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 middle-class 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. B
esides, 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.”
“Why?”
“We’re Catholics, Eddie, as you know, but she’s a woman Catholic, and they take all that shit seriously. Well, at first she wouldn’t even believe me, so I told her to call the doctor. Dr. Silverstein—and you might want to remember this, Eddie—wouldn’t tell her shit over the phone. So the next day she went to see him. Meanwhile, you know, I was back home again, and still no ass, you see. She had to get this thing straightened out. So when she saw Silverstein, and proved who she was, he confirmed the operation—that I’d had it for more than six months, and we could screw our heads off if we wanted to.”
“So everything was okay?”
“Hell, no! Then she had to see the fucking priest. He’s a real prick, and he comes over to the house for dinner about twice a month. You ought to see the bastard drink my Chivas Regal—like wine, man. Here’s the thing, Eddie. She would’ve done anything he told her to do, and he sure as hell didn’t tell her not to screw anymore. I mean, he could’ve told her that, but he didn’t. He merely let her figure it out for herself, which was worse. He told her that a woman could not deny her husband, which is right, but he also reminded her that the purpose of sex was procreation. This way, you see, she more or less had to make her own moral decision. And she decided, now that it was impossible for her to get pregnant, because I had the vasectomy, that there was no longer any purpose in having sex any more. She’d never cared much about it in the first place. I tried to reason with her—you know, what difference is there between the half-assed rhythm system, which is a way to avoid pregnancy, and a sure way—but she wouldn’t accept the logic. She’s too emotional.”
“Well, Don. If you ever want a divorce, you’ve got grounds for one. No judge would ever go along with that crap.”
“I’ll never get a divorce, Eddie. If I did, I’d lose my daughter. The way things are now, I’m stuck, that’s all. But I’m going to get out of it one of these days. Anyway, to get back to Nita Peralta. It took awhile, but she was so happy about Clara and me being reconciled it pissed me off. So I finally told Nita the truth about what was going on with my sex—or non-sex—life. She, too, you know, is a Catholic. And she’s a virgin, too, believe it or not—”
“No!” Eddie laughed.
“No, she really is, Ed, and I feel kind of sorry for her. She’s supporting her mother and her uncle, and about three teenaged kids—cousins or something. She’s past thirty now, and she’s still saving her box for a husband. But because she’s taking care of all that family—her grandmother did live with her, but she died—Nita missed out on getting married. With Cuban girls, if they aren’t married by the time they’re nineteen or twenty, they can forget about it. Twenty-five is just about the outside limit, and then they have to settle for losers. The only chance for Nita to get married now, if she has any chance at all, is some old widower, unless she marries a white man—a Protestant. And she’d never do that.”
“Hell, she’s white, isn’t she?”
“I guess so, but you know what I mean. All Cubans have got a touch or so of the old tarbrush. On an island like that, there is no way to avoid it. Even Castro is one-fourth nigger, you know.
“Anyway, Nita’s still saving her box for someone. But not her ass. The way Catholic women work these things out in their minds is really something else, Eddie. But she began to brood about my lack of sex, and all, and she worked it out inside her head that it was okay for me to screw her in the ass, but I couldn’t touch her anywhere else, you see. Not even a kiss—because a carnally-minded kiss, you see, would be a mortal sin. I wish to hell I’d had a tape recorder when she came to me with all this stuff. She had this real serious expression, and her big brown eyes were wide as she rattled through the whole explanation. It was hard for me to keep a straight face, but I did—somehow. A serious Cubano is weird enough, but a serious Cuban female-Jesus. She went on and on, and she kept throwing her arms and hands around as she got excited about it. But the upshot of the whole business was that I ended up by cornholing her over the desk here. I didn’t mind. It was something to do, and at first I was slipping it to her every damned day. Then I got turned off somehow, and unless I’m desperate I just can’t do it. Once a month, maybe—or five or six weeks go by, and then I call her in. She got worried when I slacked off, but I explained to her that it was like marriage. You do it a lot at first, and then only occasionally. I told her to talk to her girl friends about it—those who were married—and they’d tell her the same thing. So she did, and they did, and it worked out all right. What really turned me off, I think, was the fear that she’d tell the priest about it in confession. We go to the same church in the Grove, you see. I don’t want that rummy bastard to get anything on me.”
“Maybe she told him already, and he hasn’t let on.”
“No, not that bastard, Eddie. He drinks my Chivas like wine, man, and if he knew about Nita and me he’d be after a big donation.”
“You don’t believe in the church, do you, Don? How the hell can she possibly think that her ass is exempt from sin, if—” Eddie laughed, and then choked, shaking his head.
Don grinned. “There’s nothing wrong with the church, Eddie, it’s the people in it. People are always going to find a way to do what they want to do. Once Nita had worked this idea out in her squirrelly mind, she was set to carry through with it. She’s loyal to me, she was worried about me, and she came up with a way to make me happy. In her heart, maybe, or deeply buried inside her mind, there’s probably a doubt, but she’s managed to suppress it. If she didn’t have that doubt, she would’ve checked with the priest first, and asked him if it was okay. D’you see what I mean?”
“Sure, I see it. But I was asking about you, not Nita. What kind of Catholic does that make you, you bastard?”
Don shrugged. “I go to Mass on Sundays. I’m a pretty good Catholic. I believe in the church. I haven’t been in a state of grace since I got the vasectomy. But
I figure that sooner or later the church’ll get around to authorizing vasectomies. And when they do I can go to confession, and get all this crap unloaded and off my mind.”
“Suppose you die in the meantime, Don, and you aren’t in a state of grace?”
“How’d you like some coffee, Ed?” Don crossed to the door and opened it. “We keep a pot—”
“Forget the coffee,” Eddie said. “We’d better get along. I had three cups before I called you from the Pancake House.”
“When will we be back?”
“In two, maybe three hours. We’ll land in Ft. Myers, have lunch, and then fly straight back. But we’ll have to take both cars.
I won’t feel like driving back downtown from Opa-Locka, when it’s closer for me to Miami Springs, so you’d better follow me out. I’m flying to Chicago tonight.”
“Okay,” Don said, nodding. “In that case I’ll just call it a day.”
Don told Nita Peralta that he would see her in the morning, and the two men drove to the Opa-Locka Airport.
27
Flying made Gladys sick. Eddie had seen to that.
To get away from Gladys once in awhile, to have a little time to himself, he told her that the airline had ordered all pilots to fly ten additional hours per month in light planes as “refresher” training. Gladys didn’t know anything about airplanes or the airline, and she had accepted the story as the truth. It had made her angry, however, because it seemed unfair for the airline to give such an order and then make the pilots pay for their own rentals.
“If they’re making you do it,” Gladys said, “they should pay for the planes.”
“They don’t look at it that way,” Eddie told her. “Besides, that’s why they pay us so much money—so we’ll have enough dough to pay for little extras like that. The way they look at it, they’re doing us a favor. Most of us pilots like to fly light planes anyway, and by ordering us to do it, you see, we can take the expenses off our income taxes.”
The Shark-Infested Custard Page 19