“Only because you let me. This would not have been the first place I looked.”
“Let’s sit outside,” he said.
We settled in the al fresco seating arrangement on the sidewalk. It was a lot like sitting outside on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, except the metal tables and chairs were rusted, the sidewalk was cracked, and there was no one to serve us. There was a restaurant at the end of the street called Perricones, but in place of quaint little tobacco shops and hotels, we had a beauty parlor—closed for the evening—and a boarded-up bar across the street.
“Did you get any sleep?” he asked, folding the newspaper he’d been reading.
“I slept all day,” I said. “I really like sleeping. What about you? How did you spend your day?”
“Looking for Ira. Trying to find Patty. I didn’t find either one. All in all,” he sighed, “not a successful day.” I was glad to see a hint of irony in his smile, but I wasn’t sure how to respond. We had said nothing about the morning’s events when we’d parted, preferring, at least in my case, to defer until I’d had a chance to sleep and let things seep in. So it was all still there, everything Damon had laid on us, hanging in the air, as pervasive and hard to ignore as the sweet and heavy scent of the dryer sheets that kept wafting out of the laundromat. I decided to defer a little longer.
“When do you suppose someone at Air Sentinel is going to find out where their airplane is?”
“They might know. But it’s better all the way around if no one else does for now. At least not until Damon gets done whatever it is he’s doing.”
“And you think what he’s doing is hunting down Ottavio?”
“Without a doubt. And I’m pretty well convinced at this point that Jimmy is his snitch. I just don’t know what he could tell Damon that would be useful to him.”
“Jack, you didn’t tell Damon about the logbook, did you?”
“Name, rank, and serial number was all he got from me. Why?”
“I was just wondering how he would have known about it. He knew about the book but not the ring. I think that means something.”
“Maybe.” From the sound of it, he didn’t much care to think about it. A quiet breeze riffled the corners of the newspaper, and we lapsed into a silence that went on for a while. The predominant sound was that of the dryer drum rumbling around.
“If you live in South Beach, Jack, why do you come all the way over here to do your laundry?”
“It’s not that far. It’s just over the bridge. Besides, I like this neighborhood.” He nodded to the boarded-up storefront across the street. “When that bar was open, I could throw the laundry in and sip a cold beer while I waited. They used to know me over there a little too well. I think they went out of business when I stopped drinking.” He laughed, but with more bitterness than humor.
“Those things Damon said to you… about you this morning, the way he did it… He’s a piece of shit.”
“He is that. He’s also right.” He looked up at me, maybe trying, as Damon had, to gauge my reaction, and the thought flashed that I was glad it mattered to him. “That’s the problem. Everyone has always been right about me. My ex-wife. People at work. You noticed, didn’t you, that I don’t have many friends left there. Patty Spain is one of the few who still takes my calls, and she’s not even with the Bureau.”
“Did something happen?”
“Nothing happened. It was all the little things that accumulate over time when you’re a drunk. It’s the way they pile up, eventually, into this big stinking heap that people can’t ignore anymore.” He shook his head. “I let everyone down. My wife. My son. My bosses… many bosses who kept giving me chances. Sooner or later, I let them all down.” He was holding his reading glasses in his hand, opening one temple, then the other, closing one, and then the other.
“You’re sober now.”
“Two years. I spent a lot longer than that drinking. I have many amends to make. Some I never can.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged, and kept flipping those temples up and down. I thought if he did that enough, he was going to loosen the screws and the glasses would fall apart in his hands.
“Where is your wife?”
“She took my son a few years back and moved up to your neck of the woods. He’s going to college at Dartmouth.” He glanced over at me, I thought for a response or affirmation of some sort.
“That’s a good school,” I said, trying to give him what he needed.
He nodded, seemed satisfied, and dropped his glasses into the front pocket of his cotton shirt. Then he stretched his legs out under the wrought iron table, shooed a tiny winged visitor away from his face, and stared up with tired eyes into the trees overhead. He looked as if he might not ever get up. “Do you do that?” he asked, after a while.
“Do what?”
“Get used to certain places and keep going back to them?”
I’d tossed my keys on the table when I’d arrived. It was a mesh surface, and the longest key, the key from my rental car, had lodged itself in one of the openings. I set about dislodging it as I thought about that question. “The thing about the airline business is you’re either unpacking from one move or packing for the next. There’s enough time in between to find a dentist and dry cleaners. Then it’s time to go again. There’s no time to get attached to a place.”
“Or to people, huh?”
“That, too.” The key came loose with a minor tug.
“Sometimes I think I should leave Miami,” he said. “But I never do. No matter where I go, I always end up back here.”
“What keeps you here?”
He lowered his gaze until he was staring across the street at the bar that had gone bust. “I like living in a place where I know I can always find my way home. It’s useful to know the geography when you’re a drunk.”
I thought about all the places my airline career had taken me—airports and offices, ticket counters and freight houses, cities large and small. I’d lived in apartments, hotels, studios, condos, duplexes, and houses all over the country, and never once had felt that I had found my home. “There’s a lot to be said for feeling at home,” I said, “no matter who you are. Or how you define yourself.”
He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. It sounded almost as if it hurt him to draw breath, hurt somewhere deep down in his lungs. I had to keep myself from reaching out and touching his face and trying to make him stop hurting.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For letting you hear those things about me from that little prick. I should have told you.”
He was again staring up into the leaves, which were becoming less and less distinct as the evening wore on. I looked where he was looking, and wondered if we were seeing the same thing. I was pretty sure that even if we were, we were seeing it from different angles. “That would have been easier on both of us,” I said.
“He’s right about the trust thing.”
“No. I trusted you immediately, Jack, and not just because you saved me from Bull and my own stupidity. I believe you know what you’re doing, and I don’t believe you’ll let me down.”
“One of the things I thought about today, all day, was about what could have happened to you in that hangar. All the different things that could have happened.”
“I don’t recall you forcing me to go in there with you. And you offered me a gun. I should have taken it. I should have listened to you. I will next time.”
“You should go home, Alex.”
“Is that what you want?”
He stared down into his lap and I tried so hard to see into his eyes, but it was too dark.
“You should go home and get moved and start your life and your job.”
“Right now, this minute, Jack, I couldn’t care less about that job. I’m asking you if you want me to leave. If my being here makes it harder for you in any way, personally, professionally, or otherwise, I’ll go. But if you’re saying
I should leave because you think that’s what’s best for me, then I respectfully ask that you mind your own business.”
His head was resting on the back of his chair. He turned it so he could see me, but didn’t speak.
“I will not let that asshole Hollander step over John McTavish’s body to get a promotion.” My voice felt clear and strong and I knew it was because I was speaking the truth—my truth—saying what I wanted to say. “I hate what he did to you this morning, and I’m not wild about the way he treated me. If leaving here makes Damon’s life easier, that’s reason enough for me to stay. Beyond that, I want to finish the job I came down here to do. So sit up and look at me and tell me if you are asking me to leave.”
He sat up slowly, and turned in his chair. He rested his arms in front of him on the table and seemed to sit stiffly. When all he did was stare at me, I figured he was searching for the words to tell me that I was making his life a mess and I should go home. Now, if not sooner. He didn’t seem to want to look at me, so I braced for rejection and started thinking about how to tell Mae that I’d had to give up. She would be nice and maybe take my hand and—
“Stay.”
“What?”
He was looking at me now, and giving me that crooked, endearing grin he’d used on Vanessa. I liked it better when he aimed it at me. “If you want to stay, I like having you here.”
“Good.” And it was good. I felt good. I felt the way I do after I’ve run six miles. Worn out, but exhilarated. “Now, tell me what is going on between you and Jimmy. I want to know everything.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
While Jack had moved his load of darks to the dryer, I had run down to the restaurant for a couple of sandwiches. It turned out the top floor of Perricones was a restaurant, but the bottom floor was a deli, and an excellent one. We both felt better for having a little protein in our systems—hot pastrami on rye with sauerkraut for him, and turkey on wheat with lettuce, tomato, and mustard for me. We were finished eating and I was still waiting to hear about Jimmy. By the time the streetlights came on, I wasn’t sure I ever would.
A car rolled slowly by, the first in almost an hour. The driver found a place to park down the block on the street. A couple disembarked and headed into the restaurant. After they’d passed, Jack leaned over in his chair and kicked at a few stray pebbles on the sidewalk. “Did I tell you I served in Vietnam?”
I looked over at him. There seemed to be no end to the surprises he could come up with, and always in the most casual way. “No, Jack, you never mentioned that. What did you do in Vietnam?”
“I was a grunt. I got drafted and me and my low lottery number humped around the jungle like everyone else.”
It never would have occurred to me that he had been a soldier, although it made perfect sense. He was the right age for it. But I was from a generation that didn’t know war, at least not the low-tech version with ground troops, and without Scud missiles and CNN. I didn’t know any soldiers. I never assumed anyone I ever met had been one.
“I thought… didn’t you go to college?”
“I went after I came home. Uncle Sam paid for it, then I went to work for the Bureau. Everything I am I owe to the U.S. government.” His laugh was bitter and I couldn’t tell if the scorn was meant for his former employer or himself.
“How old were you?”
“I’d just turned twenty when I got there.”
He sat back in his chair, turned his face to the dark sky, and went quiet again. I pulled my chair closer to the table. I sensed that everything he was about to say was something I wanted to hear.
“Thirty years ago.” He shook his head. “Over thirty years. I can’t believe it’s been that long.”
“Do you think about it much?”
“There are things that take me back there. The sound of a helicopter. Rotor blades always do it. Living down here, it can be the way the air feels when it has a certain weight to it. These fires out in the Everglades remind me a little of what it was like there.”
“The smell?”
“Not the smell. The way the air presses against you. Vietnam had its own smell. I got it on me the first day I landed, and in some ways, it’s never left. It’s still so clear to me. You almost can’t even describe it. Sweat. Jet fuel. Cordite. You always smelled cordite, no matter where you were.”
“Cordite is—”
“It’s gunpowder. Dust… fish… rain… chemicals. Bombs leave a chemical smell in the air. You mix it all up together with the blood and the corpses. And then it gets hot.”
“I imagine that’s a smell that would stay with you.”
“You see things in a war… in battle… things you never expect to see and can’t forget. I carried wounded and dying men out of the bush to helicopters to be evacuated and I still see their faces. It does something to you to know that the ones who died, yours was the last face they saw.”
He was looking at the sky and he was talking to me, but he was remembering for himself. I could see in his face that there was a lot he was seeing he could not, maybe would not describe. If he had tried, I wouldn’t have understood. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to carry around, like cards in your wallet, the images of men who had died in your arms.
“Jimmy and I served in Vietnam together.”
He said it using that same dry, matter-of-fact tone and I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “You and Jimmy knew each other in Vietnam?”
“We met there. He was from Everglades City and I was from Miami. We were in the same unit and we hooked up. Almost from day one.”
I sat up straight and leaned across the table. The mesh surface hurt my elbows. “The Jimmy Zacharias who runs the salvage yard, you’ve known him for thirty years?”
“Off and on.”
I drifted back again in my seat. I wasn’t sure what to make of this news. It changed the way I thought about Jimmy, even though I’d never met him. And it changed what I thought about Jack because it changed what I knew about him. I was getting used to that phenomenon. “What was he like back then?”
“He loved being a soldier. He grew up out in the Everglades so he was at home in the jungle. He used to say he could smell the NVA. He always knew when they were around. He never got surprised and he saved my ass more than once. It was like he had a sixth sense for it. Jimmy was a good soldier.”
“This is the same man you suspect of killing John?”
He drew in a deep breath that seemed to take a long time to come out. “You learn things about the people you serve with,” he said. “A lot about yourself, too. Some things you’d rather not know. What I learned about Jimmy in Vietnam was how much he liked to kill. What I learned from watching him was how cheap human life can become under the right circumstances.” He thought about that. “The wrong circumstances.”
He sat up straighter and shifted his weight. The chair he’d been sitting in for hours seemed uncomfortable to him now. “I watched Jimmy shoot an old man in a rice paddy once from long range. This was someone’s father or someone’s husband or grandfather who took a bullet in the back of the head from a man he never saw for reasons that had nothing to do with him. His head exploded. He went”—he made a weak gesture with his hand—“he went right over, face forward in the mud. Jimmy killed that man and never looked back.”
“Why?”
“He was lining up the sights on his rifle.”
He’d been finding points in the distance to focus on as he’d talked, but now he was looking at me, hard. Waiting, I figured, for a reaction. I wasn’t sure what to say. What he had described struck me as the act of a man who at best had lost his way, and at worst was a psychopath. But I didn’t feel I had the right to judge, and I was very aware that whatever Jimmy had done, Jack had been there, too. “This old man, I assume he was a civilian?”
“Jimmy’s philosophy was there were no civilians. You couldn’t tell NVA from friendlies. You couldn’t tell the children from the booby traps they sometimes carried. He kille
d everything and everyone that got in his way.”
A cricket started chirping and I became aware of the deep silence we’d been sitting in. The dryer had stopped spinning. Jack was still watching me.
“When you’re in a war,” he said, “when you’re actually in it and not thinking about it or wondering about it or training for it, you’re in it up to your ass and you have to stay in it, it’s like you’ve gone to a different planet. You’re breathing different air than those people back in the civilized world. The rules are different, but you don’t know that because everyone else around you is acting the same way. All your reference points shift and you can’t get any perspective on it until you get back to the world. You can’t wait to get back to the world, but once you’re back, you start to realize what’s happened to you. You begin to understand how completely and profoundly you are not the same person you were. And you never will be.”
The light from the street lamp high overhead showed every line in his face, tiny threads that held him together and kept him from blowing apart. He looked as if he was in pain, and had been for a long time. “I don’t know if Jimmy went over there that way, or if his time there made him that way. All I know is when I met him, I liked him.”
He put his hands on his knees and started to get up. He paused for a beat, and then he did stand. I reached for his hand and held it because I wanted to touch him, and because I didn’t want him to walk away. But I didn’t know what to say. I could feel the barrier that stood between us, the one made up of all those things he had seen, and all the things I never would. It was an insurmountable barrier for me. Impossible for me to ever get to the other side. But Jimmy was on the other side with him. Impossible for him not to be.
He pulled his hand away, leaned down, and kissed the top of my head. Then he did walk away.
I followed him and watched him from the doorway of the Coin Op as he pulled the clothes out of the dryer and piled them on a folding table. His back was to me as I approached him. I laid my hand between his shoulder blades and felt how warm his skin was through his shirt. And I felt him responding. I moved my hand up, following the line of his backbone, reached over the collar of his shirt and touched the skin on his neck. It was lined and leathery and the muscles underneath were stiff and tight. He straightened and closed his eyes, leaning into the rhythm of my hand as I wove my fingers into his hair, across the curves and contours of his head. When he turned around, I held his face in my hands and ran my thumbs gently along the deepest lines in his face, the ones that made him look the saddest. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted him to kiss me. He put his hands around my waist and lifted me onto the table, onto the clothes still warm from the dryer. I wrapped my legs around him, pulled him to me close enough to feel the glasses in his front pocket between us. Our lips brushed. He opened his mouth and I tasted him. He tasted like Florida to me—sunny and tart, not sweet—and he smelled like clean clothes. I wrapped my arms around him and it felt so right to be holding him against my body, feeling his breath on my neck.
The Alex Shanahan Series Page 60