Men in Miami Hotels (13 page)

Only a raddled honesty
, he thinks, grazing the smell of her as she turns toward him in the elevator, unoccupied except for an extremely small gentleman dressed in a pale blue linen suit. Even honesty’s nothing they’ve really believed in. Maybe they only believe in the freshness of their coming together, the newness of it, rejuvenated by time apart. That’s probably closer to it.

He lets her go ahead of him out of the elevator and across the courtyard to the pool. He’s always loved the high-risen hotel pool, its formal fifth-floor isolation and bounty amid the coarse limestone walls of the Castaway. In his days here he came to know maids and bellhops, he became friends with one of the assistant managers, a Cubano who, like his father, had fled Castro—but, unlike his father, stayed in the US, Joan Montoya, now no longer assistant but the manager. They swim in the cool water under a sky half filled with clouds that look torn along the tops, as if some force from inside has blown its way out. She asked him in the room what he was going to do, but he said he didn’t know. This is true but only in the sense that he’s waiting until the next action comes to him. He wants to be in the water first, then sleep, then it’ll get here. They swim laps, side by side. She’s faster even if he really pushes it, and he doesn’t. After a while he lets go (he can feel it happening, like a swimming inside his body), opens his eyes, and drifts to the bottom. She swims down to him, touches his face, runs her fingers over his short-cut hair. As children they would speak to each other underwater, it was how they met, in Francis Mockermound’s pool, talking, then yelling at each other six feet down, after that time she saved him. They do this again now. “Everybody’s dying for a piece of the action,” he says, half-remembering a passage in
The
Georgics
or something Tommy quoted one afternoon in Flamingo Park, “We all feel so unsafe and . . .” His breath isn’t long enough. Before the end, before he adds codicils and reparatives, new, fresh aspects that if they would only hold still would contain the key to their future—to life itself, anchored in the tars and sunbursts of time—before this, his air runs out and he has to push for the surface.

She follows, touching him along his body as she comes.

“It sounded like a telephone ringing,” she says.

“One of the old ones.”

“Ours was in the hall.”

“ ‘Miracles can’t be left unclaimed,’ ” he says, closer to quoting—Virgil he thinks. He knows by now long passages of
The
Georgics
by heart, half-heart. “I know.”

“You look panicked.”

“I try not to, but I do.”

“There’re other things I want to point out, later, but go on with your speech.”

Hurrying, he pretends he doesn’t hear her. They shake out a few of the heavy orange towels, wrap themselves in them, take the elevator up to the room where in the bed she’s already chosen as her own—“It’s okay, since you’re the one paid for it,” he says—they make love, tensely at first then abruptly and with a rolling feverishness. To both of them they seem to be climbing up out of deep coverts. Despair threads quickly through him; behind it an emptiness, a ghost town. He senses how far off she’s gotten; it’s as if he can see her standing on a bluff looking out at dusty, parched terrain that goes on forever. But they’re workers—earnest, faithful. One then the other finds a way, hauling and heaving and falling back in a retreat that’s sweet and inevitable, and is what, as they give in, they both know they’re after, the cudgeled humility of it, their flesh sweaty and maculate.

They turn off the air conditioner, crank open the windows, and lie back dozing in a hesitant, salt-smelling breeze. His mother must be in Texas by now, eating posole in Mamie’s kitchen or standing out in the chaparral letting the dry wind blow on her face. Everything’ll be all right. He tells himself this in the half-light of half-dreams, the following seas of calamity and shame still somewhere behind—for the moment behind—his body for a moment like a shield against loss, half-lit dreams like a proof of no loss, the woman beside him, whom he senses in her fullness as she turns against his body, exemplary for a sec of a world without loss. He snugs against her, pressing his chest against her long broad back, pressing his lips into her neck that smells of pool water. They haven’t showered. Then the phone rings.

It’s Albertson. His breathy thin wheedling voice. “You resting up?” he says.

“Partly.”

“I can tell at the first word that you’re mad.”

“That’s because I honestly reveal my emotions.”

“It’s one of your shortcomings.”

“So they say.”

“You want to come see me?”

“I might like to.”

“Come on the boat. Bring Mrs. Bakewell.”

“Ms. Cord. I’ll ask her if she wants to come. She doesn’t like boats much.”

“You put too much store in what people like or don’t like.”

“That what they told you?”

“Mickey’ll meet you at the dock,” Albertson says and hangs up.

Cot knows A doesn’t have to say that last bit, about Spane meeting them. He’s trying to make a point—which one wasn’t clear—but his having to make any point tells him something. He has a sudden urge to go to the track—go, or call his bookie and lay some bets. He sits still until the craving passes. It turns gradually to a wisp, to a thin, miserly, tailing notion and then fades. Behind it comes a small, terrifying sense of lostness, of emptiness, like that of the barrel you look into after the treasure’s gone.

Marcella runs her fingernail lightly along his hair. “I do too like boats.” For a second or two, hardly any time, he lies still, gazing up at the pale orange ceiling. You got what you wanted, he thinks: his plan unfolding. A gull cries, far away, busy with its life. He remembers years ago walking along Miguel de Cervantes Street in Havana with his father, on the way to the market. People knew his father as the creator of the picto-novella
Felix y Consuela
. He could feel them looking at him, looking at the guitar his father carried slung over his back. He asked his father, who did not play the guitar, why he carried it. “To ease trouble,” his father said. To be part of things, his mother said when he told her. But it wasn’t only that. It was that and something else.

“You probably won’t like this boat,” Cot says.

“I don’t guess it’s something you either like or don’t.”

She gets up with him, and they stand on opposite sides of the bed dressing. Her body is wide and rangy both, sturdy, still firmly muscled, a body like his own, female version. He hardly looks at her. They ride down in the elevator in silence.

O
n the way to Albertson’s building on the bayside Cot has the cabbie detour into the old Crosswinds neighborhood where at a sporting goods store he buys a gallon of gasoline in a little can. At the grocery store down the street he buys a clear glass quart jug of Martinelli’s apple juice and in the alley pours the apple juice on the ground—all but a cup of it poured into the collapsable silver mug he carries in his coat pocket—and refills the jug with gasoline. He screws the top and pours juice over the jug to make it smell of apples. He takes a taste of the juice, strong and fragrant, and hands the cup to Marcella. “Bent all the way backwards and still here,” he says. She smiles her slightly off-center, hectic smile. Her face falls back into a somberness, and she takes a full swallow of the juice and hands the cup back to him. He drinks the remainder down and puts the cup in his pocket. He has the driver stop at a card shop, and he buys a small white tag with a thick red string attached. With a pen the proprietor lets him use he writes a note to Albertson: “Thanks for the many benefits.” He really is thankful for everything Albertson has done for him. The Big Man took him on as an enterprising boy who misunderstood instructions and blundered. Cot sits down on a bench outside the shop and slips the red strings into the jug, soaking them, pulls just enough of the string out of the neck and lets the card dangle.

“I got it,” he said when he slides into the cab’s back seat. He’s okay as long as he’s moving, as long as he’s enterprising.

“A big flight of parrots just flew over screaming like crazy,” Marcella says. “We don’t have those in Key West.”

“Screams?”

“I almost jumped out of the cab and ran away.”

“I hoped I’d given you enough time to.”

She regards him with wise, vaguely risive eyes. “This is more mischief.”

“In a way.”

She can see what he’s doing. He’s about to render something—that’s the way he would put it if she asked. He’s been like this since she knew him and she has never gotten used to it. But it excites her. Sudden nimble actions that knock a window in things. But then you want quiet and he can’t keep at that, not for long.

He has the driver pull over a block before the big white waterfront building.

“I think you better hang back,” he says.

“I knew you would say that.”

“I hate it when you say
that
.”

“But not so much you don’t listen.”

“No, not that much. I mean it on the hanging back.”

“I thought it was just pro forma.”

“Only partly.”

“I don’t want to miss your stunt.”

He pays the driver, and they get out of the car. A hotdog vendor on the corner is in Albertson’s employ. “Your mama get those place mats I sent?” Cot says.

“She did and thank you, Cot,” the vendor says. “How you, Miss Marcella?”

Marcella smiles at him. They haven’t made a decision about her coming up, not one that Cot sees. It’s the way things usually go. Objections registered, statements made, ploys attempted. The deed developing. He knew she was coming.

There are two large Egyptian date palms out front and a couple of big hibiscus in pots. He picks a red flower off one of the bushes and gives it to Marcella. She puts it in her hair. In Havana, the girls wear hibiscus and plumeria blossoms in their hair. He thinks of his father and then instantly of his mother, wonders what she’s doing right now. Probably walking along a dry arroyo collecting plant specimens. She had been an anthropologist when she went to Cuba with her father for the first time, but she fell in love with the mountain butterflies and gave up anthropology for biology. The red flower is like a big butterfly in Marcella’s hair.

Inside they all know him, the factotums and skill men and hangers-on, the rumble boys and the slack, ruined characters kept around by Albertson to remind him of worlds and episodes most men would want to forget. There’re a few smooth types, able guys who in other lives would have gone on to highly paid selling jobs or medico positions where they went in fast and cut. “How’s it going, Cot?” they say. Ralphie Modine says it looks as if he’s losing weight, but he means it as a compliment, the only one in his repertoire. Mostly they’re quiet. Albertson owns the building—eight stories on the bay—but the offices he doesn’t use he leaves empty, except for the flower shop and the pharmacy on the first floor. Through the pharmacy’s interior glass windows Cot can see Spane standing at the counter talking to a man in a pale blue smock. He might be the pharmacist, he might not. Spane nods and smiles in his taut, half-smiling way. “Pride’ll get you killed,” he likes to say. He could be saying it now to the possible pharmacist, who’s new. He doesn’t come out, but he glances at Marcella who doesn’t look at him. A man at the round lobby desk, standing beside two men staring into monitors checks him in. “I like that kind of apple juice,” he says. “It’s my favorite.”

“I’ll get you some,” Cot says.

Two men Cot doesn’t know well accompany them down the long front corridor and out the smoky glass-fronted doors to the back patio that’s covered for most of its length by a large orange awning. The boat, a ship really at more than a hundred feet, is tied up to the big dock, its only occupant. At the foot of the gangway a man sits at a small white table. He gets up, and then the two men accompanying pat Cot down and take away his two pistols. One pistol they recognize.

“Bert’s,” the shorter man says knowingly to the other, a hatchet-faced hombre Cot knows to be secretly afraid of thunderstorms and travel by air.

“It’s kind of mournful,” the taller man says. “Bert not being attached to one end of it.”

“Guess he went around to look at the
wrong
end.”

A memorial moment, of silence, death wrought, death depending, drifts through. The short man looks up as if he’s caught sight of something distantly passing. An expression flees across his face, of pain, of surprise and hurt, too fast for anybody to keep up with, even him. “He wadn’t nothing much,” he says.

“Yeah, Bert . . . ,” his partner says.

“Bert’s fine,” Cot says.

The man at the table, a man with short, carroty hair, wearing a green eyeshade like a figure in a gangster movie, studies Cot and tells him to sign the register. Cot signs his name and Marcella’s too. Then Marcella leans down and signs her name again. “She’s my lawyer,” Cot says.

“We know who she is,” the man says cocking his head like a mockingbird. He has marine blue eyes and a spray of freckles across the bridge of his nose.

“I hate plastic boats,” Marcella says and smiles.

There’s the outline of a big door in the side of the hull, a door they could have been let through if Albertson wanted, but they have to climb the steps of the gangway. That’s all right. Cot looks back and up along the front of the building to the long balcony on the top floor, a balcony men not Albertson are looking down from. They have weapons, Belgian Minimi submachine guns, in their hands. Above them, puffed white clouds hold their shape, practicing for summer. This winter he walked Albertson’s fields west of Homestead, poking blackened tomatoes with a stick. “A shambles,” Albertson said when he told him and looked as if he might cry. But he didn’t; he sometimes looked as if he would, but he never did. “The beans might make it,” Cot told him, but Albertson asked in his wispy snake’s voice how the hell somebody like him would know—he didn’t want to hear about it.

A fattish man in a puffed white cap looks down at them from the flying bridge. “That what you wear on a sea voyage?” he says. “Farm clothes?” This is Bales, Albertson’s unlikely brother, a distracted killer that being brother of a hoodlum mogul has given leeway to. Always the skittish malefic brother around in these assemblies, the one scared he won’t be violent enough. Bales counters his panic by uttering vituperatives and mashed-up malignant thoughts out loud. Some admire this. Most are just forced to. Cot feels oddly close to the man, brotherly. It’s all right, he says to him sometimes, fondly, as if speaking about nothing. He climbs the outside stairs ahead of Marcella and meets Bales at the door of the main salon. Cot shakes his swollen, mole-speckled hand and introduces Bales to Marcella which he likes. “Great hat,” Cot says.