Shark Infested Custard (24 page)

       It was the clear bright skies and good flying weather of South Florida Eddie enjoyed. He did not love Miami the way Hank and Larry had, nor did he envy the dull, higher-styled suburban life, with country club-centered activities, that Don Luchessi and his family lived.

       Ever since the swift and surprising departure of Hank, followed by Larry, only three weeks later, the salty air of South Florida had lost its savor for Eddie Miller. Solitude and a few close friends were all Eddie needed when he wasn't flying, but he did not, and could not, have any solitude living with Gladys Wilson. And, as much as he liked Don—his remaining friend—it was increasingly harder for the two of them to get together. Eddie was free to go anywhere and do anything he liked—although Gladys usually went with him—but Don, to get away from the house at night, always had to make up some kind of lie to tell Clara. Don disliked Gladys as much as Gladys disliked Don, but Clara hated Gladys and Eddie equally. Eddie was indifferent to Clara, having dismissed her in his mind long ago as a typical American housewife, accepting Clara at her word when she had claimed that she was "a simple homemaker," so he neither liked nor disliked her. On the single occasion the four of them had gone out to dinner, however, the almost electrical enmity at the table, and the frequent manifestations of middle-class morality Clara had interjected into the dinner conversation had outraged Gladys, and finally, irritated Eddie.

       As a practicing, professional Catholic mother, Clara had given an implicit impression that she would have to confess to her priest that she had eaten dinner with an unmarried couple who "were living in sin."

       Before Clara consented to going out with them in the first place—not wanting to leave Marie, their nine-year-old daughter, alone—she had insisted that Don hire a registered nurse as a babysitter. During dinner, Clara had called the nurse three times, and Don had called her twice. Gladys, a past-president of W. A. S. P. (Widows as Single People), and quite active in women's liberation activities, found these calls amusing, at first; and then, turning serious, had lectured Don and Clara on the advisability of providing their daughter with Kung Fu lessons so the girl could become self-reliant. Gladys' rather generous offer to teach Marie a few basic lessons in Karate had been rejected with unnecessary force, if not rudeness, Eddie recalled.

       When they got home to Miami Springs, Gladys said: "Never again, Baby!"

       Eddie had grinned and nodded, visualizing a similar conversation taking place in Don's house in South Miami.

       Eddie enjoyed his solitary breakfast. To prolong the pleasant feeling of being alone, he signaled the waitress to bring him another cup of coffee. He was going flying later this morning, and he decided to take old Don with him. He would feel Don out, and see how he was getting along. Perhaps he would have something to report to Hank when he saw him.

       While he waited for fresh coffee, Eddie added the apartment key Hank had mailed to him to his key ring.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The window in Don's warehouse office was uncurtained, and in the mornings he opened the venetian blinds. He found it soothing to look through the slats at the traffic on the 1-95 overpass. Almost a half-block away the noise of the traffic was a steady comforting murmur, and the sound only rose in volume when a heavy diesel semi rumbled south over the overpass in the near lane. Beneath the overpass, extending from the deeply shadowed bridge, were twenty colorful frame houses. The one-story houses, of two and four rooms, were about the last wooden houses remaining in Miami, but they were not destined to exist much longer. When Don had first moved into the warehouse office there had been seventy of these clapboard houses along Fair Alley, as it was called by the black residents (although there was no such street or alley listed on the city map), but fifty of them had been torn down, ten houses at a time, as new "Little HUD" housing had been constructed. The black residents had been "relocated," as the officials put it, in Liberty City, Brownsville, and Coconut Grove.

       Sometimes, when he had nothing else to do, which was most of the time, Don stood by the window for hours, watching the remaining row of homes and the activity of the black inhabitants. The houses were painted in gay colors—bright mustards, carnation pinks, pastel blues. On the house closest to Don's window, a brown, misshapen, short-legged panther, with pink flowered decals pasted on the body, had been painted on the lemon wall. Don truly admired this lop-sided panther, and had considered the idea of buying the wall when the bulldozers came eventually to tear down the houses. He thought about framing the panther and part of the wall and putting the mural-sized picture on the patio wall by his pool. But he had merely considered the idea, knowing that he would miss the painting when the house was gone. He knew he wouldn't actually buy the brown panther and take it home. Clara would never stand still for it. Not in 'her'' house.

       And it 'was'' truly her house now, in deed as well as in name, and so was the bank account and the bonds and jewelry in her private lock box at the Southwest Bank of South Miami, and the small waterfront lot on Marathon Key where he had hoped to build a weekend fishing cottage some day. The cottage was another plan that was out forever now that Clara had listed the lot and the price she wanted for it with a Miami realtor. The price was much too high at present, but eventually, as property values climbed inevitably, she would get it. She would get the money; not Don. He wished, somehow, that he had kept the Marathon lot a secret from her, but he had been unable to salvage anything when he went back to her. Nothing. Clara wasn't that bright, but Paul Vitale, her greasy lawyer brother, was a sharp, mean, vindictive sonofabitch. And Paul had drawn up all the papers to protect his "little sister."

       An old black man, wearing a blue short-sleeved workshirt and a pair of pink-and-white striped bermudas, came out of the second yellow house. He sat on a bench beside the door, and opened a can of beer. He dropped the tab inside the can, took a long gulping pull, and leaned back against the wall, lifting his wrinkled, grayish black face to the hot morning sun. To the old man's left, along the wall of the house, there was a row of red and pink geraniums planted in five-gallon oil cans. Each can had been painted a different color—red, yellow, and blue—and the shadows of the geraniums against the yellow wall looked a little greenish to Don. That would make a hell of a nice oil painting, Don thought—the old black man, sitting there in the sunlight, with all that garish color in the background. Not a care in the world—except that he would be "relocated" in another month or so in some regulated concrete block-and-stucco housing development in Brownsville.

       Don would miss the old man, the houses and brown panther, but if all went well, he, too, might be "relocated" by then. But how? How? And how could he take Marie with him? That was one thing he knew: he wouldn't leave Miami without Marie.

       Don left the window, sighed, sat at his desk, moved the stack of yellow invoices to one side, and took out his ostrich leather wallet. He unzipped the "secret" compartment. Before removing the two bills, he glanced at the door to see if it was shut, and listened for a moment to Nita's hunt and peck typing in the outer office. He took out two crisp bills, and put them on the desk, placing the $1,000-bill above the $500-bill. He studied Stephen Grover Cleveland's face on the $1,000-bill, wondering again how this weak-chinned unmemorable man—at least Don couldn't remember anything about Cleveland—had been chosen for this honor. William McKinley was different. He, at least, had been assassinated, and it was decent of the U.S. Treasury officials, or Congress, or whoever it was that decided whose picture was engraved on money to remember McKinley this way on the $500-bill. But why not McKinley, then, on the $1,000, and Cleveland on the $500? What in hell had Cleveland ever done to be honored more than McKinley? But maybe it worked the other way. Kennedy was assassinated, and his face ended up on fifty-cent pieces. The lower the denomination, perhaps, the higher the honor was supposed to be, like Lincoln's face on pennies.

       But who remembered Leon Czolgosz, or if they did, how many people could spell his name? Don could, and he had won a few bucks in bars by betting he could spell it. How many people, in fact, remembered or knew that Czolgosz had assassinated McKinley? Or knew that McKinley, because he had been assassinated, now had his picture on the $500-bill? Don hadn't known about the faces on the $1,000 and $500 bills himself until he had changed smaller bills for them, and it had taken the bank three days to get the higher denominations for him when he requested them.

       But it wasn't nearly enough money. He put the two bills away, zipped the compartment closed, and returned the wallet to his hip pocket. To accumulate this $1,500 had taken Don almost three months. To be able to leave Clara—and take Marie with him—Don had set an arbitrary sum of $10,000 as getaway bread. He would need at least that much. With $10,000, all in $1,000 and $500 bills, so his wallet wouldn't bulge in his pocket, he could go somewhere, anywhere he pleased, and set up housekeeping for himself and his daughter. He could change his name and have enough money left over to take care of the two of them while he established himself in business, or got a job of some kind, for a full year. Of, if he were frugal enough, the two of them could live for a year-and-a-half or even two, on $10,000. Surely, within a year-and-a-half he would be earning enough money again somewhere to support them in a half-way decent middleclass neighborhood.

       With a pad and pencil, Don refigured his money and escape plans. By hoarding $500 a month—which was really rushing it—it would still be close to two years before he could make the break. But he couldn't hold out that long. In two more years, living in the same house with Clara, he would be as crazy as a shithouse rat...

       There was a timid rap-rap on the door. Nita opened the door and entered. Her olive face had turned rosy, and she announced formally, "Mr. Miller to see you, sir."

       Eddie Miller followed her in. The sound of his boots was masked by the clatter of Nita's wooden-soled wedgies on the linoleum floor. Winking at Don, Eddie stood a foot behind Nita. As she turned clumsily to leave, her breasts brushed his chest. Unsmiling now, his face solemn, but teasing the poor woman, Eddie side-stepped as Nita side-stepped, and they did a frantic skipping dance back and forth a few times before Eddie grinned and allowed her to escape. She closed the door behind her with a bang.

       Nita would be upset all day about Eddie, Don thought. Visitors rarely came to the warehouse office, and she would feel that the clumsy dance was all her fault—not realizing that Eddie was as agile and wiry as a mountain goat.

       Don, blushing with genuine pleasure, got up and shook hands with Eddie. "Did you have any trouble finding the place?"

       Eddie grinned and shook his head. "Not much. These warehouses down here all look alike, but once I spotted the brown tiger it was easy. I'm parked in a yellow loading zone, outside, though."

       "That's okay," Don said. "I had it painted myself so I'd be sure to always have a parking place. You saw my Mark IV, didn't you?"

       Eddie nodded, and looked incuriously around the office, shaking his head. "This is a crummy office, Don, for a man making your kind of dough."

       There was a shrill whine and then a heavy thunking sound behind the plywood partition separating the office from the warehouse. Eddie raised his eyebrows.

       "It's the printer," Don explained. "There was an extra storeroom in the warehouse I didn't use, so I rented it out to this guy. He prints bolita tickets, I think, and a few other interesting things. Fake I.D. cards, birth certificates, high school diplomas, and shit like that. But he's away a lot, so he doesn't bother me any—and I pick up an extra seventy-five bucks a month that way."

       "Is that why you moved down here yourself, to save dough on office space?"

       "No. It was too inconvenient being downtown. No place to park, and I always had to be coming here anyway for silver. All the flatware's in the safe here, you know, and I keep a black warehouseman. When I used to talk to him on the phone he got the orders wrong, so it was easier this way. Besides, no one ever comes to see me for orders. I go to them, so it was stupid to keep an expensive office on Biscayne Boulevard."

       Eddie winked, and jerked his head toward the closed door. "If I'd known you had that around, I'd've been down before. How is she, Don?"

       "Keep you voice down, man. I told Hank about Nita, and he told you, didn't he?" Don smiled sheepishly.

       "Not the juicy details."

       "It isn't that juicy, but Nita's been with me about five years now, and well, you know, I talked to her about some things. My problems, some, and about Clara. So—d'you remember when we got the vasectomies?"

       "You're really something, Don," Eddie laughed. "That's an incident that would hardly slip a man's mind, for Christ's sake!"

       "You remember 'when'', I mean—it was when I was separated and living in the Towers with you guys. Well, Clara and I had always used the rhythm system, which is a bloody pain in the ass. You don't fuck when you want to, you have to wait until you have to, so to speak. I was living at the Towers when you and I and Hank talked about the vasectomy, so I never told Clara when I decided to get it done with you. Did Hank ever get his?"

       "No. He chickened out finally. He read some study where about one guy out of every thousand or so has some side effects or something. He reads all those medical magazines, and he takes that shit seriously. You know how Hank is, Don."

       "I got a postcard from Hank last week. From St. Paul."

       "What did he say?"

       "He said that when he got some time he'd write me a letter. Anyway, I think I knew at the time that I would eventually go back to Clara. Not consciously, you understand, but down there in my subconscious somewhere. And that was why—although I don't think I thought about it when we went to Dr. Silverstein—I got the damned operation. I must've thought, deep down inside someplace, that with a vasectomy, I wouldn't have to fuck around with the calendar and the rhythm system and all with Clara. So when we got back together, I told her about the vasectomy, and she got pissed, really pissed."