Red Tide (8 page)

“Anna’s new in town, Billy. Chat ’er up a bit, eh?” Nicky said, squeezing my elbow. Then he cackled and vanished into the crowd.

Anna looked embarrassed. I would have, too, except I was busy being confused, and mad at Nicky. He was ruining a perfectly good sulk.

“My name is Billy Knight,” I said, sounding stiff to my own ears.

She looked me over and our eyes met. She looked away. “Yes,” she said. “Anna Kovacic.” She said it 
ko-va-CHEECH.

“I saw you at Mallory Square, doing your act.”

There was a challenge in her blue eyes, the bluest I had ever seen. “This is no act,” she said. “It is to do this, or to clean in hotel rooms.”

“Where are you from?” I asked her. Not brilliant, but I wasn’t expecting the reaction I got. Her head snapped back to me and her eyes were suddenly burning.

“Ukraine,” she said.

“Oh.” There didn’t seem to be a whole lot to say to that. “How long have you been in Key West?”

Her face didn’t change, but she wasn’t seeing me anymore. “Since they are killing all my family there.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Yes.” She looked away again.

And that really should have been the end of it. There is really and truly nothing to say when someone tells you they have recently moved to Key West because their whole family was killed. This is where normal people scramble for an even half-graceful exit. This is where I should have run for the cover of a cold beer and another bowl of peanuts.

But something about the way she said it, like it was a challenge, made me stay and look for a way to keep the conversation going.

So what I came out with was, “How did you meet Nicky?”

She turned cold blue eyes on me. “Who?”

“The dwarf who brought you over here.”

She turned briefly, looking through the party for Nicky. “He is called Nicky?” She said it 
Nyecky
.

“Yeah.”

“Ah,” she said. “I am first meeting him just now. He is talking very hot about Haitian ruffo… rufo… How you are calling the ones who come on the boats?”

“Refugees.”

“Yes, refugees. And I say, well, we are taught when I am young America is not the land of the free if you are a black person. And he is very happy I say this. And after he talks for a minute more, he is looking around and seeing you. Then he takes my arm and say, come with me, dolly. Then he is dragging me here and 
poom
—” She shrugged. Her shoulders rippled.

I caught myself noticing that her shoulders rippled. I tried to remind myself that I was still trying to get over Nancy and I really shouldn’t be noticing anything like that right now. It was the sign of a shallow man.

But I did notice. And I noticed the graceful line of her neck, the outline of collarbone, the sleek perfection of a figure that had started good and got better through hard work. And the clear light in her eyes, the light of intelligence, wonder, doubt, thought.

Okay, I was shallow.

“Now that you’re here,” I said with a deep breath, “can I get you something to drink?”

She blushed. “Thank you. But I—” She was going to say no; maybe out of habit or insecurity, but not out of indifference, I was sure. Instead, she looked at me out of the corner of her eye, hesitated, and gave me the most serious smile I had ever seen. “Perhaps one of those yellow sodas?”

I got her a Mountain Dew. She accepted it politely and drank about half in one swallow. I admired the way her throat muscles worked as she swallowed.

We talked. Anna loosened up a little with a soda in her hand. So did I. She was astonished to learn what I did for a living. “I think everybody in America is a rich lawyer,” she said. “And you say to be a poor fishermen? Feh.”

“Not exactly. I take other people fishing. It pays a little better than if I was fishing myself.”

She looked doubtful. “In my country, fishermen is a very poor job. Very smelly.”

“In your country, people won’t pay $450 a day to go fishing. But the fish smell the same.”

She said something with a lot of consonants. “So much! For a fish?”

“Welcome to capitalist imperialism. How did you end up in Mallory Square?”

She gave me a half-sour look. “First, is what I do now. But then—” She shrugged. Those beautiful neck muscles moved again. “When I am small, I train to do gymnastic. But by the time of 16 years, 17 years, this career is over, yes? I am too big.” She made hand gestures to show how fat she was. I didn’t believe it.

“So when—when I come here I work in the hotel as a maid, clean the rooms. And in this country they are making you feel to be an animal to do this work. I watch through the windows of all the rooms every day, and I see Mallory Square, and I think I can do this and not have to feel I am a dog.”

She slanted a long look at me through thick lashes. “They are saying this is black girl’s work, to clean rooms in a hotel. It is very hard for me to see that some things in this country are just as Putin says.”

“America has a race problem,” I said. “Always has. Maybe it always will. I didn’t used to think so, but—”

“Is this why they send these Haitians home, as Nicky is saying? Because they are black people?”

“Nicky is not well right now on the subject of Haitians. But that’s part of it.”

“Why is he not well? What do you mean?”

I told her about our sailboat trip, about finding the body. “It isn’t pretty. But this happens every day and the police tend to think it’s somebody else’s problem.”

“Whose problem?”

“The Haitians.”

“And what do the people say?” I must have looked confused. “You know, the everybody.”

“The everybody doesn’t hear much about it, doesn’t think much about it.”

“And does not care because these others are black people? So if they are dying every day, this is nothing?”

I’d been hearing this from Nicky a little too much lately. On top of everything else, the subject had dropped to the bottom of my list of Things To Talk About With Beautiful Women at Parties.

But there she was, wanting to talk about it. I couldn’t very well say, “Yeah, you’re right—hey! Wanna see my boat?” No matter how much I wanted to do exactly that. So I said, “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.”

She made a face. It looked like Avenging Justice. “So. And this is the answer of someone who will not say the truth because truth is looking too bad, hah? The answer of 
politician
. The answer of so many in my country who say, but is not my problem who is killed, these are not my people.”

She threw her hands up in the air. “And so nobody is doing anything because is not their problem, and by the time is their problem they are not 
able
 to do anything and soon 
everybody
 is dead, ha? Because in my country I learn. Oppression is always the problem of everybody. You must either fight for others when you can, or you become others.”

She dropped the empty soda can into my hand. “Thank you for soda,” she said, and turned away. My mouth was still open when she walked out the door and into the night.

There were a lot of opinions I could have had about her and her attitude. That she didn’t know me and had no right to judge me like that was one. And anyway, what did I care? I was still getting over Nancy.

It was nice to see that I was finally thinking clearly. The only problem was that my body wasn’t listening; it was busy following Anna out the door.

The night was alive with the smell of things blooming, the way it can only smell in South Florida. It is a thick heady scent of orchids and rotting vegetables on top of the faint tang of low tide and it makes the hair stand up on your arms and gives you the feeling that you could live forever if you could just keep that smell in your nose.

I looked around for Anna. I saw her walking towards the center of Old Town. Still not sure what the hell I was doing, or why, I ran after her.

I caught up with her at the corner. She didn’t want to be caught. She gave me a look of icy indifference and kept walking.

“Excuse me,” I said. She did not look at me again. Now I was starting to get a little mad. “Is this the way they talk about things where you come from?” I said. “You give your opinion, which is always right, and then run out the door before anyone else can say something that might not agree?”

“Oh,” she said without looking. “You are now having an 
opinion
. This is very good. Very much progress.”

“It must be so hard on you,” I said. “To understand everything. Nobody else even knows enough to congratulate you.”

She stopped walking. Her shoulders went up. They did it very well. 
“Feh,
” she said. “And you, to be judge of 
everything
. Like all Americans, you have this thing which says, I am in right, piss on you, hah? When you have beer, who cares that others die of thirst? Feh!”

It’s funny. Sometimes even when you’re mad other things filter in and hit you. Right now, instead of shouting back at her with a really snappy comeback, all I could think of was how cute she sounding saying, “peess on yoo,” with that beautiful strange accent.

I stuttered. I had been about to say, “I’m not like all Americans,” but that was wrong, not what I wanted to say, and then she said “Peess” so cute. What came out of my mouth was something like, “I’m nee-hi hut!”

She thought I was making fun of her, so she glared at me. I glared back. We just stood glaring under a streetlight.

I cracked first. I couldn’t help it; I was suddenly swamped by an overwhelming need to laugh. I fought it hard, but I couldn’t beat it. A little snorting sound came out my nose. It was followed by a big snorting sound, a cough, a short laugh, and then, when something went down my windpipe wrong, a prolonged and crippling fit of coughing.

Anna stared at me. First with anger, then scorn, then a kind of puzzled concern. And as I slowly folded to the ground to sit helpless on the curb, she stood over me, looking down, then looking around for help, then folding her arms and just standing over me.

And just as I thought I might be able to breathe again, she said, “And so when you can’t win argument you try for sympathy to kill your self with coughter.”

It almost killed me. I think I laughed for several minutes, choking and fighting for breath.

Anna watched me. She stood with a face like one of those Greek statues, towering above me as I crouched helpless below her. And after a few more moments she snickered. Then she made the same kind of snorting sound I had made. It caught her by surprise. She laughed. And pretty soon there were two of us rolling on the pavement choking with laughter.

And just when we began to get it under control, catch our breath a little, an elderly gentlemen in a white suit walked by, trailed by an attentive elderly Filipino. White Suit stopped and stared at us with a look of the most complete disapproval I have ever seen.

That set us off again, and as we rolled together, howling with laughter, the Filipino took White Suit by the elbow and led him away, turning once to glare at us.

It was several hours and seven uncontrollable fits of laughter later that we ended up on the end of the long wooden dock at the end of Duval Street. When you laugh that long and that hard with somebody it gives you a feeling that you’ve known them a long time, and we were struggling to figure out what to do about this new-old friendship.

A kind of funny tact came over us. Neither one of us wanted to say anything that would break the illusion. So we leaned on the rail side by side, talking of things that didn’t matter, listening for what was behind them.

She liked dogs. But she found it impossible to turn down a cat. She thought there was nothing on American TV that wasn’t bad for you, except wrestling. She loved wrestling, because for her it was like a great theatre where Good battled Evil and myths were worked out.

She had also become passionate about American peanut butter, but she thought of it as a dessert item.

Pretty soon I became aware that the bars were closing all around us and the loud music had been silent for a while. And suddenly we were in the middle of that awkward moment that comes at the end of an evening when you know it has to end but you don’t want it to and the way it’s going to end hasn’t been worked out yet.

As I walked her home it still wasn’t worked out. She lived in Old Town, in an alley off Eaton, in a guest cottage attached to one of the big old houses. She shared it with two Polish women who worked as maids at one of the hotels.

“Thank you for most interesting evening,” she said in her wonderful accent, standing at the door of the small green house.

“Maybe we could have another one some time,” I said.

She looked at me for a very long time and I found myself moving closer a little at a time. Just before my face touched her she said, “Perhaps,” very softly, and slid away into her house.

I watched the outside of the door for a while, but it didn’t tell me anything, so I walked home.

The last time I’d been to a demonstration I’d been in uniform, standing in front of the Iranian consulate in L.A. I’d been to a couple more before that, all of them as a cop. So Nicky’s little get-together was a brand new experience for me.

I don’t mind the idea of standing in the street and waving a sign while you chant cute rhymes, but I’d always looked on it as either work or a kind of spectator sport.

So it still isn’t clear to me how I ended up in front of the Key West Court House carrying a sign that said
GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR WHITE MASSES
and shouting, “Haitians Are Humans.” The shouting part was sort of halfhearted on my part; in fact, really only when Anna was looking.

I say it wasn’t clear how I ended up there, but of course it was. I was there because I thought Anna would be there. No matter how stupid I felt doing it, the thought of seeing her again made stupid seem like a good idea.

Of course I had a lot to tell myself on the subject. I still wasn’t over Nancy. And getting interested in someone else so soon was shallow, not like me, the mark of a butt-head.