Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  At Raiford, in the cells, when the mail came, it was a quiet time. Jabbering fools who never opened a book or magazine, couldn’t tell you a damn thing about the news of the world, would sit quiet on their bunks and lower their heads into some letter from Mama or Sweet Little Sarah Jane, like it was the formula for the bomb that would blow down those prison walls. Blood would sit and watch them reading, their lips moving, hands scratching their heads or, often enough, going to their dicks, completely unaware of themselves. Men who would shank you for looking at them wrong out on the yard.

  Thalia had written to him faithfully. At first, he didn’t want the letters, didn’t want any reminder of the life outside. This prison was going to be his life for a while. A man had to make it here, and he didn’t want to be reminded of what was good outside. In the joint, you couldn’t live like a kid passing the candy store window every day without a dime in his pocket.

  But the letters became an interest and then a delight and finally an addiction. Blood loved them, waited for them, thought about them all the time. Thalia had a good way with words. She could tell a story, write how people talked, what they did, and put you there, make you part of it. Blood liked it, being pulled out of that cell back into her world.

  When he’d first met her, she was what he called a good girl. She’d had her share of trouble, dropped out of high school, had some shit jobs, quit them, gone on to others. She’d lived with her fat sister, or stayed with her granmon on the old lady’s Social Security. Her mother was dead. She didn’t know who her father was. But she was a good girl because she’d never had any worthless nigger’s baby, and she never did drugs, and she didn’t shoplift or whore out her ass.

  The letters were about her life, and what her and Blood were going to do when he got out. How she was going to reform him, get him going straight. But slowly they changed. Thalia got herself into some antipoverty education program down at the local vo-tech school. She wrote to him that the first time she rested her fingers on the keyboard of a computer, she was hooked.

  Blood sitting in his cell thinking that the only thing he’d ever rested his hands on that had hooked him was that beautiful place between her legs. Blood not really able to understand it, but happy for her in his way. At least she wasn’t falling into bad habits. At least she wasn’t running the streets at night with that evil crowd that hung out down at the Celebrity. There were plenty of poontang pirates who’d like nothing better than to turn out Blood Naylor’s good girl while he was locked down.

  So Thalia wrote about computers, and about how she was learning word processing (her letters showing up typed and printed out), learning to program, learning spreadsheets and databases. She said she was going to get her GED now that she had this jones for computers and see if she couldn’t get herself a decent job. She still made fun of the straight, white-man world, talked about what a joke it would be if she ended up in panty hose in some office saying, Yes sir, no sir, to a bunch of white men, but Blood knew she was changing. He could read it between the lines.

  For one thing, she wasn’t as interested in writing to him. Her letters seemed distracted and vague. She was hearing some voice he couldn’t hear calling her into a world he didn’t know. She wrote less often, and the letters got harder to read and full of people Blood didn’t know. Thalia earned her GED, then took some classes in computer science and got herself a job waitressing at a country club. She didn’t exactly say it, but Blood knew she was hoping to meet some people there who could help her move up, move away.

  Blood had been in the joint for thirteen months when she got the job, and it was around Christmas when a nigger named Troyal Summers, another fool from the neighborhood, came to Raiford doing a dime for armed robbery and aggravated assault. Troyal Summers told Blood Naylor that Thalia Speaks was fucking some white guy. That she’d been seen with the guy in bars and restaurants where black people worked but didn’t eat and drink. That it was a hot but secret romance, the guy being married and all.

  Blood asked who the guy was. Troyal Summers didn’t know. Just some white guy who belonged to the club where she worked. Well, Blood asked, where exactly is this club? Embarrassed by this, that he had to ask some dumb nigger who stuck up convenience stores with a chopped shotgun where his own woman worked on the outside. The guy said, “Some country club is all I know. Terra Ceia. You know where it is.” And Blood said yeah, he knew where it was. (He didn’t, but he would sure as shit find out.)

  The thing was, it was humiliating. Blood Naylor had become a man of influence in the prison. He belonged to the unofficial committee that solved problems, did deals, sold favors, and kept a lid on the place. Kept it from blowing away in a storm of violence. If this thing got around about Blood’s woman on the outside fucking some white man to keep her job, he would be considered a punk. He’d have to seriously fuck with any man who mentioned it, or even looked like he might want to mention it. It was just the way things worked here and, Blood thought, Thalia should have known that, should have given him a little more consideration. Respect.

  But deeper still, farther down there in that well where the water was sweet and clean but getting muddier by the day, it was something else. It was the fact that Blood had sat in his cell at lockdown, in the quiet just before lights-out, and reread those early letters of hers, his hand sneaking to his dick, stroking it, making it large with his love for her, with the pictures in his head of what they were going to do when he got out. Blood was thinking of making the woman a permanent part of his life. Turning his addiction for her into something stable, something fortunate.

  Now it had all turned into some nightmare of computers and country-club white men and moving up in a world Blood could never earn or buy or even kill his way into. So Blood decided some things. One was that he was going to get that white man, some guy who fucked little black girls so they could keep tapping their ignorant fingers on a computer. The other was that he was going to learn something about that white business world, get himself out of this prison and back onto the street in a way that was at least half legitimate.

  That was when Blood stopped opening Thalia’s letters. Started sending them back marked Refused. That was when he wrote to Lake City Community College about the business courses.

  * * *

  It was dark now and the two whores had stopped dancing to En Vogue. There hadn’t been much traffic. Two or three cars had crept down the alley with their ambers on, nobody stopping to bid for tail. Poonhounds from Suitcase City just looking and rolling on. There were plenty of girls. Girls that looked younger, cleaner, not so crazy. Blood had to get out of here. Had to go see his addiction. His Thalia. One last time, he told himself. See her one last time and you’ll know what to do.

  TWENTY-TWO

  At sunset, Teach anchored the Fortunate off the north end of Caladesi Island. The Hunter swung on generous scope in a gentle current running south toward the mouth of Clearwater Bay. Caladesi was deserted now. The park rangers cleared the tourists off at dusk, and the island recovered itself for twelve hours, becoming again a land of fiddler crabs, great blue herons, and raccoons.

  A gentle breeze cooled the cockpit where Teach sat drinking a Heineken and watching his daughter swim. This time of day, the hot land pulled cool air in from the Gulf. He raised the cold bottle and drank to the breeze, then raised it a second time for a general thanksgiving. He was a free man again, relaxing in a seaworthy craft, and his daughter, graceful as an otter, was swimming in the sunset light.

  Dean surfaced, threw back her head, tossing diamond ropes of spray. She held something up to him. “Daddy, look.”

  It was a horseshoe crab, about the size and shape of a German army helmet. It had a six-inch spike for a tail and ten struggling legs. Teach laughed, admiring her fearlessness. She just didn’t have that eee-ewww reaction in the face of the slippery and the crawly.

  “Will he hurt me?”

  “Far as I know, he’s harmless.”

  Treading water, she let the crab go, and T
each watched it bank and drift toward the sandy bottom. He remembered from his boyhood seeing the crabs congregate at mating time, knew they were not crabs but seagoing spiders. He remembered standing waist-deep on a mangrove flat, spin-casting for redfish and seeing the water around him for fifty yards go completely dark with sex-driven armies of these outlandish animals.

  Memories. Teach had been having them lately. Feeling the strong pull of the places he had called home the first eighteen years of his life. He got up and stretched, looked out at the horizon. The line where the sky met the Gulf was fiery red. He said, “Deanie, I’m going forward to check the anchor lines. Why don’t you come aboard in about ten minutes?”

  Dean did a surface dive, her arms sweeping out, head plowing, legs rising perfectly aligned, slipping under. She came up with a sand dollar. Treading, she tossed it to him. “Come on, Dad. Let me stay in longer.”

  Teach tossed the sand dollar back to her. “Ten minutes,” he said.

  He went forward to the gently dipping pulpit. Earlier, he’d swum out to check the anchor line, found the Danforth buried deep, but he couldn’t let darkness fall without checking again. His landmarks on the island showed him that the Fortunate was not dragging her hook. Teach glanced behind him and remembered making slow, sweet love to Paige up here on a bed of cushions while Dean, a child, slept in the V-berth below. Something about the proximity of the island, its primitive odors on the wind, the wildness of the Gulf stretching all the way to Corpus Christie, gave him a sudden, sad yearning for Paige and for their youth, for the time when all had seemed possible. The time when there had been plenty of time.

  He looked north. The next coastal stop was Yankeetown, after that came Cedar Key where he had been born and had grown to a raw manhood. For him, it had been a place of beauty, family, and, finally, of trouble.

  His father had captained a shrimp boat and had made a good living until one night from somewhere out in the middle ground, that vast chain of reefs in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico where the shrimp were plentiful but the weather was uncertain, the Janey Anne broadcast a distress call. Jimmy Teach’s father gave his loran coordinates, and then said, “I am forced to . . .”

  No one ever learned what the captain of the Janey Ann was forced to do. At sunset on the third day of the search, Jimmy Teach stood with his mother, Janey Anne, on the Cedar Key dock while a Coast Guard lieutenant commander told her he’d done everything he could.

  After that, the Teaches, mother and son, were poor, and after five years of watching his mother come home at night from double shifts in a seafood restaurant, Jimmy resolved to do something about it.

  One day at football practice, he was approached by an older boy, a varsity linebacker. Big and strong and looking older than his years, the linebacker took Jimmy Teach aside and asked him how well he knew the waters around Cedar Key. “Like the back of my hand,” was Jimmy’s proud answer.

  “Good,” the older boy said, smiling. “That’s damn good, son. How’d you like to make some money?”

  Teach was young, but no fool. He knew what the boy wanted. He considered it, thought about his mother falling asleep in front of the TV every night with her swollen feet in a tub of hot water, recalled what he’d heard people say about jail, then said he was interested.

  So began the wild early days of the Florida marijuana trade. The older boys, together with some friends of theirs in the university city, rented trawlers from marinas in Homestead on the east coast and crossed to Freeport where they stuffed the boats to the gunwales with bales of spicy weed. They steamed back through the Florida Straits, skirting the ten thousand islands, always making Cedar Key at nightfall. Teach’s job was to meet the boats offshore in a skiff and pilot them in through the narrow, treacherous channels to a spot where a rented U-Haul truck could be driven close enough to the bank for quick and quiet off-loading.

  Teach carried bales with the other boys, then skippered the boat back out to deep water, untied his skiff from her aft rail, and waved goodbye to the boys who motored back to the east coast marina with plenty of time to clean the trawler of every trace of hemp. It was a good business for a while. There were no Guatemalans, there were no guns, and the federal authorities on land and water were understaffed and slow to notice the rising style of life in the sleepy fishing towns. To fourteen-year-old Jimmy Teach, marijuana was nothing but a weed, and the money was a fantastic dream.

  For a night’s work, Teach was paid fifteen thousand dollars. The first time he took an envelope fat with cash to his mother, she was lying in her bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, listening to the Beatles sing “Norwegian Wood” on the radio. Teach knocked and entered quietly. He watched her lying there with her arm thrown over her eyes, her tired feet elevated on a cushion from the chair across the room. “Mama,” he whispered, “I got something for you.”

  She didn’t lift her arm, and Teach imagined the darkness in her eyes, what she saw in it, and how many times she had relived that night when the phone rang and Charlie Trimble, a local deputy sheriff, had told her the shrimper Janey Anne had sent a distress signal from the middle ground. He remembered his mother from the early days as a beautiful woman with light and love in her eyes, and a special, secret way of smiling when his father entered her kitchen in the morning. Now she was always tired, and she drank cheap wine when she sat at the kitchen table at night trying to balance the checkbook, pay the bills, buy her son the clothes the other kids were wearing to high school.

  Teach walked across the dark room, turned down the radio, and put the fat envelope under his mother’s right hand.

  “What is it, Jimmy? Ain’t you supposed to be working down at the Baybreeze by now?” She meant the restaurant where he bussed tables.

  “Go ahead,” he said, “open it, Mama.”

  She pulled her arm from her eyes, touched the envelope, and slowly sat up. She composed her face the way he remembered it from Christmas mornings when his father was alive. Her son had given her something and, even though it was probably some absurd trinket, it came from the altar of his love, and she would make big eyes and tell him in a girlish voice that it was the best gift a mother ever had. Teach watched her closely. When she opened the envelope, her eyes went small, then dark, then her mouth tightened and her jaw muscles jumped, and then everything that had been slow was fast. Her hand struck like a snake, and Jimmy Teach was backing away with the burn of her fingers across his face.

  “Take it away. Get it out of here. I don’t want it. And don’t you ever tell me where it came from. I don’t want to know.” She stood over him in her rank, food-stained waitress uniform with Janey Anne stitched above her breast, her hands trembling at her sides, her face pale with anger.

  “But Mama, I . . .” He wanted to tell her that she wouldn’t have to worry now. That he wouldn’t get caught. That the boys would make only a few trips. That they would be careful with the money, not flash it around. He wanted to tell her he’d done it for her, done it from his love, because he hated to see her so tired, so worried, muttering to herself about how much things cost. He wanted to say that he would take care of her now, just like his father had done.

  Jimmy Teach didn’t say any of these things. He backed out of the room touching the hot print of his mother’s fingers on his cheek. A month later, he put the second envelope on the kitchen table in the morning and waited. His mother said nothing about it. She had said she didn’t want to know, and Jimmy Teach took her at her word. At noon, the envelope was gone. It was from his mother that he learned to keep secrets.

  She bought him school clothes and herself some new things too, and she stopped working doubles at the restaurant. When the old Ford Ranger pickup died, she bought a new truck in a town fifty miles away, nothing fancy, and after that life went on with no muttering over the checkbook, and bottles of wine with better labels on them. Teach and his friends made five trips in all, and his cut for maneuvering a big, sluggish boat in a tight spot at night was $75,000. His mother opened bank accounts in Tre
nton, Newberry, Bronson, Williston, and Archer. She kept her job at the restaurant, never dated, never remarried, and she and her son lived without want until she died of a cerebral hemorrhage during Teach’s freshman year at the University of Florida.

  Bloodworth Naylor, a boy from Rosewood, the black town not far from Cedar Key, joined the group of teenage smugglers halfway through their run. One of the football players brought him in, a boy who was considered smarter than most. The boy vouched for Naylor and said they needed a black kid to sell to his people in the university city. In Cedar Key, things were uneasy between blacks and whites, but this was business, and the young Naylor, who also seemed smarter than most, did his job well.

  * * *

  Teach knelt in the pulpit of the Fortunate and gave the anchor line a last tug for luck. He felt the boat move with Dean’s weight as she climbed over the transom. He went aft and watched her towel off, marveling at the supple beauty of her limbs. She’d danced since she was six years old, and her flexibility was a thing that made Teach wince. She could stand on one foot next to a wall with the ankle closest to it pressed against her ear. Smiling. Her arms and calves were muscular without the bulk or excessive definition that, at least to Teach’s eyes, seemed masculine. To him, she represented everything that was decent and fine about growing up healthy and disciplined in America.

  She tossed the towel onto a cockpit bench and looked at the beer in his hand. “How many?” She put her hands on her hips, tilted her chin, and made scolding eyes.

  “The first,” Teach said, laughing. “Shall I write them in the log for you?”

  “No need. I trust you. Can I have one?”

  He looked at her. Paige had explained to him certain principles she considered to be European. Let the children drink with you, and you habituate them to alcohol in a congenial, responsible way. At dinner Paige had given Dean glasses of wine mixed with water saying it was what French parents did. Dean had drunk the mixture, smiled like a pirate’s wench, and said she’d rather have half a glass straight up.