Men in Miami Hotels (15 page)

A
fter a while he gets up and goes to tell Marcella what he’s done. She’s lying face down in the salon on a couch she gets up from and slaps him across the eyes. The water in his eyes runs down his face like tears. They stand in the big room, each on a separate bar of sunlight, looking at the other. It’s the third time in their lives that she’s hit him. He’s never hit her, not yet. He thinks of this. The blow seems to’ve knocked something out of him; there’s now a space inside. He expects this space to fill quickly but it doesn’t. She looks him in the eyes with a ferocity that doesn’t scare him. He feels as if he’s in a separate circumstance looking back at this one. Marcella feels this too. But she also feels the ropes and binderies that will soon enough haul her at great speed and force back into this place. It’s just what she was afraid would happen. There’s no mystery, she thinks, and no solution, and hauls off and hits him again.

7

T
en hours later and just outside the reef they took the runabout in the six miles to Cow Channel, entered the canal below Roosevelt Drive, and ran down to the boat ramp on 11th Street. There they were met by Jake Muster in his cab and Jake drove them to Marcella’s family place where Cot took a bicycle and peddled over to his mother’s house on Regent. He had a feeling, he told Marcella. His mother was sitting barefoot on the front steps. Mayrene’s car was parked out front. Ella was eating a small papaya, scooping curls of yellow flesh out of the hull with a salt-corroded spoon. “I’m like an addict,” she said grinning. “I can’t stay away, and every minute without it I draw closer to it.” Cot stood in the yard looking at her. He didn’t quite get what she was saying. “Look at this spoon,” she said. “All my things have been spoiled and rusted.”

“I’d sue.”

“I’m not sure that’s the thing.”

High up, buzzards, small and tending to their business, rode the island thermals. Gulls, those busybodies, raved and cut along, headed for the beach.

“It’s stormed,” his mother said.

She looked down at her long feet, long slender toes that her husband on the beach at the fort, or between Cuban sheets, liked to take in his hands and hold. “When I was wading over yonder where we plane-crashed,” she said vaguely, speaking like a country woman and pointing in the wrong direction, “when I walked out of the Gulf waters, I could feel the rheumatism in my ankles. The bones hurt as if somebody had whacked them with a stick.”

She hadn’t meant to say that, say or think the trailing thought. But that was what age was, wasn’t it, that tendency toward expostulation?

From the little yard, under a half dead, peeling gumbo-limbo tree Cot looked at her. “They let you back in?”

“I borrowed on the house.”

“And did what?”

“Paid off that little squirrel.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’m sitting here, aren’t I?”

“I’m not sure you should have done that, Mama.” Thinking, well, she could have done that all along—thinking, now they’ll just take it from her in chunks of blackmail and scurrilous doings and put her in the street.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to see you living over in the park.”

“That isn’t likely.” She thought she might go to Cuba, rejoin her husband, learn afresh to live in his unacknowledged version of failed glory. That had been the trouble before: unacknowledgment—hadn’t it?

“I have a phobia about it,” he said.

“You don’t live in a park. And don’t you mean a precognition?”

“I live in a hotel. And I can’t stand the thought of sleeping outside.”

“Is that a non sequitur?”

“No, Mama.” He
did
have a phobia about it. He waked in the night sweating from fear of it. Sweating from fear of losing Marcella, his father, CJ when he was alive, even Spane and his cohorts in Miami snug in their hotels. What conceived shambles wasn’t he scared of?

Jackie came out the front door. He was eating cereal from a bowl. He grinned broadly, a smile that mashed up his face in long rubbery creases. “I drove that car down here myself. Didn’t get stopped nare a time.”

“You seen Ordell?” Cot said.

“Not lately,” Jackie said. “Miss Ella picked me up at the bus station in Miami and I drove the rest of the way.”

“How’d you get up to the bus station?”

“Jokey Bivins carried me.”

“What about Jimmy?”

“I had to leave him.”

A mist of complicatedness, confusion and mischance was forming in his mind. “Let’s drop it,” he said.

“I didn’t bring it up.”

His mother said, “I expect you’ll find Ordell over snooping after Marcie.”

She seemed fey, shy, almost indistinct. A breeze lifted a reef of flowers in the poinciana tree by the street and set it back. Spring had stuffed the town with new blooms. He wanted to tell his mother to lie low, wanted to force her onto a plane or a ship, but he knew it was no longer any use to try. “I think you need to go to Cuba, Mama.”

“I’ve thought that myself.”

She could see in his face he meant what he said, that he was scared, peeled back from his sureties. But there was something else. He tapped his cheekbone with his foreknuckle, an old habit. She could not always read him now. Was there more, more than she could know? As with Rafael? It was as if a part of them had moved into shadow. She felt a chill.

“You got any more of that cereal?” he said.

She smiled and got to her feet and they embraced. She smelled differently now, he thought, slightly sour, bland, sunworn, the old strong odors of childhood become snips, faded flares. Her body was not frail in his arms but pared down, sinewy. He tipped her head back, placing the heel of his hand against her hairline, as he had done as a child, smoothing skin and hair both, and kissed her lightly on the lips.

“Memory lane,” she said, her voice creaking, and disengaged herself.

Out in the street Johnny Lowery towed his sister Ronnie, a slow-minded skinny woman, in a wheeled seat attached to the rear of his bicycle. They were both over fifty and, so Cot knew, inseparable. Johnny gave him a severe nod of the head. A mockingbird in the little lime tree by the porch made a mewing sound. Just then, down the street, police cars turned the corner. Cot stepped back into the yard, whirled, and ran along the side of the house, through the backyard where Jackie had the drum smoker going and into the lane. Mrs. Cranson, in a blue pinafore, was shaking out a small owl quilt on her front porch. She waved and as she did the quilt, in full fling, collapsed over her. He laughed out loud and was suddenly happy and crossing a tiny space in which happiness was stuffed in every corner and you could snatch it loose as you passed, and this passed—it was clear—but still you carried the traces and perfumes of it as you went. I won’t tell anybody, he thought and almost shouted, barreling along in big strides. He walked quickly down the lane and out on Constance. A couple of tourists in matching muscle shirts were putting their bicycles into a rack outside the Sponge House hotel.

“I’ll get those for you,” he said taking the blue racer from the larger of the two men. The man didn’t want to let the bike go, but Cot insisted.

He pedaled up the street, turned left on Harden and took the shortcut through the municipal cemetery to the Bakewell house up a little shaded driveway just past Knockout Lane. He went around back, past a large red bougainvillea draped over a big stake frame, and entered the house through the back door. Ordell was sitting in a pink banquette built into a little nook off the kitchen before a clumped mess of pancakes. He was reading the paper that had a picture of Jimmy’s plane in color on the front page. Ordell looked up, unsurprised it seemed. He pushed scarlet reading glasses up his forehead.

“It’s too bad about Jimmy,” he said.

“How about CJ?” Cot said. He hit Ordell with his fist in the side of the head. The punch sent him sprawling down the bench. He slid under the table. One hand was still on the surface, groping at the spilled pages. He came up with a pistol in his other hand.

“Come on, Ordell.”

Cot batted his gun-hand away, knocking it against the back of the booth. Ordell dropped the pistol. It fell under the table. “Damn,” Cot said. Ordell made a face. Cot dived and snatched up the pistol. Ordell tried to climb over him, scrabbling for handholds on his body. He kneed Cot in the side. Ordell had played on the line in high school football. He was clumsy and slow but played with an insurgent bitterness that made him dangerous. He kneed Cot again, this time in the face. Cot’s head banged against the strut holding the table up. He went out for a second, coming almost instantly to, and for a flash thought he was in his mother’s garage playing with plastic soldiers in the dust. Ordell was suddenly right beside him. Where did
he
come from? Then he remembered and tried to swing around, but Ordell was stabbing at him with a table fork. The fork struck him in the cheek. Cot cried out. Ordell was stabbing him. The points felt like bee stings. He ducked and got hold of the pistol that he had dropped when Ordell kicked him. He rolled onto his back under the table. Ordell was suddenly out of sight. He felt the blood on his face. He fired twice through the table top. Then, for a moment, as if he had just waked upstairs in the bed in their guest bedroom, the one with the yellow candlewick spread he had always liked and the window that looked down onto a yard filled with blossoming ruella bushes, he rested.

A voice, one he almost recognized, a woman’s voice, said, “Throw the gun out, Cot.”

“Or what?” Cot said.

“Or I’ll shoot you.”

The voice, familiar but unplaceable, sounded as if it was a small distance away. Probably hiding behind something. “Okay,” he said.

He slid the gun out onto the yellow tile floor.

“The other one too,” the voice said.

“Is that you, Isabella?”

“It is indeed. How you doing, Cot?”

“I’m a little worn out to tell the truth.”

“Slide that other pistol out on the floor.”

“You handling things for Ordell?” Isabella was a police detective, younger than them, a woman with coppery hair she wore tucked up behind her head, smarter than the men around her.

“You shouldn’t have come over here bothering the county attorney, Cot. Slide the gun out.”

She would shoot him, he knew that. He slid Bert’s gun along the floor. There was one more, his, tucked under his shirt. “Can I come out? It’s kind of cramped under here.”

“Come out backwards,” Isabella said. Isabella Mouson. Ex-goalie on the state champion girls’ water polo team. Former student of classical languages at FSU. She was the one recommended the translation of
The
Georgics
he was reading.

“You know he killed CJ, don’t you?”

“We’ll get to that.”

Cot shuffled butt first out from under the big table. The room smelled now of cordite and maple syrup. Ordell was leaning through the hall doorway talking into his phone. He issued a look at Cot that had no friendliness in it. Cot got to his feet. Ordell grimaced and glared at him, his wide Carpathian forehead unwrinkled.

“Oh, come off it, Ordell.”

“You prick.”

There were many choice rebukes Cot could apply here, but he held his tongue. He remembered that he wanted to ask Ordell if he was still an animist. He wanted to tell him he could see how in a place like this—seaswept and lonely among the mangroves—you could go for a religion like that. “Did you know the pythons have made it across Seven Mile?” he said.

“I heard that,” Isabella said. She pulled a large blue bandana out of her back pocket and tossed it to Cot. “For your face.”

He caught the bandana with one hand and with the other pulled his pistol and shot Isabella in the shoulder. She sagged against the counter and fired a shot that broke a windowpane over the booth. Her face went white.

“I’m sorry, Izzie,” Cot said. The policewoman tried to shift the pistol to her good hand but Cot was quick and plucked it from her. Two of the knuckles on that hand were scarred where she’d smashed her fist against the side of a pool years ago. He helped her to the floor, gathered up Bert’s gun, hers and the extra. He poked hers down the garbage disposal and turned it on and then off quick; the noise was dispiriting. “You sit still,” he said and kissed her on the forehead. She had pulled into a fetal position and lay softly gasping. He was sorry, yeah, sorry lathered with a sadness like an animal’s, as he saw it, a fox, say, lying under a bush waiting out the end of the hunt.

Ordell had quit the premises. He never liked guns. The adrenaline had made Cot giddy. He raced down the hall, making kicky little dance steps as he went. He hadn’t heard the front door slam, so maybe Ordell was still in the house. A sudden conundrum. Was there time to check upstairs? “You there, Ordell?” No answer. “What’d you do with the stones?” he yelled, not so loudly the police force hurrying to this spot might hear.

He checked the front porch. No sign of him. Wind shoveling itself out of a young poinciana. He yelled back up the front stairs “I’m going to shoot Isabella if you don’t come down.”

Nobody answered. Shouts, appeals, statements of fact—none of that would work with Ordell. And it wasn’t just Ordell—you never really got to run your plan out as devised. The measure was in what you made up when it haywired. Some guys pulled a gun, some sneaked, some waited, some got out of there, some capered and yelled, some prayed, some just kept cooking. He simply moved, glancing off a hunch. It was getting late. Shadows, mixed and pliant, clotted under the big mahogany tree, closing in on dark. A skinny breeze, almost not there, slid up the driveway. He crossed the open space, took the little path that ran through senna bushes around and past the Lovelaces’ yard and stopped at the street across from the cemetery. A lone cyclist, balancing a child-sized rocking chair on the handlebars, pedaled slowly up the street. The light from the laddering sun seemed stalled among the tallest grave markers.

He crossed the street and entered the cemetery though the unlatched side gate. His cheek had stopped bleeding but he dabbed at it with the bandana anyway. In the distance a few tourists were taking pictures of the Kagle’s big ziggurat tomb. He wished he was carrying a cat in his arms, or maybe he was thinking of a baby. He and Marcella rarely talked about such as that—small, bustling enterprisers, offspring, making irresistible demands. She said it would make her go blind if she did.

He crossed the cemetery to the far side where CJ’s family compound rose in its stones among a small stand of coconut palms. A large ficus, once carefully trimmed, now shaggy, loomed over the large coral stone chamber. The black iron front door was locked with an old-fashioned Scandinavian padlock that Cot had known how to jimmy since he and CJ were eight years old. Nobody about, the grounds empty of the living. He let himself in. Before he closed the door into darkness he looked at CJ’s casket, a golden metal vessel with recessed handles set on an upper shelf to the side. Cot had no illusions about CJ’s ghost being in the room with him. A mournfulness curled around him softly, running its spiky teeth across his skin. The vault was a shadowy station between the living and the dead. An intense pressure like something trying to come through subsided before it could. He burst out sobbing, so hard that he bit his fist to stop. But he didn’t want to stop. After a while he let the dark back in. He sat on the rear bench and leaned against the wall that was warm and dry. In the quiet, unallusive lightlessness he settled himself to wait.