by SKLA
Bewildered but not yet afraid, she went through the doorway behind the desk, which led on toward the kitchen. In the sitting room that no one ever seemed to use were the remnants of a not quite finished meal. There was something disturbing, something pending and glum about the abandoned dinner. Low pools of wine sat in the bottoms of two glasses; sauce streaked plates like brush strokes. Knives and forks were arrayed in gesturing positions, as if the hands that had put them down had planned on coming back, and were prevented.
The rumpled settee spoke of sudden absence, of weightless abduction. Beyond the curtained window it was still dark, and the stubbornly lingering night called up the primitive terror that there would come a time when the mechanisms of the world would stall, and the sun would fail to rise.
Spooked now, the woman who did the breakfast went into the kitchen, put the lights on as bright as they would go, and tried to beat down her unease with work. When she filled the coffee urn with water, the sound was mournful and hollow, like a splash from deep down at the bottom of a well.
In the mint green tiled house on Key Haven, Bert the Shirt also woke well ahead of dawn. Propped on pillows, he listened to the cooing of doves, the more distant squawk of seagulls. He wanted to get up and make his oatmeal. That was his routine, and routine was vastly important to him; but he was afraid he'd wake his housemate.
He needn't have worried. Sam, lying in a narrow bed on the other side of a thin wall, had been awake for quite a while, or at least he thought he had. Sleeping and waking—for him the states grew ever less distinct. Sleep gained in truth as waking lost the arrogance of certainty. Dreams, three-D and portentous, sported a logic no less satisfactory than that of what, by mere consensus, was called the real. Categories dissolved; things floated free of their names, and a kind of geriatric Buddhism became ever more unquestioned and serene.
At length it was the sound of the dog's paws clicking on the tiled floor that made the two old men confess they were awake.
They got up, put on their baggy bathrobes, and had their cereal. Breakfast eaten, they waged slow and labored campaigns in their respective bathrooms. By the time they were ready to venture out to walk the dog, the clouds had burned away and the sun had topped the trees.
Outside, the streets were bright and vacant. Bert carried a thin pink leash but he didn't put it on; the old chihuahua wasn't going anywhere. It ticked along stiffly, very near its master's shuffling shoes, stopping now and then to lift a leg just slightly. White eyes squinting, the dog toiled to pass urine; mere drops, slow and pendant as the outfall from a runny nose, formed one by one at the tip of its wizened pecker, then broke and dribbled down a blade of grass.
Bert shook his head. "Fuckin' age," he said. "Dog used to be quite the little stud."
Dubious, Sam said nothing.
"Jaunty," Bert went on. "Confident. Did he know he weighed t'ree pounds? Did it stop 'im that his wang was smaller than a cocktail frank? Bullshit. He humped Rottweilers, this guy. Chased away Dobermans. In his heart he was Rin Tin fuckin' Tin."
Don Giovanni knew when he was being talked about. Slowly, creakily, he raised his head. His hoary whiskers drooped in their dry and scaly follicles, his smeared and futile eyes panned through glare and shadow.
They strolled. At the end of their block, they took a low bridge that crossed over the canal. In the thick green water, bits of weed floated dreamily on sluggish current.
On the opposite side, Sam looked down the street and saw a snazzy blue car in the driveway of the dull gray house where the unfriendly Russian lived. The house and the car just didn't match, and Sam fiddled with his hearing aid. "Our neighbor," he said. "You think he'd drive a car like that?"
Bert sized up the Camaro. Tinted windows, extra chrome, tire skirts. The only excuse for having a car like that was youth. "Son, maybe."
Sam pushed out his lips. "Or maybe somebody who works for him."
"Works for him, like cleans, like gardens?"
"Works for him like works for him," said Sam. "Who knows? Maybe, like, a criminal guy, he has to report to headquarters."
"Headquarters," said Bert, and gave an indulgent little smile. Sam tended to get carried away. Also, people who lived together came to mimic one another, and Bert just barely noticed that Sam was beginning to talk Brooklyn. "You don't think Markov's place is headquarters?"
Sam tugged his Einstein hair. "How should I know? You're the one says don't trust how it looks."
Don Giovanni started sniffing the ground and moving in a tiny circle, like he was dancing on a beach ball. "I did say that," conceded Bert.
Heightening sun beat down. The dog hunkered into a hopeful, straining squat, tail lifted, sides pumping like a bellows. Sam said, "I think we gotta try again to get to know our neighbor."
The dog squeezed. Its skin sucked in around its ribs like leather on a drying carcass. It crouched down lower, nearly scraping its chapped asshole on the pavement. Nothing happened. Bert said, "We just go barging in his house? I don't see it, Sam."
The two men stood over the clogged chihuahua like doting uncles above a newborn. The dog lifted up its blind eyes toward them. Looking for help? Sympathy? A miracle? Sam said, "An excuse. An excuse is what we need."
The dog made one last push, then gave up, embarrassed and exhausted. Disingenuously, it pretended to kick some dirt on its nonexistent leavings. It panted. Moved to pity, Bert bent low and swept the little creature into his hands.
Sam said, "Dog looks very, very thirsty."
"No he don't," said Bert. "Just tired, disappointed."
Sam glanced off toward the dull gray house with the snazzy blue Camaro in the driveway. "Thirsty is what I'm saying. I'm saying he needs some water right away."
Chapter 41
At the Mangrove Arms, daylight quelled the ancient fear of a night that stuck forever in the groove, but did nothing to dispel the uneasy riddles of the gently roughed-up office, the mute puddles of unfinished wine.
The woman who did the breakfast had put hot muffins on a table near the pool, had rolled out the urn of coffee and the pitchers of juice. Now she was back in the kitchen, cleaning up—and cleaning up more slowly than she needed to, because a voice was telling her she shouldn't leave. Something wasn't right. Aaron was always up by now, making lists, looking for a hammer, losing his coffee in odd places as he bustled around.
His bustling was important, thought the breakfast woman; it somehow neutralized the sort of ghosts that lived in old hotels, that took the form of molds and mildews and creaking doors but whose true substance was failure and sorrow and heartbreaks past remedy. Aaron's bustling subdued those ghosts, shamed them into silence. Without his activity, they clamored, hummed, and the woman who did the breakfast didn't like the sound at all.
So she stood at the sink and made bustling noises of her own, washing mixing bowls and muffin tins. Water rang on metal and she didn't hear the footsteps coming up behind her.
She scoured, she rinsed; the steps grew nearer until, less by hearing than by some vaguer sense of closeness, she became aware of them and swiveled. Her breath caught, her fingers sprang open, a muffin tin clattered to the floor.
"Jeez," she said, "you scared me."
"Sorry," Aaron said.
She looked at him. She was the sort of person who noticed odd details she couldn't always put into words. She noticed that Aaron's arms seemed longer because his shoulders had dropped down farther from his ears. His eyes seemed farther apart because his forehead was less crinkled. She said, "Hey, what happened here last night?"
Aaron blinked at her, had to suppress an unbecoming adolescent grin. He didn't see that it was any of her business. He said, "Excuse me?" He poured himself a cup of coffee.
"The office," said the woman who did the breakfast.
"Office?" He went to look.
He stood mystified before the mess—the toppled plants, the tossed papers just dense enough to grab the eye. A weirdly considerate malice seemed to have been at work; or perhaps
the invasion was at bottom a message. Aaron righted the pots, noted the mean damage to his beautiful varnished counter—and only then remembered last night's sharp insistent ringing of the front desk bell.
By reflex he'd started getting up from the settee to answer it. Suki's arms and eyes had sought to hold him where he was. For a heartbeat he was unsure what he should do. But by his next breath several things had been not so much decided as finally understood. They were lovers and had been for a while. The tardy act of making love would be not the initiation, but an unhurried catching-up, a celebration of what already was; and there was nothing in the world important enough to delay that celebration further.
Death itself could be ringing the bell—he didn't have to answer.
They'd trundled off to Aaron's bedroom then. Their arms were wrapped around each other, faces close, pulse singing in their ears; they would not have heard the dainty vandalism, if that's when it was done. And only now, the morning after, did it occur to Aaron to wonder if this pointless invasion was the work of the rude caller with the careful diction and the foreign cadences.
He went back to the kitchen. The woman who did the breakfast discreetly watched him fill a second coffee mug and move back toward his bedroom. Confirmed in her instincts that something large had happened in the old hotel, she dried her hands and went back to her bicycle with the bits of mirror on the fenders.
"Fred," said Piney, "ya know what I sometimes wonder about?"
It was late morning and they were wandering through the mangroves back behind the airport. Strung from one shrub to another, the tiny trampolines of spider webs bounced in a light breeze. Hot sun evaporated puddles, you could almost hear the gray water being sucked into the air like soda through a straw. Fred didn't answer.
Piney said, "Songs."
Fred said nothing, just stopped walking long enough to light a cigarette. The cigarette fit neatly in a notch in his walrus moustache, and around the notch nicotine had stained the hair like oiled oak.
Pineapple said, "The words and the tunes. The way they go together."
Without interest Fred said, "Yeah, Piney. That's why they call it a song."
"But ya think about it," said Piney, "it's a miracle. The tune's just a tune, the words are just words. Totally different things. A bird and a fish."
Fred smoked, kicked at porous rocks. "Fuck's a bird and a fish got to do with it?"
"Then someone puts the words and the tune together," Piney said, "and all of a sudden it's like they had to be together, like they were together from the beginning of time."
They walked. On their left, the airport runway showed now and then through gaps in the foliage; smears of rubber on the pavement testified to the violence of landing. Ahead and on their right, the ancient missile platforms loomed, fences rusted, concrete cracked. Fred said nothing.
Hound-like, Piney sang, "Blue-oo moon ... You don't think that's amazing?"
Fred flicked his cigarette into a gray puddle. "Yeah, Piney. Real amazing."
Farther on, beyond the platforms, the scrubby pyramid of the archaic fallout shelter broke through the relentless pancake plane of Florida. A cloud blew across the sun and a shadow slithered up one side of the pyramid and down the other.
"And another thing," said Piney. "Ever notice how, even when you just whistle, you're still hearing the words?"
"I don't whistle."
"Hum then," Piney said. "Same thing hum—"
He broke off because a mildly uncanny sight had caught his attention. Uncanny sights were a feature of the mangroves, after all; the tangled choking greenery cried out for the peculiar. Ospreys landed in the mangroves with crushed terns in their talons; drunks fumbled through their knotted roots, groping after lost prostheses.
The present strangeness was more subtle: a fat man, furtive and well-dressed, carrying a shovel and pulling a little red wagon. His big pants were of expensive cloth that billowed into perfect pleats; his shoes were much too good to be covered as they were in limestone dust. The wagon's handle was too short for him, and its front wheels dangled pointlessly a few inches off the ground as the back tires labored over broken stones.
The mangroves were a neighborhood, and, as with any neighborhood, there were people who belonged and people who did not. This fat man who did not belong seemed to be approaching the earthen pyramid from the part of the wetland called Little Hamaca Park. He was on a collision course with Pineapple and Fred. He saw them and he slowed. He'd been carrying the shovel on his shoulder, as if it were a rifle, and he himself a deranged campaigner who'd lost track of where the war was. Now he dropped the shovel to his side, tried to hide it with his torso.
Pineapple, bold in his own neighborhood, walked on and reached out for the fat man's eyes. They slid away.
The stranger hesitated just a moment and then he turned his back. His shirt was glued with sweat against his spine. He walked off the way he'd come, the red wagon waddling after him like a duckling.
Fred said, with a soft and general defiance, "I don't whistle and I don't hum neither."
Piney said, "That guy. Whaddya think he's doin' back here?"
Uninterested, Fred said, "Stealing plants. Too cheap to buy 'em from the nursery."
"I don't think so," Piney said. "Stealing plants, ya don't put on good shoes."
"Burying a cat then. Who gives a fuck?"
"No cat in the wagon," Piney said.
"Buried already."
"Buried already, why'd he still be walking farther back?"
"Fuck you ask me my opinion then?"
"'Cause you're the expert digging holes," said Piney. "He was walking toward the shelter."
"Nothin' in the shelter but rat shit," said Fred.
"Useta be stuff in the shelter."
"Useta be stuff lotsa places. What's your point?"
"I don't know," admitted Piney. "But a guy with nice clothes with a shovel..."
"My guys," Fred conceded, "we dig holes, we don't dress that nice."
"A wagon. It's a little off is all I'm saying."
"It's kind of strange," said Fred. "I grant you that."
Chapter 42
Tarzan Abramowitz was pacing, but the energy he burned with each deep flex of his thickly muscled knees was insufficient to work off the anger that was building in him every moment. He was being scolded.
Ivan Cherkassky, sitting at his desk in his dim and narrow office, was giving him a dressing-down. The criticism was calm, even polite, but the young thug resented it bitterly. In the old country he would have taken it better, would have felt he had to take it; but this was America, South Florida, and there was something in the air that defeated hierarchy and encouraged insubordination, that fostered a scrappy independence whose first premise was that you shouldn't have to take any shit from anybody, ever.
"Going in person," Ivan Cherkassky was saying. "This I did not want. Draws attention."
Abramowitz paced, stretched the wide suspenders that bit into the ropy sinews between his bare shoulders and his neck. His pacing was mostly turning, he was like a fish in a too-small tank.
There was a knock at the front door.
Cherkassky would not have been inclined to answer it, but Abramowitz heard in the knock an opportunity of escape. He said, "Is probably Gennady," and bounded into the hallway.
He sprinted down the corridor, lunged across the living room, undid the locks and yanked open the door. To his bafflement, he saw, framed by a brilliant rectangle of sunlight, two old men, perspiring and flushed, one of them wearing a lime-green pullover and holding a half-dead dog with cataracts.
For a moment no one spoke. Sam Katz, looking for he knew not what, tried to peek around the young man's hairy chest. Abramowitz shifted just slightly this way and that, guarding empty air. Then Bert said, "Hi. We live around the corner."
Abramowitz said, "So?"
Sam said, "Neighbors."
Abramowitz said nothing.
"We've met your father," Bert took a guess.
"So's mine," said Sam. "I'm sorry."
Bert said, "The dog. I was wondering if the dog could have a little water."
Abramowitz was shifting foot to foot, his long arms bobbing from their sockets. "If only you live around corner—"
Bert held up the limp chihuahua. It sagged in his hand like an under-stuffed sausage. "Long way for a little dog like this. Little dog like this could drop dead 'tween here and there."
There was a brief standoff. Then Sam saw a waferish form slip around a corner from the hallway. "What is it, who's there?" Cherkassky said.
The young man turned. Sam saw an opportunity and leaned in through the doorway. "It's us. Sam Katz, remember?"
"Ah," Cherkassky said resignedly.
"Want water for dog," Abramowitz sourly explained.
"Dried out from the sun," said Bert. "Eyelids stuck. Nose all cracked."
Cherkassky looked at the ghostly pet. Then he said to Abramowitz, "Yes, of course, of course, you see this dog, bring bowl of water."
Tarzan, feeling scolded once again, clenched his fists and bounded off.
Sam and Bert stood, trying to look friendly, in the doorway that had lost its sentinel.
Ivan Cherkassky made a token attempt at a smile. His mouth corners twitched and there was a flick at the edges of his eyes. "Forgive me I cannot invite you in," he said. He pointed at the dog. "Allergic."
Making conversation, Bert said, "Same allergies in Russia?"
"You think we are that different?" said Cherkassky.
Tarzan Abramowitz came back from the kitchen. He carried a shallow bowl of water and he had to walk slowly so it wouldn't spill. Walking slowly stymied his athleticism, made him strangely awkward but gave him unaccustomed time to think. Tentatively, he stepped across the front door threshold, then bent to put the bowl down on the welcome mat. Straightening up, he said to Sam, "Did you say your name was Katz?"