Men in Miami Hotels

by Charlie Smith

  The pain sliced again, burning, in his mind. A heaviness in his body, clanking chains heaved through the hollowness. “It’s got me cockeyed,” he said out loud.

  “No, no,” Consuela said, misunderstanding, “you are welcome here.”

  He smiled at her. The cry of parakeets, a drumming sound from the street, “Hola,” a voice sweetly said somewhere not far away; he heard a bus change gears, heard the cross cries of gulls, the voice of a man yelling that he could not be made to . . . to what? But you don’t understand, someone was always saying, even here in the Paradiso Comunal. In Havana streets people moved without drawing attention to themselves, often silently, waited silently in lines for corn meal and tapioca starch. Pedicab operators leaned on their vehicles under the vast branches of laurel de India trees counting, dream cash.

  “Well, it’s okay,” he said as if his father had asked him something. The old man didn’t answer. We hardly recognize each other, he thought. It was as if they had become more and more distantly related. Eighteenth cousins by marriage and foster families, ghosts of an irresolvable past run through fingers grown crooked and stained with indigo.

  “Come, boy,” his father said. “I will walk with you, and then I will return here.”

  Cot wouldn’t stop him. He would instead reach his hand out, no, he would take a step forward, his bare feet—Consuela allowed no shoes in her house—making the palm-straw rug crackle, and take his father in his arms. Maybe that would work. But it was like hugging a scarecrow. The finches, sealed in their rooms, groaned and prattled. Was he the only one who heard the birds? His father’s body rustled and settled in his arms. He saw the old man crouching in a doorway crying, saw his mother lying under the ground in the dark, no shoes on her feet. He could taste his father’s breath. Sense the thoughts like pale divinations drifting out of darkness. The Quarterback, they called him at headquarters, the younger men mocking him as he walked down the long hall to Albertson’s office.

  His father began to cough, hacking hard, and then he whirled in a slowed-down motion and vomited on the carpet.

  Consuela, without comment, cleaned the gray froth up with a rag and a bucket of fresh water.

  His father sat huddled in a chair, his feet drawn up like a girl’s.

  “Papi,” Cot said.

  “It will pass,” his father said.

  “Something will,” Consuela said, her voice raw and unappeased.

  His father trembled. Or maybe he was only shifting his feet.

  “I got to go,” Cot said and leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

  It was afterwards, at the track—how long ago? a week?—money gone, too much money to make up, owed to Camp Billings’s bookies over on Calle Cinquo—or no, maybe it had been later, when he ran into Jack Bellieau, outside the little parlor attached to the rear of Sammy’s Athletic Bar on Maxwell Ave., that he decided. Seeing Jack had determined something—though he wasn’t sure how, or what (maybe it was Jack’s tentativeness, his step off the curb like a man not sure whether he was standing on a curb or a cliff, the uselessness of everything Jack was up to, his nutty familiarities and impiety, the tarnished silver ring Jack had tried to give him)—that settled something in him: he’d decided to get on the late bus to Key West. He was going to fix things for Mama.

  Well, he’d done that.

  “Let us now go,” his father said getting up.

  “You okay, Pop?”

  Yes, yes, of course—bustling in his slow old man’s way, retrieving his straw hat and putting it on his head, adjusting the angle. A certain reflexive jauntiness still available, even in a time of grief. This appealed to Cot. He slid his arm along his father’s back. There were still strong muscles there, stretched and thin, worked out over a drawing board. “Vendre a usted en la oscuridad de la noche,” said the beautiful Morena as she disappeared into the side of a comic book panel. I will come to you in the dark of night. The inevitability of fate—there was no other topic for the novela gráfica. The rest of us standing under the trees in the twilit dark waiting for our bus to freedom. He hoped his father would be able to work to the last. Al igual que la muerte clap de dos manos frias. Death like the clap of two cold hands.

  They walked out together into the sunshine that was like a clear varnish on flowering bushes and trees, on the pavement crumbling before their eyes and on passersby hurrying toward their fates. His father resettled his hat—cattleman’s hat—squarely on his head. His eyes had a dreamy look, but behind the dreaminess was a sternness that had frightened Cot as a boy. Now it touched him. These strong men who had left their strength somewhere behind them—he too was becoming one of them. Across the street a breeze filled the tops of coconut palms, shook them violently and let them go; the fronds hung stiffly as if the breeze had never been there.

  “I love the softness of evenings in Havana,” Rafael said maybe for the tenth time in his son’s hearing, maybe the twentieth. He was arranging things, but his son couldn’t really know that. You had to settle even the words you used, the thoughts that came as you walked each morning to see the ocean purling and stitching against the old seawall. The walk home from Consuela’s was one he had taken many times. But rarely with his son. It was something new to settle in its place. A green ice truck passed. Two men clinging to the back were drenched with water from the melting ice. That too, and the parakeets flashing in their flock overhead, quarreling as they went. And the young women in their sporty hats, the little boy in a red shirt throwing a ball against the side of a building. There was a vastness you were part of, and it was necessary to arrange and codify and settle things with this vastness. But none of this could he say to his son. He listed slightly as he walked, and told himself this was because of the weightiness of his thoughts and let it go at that, but even so there was he knew a new voice calling to him from the dark, rising from among the others. He had been strong enough to hold these voices off or evade them or outwit them but his strength was failing. The women and men in his books were his charms and fetishes constructed and thrown out ahead of him like decoys for death to snap at. That was a way of looking at them. His guitar, his raffish clothes and hat, the routes he took on his walks, his solitude, were disguises, evasions, feints. His wife had known too much, saw too clearly. And now she called to him. He shuddered and his son put his arm around him, but this did not help and he shook off the touch. He was too scared to be touched. He saw terrible things coming through the dark. Her voice—her death—had tipped the dark toward him. He sensed it groaning and shifting, the huge movement of blankness as it began to slide. “Te pido,” he whispered. I implore you.

  Cot thought he himself was listing—staggering—loose and unhinged, but he wasn’t. A breeze pushed solemnly through the heavy leaves of a nearby guasima tree, and it seemed as if it was pushing its way, lightly, through him too. Then we just drop—picking up a thought, interrupting himself, disagreeing with the shapes and forms of consideration that lay inside him like tiny scuttled vessels. Make a mistake—any mistake, press time too hard—and bang. Strange thoughts for a killer. He almost laughed. But he saw her, Marcella, lying on her side on the bed, trying to hold her head up like a fish sipping air. I have to go, he had said, terror buzzing like a hive inside him. But I want—and stopped. I want order and gainliness and a peacefulness without resolution and snappy parlance and kindness and hot home fries on a winter morning and to live quietly in the thoughts of a loved one and quickness and pleasure like a breeze moving in green leaves—and on and on, he thought.

  He groaned and he must have started to tip over because his father caught him in his still-firm grip, a grip that almost hurt. “You have to give things time to pass,” he said. “That’s what’s difficult.”

  Who’s got that kind of time, Papi?

  He smiled at his father. The breeze rattled a red sign outside a barber shop as they passed through a small square behind one of the old municipal hospitals, used now for government offices. Office of Paper Bags and Bits of String. Offic
e of Quirky Communiqués and Rambling Asides. A Cuban flag had been painted hanging from a third-story window. In the window a small boy waved. Cot waved back though he could tell the boy wasn’t waving at them. His father smiled his halfhearted smile, the one he had started with after he and Ella broke up.

  “Do you want to sit down?”

  “Maybe a minute.”

  Cot raised his face to the washed blue sky. It was late, the ancient unremarkable dusk had come on. Thin clouds, that looked worn out, nearly erased, drifted north. All of this, every job, every kiss, aimed at an easement, that peculiarity in the universe that allowed a person to be released into time. He dropped to the green wooden bench—as if from a height, he thought catching himself on the scarred wood—as if fallen from the sky. His father eased down beside him, and they bumped shoulders, two large men, reeling from blows. Well, they were not the only ones. At Florio’s coffee bar across the street, two men sat on stools before the outdoor window, their canes leaning beside them. The counterman, a fat man wearing a white brimless cap, served them tiny china cups of espresso. His father nodded to the men. One nodded back, a slim fellow in plain Russian glasses. “The world wakes and re-awakes,” his father said, “but all remains the same.”

  Cot laughed. “You got to lay off all that philosophizing, Pop. It’s going to make you dyspeptic.”

  His father reached in his pocket, brought out a few barky scrawls. “Aguedita,” he said. “I abound in roots and curatives.”

  He held the gray curls out to him. Cot took one and chewed the hot, not bark but root wood. “This is exactly what I need. They say malaria’s coming around again. Thanks, Papi.”

  Cot got up. They were only a block from the apartment. “I’ll go on,” he said.

  “Wait.”

  The look in his father’s eyes made him sit down again.

  The old man leaned against him, a spare weight of familiarity and devotion, with his head against his shoulder. But this, apparently, was not quite enough. He slid down so his head was in Cot’s lap. From there he looked up at his son, a look depleted and sorrowing, in it undarned tatters of feeling, of delays and embargoes of the spirit, parings and swollen knots, grimaces and old ransacked grievances, tears patched up and recycled, the remnants of love, nothing anyone could do anything about. Cot smoothed his father’s forehead, his lank gray hair. His father closed his eyes. For ten minutes, maybe more, they remained there, Cot’s broad hand just touching his father’s head, holding the old man as he slept.

  10

  Carrying a bouquet of red bougainvillea sprigs Cot approaches the apartment through the park. He stays out of the front-window sight line. A small boy comes by, a boy in worn canvas shorts, snapping his fingers, and Cot offers him money—two American dollars to deliver and five on return—to get the flowers to the third floor, number 3-6, and give them to whoever answers the door. The boy, with a grin, takes off to do the job. Be sure to knock hard, Cot tells him as he goes. He eases off at an angle, crosses the street and stands in the shadow of a small uprearing of areca palms, watching. He sees the boy knock and wait. No one comes to the door, no one cracks the pulled-down blinds. The boy looks around and knocks again, but no one comes. An old freezing sensation, herald of hardy and insistent matters, returns to his body. Sometimes it’s like an illumination, this chill, cold light of a radiance that shows the future. The boy presses his ear against the green wooden door and listens, then lays the flowers against the sill and scampers away. Cot walks around into the out-of-sight-line part of the street, and as the boy exits the forecourt hails him. The boy’s eyes glitter with excitement and he pants theatrically. Cot gives him his five dollars in singles, pressing them firmly into his hand.

  The living room, that smells of plumeria blossoms, the kitchen, spare and dim, and the bedroom where he left her, are empty. She’s gone, he thinks, but he knows she isn’t. An immense tenderness that makes him move as if adrift in a dream overtakes him. There’s not so much a blankness between him and what’s coming as there is an eternity of never-was. He finds her in the bathroom. Spane—say maybe it’s not Spane, say it’s a henchman, but no matter, that man too would be Spane as a robber or a wandering sociopath would also be Spane, any scorpion or biting snake or malarial mosquito, Spane—had closed the door, or Cot would have smelled the blood. The killer dragged her in there and without bothering to untie her killed her with a knife. There’s blood all over the white and green tile floor, blood on the old narrow metal bathtub, blood in the sink and on the white walls.

  A rush of terror, call it that, unindemnified against the hollowing instant, tunnels right through him. He careens into the living room, slapping the air like a man slapping gnats, and can’t find himself, can’t get the layout, spills onto the couch, climbs as if the couch is tilted against a wall he has to get over, and falls back. He wants to stretch out, extend his body. Everywhere the air touches his skin burns like fire, but he’s shivering. In an instant he’s up, scrabbling at the front window to get out and catches it in his head that he has to stop. He freezes. Time bangs a hammer against a steel rail. No one outside. Probably Spane saw him come in. He’s again the hunted one. “That’s all right,” he says. “That’s okay,” his throat dry and aching.

  He checks the front door and limps back into the bathroom. Each step carries him deeper into a nausea. In the mirror his face is the face of a man raised from the grave, color, expression, even the features themselves, replaced by a mask of ignorance and dread. He looks like some ancient peasant, head lifted from a furrow. But this peasant is filled with a shame he’s already trying to evade. “I didn’t . . .” he says groping for exculpation, an exit. There is none.

  His strength sloshed with deadness, he drops to his knees and can’t for a while get up. Eventually he hoists himself to his feet and trying to pay attention to the ringing in his ears as if from there will issue another more benevolent and resurrecting order of being sits down on the curled rim of the tub and looks at her.

  Marcella—ex-, former-Marcella—is half sprawled, half stuck between the toilet and the window from which in lazy swirls the insubstantial curtains lift and sink. The ropes haven’t even been loosened.

  Carefully, taking pains, he releases her. Crying softly, haphazardly, making little slippery sounds, blubbering, he lifts her and puts her body in the tub. She’s only four, maybe five degrees cooler than living life but he can feel these degrees like arctic ice. Her face is unbloodied, clean; her lashes are like tiny black wings on her white cheeks. Years ago her mother visited a conjurer, an old lady on Angela Street in Key West, in an attempt to put a spell on him that would take him out of her life. No power can do that, he told her. Except this one, ay Cot.

  He has to pause for breath, let his wind catch up. He backs into the hall, turns, cumbersome as a truck, and heads for the kitchen. The hall, the kitchen, every sight line recedes into an infinity of impossibility. Still, he gets there, stepping from fabrication to fabrication as if from stone to stone crossing a river. Carefully, almost fastidiously, every movement a screeching curse, he gets a mop, rags, scouring powder, and the galvanized tin bucket from under the sink, comes back and cleans the bathroom. He has to stop twice to retch into the sink; nothing rises. Special issue, he thinks, re this, but realizes even so he’s coming back to himself. He’s minutes, eons past her, active in the new version of the world. You get used to it, they say. Twenty years of Variety Work (as Albertson called it), and the business now finally here unraveled and played out. You think so? Well, time will tell.

  He cleans her body last, saving as always, the best for the time when the other, less fine, is out of the way. Between faint ring lines on her neck are the wounds—stabs into the veins on either side—that Spane’s knife made (he knows this knife with its deerbone handle and four-inch fluted blade); wounds no longer bleeding that Cot dabs at, two small slits that he covers with the tips of two fingers. At the edges of her smoke blue eyes a delicate spray of lines that you think you could b
rush away with a touch. Her face, rubbed each night with lotions and emollients, isn’t tanned. Her lips are thin but soft; she has a way of blowing them slightly outward as she speaks that makes her, especially from the side, look like a child, farm child maybe, fisher child, island child with a soul unhampered by special pleading or rancor. He touches their surface, turning the upper back a little to reveal her teeth. The gloss of her spit is still on them; they look part of the living world. A cry of commingled happiness and grief stops before it reaches the surface. He falls over onto the floor. His face hits the tile, momentarily stunning him. He presses at the pain with two fingers, encouraging it, pushes himself up. “Don’t worry,” he says, “I’m not going anywhere,” looking her in the face as he speaks, the words, he knows, a further desecration. He stands up, reaches for something, but forgets what it is before his hand is fully out. For a sec he doesn’t know what to do. He’s never before spoken to a corpse. He’s not one of those—unlike Little Mizell and Sparks, Jimmy Canada—who likes to chat up the stiffs. He passes over the dead as you would pass over a silent unbrokered river on a bridge. He does not look again at his face in the mirror. Except for the first quick involuntary touch he does not tend to his own slightly bleeding cheek. He returns to his work, climbing back into the tub. He has already undressed her; already, using the harsh brown Russian soap, washed the blood out of her clothes, soaping white cotton blouse, loose green cotton karate pants, pale yellow bikini underwear in the sink, wringing them out and draping them over a cord his father hung across the window (all the blood wasn’t out and for a moment he hesitated in a crushing dilemma, unable to go on, unable to begin again with the washing, stalled, the shame and sorrow burrowing like a sting into this moment he was afraid he wouldn’t get out of, until, his body creaking underneath him, his hands began carefully, slowly, to wring the shirt). There’s no hot water but the sun has warmed the pipes that run from a catchment on the roof, and he lets this sunwarmed water pour over her body, biting his lips as he does so. He knows she is changing in his hands into something else. Has changed. He tells himself he is changing too, right along with her, translating as he goes, learning the customs, edging deeper into her new country, but this isn’t so. He thinks of spilled papaya seeds, black as a bird’s eye, offered in her eight-year-old hand, of moments of half surprise in a cool winter’s twilight, of night flooding over them from out of the big island trees. For her the nights, from now on, will all be the same. He lays his body on hers in the tub. As he does so a little more blood squeezes out of her cuts but he doesn’t notice it. He kisses her deeply in her mouth and tastes with his tongue the exhumaceous silt, and lies there, ashamed and settling in, clutching her.