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Authors: Charlie Smith

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Men in Miami Hotels (18 page)

BOOK: Men in Miami Hotels
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I
n the night he woke, sure someone was in the house. He slipped down the stairs and walked through the rooms with his pistol in his hand. If he came on Ordell he would shoot him. But he found no one. He tried the doors; they were all locked. He went out on the front gallery and sat in the glider looking down the lane. The big sodium lamp out on the street cast a diffuse radiance back into the bushes. A big, slab-sided cat crossed the lane, returned his look, and slipped into the shadows. Ordell, he thought, come and gone. He went back upstairs, dressed and re-entered the cemetery, made his way through the internments stacked like casket condos, and let himself into CJ’s mausoleum. He lay down on the bench and slept.

******

On a hot afternoon when the air is filled with the scent of almond blossoms they bury his mother. The crowd spreads out in little clumps from the grave site across other plots, so it looks as if whole families have come to observe special ceremonies for their personal dead. The priest begins the service with a flourish of turning pages. He finds what he’s looking for and peers deeply in, straining to make out the print in the bright sunlight, and reads a passage that promises eternal life. Cot sees this. Wearing a black baseball cap he’s taken from the hall closet at Marcella’s, one of Ordell’s, he slips from the mausoleum and enters the sunlight. He hasn’t shaved for several days now, but he doesn’t really think this will disguise him and on this he’s correct. Arnie Davis, city editor at the paper, spots him right off. Arnie flicks a waist-high wave that Cot acknowledges with a nod. The air has the brilliant and uncomplicitous, wild-eyed feel of a sea breeze that has blown steadily all night. Everything but the oxygen has been swept out of it. Clouds like puffs of cannon fire hang distantly in the southwest. Bill Nolen, a silversmith who makes trinkets he sells in stores around town, recognizes him. He speaks to his wife, a short unfriendly woman who has for two years pretended she has cancer. She scowls at him, tugs a sleeve, and word moves on.

Then a cop, Frankie Garcia, known as Friendly Frank when they were in school together, sees him. He punches his phone and speaks into it. Cot moves into the crowd. He sees some of Albertson’s men over beyond the low iron picket fence surrounding the Beauchamp plot. The priest hovers over the grave, hanging above it as if over a precipice. The boys, Scofield and Buster, among others, catch sight of him. They shy off to the left, moving slowly, but with purpose, past a line of soursop bushes. The cops catch the news like a scent. There’re plenty of them, a few dressed in their formal uniforms of dark blue and white, others in their workaday pale blues, all well armed. Cot keeps moving, slipping along the ragged edges of the crowd. There must be two hundred people standing around. The priest dives cleanly into the eulogy, words like aces dealt off the top of the deck. The casket is a dull, unpolished gold, half covered with bulls-eye daisies. The breeze blows the priest’s forelock into his eyes. There’s a quiet bumping and shuffling among the gangmen, noticed by now by members of the police force. Barky Wilson, an Albertson shooter from Opalacka, son of shrimpers and river folk, pulls his pistol. Cot watches in fascination from half behind a large tombstone that has words from the Temptations inscribed into its cherry marble:
It Was Just My Imagination.
Mine too, Cot thinks. The cops are pulling their guns too. The boys are getting theirs out with the same picky familiarity and nervousness as the cops. High above the cemetery the little buzzards circle, draped and ready. Cot has his pistol in his hand, a pale yellow bandana covering it.
You keep doing irresponsible, dumb things
, he thinks, but the thought doesn’t really bother him.

Marcella is standing next to the priest. Jackie and his friend Morty Smalls are beside her with their hair slicked down. Cot slides off toward the east gate, a narrow opening between two brick pillars. The street beyond is littered with white almond blossoms. Old Mrs. Lazarus is out in the street sweeping flowers off the pavement. Cot slips through the gate and sprints down the street. The two outfits, gangsters and police, make their way, at first at creep speed then with swiftness and alarm, after him. He runs straight down the middle of the street the block and a half to his mother’s house, cuts in through the yard, crosses the lane, cuts behind the old Mosley place, nodding to sunbathers lying in pink plastic loungers around the tiny sliver of a pool, dashes across Fleming and around the corner, and sprints for the docks.

The cops and gangsters come behind running. They’re slowed down somewhat by the cops’ attempts to make the Albertson employees quit the chase. Captain Barkley orders the gangsters to cease and desist, to disband and head out of the area, but the gangsters, mostly led by Pointy Mizel, laugh and order
them
out. There’s much yelling and the cops pull mace and tear gas which does not particularly impress the gangmen. The shooting starts about halfway down Margaret Street, as they pass under a huge mango tree. Pops, cracks, the clap of Glock pistols, even the tattered metallics of a machine gun. Bullets whap trees, thunk bodies, and skid off the pavement leaving silver marks children will touch in awe. Men stumble, pitch headfirst out of life.

At the bottom of Margaret Cot picks up the boardwalk that runs along the waterfront. A large sign offers day trips to the Dry Tortugas. Dusty sponges hang on strings at Mary Harris’s shop on the corner. Manly Soledad, son of a Cuban farmer, waves to him from the door of Coupole’s, a fish bar. They were briefly in Cub Scouts together, before Cot was kicked out for over-arguing. Manly is just back from Raiford where he has done two years for laundering fish money at his father’s restaurant out on Stock Island. Cot dashes down the boardwalk, the boards popping and clanking as he runs. A tourist family yells encouragement as he goes by, as if they are spectators at a race they know all about. The boardwalk jags right and Cot runs along past the old turtle corrals and along the docks. Sloops and sport boats are racked in long rows. Somewhere along here is Justin Peoples’s Mako. A mingling panic shivers him. Then he sees the boat, sees Justin sitting in it with the motor running. Marcella went over this with him yesterday. She’s supposed to be here, but he’s already realized there’s no way under the circumstances—cops, reporters, townsfolk everywhere—for her to accomplish that. Grief bites like a small ugly insect. Justin stands up in the boat. Cot scrambles down the little ladder to the floating dock and crosses quickly past the flotilla of dinghies in from the mooring field off Wisteria Island. He cocks a look back and sees Marcella. She’s coming fast on a scooter around the corner from Elizabeth Street. The scooter wobbles and nearly goes down. A sudden disfigurement of alarm appears and vanishes in her face. “How is it, Justin?” Cot says not taking his eye off Marcella.

“Sorry about your mother, Cot.” Justin says, a speech Cot figures he’s rehearsed.

Back a ways shots bust and whine. Voices of the wounded or the shot near to death raise their cries.

Marcella pulls up, letting the scooter slide like a heavy seal to its side, and comes down the ladder at a skip. Justin makes one-handed grabbing motions at her. Cot and Marcella don’t bother to hug or even acknowledge each other. But he’s waited for her—
I should have gone on
—and he scrambles behind her into the boat. He’s put his pistol back under the green Hawaiian shirt he wears, but as he gets in the boat he takes it out again and waves it, per arrangement, at Justin, yelling at him to get out of here.

They’re almost out of the inner harbor when the pursuers arrive at the docks, one or two at first, then in clusters. The groups are no longer shooting at each other (eight down) but they haven’t made a truce. The pursuers don’t see Cot’s party until, just as the Mako speeds past one of the big yachts tethered at the outer docks and into open water, a shout goes up. Somebody fires a few shots but the firing is brief and futile. The escapers are out past the island headed west toward the flats before anybody can do anything about it.

S
oon enough they’re in the Refuge. Green-topped, brown-topped islands lie around them in their ancient scattering. The water that’s as clear as if from a tap looks yellow from the color of the bottom sand. They run fast along channels only a few feet deep. Justin spends his life out here making his living so Cot leaves the divagations and nautical finery to him. Twenty minutes later they come to Ordell’s sport fishing boat, a fifty-foot Cooper Sea Cruiser he bought up at the boat show in Miami, bobbing at anchor, and Justin hangs the Mako next to it.

“Don’t you want to knock me on the head or something, Cot?” Justin says as Cot starts to leave the sleek little flat-decked boat. Without a word or any other sign Cot turns and catches him above the eye with the butt of his pistol. Justin crumples soundlessly into the well. Cot scrambles back into the boat and picks him up. Marcella looks down from the Cooper deck. In her eyes is a hard knowingness but no alarm. They have barely spoken on the way out. Blood pours from the cut above Justin’s eye. He’s groggy and he doesn’t know where he is. “Shit, Justin,” Cot says. “I’m sorry.”

Marcella hurries along the deck and dashes inside to start up the boat. Cot scoops water and bathes Justin’s face. This takes only seconds, but in that time that seems to stretch out from them flexibly as a cast line, he feels a deep and sustaining affection, for Justin, for Marcella, for the world around them. With a fine cold tip grief touches a spot. Justin coughs and comes all the way to. His eyes wander, but then he catches what’s up. He jerks like a puppy gone to sleep in your lap. “It’s me,” Cot says.

“Jesus, you hit hard.”

“I keep stumbling on my way.”

He tries to help Justin to his feet. “Naw,” he says, “Let me sit back down. I’m gon rest a while and then limp around out here for ’em to catch up with me.”

“Sure.” Cot finds his hand and shakes it. “You got my thanks, man.”

“Glad to do it,” Justin says and lies back with his head hanging over the side of the boat.

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Spectacular.”

A jittery, a fine glassine sparkling on the tips of tiny waves. As if the whole sea world is touched by alarm, by tension and nervous collapse.

The big boat engines start with a clap that subsides into a heavy gurgling. Cot climbs the ladder and heads for the wheelhouse. Marcella has already gotten under way by the time he gets there. “Go down and fix us a couple of drinks,” she says.

“In a second.”

He takes her in his arms and holds her tight. A huge, wobbling feeling of relief, of pain and love hauls through his body. It lasts only a second. Behind it a stubby awkwardness, a sense of dislocation and ill-formed plans scrapes by. She breaks away and wheels the boat into the channel and pushes the throttle forward. Before her is a gauge panel containing information Cot has no real understanding of. It reminds him of Jimmy’s plane. He can pick out the speedometer. In a couple of minutes it’s up to 40 knots. The big diesel engines stay quiet even at top speed. Marcella says they will run all day like that. She says the boat can go six hundred miles before the auxiliary tank cuts in.

“That ought to be enough,” Cot says.

He goes forward to the open lounge and sits on a white cushioned bench. A feeling creeping like the wind—but not the wind that’s blowing briskly, handling his face—presses in on him. It’s like somebody’s covering him with a pistol. He’s suddenly rigid with fright. He leans back against the transom waiting for the feeling to pass. It won’t—and then it begins to, slinks off in simpers and smirks. He’s not getting anywhere. Not getting out. Cuba, shabby memorial isle, is in their sights. Banked like a green rug churned up against the Caribbean Sea. In this moment the whole island unaware, indifferent to them, each local
compañero
going about his business, each madonna, castaway, and fisherman raking together the necessary care and protection for another life in another day. Nobody knows they’re coming. The sky is a rich turquoise blue peppered with tiny clouds like clean white dots. Beneath those dots in KW streets lie the sprawled and indelicate dead. Cops and gangsters. Maybe townspeople too. Little boys will finger stray bullet holes. Tonight a new misery, born in the tropics. He feels as if he’s hanging from a wire suspended between enormous nullities. The best he can hope for is to be left hanging there for a while. The westering sun glances off the water in short sparkling ricochets. Chuck Burle, Spotty Suber, Ennis Placer: cohorts among the fallen. He saw them go down. And Jimmy Nightingale, too. And Jake Rouse and Carl Pickens, cops of Key West, and Joe Cosmopolis who played with him on the football team. The names like wounds he sucks with his tongue. The wind pushes him like a hand. He could fall over backwards easily enough. He could throw himself in the ocean, like some old Roman, Virgilian, from another time. But he won’t.
A boy like you is going to pay for every breath he takes
—that’s what his father told him. You’re going to pay for it a thousand times if you don’t change but you can’t change and even those who change don’t get any dispensation. Was that true? His life was just a string of wild guesses. The couch under him smells of plastic, and faintly, of vomit. Ordell bought the boat right off the showroom floor. He had to have it, had to, like it was a pair of new shoes, wear it home from the store. He’d driven the boat onto the reef at Key Largo. They had to pull it off with a bulldozer from shore. But the boat was okay. Ordell had made the marina at Garrison Bight by dark, parked it with all the lights on.

A
s they enter the Gulf Stream long, moiled lines of trash begin to show up. Plastic pails and melon rinds among long streaks of pale grease and cloudy tailings, wooden pallets, coconuts, and the busted housing of a cabin cruiser bobbing with one end tipped high like a possible refuge, slip by. Marcella has to slow down. They push against the big current, heading slightly east at first, not meaning to, but without realizing it steadily losing the track, correcting by feel, then over-correcting, until they’re headed west of where they want to go. Marcella’s no expert with the electronics either. She can’t get the GPS to engage. A squall blows up out of a blue sky and in a moment drenches the boat. They have to run slowly for the rain that seems to pour out of huge reservoirs. The sea bucks like a horse, kicking up spray that whips off the wave tops. They’re all at once climbing the backs of huge swells like lathered hills. The seas break over the bow and kick along the deck in foaming sheets. They can’t see much. Marcella throttles down and runs slowly, climbing the swells as if they ride in one of those clanking funiculars that crawl up the side of mountains. The boat wallows and pitches, trying to slew sideways. They’re both afraid of hitting something, some sea creature or chifforobe or drifting leftover from the remote and useless past. She’s begun chanting, blurting snatches of old songs and prayers, gripping the wheel as she does so.

BOOK: Men in Miami Hotels
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