Men in Miami Hotels (16 page)

F
or a time Ella drifted through the rooms of her house like a spirit returning to its natural form. She touched the curtains, the counters, the bedsteads, the dressers, the huge cabinet in the hall that Cot liked to hide in as a boy. Each seemed to rise out of a massive stillness. She saw how time could stop and rest in these simple places and thought how there must be many other such around the world, disused buildings, forgotten stretches of road, houses in cutover fields, scrub meadows, caves, ruins in deserts that themselves were quiet spots where time lay like an old cat sleeping. She hardly wanted to wake the silent rooms. But she could not stop herself. She lay down on the yellowed sisal rug in the living room and listened to the little house geckos chirping like docents. She folded back the old blue spread on her bed and lay on the clean sheets underneath. Dreams almost captured her there, but she shook them off and rose and moved on. In a pool of sunlight in the hall she knelt and said a prayer, offering it like a fingered rosary to Whatever might take it. She did not wish to hurry the sleeper, but her movements became more purposeful, more engaged with the beating of her own heart.
Arise
, she said silently,
the Redeemer has come
, and stopped in the kitchen—that still held its faded bundle of afternoon light like a sheaf of yellow seagrass in its arms—and laughed out loud.
Arise! The Redeemer has come!
She drank a glass of water straight from the tap, the chalky, dust-tasting island water that she disliked. She found a broom standing straight as a soldier in the closet and went through the rooms sweeping the dust ahead of her. She stripped the beds, the couches, pulled down the curtains and sent them with Jackie to the laundromat. She raised the rugs off the floor and hauled them to the backyard where she beat the old dead dust out of them. She washed the floors with oil soap, washed the walls, got down on her knees in the bathroom and cleaned the floor, tile by tile, careful to excavate the curdled dust from the little grout troughs. She washed all the dishes, the pots, everything in the kitchen that could be washed. She dusted lamps, polished tables, carefully wiped the books in the old red-painted bookcase. The house took on a brightness it had not known since the early days of her marriage. Time started up again, roved like a hunting dog into the lost fields, and returned, headed out to the new lands. She danced and capered. “Carry me!” she cried. “Oh, carry me!” It was as if the world, or life itself, would snatch her up and swing her around dancing in the charming sunlight. She sat in the east window seat looking out at the pale purple flowers of the frangipani tree. She ran a bath and got into the tub and listened to Bach’s oboe concerto on her little player while she lazed in the cool water. In the spaces between the notes she thought she could just hear Bach’s wife calling him to supper.

She was thinking of an old bathing suit she loved as a girl, picturing it draped over the back porch rail drying in sunlight when Ordell Bakewell walked into the bathroom. He was wearing his pinstriped suit pants and a white shirt and carrying a black pistol. For an instant she wanted a cigarette, something she’d not tasted for thirty years. “Hello, Ordell.”

“Hey, Mrs. Sims.”

His face looked raked back by wind, or by a hard hand, strained and pressured, the pale shining skin worn nearly through. “You look tired,” she said.

“Actually I’m feeling pretty fit.”

She thought of her son, of the brightness in his eyes that as a child had been like a promise that nothing terrible would happen to any of them. She remembered her husband and pictured him leaning over his work table bringing lovers to life in pictures. She blessed him, blessed Jackie, blessed her son, and experienced a declining and simple tenderness. She never heard the shot, and the bullet entering her brain burned too briefly for her to worry about it.

A
little after midnight Cot slipped through a section of bent-back fence that let out onto Conover Street, walked up to Cromartie’s All-nite Store, and got a
pernil
sandwich and a cold can of ginseng tea. The Bangladeshi man behind the counter had a family resemblance to Cot’s friend Rajah, his brother, who was on his way to jail on a tax dodge—probably already there—but Cot didn’t know his name and the man didn’t know him. He bought half a dozen postcards and stamps and standing at the counter wrote messages to people around town and one to the boys up in Miami, addressed to Spane. Sending postcards was a habit he’d kept up all his life. “Gus said he thinks the world of you,” he wrote to Spane and the boys. “
Perseverent
was the word he used. ‘They’re game,’ the Big Man said. I miss you too.”

To Marcella he wrote,

“You touch the tenderest parts of me with a gentleness that would make the meanest cut artist shiver. This has always seemed miraculous to me, like waking for the first time on the beach to the sunrise shining in your face.”

He scratched the last line out and wrote over it:

“I’m feeling a little tentative right now, but truth is I’m making progress on serious matters that concern us both. Maybe we should have a baby after all. Or—forget it—I don’t mean to bring up a worrisome topic. Love you lovable you.”

To his mother he wrote:

“Dear Ma: you extend my thinking always. I never could quite keep up with your curiosity about life’s specks and illuminata, but still it tugs me on. I really enjoy our discussions about the why of things but I wonder sometimes lately if life isn’t mostly just taking life in without thinking much about it. I’m dreaming these days of Mexico.”

He wrote postcards to Jim Willys, the police chief, and to the mayor, explaining briefly what Ordell had done. What had he done? Killed CJ and taken the emeralds.

“ . . . and unleashed a string of emergencies from here to Fort Myers, Miami, and back. I realize I have had a part in this. You might even say it’s all my fault. But if Ordell hadn’t raised his greedy hand against CJ I think things would have gone a lot smoother.”

His handwriting got smaller and more rushed as he went. He was careful to make it legible, a problem that went back to his grammar school days. There was always so much to say and such a pressing need to say it. Sometimes these days he looked over his rushed cards and couldn’t make out a word he’d written. He needed a translator for his own scribblings. “ ‘ . . . easy quiet, a secure retreat / A harmless life that knows not how to cheat’ ” he quoted, adding in small printed letters: “Virgil,
The
Georgics
2.” This in a card to Winky Gold, the county mayor, chief of everybody who lived in the Keys outside KW. As he finished and stacked the cards—five minutes of his time that he was aware was like gold dust draining from a bag—two drunks, no, a drunk and an older man, not the drunk’s partner, came into the store. They both went to the counter, and the drunk took up an argument with the counterman that had clearly begun earlier. As he spoke the man behind him, an older man in a red satin vest and white shorts, pulled change from his pocket. The change got loose and scattered on the floor. Cot and the drunk helped the man pick the silver up. Cot could smell the drunk’s fruity and preservative-saturated breath. He knew him slightly, a man he had chatted with one rainy afternoon a year or so ago about mincemeat pies. They both had favored lard to make the crust flaky. The man didn’t seem to recognize him. Cot handed the few cents back, and the older man thanked him. He got another postcard and standing at the counter wrote his father.

“You once told me that your parents’ heavy hand had worn out all familial feeling in you. Well, it’s never been that way for me. My love for you, Papa, keeps winging over the waters. One trade item that no embargo can keep out.”

He paid for the cards and for the tall can of iced tea and the sandwich and went out into the night. The air was clean smelling and cool. He mailed the cards at a box on the corner. As he lingered a moment leaning against the big metal container inhaling sweet airs of night he realized he had known the other gent too, the man in the vest: Rev. Buckle from Grace Episcopal church; the rev’d taught him the Nicene Creed when he was twelve. Back then the priest had been a stocky man, the flesh stretching the skin with health, his glittery blue eyes snapping shrewd looks at him as he recited. Now a man grown old. Discrete swirls of white hair, loose jowls, a dark patch above his lip like a phantom mustache. The old man hadn’t recognized him either. Maybe he too had lost some essential identifier. As Cot mused by the mailbox the reverend came out. He raised his face to the light from the overhead mercury lamp and sniffed the air. Stood a moment looking vaguely around. Then leaning forward like a heavy object tipped out of its inertia he plunged ponderously into the dark village night. For an instant Cot wanted to be the sort of person who spoke to aged benefactors. A plug of sadness had lodged under his breast bone. Old malarkies that took on unforeseen resonances. He had forgotten the creed the old preacher had taught him. Did it include the part about resurrection of the body? Yes, it did. Not zombies walking around but reanimated souls in their best clothes. His mother had once been Episcopalian but had changed her religion to Catholic to please his father, and then his father had repudiated the Catholics. She was left dangling among the papists. But not really. She had climbed down and walked away through the scruffy ecumenical streets of Key West.

He massaged a place in his chest that hurt. Maybe only a little muscle that had been over-stretched out in the Gulf.

Two tall men on bicycles, the bikes sporting plaques identifying them as tourist wheels, passed by in the street. Both men, as if they were a team, pedaled in the same stately manner. Both were barefoot. It was great to come down to the tropics without ever having to leave the country, everybody knew about that. And good to ride a bike at night in your bare feet. The sea winds blew the stinks of the addled republic away. Not just the beefy and chlorosulfuric stench of the cities, but the funks of the ruralities as well, the crotty smell of cornfields and the coal oil reek of mountains. He laughed, whispery and low. Green growing crops—skinned deserts, elevated scenarios where you had to climb and look out over territory—the natural world, made him uneasy. Dirt. Sap. Fruit rotted black and mushy. Coconuts could drop out of a tree and kill you. Plains, deserts, country roads were clogged with snakes and horrible biting bugs. He’d stopped his car once and fired a full Uzi clip into bushes just to keep the swamp back. He knew what growing things wanted.
Yeah, so why Virgil?
he thought. It was his way—he knew it. Cross-grained to the end. It was homage and hope, it was the little boy trying to become some strange and special thing. Farms! Where you had to go to bed early and everything smelled of cow shit! Mountains hard to climb, hard to climb down from! Fields! Tomatoes with stony green fruit hanging like tiny grenades in the armpits of the branches!
He
liked to sit on the curb outside Smacky’s Fin up in Miami eating shrimp salad with his fingers. He liked that, Virge. He liked to squeeze lime juice into his mouth, Marcella liked that too. Christ! He wished she was here.

B
ack in the mausoleum he lay on the bench sipping the cold tea. The air in the tomb was dry, comforting in its dryness. A faint dust on everything. He got up and ran his hand over CJ’s casket. He would like to look at him once more, but he was reluctant to break the seal. Maybe he was only shy, same old Cot, letting opportunity slip by. Except at work, and as he could have said once, except for on a football field. People had always been a little blurry to him. He got up and went outside. Stars everywhere like bristly bits tossed aside, crumbs. He crossed to the other side of the cemetery and entered the small compound where Marcella’s people were buried. Oleander bushes flowered along one side of a low rusty iron picket fence. Cot lay down under one of the bushes and went to sleep and dreamed of dogs running ahead of him across a stony field somewhere near the ocean.

M
arcella found him there in the early morning, curled up, his face pressed into a tuft of bahia grass, dreams, rusty and creaking, scurrying for the exits. She told him Ordell had shot his mother. Cot sat in the grass in the fresh soft light and listened, but what she said sounded stupid. A flock of crows wheeled above distant bushy trees, unaware of what had happened, but maybe they too knew, he thought, maybe they had seen it all and the flycatchers too and the cats and the bugs and the goosefoot grass and hibiscus flowers and stray elements of breeze and creation in general had seen it. An insufferable sense of humiliation filled his body so suddenly he was choking on it before he could even think what was happening.

“How do you know this?”

“He told me.”

“Where is he?”

“He said he was going to turn himself in.”

“Will he do that?”

His mother’s life an evacuation, a country, a race just wiped off the map.

Marcella’s face was marked with tiny seeps and abandonments of fatigue. A small, disamplified breeze, breeze in a minor key, brushed by them carrying the smell of jasmine.

“I better find him,” he said.

For a single moment that was almost more than he could bear the full weight of grief pushed against him, bland and featureless and solid. He wanted to run away. Spring from that place, fired like a shot into another world, but he couldn’t move. The moment passed as it came but it left a sensation as if he’d been entered by a nothingness, a feral slow-wittedness without design or purpose or connection to anything else, inevitable and vast, tasteless, formless, a grinding stupidity and ignorance older than the world. He felt suddenly emptied, tossed aside, beyond rescue.

He got up and stamped his feet on the scruffy, salt-gray grass. Buried in the grave he nearly stood on was Duffy Holt, Marcella’s great grandfather, a schooner captain, a man left bewildered, so they said, when the wooden sailing ships became only curiosities. He had been buried in the uniform of blue and braid he had devised for himself and walked around town in, beached, a ridiculous and touching figure. Cot started to move away but a fatigue beyond his late weariness stopped him. He sat down on a gravestone, above the last resting place of Oscar Cord, child of Hattie and Homer. He looked bleakly up at Marcella. He wanted to ask her what to do. Where should he go?