the half-tall white buildings of Miami Beach. Albertson has a house out there, raised on pillars among mango and ceiba trees, big trees with aboveground roots erupting from the coral like huge gray tumors. The salon is empty. Bales walks them in. “You want a drink?” he says. “You want some of that shit apple juice?”

“It’s for the Big Man,” Cot says.

Bales scowls. “Maybe I ought to sample it first then.” He pauses, waiting for Cot to give him the jug. Time like slivers of cold blue glass drifting in space.

“That would worry me. It would probably worry your brother too.”

Bales looks to him as if he has pronounced the answer to an intricate, distasteful riddle. “What you want, Mrs. Cord?” he says.

“A gin and tonic would be just right,” Marcella says. She’s studying a clear glass bowl filled with cowrie shells. Mixed in with the shells are what look like human knuckle bones. “Y’all sit down,” Bales says, but Cot ignores him. “You ever tried to swim across the bay?” Bales asks, mostly to Marcella.

“I think it would wear me out,” she says smiling her winning smile, the one that carries a stinging rebuke just a couple of microns below the surface.

“Oh, no,” Bales says making crabby swimming motions. “It’s stimulating.”

“Exercise is the key.”

“To what?” He cocks his head as if it has slipped slightly on his neck.

“To a full life.”

“I never heard that,” he says earnestly.

Cot looks at Marcella as if to say
see what I mean about nobody to talk to?
though he’s never said exactly that and doesn’t really want to. She looks back a friendly puzzlement that isn’t puzzlement at all but is something else he can’t get straight in his mind and for a sec he feels alone in the world. It’s a feeling guzzling along like a hag fish, chronic.
I live in a dent in time
, he thinks, something that came to him in the last few days, maybe on the bus ride down, but this doesn’t mean anything. Mobsters are sometimes friendliest just before they kill you—he thought that too on the bus, cupping a hand under his chin so as not to drip the orange he was eating above his lap. A moment of freedom from a lifetime of restraint. The friendliness clumsy and overeager. Later it’s what they’re most ashamed of. He’s probably already said all this to Marcella, but he isn’t sure. I’m running a tab on my life, he thinks and almost says. “Mobsters are often friendliest . . .” he says in a quiet, conversational voice and stops.

“I’m like that too,” she says and smiles a simple homemade smile.

“So where’s the maestro?” Cot says to Bales.

“Down in the innards.”

Cot knows that Albertson likes to go down to the engine room to watch the big turbines work. He likes to wear a stained khaki cap like that of petty officers in the Navy. Not like—a
real
Navy hat.

“I’ll go down and talk to him,” Cot says.

“Maybe you better wait.”

“Why don’t you check the view out at the rail,” Cot says to Marcella.

“Where you going?” Bales says to Cot as he starts out of the big room.

“I’ve got a present for your brother.”

“Besides that apple juice?”

“Something he’ll like.”

“You better have something mighty special.”

Cot descends into the interior of the ship. Double doors open into a long room containing large blank-faced engines. The turbines turn huge driveshafts that lie like great dragontails in their beds of power. Albertson leans over a rail, so far that he’s partly balancing, looking down at them. He’s a large black-haired man with a wide, slightly pockmarked face that is roughly handsome and seems just barely to conceal a figuration of the spirit, a domesticity and warmth, that has never been known to come fully to the surface. Cot walks toward him through a humming silence. Bales hasn’t followed him down. Being that deep in the steel makes him seasick; Cot’s counted on that.

Albertson watches him come.
There’s something about me that has never been touched
—Albertson tells himself. His soul, he thinks, wedged like a stone deep inside him. But that’s not it, he doesn’t mean that, he means some bit, some startling indestructibility, alive, that always swims just out of reach. He’s almost fainting. Fainting? The engine room is air-conditioned so it can’t be the heat. Maybe it’s the tumor. Cot, this Cot advancing, has worked for him for eighteen years. He’s grown like the grass in the field. Now it’s time to cut the grass and toss it into the fire.
Whyfore have I exalted thee . . .
, he says to himself, believing it to be part of a great quotation. Albertson thinks Cot looks tired. He sees something else, something that has lurked nearby for years, and he knows it for what it is, but a power he doesn’t understand stalls him.
What’s it going to be?
he thinks as he watches Cot take a lighter from his pocket.
Is that a jug of apple juice?
He’s familiar with the brand.

I
n no time Cot’s back on deck. Heads, already turned, minds already reeling. A man in whites on the other side of the ship—Cot can see him through the salon windows—is loudly yelling. Another man has two pistols out and is waving one of them as if directing traffic.

“Something blew up down there,” Cot says. He’s shaking, grimacing into a close-by nothingness. “Oh, man.”

“Something you had a part in?” says Bales, white in the face. He’s pulled his pistol and he jerks it at Cot. “You stay right there.” He runs down the passageway.

The ship has already pulled away from the dock and is headed out into the bay. Marcella leans her back against the rail gazing at him. “You look a little frosty,” she says. She clasps herself in her arms and lets herself go, slaps the rail with her open palm. “Cot,” she says in a low voice.

“I know,” he says. “But it won’t always be.”

White clouds solid as giant figurines hang above them in the vast blue placidity. Concussive, dark with a louring yellow eye, the blast knocked him against the bulkhead, even though he managed to get one of the steel doors slammed shut between himself and the engine room.

Hurrying Marcella along he climbs to the bridge where he tells the captain to maintain headway. The captain knows who he is and does what he’s told. Then Cot goes down to Albertson’s cabin, offers his hand to the man standing outside the door and when the man—Jackie Harris, owner of a new Mercedes he likes to wheel triumphantly down Ocean Drive—goes to take it he brings his fist sharply up and slams the back of his head against the bulkhead. He takes Jackie’s pistol and locks him in Albertson’s suite. The other men with guns are out on the fantail watching the ship get under way, waving—or were until a few moments ago. The alarm, the dread, is still in their faces when he takes them, which he does by sending a steward out with a tray just before he comes around from the side with a gun on them. He makes them throw their pistols overboard, all but a little Sig .38 he keeps for himself. He herds the men downstairs and locks them with Jackie in Albertson’s stateroom. He knows them all, has eaten steak dinners with them at Johnnie’s, lied, goofed, come nearly to blows—all but one, a kid from Texas who has come by way of Wilkie Wilkes into the organization, an encumbered thinker, too quick to anger, but eager—and he tells them he’s sorry, it seems the thing to do, about this.

“About what?” Marvin Chek says. “About
what
, Cot?”

He finds another gunsel washing his hands in a restroom down the hall, de-guns him, and puts him in Albertson’s suite as well. Finds the last one—he figures—groaning in his bunk in the crew’s quarters where a couple of sailors are arguing over a book of recipes.

“Done in?” Cot says to the groaner.

“Oh, God almighty,” the man says, a slender fellow with a slight lisp, another new man, who, week before last, walked out of the cane fields with Jean Paul Loess’s head under his arm.

“Joined the Sea Brigade,” Cot says.

“What’s that?”

“Sea Brigade.”

“I can’t talk.”

Cot makes him get up anyway. The man throws up on the floor and tries to get back in bed, but Cot makes him come along. He puts him in with Albertson’s crew, drives with the butt of the Sig Sauer the thick-bladed oyster knife he’d taken from Jug Melson into the door’s steel lip strike, jamming it, and leaves them.

By now Bales is on his way back topside. He’s come on the carnage in the engine room. The turbines were sooty but unhurt, but the men down there—three of them at least—had been burned. Two killed, one being his brother, Gustave Lorian Albertson, Master of Miami Ganglia, as he liked to say. His body burned naked and peeled to flush and char, stinking of gas. His face hanging in strips. (Cot had lit the lamp of Martinelli, held the jug a moment in his palm, wondering even then if the idea would work [if all the years could come to this, if Albertson would know what was up, if he Cot could possibly get out of there], and then he threw it in a high and—it seemed to him—slow arc that he never caught the end of because he had already ducked back through the companionway door and slammed it behind him. The wall seemed to bulge and a radiance, a force he had not expected, knocked him against the opposite bulkhead. His ears rang and he could smell gasoline. There was a layer of black smoke feeling its way along the floor. It curled, writhing, around his legs. A thumping in his chest grated and lunged, as if his heart was being hurled repeatedly against bone.)

Bales comes up the central passageway crying, with his head down, the shock of seeing his brother dead reared like a shrieking ghost in the center of his mind, and he doesn’t see Cot until he has his pistol leveled at his face. “Ah, you squat,” he groans. “How could you do such a thing?”

Cot takes his pistol, an ugly, squared off police Glock, and backs him into the salon. He hands Bales a napkin from a stack on a counter and tells him to wipe his face. Bales looks at him as if he doesn’t understand. Marcella takes the napkin and wipes his face for him. “It’ll be okay,” Cot says.

“No, it won’t,” Bales says. He stands on the dark blue rug trembling like a winded dog. It’s the steadiness, the rationality in Cot that makes hatred thicken in Bales. Cot makes him go outside to the rail and wave to the boys still on the dock—now concerned, now wondering, now hoping no disaster—he doesn’t want to but he does it.

Marcella goes with him and she waves too. She calls the name of one of the boys—Gus Boland—even though they are too far away by then for him to catch it.

She’s a good-looking woman, Gus thinks, getting a little age on her, but still crisp.

There’re only three or four men on the patio. A couple wave at Marcella or maybe they are waving at Bales. Marcella, a pistol held in one hand and covered by the other, keeps Bales out there until the men have gone back into the building. It isn’t unusual for the boss to head out to sea. From where they stood the explosion was only a muffled metallic cough—who knew what went on in the bellies of ships?

C
ot makes Bales sit with them in the salon until the ship has made its way into the roads. They come up the back side of Dodge and slip into the channel and through to the Cut and out. Cot sends Marcella up to the bridge to ride with the captain and make sure he doesn’t worry about anything. These are the new days, not the old: the captain doesn’t have to speak to the engineer to get more, or less power. The explosion sounded like dropped crockery. But the captain wonders where Albertson is, maybe he knows, maybe it’s like a coup that everybody senses, that gulls and ants and highwaymen sense and turn toward as to the discovery of a new sun moving in. Marcella calls Cot to tell him the captain’s nervous.

“Tell him the Big Man’s taking a nap.”

In the salon he drinks a glass of ice water. Bales doesn’t want one. Cot feels sick to his stomach. His blood’s hard banging has subsided, but he feels crashed into and knocked around and dumbfounded partially; he feels as if maybe he’s going out on his feet.

“I’m about to be sick,” Bales says. His face is yellowed with gray patches under his eyes. Cot goes with him into the restroom, and while Bales vomits into one of the toilet bowls Cot vomits into one of the sinks.

“Make sure you clean that up,” Bales says when he comes out of the stall. Cot is already wiping down the blue marble countertop, and it annoys him that Bales would order him to do what he’s already on top of. But he understands—Bales is crushed. He would be too if something happened, say, to Marcella.

After they’re out in the inky blue deeps, after Bales has begun his elegies and trifles, his death song of stories about growing up on the north side, up in Hialeah where he hung around the track cutting up and extorting cash from the big shots, where he cut his first shag as he puts it out on Raymond Canal, under a big yellow flower bush, his fuck bush, as Bales puts it, and, after he keens and cries out, his voice straining in the sunlight, perspiring as he yells, his face flushed and in his eyes a despair Cot has never seen there before, after Cot who’s in and out on paying attention thinks about how he rarely pauses to see how a shot man falls—unless he’s only wounded—rarely any more than glances at the body pitched on its face like that of a drunken man, say, who would wake the next morning with his face stiff and numb but still alive, after the gulls, side-sliding and cawing like crows, depart under a sky briefly clear even of clouds, after this he walks Bales down to the loading area in the stern, opens the big doors that look out on the oily Atlantic, takes Bales by the hand and leads him out onto the small platform where in port they would board the runabouts and jet skis, and without saying anything to Bales by way of exculpation, accusation or commentary, throws him into the roiled and frothing wake. Bales goes straight down as if he has important business on the bottom. Cot squats and then sits down on the platform and gazes out at the wide blue ocean that’s as empty as on Earth’s first day.