Men in Miami Hotels (21 page)

“It makes you sad.”

“Yes it does.”

With one long-fingered hand she pushed her black hair out of her eyes. Outside someone, a child, said, “I am the prince among wolves.” (
Yo soy el principe entre los lobos
.) “I mean,” she said, “that what
was
impossible, isn’t. Now we can.”

But won’t, he thought.

She looked away from him. Her tongue licked along her full bottom lip. What she was concealing started a shuddering inside him, but he knew it didn’t show.

“Have you seen Pop?”

“He said he was going over to Consuela’s.”

Consuela was the woman his father had been involved with all these years. He had once thought she was the reason his mother had left Havana for good, the reason his father, who trailed his mother to Key West, had returned to Cuba. He didn’t think that now, or only that. His mother had been following some other circuit, following something like a principle that wasn’t really a principle. Something more a feeling, or an index of a feeling, some understanding that the world was filled with sadness, say, that no one would miss out on sorrow—a drift, like a winter tide when the surges came in slow rising swells and, quietly, with great power, pulled what lay on the beaches out to sea. His own choosing of the life he led seemed like that, and in that way, seemed to him the ordinary progression, or restatement, of life, from parent to child, the passing on of response and call, the way his own dark brown eyes were his father’s, his light curling hair his mother’s. He knew there was more than that, but he thought that the
more
itself was part of a drift of possibility, of chance and a hard-minded preference.

She got up from the bed. She was wearing her yellow underwear. She had slept under a light cotton coverlet, yellow with red tea roses printed on it. He went out into the living room while she got dressed. On his father’s slanted desk at the front windows were panels he was working on.
Fotonovelas
. That wasn’t the word. They were graphic novels—comic books for adults, for middle-aged women mostly, these days,
gráficos
. In one panel a woman with full sculpted lips and beautiful eyes looked expectantly back at a man who was staring at her. “
Incluso riquezas—incluso el amor . . . no son suficientas para mi
,” the man said. Even riches—even love . . . are not enough for me. What is? He thought he knew. Out in the street a pedicab passed carrying two tourists, a man and an enormously fat woman, in white clothes and identical straw hats. The man was trying to look through a pair of brass binoculars. Without returning to the bedroom Cot said, “Pack your bag.”

Marcella came and stood in the doorway. She was a tall woman, heavier than the slender girl she had been. She leaned against the door frame, brushing her hair. Her eyes, on him from the first instant, seemed to come more sharply into focus. His cat was like that, he thought, when he returned from one of his trips—her eyes going wide for a second in a kind of simple amazement that it was him. It was a look they shared, he thought, he and the cat and Marcella. But now she frowned, grimaced, so that lines bunched between her heavy eyebrows; this was a look that was only hers. She pressed her finger hard against the side of her long nose, turning it. “Are
you
packed?”

“I’m going to hang around.”

“Oh, Cot.”

“You knew about CJ, didn’t you?”

She glanced, once, lightly it seemed to him—in a single instant—out the wide front windows at palms and tamarind trees and hibiscus flowering, at the quiet street in the old part of the old city, at an old woman in a worn, ruffled yellow dress waving a folded umbrella as if conducting a slow, silent orchestra. “Yes,” she said. “Afterwards.”

“Did you know Ordell would kill Mama?”

“No. I never knew that.” She clutched herself in her arms. “I didn’t think it. I didn’t dream it.”

“Sometimes one thing leads to another.”

“You don’t always know.”

“You get a feel for it.”

“Still, you don’t know.”

He saw her then, marooned on an island in an island apartment in the shallow sea of the old Indian tribes—thinking: one of those old men down at Playa Giron was an Awarak, some few still around—marooned in the hemisphere, on the planet, in the whirling system of stars. And on and on. The air in the apartment smelled of his father’s aftershave. An old Cuban, lime-smelling concoction. His father had tired of his mother, of her intensities, of her sure-footedness.

He took a step, reached for her, but she backed away.

“No,” she said. “Don’t save me.” Her face had suddenly turned old, ancient, she had become an old woman tapping at plastic window blinds, straining to hear the steps of her dead ones.

“Is that why you came down here with me?”

“I don’t know.”

As he spoke, as he stood there with the sunlight from the open front window raining on him, burning his body, leaching his mind, he reconfirmed that there were facts he didn’t want to know. She had called Spane in Miami. He didn’t want to know that. She loved another man. She had already left him. He didn’t want to know. He wanted simply to walk around these facts without even glancing at them.
Don’t tell me.

He said, “What did you plan to do?”

“Stay with you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Oh yes. That’s what I planned.”

“In shabby, unfumigated Havana.”

“Good times are coming again.”

“We’ll all get rich.”

“That too.”

“Do you have the emeralds?”

“No.”

“Didn’t Ordell find them?”

“No. That’s why he went up to Lauderdale. Those head-knockers grabbed them.”

“Spane’ll be glad to hear that.”

A cricket chirped somewhere—no, it was a gecko. They were all over down here in the houses, slim white lizards chirping their commentary from the ceilings.

“Cot.”

She looked into his eyes. He could see the collapse, the caving in. But she didn’t back away or turn, she didn’t drop her gaze. He could feel her sinking her leads and grapples deeply into him, sense the following commandos of her power entering him. She could see all the way to the bottom; that was what he counted on her for.

“Why Spane?”

“I don’t know.”

He jerked his fist up: he could feel the power in his body, feel the arm raised strong as a derrick, lifting a hundred feet into the air, feel the great weight of the boom that strained his shoulder and his back, but he didn’t let it loose. It was like putting the brakes on a planet. He twitched, shuddered.

She reeled away, as if blown loose, but this movement, the elaborate near fall, the catching of herself against the flowery arm of the couch, of her standing—looming, he thought—before the particularized, self-perfecting day outside, was all an act, a formal presentation. He wished he’d hit her, but it was already too late for that. The next instant crowded in, jamming signals, proposing new approaches and lies.
I got to get going.
Her face looked smaller and creased as if it was mummifying before his eyes. Her hair was dry, and he saw that it had a few long white strands mixed in with it.

“We’re on the other side of the Gulf Stream,” she said.

“Great Wall of the Americas.” A twitching had begun in his left arm, a fresh compilation making itself known. “
Spane?
”

“Sure.”

“
Si—claro
.” He knew it would get worse. But when it got worse there would be no shock. He was glad of that. “You call him Mikey?”

“Miguel.”

“When should I expect him?”

“Tonight.”

Her face was white, or no, white with tiny dark blotches fading into the hairline. She had always thought her hairline was too frizzy. White nappy, she called it. She had learned Cuban dances, Cuban songs she sang in grade school wearing a bright red bandana around her neck.

“Papi?”

“Oh, Cotland. He’s at Consuela’s. He doesn’t know anything.”

“That might not matter to Spane.”

“It will. Don’t worry.”

“Don’t tell me not to worry, please.”

“All right.”

“Where’re you meeting him?”

“At the Ambos Mundos Hotel.”

“That turista pile? Jesus. Is he staying there?”

“Yes—I don’t know.”

“Come on, Marcella.”

“Cot, I. . . .” She started out of the room. A defiance, a hardness crackled in her body—he could see it—flared, and flickered out. She stopped. There was a gloss of sweat on her face. “I wish people had air-conditioning down here.”

“It’s all green in old Habana.”

“I’m swimming in shame.”

“Are you?”

“Sloshing.”

“What was Ordell’s cut?” Things had clarified, like ice cubes in a drained glass.

“On the emeralds?”

“Yes, May.”

“Fifteen percent.”

“That’s all? Murders, mayhem, destruction of local families . . .”

“It’s two million dollars, Cot.”

“Well.”

“He proposed a deal to get the gems, and Miguel agreed, after which Miguel told him he would kill him if he didn’t get them back.”

“He would. Yes.”

“Ordell was terrified. He didn’t know what to do.”

“So he went and shot Mama.”

“Yes. Because of that, and because he hates you, Cot.”

“Did he think I had the stones?”

“He didn’t know. He thought you would give up.”

“I already did that—a long time ago.”

“Ah, Cot.”

“Stop saying my fucking name.”

“All right.”

He could see how tired she was. He could see how she had been carried far beyond what she could bear. These little islands, he thought, that we hold sacred and plan to flee to. That fade as we approach them.

“He was supposed to kill me.”

“Yes. But you gave the gems to CJ.”

“But I never told Mikey.”

“——————”

He had told Marcella. “You’re a real killer, baby.”

“You sound like you always wanted to say that.”

“Not to you.”

A bird—he didn’t know what kind—flew by outside with a quick sharp striking of wings.

“He told me he was going to take the emeralds from you.”

“Ordell.”

“He said you would trade them for your mother’s house.”

“I didn’t need him.”

“Yes, you did.”

“———————”

“He could have held you up forever. He could have taken the house.”

“I guess I missed something with you two.”

“I guess.”

“Well, tell me this.” He stopped because he didn’t know what to say next.

She didn’t say anything.

He felt—somehow felt—that what they were saying had been said a million times before, as if the words had been scraped up from the grotty carpets of twenty-dollar bedrooms and second-run movie houses, and not even dusted off, not even looked at or sorted, used again. Old familiar scuds and wrake. The inside of his mouth felt dirty. His brain, his heart, all of it, felt dirty. He could see that whipped, shamed, scared she was still in a rage. He stepped toward her, the fingers of his right hand cupped as if holding an offering, of sweet loquats say. But she shrank from him—he saw it—and quickly, so quickly that he could tell himself, if he wanted to (he didn’t want to, not yet), that she hadn’t flinched, pulled herself into alignment, into the shape of one who was still in love with the one she hated; who thought she could pull it off.

He was going to touch her anyway. But then he didn’t.

She smiled at him, a new, tremendously complicated, evasive smile, half-caste and localized. She would not even bow her head and say
You can do with me what you want
. She wouldn’t, even now, allow anything like that. He had loved that she was such a strong-minded woman. Able to bear the consequences of what she had to do. He stared at her. He wanted to break her down and study her. Take her to the laboratory. She looked back at him from another world. The faint shuss and rattle of almond leaves came from outside. In this season, dry season, the wind would turn around sometimes. They weren’t far enough south to wholly miss winter, if winter was strong enough. Even in Havana women walked around in January in old sequin-flecked sweaters, men in patched windbreakers. But it was spring. The plumeria flowers had crept back onto bony gray branches. The flamboyants bustled up their barrages.

“Come on,” he said.

She preceded him into the kitchen where from under the sink he took a coil of laundry cord he found there and made her tie herself up with it. He completed the job, making the knots firm and the loops tight against her skin. She was hog-tied—that was the word. She believed him when he said he would kill her if she didn’t do what he told her. He lifted her and carried her over his shoulder and lay her on the bed. He put a clean rag in her mouth and blindfolded her with a yellow bandana that still had the crease marks in it. You can still get away he thought of saying but he didn’t. Then he left the house and took a cab the fifteen blocks to Consuela’s apartment and sat in the living room with his father drinking a glass of
agua dulce
and listening to el Presidente’s speech on the radio.

“D
emocracy,” Consuela said from the living room, “like Christianity and Brotherhood, is not to be found among those who claim them. These great principles have flown to some other, undiscovered lands.” In the back of her apartment came the sound of her finches, quarrelsome tiny birds expressing themselves constantly. From the bathroom window he could see down in the courtyard a couple of old women feeding chickens. One of the women wore a red bandana around her hair. His face in the mirror looked plasticized and faded. A parrot screeched from some hidden place. His face seemed to be the face of one who lacked governance. He got down on his knees and tried to pray, but he felt cumbersome and lonely there. He got up and looked out the window at two men who were setting up a card table in the backyard. The women were sitting in folding chairs under a senna tree talking. The men divided dominoes and began to play. It could go on and on like this, like it had in childhood where there was always another interesting development. If they asked at his trial he would say that was what it was like to work for Albertson, or had been. The parrot screeched again, its voice almost breaking into speech. It wouldn’t know what it was saying, as he hadn’t known when at six he shouted Cuban war cries taught him by Manuel Cordoba. He pressed his ear against the inside wall. “Rat-tat-tat,” said Consuela, mimicking a machine gun in illustration of one of her martial points. She always talked of obedience. Of how one must submit to a greater power. He liked that. Someone—or something—you had to answer to. He bathed his hands in the sink, washing with Consuela’s lemon-scented soap. Then he took a shower, supporting himself against the wall as the water ran over his head and back as he had seen a gangster do in a movie. The water was cool, refreshing. He dried off with one of Consuela’s fluffy yellow towels. He sat on the side of the tub naked saying bits of
The
Georgics
to himself. Virgil had been often at the beck and call of governance. He had lived under the ruthless, corporate hand of the Caesars. The pressure twisted things. He would read the Greeks next, Sophocles maybe. The sky was pouring through a soft funnel of cumulus. Birds like scraps of paper, of testament, blew by.