She got up from the bed. She was wearing her yellow underwear. She had slept under a light cotton coverlet, yellow with red tea roses printed on it. He went out into the living room while she got dressed. On his father’s slanted desk at the front windows were panels he was working on. Fotonovelas. That wasn’t the word. They were graphic novels—comic books for adults, for middle-aged women mostly, these days, gráficos. In one panel a woman with full sculpted lips and beautiful eyes looked expectantly back at a man who was staring at her. “Incluso riquezas—incluso el amor . . . no son suficientas para mi,” the man said. Even riches—even love . . . are not enough for me. What is? He thought he knew. Out in the street a pedicab passed carrying two tourists, a man and an enormously fat woman, in white clothes and identical straw hats. The man was trying to look through a pair of brass binoculars. Without returning to the bedroom Cot said, “Pack your bag.”
Marcella came and stood in the doorway. She was a tall woman, heavier than the slender girl she had been. She leaned against the door frame, brushing her hair. Her eyes, on him from the first instant, seemed to come more sharply into focus. His cat was like that, he thought, when he returned from one of his trips—her eyes going wide for a second in a kind of simple amazement that it was him. It was a look they shared, he thought, he and the cat and Marcella. But now she frowned, grimaced, so that lines bunched between her heavy eyebrows; this was a look that was only hers. She pressed her finger hard against the side of her long nose, turning it. “Are you packed?”
“I’m going to hang around.”
“Oh, Cot.”
“You knew about CJ, didn’t you?”
She glanced, once, lightly it seemed to him—in a single instant—out the wide front windows at palms and tamarind trees and hibiscus flowering, at the quiet street in the old part of the old city, at an old woman in a worn, ruffled yellow dress waving a folded umbrella as if conducting a slow, silent orchestra. “Yes,” she said. “Afterwards.”
“Did you know Ordell would kill Mama?”
“No. I never knew that.” She clutched herself in her arms. “I didn’t think it. I didn’t dream it.”
“Sometimes one thing leads to another.”
“You don’t always know.”
“You get a feel for it.”
“Still, you don’t know.”
He saw her then, marooned on an island in an island apartment in the shallow sea of the old Indian tribes—thinking: one of those old men down at Playa Giron was an Awarak, some few still around—marooned in the hemisphere, on the planet, in the whirling system of stars. And on and on. The air in the apartment smelled of his father’s aftershave. An old Cuban, lime-smelling concoction. His father had tired of his mother, of her intensities, of her sure-footedness.
He took a step, reached for her, but she backed away.
“No,” she said. “Don’t save me.” Her face had suddenly turned old, ancient, she had become an old woman tapping at plastic window blinds, straining to hear the steps of her dead ones.
“Is that why you came down here with me?”
“I don’t know.”
As he spoke, as he stood there with the sunlight from the open front window raining on him, burning his body, leaching his mind, he reconfirmed that there were facts he didn’t want to know. She had called Spane in Miami. He didn’t want to know that. She loved another man. She had already left him. He didn’t want to know. He wanted simply to walk around these facts without even glancing at them. Don’t tell me.
He said, “What did you plan to do?”
“Stay with you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Oh yes. That’s what I planned.”
“In shabby, unfumigated Havana.”
“Good times are coming again.”
“We’ll all get rich.”
“That too.”
“Do you have the emeralds?”
“No.”
“Didn’t Ordell find them?”
“No. That’s why he went up to Lauderdale. Those head-knockers grabbed them.”
“Spane’ll be glad to hear that.”
A cricket chirped somewhere—no, it was a gecko. They were all over down here in the houses, slim white lizards chirping their commentary from the ceilings.
“Cot.”
She looked into his eyes. He could see the collapse, the caving in. But she didn’t back away or turn, she didn’t drop her gaze. He could feel her sinking her leads and grapples deeply into him, sense the following commandos of her power entering him. She could see all the way to the bottom; that was what he counted on her for.
“Why Spane?”
“I don’t know.”
He jerked his fist up: he could feel the power in his body, feel the arm raised strong as a derrick, lifting a hundred feet into the air, feel the great weight of the boom that strained his shoulder and his back, but he didn’t let it loose. It was like putting the brakes on a planet. He twitched, shuddered.
She reeled away, as if blown loose, but this movement, the elaborate near fall, the catching of herself against the flowery arm of the couch, of her standing—looming, he thought—before the particularized, self-perfecting day outside, was all an act, a formal presentation. He wished he’d hit her, but it was already too late for that. The next instant crowded in, jamming signals, proposing new approaches and lies. I got to get going. Her face looked smaller and creased as if it was mummifying before his eyes. Her hair was dry, and he saw that it had a few long white strands mixed in with it.
“We’re on the other side of the Gulf Stream,” she said.
“Great Wall of the Americas.” A twitching had begun in his left arm, a fresh compilation making itself known. “Spane?”
“Sure.”
“Si—claro.” He knew it would get worse. But when it got worse there would be no shock. He was glad of that. “You call him Mikey?”
“Miguel.”
“When should I expect him?”
“Tonight.”
Her face was white, or no, white with tiny dark blotches fading into the hairline. She had always thought her hairline was too frizzy. White nappy, she called it. She had learned Cuban dances, Cuban songs she sang in grade school wearing a bright red bandana around her neck.
“Papi?”
“Oh, Cotland. He’s at Consuela’s. He doesn’t know anything.”
“That might not matter to Spane.”
“It will. Don’t worry.”
“Don’t tell me not to worry, please.”
“All right.”
“Where’re you meeting him?”
“At the Ambos Mundos Hotel.”
“That turista pile? Jesus. Is he staying there?”
“Yes—I don’t know.”
“Come on, Marcella.”
“Cot, I. . . .” She started out of the room. A defiance, a hardness crackled in her body—he could see it—flared, and flickered out. She stopped. There was a gloss of sweat on her face. “I wish people had air-conditioning down here.”
“It’s all green in old Habana.”
“I’m swimming in shame.”
“Are you?”
“Sloshing.”
“What was Ordell’s cut?” Things had clarified, like ice cubes in a drained glass.
“On the emeralds?”
“Yes, May.”
“Fifteen percent.”
“That’s all? Murders, mayhem, destruction of local families . . .”
“It’s two million dollars, Cot.”
“Well.”
“He proposed a deal to get the gems, and Miguel agreed, after which Miguel told him he would kill him if he didn’t get them back.”
“He would. Yes.”
“Ordell was terrified. He didn’t know what to do.”
“So he went and shot Mama.”
“Yes. Because of that, and because he hates you, Cot.”
“Did he think I had the stones?”
“He didn’t know. He thought yo
u would give up.”
“I already did that—a long time ago.”
“Ah, Cot.”
“Stop saying my fucking name.”
“All right.”
He could see how tired she was. He could see how she had been carried far beyond what she could bear. These little islands, he thought, that we hold sacred and plan to flee to. That fade as we approach them.
“He was supposed to kill me.”
“Yes. But you gave the gems to CJ.”
“But I never told Mikey.”
“——————”
He had told Marcella. “You’re a real killer, baby.”
“You sound like you always wanted to say that.”
“Not to you.”
A bird—he didn’t know what kind—flew by outside with a quick sharp striking of wings.
“He told me he was going to take the emeralds from you.”
“Ordell.”
“He said you would trade them for your mother’s house.”
“I didn’t need him.”
“Yes, you did.”
“———————”
“He could have held you up forever. He could have taken the house.”
“I guess I missed something with you two.”
“I guess.”
“Well, tell me this.” He stopped because he didn’t know what to say next.
She didn’t say anything.
He felt—somehow felt—that what they were saying had been said a million times before, as if the words had been scraped up from the grotty carpets of twenty-dollar bedrooms and second-run movie houses, and not even dusted off, not even looked at or sorted, used again. Old familiar scuds and wrake. The inside of his mouth felt dirty. His brain, his heart, all of it, felt dirty. He could see that whipped, shamed, scared she was still in a rage. He stepped toward her, the fingers of his right hand cupped as if holding an offering, of sweet loquats say. But she shrank from him—he saw it—and quickly, so quickly that he could tell himself, if he wanted to (he didn’t want to, not yet), that she hadn’t flinched, pulled herself into alignment, into the shape of one who was still in love with the one she hated; who thought she could pull it off.
He was going to touch her anyway. But then he didn’t.
She smiled at him, a new, tremendously complicated, evasive smile, half-caste and localized. She would not even bow her head and say You can do with me what you want. She wouldn’t, even now, allow anything like that. He had loved that she was such a strong-minded woman. Able to bear the consequences of what she had to do. He stared at her. He wanted to break her down and study her. Take her to the laboratory. She looked back at him from another world. The faint shuss and rattle of almond leaves came from outside. In this season, dry season, the wind would turn around sometimes. They weren’t far enough south to wholly miss winter, if winter was strong enough. Even in Havana women walked around in January in old sequin-flecked sweaters, men in patched windbreakers. But it was spring. The plumeria flowers had crept back onto bony gray branches. The flamboyants bustled up their barrages.
“Come on,” he said.
She preceded him into the kitchen where from under the sink he took a coil of laundry cord he found there and made her tie herself up with it. He completed the job, making the knots firm and the loops tight against her skin. She was hog-tied—that was the word. She believed him when he said he would kill her if she didn’t do what he told her. He lifted her and carried her over his shoulder and lay her on the bed. He put a clean rag in her mouth and blindfolded her with a yellow bandana that still had the crease marks in it. You can still get away he thought of saying but he didn’t. Then he left the house and took a cab the fifteen blocks to Consuela’s apartment and sat in the living room with his father drinking a glass of agua dulce and listening to el Presidente’s speech on the radio.
“Democracy,” Consuela said from the living room, “like Christianity and Brotherhood, is not to be found among those who claim them. These great principles have flown to some other, undiscovered lands.” In the back of her apartment came the sound of her finches, quarrelsome tiny birds expressing themselves constantly. From the bathroom window he could see down in the courtyard a couple of old women feeding chickens. One of the women wore a red bandana around her hair. His face in the mirror looked plasticized and faded. A parrot screeched from some hidden place. His face seemed to be the face of one who lacked governance. He got down on his knees and tried to pray, but he felt cumbersome and lonely there. He got up and looked out the window at two men who were setting up a card table in the backyard. The women were sitting in folding chairs under a senna tree talking. The men divided dominoes and began to play. It could go on and on like this, like it had in childhood where there was always another interesting development. If they asked at his trial he would say that was what it was like to work for Albertson, or had been. The parrot screeched again, its voice almost breaking into speech. It wouldn’t know what it was saying, as he hadn’t known when at six he shouted Cuban war cries taught him by Manuel Cordoba. He pressed his ear against the inside wall. “Rat-tat-tat,” said Consuela, mimicking a machine gun in illustration of one of her martial points. She always talked of obedience. Of how one must submit to a greater power. He liked that. Someone—or something—you had to answer to. He bathed his hands in the sink, washing with Consuela’s lemon-scented soap. Then he took a shower, supporting himself against the wall as the water ran over his head and back as he had seen a gangster do in a movie. The water was cool, refreshing. He dried off with one of Consuela’s fluffy yellow towels. He sat on the side of the tub naked saying bits of The Georgics to himself. Virgil had been often at the beck and call of governance. He had lived under the ruthless, corporate hand of the Caesars. The pressure twisted things. He would read the Greeks next, Sophocles maybe. The sky was pouring through a soft funnel of cumulus. Birds like scraps of paper, of testament, blew by.
The old lady was insubstantially drunk, as was his father. Rafael had told him that he usually wound up—meagerly, faintly, superficially, as he put it—drunk, whenever he spent any time at Consuela’s. “It worries me,” he said, but Cot could tell it didn’t worry him much. He was old now. Age was like a crust upon him, under which moved the muscularity and mind of a younger man. But this younger man was becoming more and more deeply trapped by the more and more impenetrable crust. His hands holding the glass were veiny, the long fingers more sinewy than ever. The hands still flexible and strong, able, like patched equipment, like everything down here, reworked and able, aged devices opening and closing like clockwork, fixing and holding.
Consuela, talking of liberty, served cut up bits of sausages and pickled palm hearts and stems of lemon grass or something like it slathered in hot sauce. Cot rubbed the hot sauce on his lips. It burned, and he started to sweat. His father looked at him and grinned. Cot tried to take his father’s hands in his, but his father pulled away. “I don’t want that picadeni,” he said. He didn’t like anything on his hands, not even the smell of soap. From the street came the cries of vendors and a man saying “I will propose a solution impossible to resist,” and then someone blew a brief squealing blast on a horn.
As his father studied his face Cot tried to will a blankness into his eyes, as he had as a boy but was never able to; he wasn’t able to now. Well, let the old man look. The smell of some complicated cooking came from the kitchen, coriander and cumin, hot pork. The walls were painted pale blue like the porch ceilings in Key West. What do you see, Papi? Ill-lit, banged-together excuses and windedness? His father studied his face without speaking. He had been a young man with promise—his father had—with genius, they said, capable of writing great novelistic works. But his father said that was only the dream of those who didn’t really know him. He had wanted something besides the imperatives and gauges of any kind of genius and that something else he’d done. “I couldn’t keep hold of your mother,” he would say sometimes, but that was another matter. Yes, well,
there was always another matter. Cot had wondered if he could convince his father to flee the approaching killers, but now, up close, inside the rasp and clutch of his father’s dreaming, he realized he couldn’t convince his father to flee anything. A searing pain flashed behind his eyes. He bent over his knees.
“Milk,” his father said to Consuela. In a few minutes they would be marching around the room singing old mountain guerrilla songs. Consuela brought him a glass of chilled and diluted evaporated milk. He sipped it and put it down. The milk didn’t touch the hollowness in him. Consuela was an anthropologist, of the ex variety, hagiographer of the old native tribes. In her youth she had taken Indian lovers, last of the Awarak-, of the Caribe-, of the fabled Siboney-style. She had borne at least three Indian children, maybe more, way back, but they had been lost to her, by way of disease and war and simple disappearance. Her life, she said, had become a happenstance, a drift through time. She talked like that.
“I got to be going,” Cot said. He and his father lay on the thin couches in the big living room that had once been a ballroom in Consuela’s family mansion, now cut up in slices into little apartments, except for this one. The finches cried out from the back. Consuela, half draped in filmy pastel scarves, floated around the room. “I got to go,” Cot said. She looked at him as if she knew he believed everything she had ever told him. His father made his little patting, half-clapping motion, and rubbed his hands. He was a man who sought precious things. So he had said many times.
Cot’s mind wandered, shying from talk, like a child’s slipping away from the adult business. In Key West they had retrieved his mother from the deeps of her chipped porcelain tub that sat quietly unabashed on its four lion’s paw feet. Word of this had crossed the Gulf Stream to get here. Word. Syllables memorized like a parrot’s speech. Cries of finches, of street hawkers, of agents outside seedy nightclubs. A ditty sung to tourists. Sunk—retrieved, they said, expelled like a bite of bitter fruit or a fact declaimed in the street—his mother doting on her own death, the brilliant Key West day leaning down like an old man looking at a bright feather on the floor—word of it prattled, groaned out, lilted in caprice, tolled as fate, whispered in hotel coffee shops and government offices, slipped into el Presidente’s liturgies: all falling short of the truth. Even the most alarming facts, the heartbreakers, in this case didn’t eliminate confusion.
Men in Miami Hotels Page 19