Men in Miami Hotels (23 page)
Cot laughed. “You got to lay off all that philosophizing, Pop. It’s going to make you dyspeptic.”
His father reached in his pocket, brought out a few barky scrawls. “
Aguedita
,” he said. “I abound in roots and curatives.”
He held the gray curls out to him. Cot took one and chewed the hot, not bark but root wood. “This is exactly what I need. They say malaria’s coming around again. Thanks, Papi.”
Cot got up. They were only a block from the apartment. “I’ll go on,” he said.
“Wait.”
The look in his father’s eyes made him sit down again.
The old man leaned against him, a spare weight of familiarity and devotion, with his head against his shoulder. But this, apparently, was not quite enough. He slid down so his head was in Cot’s lap. From there he looked up at his son, a look depleted and sorrowing, in it undarned tatters of feeling, of delays and embargoes of the spirit, parings and swollen knots, grimaces and old ransacked grievances, tears patched up and recycled, the remnants of love, nothing anyone could do anything about. Cot smoothed his father’s forehead, his lank gray hair. His father closed his eyes. For ten minutes, maybe more, they remained there, Cot’s broad hand just touching his father’s head, holding the old man as he slept.
C
arrying a bouquet of red bougainvillea sprigs Cot approaches the apartment through the park. He stays out of the front-window sight line. A small boy comes by, a boy in worn canvas shorts, snapping his fingers, and Cot offers him money—two American dollars to deliver and five on return—to get the flowers to the third floor, number 3-6, and give them to whoever answers the door. The boy, with a grin, takes off to do the job. Be sure to knock hard, Cot tells him as he goes. He eases off at an angle, crosses the street and stands in the shadow of a small uprearing of areca palms, watching. He sees the boy knock and wait. No one comes to the door, no one cracks the pulled-down blinds. The boy looks around and knocks again, but no one comes. An old freezing sensation, herald of hardy and insistent matters, returns to his body. Sometimes it’s like an illumination, this chill, cold light of a radiance that shows the future. The boy presses his ear against the green wooden door and listens, then lays the flowers against the sill and scampers away. Cot walks around into the out-of-sight-line part of the street, and as the boy exits the forecourt hails him. The boy’s eyes glitter with excitement and he pants theatrically. Cot gives him his five dollars in singles, pressing them firmly into his hand.
The living room, that smells of plumeria blossoms, the kitchen, spare and dim, and the bedroom where he left her, are empty. She’s gone, he thinks, but he knows she isn’t. An immense tenderness that makes him move as if adrift in a dream overtakes him. There’s not so much a blankness between him and what’s coming as there is an eternity of never-was. He finds her in the bathroom. Spane—say maybe it’s not Spane, say it’s a henchman, but no matter, that man too would be Spane as a robber or a wandering sociopath would also be Spane, any scorpion or biting snake or malarial mosquito, Spane—had closed the door, or Cot would have smelled the blood. The killer dragged her in there and without bothering to untie her killed her with a knife. There’s blood all over the white and green tile floor, blood on the old narrow metal bathtub, blood in the sink and on the white walls.
A rush of terror, call it that, unindemnified against the hollowing instant, tunnels right through him. He careens into the living room, slapping the air like a man slapping gnats, and can’t find himself, can’t get the layout, spills onto the couch, climbs as if the couch is tilted against a wall he has to get over, and falls back. He wants to stretch out, extend his body. Everywhere the air touches his skin burns like fire, but he’s shivering. In an instant he’s up, scrabbling at the front window to get out and catches it in his head that he has to stop. He freezes. Time bangs a hammer against a steel rail. No one outside. Probably Spane saw him come in. He’s again the hunted one. “That’s all right,” he says. “That’s okay,” his throat dry and aching.
He checks the front door and limps back into the bathroom. Each step carries him deeper into a nausea. In the mirror his face is the face of a man raised from the grave, color, expression, even the features themselves, replaced by a mask of ignorance and dread. He looks like some ancient peasant, head lifted from a furrow. But this peasant is filled with a shame he’s already trying to evade. “I didn’t . . .” he says groping for exculpation, an exit. There is none.
His strength sloshed with deadness, he drops to his knees and can’t for a while get up. Eventually he hoists himself to his feet and trying to pay attention to the ringing in his ears as if from there will issue another more benevolent and resurrecting order of being sits down on the curled rim of the tub and looks at her.
Marcella—ex-, former-Marcella—is half sprawled, half stuck between the toilet and the window from which in lazy swirls the insubstantial curtains lift and sink. The ropes haven’t even been loosened.
Carefully, taking pains, he releases her. Crying softly, haphazardly, making little slippery sounds, blubbering, he lifts her and puts her body in the tub. She’s only four, maybe five degrees cooler than living life but he can feel these degrees like arctic ice. Her face is unbloodied, clean; her lashes are like tiny black wings on her white cheeks. Years ago her mother visited a conjurer, an old lady on Angela Street in Key West, in an attempt to put a spell on him that would take him out of her life. No power can do that, he told her. Except this one, ay Cot.
He has to pause for breath, let his wind catch up. He backs into the hall, turns, cumbersome as a truck, and heads for the kitchen. The hall, the kitchen, every sight line recedes into an infinity of impossibility. Still, he gets there, stepping from fabrication to fabrication as if from stone to stone crossing a river. Carefully, almost fastidiously, every movement a screeching curse, he gets a mop, rags, scouring powder, and the galvanized tin bucket from under the sink, comes back and cleans the bathroom. He has to stop twice to retch into the sink; nothing rises. Special issue, he thinks, re this, but realizes even so he’s coming back to himself. He’s minutes, eons past her, active in the new version of the world. You get used to it, they say. Twenty years of Variety Work (as Albertson called it), and the business now finally here unraveled and played out.
You think so?
Well, time will tell.
He cleans her body last, saving as always, the best for the time when the other, less fine, is out of the way. Between faint ring lines on her neck are the wounds—stabs into the veins on either side—that Spane’s knife made (he knows this knife with its deerbone handle and four-inch fluted blade); wounds no longer bleeding that Cot dabs at, two small slits that he covers with the tips of two fingers. At the edges of her smoke blue eyes a delicate spray of lines that you think you could brush away with a touch. Her face, rubbed each night with lotions and emollients, isn’t tanned. Her lips are thin but soft; she has a way of blowing them slightly outward as she speaks that makes her, especially from the side, look like a child, farm child maybe, fisher child, island child with a soul unhampered by special pleading or rancor. He touches their surface, turning the upper back a little to reveal her teeth. The gloss of her spit is still on them; they look part of the living world. A cry of commingled happiness and grief stops before it reaches the surface. He falls over onto the floor. His face hits the tile, momentarily stunning him. He presses at the pain with two fingers, encouraging it, pushes himself up. “Don’t worry,” he says, “I’m not going anywhere,” looking her in the face as he speaks, the words, he knows, a further desecration. He stands up, reaches for something, but forgets what it is before his hand is fully out. For a sec he doesn’t know what to do. He’s never before spoken to a corpse. He’s not one of those—unlike Little Mizell and Sparks, Jimmy Canada—who likes to chat up the stiffs. He passes over the dead as you would pass over a silent unbrokered river on a bridge. He does not look again at his face in the mirror. Except for the first quick involuntary touch he does not tend to his own slightly bleeding cheek. He returns to his work, climbing back into the tub. He has already undressed her; already, using the harsh brown Russian soap, washed the blood out of her clothes, soaping white cotton blouse, loose green cotton karate pants, pale yellow bikini underwear in the sink, wringing them out and draping them over a cord his father hung across the window (all the blood wasn’t out and for a moment he hesitated in a crushing dilemma, unable to go on, unable to begin again with the washing, stalled, the shame and sorrow burrowing like a sting into this moment he was afraid he wouldn’t get out of, until, his body creaking underneath him, his hands began carefully, slowly, to wring the shirt). There’s no hot water but the sun has warmed the pipes that run from a catchment on the roof, and he lets this sunwarmed water pour over her body, biting his lips as he does so. He knows she is changing in his hands into something else. Has changed. He tells himself he is changing too, right along with her, translating as he goes, learning the customs, edging deeper into her new country, but this isn’t so. He thinks of spilled papaya seeds, black as a bird’s eye, offered in her eight-year-old hand, of moments of half surprise in a cool winter’s twilight, of night flooding over them from out of the big island trees. For her the nights, from now on, will all be the same. He lays his body on hers in the tub. As he does so a little more blood squeezes out of her cuts but he doesn’t notice it. He kisses her deeply in her mouth and tastes with his tongue the exhumaceous silt, and lies there, ashamed and settling in, clutching her.
A
fter a while he’s able to get to his feet. He carries her into the bedroom and dresses her in fresh clothes and lays her on the bed. There’re a thousand things in his head, but it’s hard to pick the right one. His father will spend the night at Consuela’s. He goes out to the kitchen and fixes himself a sandwich and sits eating it, the textureless Cuban bread, the peanut spread that’s not really peanut butter, thin slices of a papaya he finds in the little fridge. The refrigerator shuts with a clamp. He eats and then sits at the table as the day draws closer around him, the twilight easing through its quelled and lingering performance, the night, adrift and not particular, freighting its featured quality silently in. Once, he gets up and goes into the bedroom and lies down beside her on the worn blue chenille spread. He’s placed two small squares of adhesive tape over the cuts in her neck, and as he looks at these his body goes hollow. He retreats to the living room and sits on the couch, gets up, goes back into the bedroom, retrieves his copy of
The
Georgics
, and returns to the couch. He can’t read the book in the dark, but his finger finds his place marker, a two-dollar bill folded lengthwise on which he’s written the words
I am gainfully employed
. One glance and the page, the bees, and the young bulls on round Etruscan hills, will come alive again, but he’ll have to turn on the light. He’s memorizing the poem as he goes along. He read passages to her, but she was not as taken with Virgil, or farming, as he was. “Plowboy,” she called him. He leans back against the couch. The night is like a bad smell. Like a disease, a fever borne in the blood, a thickening surge sinking deeper into his body. He makes himself stay where he is until the sensation of this passes. He doesn’t turn on the light.
T
he clock by the bed says three
A.M
. No way to tell how many shooters Spane has outside waiting for him. He pictures them tucked into notches, creases, folds in the landscape. Their Miami hotel rooms like so many silent shrines awaiting the little priests’ return. He goes out to the kitchen, gathers paper scraps from the pile of old newspapers his father keeps under the counter, dumps the trash from the galvanized tin can into the sink, stuffs the papers in the can, and just after he sets the concoction on fire uses Marcella’s mobile phone—battery almost gone—to call the fire department.
Huge fire on Calle Tremana, upstairs it looks like. ¡Ponte las pilas! ¡Ayúdame!
He goes out to the living room, opens the front door and sets the brightly burning papers in it. The papers burn swiftly and from a nook in the shadows he throws balled-up newspaper on the flames.
In five minutes the trucks are there. In six the firemen are running up the stairs. He has slid her body under the bed. The firemen burst in, carrying axes and long poles. Just before they get to the third-floor gallery he kicked the can across the threshold. The first fireman, a young man wearing a helmet painted white, seems surprised to see him.
“Anyone else in here?” he asks.
“
Solo estoy aquí
.” No one.
He has his father’s drawings rolled up under his arm. These he gives for safekeeping to the next-door neighbor, an old man with knobby bare legs under bush shorts. There are four or five trucks, old vehicles with large tires and rounded snouts. The street fills quickly with gawkers. Everyone has come out of their apartment. He’s able to slip down the stairs and through the crowd into the park across the street and away in the wooly darkness of the false dawn.
H
e makes his way by cab, riding in the rear of an old humped Buick, his head leaned back on the cloth seat, his hand resting on the hinge of the roll-down window that’s been repaired with screws slightly too small for it. Through streets that are as dark as if they’re uninhabited, as if Havana is an old dream that played out and even the sleeper has gotten up and gone away. On Avenue Mareña amber lights run in strings, pole to pole, down to a lighted area. His heart seems to be pumping faint flares, gas rings, and tatters out of his body in lumpy effusions. He can feel Marcella moving around inside him, like an old woman in a deserted house, opening door after door. He grips the armrest, and it comes off in his hand. He tries to reattach it but can’t. He starts to say something to the driver, but he can see by his eyes in the mirror that he’s already caught the situation. “
Disculpeme
,” he says. He feels himself shaking, but when he looks down his long limber body he is as still as a wood carving. The driver’s square dark head doesn’t move either. Remnants of her—spirit, he would call it—cling to him like bits of life itself. A wild despairing notification, bill of sale, burns as it flies up through his mind. He presses his back against the seat, or thinks he does. He can smell the ten thousand bodies that have ridden in this cab, sense the dreams and hopes, the desolations carried like little knobby treasures. The sky above the city is spotted with brown summery clouds, large and stuffed. In the east the dawn pretends its time has come.
Not yet.
His thoughts—his knowledge, the facts poking from their covert—touch him lightly with acid fingers. He grips his left wrist. He’s right-handed but his left wrist is larger than his right. Even in the smallest things there are misalignments.
A man, loose and muddled-looking, shouts from the sidewalk, a heavyset American in a madras jacket, swaying on the corner before a shop that sells Iron Curtain watches. Cot nods at him. The man grins hugely as if they are friends in on a secret. Cot signals to him, stops the cab, and calls him over. The man, who seems to be drunk but maybe isn’t, moving abruptly, comes to him. He carries a narrow-brimmed straw hat in his hand. “You got a sec, man?” The man goggles him. “I need your help.”