The other shoveler and he—both soon to go, if the little man’s cough and his own . . . jam, I’m in a jam, Ma, are any indication—work silently for several minutes. Cot stops and picks up a clod of the crusty earth. “You guys must have run most of the dirt in this place through your fingers, at one time or another,” speaking like a tourist, like a man without depth, the clustered clod falling apart in his hands, his face flushed; he can feel the blood moving in him—as if it wants to get away.
“Not me,” the man says. “I just started here last week.”
After a while the men load the little backhoe on a trailer behind their pickup truck, cover the grave with another scrap of blue tarp, and drive off. Cot squats by the grave and reaches in under the tarp, pats the accurate side. The man working the hoe had been a craftsman. Yes, and he, Cot, the Finisher, knows graves that are only a bed of leaves, a saltwater ditch, a slough, ocean deeps. He feels as if he’s suffocating. Tiny yellow bees buzz among the foamy blossoms of a little geiger bush. He offers his hand. A single bee, tiny as a pumpkin seed, lands on the back, between the knuckles. It walks around, its skinny legs lifting and lowering the velvety body. The bee dips its rear end and stings him. He flings his hand out, shaking the bee loose. It leaves a dab of guts on the head of the stinger, a dot of fire pinned to his skin. He feels lightheaded, then this passes. He rubs the back of his hand on the grass. Clouds to the south look like white reefs before the invisible continents of space.
Marcella returned shortly after dark to tell him she had a boat. They left the cemetery and walked in the darkness down Custard and turned up Windsor and then into Cutpurse Lane to the little duck-by and entered the house. She said she didn’t know where Ordell was. “Just riding around,” she said. She had spoken to him on the phone, a few phones. All landlines. He was still in the Keys. “Looping around,” she said.
“How do the police know to come after him?”
“Jackie. He saw him run out of the house.”
“Jackie was the one found Mama?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes. And he ran down to the store and called the police. They’d already figured out about CJ. Or knew Ordell had put them on a false lead—I’m not sure. It’s going to be a big scandal.”
“Maybe I’ll be the hero.”
“Except for your shooting Isabella, yeah.”
“Is she going to be all right?”
“She’s got a big pain in her shoulder, but umm, yes, they say she’ll be good as new.”
“Except no one ever is.”
“I’m surprised you know that.”
“I need to make amends to her.”
“I’d say so. You can do it as soon as you get out of Raiford, if you ever do.”
She explained about the boat and he said it’s just the ticket—just saying it was—but before they got started he wanted to be there for the funeral.
“They’re pretty committed to running it without your participation.”
He made a mocking face. They were up in the orange and yellow second bedroom that she had taken to sleeping in since she and Ordell stopped having sex. (Completely? Without prejudice.) She went downstairs to get drinks and he lay back on the bed. The room smelled of apples. She liked to keep them around, an exotic fruit in the tropics. If she had money to give me, why didn’t she give it to Ella? But even as he thought this he knew the answer: Ella wouldn’t take it. She probably wouldn’t even acknowledge the offer. So as not to be the agent of embarrassment to Marcella for having made it. She wouldn’t have taken it from him either. Which was why I had to steal the emeralds. Only something irreducible like gemstones, something too pretty, would have worked to pry the inspector—what was his name?—away from his principles—his scaredy-catness. Mama would have looked up from whatever challenging moment she was passing through to find the deed done, her son bustling around the kitchen making breakfast. He’d wanted to see the look on her face. His act of meretricious special pleading she would have seen through as who wouldn’t. He had other motives.
When Marcella reappeared at the door carrying a tray with a pitcher of fresh gin and tonics on it she was crying. He jumped up from the bed and took the tray from her, set it on the big table at the foot of the bed, and eased her into his arms. They lay down together on the bed. She turned away from him, but he drew her back, almost roughly, moving along the edge of what was permissible. He pressed his nose deeply into her intimate, unwashed smells; she had been too busy, too distracted to bathe, and this touched him. They rolled and jolted, whispering their smudged enchantments. Afterwards he opened the two big bedroom windows and let the natural air come through the screens. Tiny birds flitted around the big traveller’s palm off the gallery. He thought of The Georgics, that kept, each one, circling around through planting and breeding, through star charts and rolling hills and honeyed comforts to the fearsome deadly world and the crash of battles, to chaos and trouble that this life in the ruralities was supposed to be a shelter from. Help me, help me was the undercry. Everybody, since the beginning, so Virgil knew, crying it.
He lay back in the bed and slept. When he woke he didn’t at first know where he was. He lay on his back remembering a dream: of the time the Albertson company drove out to the Everglades in two cars and fought the Campos—or intended to—a family of car thieves and disassemblers who had tried to break into the drug smuggling business. In the dream the gangmen were all there, as they had been in life—the shooters and the grim-reaper types and the clowns, the steady hands—all ready to gun down the Campos. But there’d been no shooting. Not by Albertson’s troop. As they pulled up in two Land Rovers before the big unpainted house, old Mr. Campo had come out on the porch. They had sat in the vehicles, waiting to see what he would do. What he did was this: he walked down the wide plank front steps, knelt in the yard, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. This was in life. In the dream the old man didn’t even have a gun. In the dream he drifted down the steps on light feet and in the yard, instead of kneeling, lifted off the ground and flew away. Cot stood by the car watching him dwindle into the clear sky. He wanted to rise too. An anguish, harsh, unpulverized by time, poured through him as he watched the old man dwindle until he disappeared. He felt as if his heart was being crushed. Oh no, he cried in the dream, oh no. He slept again and in another dream Marcella appeared in a pointed green hat like the one Robin Hood wore. She didn’t seem to know him. He fled into tall golden bushes and fell.
He waked with her lying beside him clothed in soft white pants and linen shirt, kissing his face. He told her about the Campo dream. “What happened in real life?” she said.
“Mr. Campo cleared the matter up.”
“I’ll bet.”
He touched her face. Every part of it, subtle shelving, patch and stain, was beautiful to him. Nowhere on her body was an ugly spot. Still, he always saw her imperfections. The abraded nest of acne scars on her left cheek. The dent in her long nose. The tiny healed-over rip in her left earlobe. She was getting older and age was not being kind to a face raised in tropic sunlight. He sensed the sadness she felt about this. She wasn’t like his mother who moved through her life as if there was nothing beyond the passing lashes of loved ones that could harm her. Cot knew that Marcella often stood in front of the long mirror on her back porch appalled and overcome by her disasters. Bursting squalls of disillusionment and failure. They were both like that and both shied from admitting it.
In the night he woke, sure someone was in the house. He slipped down the stairs and walked through the rooms with his pistol in his hand. If he came on Ordell he would shoot him. But he found no one. He tried the doors; they were all locked. He went out on the front gallery and sat in the glider looking down the lane. The big sodium lamp out on the street cast a diffuse radiance back into the bushes. A big, slab-sided cat crossed the lane, returned his look, and slipped into the shadows. Ordell, he thought, come and gone. He went back upstairs, dressed and re-ent
ered the cemetery, made his way through the internments stacked like casket condos, and let himself into CJ’s mausoleum. He lay down on the bench and slept.
******
On a hot afternoon when the air is filled with the scent of almond blossoms they bury his mother. The crowd spreads out in little clumps from the grave site across other plots, so it looks as if whole families have come to observe special ceremonies for their personal dead. The priest begins the service with a flourish of turning pages. He finds what he’s looking for and peers deeply in, straining to make out the print in the bright sunlight, and reads a passage that promises eternal life. Cot sees this. Wearing a black baseball cap he’s taken from the hall closet at Marcella’s, one of Ordell’s, he slips from the mausoleum and enters the sunlight. He hasn’t shaved for several days now, but he doesn’t really think this will disguise him and on this he’s correct. Arnie Davis, city editor at the paper, spots him right off. Arnie flicks a waist-high wave that Cot acknowledges with a nod. The air has the brilliant and uncomplicitous, wild-eyed feel of a sea breeze that has blown steadily all night. Everything but the oxygen has been swept out of it. Clouds like puffs of cannon fire hang distantly in the southwest. Bill Nolen, a silversmith who makes trinkets he sells in stores around town, recognizes him. He speaks to his wife, a short unfriendly woman who has for two years pretended she has cancer. She scowls at him, tugs a sleeve, and word moves on.
Then a cop, Frankie Garcia, known as Friendly Frank when they were in school together, sees him. He punches his phone and speaks into it. Cot moves into the crowd. He sees some of Albertson’s men over beyond the low iron picket fence surrounding the Beauchamp plot. The priest hovers over the grave, hanging above it as if over a precipice. The boys, Scofield and Buster, among others, catch sight of him. They shy off to the left, moving slowly, but with purpose, past a line of soursop bushes. The cops catch the news like a scent. There’re plenty of them, a few dressed in their formal uniforms of dark blue and white, others in their workaday pale blues, all well armed. Cot keeps moving, slipping along the ragged edges of the crowd. There must be two hundred people standing around. The priest dives cleanly into the eulogy, words like aces dealt off the top of the deck. The casket is a dull, unpolished gold, half covered with bulls-eye daisies. The breeze blows the priest’s forelock into his eyes. There’s a quiet bumping and shuffling among the gangmen, noticed by now by members of the police force. Barky Wilson, an Albertson shooter from Opalacka, son of shrimpers and river folk, pulls his pistol. Cot watches in fascination from half behind a large tombstone that has words from the Temptations inscribed into its cherry marble: It Was Just My Imagination. Mine too, Cot thinks. The cops are pulling their guns too. The boys are getting theirs out with the same picky familiarity and nervousness as the cops. High above the cemetery the little buzzards circle, draped and ready. Cot has his pistol in his hand, a pale yellow bandana covering it. You keep doing irresponsible, dumb things, he thinks, but the thought doesn’t really bother him.
Marcella is standing next to the priest. Jackie and his friend Morty Smalls are beside her with their hair slicked down. Cot slides off toward the east gate, a narrow opening between two brick pillars. The street beyond is littered with white almond blossoms. Old Mrs. Lazarus is out in the street sweeping flowers off the pavement. Cot slips through the gate and sprints down the street. The two outfits, gangsters and police, make their way, at first at creep speed then with swiftness and alarm, after him. He runs straight down the middle of the street the block and a half to his mother’s house, cuts in through the yard, crosses the lane, cuts behind the old Mosley place, nodding to sunbathers lying in pink plastic loungers around the tiny sliver of a pool, dashes across Fleming and around the corner, and sprints for the docks.
The cops and gangsters come behind running. They’re slowed down somewhat by the cops’ attempts to make the Albertson employees quit the chase. Captain Barkley orders the gangsters to cease and desist, to disband and head out of the area, but the gangsters, mostly led by Pointy Mizel, laugh and order them out. There’s much yelling and the cops pull mace and tear gas which does not particularly impress the gangmen. The shooting starts about halfway down Margaret Street, as they pass under a huge mango tree. Pops, cracks, the clap of Glock pistols, even the tattered metallics of a machine gun. Bullets whap trees, thunk bodies, and skid off the pavement leaving silver marks children will touch in awe. Men stumble, pitch headfirst out of life.
At the bottom of Margaret Cot picks up the boardwalk that runs along the waterfront. A large sign offers day trips to the Dry Tortugas. Dusty sponges hang on strings at Mary Harris’s shop on the corner. Manly Soledad, son of a Cuban farmer, waves to him from the door of Coupole’s, a fish bar. They were briefly in Cub Scouts together, before Cot was kicked out for over-arguing. Manly is just back from Raiford where he has done two years for laundering fish money at his father’s restaurant out on Stock Island. Cot dashes down the boardwalk, the boards popping and clanking as he runs. A tourist family yells encouragement as he goes by, as if they are spectators at a race they know all about. The boardwalk jags right and Cot runs along past the old turtle corrals and along the docks. Sloops and sport boats are racked in long rows. Somewhere along here is Justin Peoples’s Mako. A mingling panic shivers him. Then he sees the boat, sees Justin sitting in it with the motor running. Marcella went over this with him yesterday. She’s supposed to be here, but he’s already realized there’s no way under the circumstances—cops, reporters, townsfolk everywhere—for her to accomplish that. Grief bites like a small ugly insect. Justin stands up in the boat. Cot scrambles down the little ladder to the floating dock and crosses quickly past the flotilla of dinghies in from the mooring field off Wisteria Island. He cocks a look back and sees Marcella. She’s coming fast on a scooter around the corner from Elizabeth Street. The scooter wobbles and nearly goes down. A sudden disfigurement of alarm appears and vanishes in her face. “How is it, Justin?” Cot says not taking his eye off Marcella.
“Sorry about your mother, Cot.” Justin says, a speech Cot figures he’s rehearsed.
Back a ways shots bust and whine. Voices of the wounded or the shot near to death raise their cries.
Marcella pulls up, letting the scooter slide like a heavy seal to its side, and comes down the ladder at a skip. Justin makes one-handed grabbing motions at her. Cot and Marcella don’t bother to hug or even acknowledge each other. But he’s waited for her—I should have gone on—and he scrambles behind her into the boat. He’s put his pistol back under the green Hawaiian shirt he wears, but as he gets in the boat he takes it out again and waves it, per arrangement, at Justin, yelling at him to get out of here.
They’re almost out of the inner harbor when the pursuers arrive at the docks, one or two at first, then in clusters. The groups are no longer shooting at each other (eight down) but they haven’t made a truce. The pursuers don’t see Cot’s party until, just as the Mako speeds past one of the big yachts tethered at the outer docks and into open water, a shout goes up. Somebody fires a few shots but the firing is brief and futile. The escapers are out past the island headed west toward the flats before anybody can do anything about it.
Soon enough they’re in the Refuge. Green-topped, brown-topped islands lie around them in their ancient scattering. The water that’s as clear as if from a tap looks yellow from the color of the bottom sand. They run fast along channels only a few feet deep. Justin spends his life out here making his living so Cot leaves the divagations and nautical finery to him. Twenty minutes later they come to Ordell’s sport fishing boat, a fifty-foot Cooper Sea Cruiser he bought up at the boat show in Miami, bobbing at anchor, and Justin hangs the Mako next to it.
“Don’t you want to knock me on the head or something, Cot?” Justin says as Cot starts to leave the sleek little flat-decked boat. Without a word or any other sign Cot turns and catches him above the eye with the butt of his pistol. Justin crumples soundlessly into the well. Cot scrambles back into the boat and
picks him up. Marcella looks down from the Cooper deck. In her eyes is a hard knowingness but no alarm. They have barely spoken on the way out. Blood pours from the cut above Justin’s eye. He’s groggy and he doesn’t know where he is. “Shit, Justin,” Cot says. “I’m sorry.”
Marcella hurries along the deck and dashes inside to start up the boat. Cot scoops water and bathes Justin’s face. This takes only seconds, but in that time that seems to stretch out from them flexibly as a cast line, he feels a deep and sustaining affection, for Justin, for Marcella, for the world around them. With a fine cold tip grief touches a spot. Justin coughs and comes all the way to. His eyes wander, but then he catches what’s up. He jerks like a puppy gone to sleep in your lap. “It’s me,” Cot says.
Men in Miami Hotels Page 16