Heat of Night (2 page)

He remained in Dead Bay that week until his boss sent nasty wires, until his wife stopped writing at all, and until the woman upstate he’d been anticipating visiting had begun to date three other men. But there was no sense talking about it; he couldn’t leave Dead Bay until he’d seen Big Juan’s woman.

Then, next morning, Big Juan kissed his palm, hurled the kiss to the sun-bleached heavens and jerked his head toward the stout woman carrying a basket of mullet from the boats to the ice chests up at the house.

“Is Rosa!” he said, whacking the drummer on the back. “You see her? That’s Rosa mia!”

• • •

The drummer caught the next bus out of Dead Bay. He was not downcast. Rosa was in her early forties. What had he been thinking, how had he deceived himself imagining some young raving beauty? She was the mother of that brood, of Alberto who was thirty, and of Dolores who broke your heart when you looked at her. Rosa wore her black hair long about her shoulders because she was too busy to pin it up. She squinted those black eyes because the sun was so blindingly bright. She had breast-fed every one of her children because she believed that this was as God intended, and she believed in God and not in beauty. Her sandals flapped against her heels when she walked and her dress had had all the life washed out of it long ago.

But Big Juan? He stared after Rosa, eyes misted and big head cocked with pride.

This woman the drummer must have seen a dozen times about the Venzino place, never suspecting she was what Rosa had become. And he was eighty miles away on the bus before he realized that she actually was lovelier than ever to Big Juan, who’d never been away from her side for more than two days at a time in over thirty years.

“I stood there and I still wouldn’t have believed it was Rosa,” the drummer said in that awed way. “But Big Juan called some endearment to her — in Spanish — I don’t know what — and the woman laughed. Well. When I heard that laugh, I believed. Nobody but Big Rosa Venzino could laugh like that.”

A
DEADLY PALL
hung over the village of Dead Bay. After thirty years, silence at the Venzino place stunned every villager. Gossips shook their heads over their back fences. The mayor’s wife said to her husband that it was bound to happen, Venzino must have tired. After all, a thing that burns white-hot burns out. Shopkeepers fretted, wondering what the change would do to business in Dead Bay. Amateur astronomers studied their charts and their range gauges; the atmosphere of silence was like the dead lull preceding a storm.

Not for weeks had anyone heard the sound of Rosa’s laughter. Many who’d professed to being annoyed by its abandon, recognized now the quality of love and wonder in it, and the whole village was poorer without it. The priest at the church pondered it. He would have spoken to Juan and Rosa about it but he had never known how to speak to them about love; it was somehow like recommending wine to the people who owned the vineyard.

On Sunday morning, the good Reverend Brother Caulford, preacher at the Baptist Church, paused between sentences in his sermon, cocking his head as though listening for something.

• • •

After supper, Juan came into the juke-loud room at Jake’s Bar. Everybody looked up expectantly. Ruby, who worked as waitress and had a sparsely furnished room at the rear, paused pouring a beer and turned to watch Big Juan take his usual place at the bar. She heard him order his usual beer, saw Jake lace it strong with white shine from a gallon bottle under the counter, saw the other men turn expectantly, waiting for Big Juan to roar out his latest views.

But it didn’t happen.

Ruby set the bottle down and let her customer pour it himself. A tip was one thing and she didn’t mind brushing legs or having her garter belt snapped for a good tip, but an idea was mushrooming in her mind and contemplating it for the past few days made her as breathless as a schoolgirl. And Ruby hadn’t been a schoolgirl since she left the sixth grade. Grown men were paying her for her favors at the time and she was grossing more per year than the sixth-grade teacher.

She moved between the tables, a lush girl in her late twenties. It was difficult for some men around Dead Bay to realize Ruby was still quite young; she’d been around and available for so many years. Faint crowsfeet worked in the corners of her blue eyes when she smiled. Her hips were broad and soft, her ankles trim. She was good for business at Jake’s Bar. He would stop serving white shine before he would let Ruby go, that’s what Jake said some nights after ten o’clock.

Now Ruby paused at Big Juan’s back. As always she felt excited with the urge to smooth her hands hard over the muscles that corded his back beneath his denim shirt. Oh, lord, she thought, I could do just that for five hours straight and get more excitement than I’ll ever find with other men.

That back would be hot from the Gulf sun and those muscles would stand hard and throbbing against her palm. She swallowed back the saliva that had melted upward into her mouth.

“Big Juan,” she said. “Hi, there.”

She wanted him to turn and she was going to let him look deep into her opened and naked eyes. Juan was the kind who didn’t need it spelled out in Braille. If he had trouble at home, she had a room in the back of this place, and there were men who said she had a cash register for a heart but she would let Juan see what a lie this was.

He glanced at her and did not even smile. He did not look into her eyes or make a joke. He always made a joke about how much he wanted her, this for everybody in the room to hear. “I don’t come here to drink,” he would yell. “I come here to watch Ruby go between them tables.”

He could have had her any time in the past fourteen years and he had never wanted her, and even now with this bad trouble — whatever it was — he still did not want her.

She’d never been so sorry for anybody in her life. Here was a man who needed to be cheered. Who better than Ruby to cheer him?

“What’s the matter with you, Big Juan?” Ruby was a direct and honest soul.

He shrugged. Jake leaned across the bar, his fat face troubled. “Yeah, Juan. Break down. You got something wrong, tell us. Ain’t we your friends?”

“Friends.” The way Juan said it, this was the last thing on earth that could help him.

“Sure, we’re your friends,” the owner of the Standard Oil station said. “What’s wrong, kid? You planning to go hunting that sea treasure soon — and afraid we’ll find out?”

“It could be that,” somebody else said. “That would make Big Rosa sore all right. She sure has a big hate for that sea treasure idea of Juan’s.”

“Rosa is not sore at me,” Juan said.

“I’ll bet she is. I’ll bet you got together enough money for a diving gear and aqua-lung. Come on, Juan, tell us, is that it?”

Jake said, “Somebody else found your treasure, Juan?”

Juan shook his head. “Nobody else find my treasure. Nobody but me knows where it is. And me? Agh. I know. I can see it in the Gulf like as if there is a sign sticking out of the water saying, ‘Here it is, Juan, just for you.’ ”

He exhaled deeply. Despair in a man as big as Juan was outsized, bigger than any other man’s grief, something they could not fully comprehend, but it dampened the spirits of the whole place like a long night of rain.

“Looks like if you knew where that treasure was, Juan, why Rosa would want you to go.” They had heard him expound about the treasure a hundred times but now they were trying to lift his spirits.

It was no good. “Agh. What is the good of it? I know where it is. But without the gear … what’s to talk about it?”

“I remember two toughs came out here from West Tampa one time,” Jake said, attempting to stir Juan’s enthusiasm. “They was going to take Big Juan over. They had heard he knew where this sunken treasure was. They planned to take Juan out in the Gulf, let him bring up the treasure and then dump him over in its place. Isn’t that right, Juan?”

He drank his beer and stared at something none of them could see. “Something like that.”

“Come on, Juan. Tell us what you did.”

“Whatever happened to those toughs, Juan?” Jake prompted. He laughed, winking at the others. “They came here with guns and gear. I never saw them around here any more after that. Whatever happened?”

“I don’t know,” Juan said. “I don’t remember.”

He stood up and paid his bill. He drew in a deep breath of the beer-smelling room and then walked between the tables toward the door.

“Five beers,” somebody whispered. “He’s sick. He never walked out of here with less than a dozen beers in his belly before.”

Jake’s face was drawn. “Yeah,” he said. “There goes a man with something bad on his mind.” After a few minutes of pall-like silence, Jake said, “Well, hell, this here ain’t no funeral parlor. You, Ruby. Put some money in the juke. We got to liven this place up…. Ruby?”

Everybody looked around. Ruby was gone, too.

Some of the men smiled in a knowing and contented manner.

“Well,” Jake said. “I’m glad about this. No matter what ails old Juan, there’s nothing I know better for the miseries than Ruby.”

“That’s right,” they all said. And they had certain knowledge of this provident truth.

• • •

“Juan.”

He paused in the darkness of Main Street. The yellow and green light from the sputtering neon over Jake’s doorway fell across him. He looked about, then saw Ruby standing in the narrow walkway between Jake’s and the plumbing shop next door.

“Yeah?”

“Juan. Something’s happened. Could you — come back here a minute?”

He could tell by the breathlessness of her voice that something was wrong with Ruby all right. It troubled him. A nice girl like Ruby. She made more men happy than all the sermons he ever listened to. If some guy back there was making trouble for her, he’d break his head, and he forgot his own grief for a moment as he followed her through the passage, his shoulders brushing the walls on both sides.

She opened the door to a darkened room. He saw a bed with a white sheet on it, a night stand and a faint night light glowing.

The room was empty.

“My room,” Ruby said. Her voice sounded very odd — as though her throat were tight.

“What is wrong?” Big Juan said.

“I — want to talk to you,” Ruby said in that choked voice. “It’s about — your trouble.”

His face darkened. “What you know about this?”

She licked her tongue across her mouth thinking of how desperately she wanted to taste him, of how she had been dying of hunger for him all these years.

She backed away from him slightly into the vaguely lighted room. He stood in the doorway, scowling at her and troubled.

Her frantic fingers worked at the white nylon uniform. He saw it tugged away from her breasts and she wore no bra and she needed none. He was faintly astonished to see her breasts so full, so firm and not in any way sagging. She looked so young. But her fingers were not still; the dress dropped away from her. She thrust her fingers beneath the elastic band of her lace pants and tugged downward.

“No,” he whispered.

“Juan. Come here, Juan. I must talk to you.”

“No.”

“I must talk to you.” Her voice was a whisper but it was wild, growing frantic. She motioned him toward her.

His face twisted, growing hideous with the agony that tore him apart. He lumbered forward a step with his hand outstretched toward her. It was a mortal sin and he could not stop moving forward. He felt himself throbbing hot; he could not stop. He knew only that he must touch the pink firmness and the dark beauty she pressed toward him.

His hands closed on her. Liquid fire melted all the reason behind his eyes, dimmed his sight, blurred his memory of the past or his consciousness of the future. He tried to think mortal sin, but he could think only mortal. Mortal. Mortal.

She whimpered, sobbing when he touched her and she reached both her frantic hands for him, her mouth parted and wet in the light.

She sank back across the bed whispering to him, cooing to him, murmuring his name, feeling the heat of all the suns in his muscles.

Suddenly he lurched away from her, banging his shoulder against the door.

“Juan. My God, Juan,” she whispered.

Tears were streaming down his face. He shook his head, trying to find the doorway and still blinded by the fires raging red behind his eyes. He stared at her a moment, knowing she was young and fresh, and as far as he was concerned — as far as she was concerned, panting there through parted lips — no other man had ever touched her as he would touch her.

She wept piteously, “Oh God, Juan, please.”

He found the door. He tried to speak, tried to tell her it was not her fault — he found her lovely and young beyond belief. The fault was his, he already had terrible grief and now he was trying to compound it here in a room behind Jake’s Bar. There was so much he wanted to tell her but all he could say was, “Mortal sin. Mortal sin.”

He ran down the alley, tears spilling from his eyes, whispering it over and over as he ran.

A
L
V
ENZINO
slowed the Chevy on the black macadam road when he saw the first signs of Dead Bay village ahead.

His hands tightened on the wheel and a sudden warm rush of nostalgia for this place flooded through him along with the urgent need to hurry into the town.

The morning sun was already making of it a burning cauldron two hours before noon; it was so hot not even the bottle flies would be stirring. But he had the urgent anticipatory feeling that he was coming home again after a long time, that he was a kid again and not thirty, that he was going to wade in the bay and swim to the farthest island and help Big Juan with the nets.

“Kids have it lucky,” he said, thinking about the children still at home with Big Juan and not even realizing he had spoken aloud.

“What?” his wife asked. Bea, a stout woman with matronly bosom, was a couple of years younger than Al. She’d been considered one of the prettiest girls in school and she did not forget it though almost everyone else had. Marriage agreed with her. She’d aimed toward marriage since she’d first played house, dominating the game. She was a good woman, and she loved Al, but their backgrounds were different. Marriage to Al was a challenge for Bea and she’d set as her goal making him into the kind of civilized husband she believed he should be.

Bea’s voice jerked Al back to reality and he remembered that he wasn’t one of Juan Venzino’s vital, primitive kids any more; he was a respectable businessman, with Bea working hard twenty hours a day to make him forget his beginnings.

“What did you say, Albert?”

He shook his head. Suddenly he hated her fiercely, the way people learned to hate in this hot village. She was “good people,” she loved him, even her nagging was for his own benefit, but he was sick of it. Why had he married her? Why had he let her drag him away to Tampa and an insurance brokerage? Here he was, thirty years old, with nothing he wanted, not even kids. What was the sense of reminding himself that everything Bea said was for his own good? He was tired trying to be something he was never intended to be. Fairly he had to admit she was right. But this didn’t make him like it.

He stared at this flat, ugly bay country he loved so terribly and felt a sharp pain in his chest. What’s to love? And he couldn’t answer that. For miles before you reached the village the backcountry road was banked up across soggy marshes of saw grass broken by shapeless pools of tidewater. Where the land rose above bay level nothing grew but cabbage palmettos, cabbage palms, and shabby slash pines; there were no living things but hard-shell gophers and rattlesnakes. What’s here to love, for God’s sake?”

But he stared at it all hungrily as if it were something he’d yearned for a long time without even knowing it. The backyards of frame shacks, with garden patches in black squares, displayed clothes strung on sagging lines and privy doors hanging open.

Bea’s nose was quivering the way it always did about here on the way home.

“I hope you’re not going to stay too long this time, Albert.”

“What’s too long, Bea?” he asked wearily. “Is twenty minutes too long?”

“It is for me.”

“Okay. Okay. Pa said it was trouble. That’s all I know.” He sighed, thinking about her correct parents and correct schools and correct existence, and wondering why she’d ever wanted him? “We’ll leave as soon as we can.”

“Well, I’m just not staying overnight, no matter what violent crisis your family is facing this time. Those kids screaming and the mosquitoes and the sand fleas. My God, I don’t see how they stand it. You ought to thank God every day, Albert, that you married me and got out of all this.”

“Sure, Bea.”

“Well, you could still be right here, you know. Here in this Godforsaken village.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got me to thank.”

“Thank.” He said it purposely that way.

“Oh, stop being a smart Cuban. You know you hate all that dirt and the dogs underfoot. You’re going to be somebody — someday — when you quit even coming back to this place at all.”

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it, Bea?”

She missed the irony in his voice. She always missed it or ignored it or overlooked it. Now she exhaled. “It would be a miracle. It would be God answering my prayers when you stopped running over here every time they called you.”

“It’s my family, for God’s sake.”

“Your family. What have they ever done for you? I can tell you, anything that’s been done for you, my family has done it. My family. And yet, every time these people yell, you come running.”

He smiled in a savage way that pulled his mouth out of shape. He was stocky as all Juan’s sons were but he was not as tall as Big Juan, and there was about his chiseled features the look of Rosa. His mouth was soft, his black eyes were gentle. He was losing his hair. It was receding at the temples and he was not handsome as Big Juan was in that rugged, disturbing way. Bea had thought Al very handsome when they met but sometimes now she admitted Albert looked older than his father, especially when the exigencies of the insurance business bore him down. Being inside the office all the time, he had lost his tan, and there was an odd paleness about his olive complexion that made him look as if he’d just been released from the hospital after a long convalescence.

“Not every time I don’t come running, Bea,” he said in a flat tone. “Sometimes you forget to tell me they called.”

Her voice flared. “I do it only to protect you. If they had their way you’d spend all your time over here, giving them all your money and patching up all their woes.” Her voice lowered, becoming very level and patient, but firm. “If they want money this time, Albert, you tell them no, you understand?”

He exhaled, did not speak. They were entering the village now and he swore to himself with a warm inner smile that the place had not changed at all. The same curios in the curio shops that stood empty and forsaken, waiting for the occasional tourist that wandered off the main highway, made a wrong turn or found the spot on a road map and felt adventurous. The streets always looked deserted, even during the busiest hours of the day. Main Street was wide, paved with red Georgia brick that dismayed him when he considered how it must have been trucked in here across those marshes years ago, before he was born.

He watched from the corner of his eye some children playing hopscotch and jacks in the small park next to the drug store. Even when people hurried in Dead Bay they moved slowly. But mostly when people got fretted into hurrying for any reason, they just sat down and stewed about it in the shadiest place they could find.

“You understand me, Albert?”

She was getting through to him again.

“What?”

“Money. No money to them this time.”

“All right, Bea.”

“You know what will happen. Your father will start spouting about that damned fool idea of his of deep-sea treasure diving — ”

“It might not be so crazy, Bea. I always thought Papa might be right. You tell me who knows more about the Gulf than Papa. He might really know where there’s buried treasure.”

“Oh, he does.” Bea’s voice was scathing. “In your pockets. They’re just lined with treasure for him. That’s where his buried treasure is. And not buried very deeply, either.”

“I got to help them the little I can.”

“I wouldn’t mind ‘a little’ so much. But it’s constant. And that talk about buying diving gear and an aqua-lung so he can dive for treasure.” She sniffed, crossing her arms over her bosom. “All the beer he’s drunk, he couldn’t sink even with weights on him.”

Al allowed himself a smile. He knew she hadn’t intended to be funny at all.

“You might have a real point there, Bea. I’ll mention it to Big Juan.”

“Well, don’t tell him I said it. He dislikes me enough as it is.”

“He doesn’t dislike you, Bea. You’re just self-conscious.”

“Oh, they all hate me. They know I’m — well, different — ”

“Better than they are, Bea?” he inquired.

“Well, I admit I don’t like living as they do. They know it. They resent it. That’s why they hate me.” She dabbed a lace handkerchief at her dry eyes. He’d never seen her really cry, though once he thought she’d cried. Now he knew she wouldn’t soil a lace handkerchief with tears; if she were going to cry she’d use Kleenex. “Oh, Albert, don’t make me stay here too long. We’ve so much to do at home. I want to get the swimming pool started and if we’re not nicer to the Magruders, we’re never going to be accepted in the country club…. Do you hear me, Albert? You’ve got to start being nicer to Ted Magruder.”

“Okay. Next time I see him, I don’t spit on him.”

“Now you sound exactly like your father.”

Albert turned the Chevy along the shell-paved side road that led through mangroves, clustered sea grapes, wild oats and tractionless sand, white as sugar, to the house where he’d been born. He felt his heart pounding faster, an anxiety building in him to be there. He stared out at the bay, calm and flat, and the Gulf beyond the islands and the channel, lying dangerous and enticing as a whore.

There was an odd emptiness in his voice. “Don’t worry, Bea. Once in a while I might sound like him. “I’ll never be the man Big Juan is.”

He watched sea gulls screaming out over the piers where some of the kids had tossed fish entrails. A bored pelican perched on a pier support and watched the screaming gulls with one eye. Al could hear the children yelling; one of them was carrying a sting ray, and the others were trying to take it away from him. He was flailing at them with it and screaming as loud as he could. His left leg was bright with blood but his screams were enraged. They were trying to take his sting ray and they were not about to do it. He was going to die fending them off, and die screaming, too.

But the stillness from the house seemed louder than the screams of the children. It was as if the frame shack sat in a vacuum of its own silence. It was as if someone were dead. No one was dead, yet the silence frightened him and he could not say why.

He blew the Chevy’s horn loudly, once, twice, three times, not to let them know he was coming — this didn’t seem a vital matter to him — but to break that worrisome silence.

The kids came shrieking up from the bay, spreading out over the white sand like skittering sand crabs and then crossing through the whiskery growth of sea oats tickling at their bare legs. They were as brown as sea urchins and their teeth gleamed as white as the little stars you found when you snapped open a brittle sand dollar.

“Albert. Now remember. No money. And don’t you go encouraging your father when he starts talking about diving for treasure — ”

“All right, Bea. All right.”

“And no matter what the trouble is, you don’t give them any money. We need every penny we’ve got.”

“I said all right.”

“Sure. You said it. You’re not even paying any attention to me.”

He stopped the car, killed the engine. They were yelling at Albert that a sting ray had slapped its pronged tail into Luis, he had cut away the flesh because this was the only way to get out the prongs that opened like saw teeth after the tail was driven into its victim, and now Luis refused to give up the sting ray. It was his and he was thinking of some way to make it die slowly and painfully.

They scrambled over the car; the dogs lunged barking and yapping against its side.

Bea screamed at them to keep the dogs down, they were scratching the paint. “Can’t you see? Your dogs! You horrible little creatures,” she wailed at them. “Can’t you understand they’re clawing the paint?”

But Albert was not paying any attention to Bea or the kids. He was watching the silent house, waiting for Juan and Rosa to come out of the door.