The Middleman and Other Stories (6 page)

“It's not your factory,” I say. “You're supposed to be on vacation.”

“So, you are worrying about me? Yes? You reject my heartfelt wishes but you worry about me?” He pulls me close, slips the straps of my nightdress off my shoulder. “Wait a minute.”

I wait, unclothed, for my husband to come back to me. The water is running in the bathroom. In the ten days he has been here he has learned American rites: deodorants, fragrances. Tomorrow morning he'll call Air India; tomorrow evening he'll be on his way back to Bombay. Tonight I should make up to him for my years away, the gutted trucks, the degree I'll never use in India. I want to pretend with him that nothing has changed.

In the mirror that hangs on the bathroom door, I watch my naked body turn, the breasts, the thighs glow. The body's beauty amazes. I stand here shameless, in ways he has never seen me. I am free, afloat, watching somebody else.

 

SHE sends for this Goldilocks doll in April.

“See,” she says. The magazine is pressed tight to her T-shirt. “It's porcelain.”

I look. The ad calls Goldilocks “the first doll in an enchanting new suite of fairy tale dolls.”

“
Bisque
porcelain,” she says. She fills out the order form in purple ink. “Look at the pompoms on her shoes. Aren't they darling?”

“You want to blow sixty bucks?” Okay, so I yell that at Jonda. “You have any idea how much I got to work for sixty dollars?”

“Only twenty now,” she says. Then she starts bitching. “What's with you and Velásquez these days? You shouldn't even be home in the afternoon.”

It's between one and two and I have a right, don't I, to be in my Manufactured Home—as they call it—in Laguna Vista Estates instead of in Mr. Vee's pastel office in the mall? A man's mobile home is his castle, at least in Florida. But I fix her her bourbon and ginger ale with the dash of ReaLemon just the way she likes it. She isn't a mail-order junky; this Goldilocks thing is more complicated.

“It makes me nervous,” Jonda goes on. “To have you home, I mean.”

I haven't been fired by Mr. Vee; the truth is I've been offered a raise, contingent, of course, on my delivering a forceful message to that greaser goon, Chavez. I don't get into that with Jonda. Jonda doesn't have much of a head for details.

“Learn to like it,” I say. “Your boyfriend better learn, too.”

She doesn't have anyone but me, but she seems to like the jealousy bit. Her face goes soft and dreamy like the old days. We've seen a lot together.

“Jonda,” I start. I just don't get it. What does she want?

“Forget it, Jeb.” She licks the stamp on the Goldilocks envelope so gooey it sticks on crooked. “There's no point in us talking. We don't communicate anymore.”

I make myself a cocktail. Milk, two ice cubes crushed with a hammer between two squares of paper towel, and Maalox. Got the recipe from a Nam Vets magazine.

“Look at you.” She turns on the TV and gets in bed. “I hate to see you like this, at loose ends.”

I get in bed with her. Usually afternoons are pure dynamite, when I can get them. I lie down with her for a while, but nothing happens. We're like that until Oprah comes on.

“It's okay,” Jonda says. “I'm going to the mall. The guy who opened the new boutique, you know, the little guy with the turban, he said he might be hiring.”

I drop a whole ice cube into my Maalox cocktail and watch her change. She shimmies out of khaki shorts—mementoes of my glory days—and pulls a flowery skirt over her head. I still don't feel any urge.

“Who let these guys in?” I say. She doesn't answer. He won't hire her—they come in with half a dozen kids and pay them nothing. We're coolie labor in our own country.

She pretends to look for her car keys which are hanging as usual from their nail. “Don't wait up for me.”

“At least let me drive you.” I'm not begging, yet.

“No, it's okay.” She fixes her wickedly green eyes on me. And suddenly bile pours out in torrents. “Nine years, for God's sake! Nine years, and what do we have?”

“Don't let's get started.”

Hey, what we have sounds like the Constitution of the United States. We have freedom and no strings attached. We have no debts. We come and go as we like. She wants a kid but I don't think I have the makings of a good father. That's part of what the Goldilocks thing is.

But I know what she means. By the time Goldilocks arrives in the mail, she'll have moved her stuff out of Laguna Vista Estates.

I like Miami. I like the heat. You can smell the fecund rot of the jungle in every headline. You can park your car in the shopping mall and watch the dope change hands, the Goldilockses and Peter Pans go off with new daddies, the dishwashers and short-order cooks haggle over fake passports, the Mr. Vees in limos huddle over arms-shopping lists, all the while gull guano drops on your car with the soothing steadiness of rain.

Don't get me wrong. I liked the green spaces of Nam, too. In spite of the consequences. I was the Pit Bull—even the Marines backed off. I was Jesse James hunched tight in the gunship, trolling the jungle for hidden wonders.

“If you want to stay alive,” Doc Healy cautioned me the first day, “just keep consuming and moving like a locust. Do that, Jeb m'boy, and you'll survive to die a natural death.” Last winter a judge put a vet away for thirty-five years for sinking his teeth into sweet, succulent coed flesh. The judge said,
when gangrene sets in, the doctor has no choice but to amputate.
But I'm here to testify, Your Honor, the appetite remains, after the easy targets have all been eaten. The whirring of our locust jaws is what keeps you awake.

I take care of Chavez for Mr. Vee and come home to stale tangled sheets. Jonda's been gone nine days.

I'm not whining. Last night in the parking lot of the mall a swami with blond dreadlocks treated us to a levitation. We spied him on the roof of a discount clothing store, nudging his
flying mat into liftoff position. We were the usual tourists and weirdos and murderous cubanos. First he played his sinuses OM-OOM-OOMPAH-OOM, then he pushed off from the roof in the lotus position. His bare feet sprouted like orchids from his knees. We watched him wheel and flutter for maybe two or three minutes before the cops pulled up and caught him in a safety net.

They took him away in handcuffs. Who knows how many killers and felons and honest nut cases watched it and politely went back to their cars? I love Miami.

This morning I lean on Mr. Vee's doorbell. I need money. Auguste, the bouncer he picked up in the back streets of Montreal, squeezes my windbreaker before letting me in.

I suck in my gut and make the palm trees on my shirt ripple. “You're blonder than you were. Blond's definitely your color.”

“Don't start with me, Marshall,” he says. He helps himself to a mint from a fancy glass bowl on the coffee table.

Mr. Vee sidles into the room; he's one hundred and seventy-five pounds of jiggling paranoia.

“You look like hell, Marshall,” is the first thing he says.

“I could say the same to you, Haysoos,” I say.

His face turns mean. I scoop up a mint and flip it like a quarter.

“The last job caused me some embarrassment,” he says.

My job, I try to remind him, is to show up at a time and place of his choosing and perform a simple operation. I'm the gunship Mr. Vee calls in. He pinpoints the target, I attempt to neutralize it. It's all a matter of instrumentation and precise coordinates. With more surveillance, a longer lead time, a neutral setting, mishaps can be minimized. But not on the money Mr. Vee pays. He's itchy and impulsive; he wants a quick hit, publicity, and some sort of ego boost. I served under second looies just like him, and sooner or later most of them got blown away, after losing half their men.

The story was, Chavez had been sampling too much of Mr. Vee's product line. He was, as a result, inoperative with women. He lived in a little green house in a postwar development on the fringes of Liberty City, a step up, in some minds, from a trailer park. By all indications, he should have been alone. I get a little sick when wives and kids are involved, old folks, neighbors, repairmen—I'm not a monster, except when I'm being careful.

I gained entry through a window—thank God for cheap air conditioners. First surprise: he wasn't alone. I could hear that drug-deep double-breathing. Even in the dark before I open a door, I can tell a woman from a man, middle age from adolescence, a sleeping Cuban from a sleeping American. They were entwined; it looked like at long last love for poor old Chavez. She might have been fourteen, brassy-haired with wide black roots, baby-fat-bodied with a pinched, Appalachian face. I did what I was paid for; I eliminated the primary target and left no traces. Doc Healy used to teach us: torch the whole hut and make sure you get the kids, the grannies, cringing on the sleeping mat—or else you'll meet them on the trail with fire in their eyes.

Truth be told, I was never much of a marksman. My game is getting close, working the body, where accuracy doesn't count for much. We're the guys who survived that war.

The carnage at Chavez's cost me, too. You get a reputation, especially if young women are involved. You don't look so good anymore to sweatier clients.

I lean over and flick an imaginary fruit fly off Haysoos Velásquez's shiny lapel. Auguste twitches.

“What did you do that for?” he shrieks.

“I could get you deported real easy.” I smile. I want him to know that for all his flash and jangle and elocution lessons so he won't go around like an underworld Ricky Ricardo, to me he's just another boat person. “You got something good for me today?”

A laugh leaks out of him. “You're so burned out, Marshall,
you couldn't fuck a whore.” He extracts limp bills from a safe. Two thousand to blow town for a while, till it cools.

“
Gracias, amigo.
” At least this month the trailer's safe, if not the car. Which leaves me free to hotwire a newer model.

Where did America go? I want to know. Down the rabbit hole, Doc Healy used to say. Alice knows, but she took it with her. Hard to know which one's the Wonderland. Back when me and my buddies were barricading the front door, who left the back door open?

And just look at what Alice left behind.

She left behind a pastel house, lime-sherbet color, a little south and a little west of Miami, with sprinklers batting water across a yard the size of a badminton court. In the back bedroom there's a dripping old air conditioner. The window barely closes over it. It's an old development, they don't have outside security, wire fences, patrol dogs. It's a retirement bungalow like they used to advertise in the comic pages of the Sunday papers. No one was around in those days to warn the old folks that the lots hadn't quite surfaced from the slime, and the soil was too salty to take a planting. And twenty years later there'd still be that odor—gamey, fishy, sour rot—of a tropical city on unrinsed water, where the blue air shimmers with diesel fumes and the gray water thickens like syrup from saturated waste.

Chavez, stewing in his juices.

And when your mammy and pappy die off and it's time to sell off the lime-sherbet bungalow, who's there to buy it? A nice big friendly greaser like Mr. Chavez.

Twenty years ago I missed the meaning of things around me. I was seventeen years old, in Heidelberg, Germany, about to be shipped out to Vietnam. We had guys on the base selling passages to Sweden. And I had a weekend pass and a free flight to London. Held them in my hand: Sweden forever, or a weekend pass. Wise up, kid, choose life, whispered the cook, a twenty-year lifer with a quarter million stashed in Arizona.
Seventeen years old and guys are offering me life or death, only I didn't see it then.

When you're a teenage buckaroo from Ocala, Florida, in London for the first time, where do you go? I went to the London Zoo. Okay, so I was a kid checking out the snakes and gators of my childhood. You learn to love a languid, ugly target.

I found myself in front of the reticulated python. This was one huge serpent. It squeezed out jaguars and crocodiles like dishrags. It was twenty-eight feet long and as thick as my waist, with a snout as long and wide as a croc's. The
scale
of the thing was beyond impressive, beyond incredible. If you ever want to feel helpless or see what the odds look like when they're stacked against you, imagine the embrace of the reticulated python. The tip of its tail at the far end of the concrete pool could have been in a different county. Its head was out of water, resting on the tub's front edge. The head is what got me, that broad, patient, intelligent face, those eyes brown and passionless as all of Vietnam.

Dead rabbits were plowed in a corner. I felt nothing for the bunnies.

Then I noticed the snakeshit. Python turds, dozens of turds, light as cork and thick as a tree, riding high in the water. Once you'd seen them, you couldn't help thinking you'd smelled them all along.
That's
what I mean about Florida, about all the hot-water ports like Bangkok, Manila and Bombay, living on water where the shit's so thick it's a kind of cash crop.

Behind me, one of those frosty British matrons whispered to her husband, “I didn't know they
did
such things!”

“Believe it, Queenie,” I said.

That snakeshit—all that coiled power—stays with me, always. That's what happened to us in the paddyfields. We drowned in our shit. An inscrutable humanoid python sleeping on a bed of turds: that's what I never want to be.

So I keep two things in mind nowadays. First, Florida was built for your pappy and grammie. I remember them, I was a
kid here, I remember the good Florida when only the pioneers came down and it was considered too hot and wet and buggy to ever come to much. I knew your pappy and grammie, I mowed their lawn, trimmed their hedges, washed their cars. I toted their golf bags. Nice people—they deserved a few years of golf, a garden to show off when their kids came down to visit, a white car that justified its extravagant air conditioning and never seemed to get dirty. That's the first thing about Florida; the nice thing. The second is this: Florida is run by locusts and behind them are sharks and even pythons and they've pretty well chewed up your mom and pop and all the other lawn bowlers and blue-haired ladies. On the outside, life goes on in Florida courtesy of middlemen who bring in things that people are willing to pay a premium to obtain.