“You once told me that your parents’ heavy hand had worn out all familial feeling in you. Well, it’s never been that way for me. My love for you, Papa, keeps winging over the waters. One trade item that no embargo can keep out.”
He paid for the cards and for the tall can of iced tea and the sandwich and went out into the night. The air was clean smelling and cool. He mailed the cards at a box on the corner. As he lingered a moment leaning against the big metal container inhaling sweet airs of night he realized he had known the other gent too, the man in the vest: Rev. Buckle from Grace Episcopal church; the rev’d taught him the Nicene Creed when he was twelve. Back then the priest had been a stocky man, the flesh stretching the skin with health, his glittery blue eyes snapping shrewd looks at him as he recited. Now a man grown old. Discrete swirls of white hair, loose jowls, a dark patch above his lip like a phantom mustache. The old man hadn’t recognized him either. Maybe he too had lost some essential identifier. As Cot mused by the mailbox the reverend came out. He raised his face to the light from the overhead mercury lamp and sniffed the air. Stood a moment looking vaguely around. Then leaning forward like a heavy object tipped out of its inertia he plunged ponderously into the dark village night. For an instant Cot wanted to be the sort of person who spoke to aged benefactors. A plug of sadness had lodged under his breast bone. Old malarkies that took on unforeseen resonances. He had forgotten the creed the old preacher had taught him. Did it include the part about resurrection of the body? Yes, it did. Not zombies walking around but reanimated souls in their best clothes. His mother had once been Episcopalian but had changed her religion to Catholic to please his father, and then his father had repudiated the Catholics. She was left dangling among the papists. But not really. She had climbed down and walked away through the scruffy ecumenical streets of Key West.
He massaged a place in his chest that hurt. Maybe only a little muscle that had been over-stretched out in the Gulf.
Two tall men on bicycles, the bikes sporting plaques identifying them as tourist wheels, passed by in the street. Both men, as if they were a team, pedaled in the same stately manner. Both were barefoot. It was great to come down to the tropics without ever having to leave the country, everybody knew about that. And good to ride a bike at night in your bare feet. The sea winds blew the stinks of the addled republic away. Not just the beefy and chlorosulfuric stench of the cities, but the funks of the ruralities as well, the crotty smell of cornfields and the coal oil reek of mountains. He laughed, whispery and low. Green growing crops—skinned deserts, elevated scenarios where you had to climb and look out over territory—the natural world, made him uneasy. Dirt. Sap. Fruit rotted black and mushy. Coconuts could drop out of a tree and kill you. Plains, deserts, country roads were clogged with snakes and horrible biting bugs. He’d stopped his car once and fired a full Uzi clip into bushes just to keep the swamp back. He knew what growing things wanted. Yeah, so why Virgil? he thought. It was his way—he knew it. Cross-grained to the end. It was homage and hope, it was the little boy trying to become some strange and special thing. Farms! Where you had to go to bed early and everything smelled of cow shit! Mountains hard to climb, hard to climb down from! Fields! Tomatoes with stony green fruit hanging like tiny grenades in the armpits of the branches! He liked to sit on the curb outside Smacky’s Fin up in Miami eating shrimp salad with his fingers. He liked that, Virge. He liked to squeeze lime juice into his mouth, Marcella liked that too. Christ! He wished she was here.
Back in the mausoleum he lay on the bench sipping the cold tea. The air in the tomb was dry, comforting in its dryness. A faint dust on everything. He got up and ran his hand over CJ’s casket. He would like to look at him once more, but he was reluctant to break the seal. Maybe he was only shy, same old Cot, letting opportunity slip by. Except at work, and as he could have said once, except for on a football field. People had always been a little blurry to him. He got up and went outside. Stars everywhere like bristly bits tossed aside, crumbs. He crossed to the other side of the cemetery and entered the small compound where Marcella’s people were buried. Oleander bushes flowered along one side of a low rusty iron picket fence. Cot lay down under one of the bushes and went to sleep and dreamed of dogs running ahead of him across a stony field somewhere near the ocean.
Marcella found him there in the early morning, curled up, his face pressed into a tuft of bahia grass, dreams, rusty and creaking, scurrying for the exits. She told him Ordell had shot his mother. Cot sat in the grass in the fresh soft light and listened, but what she said sounded stupid. A flock of crows wheeled above distant bushy trees, unaware of what had happened, but maybe they too knew, he thought, maybe they had seen it all and the flycatchers too and the cats and the bugs and the goosefoot grass and hibiscus flowers and stray elements of breeze and creation in general had seen it. An insufferable sense of humiliation filled his body so suddenly he was choking on it before he could even think what was happening.
“How do you know this?”
“He told me.”
“Where is he?”
“He said he was going to turn himself in.”
“Will he do that?”
His mother’s life an evacuation, a country, a race just wiped off the map.
Marcella’s face was marked with tiny seeps and abandonments of fatigue. A small, disamplified breeze, breeze in a minor key, brushed by them carrying the smell of jasmine.
“I better find him,” he said.
For a single moment that was almost more than he could bear the full weight of grief pushed against him, bland and featureless and solid. He wanted to run away. Spring from that place, fired like a shot into another world, but he couldn’t move. The moment passed as it came but it left a sensation as if he’d been entered by a nothingness, a feral slow-wittedness without design or purpose or connection to anything else, inevitable and vast, tasteless, formless, a grinding stupidity and ignorance older than the world. He felt suddenly emptied, tossed aside, beyond rescue.
He got up and stamped his feet on the scruffy, salt-gray grass. Buried in the grave he nearly stood on was Duffy Holt, Marcella’s great grandfather, a schooner captain, a man left bewildered, so they said, when the wooden sailing ships became only curiosities. He had been buried in the uniform of blue and braid he had devised for himself and walked around town in, beached, a ridiculous and touching figure. Cot started to move away but a fatigue beyond his late weariness stopped him. He sat down on a gravestone, above the last resting place of Oscar Cord, child of Hattie and Homer. He looked bleakly up at Marcella. He wanted to ask her what to do. Where should he go?
She took a step and touched his face, upturned to gaze at her. He pushed up the front of his hair with a hand she hadn’t realized was (recently) scarred across the knuckles. Rumbling, growling, screeching, the morning flight from Miami passed overhead, a heavy jet that seemed to wobble and sway as it went. The plane disappeared beyond the buildings and trees and he waited for the crash that didn’t come. He leaned back, away from Marcella’s dry fingers. Her hand hung a moment in the air and then went away. He cupped his hand over his mouth. Grasped his lips softly between finger and thumb and let go. He slid to the ground and curled up in a ball on his side. Then he relaxed his legs and turned facedown into the grass. He could smell the chalky coral earth, smell the juice in the grass. As a child he had imagined embracing the earth in this graveyard, this largest open field on the island, and somehow swinging the planet in his arms. Everywhere around him all his life had been a vastness—of sky or ocean, wildernesses that were continuously running changes. No two days ever the same. But here, in this place, was some sort of unification, of lastingness. One of his grandfathers here—one of the great greats—had been a pirate, before, during the War of 1812, being commissioned in the US Navy as a captain running the British blockades. He had lived to 106 and was buried under a stone that praised him for finally going straight. Cot didn’t care about that. Through a haze he looked up at Marcella. He wanted to th
rust his hand right through her body into the sunlight on the other side. You could tear through the fabric of the universe if you wanted to they said and knew how. But he didn’t know how. Ah, dog. He turned on his back, a movement that took every bit of his strength. He would have to be moved from now on by derrick, raised by davits and lowered into whatever mischief was ready for him. The thought made him laugh out loud, a short bark.
Marcella looked half at him, half startled. She was afraid of what he might do. She wanted this to go away, wanted all this to go away, even as she pitied him. Him too. It was okay to leave a bare patch. A raw, rubbled patch where nobody could remember what had been there before. Same for her. And for Ordell. For Ella Sims, the former Ellarese Jax. From space you could see little patches rubbed bald by grief. She knelt beside him. She wanted to touch him, to calm him, help him, but she didn’t dare to. Her hand went out, her fingers brushed lightly over his chest. Nobody knew how brave she was—except Cot, and now he didn’t anymore know.
He smiled at her. Her face, eroded by what he took to be sadness, looked expressionless, as if the whole array of feelings had been erased and now there was only a single, thin, and diminished specie left, a faint denomination that made her face seem the face of an over-corrected child. He pushed up on his arms, turned over and got to his knees. Marcella touched his hair. Her fingers slid down along his neck, found his face, his lips. He opened his mouth. She slid her fingers in, and he sucked them. The taste was of mangoes, and faintly of hand lotion.
He pulled away and got up, snapping off glances, looks, regards like a ticket punch. “You were about to say?”
“We have to get out of here. Get out of the daylight.”
“Where’s Ordell?”
“He’s in his car, riding around the island.”
In a cotton sack with a picture of a chimp in a pirate’s hat on it Marcella had brought a change of clothes, a sandwich (egg salad), a ripe mango, an apple, a copy of the Rule of St. Benedict, a box of .38 caliber bullets, a thousand dollars in fifty dollar bills, and his mobile phone. “I have another idea”—which he told her about as they walked back through the grave plots. They stopped at CJ’s family vault. The sun caught in the leaves of the almond tree above it. “Would you rather come home with me?” she said.
“I don’t see how we can work that.”
“Maybe I can think of something.”
“The funeral will probably be tomorrow.”
“Yes. Ella left instructions with me.”
“Are you—were you—her lawyer?”
“You know that.”
“I forgot.”
“A day for the funeral home business, the viewing—home style now—”
“Jeeze—”
“ . . . viewing . . . and contemplation—”
“Contemplation?”
“That was her word. She wanted people to have time to think about her, maybe sit with her awhile as they thought.”
“Is that contemplation?”
“Don’t start that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You haven’t gotten much sleep.”
“I wish you’d brought an air mattress.”
“My innards feel hand-wrung,” she said smiling bleakly.
Beyond the far end of the cemetery a man was raising a Florida state flag in his small front yard. The man ran the flag smartly up the silver pole, tied it off, stepped back, saluted, whirled, his blue shirt opening off his pale belly, and ran into the house. Every movement he’d made had been with the rapidity of anxiety, of alarm. But he hadn’t looked their way and anyway they were too far off for him to be sure who they were. Over there was where Marcella and Ordell lived, their yellow, biota-embraced house hidden behind its huge trees, its crowding shrubs. You couldn’t know for sure what people were seeing or what they thought about it, until later.
8
He mostly spends the day inside the mausoleum reading by flashlight, sleeping and burrowing into feelings he doesn’t have a name for, sunken, louring, caved-in-on, spumed up out of deep vents and seeps, those feelings. Twists and false appellations, a meandering spirit, chilled and shrunken, and a sense of the looseness of time, the unavailability of recompense, of shallowness in desire, of the trivialization of all things through calling them by names and even spending time with them are upon him. He wants everything to just stand there. He doesn’t even want to touch it. The close air of the dead world is all around him. This pseudoeternity. He gets up and lies by the door, breathing in, but not enough outside air gets through. He cracks the door slightly, letting in a sliver of light. He sits in this light nodding and patting his face, leaning forward like a drunk man at a bar, talking silently to CJ, to the faded dead, to his father in Cuba bearing down on his big pages at his table, to the surroundings themselves and the appetites and calamities he draws small reckonings upon as they pass through his mind, but not to his mother. I’m crazy now, he thinks but that isn’t the word for it. He knows no word that will do and leans back into the darkness as if into the cupped hands of absence itself.
Just after dark Marcella slips into the cemetery and calls to him, and he staggers out into the sweet-smelling world and they lie on the grass inside the little family compound where his maternal grandfathers and grandmothers are buried. She has brought a blanket to ward off the bugs. Clouds hide the moon but they can see by the leftover starlight. From out in the streets murmurs of living passersby drift in. He feels a loneliness as if they’re on a big dark ship sailing silently past the resting fleet. World of business and affections, of focused intent. They don’t comment on what she said back in the Big Cypress prairies about leaving; she’s spoken such as that many times before. She lies on top of him in the grass and they work their clothes loose enough to hook up. They often fucked without looking at each other’s bodies, the smells, the broad range of being and pressure enough. The stars wobble in their sockets. Bats tack the night into the heavens. He cries for his mother, at one point gets up and starts dumbly off. He wants to disappear into one of the big wildernesses, not this one of weeds and dirt, but he comes back.
He doesn’t mention desires of this nature to Marcella, but in the afternoon he goes out and stands with the gravediggers as they scratch out his mother’s grave with a little backhoe. He looks out beforehand to make sure he doesn’t know them, and then walks around and comes on them from past the little rusted loggia of the Floret’s Cubano graves. Two men work there. One scrapes and cleans the grass off the rough coral marl the backhoe brings up. The cemetery is the highest point on the island, Solares Hill, the place people will flee to if a hurricane blows the ocean over everything else. A real Cayo Hueso island of bones. He stands there looking into the hole. The backhoe’s big dinosaur teeth are streaked gray. “Precious spot,” he says to the man working the shovel. The man, short with stubby, strong arms, hasn’t looked at him until he speaks.
“How’s that?” he says.
“Last resting place.”
“One hole’s about the same as another on this island.”
“Unless it’s yours, huh?”
“I won’t let them deposit me in this rock, no thank you.” He plans, he says, to be buried back where he comes from, in a farm cemetery out in Kansas. “We got a little rise among some cedar trees where you can look out and see the house and the fields. Got little groundcherry bushes planted all around.”
A pang that’s more than a pang, a new condition, robust and dry, sweeps across his consciousness, takes up its motion, banging at him, and this is not so bad. Even a punch is life, even calumny and persecution—still life. He feels slightly faint—or as if he is entering a new state, a queasy wakefulness without precedent or alteration. A panic surges and subsides. I take everything back, he silently says, touching with the tip of his flip-flop the little tufts of hawkweed and cumberland daisies by the grave. Flowers like sports, show-offs, as if they were encouraging life, the dead surrounded by uncaring really. With one finger he knocks a tear of
f his face, turning away as he does so and catching sight of a large high-flown hawk dipping a wing into breeze. What’s next?
He takes up a shovel—“May I?” “Sure, sure, buddy.”—and helps the man shape the scattering of dirt odds and ends into a pile on a blue scrap of tarp. The grave looks more like a slot than anything else. He’s been to many funerals, it’s one of the rituals in his line of work. When he was younger he’d been on the crew sent to clean out the dead man’s domicile, usually in a hotel, often at the beach. He sorted the cheesy and futile remains of lives lived in single rooms. Into cardboard boxes picked up behind grocery stores he placed the starched shirts and carefully hung pants, the trinkets and pornographic tracts. Men kept odd and familiar things. Varnished chicken feet and statuettes in contorted poses, calendars with the dates inked out—key rings holding keys abandoned by their locks, smeared wine glasses, a copy of the US Constitution once, rusting electric razors, an empty hornets’ nest, shoes with curled up toes, brassieres, trusses like bits of parachute harness looped over coat hangers, studs, medals, coins on which were stamped the faces of kings. The oblate, rounded phraseologies of the funeral services, the blatting words written out on a piece of paper or memorized or come up with on the spot, the preacher’s or priest’s or rabbi’s issuing of the sanctified confidentialities, were lessened, pushed into trivia before the sturdy facts of the photos and rusted diving trophies and the carved coconut doorstops he had placed into cardboard boxes and taken to the Goodwill store (that took them only because he insisted). As far as he was concerned the words were an insult to the gummy razors and the cowboy boots with their tops folded over and the lists of emergency numbers taped to the little refrigerator door. He thinks of this now, these stipulations of grief, and they don’t really make much sense. It doesn’t matter what you say or don’t say, doesn’t matter how seriously you do or don’t take the bleak mementoes of lives no longer in this world. He wants to explain this to the grave diggers but he knows it’s trivial, not much to tell anyone, certainly not a grave digger.
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