Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  Severiana got to her feet, pulled off the rubber gloves, and dropped them in the sink, massaging her knees. “It’s okay. It’s clean now. You want to replace something, get me a new dresser. That one you brought me got roach poop in it.”

  Blood said sure, sure, he’d see to it. Anything to make her happy. He wanted his girls to be happy. Happy and afraid of him and clean enough, quiet enough here in the neighborhood to do business without any trouble. They brought trouble down on Blood, he returned it to them tenfold. That was the deal. It was what they knew.

  Severiana had left the newspaper open on the table, some of it lying on the floor where she’d used it to wipe up that evil shit she sprayed in the oven. Blood drank the cold Corona Severiana put in front of him and looked at the sports page, then the city section.

  Holy shit, there it was! Thurman Battles dropping the lawsuit against James Teach. Saying the racial situation in the city was too volatile. A long, what was that word, contentious trial could take things over the top. Saying the facts of the case were ambiguous. (Why couldn’t the guy talk English?) They didn’t, in Battles’s judgment, merit the time and expense of a trial. And blah, blah, on it went. Lawyer bullshit for the simple fact that Battles was quitting. Blood and Tyrone had handed the guy a perfect opportunity for the kind of grandstanding he loved, and he was letting it slip out of his hands. What the fuck is going on here?

  Blood tossed the newspaper onto the floor and walked away from the stink of the oven cleaner, the spicy sweat of Severiana, the funky musk of the house (strong despite the air-conditioning he was paying for), and went out to the Bronco. Mook and Soldier had left with the truck. Blood sat in the Bronco with the engine running. It still had that factory-clean smell that reminded him of good hotel lobbies and jewelry stores. He had to think about this thing. Review his options.

  He opened the glove box and put his hand on the Smith stainless steel .357. It was clean, unregistered. He kept it near to hand, had never used it. He did his job without violence or hired out the physical stuff to the dime-a-dozen thumpers you could find in College Park. What he wanted to do right now was drive over to Teach’s house, knock on the door, screw the barrel of the Smith right into Teach’s upper lip, right up his big fat white-man nose, and pull the trigger. Keep pulling it until there was nothing in front of him but a fine red mist.

  Blood’s hand was trembling, hovering there in the air above the glove box. All he had to do was take a long drive and a short walk and pull that trigger. Then run like hell, back to the car, lay rubber down that fancy Terra Ceia street . . . and then what? Who would see him there, a black man in a white Bronco driving too fast in the quiet afternoon? Who would see him there? Calm down, Blood, calm down. You got a decision to make.

  He had talked to Tyrone about what Uncle Thurman was planning for Teach. The kid had told him about Teach going to his uncle’s office, pleading for his miserable white-man life. The way Tyrone told it, the guy was already in a world of shit—laid off his job, his friends at the country club turning their heads away out there on the links or the greens or whatever you called those acres where white people chased a little white ball.

  Maybe the point here was that the guy had suffered enough. His name in the paper, his reputation dirty, his job on the line. Maybe Blood already had the revenge he needed. Maybe the thing to do was stay cool, let this thing heal over. Get some scar tissue on it. Blood had a good thing going, a good business. He was getting rich, and the cops were leaving him alone. Going after Teach any more was dangerous, could cost him everything if things went wrong.

  Blood started the Bronco. He had to go down to College Hill, the nasty side of town, the place where the street hos strutted their butts. He had to because she’d be there and, seeing her, he’d know what he had to do. Know if that .357 was coming out of the glove box, or if he could just let this thing die away like a long, sad cry in the night.

  TWENTY

  Holding a toolbox and a cooler, James Teach stood on the dock, under the high tin roof of the marina, admiring his thirty-two foot Hunter. The sailboat was named Fortunate. He’d bought her after his promotion to vice president and named her for what he felt. Now, he felt like a man returned from the dead. He put down the toolbox and the cooler and flexed his arms and shoulders. He planned to replace the sacrificial zinc on the boat’s propeller shaft, change the engine oil, and give the cabin and head a good cleaning in preparation for a weekend sail with Dean. Across Tampa Bay to Egmont Key, then up to Caladesi Island. It would be a celebration of what he was calling—in his thoughts anyway—his new life.

  It had been two weeks since Thurman Battles had dropped the lawsuit. In the press release, Battles had made himself look good and made Teach look like the luckiest man in the world. Battles had used some of the phrasing Teach had requested: merit on both sides of the case; Teach’s actions understandable given his (obviously lamentable) perspective; both of them acting for the good of Tampa. But in subtle ways, Battles had left hanging in the air the heavy odor of the probability that a lawsuit would have proven Teach to be exactly the kind of white man who’d caused the stormy racial weather of Tampa. Teach’s own statements had been terse. And, as agreed, he’d sent the negatives to Battles by registered mail.

  He had talked to Marlie Turkel twice. The first time because it was necessary. The second time, as he saw it, doing the woman a favor.

  She called early in the morning and asked the same question: why had Battles dropped the lawsuit? Teach could hear her fingers clicking on the keyboard, recalled the grainy photo of her narrow, news-hawk face that ran above her column.

  “Did you meet with Thurman Battles?”

  He figured she had already called Battles to confirm their meeting.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me what was said at this meeting?”

  “We discussed the good of the community. We came to an accord.”

  Silence on the line. A big mouth, shut. Finally, Marlie Turkel said, “This whole thing smells like bad sushi, you know what I mean?”

  “No. Tell me what you mean.” He liked it, questioning her, urging her to commit herself to something she might later regret.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Teach allowed himself the pleasure of dropping just one turd into her morning coffee: “Community harmony is good news, isn’t it, Ms. Turkel? Why don’t you write it that way? You folks print good news, don’t you?”

  Teach used the spring line to pull the Hunter to the dock and swung the toolbox, then the cooler, across to the cockpit. He jumped aboard, feeling the deck move under his old boat shoes. It was three o’clock and hot under the tin roof. He planned to spend a few hours with his mind on autopilot while his muscles did menial work. As soon as he was finished aboard, he’d strip, put on a mask and snorkel, drop the dive platform over the transom, and replace the zinc.

  After the newspapers published Battles’s decision, Mabry Meador had called.

  “Jim, we’ve got a remarkably good outcome on this thing. Much better than I anticipated. Why don’t you come in this afternoon, and we’ll talk about the new sales campaign?”

  Teach said, “Mabry, can you give me another week?”

  We’ve got an outcome? My daughter hears that an honor student is a drug addict, I own a camera, and we’ve got an outcome?

  Meador cleared his throat, emitted the dry laugh that meant he wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

  Teach waited, wishing he could say what he was thinking: You gave me the tranqs for my wild mood swings and my gibbering anxiety. Maybe I’ll take the pills now. Get blissed out of my skull and not come back for a month. If you don’t like that, we can talk about a separation. Now that I’m not Tampa’s own David Duke, the opportunities are rolling in. A guy who devotes his life to the good of the community has a lot of employment possibilities. I’m reviewing my options.

  “All right, Jim. Take some time, relax. We’ll talk next week. And Jim, I want you to know I’m ge
nuinely happy to see you, uh, out of the woods on this thing.”

  A little control flowing back to Meador’s side of the desk. You were in the woods, Teach, you lucky rascal. Deep and dark in there, boy, deep and dark. Don’t stay away too long.

  Teach took the cooler into the saloon and opened it. The six green bottles of Heineken sweated agreeably in their bed of ice. He had resolved to cut down on his drinking. Reluctantly, he had faced the possibility that things might have gone differently at Malone’s Bar if he had not drunk so much bourbon. He was calling it a possibility, not a fact, and was facing it obliquely, not squarely. He had brought six bottles of beer and would consider the day a success if he worked hard, sweated out some of the poisons of the last two weeks, and brought home one or two beers. Cutting down was not quitting, it was harder than that.

  Teach went back up to the cockpit and took in the quiet marina. Bright hulls rocked gently on luminous green water. Blue, maroon, and white canvas Biminis and sail covers glowed in the shadows. Outboards perched like long-necked birds on transoms, and dinghies swung from davits. This was the clean place, the place where Teach came to think about important things. He had always wanted to be a good man, and, like most, had fallen grievously short of the mark. Now he had resolved to take stock of himself, audit the internal accounts.

  He had been good since Paige’s death and the end of the affair with Thalia. He had recovered as much of himself as he could from that strange dream of Thalia’s cinnamon skin. He had found the old, lost Teach, the man who loved his wife and daughter in the uncomplicated way all good things happened. He had given that man back to his daughter with a redoubled energy. When things got bad inside his head, he held to the idea that he had never left Paige. He had only lost his way for a time.

  Teach went into the cabin, removed the steps that led down from the cockpit, exposing the engine. Better to do the hot work first. He studied the cooler, told himself he had not yet earned a beer, and crawled into the small compartment, curving his body into the space beside the Yanmar diesel.

  As he changed the oil and filter, checked the hoses and belts, he thought about Dean. She had told him Tyrone’s secret. Since that night, he had wondered what arguments she might have had with herself before exposing the boy. He knew her loyalties were divided. A part of her lived in the house of Teach, and some other part had moved on to the house of Woman, a dwelling he could never enter. In that house, Dean and Tawnya Battles had met and agreed that the offenses of Tyrone must be punished. Us chicks hang together, Dad. Don’t you know that yet?

  Teach resolved to know his daughter better. By some pathway still obscure to him, he knew this must lead to his telling her the story of him and Paige. He would begin by teaching Dean the things he knew, things that gave him pleasure: sailing, fishing, diving. Then maybe he could tell her the stories of his past. Let her into the world he had come from, the small fishing town on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Now was the time for them to learn each other. It was no little girl who had come to him in his study. A woman had come to tell him he drank too much and then hand him a camera. A woman should know her father.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Blood Naylor stood on the loading dock of Naylor’s Rent-to-Own, watching the two hookers take up their positions under the jacaranda. The purple blossoms had all fallen and lay rotting on the ground. The tree had its full, dark-green growth now, but it wasn’t pretty anymore. The two girls, Imelda and Mireen, one of them in cutoff jeans so tight they split her up the front, and the other in a gold miniskirt and red platform shoes, stood out there jiving to the tunes from a box propped in the crotch of the tree. Pretty soon the traffic would roll down the alley, white men from Suitcase City—college boys, rednecks from Lutz and Brandon—homing in on that booty.

  Blood was sad tonight. For a week he’d been telling himself not to fuck up his good thing. Telling himself Teach had been punished enough, the guy running crazy all over town trying to save his job, his life. Blood telling himself to forget about Thalia, what the white man had done to him with her. Telling and telling. But something in there just wasn’t listening. Blood looked back into the dark warehouse at the furniture shrouded in dusty plastic, the forklift, the office, the business he had built. Would he risk it all to screw this guy, and all for a woman? He’d asked himself again and again, the answer coming from way down there, some dark place like the bottom of a well: Thalia Speaks isn’t just a woman. She is the woman. She was your woman.

  Blood hated to admit he loved her. He was a pimp. He put women on the street, used them, cut them loose when they were used up, and never got close to them. Oh, he had convinced a good many that he loved them, would always take care of them, but when the time came to let them go, run his game on the next bitch, it was easy to get shut of Susie or Annie. Thalia had been different.

  Blood knew that men like him never loved, or they loved just once. If it was never, they were safer in this evil world than if it was once. If it was once, and they were lucky, it finally wore out, went away. He had seen men turn fools for love and get over it. Time did that. The trouble was, Blood had gotten the heart thing for Thalia just before he’d done his five-spot in prison. If he and Thalia had been together another six months and things had run their course, maybe he wouldn’t be out here now watching the shadows start to lean over the alley where the two hos were singing some drugged-out imitation of En Vogue’s “My Lovin’.”

  He’d picked up Thalia on a College Hill street corner one afternoon, told her she knew him, knew he wouldn’t hurt her, offered her a ride to wherever she was going. She got in his car, in those days a Sedan de Ville, looked around, approving, wiggling the prettiest little butt he’d ever seen on that soft leather, and said she wasn’t going anywhere.

  “What was you doing out there in the hot sun, girl? You wouldn’t be selling it, would you?”

  She gave him a sour look, that good-girl-with-the-wrong-man look. She opened the car door, got out, leaned back in. “This girl don’t sell it. Anyway, you ain’t got enough money to buy it. Not even with your rock empire.” Referring to Blood’s cocaine business.

  Blood smiled. “Girl, you be surprised how much money ol’ Blood got put away.”

  “Boy,” walking away now, down that hot street, “you be surprised how much I don’t care about that.”

  Well now.

  It was a good start. He liked her. She had spirit, stone-fox beauty, and she talked that good trash. Blood found out where she lived and went over that evening. Her sister, one of the fat sopranos who fanned themselves and fell out with the vapors down at the AME Church, told him she might be visiting her Grandma Liston. Another old lady. This one half-blind and using one of them aluminium walkers.

  Thalia was sitting on the front porch with this old lady, both of them fanning themselves and drinking sweet tea. Blood introduced himself to the old lady, and she said, “Humph!” and looked off down the street, that fan going like a hummingbird’s wing. Blood asked Thalia if she could come on with him, maybe go down to the Celebrity and let him give her one of them big margaritas, and she said, “No, but if you want to ask my granmon if you can come up on her porch, she might let you sit here with us and drink some tea and pass the time of day.”

  Blood smiled, laughed. He knew what she wanted. She wanted him to get up on that porch, sink his butt into that rattan rocker like some field nigger courting his Sophronia Marie after services on a Sunday afternoon. Blood was about to walk away, maybe throw an unkind word back over his shoulder, something about how there was plenty of pretty ladies down at the Celebrity that would suck his dick for a margarita and a rock of crack, but something happened just then. That voice from way down the bottom of the well, down where the water was sweet and clean, calling up. It said, Stay.

  Blood stayed. Sat on that porch drinking sweet tea and eating fried plantains from a real silver platter, talking about the weather and the elections for city council and when, if ever, the city was going to pave the street in front
of Granmon Liston’s house.

  Blood carried Thalia out for three months before he got busted, sent to Raiford. It was a sweet time. Blood was a bad man, that was how it was, but mostly he acted good with Thalia. She wouldn’t have it any other way. He got hot-tempered with her, raised a hand to her, talked that nasty trash to her, brought around any of that criminal element, she’d disappear as quick as a chicken breast when the preacher came to eat.

  And she made him wait a long time before she did the thing with him. When it happened, it was worth waiting for. Thalia had a powerful way with her pussy. But it wasn’t really that, it was her whole self. When he made love to her, he knew he was crossing over into her and letting her into him, and, for a few seconds anyway, they were one glorious, flying black bird.

  Blood had never had much to do with religion, not since his Auntie Mary, the woman who’d raised him, had died of a stroke scrubbing floors on the night shift down at the Citizen’s and Southern Bank. She’d made him go to church with her until he was thirteen, and after she died facedown next to her mop and bucket, he’d never set foot in one again. But this thing with Thalia, it made him feel like he’d felt in church as a boy of seven or eight when the big black women had opened their throats and let roll that long, low moan that was a bridge to heaven. A bridge of sorrow and joy. When Thalia came for him, she cried out like that, some moan and song and prayer, and Blood had become as addicted to it as any fool was to the cocaine he peddled.