“Jesus, you hit hard.”
“I keep stumbling on my way.”
He tries to help Justin to his feet. “Naw,” he says, “Let me sit back down. I’m gon rest a while and then limp around out here for ’em to catch up with me.”
“Sure.” Cot finds his hand and shakes it. “You got my thanks, man.”
“Glad to do it,” Justin says and lies back with his head hanging over the side of the boat.
“You sure you’re all right?”
“Spectacular.”
A jittery, a fine glassine sparkling on the tips of tiny waves. As if the whole sea world is touched by alarm, by tension and nervous collapse.
The big boat engines start with a clap that subsides into a heavy gurgling. Cot climbs the ladder and heads for the wheelhouse. Marcella has already gotten under way by the time he gets there. “Go down and fix us a couple of drinks,” she says.
“In a second.”
He takes her in his arms and holds her tight. A huge, wobbling feeling of relief, of pain and love hauls through his body. It lasts only a second. Behind it a stubby awkwardness, a sense of dislocation and ill-formed plans scrapes by. She breaks away and wheels the boat into the channel and pushes the throttle forward. Before her is a gauge panel containing information Cot has no real understanding of. It reminds him of Jimmy’s plane. He can pick out the speedometer. In a couple of minutes it’s up to 40 knots. The big diesel engines stay quiet even at top speed. Marcella says they will run all day like that. She says the boat can go six hundred miles before the auxiliary tank cuts in.
“That ought to be enough,” Cot says.
He goes forward to the open lounge and sits on a white cushioned bench. A feeling creeping like the wind—but not the wind that’s blowing briskly, handling his face—presses in on him. It’s like somebody’s covering him with a pistol. He’s suddenly rigid with fright. He leans back against the transom waiting for the feeling to pass. It won’t—and then it begins to, slinks off in simpers and smirks. He’s not getting anywhere. Not getting out. Cuba, shabby memorial isle, is in their sights. Banked like a green rug churned up against the Caribbean Sea. In this moment the whole island unaware, indifferent to them, each local compañero going about his business, each madonna, castaway, and fisherman raking together the necessary care and protection for another life in another day. Nobody knows they’re coming. The sky is a rich turquoise blue peppered with tiny clouds like clean white dots. Beneath those dots in KW streets lie the sprawled and indelicate dead. Cops and gangsters. Maybe townspeople too. Little boys will finger stray bullet holes. Tonight a new misery, born in the tropics. He feels as if he’s hanging from a wire suspended between enormous nullities. The best he can hope for is to be left hanging there for a while. The westering sun glances off the water in short sparkling ricochets. Chuck Burle, Spotty Suber, Ennis Placer: cohorts among the fallen. He saw them go down. And Jimmy Nightingale, too. And Jake Rouse and Carl Pickens, cops of Key West, and Joe Cosmopolis who played with him on the football team. The names like wounds he sucks with his tongue. The wind pushes him like a hand. He could fall over backwards easily enough. He could throw himself in the ocean, like some old Roman, Virgilian, from another time. But he won’t. A boy like you is going to pay for every breath he takes—that’s what his father told him. You’re going to pay for it a thousand times if you don’t change but you can’t change and even those who change don’t get any dispensation. Was that true? His life was just a string of wild guesses. The couch under him smells of plastic, and faintly, of vomit. Ordell bought the boat right off the showroom floor. He had to have it, had to, like it was a pair of new shoes, wear it home from the store. He’d driven the boat onto the reef at Key Largo. They had to pull it off with a bulldozer from shore. But the boat was okay. Ordell had made the marina at Garrison Bight by dark, parked it with all the lights on.
As they enter the Gulf Stream long, moiled lines of trash begin to show up. Plastic pails and melon rinds among long streaks of pale grease and cloudy tailings, wooden pallets, coconuts, and the busted housing of a cabin cruiser bobbing with one end tipped high like a possible refuge, slip by. Marcella has to slow down. They push against the big current, heading slightly east at first, not meaning to, but without realizing it steadily losing the track, correcting by feel, then over-correcting, until they’re headed west of where they want to go. Marcella’s no expert with the electronics either. She can’t get the GPS to engage. A squall blows up out of a blue sky and in a moment drenches the boat. They have to run slowly for the rain that seems to pour out of huge reservoirs. The sea bucks like a horse, kicking up spray that whips off the wave tops. They’re all at once climbing the backs of huge swells like lathered hills. The seas break over the bow and kick along the deck in foaming sheets. They can’t see much. Marcella throttles down and runs slowly, climbing the swells as if they ride in one of those clanking funiculars that crawl up the side of mountains. The boat wallows and pitches, trying to slew sideways. They’re both afraid of hitting something, some sea creature or chifforobe or drifting leftover from the remote and useless past. She’s begun chanting, blurting snatches of old songs and prayers, gripping the wheel as she does so.
“I think we’re backpedaling,” he says. He’s just come in from out in the bluster.
She leans over the console peering into what looks like nothing but spray. “Get wet?”
Water drips into his eyes. “Hope we don’t get runned over.”
She starts to say something but stops and to Cot it’s as if her brain’s been jerked up thrashing, her mind that is, and he sees her fighting, losing ground, hating the loss and holding on, her hair that has no gray in it matted against the side of her head, her long nose shiny and red, her hands gripping the wheel as if it’s the rim of a chalice holding the one true elixir. He wants to move up behind her, to spell her, relieve the press and stall of whatever it is nagging through the storm, but he doesn’t, knows she won’t take it. The squall whines and squeals, emptying itself.
By the time the storm lets up they’re rounding the western tip of the long, Lepidosaurian island and pressing on beyond, heading south. She realizes they’ve gone too far, or thinks she does. Dark’s coming on. The squall has burned itself out, and now the ocean lies before them, slowly rising and falling in a long-distance breath, shining and white streaked. They’ve both been sick, Marcella more so.
“Let me take it,” he says.
She bangs her palm against the wheel and bares her horsey teeth. “Take it how? Take it where?” She’s near to cursing him, to flinging down responsibility like an offending appliance. “These fucking reefs run forever.”
Los arricifes de coral, he says silently to himself, backing away, coming up close again.
“Fuck this,” she screams and elbows him.
In her mind she shades him out like she would shade a puppy out of the sun with her hand. The world all around her is dotted now with shaded places. She hates herself for what she’s done, but she doesn’t want to stop doing it. Coverts and hideouts and caves hidden by bushes and forts set up in a world turning to wilderness—that was life, and you took it under your wing as best you could. She makes a noise like a cat would make denying rumors.
He wants to touch her but he knows not to. She leans against the wheel, turning it slightly, shading a little more to the east, maybe the southeast, heading into the dark out of which Judgement Day will come, the sun already climbing hand over hand through the big troughs and valleys of the wild Atlantic. She puts speed to the boat.
Now he can touch her.
He slips behind her and takes her shoulders in his hands. Her hands on the wheel are strong, blotched. There’s nothing much he can say right now. They can smell the land, murky and feculent, a smell like rotting fruit—mangoes maybe—and trash fires. “You’re tired,” he says. The tension in her shoulders begins to give way under his fingers that dig gently in.
“You’re the smart one,” she says and angles h
erself away from him. He lifts his hands off her. “No,” she says.
He can hardly tell what she means, everything between them is so spare, harsh, splintered.
He puts his hands on her again, with just two middle fingers pressing the long muscles in her back. He senses her giving in; senses the coarse, repellent grief, surrender of armies. He lets his hands rest lightly on her. They can go days sometimes without her allowing any touch. He’ll say I thought I was the brutal one, and she’ll only stare at him as if he’s a ruiner of children and pets. He kisses her backbone, following the strung dice downward, touching just enough for the touches to be kisses. It’s as if he’s lifting tiny particles off her body. She says, “I can’t see what’s ahead of me.”
He knows what she means and wishes she hadn’t spoken.
“I never can.”
“You don’t have to.”
He knows what she means there too. “It doesn’t come as naturally as you might think.”
“I don’t think that. But you don’t know.”
“Know what?” The last time he asked what? she said he didn’t know how hard it was to be a woman. That isn’t the only thing, he told her.
“I don’t know,” she says now, which he understands to mean that she knows exactly. He winces, but so deeply inside that it doesn’t show on the surface of his body.
“Everybody gets confused around here this time of night.”
She snorts, bends her head toward the big wheel, turns quickly and kisses him on the lips. “I saw Muncie Baker holding up his hand that was covered with blood. There was a look in Mrs. Tillman’s face that I’d never seen anywhere—so much pain. And Estelle, the ranger at the fort?—she was lying on the ground holding her arms up.”
“Everybody letting go.”
“No, Cot, that wasn’t it.”
Unnerved, something come loose in his mind, he begins to wander around the boat. Three steps down into the big combo living room, kitchen and sleeping compartment. He fiddles with taps, turns on the water, washes his hands, pokes into the refrigerator, pulls out a bottle of seltzer and drinks from it. The refrigerator smells of turnips and faintly of rotten meat. A fold-down table releases rolled-up charts and the red plastic-bound ship’s log.
He sits at the little fold-out seat and reads the log, Ordell’s rushed and twitchy script:
“Hazards of hope and duplicity. Rained all day. No fish in the ocean, we ate cold hamburgers and sat in the stern bay arguing. She won’t give in about anything that is important to me. She senses what matters most and takes that as her own and won’t let me have a sip of it. She treats me like a burglar who’s begging to be let off. I could throw her into the ocean and explain her away like indigestion. Christ. The ocean is so blue you’d think that was the only color God loved. I hate the fucking ocean. Here they come the big swells swollen like a sickness. I might kill her yet.”
That’s for January 18th, this year.
For January 2nd, Ordell wrote:
“Her infidelity’s like a goiter. You ignore it but really you can’t stop thinking about it. rain all day. the Ocean’s gray as ashes. Gulls followed us all the way out crying like the betrayed. they know something we don’t admit to. She says she’s giving up the old life, the one she’s stretched out like a series of bedsheets she tied together to let herself down from a prison—that’s the way she talks—but I don’t believe her. Near Doomsday Shoal the water’s clear as a bell a hundred feet down to a sandy bottom. I would swim down to it and sit all morning resting my nerves. Or maybe screaming.”
December 16th, off Big Elbow Light:
“She dived in and swam a circle around the boat. We were anchored over a coral shelf at the edge of a deep drop-off into blue water. I called to her to get out but she wouldn’t. Then I saw a shark—maybe eight feet long with a white-tipped dorsal—swimming around her. It swam slowly at a distance. I started to call to her again, but i didn’t. I turned back to the book I was reading, a biography of Disraeli—thinking I am the center of this circle—thinking I am trapped like her. But it was a kind of enticement—I knew I could break out. A little later I heard her climbing the ladder. My heart was thumping. I don’t know why—or do—”
December 2, Lat 23.15 Long 81.08:
“All day rode the swells with the engine off. I felt what it is to be flotsam, jetsam, rising and falling with the tremendous weight of the Gulf stream under us. Once I would of thought of this big river of water as infinitely replenishing, as self-cleansing and pure but I can’t believe in such things anymore. You see the trashiness of the ocean, the stains and grease patches riding on it. She came topside and stood there yawning, so beautiful like a lovely horse in the shade. I slapped her across the eyes after she told me she was in love with”
The bottom half of the page and all of the next one back are torn out. He carefully closes the book and tucks it under a small stack of books and folds up the desk. He goes into the forward cabin, lies down but gets quickly up. He starts back out into the big room but that feels too proximate to her, to her kinetics. He can hear her cursing, shouting. There’re no words in what she’s saying, and he tells himself it’s this that keeps him away, repels him. He lies down again. A panic catches him, but he makes himself stay still. Abruptly his mother’s presence is all around him—and not only around: He’s become porous: she sluices in and out of him; maybe leaving a residue, maybe not. For a time he has no memories of her. He has—call them sparks, flashes of a drained, ascetic face, torn by wind; fingers touching chess pieces in a room lit by candlelight; lips washed by a fat, gray tongue. Warm spots and cold spots pulse in his chest. Not far behind his eyes a breeze shakes the red flowers of an achiote bush. A sense of give and take, like a philosophy, rises to power and ebbs. He smells roasting hamburgers, followed by an anguished feeling of emptiness. On the stinging surface of his cheek he feels his mother’s ancient slap. Where she is can she still feel his? He’s sure he believes in a continuing presence. A poke-around, nosy apparitional something, prodding and pausing to fiddle with useless matter, maybe caress it, trying to recall some stumped and useless business that no one else on Earth at this moment has in his mind. Many are thinking about her tonight, but day by day the number will diminish until no one is. They’re thinking of others too this night. Funerals to come. Eventually each of us will lie in an unmarked grave. Spane said that, morbid fellow combining this with that to make a murder. What gives? Cot had quit the football team midseason of his senior year—he didn’t know why. And then quit school just before the Christmas vacation—he didn’t know why—and took the bus to Miami and got a room out at the beach for fifty dollars a week and sat on his little balcony lonely as a gull reading Parsifal and thinking of the bitterness in his soul. He shopped in a Cuban market on Washington and sat in the park eating a papaya with a plastic spoon. Marcella found him there. She brought him a Christmas present of a rolled-up Brueghel print, Isaac Babel’s collected stories, and a plastic pack of jockey shorts. I got a mama for that last, he told her, and she said that woman doesn’t want to speak to you. And she didn’t. Not for years. But after a while things changed. Life was just long enough to wear most folks out. Marcella hadn’t criticized him or asked him to come home. She lay on the bed naked, looking at him. I’ll do anything you want, he said. But she said she didn’t have a thing on her mind.
Tipped left, then left again, fumbling in the dark past Juventud, past Cantiles, Rosario, and Largo del Sur, left turn at the lights of Giron, up the Bahia des Cochinos onward to the playa where the invasion museum sports a Hawker Sea Fury loaded with rockets and on to the narrow strip of sand sloping down from the concrete trenches—unmanned now, going back to grass—where a hundred yards out they drop anchor, row the dinghy in to shore and sleep the sleep of the almost dead among the weeds beyond the tide line.
In the early morning two old men carrying a couple of small throw nets wake them. Cot speaks to the men in Spanish and for some reason shows them his Cuban passport, the
one he first got years ago and renews through his father since, even though he can tell they aren’t officials and don’t ask to see it. He’s jumpy and overfriendly and the men say OK, OK, and murmur, not to each other but to some secret listener in their hearts and Cot can see this, and he sees too the future dwindling ahead of him, flattening out like whirled-up dust settling from a passing car. He thinks maybe I’ll shoot these guys but doesn’t; he goes on grinning, turning the pages of the passport, showing the stamps for Peru and Martinique and Belize and Trinidad where in Port of Spain in a gunfight in the middle of Constitution Street he took the lives of three Indian gangsters who had cheated Albertson on a rights question. The passport has a blue plastic cover and contains stamps of entry and exit. No current entry stamp, but he doesn’t show the men that. One of them has a glossy gray beard. The other is slender with an old man’s slenderness that doesn’t look like good health. Cot asks what they are after. Bait, the bearded one says. Anzuelo. His eyes glisten with excitement.
“We’re traveling,” Cot says. Marcella, kneeling in the sand behind him hasn’t spoken. The men wave discreetly at her, their old-man hands almost limp.
They follow the men up to the village that’s a collection of small tin-roofed houses along a dusty coral street among breadfruit and mango trees and seems essential to something he’s got no good idea of. Frayed tufts of banana trees stick out from behind the houses. There’s a store with a screened front tacked on and in the yard under a big mamey tree benches where you could sleep away your life. He’d like to do that; he’s always felt that way he thinks and knows this isn’t true. They buy bread and Egyptian peanut butter and eat breakfast under the dark green leaves of the old tree, from time to time pointing out little features of life around them. An old woman smokes a huge cigar; a man with a cheek filled with something elastic, maybe bubblegum, maybe betelnut, chews steadily; a child holds up the hem of her frilly dress revealing frayed khaki shorts underneath.
Men in Miami Hotels Page 17