Heat of Night (6 page)

J
UAN STRODE AROUND
the chair in which Mal Hollister sat, staring at the cut of his features, the texture of his suit, the gold of his watch — or so it seemed to Mal.

What was the man looking for? Hollister thought he was an ordinary kind of character; maybe he’d dressed carefully tonight, hoping to impress Dolores, but certainly he looked no different than usual.

Juan shrugged his denim shirt up on his shoulders. It was unbuttoned almost to his navel. He wore no shoes. The quality of Hollister’s clothing angered him because it did not belong in this room, any more than Hollister belonged here.

“Hey,” Juan said at last. The word burst upon the room. Silence had borne down since they’d exhausted talk of the weather. He glanced up but the word meant Juan was speaking to himself, testing his own vocal chords like a violinist tuning his fiddle.

Juan stopped in front of Mal’s chair, as abrupt and direct as the child Mal had met in the yard. “Out on the town tonight, Meester Hollister? Out for a good time, hey?”

Mal frowned, not in the least deceived by the smile on Juan’s face. He’d known this man for a long time, casually, it was true, and from a distance. He’d never seen quite this belligerent manner on him before. He wondered mildly how drunk Juan was, or if he were drunk at all? Maybe Big Juan needed a dozen beers under his belt to slow him down to civilization’s pace?

“Dolores and I are having supper together.” Mal decided this was noncommittal enough.

“Have supper, huh? Have a big supper?”

“If she likes.”

Juan had held the smile so long now it looked painful. “What you mean — if she likes? What she likes? If she likes four, five cocktails before dinner, hey? Fine, huh? If she’s a-like a wine during meal, you think this is fine, huh? And after you eat, what, huh?”

“I don’t know yet, Juan. I play by ear.”

He was instantly sorry he’d said this; he’d intended it to sound honest; it was honest but he saw neither Juan nor Rosa saw it in this light at all. It was a sophisticated man’s sarcastic answer to people not worthy of his attention. This was in their faces and it was not his intent at all.

“Yeah.” Big Juan shivered as though he were cold all over. He paced across the room and back. Mal looked around helplessly, wondering why Dolores was taking so long.

Juan swung around on his bare feet, changing the subject abruptly, pointing at Mal, finger extended.

“How many girls you
hire
at your office, huh? How many?”

“Well, what you mean? I hire as many as we need.”

“All the time you need new girls, huh? Is this true? I don’t mean you need just girls, Meester Hollister. I mean between you and me and Rosa. We all grown up, huh? We all know our way around, right? We all three about the same age, huh?”

Mal shrugged. He was not about to argue with Juan over a matter of ten or eleven years. He agreed that generally they were the same age.

“Yeah.” Big Rosa spoke suddenly. She pushed her hair from her face. She leaned forward staring into Mal’s face. “You — don’t care much for girls old as you, huh?”

Mal flushed. Big Juan glanced over his shoulder and made a downward gesture toward Rosa. Mal saw Juan felt he was being subtle in his approach while there was nothing subtle about Rosa’s frontal attack on his morals.

Juan got together a new smile, compounded of the agony in his eyes and the sag of his weary mouth muscles.

He said, “I ask you a question, Mr. Hollister? How many girls you hire as you secretary? Huh? How many girls like Dolores? How many — say — in one year, huh?”

“I don’t know, Juan. You know how it is with girls. They get married. They quit for one reason or another.”

Juan gave him a smile that was full more of rage than of camaraderie. “Or maybe you fire them, too, huh? I mean — if they not friendly with the boss — hell, why keep them, huh? A man like you — and me — we like the girls around us to be real friendly, huh?”

Mal couldn’t help laughing. “You, mean unless they date me — I fire ‘em?”

Juan’s mouth pulled down in a raging leer. He tried to sound friendly and in complete empathy. “Oh, you kid. Some fun, huh? Plenty new girls. Huh?”

He looked as if tears would break his mask of laughter.

“No.” Mal spoke in a determined way but he may as well have been speaking against the winds roaring in from the Gulf.

Neither Juan nor Rosa believed him. Rosa made a clicking sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

Juan tried another tack. “You kicked around a lot over on Twenty-second Street in Tampa when you was a young guy, right?” Juan’s haggard eyes still tried to smile. “Cuban girls. Over in Ybor City. Some hot chickens. Huh?”

“I don’t know. I had to work pretty hard. I didn’t have a lot of time for fun.”

Both Rosa and Juan digested this thought for a moment. It altered the complexion of things slightly, but not for the better.

“This a-way it is with some men. They think when they get older — older like us three — they have missed something,” Rosa said She got up and walked to where Juan stood before Mal’s chair. Both bent from the waist, staring down at him. “They work hard when young. Pile up some money. Get to looking around for pretty young girls they missed, huh?”

“I don’t know,” Mal said.

“You,” Rosa said. “What’s a man like you want with a young kid like Dolores, huh?”

“I — like Dolores.”

“Shu. You like her. She likes you. She likes her papa, too. Her mama. We get our age — we all got to look after kids like Dolores. Huh? You think this?” Rosa’s eyes were troubled but they defied him to utter the wrong answer and he knew there was no right answer.

Mal breathed deeply, not knowing what to say. He supposed they did not know how insulting they were, or if they vaguely suspected, they didn’t care. They loved Dolores. They wanted to protect her and were like two embattled mockingbirds pecking at the hawk that molested their nest. He told himself he was beginning to feel like a hawk. They were right, he had no right here. The simplicity of their rage was convincing. Anything so simple and honest must be right. Then he remembered his dreams about Dolores, many of them waking dreams.

Rosa rocked her head back and forth. “A man like you. You must have had plenty women in you time, huh?” She did not wait for him to answer. “Why you waste your time with a young girl like Dolores? What you think a little girl like this knows, huh? The things a man like you wants, what would she know about them?” She made a tent with the fingers of her right hand, staring at them with contemptuous eyes. “What a child like this know for a man like you?”

He gave up, defeated. He said, “She’s a lovely girl. That’s all I know.”

Big Juan said, “This we know, too. It’s this lovely girl we want to keep like this. Let her marry some nice boy her own age. Eh? A man like us — like you and me, our age — what we want with such a child, huh? What a man like you and me think of a child like Dolores, eh? Not much. A little fun tonight — and then
phoo.
Is — this what you think?”

Despite his best efforts, Big Juan’s voice was trembling on the brink of outrage and violence.

Mal stood up suddenly, his movement so abrupt both Rosa and Juan stepped back, startled.

“I don’t think anything like that,” Mal said.

The screen door slammed and Ric stepped into the room. He glanced at them, slumped into a chair in the corner. He fiddled with the lace arm coverings. None of them looked his way.

“Shu,” Rosa said to Mal, completely unconvinced.

He was tired of them. He spoke sharply. “Dolores can take care of herself.”

He heard Rosa’s sharp intake of breath. He’d made another bad mistake. There was no sense trying to batter his way into their closed minds. He just wanted to keep them quiet until he could collect Dolores and get out.

Rosa said, “Maybe you think this that Dolores can take care of herself, sir, Meester Hollister, sir. But kindly listen to me. It is for us to take care of her. A man like you got no good in his mind when he thinks about a girl like Dolores. Why not you find a woman like you wife — you own age, huh? You find she’s a lot better for you. A woman knows what a man wants. A girl — what does she know?”

Mal did not answer. He felt his own rage growing against them, and against himself.

“Tell you what,” Juan said suddenly as if he’d just thought of something fine. “Why you not let Rosa tell Dolores this date is all off, huh? You and me. We got time to go down to Jake’s Bar. Have some drinks. Big laughs. We men who know our way around, huh? We not got time for keeds, huh? This is a laugh when you stop to think over it, huh? Say, you know this girl down there at Jake’s Bar. She’s a-wait tables, huh? Oh, she’s a good one for fine jokes. She’s got fine wide hips, too. She knows how to make a man laugh, how to laugh with a man. What you say?”

“I’m sorry.”

Big Juan exhaled. This man was pushing him to the very edge of violence. Just the same, he’d tried hard to be friendly. He stared at Hollister, at Rosa, at his fists, at the night darkening his windows.

He made a decision. He said, “Rosa, now we fix dinner, huh? We late for dinner now, huh?”

He pushed her ahead of him into the kitchen. While Rosa worked, he watched Dolores’ bedroom door. When she came out of her room, he would solve the matter. He would tell her simply she could not go out with this man. He would say it in front of him and this would end it.

He winced, knowing better. Unless he killed this man there was no way to end it. They had been through it all with Dolores. Over and over. You fought with Dolores, she became stubborn. She would meet this man anyhow — sneaking out to meet him. Desire is a terribly strong compulsion to drive a person to do strange things, strange even to his own nature. He knew this from his own experience. No, he could not force Dolores to do anything. Her will was too strong, she was too much like Rosa, too much like him.

He covered his face with his hands. There had to be some other way — some way like taking Hollister far out in the Gulf and holding his head under the water for five or ten minutes.

M
AL STARED AT
Ric Suarez slumped in a corner chair. He could feel the hatred being generated in this room. It was so thick it could be cut with a knife.

Mal gazed around, feeling trapped. He’d thought being left alone on the grill with Juan and Rosa was as bad a thing as could happen to him. But this — alone with this malevolent football hero was even a new low. It was the sort of situation he dreaded. He’d started out the night gay, feeling almost young, almost alive again for the first time since Stella had divorced him. But now his thoughts were darker than the Gulf, wilder, with inner rages against himself and the Venzino family.

He checked his watch, wondering if they had Dolores chained in a room somewhere.

He walked to the screen door, stood framed in it, staring at the lowering sky, the way the bay seemed flat, as if withdrawing from the fury lashing across the Gulf, spiraling in on thick wind and black clouds.

He couldn’t endure the silence.

“Looks like a real storm brewing,” he heard himself saying. Hell, next they’d be discussing the crops.

“Yeah,” Ric Suarez said. He got up and paced back and forth, unable to sit still, popping fist against palm.

There was more silence and Mal said, “Some weather.”

“Yeah.”

“We — haven’t had a real twister — not a bad hurricane, not in years.” He despised the sound of his own voice, why couldn’t he cut it off? “Not in years.”

“Yeah.”

Mal shrugged. Even a football dummy should have learned more than one word. He glanced toward the kitchen, hearing Rosa banging pots around in there, but was unable to see her. He wondered if the kids ever came in until they were forcibly dragged in to their meals?

“Hear you dropped out of football,” Mal said after an interminable three minutes of silence. Pebbles or debris or bits of palm frond were slapped against the roof by the rising wind. Silence moved charged and dry ahead of the storm. What the hell, if Suarez hated him so badly he could not speak, why make conversation with him, talk neither of you want, about matters in which you have no interest. You owe him nothing. Why not suggest goal posts at twenty paces?

“Yeah.”

What a lovely evening is building up here. “Too bad,” he heard himself saying. “You really had it one time.”

He heard Suarez snatch in his breath and realized this was too near the truth. It rankled Suarez to realize someone else considered him a has-been, even if he already believed it about himself.

“Yeah?” This time the word was a question, inflection hard and pointed.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, Ric. We’re all very proud of you here.”

“Yeah.”

Mal gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Me. I never could play football when I was in school. Too light. Not fast enough. If you’re light — you got to be fast.”

“Yeah.” Ric stared at him and slapped his fist.

“I was light. Light and slow, plodding.”

“Yeah.”

Mal exhaled. “You were fast. Well, it’s a big man’s game. A little man is a fool to buck it — I mean unless he loves it. I got stepped on a few times. I knew I had had it. Right then and there.”

“Yeah.” Suarez prowled the room.

“You probably wouldn’t think I was too light when I was a kid — I mean to look at me now.”

“Yeah.” This didn’t mean anything.

Mal walked out on the porch, letting the door slap behind him. The hell with Suarez. What was the sense of this, apologizing because he’d never played football? Jesus. He’d never even wanted to play football.

The door slammed behind him and he turned thinking it was Suarez. It would relieve some of the tension in him just to take a poke at that neanderthal monster.

“What’s the matter, Mal?” It was Dolores, in a simple print frock and a roll-collared cardigan against the rising wind. God, she was lovely.

She took his arm, he felt relief flood through him. He could smell the elusive fragrance of her. He ached across the bridge of his nose, wanting her, loving her, needing her out of here, away from here.

She looked up, smiling. “You want to go?” she said.

Ho boy, he thought, the understatement of the year.