Men in Miami Hotels (22 page)

T
he old lady was insubstantially drunk, as was his father. Rafael had told him that he usually wound up—meagerly, faintly, superficially, as he put it—drunk, whenever he spent any time at Consuela’s. “It worries me,” he said, but Cot could tell it didn’t worry him much. He was old now. Age was like a crust upon him, under which moved the muscularity and mind of a younger man. But this younger man was becoming more and more deeply trapped by the more and more impenetrable crust. His hands holding the glass were veiny, the long fingers more sinewy than ever. The hands still flexible and strong, able, like patched equipment, like everything down here, reworked and able, aged devices opening and closing like clockwork, fixing and holding.

Consuela, talking of liberty, served cut up bits of sausages and pickled palm hearts and stems of lemon grass or something like it slathered in hot sauce. Cot rubbed the hot sauce on his lips. It burned, and he started to sweat. His father looked at him and grinned. Cot tried to take his father’s hands in his, but his father pulled away. “I don’t want that
picadeni
,” he said. He didn’t like anything on his hands, not even the smell of soap. From the street came the cries of vendors and a man saying “I will propose a solution impossible to resist,” and then someone blew a brief squealing blast on a horn.

As his father studied his face Cot tried to will a blankness into his eyes, as he had as a boy but was never able to; he wasn’t able to now. Well, let the old man look. The smell of some complicated cooking came from the kitchen, coriander and cumin, hot pork. The walls were painted pale blue like the porch ceilings in Key West. What do you see, Papi? Ill-lit, banged-together excuses and windedness? His father studied his face without speaking. He had been a young man with promise—his father had—with genius, they said, capable of writing great novelistic works. But his father said that was only the dream of those who didn’t really know him. He had wanted something besides the imperatives and gauges of any kind of genius and that something else he’d done. “I couldn’t keep hold of your mother,” he would say sometimes, but that was another matter. Yes, well, there was always another matter. Cot had wondered if he could convince his father to flee the approaching killers, but now, up close, inside the rasp and clutch of his father’s dreaming, he realized he couldn’t convince his father to flee anything. A searing pain flashed behind his eyes. He bent over his knees.

“Milk,” his father said to Consuela. In a few minutes they would be marching around the room singing old mountain guerrilla songs. Consuela brought him a glass of chilled and diluted evaporated milk. He sipped it and put it down. The milk didn’t touch the hollowness in him. Consuela was an anthropologist, of the ex variety, hagiographer of the old native tribes. In her youth she had taken Indian lovers, last of the Awarak-, of the Caribe-, of the fabled Siboney-style. She had borne at least three Indian children, maybe more, way back, but they had been lost to her, by way of disease and war and simple disappearance. Her life, she said, had become a happenstance, a drift through time. She talked like that.

“I got to be going,” Cot said. He and his father lay on the thin couches in the big living room that had once been a ballroom in Consuela’s family mansion, now cut up in slices into little apartments, except for this one. The finches cried out from the back. Consuela, half draped in filmy pastel scarves, floated around the room. “I got to go,” Cot said. She looked at him as if she knew he believed everything she had ever told him. His father made his little patting, half-clapping motion, and rubbed his hands. He was a man who sought precious things. So he had said many times.

Cot’s mind wandered, shying from talk, like a child’s slipping away from the adult business. In Key West they had retrieved his mother from the deeps of her chipped porcelain tub that sat quietly unabashed on its four lion’s paw feet. Word of this had crossed the Gulf Stream to get here. Word. Syllables memorized like a parrot’s speech. Cries of finches, of street hawkers, of agents outside seedy nightclubs. A ditty sung to tourists.
Sunk
—retrieved, they said, expelled like a bite of bitter fruit or a fact declaimed in the street—his mother doting on her own death, the brilliant Key West day leaning down like an old man looking at a bright feather on the floor—word of it prattled, groaned out, lilted in caprice, tolled as fate, whispered in hotel coffee shops and government offices, slipped into el Presidente’s liturgies: all falling short of the truth. Even the most alarming facts, the heartbreakers, in this case didn’t eliminate confusion.

The pain sliced again, burning, in his mind. A heaviness in his body, clanking chains heaved through the hollowness. “It’s got me cockeyed,” he said out loud.

“No, no,” Consuela said, misunderstanding, “you are welcome here.”

He smiled at her. The cry of parakeets, a drumming sound from the street, “
Hola
,” a voice sweetly said somewhere not far away; he heard a bus change gears, heard the cross cries of gulls, the voice of a man yelling that he could not be made to . . . to what?
But you don’t understand
, someone was always saying, even here in the
Paradiso Comunal.
In Havana streets people moved without drawing attention to themselves, often silently, waited silently in lines for corn meal and tapioca starch. Pedicab operators leaned on their vehicles under the vast branches of laurel de India trees counting, dream cash.

“Well, it’s okay,” he said as if his father had asked him something. The old man didn’t answer. We hardly recognize each other, he thought. It was as if they had become more and more distantly related. Eighteenth cousins by marriage and foster families, ghosts of an irresolvable past run through fingers grown crooked and stained with indigo.

“Come, boy,” his father said. “I will walk with you, and then I will return here.”

Cot wouldn’t stop him. He would instead reach his hand out, no, he would take a step forward, his bare feet—Consuela allowed no shoes in her house—making the palm-straw rug crackle, and take his father in his arms. Maybe that would work. But it was like hugging a scarecrow. The finches, sealed in their rooms, groaned and prattled. Was he the only one who heard the birds? His father’s body rustled and settled in his arms. He saw the old man crouching in a doorway crying, saw his mother lying under the ground in the dark, no shoes on her feet. He could taste his father’s breath. Sense the thoughts like pale divinations drifting out of darkness. The Quarterback, they called him at headquarters, the younger men mocking him as he walked down the long hall to Albertson’s office.

His father began to cough, hacking hard, and then he whirled in a slowed-down motion and vomited on the carpet.

Consuela, without comment, cleaned the gray froth up with a rag and a bucket of fresh water.

His father sat huddled in a chair, his feet drawn up like a girl’s.

“Papi,” Cot said.

“It will pass,” his father said.

“Something will,” Consuela said, her voice raw and unappeased.

His father trembled. Or maybe he was only shifting his feet.

“I got to go,” Cot said and leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

It was afterwards, at the track—how long ago? a week?—money gone, too much money to make up, owed to Camp Billings’s bookies over on Calle Cinquo—or no, maybe it had been later, when he ran into Jack Bellieau, outside the little parlor attached to the rear of Sammy’s Athletic Bar on Maxwell Ave., that he decided. Seeing Jack had determined something—though he wasn’t sure how, or what (maybe it was Jack’s tentativeness, his step off the curb like a man not sure whether he was standing on a curb or a cliff, the uselessness of everything Jack was up to, his nutty familiarities and impiety, the tarnished silver ring Jack had tried to give him)—that settled something in him: he’d decided to get on the late bus to Key West. He was going to fix things for Mama.

Well, he’d done that.

“Let us now go,” his father said getting up.

“You okay, Pop?”

Yes, yes, of course—bustling in his slow old man’s way, retrieving his straw hat and putting it on his head, adjusting the angle. A certain reflexive jauntiness still available, even in a time of grief. This appealed to Cot. He slid his arm along his father’s back. There were still strong muscles there, stretched and thin, worked out over a drawing board. “
Vendre a usted en la oscuridad de la noche
,” said the beautiful Morena as she disappeared into the side of a comic book panel.
I will come to you in the dark of night.
The inevitability of fate—there was no other topic for the
novela gráfica
. The rest of us standing under the trees in the twilit dark waiting for our bus to freedom. He hoped his father would be able to work to the last.
Al igual que la muerte clap de dos manos frias
.
Death like the clap of two cold hands
.

T
hey walked out together into the sunshine that was like a clear varnish on flowering bushes and trees, on the pavement crumbling before their eyes and on passersby hurrying toward their fates. His father resettled his hat—cattleman’s hat—squarely on his head. His eyes had a dreamy look, but behind the dreaminess was a sternness that had frightened Cot as a boy. Now it touched him. These strong men who had left their strength somewhere behind them—he too was becoming one of them. Across the street a breeze filled the tops of coconut palms, shook them violently and let them go; the fronds hung stiffly as if the breeze had never been there.

“I love the softness of evenings in Havana,” Rafael said maybe for the tenth time in his son’s hearing, maybe the twentieth. He was arranging things, but his son couldn’t really know that. You had to settle even the words you used, the thoughts that came as you walked each morning to see the ocean purling and stitching against the old seawall. The walk home from Consuela’s was one he had taken many times. But rarely with his son. It was something new to settle in its place. A green ice truck passed. Two men clinging to the back were drenched with water from the melting ice. That too, and the parakeets flashing in their flock overhead, quarreling as they went. And the young women in their sporty hats, the little boy in a red shirt throwing a ball against the side of a building. There was a vastness you were part of, and it was necessary to arrange and codify and settle things with this vastness. But none of this could he say to his son. He listed slightly as he walked, and told himself this was because of the weightiness of his thoughts and let it go at that, but even so there was he knew a new voice calling to him from the dark, rising from among the others. He had been strong enough to hold these voices off or evade them or outwit them but his strength was failing. The women and men in his books were his charms and fetishes constructed and thrown out ahead of him like decoys for death to snap at. That was a way of looking at them. His guitar, his raffish clothes and hat, the routes he took on his walks, his solitude, were disguises, evasions, feints. His wife had known too much, saw too clearly. And now she called to him. He shuddered and his son put his arm around him, but this did not help and he shook off the touch. He was too scared to be touched. He saw terrible things coming through the dark. Her voice—her death—had tipped the dark toward him. He sensed it groaning and shifting, the huge movement of blankness as it began to slide. “
Te pido
,” he whispered. I implore you.

Cot thought he himself was listing—staggering—loose and unhinged, but he wasn’t. A breeze pushed solemnly through the heavy leaves of a nearby
guasima
tree, and it seemed as if it was pushing its way, lightly, through him too.
Then we just drop
—picking up a thought, interrupting himself, disagreeing with the shapes and forms of consideration that lay inside him like tiny scuttled vessels. Make a mistake—any mistake, press time too hard—and bang. Strange thoughts for a killer. He almost laughed. But he saw her, Marcella, lying on her side on the bed, trying to hold her head up like a fish sipping air. I have to go, he had said, terror buzzing like a hive inside him. But I want—and stopped.
I want order and gainliness and a peacefulness without resolution and snappy parlance and kindness and hot home fries on a winter morning and to live quietly in the thoughts of a loved one and quickness and pleasure like a breeze moving in green leaves
—and on and on, he thought.

He groaned and he must have started to tip over because his father caught him in his still-firm grip, a grip that almost hurt. “You have to give things time to pass,” he said. “That’s what’s difficult.”

Who’s got that kind of time, Papi?

He smiled at his father. The breeze rattled a red sign outside a barber shop as they passed through a small square behind one of the old municipal hospitals, used now for government offices. Office of Paper Bags and Bits of String. Office of Quirky Communiqués and Rambling Asides. A Cuban flag had been painted hanging from a third-story window. In the window a small boy waved. Cot waved back though he could tell the boy wasn’t waving at them. His father smiled his halfhearted smile, the one he had started with after he and Ella broke up.

“Do you want to sit down?”

“Maybe a minute.”

Cot raised his face to the washed blue sky. It was late, the ancient unremarkable dusk had come on. Thin clouds, that looked worn out, nearly erased, drifted north. All of this, every job, every kiss, aimed at an easement, that peculiarity in the universe that allowed a person to be released into time. He dropped to the green wooden bench—as if from a height, he thought catching himself on the scarred wood—as if fallen from the sky. His father eased down beside him, and they bumped shoulders, two large men, reeling from blows. Well, they were not the only ones. At Florio’s coffee bar across the street, two men sat on stools before the outdoor window, their canes leaning beside them. The counterman, a fat man wearing a white brimless cap, served them tiny china cups of espresso. His father nodded to the men. One nodded back, a slim fellow in plain Russian glasses. “The world wakes and re-awakes,” his father said, “but all remains the same.”