Men in Miami Hotels

by Charlie Smith

  After a while he’s able to get to his feet. He carries her into the bedroom and dresses her in fresh clothes and lays her on the bed. There’re a thousand things in his head, but it’s hard to pick the right one. His father will spend the night at Consuela’s. He goes out to the kitchen and fixes himself a sandwich and sits eating it, the textureless Cuban bread, the peanut spread that’s not really peanut butter, thin slices of a papaya he finds in the little fridge. The refrigerator shuts with a clamp. He eats and then sits at the table as the day draws closer around him, the twilight easing through its quelled and lingering performance, the night, adrift and not particular, freighting its featured quality silently in. Once, he gets up and goes into the bedroom and lies down beside her on the worn blue chenille spread. He’s placed two small squares of adhesive tape over the cuts in her neck, and as he looks at these his body goes hollow. He retreats to the living room and sits on the couch, gets up, goes back into the bedroom, retrieves his copy of The Georgics, and returns to the couch. He can’t read the book in the dark, but his finger finds his place marker, a two-dollar bill folded lengthwise on which he’s written the words I am gainfully employed. One glance and the page, the bees, and the young bulls on round Etruscan hills, will come alive again, but he’ll have to turn on the light. He’s memorizing the poem as he goes along. He read passages to her, but she was not as taken with Virgil, or farming, as he was. “Plowboy,” she called him. He leans back against the couch. The night is like a bad smell. Like a disease, a fever borne in the blood, a thickening surge sinking deeper into his body. He makes himself stay where he is until the sensation of this passes. He doesn’t turn on the light.

  The clock by the bed says three A.M. No way to tell how many shooters Spane has outside waiting for him. He pictures them tucked into notches, creases, folds in the landscape. Their Miami hotel rooms like so many silent shrines awaiting the little priests’ return. He goes out to the kitchen, gathers paper scraps from the pile of old newspapers his father keeps under the counter, dumps the trash from the galvanized tin can into the sink, stuffs the papers in the can, and just after he sets the concoction on fire uses Marcella’s mobile phone—battery almost gone—to call the fire department. Huge fire on Calle Tremana, upstairs it looks like. ¡Ponte las pilas! ¡Ayúdame! He goes out to the living room, opens the front door and sets the brightly burning papers in it. The papers burn swiftly and from a nook in the shadows he throws balled-up newspaper on the flames.

  In five minutes the trucks are there. In six the firemen are running up the stairs. He has slid her body under the bed. The firemen burst in, carrying axes and long poles. Just before they get to the third-floor gallery he kicked the can across the threshold. The first fireman, a young man wearing a helmet painted white, seems surprised to see him.

  “Anyone else in here?” he asks.

  “Solo estoy aquí.” No one.

  He has his father’s drawings rolled up under his arm. These he gives for safekeeping to the next-door neighbor, an old man with knobby bare legs under bush shorts. There are four or five trucks, old vehicles with large tires and rounded snouts. The street fills quickly with gawkers. Everyone has come out of their apartment. He’s able to slip down the stairs and through the crowd into the park across the street and away in the wooly darkness of the false dawn.

  He makes his way by cab, riding in the rear of an old humped Buick, his head leaned back on the cloth seat, his hand resting on the hinge of the roll-down window that’s been repaired with screws slightly too small for it. Through streets that are as dark as if they’re uninhabited, as if Havana is an old dream that played out and even the sleeper has gotten up and gone away. On Avenue Mareña amber lights run in strings, pole to pole, down to a lighted area. His heart seems to be pumping faint flares, gas rings, and tatters out of his body in lumpy effusions. He can feel Marcella moving around inside him, like an old woman in a deserted house, opening door after door. He grips the armrest, and it comes off in his hand. He tries to reattach it but can’t. He starts to say something to the driver, but he can see by his eyes in the mirror that he’s already caught the situation. “Disculpeme,” he says. He feels himself shaking, but when he looks down his long limber body he is as still as a wood carving. The driver’s square dark head doesn’t move either. Remnants of her—spirit, he would call it—cling to him like bits of life itself. A wild despairing notification, bill of sale, burns as it flies up through his mind. He presses his back against the seat, or thinks he does. He can smell the ten thousand bodies that have ridden in this cab, sense the dreams and hopes, the desolations carried like little knobby treasures. The sky above the city is spotted with brown summery clouds, large and stuffed. In the east the dawn pretends its time has come. Not yet. His thoughts—his knowledge, the facts poking from their covert—touch him lightly with acid fingers. He grips his left wrist. He’s right-handed but his left wrist is larger than his right. Even in the smallest things there are misalignments.

  A man, loose and muddled-looking, shouts from the sidewalk, a heavyset American in a madras jacket, swaying on the corner before a shop that sells Iron Curtain watches. Cot nods at him. The man grins hugely as if they are friends in on a secret. Cot signals to him, stops the cab, and calls him over. The man, who seems to be drunk but maybe isn’t, moving abruptly, comes to him. He carries a narrow-brimmed straw hat in his hand. “You got a sec, man?” The man goggles him. “I need your help.”

  The man throws a look skyward, stands as if transfixed, as if pondering the depths of space, opens the door and splashes down. “Lost?” He has a scruff of white beard and his eyes are mistrustful “Where you going?”

  “To the Ambos down there”—indicating with his head: we all know it.

  The man chuckles in a superior, nonthreatening way. “I’m staying at the old International. A queer spot I’ll tell you that.”

  “What once was, eh?”

  “You said it, buddy. I tell you. I came here as a little boy with my parents, and it made Las Vegas look like a methodist church camp. Where we going?” His voice is strong, undrunk.

  “The hotel.”

  Obispo is blocked off for tourists, so the cab turns away from the waterfront onto Soledad Marcos. Down the block the pink hotel gleams like a salmon cake. The man looks sleepy. Cot puts his hand on his shoulder. “Still a ways to go,” he says. He has the driver turn down Mercaderes and stop. “What is it, brother?” the man says. An oddness about him, about his manner that under other circumstances would make Cot wary.

  “I need you to carry a message for me.”

  “Spy business?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “I wouldn’t think there’d be any secrets in this place any government would need to know.”

  “There’re enough secrets between this cab and that hotel door . . .” He lets it go. He’s been a loosener of secret material, pry bar. “Go to the desk and leave a message for Mr. Miguel Spano. Ask them to call him.”

  “Miguel Spano. Okay.”

  The man starts out the door.

  “Wait,” Cot said. “The message.”

  “Yeah. What is it?”

  Cot knows this is a bad idea—this courier. “Just say Plaza de Armas.”

  The man repeats the park’s name slowly, working the syllables with his tongue. Cot offers him a twenty-dollar bill, but the man looks insulted. “Okay,” Cot says.

  “Plaza de Armas, Miguel Spano,” the man says, his eyes narrowing as he speaks, as if the words are the unpalatable answer to a question he’s already grown tired of asking himself

  “Thanks mucho,” Cot says.

  A couple of gold-spangled jackets pass, murmuring. “Drunken ladies,” a voice says. Gulls, up late, cry, wheeling below bottom-lit clouds. Essences, Cot thinks: we get distilled. The man, thick and square, gets out of the cab, heads for the door, his shoulders thrown back. Cot watches him enter the hotel. Ernest Hemingway stayed in room 511, a room that looks west along Mercaderes Street, over the old red-t
iled roofs toward the cathedral and the waterfront; you can peep in through a roped-off door. The hotel claims Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in that room. Even hotel managers are living in a dream, Cot thinks. He’s sweating in the humid air. An early morning rain is on its way. With two fingers he presses hard at the center of his forehead. Something, a complexity, her face, expressing her arrival in another zone, the dusk light falling on his hands through the bathroom window, some half-bit encyclical is trying to come through. Spirit is the continual motion toward freedom from nature. Who said that? Virgil, pulling a fast one? Maybe Jackie. Or his mother as she walked with him under the canafistula trees to Fausto’s for groceries. We’re all on our way, at all times traveling, she would say sometimes. Marcella picked it up. I’m on my way, she said.

  The man, who he noticed looks vaguely Hemingwayesque, exits the brass hotel doors and walks toward the cab. “I got him,” he says as he comes up. He opens the door and slides in. “Yeah,” he says his head tilting to the side so Cot can see a sharp, burning scar on his neck. “I called him up and gave him the info on the phone.”

  “That was good. Here’s the twenty—”

  He withdraws his hand as he says the words, remembering the man’s pique at being offered money. The man grimaces. “I told you . . .”

  “Yeah, okay. I’m sorry. But thank you.”

  Cot waits for him to get out of the cab, but he doesn’t. His belly protrudes above his white slacks like a shiftless tendency. “Thank you,” Cot says again.

  “De nada,” the man says. “You sure you don’t . . . ?” he lets the question hang in the cool damp air.

  “I’m sure. Sorry.” He doesn’t know what the man’s talking about. Some mystery of his own.

  Cot waits another moment. He might have to make the man get out, but he doesn’t want to do that. The man turns his head, squinting back the way he’s come. The sidewalk is empty. “I like that place,” he says.

  “Listen,” Cot says. “I need to be on my own here.”

  “Actually you look as if you need company.”

  “I’m serious.”

  The driver turns in his seat, a shock of heavy black hair falling over his forehead as he does so. “¿Problemas aquí?”

  “It’s okay,” Cot says. When this is over he will carry Marcella’s body from his father’s house, dig a grave in the park across the street, and bury it, and then he’ll return to the house where he’ll crawl into his father’s bed and curl up close to him. This thought swings slowly like a torn paper lantern above a darkened doorway. “What’s your name?” he says to his accompanist who has not moved to exit the cab.

  “Stubbs. James L. Stubbs, from Fort Wayne.”

  “Mr. Stubbs. I need this cab to myself now.”

  “What you need is somebody to set you straight. I know some things.”

  “You a thinker? Fort Wayne mastermind?”

  The driver watches them through his rearview mirror that has a St. Christopher medal and what looks like a tiny head carved into an avocado seed attached to a string hanging from it. Cot grabs a clawful of the man’s stomach flesh.

  “Awf.” The man swings an elbow, catching Cot in the temple. Cot lurches to the side, his head, just at the back corner of his skull, hitting the door frame. For a moment he doesn’t know where he is, or who. Then he’s back. The man is grinning at him, a narrow, non-Hemingwayesque grin. One front tooth laps slightly over the other. “Easy on the bad manners,” he says.

  Cot reaches for his pistol behind his back, but the man hits him again before he can get his hand on it, knocking him hard against the door.

  Cot feels as if he was shaking his head, but he in fact isn’t moving. He seems—no, the cab, seems to be moving. But it too is standing in the same place, just down the block from the entrance of the Ambos Mundos, out of the door of which Spane, following a couple of the Miami boys has just stepped.

  Cot pushes forward in the seat and tries to open his door.

  “Hey,” his companion says, “I was just saying—”

  “Sorry . . . ,” he’s having trouble working the door.

  “You owe me fifteen dollars,” the driver says in English. “That door doesn’t open from the inside.”

  “I was just saying,” the big man says, “I’m Jimmy Stubbs, Detective Sergeant, Fort Wayne, Indiana, police force.”

  “You propositioned me,” Cot says sounding foolish to himself. His mouth feels cottony and only half his.

  Another couple of Miami guys, Squinky Dukes and Nolan Sanderson, come out of the hotel after Spane, who is standing next to a large planter filled with a trimmed ficus bush. How did he get all these guys into Cuba? “I got to go.”

  He reaches for his money clip, but the detective catches his wrist.

  “I could call the cops,” Cot says.

  “Who they gon believe—me or you?”

  “I’m a Cuban citizen.”

  “You’re a Miami lowlife is what you are.”

  “Miami?”

  “I could see it a mile away.”

  “Wizard.”

  Cot stares into the man’s large, sea-blue eyes. Does he know him? Or is he only some mustered bad angel from his dreams? Maybe a local finger man. “Lo siento, verijas,” Cot says.

  Stubbs pops him again. “Cunt, ay? Now take that wad out of your pocket—take it slowly—and pay this good man.”

  “Listen. I have to go. It’s essential. I have to meet somebody.”

  “One of your lowlife friends, I reckon. You squirts are still trying to get back in here, aren’t you?”

  “We’re a new crowd.” He’s the one tired and drunk, not this man.

  “Nothing you do’s new, bucko.”

  Cot has out the silver clip Marcella gave him, and it lies like a thin small fish in his lap. He needs to retrieve the bills. He hasn’t changed any money. He works a twenty free, the paper sliding greasily under his thumb, and hands it to the driver. “Keep it,” he says.

  “You’re five short,” the driver says in a sour voice.

  “Pescador mosca,” Cot says, his eyes narrowing. “Okay.” He hands the man another five.

  “Now you let us out,” the detective says to the driver in Spanish. “I’ll walk with you down to that plaza,” he says to Cot.

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Oh? I need backup?”

  “I’m meeting my girlfriend.”

  “Miguel Spano?”

  “That’s not her name.”

  Stubbs motions to the driver, unnecessarily, since the cabbie is already out and opening the door. As Cot moves to the door Stubbs grabs him by the belt in back, finds the pistol, and shoves him out. He makes him stand on the sidewalk while he frisks him, the familiar indignity. He finds the other pistol in his sock that is strapped down with a green rubber band. “Mr. Smarty,” the detective says in an affected, childish voice.

  “You’ll be surprised how little you get out of this,” Cot says. The plates of his skull hurt where the man hit him.

  Spane and his men have already disappeared up Obispo, headed toward the park. He shivers. The cop strikes him between the shoulder blades with the butt of his own pistol. “You’re wearing out your welcome,” Cot says staggering. He looks back at the cop who is jamming the pistol under his flimsy, color-spattered jacket. In the window of the cab he catches his own face: face of an alien, a stranger—and not just that, sees the heap uprisen, as if a small section of sidewalk, or the earth underneath it, had wrinkled up. “Just a drift of atoms, bud,” he says to the cop.

  “You’re about to slow down to dead,” the cop says.

  Cot straightens up. For a second he forgot she was gone. He is blinded suddenly by the knowledge of everything about her he had never touched. His mouth tastes bitter. A passing woman pats her hair with careful fingers as if there’s a secret hidden there and nods forlornly at the man she’s with. The night is cool and has a sour sea smell. A boat whistle gives two short blasts from the canal, out
let to the sea and the Gulf Stream. Cot thinks he’s going to vomit, but he doesn’t. Time is loose and wallowing, fading slowly in and out. There are no other people like you, she said, as if this was a great thing. You’re wrong about that, he said, hopefully.

  He begins to walk toward Obispo Street. The cop follows, speaking as he comes, telling Cot in a low, dispassionate voice how he’s a nobody, a nothing, a puss blister popped in the womb, only a stinking puddle people have to walk around so as not to get the slop on their shoes, a useless, puerile, rotten—

  “I already been over that,” Cot says. “Get to the good part.” He flicks one of the trade glances at the cop, the one that says: I got you memorized.

  The cop catches the look and tries to fling it back but can’t quite. This one’s on me, Cot thinks, checking off the fear rat-slipping in the man’s eyes, feeling a loose ID with him, both of them out way too far. “Slow down,” Stubbs growls, but Cot keeps moving, not fast but steadily.