“The usual desperate character?”
“We’re all desperate characters.”
“Existentially speaking.”
“I thought you weren’t speaking to Ordell.”
“I’m not. But we talk anyway. Like you and me.”
People, folks who knew her, who knew them both, who had known everything about them since the day they were born and their parents had put a conch shell out on the front porch rail to tell everybody about it, waved or bopped the horn as they passed. Crook and Countess—that was what they had called them in high school. You could spend a lifetime feeling rosy and accomplished about such matters. He leaned down and placed his head against the dashboard, caught himself, and jerked back. She pressed deeply into her seat, looking at him. A line of tension showed like a scar along her jaw. He was losing his sense of the elaborated moment. Thought this and said it to her.
“I’m on my way to get some shrimp,” she said.
They drove out to the docks on Stock Island and she bought three pounds of pink shrimp and half a dozen dorado fillets.
“Having a party?”
“An impulse.”
Jocko Brainard, the counterman, looked at them as he looked at everyone who appeared before him—as if he knew all there was to know.
“You ever go out on the boats, Jocko?” Cot said.
“You asked me that the last time you was in here,” Jocko said, pushing against his bad eye with the back of his hand.
“I can’t think of anything else to say.”
“You used to be real talkative.”
“You seen my mother lately?”
“She comes in here about onc’t a week.”
“When you see her would you tell her I said would she please go up to Aunt Mayrene’s?”
“You going to have to tell her that yoself.”
“I would, but she won’t listen.”
Marcella had drifted out the big warehouse-style doors onto the docks. He followed her, and they walked along looking at the high-prowed shrimp boats rusting under their painted skins. “They still go out,” Cot said.
“It’s like the Japanese growing rice.”
“You mean government subsidy making sure a ritualistic jot of rice—the historic symbol of the outfit’s once great mythos—is still grown in-country.”
“You bet.”
“About a washtub full I reckon.”
“It’s awful. Birds falling out of the sky. Fishes washing up on the beaches—what few fishes there are. Raccoons wandering into the yard coughing like smokers. Manatees sink to the bottoms of ancient springs, never having uttered a single word of protest. Children rock with allergies. Gunmen stagger retching into the undergrowth.”
Her voice almost gleeful, the energy, the synthesis, like a mixture turning red to blue, making her happy.
“That’s what’s happening to you,” she said. Brooks Dublin, fat shrimper captain, stood in the door of his wheelhouse looking down the channel where nothing but a few gulls, tough as old prizefighters, wheeled and complained. They both waved at him, but he didn’t wave back.
“It’s for the best,” he said.
“You always know the right thing to say.”
“If only that were true.”
“Cot—damn.” She dashed a single tear—it could have been a tear—off her cheek, quickly, with her finger tips, as if it were a bug. “You’re in so much trouble.”
“Ah, honey, it’s not time yet to bring out the fun-destroying facts.”
She skipped a beat into silence. “I apologize.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be off somewhere lawyering?”
“There was a bomb scare at the courthouse and Judge Tomlane sent everyone home.”
“You mean besides the one I called in?”
“So funny.”
“I have to find out who robbed CJ.”
“It was some men from Fort Lauderdale.”
“How do you know?”
“One of those little lawbreakers from up the Keys told on them, Ordell said.”
“That’s a fact for sure?”
“Mmm.”
“So’d Ordell call the authorities?”
“He said he was going to.”
They watched a slender sailboat, a sloop, sails furled, a sunbrowned man and woman on deck, come sliding along, easing in against the next dock over. It soothed him to see such a beautiful boat. The man’s hair was sun-blond, the woman’s too, they could have been twins, familiar gods from another world. He said, “We get so close, just a step away—you’d think we could make it.”
“Are you talking about us?”
“Among other things.”
“I wish you wouldn’t get portentous—is that the word?”
“Dystopian.”
“That’s not quite it.”
Across the water on the far side of the docks: egrets in the jucaro trees, white fuel tanks belonging to the power station next door, and three cars coming down the unpaved street raising dust—something . . . a feeling as if they were moving smoothly into a silent, secret movie, into still pictures, coming over him. A’s deadline hours ticking, a whole day gone—and more, was it more?—like fingernails ticking on a hardwood counter, on the stock of an AK-47.
He grabbed her hand, pulling her. “Let’s go.”
They ran down the docks, cut through an open storage warehouse and out into the power plant grounds where a couple of men on forklifts were moving bales from one place to another.
She hadn’t spoken, she had only run with him, her head thrown slightly back as if she was running in a parade, but now she said, “Are you going to tell me anything?”
“Sorry. In a minute.”
Around a corner among the huge exposed parts of old transformers and uncoiled spools of wire they stopped. She said silently
what what what
, and he kissed her, putting his tongue like a sly one into her mouth, wishing it was long as a snake, that he could sink into her guts among the placards and ruby necklaces and the gushes of untainted blood. “What?” she said.
“This guy. This Bert.”
“The one you depantsed?”
“The exact same. Plus a couple of recruits.”
“Because you stole from them?”
“These islands are dotted with little crosses where they buried treasure.” In his business, he had told her, after you pass the tests, they begin to reveal the locations of these X’s.
“Does he know the locations too?”
“No.”
“That’s his real problem, ay?”
“Yeah. Envy.”
“It gets in everywhere.”
“Like fly eggs.”
So they spoke as they sprinted across the big rumpled yard and entered the scrub woods. Immediately the smell of sea rot—grasses and tiny fishes, abandoned mollusk housing, shreds and tatters—fumed up. There was a path, winding, gray with bony coral outcroppings, and they followed this through mixed buttonwood and acacia past a little stream, really only a sally of ocean water diverted into the woodland. The water was orange from the buttonwood roots; tiny snapper fry darted and frisked in cloudy schools, shirking danger. The buttonwoods creaked and swayed in a jittery breeze. He knew there wasn’t really anywhere but Coon Channel to get to, but he hoped Bert didn’t know that.
Dodging faded fabric trash, broken fish boxes and such, they came to a clearing. Off there the reticulated sea vista: the old channel, ruffled along the back by breeze. She waved flies away from her face. “We’re going which way?”
“Swimming.”
He was still carrying the shrimp but now he swung it in an arc and sent it sailing into the channel. She made a muffled cry, half laughter, half scooped out of other sorrows. The shrimp hit the water, followed by gulls that began to nip at the plastic bag. “Salt to salt,” she said.
“You all right?”
“Don’t I look it?”
“Only partly.”
She scowled in a familiar way that didn’t really reassure him.
They waded into the clear, lightly soughing current. Across the channel a quarter mile off they could see houses poked out from among bushes and palm trees behind a short flat beach. Okay, he said stuffing his flip-flops in the back pockets of his shorts, and they slipped in, not taking time to say good-bye to land or struggle. Behind them nothing at first but halfway across he looked back and saw Bert taking aim. Saw as well the other two abruptly conjured, miscreant experts, one holding his pistol with two hands, the other crouching among refuse carefully drawing a bead.
Pop, pop.
The shots weren’t close, hit the surface like skids, kicking up aught in the sea’s big mitt.
They were both strong swimmers, but he kept himself between her and the assailants behind who were not getting into the water, were not shouting or threatening, only taking—Bert was taking—a long last look, a steadying and fixing look, and tucking back into the smelly boondocks.
A
bit later they caught a ride out on the highway from Bubsy Mannix, a local woman who’d run off at sixteen to join the rodeo and come back at twenty-five with a permanent limp and witty stories of livestock and cowboys throwing their weight around, now a seller of fruit pies and bakery goods, a woman with pulled-back blonde hair and a cowboy hat hanging behind her head on a string, who stopped by Randy’s Imperial Room and picked them up, two sea-damp escapees, and let them off a few minutes later in front of his mother’s misaligned house.
Marcella immediately stepped next door and hooked a ride with Delilah Strake, who had her cab parked out front while she sat under the wheel eating a slice of devil’s food cake on her break.
“I have to fetch my car,” she said as he followed her over.
“I wouldn’t do that just yet.”
“I’ll get somebody from the station to pick it up.” Standing under a big flower-filled flamboyant she called the police on Delilah’s phone—hers was wet—explained the situation, and they said they would get right on the problem. Problem of Bert and his confederates. He stood in the shade listening to her talk to the police. It was like somebody talking to one of her feckless and amusing former boyfriends.
“They already have a cordon—that’s their word—thrown up around Stock Island,” she told him.
I
t’s in the paper that night, Internet version: three men, possible assassins, picked up lost in undergrowth and transported to jail. They are all in jail. Cot goes down there, and they let him in to talk to Bert who as usual is sick with regret.
“I don’t know what came over me, Cot,” he says.
“You mean trying to kill me?”
“Well, that too, yeah. But I mean losing my head about it. I felt so ashamed when you pulled my clothes off.”
“It was the quickest thinking I could do at the time.”
“You were always a strange quick thinker, Cot.”
“So, Spane sent you?”
“Yeah, well, the first time. Before you had me put in jail. The other time was my own. They say you got to show initiative. Big A’s awfully mad at you, Cot.”
“I’m getting a little worked up myself.”
“I mean they told me to leave you alone. At least until four
P.M
. tomorrow.”
“That’s what had me confused.”
“Yeah, I know. Would you tell Mrs. Bakewell that I’m sorry.”
“She already knows you are.”
“But if you’d tell her I’m sure it would be a big help. Maybe she’ll take the case.”
Out the window Cot can hear children shouting. Or maybe they are only childish adults, frolicking. He feels sick to his stomach.
On the cab ride home he stops to pick up some Chinese food at Chee’s and then he has Slocumb drive over to the botanical garden to help fetch his mother. As usual she doesn’t really want a ride but because it’s him she consents. He explains what the trouble is, more or less.
His mother, who was once a heavy woman with a light step and is now headed in the opposite direction, leans her head against the doorpost and closes her eyes. She has spent the afternoon talking to local women about flowering vines and fortune telling and is worn down by human contact. They sat in a circle up in the grassy space on the garden’s top terrace. From there the ocean lay spread out flat and fetching, uninflected and blue as a baby’s eye. As always—as almost always—Ella thought of her husband. He was probably lying in his same-time-zone bed in the big tile-floored apartment on Castroneves Street thinking about one of his
gráfico
predicaments, about conjurations, fated charmers. Everyone in his books was some better-realized version, some prophesied and never-found version, of himself, even the villains. He would probably get up and fix himself a big jar of tea that he iced with chips struck off the block he bought from the ice man on his rounds. It would be mushy hot on his side of the Gulf Stream and he would rub a small chunk of ice against his forehead. She could see the gleaming streak of water on his pale, half-Scottish skin. “It soothes the little molecules of remembrance,” he would say to the air. Her son, this man she had once told never to come around again, was in trouble. She offers a little prayer, by way of her husband who never seems not her husband, and lets it go, like a small bird, out the window. The sky is jammed in the south with clouds, but the clouds have no threat in them. She wishes things like this were a sign—of goodness, of hope. But there are no signs, only imaginings, she’s pretty sure of that.
Oh, Rafael.
She’s almost said his name out loud.
They drive up the beach and stop at Christie’s market for some mangoes, imported from Mexico. Christie and his two sons are in back drinking pulque around the large table with a few of their customers. His wife Estella waits on her and the two women exchange looks filled, so it seems to Ella, with fealty and an understanding that contains a timeless wisdom. Lord, what we know about this world. And those running around in it. She no longer believes there is much you can do about any of it. Back in the cab she thinks again of her husband, who, when he made the tea, would drink a chilled jar of it standing out on the little back second-floor balcony looking into the courtyard. The feral cats lived out there during the day. Rafael would call to the cats, whistle softly to them as if they were dogs, and the cats would come.
T
hat night they all eat over at Marcella’s house, feasting on a second batch of shrimp and dorado the police who drove the car home picked up. Jackie’s there along with Arthur Haskel’s mother and his brother Hauck. Hauck wanders away down the back lane before supper is served, swinging his crippled left hand as he goes. He says he wants to go down to the store and play a round of pool. It’s just something he says, everybody knows that. He probably doesn’t know what he wants to do, he only has an itch to move. “Come back soon,” Marcella says, and Hauck looks at her out of his hooded friendly eyes as if he’s afraid of the pressure she’s putting on him.
They eat the shrimp on the upper gallery overlooking the big bamboo patches on Chastain Street. As children he and Marcella ran up and down that dark street waving sparklers. The streetlight on the corner has been put out, and Cot wonders about that and then he doesn’t wonder, and he gets up and goes down the outside stairs, around the house and slinks along the big silvertop bushes—careful not to step in the drained fishpond where twenty-five years ago Marcella’s father burned his law books—until he gets under the big poinciana that belongs to the pie-maker, Frank Bacon. When Cot was a boy Mr. Bacon’s place smelled of baking pies, but no longer. Now the pies—fruit and custard—are mostly baked in a facility up in Marathon. Over behind the wall of the Church of Holiness grounds children at play shout. It’s dark, but they don’t want to go home yet, that’s clear. A car, sputtering and backfiring, passes: Donnie Cantrell on his way home to explain himself to his wife. Tourists on bicycles, their tiny LED lights blinking, wobble by, moving in a slow motion that must be a feature of the tropic dream they have purchased for themselves. Right after them he sees a figure enter the street, pause, then slip so quickly it’s as if it wasn’t there, between two dilapidated sheds beside the old Terrence house. A familiar buzzing sets to in his head.
He crouches and angles around to the other side of the pie-man’s yard and through a gate that opens into a little fenced-off area where the Hertzels next door used to keep chickens in the days before local poultry became ornamental and consigned to the streets. In a minute the somebody—a man moving fast, carrying something like a long valise—crosses the street and enters a vacant lot. Cot slips around to the right, easing in among and out of big hibiscus bushes massively flowering, and comes around the side of the dark and shuttered tourist house across the street. He waits in the shadow of the tourist house. Crouched in the lot among stacks of loose bricks and boards, the man, darkly clothed, is working on a small, bulky piece of equipment on the ground.
Cot can barely make it out then barely believe what it is: a sniper rifle.
He takes three quick steps into the lot and with the pistol, Bert’s pistol, shoots the man once in the head. The sound of the shot is loud, but it is only one shot and a single shot you can always just wonder about and let go. He leaves the man where he falls, a stocky man in a dark shirt, someone he doesn’t know. He takes the half-assembled rifle in his hands—for a sec marveling at its compact uncomplicated shape—jams it between two large coral stone boulders, bends the barrel sideways and tosses the rifle into the bushes and shakes the .308 ammo out of its little cartridge holder and flings it into the bushes too. The ammo makes a rustling sound like lizards moving among the leaves as it hits. From where he stands he can see the lights of Marcella’s balcony through the still-bare branches of the big mahogany trees behind the pie-maker’s.
T
hey’re all enjoying themselves, drinking rum drinks and watching a Cuban comedy show flown in each week to Miami. His mother and Marcella look up at him from the couch where they sit side by side, and they both get up at the same time and come to him. Marcella’s mother pays no attention. The two women—still his favorites—touch him lightly, brushing little special places that maybe seem out of synch or stained, their hands just reaching him as he crosses the room and goes out on the darkened second-floor gallery with the women following. A throbbing presence inside urges him to keep going, keep moving, even if movement is only a small and futile agitation, but he makes himself stop. Above the yard bats stitch up the night. His mother sits down in one of the big armchairs. Marcella, letting the skirts she has gathered up to run after him fall, pushes unrestrained straight into him in the old way, as if she is setting off on a walk right through and all along the byways of his body. He catches her and gently holds her off. He remembers where he is. “We need more firepower,” he says and laughs and looks out into the yard that seems to be disappearing in fog.
“We’re all right,” Marcella says and runs her hand over his, picking lightly at the skin.
“No. We’re not.”
“Ordell has the police on alert.”
“Concerning what?”
“Marauders in the neighborhood.”
“I didn’t see any cruisers.”
“They’re around.”
He never really trusts letting others take care of things. He doesn’t especially believe in his own ability to manage, but it’s familiar and he believes in possibility, in increments adding up if you conduct the affair deeply enough in the shadows and keep at it. Or has. Even this is slipping away. What he believes in now, in this moment—
a sniper?
—has become tatters and figments, outlines drifting like ghosts above where the body’d been.
T
hey bolted the doors and he put Jackie downstairs on a mattress pulled out of a spare bedroom (Arthur’s mother slipped out as soon as she got a good look at Cot). He himself simply stayed awake walking around the house in the dark. The clamminess, the polluted sweat, was still on him. His insides shivered and sloshed. If anybody was coming it would be in the blank precedence before dawn. But you couldn’t be sure. The house still smelled of rosewood and cinnamon and of bay leaves crumpled in jars as it had when he was a child and Marcella’s father, the old padrone, roved the premises giving orders no one minded. He had been knocked dead of a heart attack when Marcella was thirteen. She’d found him on his knees, bent over the bed, his pants around his ankles. And she had taken the time to rearrange him before she called her mother.
For a while she stayed awake with him. He didn’t tell her about the sniper, but he talked to her of his crime, of CJ, of the emeralds glittering somewhere, elsewhere, out on the earth, glowing he said like little lit furnaces left over from worlds so long forgotten no one remembered there had ever been such worlds, and, as if answering a question, she said
chain of being
which was a phrase they had gotten stuck on in high school the year before he left for Miami, and they laughed at this and then on the couch in her old bedroom where they had made love for the first time they made love in their rude and troubled fashion, bumping and shoving as if in a locked trunk they were trying to get out of, and she said, only a moment afterwards, that it was the one thousand four hundredth time, a number she made up afresh each time, high or low, depending on how she felt about him, about things in general, and then he walked around the house and sat a while on one of the creaky bamboo couches on the upper gallery, and got up again and walked around the gallery as well, and sat on the glider that he was careful not to set in rusty motion and watched the dawn stumble eventually to its feet out of the ocean’s basements beyond the scattered and brushy islands to the east.
W
hen the sun is up finally over the horizon he walks to South Beach and swims for half an hour. There’s a slimy mess of seaweed on the rough slab-coral beach, and tourists are out at the old hotel next door talking about it. It’s only sea lettuce, and every year around this time there are expected vagaries in the water, but it doesn’t look appetizing this dank vegetable wallow and smells bad. The hotel’s been freshly painted and looks like a vision of the tropics that anyone would go for. Blinky Borden, the proprietor, comes out as Cot starts up the street and he goes in and they have coffee on the hotel’s big back porch. Blinky wants to know how things are between Ordell and Marcella.
“Nothing much I can tell you about that.”
Blinky like so many others has been in love with Marcella all his life, but he’s never made much headway. It makes him feel good, makes him feel as if he’s in the mix and important, to talk about her. Cot sees this. He doesn’t mind. Somehow it makes him feel connected to the world, up to something like everybody else, a cohort and celebrant among the multitudes, and this soothes him a little as it’s going on, even if it doesn’t later. After a while he excuses himself and walks back to the old house. Nobody’s there. He runs around the rooms, coldly angry, shouting under his breath, but everybody’s gone. The cars are gone. He calls Ordell, and
he
says he doesn’t know where they are. He has already pulled the police detail off the job. “Were they ever on it?” Cot says. Ordell’s voice sounds weak and Cot wonders if he’s been crying. “I’m sorry,” Cot says. This is the day he’s supposed to produce the emeralds. He doesn’t have a clue where they might be, but, as he understands it, he has until late this afternoon before his time’s up. He calls Spane on a cell he found on the kitchen counter, first time doesn’t get him, but the next, five seconds later, he does. Spane says he’ll check on the time. “I’m on my way after them now,” Cot says. Just outside the window a bird in a little red vest dawdles in a skinny lime tree. High up Cot can see clouds lined up in dots and stripes as if they’re about to become messages. No special telegraph of the astral needed here, thanks. He goes outside and stands in the big yard, one of the last big yards on the island. The sun sprawls yellow and helpless on the meager grass. The big flamboyants on the street side take the breeze in their arms and fling it back, gently, as if the breeze is a bully charmed into sweetness. Cot sits down in one of the white-painted cast-iron chairs under a little pollarded orange tree. The fruit is green and small in the branches. He thinks about where Marcella and his mother might have gone but can’t get a reading. Then the phone rings.
A man whose voice sounds vaguely familiar tells him
they
—“Who’s they?” Cot says but the man ignores him—are
keeping everybody
—“Who’s everybody?” Cot says but the man goes right on over his asking—and the detainees will be
okay
,
returned to him
—as if he is speaking of lost pocketbooks—when he delivers the emeralds to the mailbox of a house on Scooter Lane up the Keys at Summerford. “You know where that is?” the man says. Cot knows. “You get ’em there by twilight time and everything’ll be jim-dandy.”
“That the beginning of twilight or do I have all the way to the end?”
“What’s that?”
“Twilight lasts a while. Do I have . . .”
“Just bring the fucking stones.”
“Okay,” Cot says.
“What’d you say?”
“Okay. I’ll get them there.”
“I thought you didn’t know where they were?”
“Who is this? This you, Solange?” Solange worked for Albertson on the administrative side.
But whoever it is, is gone.
H
e leaves the shade and stands in the full sunshine of the new day shaking. The yard—a corner lot—opens on two sides onto the street. A string of tourists on pink and yellow bicycles pedal orderly by, parents and three young children, dressed up. Natty gray mockingbirds tumble in the big grapefruit tree at the edge of the old, now unused, driveway. Cot tries to redial the caller, but the number’s private, not available. He takes Marcella’s car that’s still in the new garage beside her mother’s aged Buick and drives to the police station. Everybody there knows a little something about the CJ affair, but nobody has a really good idea of what to do. “You see,” the chief is saying into a cell phone as Cot waits to talk to him, “the only thing you got backing up a hustler is neediness and a yearning for unearned pleasures.” He winks at Cot. “He falls apart in a minute.”
“W
ell, nada on top of nada on that one,” the chief says to Cot concerning the Cross Dresser Killers as he calls them. Under his right eye he has a small scab from a skin cancer excision that moves as he smiles.
They haven’t yet found the body over in the vacant lot.
C
ot sits on the station front steps running down the possibilities. Each is fey and shaky, thin, bubbles coming through milky surfaces. Buzzards circle high above the parking lot next door, taking their time. A man in red shorts chases a little boy around the lot and appears unable to catch him. In one of those little abrupt clicks in time Cot can’t remember where he is, who he is, which world he’s in. Then everything snaps back into place, same old arrangement. What he’s done is carved into tablets leaned against a rough stone wall, letters and florid phraseology shining in a dusty murk. You can’t miss what the words say.
H
e goes around to Ordell’s office but Ordell isn’t in. His secretary says he’s taken a leave of absence. He finds the sheriff and asks him about this but the sheriff says there isn’t much he can tell him. What about CJ’s case? With a silver penknife the sheriff carefully peels a small guava into an ashtray as they talk. He looks at Cot as if he doesn’t know what he’s referring to. Maybe they
are
in an alternate universe, some place where just now a big poinciana waves its massed orange flowers in the window and a flock of gulls fresh in from sea duty peck at a dead chicken on the sidewalk.
“None of y’all got the heads-up, ay?” Cot says.
“CJ?” the sheriff says again, touching his lower lip with the blade of the penknife.
Maybe it was you
, Cot wants to say.
Maybe
you
did it.
In a moment of blind slippage, of modal disharmony, this traveling second of spiritual beggary, everybody looks guilty.
That’s how it gets
, he thinks,
when you won’t face up to your business.
H
e goes around to Jonny Day’s on Front Street and sits in a window seat drinking salted coffee and tapping into a rented computer. He tries one or two of CJ’s social pages, but everybody there is in mourning, baffled and without a clue (though some make raging, preposterous claims). He calls Tommy in Miami and asks him to find out what he can about an arrest in Lauderdale. Killers under lock and key for a Key West murder. Tommy says he’ll get back to him. Bert passes on the sidewalk and Cot goes out to meet him.