by Burton Hersh
There was no bell. I knocked, resoundingly, on one of the aluminum panels. Nothing. The heat of the afternoon was coming off the patched-up pavement below. I draped my jacket over one arm and knocked again, sweaty and a little out of breath from the climb.
I was about to start down when I heard the click of toenails scurrying across dried-up linoleum and sensed a form. The handle turned. The door opened outward and the muzzle of a half-grown boxer, as black and glistening as licorice, strained toward me with an expression so doleful yet full of inquiry that I stepped back on impulse, not wanting to provoke this high-strung animal. Behind the dog a short woman with searching, canted eyes was patting the boxer’s neck.
“She won’t bite you,” the woman said. “She is a big pup.”
The woman waited. Her heavy black hair was drawn back behind her neck in a tortoise-shell clasp. Something about her reminded me immediately of the woman in Mother’s Klimt.
“I’m here,” I started. But that seemed lame. “We sent you…letters?” I started again.
The woman nodded, resigned. “You are the representative of the landlord.”
“I am the landlord. For all practical purposes.”
“What purpose is not practical?” the woman said. “You look very warm. Come in.”
She had a level, melodious voice. The woman and the dog backed up; as I went by her I inadvertently grazed one generous breast; a corner of her full mouth lifted, crimped: a smile. The room was clean but very nearly empty. A futon in the corner, several chairs and a table of woven raffia. There was a lighted parchment lamp with a fringe and a tattered geometric rug. I sat down in a chair by the table while the woman went over to the primitive sink and drew me a glass of water and handed it to me. As I was starting to drink the boxer sprang onto the table and inclined toward me, shuddered, and plastered my entire jaw with an extravagant lick.
“She is a pretty good judge of character,” the woman said. “For an animal that is still so young.”
“That, or I’m awfully salty.”
That broke her up suddenly, a rilling, uninhibited laugh I’d seen no reason to expect. Her hollow cheeks seemed dark yet glowed with a pearlescent cast. She looked somewhere in her mid-twenties. I noticed a wall hanging behind her, intricate, entirely of beads.
“This is a guess,” I said. “But are you..Native American?”
“You guessed that one. All Injun. Pure squaw.”
I pulled the notebook that I carried instead of a briefcase out of my jacket pocket. The room was getting warmer as the evening settled in. “You must be…Alice Meadows.”
“I wish I was. She went to Hawaii. I told her, you just go. Alice is my cousin. I told her, leave Penelope to me. Penelope is her dog here. That has a crush on you.”
“I hate to start in on you like this, but did Alice Meadows mention anything else to you? Like her lease. No pets, no sublets, pay once a month, annoying details like that? I hate to come on like Simon Legree, but—“ Abruptly my collar itched; I attempted to shrug it loose.
The woman stood up to help me off with my jacket. She hung it carefully over the back of the chair and went back and sat down. “Who is Simon Legree?”
“Another landlord.”
“You work for him?”
“Sometimes it feels like that.” There was a little water in the glass, which I drank carefully to buy time. “Maybe you should tell me your name.”
“We have to be careful when we do that. Our medicine men say, when you give a stranger your name you endow him with the reflection of your soul.” She sat a moment, looking into my eyes. “My true name is Dances-Like-Fire,” she said. “For on the rez. People here call me Linda.”
“Linda Meadows.”
“Why not, if that is what you want it to be.”
I felt stymied. Penelope sat unmoving next to me, her snubbed profile distinct against the waning afternoon.
“You want money,” Linda finally announced.
“Isn’t that the deal? You – or Alice, or somebody – gets to stay here and we get reimbursed in some way.” I really didn’t like the way that came out, and I could see by her frown that Linda didn’t either.
“If you want money,” she said, briskly, “I have a proposal.” She produced a battered wallet and eased a dog-eared card out and leaned over to flip it onto the table. The square-cut bosom of her dark shift lapsed open for a moment; I endeavored not to look. The White Man’s Burden. Penelope jumped off the table and I hoped she wasn’t going to sniff my hard-on.
The card attested to Linda’s racial purity. Certificate Degree of Indian Blood was printed across the top. Linda contained 4/4 degree of Indian blood, it said, and followed up with a registration code and her Social Security number.
“I am a full-blooded Comanche,” Linda said. “We have a trust fund from the profits of the casinos and the hospital on the reservation in Oklahoma and the smoke shops and all the enterprises. Every six months the comptroller sends the check. And then you got the percentage Savage Owl – Charlie – has to send me from Big Cypress. You know that crazy resort? Outside Hollywood, before Miami? Charlie is mostly Seminole, but still he doesn’t get all that much.”
“You’re an heiress?”
“I get a trickle. A tiny pitiful drop or two.”
“Who’s Charlie?”
“He was the husband. The tribal council there gave him the baby. Our sweet little papoose. And why? His uncle is the chief.” Linda looked off into space. “You think I’m a dead-beat, right?”
“Just passing through,” I said. “Not passing judgment.”
“How much do you have to have? I lived in my smelly little Volkswagen before, you know.”
“I didn’t know. Would Penelope go too?” Penelope laid her snout on my knee, and I fondled the gristle behind her lapsed ears. “We ought to be able to work something out.”
She shot me another very ambiguous look from under those glittering hooded eyes. “Three hundred a month?” she said finally. “Maybe they will take me back on at Pizza Hut.” Linda exhaled, slowly. “And I will write Alice. Maybe she will come home sooner or later.”
From a shadowy corner one of the ubiquitous local lizards, the anole, darted toward our table, dodged Penelope’s marauding nose and all but levitated onto the back of Linda’s hand. Very large, prehistoric-looking, it pumped its leathery torso five or six times, then reared back and inflated its slate-colored larynx, which ballooned out until it was almost transparent.
Linda regarded the lizard and blew on it, affectionately, which it seemed to like. “She is named Isabella-Yearns-For-Water,” Linda confided. “She eats the cucarachas. This is my only friend here,” she confessed, pinching up that one-sided smile. “Except for the dog. But Penelope is more, like, you know, my family now. She is a very old spirit.”
6
When I got back to the office that evening I juggled the books a little. If we could manage a five-figure donation to the Free Clinic every year we could carry Linda until her prospects improved. Dad would understand that, and certainly Mother would. Dad could get short with me that winter – his every intuition told him the stock market was in serious trouble. Real estate was losing altitude fast and growth-crazy outfits like Countrywide showed signs of public indigestion after gobbling up backwoods homeowners by the hundreds of thousands lured into adjustable-rate paper. The Federal Reserve was cheering the inevitable train-wreck on.
I brought up Linda’s predicament to Dad toward the end of January, when I stopped by at Snell Isle to catch him up with what was happening with his real estate day to day. “Sure, why not?” he conceded right away, just as I anticipated. “Is there an alms category in your receipts book? The thing is, try to get something every month. Ween her into respectability. The dog sounds like an asset. Keeps an eye on the premises. Maybe we should pay her.”
At this point Dad was obviously feeling seller’s remorse about entrusting to Sunrise Capital Partners our precarious little collection of overprice
d condominiums and ocean-side villas. By then we would have long since doubled or in some cases tripled our original stake if we had gotten out perhaps a year earlier. At current prices, which were still high, we could have sold and come out with something like $25,000,000 on a capital investment not much more than half the size.
“Our problem,” he reiterated to me directly a few days after my visit to Linda, “is the unfortunate fact that most of our choicer properties are locked up in Miami. I’m starting to develop a nasty case of investment spilches. The itch to make some changes, fast.”
Dad was at his desk in his library in the loggia. Through the clerestory window you could glimpse the ocean.
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “What was all that about maybe a little nibble?”
“You’re more than flesh should have to bear sometimes,” Dad said. “A lawyer is bad enough. But a lawyer with a memory…?”
“How about the escape clause? We get to annul the entire arrangement and recover the constituent properties at any time during the first five years if Sunrise doesn’t perform. I’m sure you remember how long they kept stalling us about the October payment, and January is almost over, and zilch. Also, it’s been six months since we’ve seen any payout on our hedge fund participation. ”
“Jesus,” Dad said. “You do sound almost like a lawyer. What are you saying, you think they’re sliding into Chapter Eleven or something ? They might have liquidated our real estate?”
I inclined forward. “If Sunrise Capital Partners had sold any of our stuff they were required by contract to get our approval six weeks beforehand. Which they have not. Done. Could not do, because we’re still the mortgage-holder. We kept the paper. So we’re probably OK.” I let myself back in the antique Barcalounger Dad reserved for visitors.
Dad minced his lips together. “This could get..personal, if you know what I mean. Family shootouts are always the nastiest, like incest without the home-cooked meal. The Bobbsey Twins are all about that goddamned hedge fund every time I run into either of them.” Between us the Bobbsey Twins was code for the brothers-in-law.
“It’s what they’ve got. If it puts together, they’re made.”
“I guess I understand that.”
“Home-cooked meal! Christ, if that isn’t far-fetched! You and your metaphors.”
“That’s what this editor says. I’m going over the galleys for the Keynes book before we jump over the pond next week to cross-check a couple of last-minute references she spotted in the notes. This punk kid they assigned me as an editor at Random House has taken it upon herself to demand verification for everything. After months of quibbling over every Goddamned phrase.” Dad flashed one page, which was spider-webbed with crisscrossing red lines. “Editing software! It’s the worst idea those merchandising chazirs have come up with since the English started promoting Enema Cruises.”
* * *
Later in the week I stopped by for a supper with Carol and Buckley. They lived in Pass-a-Grille, a spur of beachfront that hung down into the Gulf of Mexico below the gigantic turreted pink landmark of a twenties hotel still called the Don Cesar. Their concrete walkup condominium had a balcony wide enough for a dining table; when I showed up, Rick and Wendy were there too.
“Sort of a family reunion,” I said. “Jeez! When do we pass around the pictures of the grandchildren?”
Wendy gave me her sultry, fuck-you look. “We’ll get to that,” she said. She planted her big right hand on Rick’s knee. They were both in cargo pants. “At least we’re working on it. We definitely never saw any indication that you and – what was her name, Janine? – got anywhere near pumpin’ them bambinos out--”
“Her name was Janice,” Carol broke in, and crushed out her cigarette. “Wendy, I think you’re really out-of-bounds, bringing that up—“
“Too much time in Church,” Wendy overrode her. “I heard the rumor she left her ovaries in the collection plate—”
Rick roared. “Jesus, Wendy,” I said. “That’s rough.”
“I’m my father’s daughter.”
“Dad wouldn’t have said that,” Carol said. “You know he wouldn’t have said that.”
There was a very awkward moment. Buckley stood up. “Listen, boys and girls, Carol here has concocted these absolutely mind-boggling clam dip and mushroom hors d’oeuvres, which I am about to rescue from a fiery afterlife and lay before you, pronto.” He edged through the half-open sliding door and into the galley-like kitchen.
“Don’t say a word!” Carol warned her sister. “Not a word!”
“What’s to say?” Wendy arched those untended brows. “He’s fucking perfect!”
The main course came off the outdoor grill, either skinless chicken breasts or bratwursts so packed with fat they threatened to burst into flame every time Buckley turned one over. The dining area was cramped, especially for Enrique, who kept arching his back and pushing out his heavy legs. The extended scar from his wound was visible on his left thigh just below the hem of his shorts. The no-see-ums were after him, and he was continually twitching his high temples and wiping down his arms and calves.
Out at the margin of the Gulf the sun was the exaggerated red of an inverted forest fire and tinted a layered banking of cloud that reached across the horizon. The wharf a few blocks to the south looked overpopulated from our balcony. Fishermen, many in rags, were pulling in mullets and bluefish and filleting them while they wriggled and tossing the guts to the hovering pelicans. Carol produced a tub of chocolate swirl ice cream and pried the top off and handed each of them a spoon.
“Saves dishes,” she announced.
“Good thinking,” Wendy said. “Keeps the germs in the family.”
“I tried to invite the parents,” Carol said. “But Mother said they were going to England early next week and she was worried about finishing up the packing. Her energy level is not outstanding these days. Did you know they were going away, Mikey?”
“Dad said something. They want him to run down some footnotes before they commit to the bound galleys on his Keynes book.” The ice cream got around to me and I levered up a healthy mouthful. “He won’t be gone long. I know he wants to get right back. He’s teaching a seminar, and I know he wants to consolidate and switch around and sell just about everything he can get his hands on before this market hits the fan. Dad’s worried about all that real estate we lent to the hedge fund. Time to liquidate that. The old guy is definitely in a high-speed panic.” I was nervous, sounding like Buckley. Talking through the ice cream, I realized I hadn’t made much sense.
Rick was examining me. “How realistic can it be, to reorganize at this time?” he wanted to know. “The hedge fund have a lot of these properties, an’ we have to use them to provide principal for the investments. I think the counterparties don’t like that, if no more we have the principal. Dangerous! Very difficult to make the unwindings….”
“Dad knows that.” I said. “That said, it still may be necessary to exercise our repurchase option.”
Rick sat up in his chair. Except for his frown he looked mostly stone-faced. Unreadable.
Buckley took some ice cream and glanced at Ricky and handed the tub to me. “You have to realize, Mike, any move your father or anybody else might make at this stage fiddle-fucking with the assets of the fund could throw off everybody’s timing. We don’t want to spook the Canadians, let alone our confreres in Cuba. They are still hot to trot, and it is essential to keep them geared up….”
“Talk to Dad,” I said. “He ought to be back in a little over a week.”
* * *
The following Wednesday it was time to check in with our delinquent renters and push and prod to keep them on the books. Eviction was the pits, for everybody, and most of the time our people would make some attempt to catch up if they were approached with a little finesse.
I got to Linda Meadows’ around three-thirty. She had been on my mind, afflicting my thoughts with an anticipation I hoped was not primarily sexual. She was a po
verty case, obviously busted out, but she was in touch with something I knew I needed to pull me back from too many bad months, recurrent intimations of worthlessness that kept coming over me after Janice bailed out.
The problem was not to be burned out merely jacking up my endorphins. Several times I’d driven out to Fort De Soto and found myself swimming out so far I could not see the cannon blocks of the fortification, then floating back exhausted on the afternoon tide. I rode the cracked, mold-streaked, faded-rose concrete bi-ways of the Pink Streets as fast as I could get my touring bike to go, an hour at a time, and dismounted afterwards streaming sweat, bug-bitten, sinuses aching from early pollens, unrelieved. I was obviously depleted in some existential way.
I’d meant to call Linda first. But she had no listed phone, so I just turned up again. Before I could knock, Penelope let loose her sharp, soulful bark, so Linda had that much warning. She opened the door immediately and conferred on me that one-sided smile, as if she had been expecting me at precisely that moment.
“It’s me again,” I said.
“You took a long time.”
“Can’t harass the tenants. It’s the law.”
“So many laws here,” Linda said. She let her breath out. Penelope had leapt up onto the table and was regarding me appraisingly, eye to eye. I stepped back before she could lick my face.
“Penelope is so crazy about you,” Linda laughed. “And see, look, you leave her in the lurch. Are you always so demanding with your females?” I thought she was on the point of touching my wrist, but I wasn’t sure. We were on dangerous ground. Tenant-landlord relations are covered very specifically in the St. Pete housing code. Things could get messy, especially in the local newspapers, for any property owner suspected of taking out his rent in trade.
“It’s really so good you came today,” Linda said. She reached into the pocket of her shift and pulled up a roll of bills. “Three hundred dollars. Count it, go ahead. A lot of wampum. Twenties mostly. Some tens.”