Men in Miami Hotels (9 page)

“I thought I told you.” The wind skips across the tops of some mangroves up the shore, picking at leaves and letting them go. She’s dressed in black rodeo clothes with bits of orange highlights here and there like a cowgirl villainess.

“You didn’t tell me anything that I can remember.”

“I wanted to pay Mama’s house out of hock to the city. I still plan to do it.”

“If you didn’t give all your money away at the horse races you’d have a little.”

“I know that already. I don’t have to be shamed by you to know it.”

“I’m not the one shaming you.”

He wishes his whole life could simply stop—so he could sneak around behind it, work on it and if he couldn’t fix it escape out the back. “My appetite,” he says as old desires crawl on his skin, spiral up from the inside, circle his heart like an abashed tribe that’s lost everything, and he can’t remember what he wanted to say.

“Appetite?”

“Agreed. Yeah. Foolishness. I still need you to come with me. And I expect—I’m sorry, sweetie—I expect Albertson’ll look at you as a part of all this.”

She squinches up her face in aggravation, in sadness, in several other load-bearing ways, but says only, “Yes, I guess so. Maybe so.” She looks out at the bay where the breeze is chopping bits of light off the wave tops. “I keep meaning to say good-bye to you, but I forget.”

He laughs his crackly, off-key laugh, his jokey, shamed laugh.

She says “I wasn’t saying it to be funny,” and turns away leaving the words like tiny signals or remnants cast aside as one walks off down a path. He can tell something else is on her mind, maybe Ordell, maybe the whole rattled beadbasket of her life, the one with him. “All right,” he says, knowing anyway—by osmosis, telepathy, by spirit consciousness or the cast of her eyes, by her face and the movements of her body, by guesswork or deduction, by the tiny, loosely shaped stillness in her—that she’s already agreed.

The pilot—wearing a Cincinnati baseball cap and rally gloves—hurries everybody along as if it’s been his project from the start, which is his way. Cot and Jackie haul a small ice chest and some clothes stuffed in plastic bags and put them on the plane. Jimmy skips along behind jotting a flight plan in his little blue book as he comes. “Where we going?” he calls to Cot who stands on the dock looking vaguely out at the water.

“Anywhere you like—no, how about Madeira, or Joe Bay?”

“Okay, I got you. But where
are
we going? Just so I’ll know. We going to the mainland, or just up the islands?”

“The mainland. West side.” Naples, he thinks—where they can catch a bus up to Fort Myers—but he’s feeling vague, feeble, and doesn’t want to say. “We need to get there in a hurry, if you don’t mind.”

And sure enough Marcella comes along too, and Jackie who wouldn’t desert his mother, and his mother who has her own reasons; they troop up the steps, enter the cabin, and settle in.

A
s the plane lifts smoothly off the light chop, the sound of the rushing water ending as if they have flown off the edge of the world, he sees from his seat in the copilot’s chair a boat veer out from behind a small, tousled island in the bay. They’re going to be too late, he thinks, but he doesn’t say anything. The plane rises, climbing steadily as the little white boat comes on at high speed. A man gets up in the bow and raises a small machine gun. “Better turn,” Cot says.

“What’s that?” Jimmy says looking up from the dials in front of him. “You know them?”

“Just barely.”

As the plane comes suddenly upon them the man in the bow opens up with the machine gun. A string of holes smack through the bottom of the plane and into the cabin. One of the bullets catches Jimmy under the chin. He sits back in his chair with his eyes suddenly red and bulging in his head, still pulling on the wheel. Cot can see he’s dead. The plane starts to slip to the right but Cot straightens it out with his wheel and continues with the take-off, already almost complete. He calls out, a sudden grief saturating his voice, asking if anybody’s hurt. The answer comes back in bleats and shouts that they are all right. He glances back at Marcella; she’s gnawing at the inside of her left cheek, looking out the window, but not down, just out.

They are up high by now, rising into the clear blue sky. Behind them the man with the gun stands in the boat watching them go. There’s blood on Jimmy’s chin and dribbled down the front of his white shirt, but not much. Marcella gets up and squats behind them. “Ah, Cot, look at Jimmy.” She sinks back but immediately reappears, her head and shoulders beside him. “Poor oh nos,” she says in a thin, whistling voice. She looks past Cot’s face. “Can you fly this?”

“Sure. Sure.” Thinking:
about half
.

“I know
all
your shortcomings. I don’t even
have
to imagine them.”

“Don’t fall to pieces.”

“I’m not.”

He can get them to the mainland—he figures he can—well enough. He tests the pedals and the plane slides sideways, to the left. “It’s kind of loose,” he says.

Marcella disappears and comes back with a beach towel she folds up partially under Jimmy’s head against the side window and laps over his head. The towel is one with a big color map of Florida printed on it.

“Now we won’t lose our way,” he says, but she doesn’t get it and he waves the words off.

Ella comes up and looks at the situation. She smiles at her son, there isn’t much else to do. “We’re okay back here,” she says, meaning she and Jackie who’s crying mutely into a large blue bandana. He raises his head. “I knew I never should have left home.”

“You’re doing fine,” Ella says.

Cot turns the wheel to the right, pressing slightly on the left pedal as he pulls back a little on the throttle. He’s scared but as he pets his fright he senses a clear space opening inside him. He returns the wheel to a steady position and holds his feet quiet on the pedals. The plane levels out and then they are flying north toward the Florida coast. They have a hundred-mile-wide stretch of coast to set as their mark so they should be able to grope their way to it all right. Down in Colombia he has done a little cub flying—taking off, setting down under Johnny Cutler’s steady hand, handling the stick in clear weather—a piecemeal, jokey apprenticeship, only a pastime with him, it’ll have to serve. His hands are shaking so the plane jigs slightly, and he forces his hands to stop and then he’s calm again or half calm and even though he really wants to bring the plane down low enough so he can jump out he makes himself sit steady, feeling the panic heaving and gushing under him, and smiles.

“Would you get me a Coke?” he says to Marcella.

He can tell Marcella wants to sit beside him but neither of them want to deal with Jimmy. I don’t want to, Cot thinks, and then he does.

“Can you move him?” he says. Marcella ignores him, gets the drink, opens it, sets it on the console. “Can you move him to the back?” he says.

She asks Jackie to help but he won’t. He looks steadily out the window where little green islands float like bobbers in the wide clear bay. The water is so shallow it looks like tapwater running over a sandy brown floor. In the channels the water is blue. Farther out in the deeper channels it’s a stronger, steadier blue, but then abruptly it’s shallow again. You can see the pleats and patterning of the sand. It’ll be like that most of the way across.

Marcella and Ella manhandle Jimmy to the back, prop him half–lying down on the back bench and cover him with the Florida beach towel. The arrangement looks not like respect for a dead man but a poor game Jimmy’s involved in. His face is under Daytona Beach where a woman rides a surfboard over a high-curling wave.

Marcella slides in beside Cot. “When I’m with you I get stretched pretty quick way out past where I intended to go.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Only rarely. And then only briefly.” She hooks a straggle of black hair away from her face. Her wide forehead is clear, unmarked by trouble. Only around her eyes, netted in fretting lines of capture, can you tell living’s getting to her.

“I never met anybody as worried as you,” he says now.

“I have cause.”

“That you do. How’s Ordell?”

“Weirdly evasive.”

“About what?”

“In general—and particularly—about all this business.”

“Us?”

“CJ—and those gems.”

“You told him?”

“I had to. He didn’t seem very surprised. He said he knew it was some foolishness.”

“I wanted to pay Mama out of trouble.”

“You said that.” She looks out the window. “How high are we?”

He studies the dials: RPM, Torque, Oil Pressure, Fuel Flow—he understands Air Speed, Fuel Quantity—ah, there: “1200 feet.”

“I’d feel safer if it was . . . maybe four feet.”

“We’re going eighty-five miles an hour.”

“Who were those people?”

“Poachers.”

“Tell me. The ones firing guns at us.”

“There was only one shooting.” He knows him. Buster Brane, originally from Tampa, son of a cigar roller, ex-semi-pro ballplayer, now an Albertson machine gun artist who lives at the Tradewinds Hotel out at the beach and likes to sit out front with the old folks on his days off and make remarks about the tourists. “I don’t know. For sure.”

“Who maybe?”

“Don’t pressure me.”

“Pressure you? For Christ sake, Cotland. All the hoodlums in Miami are after you, and you don’t know who they are?”

“Why are you talking this way? I told you Albertson was after me.”

She slumps in the seat. “This paradise,” she says.

“Don’t pity yourself.”

“I can express an opinion.”

“You’re my panacea.
Mi querida
. That’s what I meant to say.”

“When?”

“Just now. Every time I look at you.”

“You probably can’t see how disappointing that is.” She has always loved his dash, his stubbornness even, his hesitancy most, but not his tendency to see her as saving him. “I can’t,” she says.

He looks at her as if he understands. “I know.” But she knows he doesn’t, not quite.

They fly over the tip of Summerford and over the kidnap camp. It looks deserted. The crew already on the way back to Miami. The land dribbles out into the bay, the scrub pines giving way to buttonwood scrawl and wax myrtle bushes, then to mangrove. The original flora has never been anything much. Even the Indians probably hadn’t been proud of it. Once there’d been a little topsoil, just enough for sweet potatoes, peppers, melons, other truck crops that could grow between the cracks in the rock, but storms scoured it off the coral bed. His mother used to plant tomatoes and bell peppers in buckets on the front porch. Like a country person, his father said. She wanted him to let her cut down one of the big trees in the backyard to put in a garden but he had shrunk at the possibility. After he returned to Cuba she could have done it, but she didn’t have the heart to then.

The view opens up to the north, clear skied all the way. There’s hardly any breeze over the water. He laughs out loud.

“What?”

“I thought I’d come down here and . . . well . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.

“Lord, and you were born here.”

“Hilarious, ain’t it?”

The fuel is draining too fast. He touches the black-faced dial, lets his fingers rest on the glass. Brane must have hit one of the tanks. She looks at him, her blue eyes more smokey than blue, just right, for him, he’s always thought, just his color. “What is it?”

“Nothing. I’m just plotting.”

“A course. Or an escape?”

“Is there any difference?”

She leans in and kisses his cheek. Her lips are thin but soft. Her breath smells of oranges. “You’re scared,” she says.

“That’s not unusual.”

“What is it?”

“If you haven’t noticed yet I can’t explain it.”

He glances back. His mother is reading one of her books, her pamphlet of stirring passages, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Browne, and the like. She doesn’t look frightened. Jackie has his head leaned against a rolled-up shirt pressed against the window, pretending to himself that he’s asleep. “It’s going to be all right,” Cot says, the words passed back like stale snacks.

“For everybody but Jimmy,” Jackie says without opening his eyes. “For everybody but us,” he adds more softly.

“You were always the brainy one,” his mother says smiling her slightly off-center smile, the one where you can’t tell exactly what she’s thinking but have hopes, and drops her gaze into the remarks of the great. Time was he would have spoken sharply to her, time was he would have blamed her for his father leaving, for predicaments raised like corpses from a marly deep, time was the savagery between them was like a sickness in them both, their words cutting and forced in like knives, but now there are only slurs and asides, quirky bits the other can only half make out. They go by feel, by memorization, by heartbeat. It’s getting late, he thinks to resolve things. He’s been thinking this for years. Sometimes you wake up and what’s capsized has righted itself. Sometimes the other way around. Hope like grease on your hands if you even can bear to hope.
What a crock.
Nobody can ever tell for sure what’s coming, he’s sure of that.

T
hen the big islands are behind them, trailing off to the right, hazy in the morning sunlight. The bay is clear mostly, little islet stubs every few miles, then these peter out and they’re over open water. Nobody talks much. Cot holds the plane steady. After a while he can make out the mainland, a thin yellowed strip ahead, then, soon enough, the shapes of the swamp, humped trees pushing up out of the grass. The fuel is still draining, but maybe they’ll make it. He turns toward Chokoloskee, toward Naples and the highway north, the plane sliding, sinking and rising again in a mushy, reluctant way, and leveling out.

As they fly over the first of a string of coastal islands the engine begins to cough. He jiggles the fuel switch, tips the wings and the engine fully catches again, but they’re losing altitude. He doesn’t want to say anything about it, but the look in Marcella’s face makes him. “We’re going to have to set down.”

“Lord God,” Jackie says, pressing his hands flat against the ceiling. “I’m like a crab stuck in a shell.”