“You don’t live in a park. And don’t you mean a precognition?”
“I live in a hotel. And I can’t stand the thought of sleeping outside.”
“Is that a non sequitur?”
“No, Mama.” He did have a phobia about it. He waked in the night sweating from fear of it. Sweating from fear of losing Marcella, his father, CJ when he was alive, even Spane and his cohorts in Miami snug in their hotels. What conceived shambles wasn’t he scared of?
Jackie came out the front door. He was eating cereal from a bowl. He grinned broadly, a smile that mashed up his face in long rubbery creases. “I drove that car down here myself. Didn’t get stopped nare a time.”
“You seen Ordell?” Cot said.
“Not lately,” Jackie said. “Miss Ella picked me up at the bus station in Miami and I drove the rest of the way.”
“How’d you get up to the bus station?”
“Jokey Bivins carried me.”
“What about Jimmy?”
“I had to leave him.”
A mist of complicatedness, confusion and mischance was forming in his mind. “Let’s drop it,” he said.
“I didn’t bring it up.”
His mother said, “I expect you’ll find Ordell over snooping after Marcie.”
She seemed fey, shy, almost indistinct. A breeze lifted a reef of flowers in the poinciana tree by the street and set it back. Spring had stuffed the town with new blooms. He wanted to tell his mother to lie low, wanted to force her onto a plane or a ship, but he knew it was no longer any use to try. “I think you need to go to Cuba, Mama.”
“I’ve thought that myself.”
She could see in his face he meant what he said, that he was scared, peeled back from his sureties. But there was something else. He tapped his cheekbone with his foreknuckle, an old habit. She could not always read him now. Was there more, more than she could know? As with Rafael? It was as if a part of them had moved into shadow. She felt a chill.
“You got any more of that cereal?” he said.
She smiled and got to her feet and they embraced. She smelled differently now, he thought, slightly sour, bland, sunworn, the old strong odors of childhood become snips, faded flares. Her body was not frail in his arms but pared down, sinewy. He tipped her head back, placing the heel of his hand against her hairline, as he had done as a child, smoothing skin and hair both, and kissed her lightly on the lips.
“Memory lane,” she said, her voice creaking, and disengaged herself.
Out in the street Johnny Lowery towed his sister Ronnie, a slow-minded skinny woman, in a wheeled seat attached to the rear of his bicycle. They were both over fifty and, so Cot knew, inseparable. Johnny gave him a severe nod of the head. A mockingbird in the little lime tree by the porch made a mewing sound. Just then, down the street, police cars turned the corner. Cot stepped back into the yard, whirled, and ran along the side of the house, through the backyard where Jackie had the drum smoker going and into the lane. Mrs. Cranson, in a blue pinafore, was shaking out a small owl quilt on her front porch. She waved and as she did the quilt, in full fling, collapsed over her. He laughed out loud and was suddenly happy and crossing a tiny space in which happiness was stuffed in every corner and you could snatch it loose as you passed, and this passed—it was clear—but still you carried the traces and perfumes of it as you went. I won’t tell anybody, he thought and almost shouted, barreling along in big strides. He walked quickly down the lane and out on Constance. A couple of tourists in matching muscle shirts were putting their bicycles into a rack outside the Sponge House hotel.
“I’ll get those for you,” he said taking the blue racer from the larger of the two men. The man didn’t want to let the bike go, but Cot insisted.
He pedaled up the street, turned left on Harden and took the shortcut through the municipal cemetery to the Bakewell house up a little shaded driveway just past Knockout Lane. He went around back, past a large red bougainvillea draped over a big stake frame, and entered the house through the back door. Ordell was sitting in a pink banquette built into a little nook off the kitchen before a clumped mess of pancakes. He was reading the paper that had a picture of Jimmy’s plane in color on the front page. Ordell looked up, unsurprised it seemed. He pushed scarlet reading glasses up his forehead.
“It’s too bad about Jimmy,” he said.
“How about CJ?” Cot said. He hit Ordell with his fist in the side of the head. The punch sent him sprawling down the bench. He slid under the table. One hand was still on the surface, groping at the spilled pages. He came up with a pistol in his other hand.
“Come on, Ordell.”
Cot batted his gun-hand away, knocking it against the back of the booth. Ordell dropped the pistol. It fell under the table. “Damn,” Cot said. Ordell made a face. Cot dived and snatched up the pistol. Ordell tried to climb over him, scrabbling for handholds on his body. He kneed Cot in the side. Ordell had played on the line in high school football. He was clumsy and slow but played with an insurgent bitterness that made him dangerous. He kneed Cot again, this time in the face. Cot’s head banged against the strut holding the table up. He went out for a second, coming almost instantly to, and for a flash thought he was in his mother’s garage playing with plastic soldiers in the dust. Ordell was suddenly right beside him. Where did he come from? Then he remembered and tried to swing around, but Ordell was stabbing at him with a table fork. The fork struck him in the cheek. Cot cried out. Ordell was stabbing him. The points felt like bee stings. He ducked and got hold of the pistol that he had dropped when Ordell kicked him. He rolled onto his back under the table. Ordell was suddenly out of sight. He felt the blood on his face. He fired twice through the table top. Then, for a moment, as if he had just waked upstairs in the bed in their guest bedroom, the one with the yellow candlewick spread he had always liked and the window that looked down onto a yard filled with blossoming ruella bushes, he rested.
A voice, one he almost recognized, a woman’s voice, said, “Throw the gun out, Cot.”
“Or what?” Cot said.
“Or I’ll shoot you.”
The voice, familiar but unplaceable, sounded as if it was a small distance away. Probably hiding behind something. “Okay,” he said.
He slid the gun out onto the yellow tile floor.
“The other one too,” the voice said.
“Is that you, Isabella?”
“It is indeed. How you doing, Cot?”
“I’m a little worn out to tell the truth.”
“Slide that other pistol out on the floor.”
“You handling things for Ordell?” Isabella was a police detective, younger than them, a woman with coppery hair she wore tucked up behind her head, smarter than the men around her.
“You shouldn’t have come over here bothering the county attorney, Cot. Slide the gun out.”
She would shoot him, he knew that. He slid Bert’s gun along the floor. There was one more, his, tucked under his shirt. “Can I come out? It’s kind of cramped under here.”
“Come out backwards,” Isabella said. Isabella Mouson. Ex-goalie on the state champion girls’ water polo team. Former student of classical languages at FSU. She was the one recommended the translation of The Georgics he was reading.
“You know he killed CJ, don’t you?”
“We’ll get to that.”
Cot shuffled butt first out from under the big table. The room smelled now of cordite and maple syrup. Ordell was leaning through the hall doorway talking into his phone. He issued a look at Cot that had no friendliness in it. Cot got to his feet. Ordell grimaced and glared at him, his wide Carpathian forehead unwrinkled.
“Oh, come off it, Ordell.”
“You prick.”
There were many choice rebukes Cot could apply here, but he held his tongue. He remembered that he wanted to ask Ordell if he was still an animist. He wanted to tell him he could see how in a place like this—seaswept and lonely among the mangroves—you could go for a religi
on like that. “Did you know the pythons have made it across Seven Mile?” he said.
“I heard that,” Isabella said. She pulled a large blue bandana out of her back pocket and tossed it to Cot. “For your face.”
He caught the bandana with one hand and with the other pulled his pistol and shot Isabella in the shoulder. She sagged against the counter and fired a shot that broke a windowpane over the booth. Her face went white.
“I’m sorry, Izzie,” Cot said. The policewoman tried to shift the pistol to her good hand but Cot was quick and plucked it from her. Two of the knuckles on that hand were scarred where she’d smashed her fist against the side of a pool years ago. He helped her to the floor, gathered up Bert’s gun, hers and the extra. He poked hers down the garbage disposal and turned it on and then off quick; the noise was dispiriting. “You sit still,” he said and kissed her on the forehead. She had pulled into a fetal position and lay softly gasping. He was sorry, yeah, sorry lathered with a sadness like an animal’s, as he saw it, a fox, say, lying under a bush waiting out the end of the hunt.
Ordell had quit the premises. He never liked guns. The adrenaline had made Cot giddy. He raced down the hall, making kicky little dance steps as he went. He hadn’t heard the front door slam, so maybe Ordell was still in the house. A sudden conundrum. Was there time to check upstairs? “You there, Ordell?” No answer. “What’d you do with the stones?” he yelled, not so loudly the police force hurrying to this spot might hear.
He checked the front porch. No sign of him. Wind shoveling itself out of a young poinciana. He yelled back up the front stairs “I’m going to shoot Isabella if you don’t come down.”
Nobody answered. Shouts, appeals, statements of fact—none of that would work with Ordell. And it wasn’t just Ordell—you never really got to run your plan out as devised. The measure was in what you made up when it haywired. Some guys pulled a gun, some sneaked, some waited, some got out of there, some capered and yelled, some prayed, some just kept cooking. He simply moved, glancing off a hunch. It was getting late. Shadows, mixed and pliant, clotted under the big mahogany tree, closing in on dark. A skinny breeze, almost not there, slid up the driveway. He crossed the open space, took the little path that ran through senna bushes around and past the Lovelaces’ yard and stopped at the street across from the cemetery. A lone cyclist, balancing a child-sized rocking chair on the handlebars, pedaled slowly up the street. The light from the laddering sun seemed stalled among the tallest grave markers.
He crossed the street and entered the cemetery though the unlatched side gate. His cheek had stopped bleeding but he dabbed at it with the bandana anyway. In the distance a few tourists were taking pictures of the Kagle’s big ziggurat tomb. He wished he was carrying a cat in his arms, or maybe he was thinking of a baby. He and Marcella rarely talked about such as that—small, bustling enterprisers, offspring, making irresistible demands. She said it would make her go blind if she did.
He crossed the cemetery to the far side where CJ’s family compound rose in its stones among a small stand of coconut palms. A large ficus, once carefully trimmed, now shaggy, loomed over the large coral stone chamber. The black iron front door was locked with an old-fashioned Scandinavian padlock that Cot had known how to jimmy since he and CJ were eight years old. Nobody about, the grounds empty of the living. He let himself in. Before he closed the door into darkness he looked at CJ’s casket, a golden metal vessel with recessed handles set on an upper shelf to the side. Cot had no illusions about CJ’s ghost being in the room with him. A mournfulness curled around him softly, running its spiky teeth across his skin. The vault was a shadowy station between the living and the dead. An intense pressure like something trying to come through subsided before it could. He burst out sobbing, so hard that he bit his fist to stop. But he didn’t want to stop. After a while he let the dark back in. He sat on the rear bench and leaned against the wall that was warm and dry. In the quiet, unallusive lightlessness he settled himself to wait.
For a time Ella drifted through the rooms of her house like a spirit returning to its natural form. She touched the curtains, the counters, the bedsteads, the dressers, the huge cabinet in the hall that Cot liked to hide in as a boy. Each seemed to rise out of a massive stillness. She saw how time could stop and rest in these simple places and thought how there must be many other such around the world, disused buildings, forgotten stretches of road, houses in cutover fields, scrub meadows, caves, ruins in deserts that themselves were quiet spots where time lay like an old cat sleeping. She hardly wanted to wake the silent rooms. But she could not stop herself. She lay down on the yellowed sisal rug in the living room and listened to the little house geckos chirping like docents. She folded back the old blue spread on her bed and lay on the clean sheets underneath. Dreams almost captured her there, but she shook them off and rose and moved on. In a pool of sunlight in the hall she knelt and said a prayer, offering it like a fingered rosary to Whatever might take it. She did not wish to hurry the sleeper, but her movements became more purposeful, more engaged with the beating of her own heart. Arise, she said silently, the Redeemer has come, and stopped in the kitchen—that still held its faded bundle of afternoon light like a sheaf of yellow seagrass in its arms—and laughed out loud. Arise! The Redeemer has come! She drank a glass of water straight from the tap, the chalky, dust-tasting island water that she disliked. She found a broom standing straight as a soldier in the closet and went through the rooms sweeping the dust ahead of her. She stripped the beds, the couches, pulled down the curtains and sent them with Jackie to the laundromat. She raised the rugs off the floor and hauled them to the backyard where she beat the old dead dust out of them. She washed the floors with oil soap, washed the walls, got down on her knees in the bathroom and cleaned the floor, tile by tile, careful to excavate the curdled dust from the little grout troughs. She washed all the dishes, the pots, everything in the kitchen that could be washed. She dusted lamps, polished tables, carefully wiped the books in the old red-painted bookcase. The house took on a brightness it had not known since the early days of her marriage. Time started up again, roved like a hunting dog into the lost fields, and returned, headed out to the new lands. She danced and capered. “Carry me!” she cried. “Oh, carry me!” It was as if the world, or life itself, would snatch her up and swing her around dancing in the charming sunlight. She sat in the east window seat looking out at the pale purple flowers of the frangipani tree. She ran a bath and got into the tub and listened to Bach’s oboe concerto on her little player while she lazed in the cool water. In the spaces between the notes she thought she could just hear Bach’s wife calling him to supper.
She was thinking of an old bathing suit she loved as a girl, picturing it draped over the back porch rail drying in sunlight when Ordell Bakewell walked into the bathroom. He was wearing his pinstriped suit pants and a white shirt and carrying a black pistol. For an instant she wanted a cigarette, something she’d not tasted for thirty years. “Hello, Ordell.”
“Hey, Mrs. Sims.”
His face looked raked back by wind, or by a hard hand, strained and pressured, the pale shining skin worn nearly through. “You look tired,” she said.
“Actually I’m feeling pretty fit.”
She thought of her son, of the brightness in his eyes that as a child had been like a promise that nothing terrible would happen to any of them. She remembered her husband and pictured him leaning over his work table bringing lovers to life in pictures. She blessed him, blessed Jackie, blessed her son, and experienced a declining and simple tenderness. She never heard the shot, and the bullet entering her brain burned too briefly for her to worry about it.
A little after midnight Cot slipped through a section of bent-back fence that let out onto Conover Street, walked up to Cromartie’s All-nite Store, and got a pernil sandwich and a cold can of ginseng tea. The Bangladeshi man behind the counter had a family resemblance to Cot’s friend Rajah, his brother, who was on his way to jail on a tax dodge—probably alr
eady there—but Cot didn’t know his name and the man didn’t know him. He bought half a dozen postcards and stamps and standing at the counter wrote messages to people around town and one to the boys up in Miami, addressed to Spane. Sending postcards was a habit he’d kept up all his life. “Gus said he thinks the world of you,” he wrote to Spane and the boys. “Perseverent was the word he used. ‘They’re game,’ the Big Man said. I miss you too.”
To Marcella he wrote,
“You touch the tenderest parts of me with a gentleness that would make the meanest cut artist shiver. This has always seemed miraculous to me, like waking for the first time on the beach to the sunrise shining in your face.”
He scratched the last line out and wrote over it:
“I’m feeling a little tentative right now, but truth is I’m making progress on serious matters that concern us both. Maybe we should have a baby after all. Or—forget it—I don’t mean to bring up a worrisome topic. Love you lovable you.”
To his mother he wrote:
“Dear Ma: you extend my thinking always. I never could quite keep up with your curiosity about life’s specks and illuminata, but still it tugs me on. I really enjoy our discussions about the why of things but I wonder sometimes lately if life isn’t mostly just taking life in without thinking much about it. I’m dreaming these days of Mexico.”
He wrote postcards to Jim Willys, the police chief, and to the mayor, explaining briefly what Ordell had done. What had he done? Killed CJ and taken the emeralds.
“ . . . and unleashed a string of emergencies from here to Fort Myers, Miami, and back. I realize I have had a part in this. You might even say it’s all my fault. But if Ordell hadn’t raised his greedy hand against CJ I think things would have gone a lot smoother.”
His handwriting got smaller and more rushed as he went. He was careful to make it legible, a problem that went back to his grammar school days. There was always so much to say and such a pressing need to say it. Sometimes these days he looked over his rushed cards and couldn’t make out a word he’d written. He needed a translator for his own scribblings. “ ‘ . . . easy quiet, a secure retreat / A harmless life that knows not how to cheat’ ” he quoted, adding in small printed letters: “Virgil, The Georgics 2.” This in a card to Winky Gold, the county mayor, chief of everybody who lived in the Keys outside KW. As he finished and stacked the cards—five minutes of his time that he was aware was like gold dust draining from a bag—two drunks, no, a drunk and an older man, not the drunk’s partner, came into the store. They both went to the counter, and the drunk took up an argument with the counterman that had clearly begun earlier. As he spoke the man behind him, an older man in a red satin vest and white shorts, pulled change from his pocket. The change got loose and scattered on the floor. Cot and the drunk helped the man pick the silver up. Cot could smell the drunk’s fruity and preservative-saturated breath. He knew him slightly, a man he had chatted with one rainy afternoon a year or so ago about mincemeat pies. They both had favored lard to make the crust flaky. The man didn’t seem to recognize him. Cot handed the few cents back, and the older man thanked him. He got another postcard and standing at the counter wrote his father.
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