Mangrove Squeeze

by SKLA

  But now it was the middle of a working day and he was wandering. He wandered past Hemingway House, tour buses lined up along its slapdash brick wall; past Southernmost Point with its Indians selling conch shells; up to the gay end of Duval Street, past the elegant and well-run and fully booked guest houses such as his would never be.

  He wandered, and he tried to figure out just why he was doing it. Was he being chivalrous or pigheaded? Maybe, at the end of this sleeplessness and disruption, it would turn out, pure and simple, that Suki had stood him up. Changed her mind. Got a better offer. Happened to some poor lonely bastard every day.

  But he kept going. Past sunglass shops and ice cream stores, places that sold pornography and bathing suits. Tourists spun postcard racks in front of him, or sat on patios in silly hats, sipping cappuccino.

  Then he saw something that didn't quite register until after he'd strolled past it: a shop that wasn't open.

  It was a busy day in the midst of tourist season, pale visitors were milling and buying, and this one store was closed up tight and dark. Aaron backed up to look at it more closely. In its dim window were racks and racks of T-shirts. Some had spangles, some had pictures, some had slogans. Some racks said special today and some said decals free. On the big glass pane of the front door of the store, a hand-scrawled cardboard sign had been crookedly taped up. It said: close due to deth.

  The message was only four words long, but Aaron read it several times, as if it held a nagging and laconic riddle. Suki was involved with Lazslo, and Lazslo ran the T-shirt shops. The T-shirt shop was closed and Suki had not been heard from and somebody had died. He walked on, turning the riddle this way and that, looking for the strand of logic that would make it all come clear. He walked past smoothie stands and bars, galleries and restaurants. Yellow sun bounced off metal roofs and a line of shadow ran down the middle of the street.

  On the next block there was another T-shirt store. It too was closed and dim. It too had a cardboard sign in the window of the recessed front door. This one said: death in femily—not today.

  But as Aaron was walking past, the door swung open and a young man stepped out, turning around to lock the place behind him. Aaron studied him a moment He wasn't especially tall, but his arms were huge and his back muscles quaked with even the smallest movements. He wore no shirt just thick suspenders crisscrossed on his massive shoulders. His hair was long and tangled; at the nape of his neck it merged indistinctly with the soft fur that grew in patches down to his waist.

  His back looked unfriendly, show-offish, menacing. Aaron struggled against a reluctance born partly of shyness and partly of an idiotic jealousy, and approached him as the second lock was clicking shut.

  He said, "Excuse me. By any chance, is your name Lazslo?"

  The fellow spun toward him. His eyes were hard and narrow. For an instant they flashed suspicious or maybe spooked. He said a simple no and began to walk away.

  Aaron followed, gesturing backward toward the sign. "Who died?"

  The muscular man was breaking into the heavy flow of walking traffic on Duval. Grudgingly, a little off the beat, with a slightly guttural h and langorous vowels, he said, "Soon everyone will hear."

  They were moving down the busy sidewalk now, Aaron dodging tourists and racks of souvenirs as he tried to keep pace with the other man's bounding steps. "Hear what?" he said. "This is what I'm asking."

  The man with the suspenders kept rolling. Couples parted to let him pass between them. Without looking at Aaron, he said, "Is not your business. Leaf me alone."

  "But—"

  "I tell you go away."

  Aaron didn't go away. He wanted to know and he made a mistake. He put his hand on the young man's shoulder, said, "Look, all I'm asking—"

  The other man was tired of the questions and it made him angry that this annoying stranger had touched him. With the coiled economy of the practiced fighter, he pivoted quickly, almost nonchalantly, and grabbed two handfuls of Aaron's shirt.

  Aaron just barely had time to be befuddled. He hadn't been in a fight since junior high school; he'd had neither strength nor conviction for it even then; fighting, he felt, was for kids whose fathers hadn't taught them reason. But now, by reflex, he defensively reached out and held the other man's arms. The arms were thick as fence posts and fibrous as snakes and they could not be held.

  The man looked at Aaron with a calm, impersonal malice, gave a quick sharp pull and then a shove.

  Aaron's head whipped forward as his torso rocked back, and he stumbled for a step or two until a parking meter caught him square between the shoulder blades. The impact knocked some air out of his lungs, sent arrows of hot pain up to his brain stem and down to his kidneys.

  Nauseating starbursts appeared at the edges of his vision, and by the time his eyes had cleared, a sparse ring of passersby had gathered. They were staring at him. Not in sympathy but with embarrassed fascination for the loser. He'd become a part of their vacations, something they'd remember; a victim of the kind of brief and pointless sidewalk brawl that Duval Street was famous for.

  As for the young man with the suspenders and the giant arms, he was half a block away, walking neither faster nor slower than he'd walked before. Aaron did not go after him.

  Chapter 19

  He went back home instead, and the first thing he saw as he walked into the office of the Mangrove Arms was a crippled blind chihuahua curled up on the front desk, its scaly black nose resting against the cool metal of the service bell. The dog just barely lifted up its hoary head as Aaron entered. Its white eyes panned futilely as its twitching nostrils tested the air to find the new arrival.

  Sam Katz was sitting in a chair behind the desk. His new friend Bert was sitting next to him, wearing a shirt of emerald green with a navy chalk stripe and a collar whose wings came halfway down his chest. The two old men were in the middle of a game of gin. Each had a stack of quarters at his elbow, and a ragged pile of cards was spilling over between them. Sam said, "Ah, here he is."

  Bert stood up, gnarly hand extended. He said, "I come to visit the old man."

  Aaron reached across the counter to shake his hand; the motion stretched the lingering pain down from the valley between his shoulder blades. Distractedly, he said, "Great. That's great."

  Sam said, "You went out, I didn't know you went."

  It was not an accusation, not exactly, but Aaron, good son, felt guilty nonetheless. "Had a couple things to do," he said. Absently, he petted the chihuahua. With every stroke, hairs the length of eyelashes fluttered from its scalp.

  His father looked at him. Sam Katz forgot a lot of things, and a lot of other things passed him by entirely. But he knew his son. He said, "Aaron, something wrong?"

  Aaron, a pathetic liar, said, "No, Pop. No."

  There was a pause. The dog had exhausted itself, it wheezed and lay down flat again. Then Bert said, "There was a call for you. A guy Evans, Edwards, something like that."

  "We wrote it down," said Sam. "Better we should write it down. Where'd I put the paper?"

  He patted pockets till he found it, handed it to Aaron. Aaron looked at it then headed for the door behind the desk.

  The old men went back to their game of gin.

  Sam fiddled with his hearing aid, said, "Wait a second. Been too long, now I can't remember what's been played."

  His friend said, "Tough titty, we're playin' cards heah."

  "But I'll throw what you picked up already," Sam complained.

  "Then I guess I'm gonna win," said Bert.

  "It isn't fair," said Sam.

  "How sweet it is," said Bert, and he reached out to pet his dog for luck.

  "No way," said Suki. "Forget about it."

  It was late afternoon. Inside the hot dog the light was getting slanty and yellow, motes of dust gleamed golden against the dull chrome of the counters. Pineapple was moving with his bedroll toward the ripped screen door. "We sleep outside a lot of the time," he said. "Really. Don't we, Fred?"


  "Yeah," said Fred, halfheartedly. In October they did, or April. But this was January. Sunsets were early and the ground was cold by midnight. Sometimes a low silver mist, just barely visible, curled up from the salt puddles in the moonlight. Noses ran. Fred's knees were still stiff from the night before.

  Pineapple said, "You'll have more room. A little privacy."

  "I don't need more room," said Suki, though, looking around the wiener she had to admit it would be very cramped for three. A face next to the propane fridge. A backside folded to fit under the sink. The leaning sack of trash, at least, would have to go. "I can sleep up on the counter."

  "You roll over," said Fred, "it's the 'kraut on one side and a long drop on the other."

  "It's all settled," said Pineapple, though the truth was that neither he nor Fred was moving toward the screen door all that fast.

  "Look," Suki said. "Why not wait till nighttime to decide? See how cold it gets."

  Fred looked hopefully at Piney. Piney just tugged lightly at his scraggly beard.

  Suki took advantage of their hesitation. "Good," she said. "And in the meantime, could I ask someone to do me a big favor?"

  "Name it," Piney said.

  Her mouth began to open but then she seemed to think again. "No," she said. "Forget it. It isn't fair to ask."

  "What?" said Piney.

  Suki had been standing. She plopped down now on the edge of the dinette chair, leaned an elbow on her knee. She said. "What if they have someone watching my apartment? To see if I come home."

  Piney said, "Why would they expect you home? You're supposed to be ... ya know ..."

  Fred said, "Even Lazslo thought you were ... ya know—"

  "Even so—" said Suki.

  "What's the favor?" Piney asked.

  Suki breathed deep through her battered throat. "I would dearly love," she said, "some clean clothes and a toothbrush and a lipstick."

  Aaron, alone in his room, was dazed when he got off the phone with Donald Egan.

  There was too much he didn't understand, too much he had to swallow all at once. Lazslo Kalynin had been murdered. Egan had learned of it from a contact in the coroner's office. The news reminded the publisher that Suki had been leaning on him to do an investigative story about the T-shirt shops and the shadowy foreigners who ran them. Organized crime, she'd suggested. Russian Mafia. Crazy stuff. Egan had pooh-poohed it, called it paranoid and xenophobic. Now Lazslo was dead and Suki was AWOL. Probably there was no connection, no connection whatsoever. But Egan thought that since Aaron seemed to be a friend, seemed to be concerned, he should be aware at least.

  So now he was aware, and felt the burden of awareness.

  He put the phone down and paced. Pacing, he felt the ache between his shoulder blades travel up and down his spine. He paced to his bed and sat a moment. The bed ejected him and he paced some more. Unaware of choosing a direction, he paced through the door of his room and down the hallway to the kitchen, and through the kitchen to the office.

  He found himself leaning against the front desk counter, where the ancient chihuahua was still reclining with its nose against the bell. The old men were still playing gin.

  Bert's stack of quarters had grown, Sam's had dwindled. Sam threw a picture card and Bert quickly scooped it up.

  "Shit!" said Sam. He glanced at Aaron. "He playing jacks, or clubs?"

  Then he looked at his son more closely. There was a tightness around his mouth and a slight twitch beneath the skin at the corner of his right eye. "Aaron, something's wrong," he said. "What is it? Tell me."

  Aaron slumped, put more weight onto his elbow. He wasn't quite sure how he'd gotten to the office and he didn't see the point of sharing his worries with the two old men. Talking things over with his father, though—it was a habit of long standing, and old habits dug troughs that survived the deaths of many brain cells; they didn't change just because time juggled the balances of strength and comprehension and stature in the world. Aaron opened his mouth. What came out was a helpless exhalation somewhere between a sigh and a snort. He tried again, said, "It's nothing. It's too complicated."

  "Nothing and too complicated," said Sam. "That's two different things."

  "Complicated?" said Bert. "Hey, the whole idea of bein' here is that this is supposed to be a simple town."

  "That's what I thought," Aaron said. "Till now."

  "Till what?" said Sam.

  Aaron sucked a deep breath in, blew it through his teeth. "Till I tried to have a bowl of pasta with a woman, and a guy I decided I was jealous of got killed, and the woman disappeared, and everybody started whispering about a Russian Mafia."

  Bert shrank down just a little at the final word, raised his cards a few inches higher. Sam didn't notice. He dropped his own hand; he'd forgotten he'd been playing gin. He said, "Mafia? Whaddya know. Bert was Mafia."

  His friend said nothing, just cinched together his silver brows and shot a look at Sam.

  Sam said, "What? You told me yourself. I'm not supposed to say?"

  To no one in particular, Bert said, "Everything else, the man forgets. This he has to remember."

  "Who could forget a thing like that?" said Sam.

  "Okay, okay," said Bert. "But it's not the kinda thing ya hang a sign."

  Aaron stood there. He squeezed the counter, tested its solidity. He looked through the window at the hibiscus hedge, the familiar rustling palms. The veneers of his universe were coming unglued, he needed some assurance that the planet he inhabited at that moment was still the same one that he'd lived on all his life. At last he said, "Bert—you're a mafioso?"

  "Used to be," admitted Bert. He looked down but could not quite squelch a piece of smile at one end of his mouth. "They called me Bert the Shirt. Knew how ta dress, ya know? But I been outa that game a long time now."

  Aaron tried his best to look worldly and unshockable. His father playing gin with a gangster. Soviet desperadoes getting their throats cut half a dozen blocks away. Okay, no problem. Casually he said, "Know anything about the Russians?"

  Bert reached out to pet his dog, short pale hairs rained down from its knobby head. "Not really. I was already out when they were comin' in. But ya think about it, how different could it be?"

  "I have no idea," said Aaron.

  "Customs," said Bert. "Cultures. I'm sure there's differences. But the basics are the basics. Gotta be. Loyalty. Secrecy. Revenge."

  Sam said, "Revenge?"

  "Can't hold the thing together wit'out revenge. Pretty basic, that."

  Aaron nodded, but then his attention was diverted by his father, who was squinting upward toward the ceiling, pulling lightly on his translucent tufts of Einstein hair. "Shit," he said at last. "My Russian's going too."

  "What, Pop?"

  "I was trying to remember the Russian word for mafia."

  Aaron said, "I think the Russian word for mafia is mafiya."

  Bert lifted half an eyebrow, reached out to pet his dog. "See dat?" he said. "Same word and everything. How different could they be?"

  Chapter 20

  The worst crimes that Pineapple had ever committed were vagrancy, loitering, and, back before he'd sworn off alcohol, the occasional bout of public drunkenness. He never stole. In this he differed from Fred, who was not above slipping a couple of Slim-Jims into his pocket if the prong that held the packages was concealed by the lip of the convenience-store counter, or glomming some cigarettes if, by luck, the wire rack was left briefly unattended. Piney didn't do that. He had a superstitious dread of doing wrong and getting caught; a dread that in more solid citizens was recognized as virtue.

  Still, he knew very well what it was to feel like a criminal. He understood the vague shame that descended when a storekeeper, his hard stare righteous and rude, dogged him as he made his way up and down the aisles. He knew the fugitive edginess that resulted from a cop car going by, the passenger-side cop giving him a long smirking glance as he sat there on the curb. The feeling was like confronting a blank dem
erit sheet that hinted nonetheless at grievous faults; a floating guilt waiting only for some act to be attached to.

  He felt those things now, as he leaned his rusted bicycle with its corroded metal basket against the picket fence in front of Suki's house.

  It was dusk. The street lamps were just coming on. They buzzed slightly and their salmon-colored light was brittle and metallic against the plush blue of the fading sky. Daytime flowers were closing up, their edges crinkly, like eyelids at the cusp of sleep. A few people were about, doing the things that people who lived in houses did. A woman on skates trailed a pair of cocker spaniels on a leash. Another woman carried a bag of groceries, a bouquet of lettuces poking out the top. Half a block away, a man parked his car and then emerged, his posture saying he had every right to be there.

  Feeling like an intruder and a thief, Pineapple unlatched the gate that gave onto the walkway that led to Suki's porch. On either side of the wooden stairs, shrubbery beds were planted with crotons and jasmine; their dense foliage swallowed up the light, and partly masked Piney as he climbed the steps. Still, he felt like eyes were on his back as he made his way along the porch to the apartment on the ground floor left. He could not help looking over his shoulder as he skulked along, and the furtive gesture only made him feel more furtive.

  As Suki had described, her door was flanked by rows of flower pots—pansies, basil, blue daze. Bending quickly, ducking his head below the level of the shrubs, Piney lifted the third pot on the right. Beneath it were a few crumbles of soft dirt and a house key. The key gleamed slightly and Pineapple found it terrifying. He hated keys—the guilty summaries of all things owned and guarded. He was here at Suki's request; he was doing her a favor. Still, to seize somebody else's key and open up a door to someone's home—the enormity of it made his mouth go dry.

  His hand trembled as he fitted the key to the lock. It seemed to him that the click of the bolt could be heard all over the neighborhood. He opened the door no wider than he had to, and as soon as he had squeezed through he shut it firmly behind him. He was standing in her living room.