Virgin Heat (10 page)

But the small talk could not go on forever, there had to be a time when Angelina and her relative would have a heart-to-heart.

It happened not long after they left Raul's to walk in no particular direction through the hot streets with their slinking cats, their sleeping dogs nestled against the tires of parked cars. At a quiet intersection, Michael looked at Angelina, tried to read in her eyes what it was she needed from him, then gave a somewhat theatrical yawn and announced that he was tired, he was going home— which meant, of course, that he wasn't tired and he was going out.

Alone now with his niece, Uncle Louie said, "Cuppa coffee?"

They ducked into a side-street cafe, really just a Cuban grocery with a few tables set up in an alley dimly lit with strings of Christmas lights. They settled into slatted wooden chairs from which hung little curls of peeling varnish, and after they'd ordered, Angelina said, "So Uncle Louie, why are you here?"

"Why are you here?" he asked right back.

"I asked you first."

He was fidgeting with a sugar packet, shaking all the sugar to one end. He replied as though the answer was self-evident. "I came to find you."

Angelina had been uneasily proud of her getaway from Pelham Manor, the unpracticed deftness with which she'd sneaked and fibbed. Now all of a sudden she wondered if she'd fooled anyone at all, if there'd been even a moment when she wasn't in the unrelenting bosom of her family. "You knew I was here?"

Uncle Louie didn't answer right away. Instead, he folded his hands, tilted his head, fixed Angelina with a cockeyed smile full of fondness and collusion. Then he said something he would never say to anyone up north, because up north he could not imagine that it might be taken as a compliment. "Angelina, you and me, we're a lot alike, I think. My tape—I saw the way you looked at it. This town—I could tell it struck a chord with you."

"Who else knows?" said Angelina. She couldn't entirely keep panic out of her voice, nor could she wholly banish from her mind a shaming and equivocal hope that her father might yet rescue her and spoil everything, drag her kicking and screaming away from this splendid adventure she shouldn't be having.

Her uncle had hoped for a different kind of reply, some confirmation from his favorite niece that they did in fact have lots in common. Hiding his deflation, he said, "Who else? No one else. Nobody knows I'm here either. And dollars to donuts no one figures it out."

He leaned low across his elbows, his tone turned even more conspiratorial. "Our family, Angelina, I'll tell ya something about our family. They think they're close-knit, they pride themselves on being loyal, but the truth is, no one really pays attention t'each other, no one sees enough to really know what anybody else is feeling, wanting."

The waitress brought the coffees. Steamed milk foamed on top, the bubbles turned blue and red and green beneath the Christmas lights.

"Now it's your turn, Angelina," Louie said. "Why did you come here?"

She drizzled sugar into her coffee, watched the crystals turn translucent, then congeal into a coffee-colored paste, then sink beneath the foam. Finally she said, very softly but with a serene defiance, "I came to find the love of my life. And I have."

Louie did not expect quite so fraught an answer. He settled back against the peeling varnish of his chair to mull it over. He looked at Angelina with wonder and almost shyly, the way a father looks upon his daughter as a bride, and he trembled for her, knowing suddenly that she was grown and he had no wisdom to impart, no advice that could assure her happiness. Still, he hated to see her hurt or disappointed. "Angelina," he said, "maybe it's none of my business, maybe I should keep my mouth shut, I mean, hey, wha' do I know? But okay, lemme say it straight out: Don't'cha think maybe he's gay?"

Angelina reached across the small table, put her hand on top of his. "You can't ask me that, Uncle Louie. I'm sorry, but you can't."

"Why not?"

"And you can't ask why not. Sometime maybe I'll tell you."

They fell silent, sipped their coffee. Farther back in the alley, lizards made furtive scraping sounds as they nosed for bugs in gravel; from high up, tree frogs smugly croaked, nestled under the skirts of palms.

After a moment Angelina smiled, said, "Pretty smart, Uncle Louie, you figuring out I was here."

Louie smiled back, knowing that his favorite niece was being kind, was giving him a gift. But in that moment he was not so sure he'd done right by her. He'd set out in search of a lost child, and found instead a woman with her own desires. He felt like he was meddling, like he was in the way.

Angelina reached for him again, took his wrist this time, pressed it as she fixed him with her violet eyes. "But please don't tell my father, Uncle Louie. Please don't make it so I have to leave."

Louie sighed, blinked, weighed his giddy reborn fantasy of being a big shot, a hero, against Angelina's right to choose herself a life.

"Sometime I'll go back," she said. "But not now, Uncle Louie. I'm not ready to go back."

He slipped out of her grip, pushed back onto his chair's hind legs, and looked up from the confines of the alley, past the strings of Christmas lights, to a narrow swath of sky where tropic stars were nested one by one in cottony and lucent puffs of humid air. He said, "You know what, Angelina? I'm not ready to go back either."

The next morning, Ziggy was summoned to the garden of Carmen Salazar.

With not enough sleep behind his eyes and not enough caffeine in his bloodstream, he drove the still streets to the candy store. When he walked through to the bright doorway at the back, he found Salazar in conversation with two men, who fell instantly silent at the arrival of a stranger. Salazar nodded that it was okay to talk, and one of them resumed mid-sentence.

He said "... a chance to profit from a patriotic duty." This man was tall, with the rumpled and phlegmatic good looks of a warped aristocrat. He had a prosperous and graying moustache, the wise liquid eyes of a hound, and a Panama hat he held in his lap, slowly and ceaselessly rolling and unrolling its brim.

But his argument wasn't playing well with Salazar. "That Cuban stuff does nothing for me," he said. "My people left Havana in the 1870s. Me, I have as much feeling for Cuba as I have for Lithuania."

Ziggy recognized the other man—short and stocky, his nose so badly broken that you saw his profile when he was looking you right in the eye. He had crisp unlocal creases down his pants legs, and he couldn't sit still, was always plucking at lint or at imagined wrinkles. He said, "Right, this is exactly what I'm saying. Don't complicate it wit' politics, don't get all righteous and stupid. Treat it like a simple business. Weapons in; money out. Business. Simple."

"Business, fine," said Salazar. "Simple, not really."

Ziggy stood there. The sun was at a difficult angle, he couldn't find a piece of shade to hide in. His head felt cottony and, after the initial glance, no one had so much as looked at him.

"Forget that politics bullshit," the short man went on, his voice staccato, his fingers busy. "Politics. Overthrow. No one's talkin' overthrow. What I'm talkin', I'm talkin' like wit' Russia. When the time comes, it overthrows itself. It just happens. Then it's fuckin' chaos. The people wit' strength, they profit. Free enterprise, bang bang. So what I'm sayin', I'm sayin' see it as an opportunity to get in good wit' the people who are gonna be profiting."

But the tall man was not content to leave it at that, he badly wanted to dress the scam in some nobility. He added, "And a chance to participate in a great—"

"Will you cut that bullshit out?" the short man interrupted.

There was a silence filled with the smell of ripening fruit. Then Salazar sucked his gums and said, "I just don't know, gentlemen. I'm flattered by your trust, of course. But the scale of what you're proposing . . . Look, what I'm running here, it's a cozy, low-risk, small-time operation. Isn't that right, Ziggy?"

Ziggy said, "Hm?"

He'd given up expecting to be addressed. Logy in the sunshine, his mind had wandered; he'd been thinking about the skin on Angelina's neck. He didn't want to think about it, but his mind kept going back to it like a dog to a buried bone. The skin on her neck was smooth and dry, so soft it felt powdery, but he could remember that, after he touched it, it turned a little pebbly and gradually grew as moist as steak.

Salazar said to him, "I was saying that, while we are fortunate enough to have associates with big-time talents, what we run here is a small-time operation. Isn't that right?"

Ziggy treaded water. "Yeah," he said, "that's right."

"And while these gentlemen," Salazar continued, "no doubt have a canny grasp of world events, these greater things might simply be beyond our scope. Wouldn't you agree?"

"Yeah, Carmen, yeah," said Ziggy, but he was feeling the unease of the hard of hearing, he understood he'd missed something and would probably now miss other things as well. Attention was a habit, a groove, and once it got away from you, it was as hard to find again as a home-run swing.

Salazar turned his attention back to his two visitors. "So you see, gentlemen, if I do choose to get involved, at least I have a savvy, top-notch workforce. Let me think it over."

The others sat in the shade. Ziggy stood in the sun. He understood that something big was being talked about and he understood that he was being mocked. But the connections eluded him. He tried to look cocky; he hoped the meeting was finished. Silently he cursed Angelina for coming to Key West and messing with his concentration. He cursed her and he thought about her neck.

*

Angelina had slept badly, had awakened with damp and tangled sheets between her thighs, her eyes itchy behind puffy lids. Her skin felt wrong. Though unrested, she couldn't wait to get out of bed, to put the goading night behind her. She wanted coffee and daylight, and she wanted to talk to Michael.

She slipped into a modest one-piece bathing suit, and went down to the courtyard, where breakfast was laid out on a table covered with fronds from the traveler palm, and thwarted bees hovered around the fruits and juices under their pagodas of frail white netting. She took coffee and a mango muffin and a wedge of melon and sat down in a lounge chair by the pool.

She sipped and nibbled and absently absorbed the guileless intimacy, like something out of childhood, of a resort waking up. A man appeared in boxer shorts with hearts on them, took two cups of coffee and two bananas, retreated to his room. A drag queen came by in a long pink robe, his hair in curlers, drank guava juice and smoked a cigarette. The day's first sleepy-eyed nudists dropped their towels and took their wake-up dips. Angelina could estimate how long they'd been at Coral Shores by how closely the color of their buttocks matched the rest of them. For the first time ever that she knew of, she wondered how Sal would look with nothing on.

She fetched more coffee, waited for Michael to wake up.

She waited a long time. The sun got higher, shadows shrank inward like evaporating puddles. Finally the buffet was broken down like a stage set, the coffee urns rolled away on metal tables that looked surgical.

Angelina watched the little square of patio in front of Michael's room, but when Michael finally appeared, it was not by way of his own door, but through the picket gate that separated the courtyard from the heat and possibilities of the world beyond. Angelina saw him before he noticed her, and determined beyond a doubt that he was wearing last night's clothes. She knew somehow that they'd been off then on again. She waved.

He came over, said a nonchalant good morning, squinted through somewhat bloodshot eyes toward the place where the buffet had been. He said, "Coffee's gone already?"

She handed him the last half-cup of her own, and he sat down at the foot of her lounge chair.

A slightly awkward moment passed. Michael's posture was relaxed, fatigued, yet also slightly smug, puffed up. Angelina felt her forehead flushing, her mouth going dry, and she dimly realized it was because of the tweaking proximity of sex, a newly admitted awareness that desire was all around her, as various as flavor and as enveloping as air. "Nice night?" she said at last.

"Wonderful night," said Michael, sipping the lukewarm coffee, toying with his earrings. "Miraculous night." His green eyes were dreamy, a reddish stubble had sprouted on his cheeks and glinted in the sun.

Angelina gave him a moment to be coy, then said, "So tell me."

Michael said, "David. His name is David. We met at the Copa. Didn't dance. Hardly talked at first. Just, you know, locked eyes. Then walked on the beach. Saw a spectacular moonset, a perfect orange slice right down to the horizon."

Angelina smiled but also felt a pang that took her by surprise. Envy. Why hadn't she known nights like that, glorious nights with moonlight on salt water in the arms of a thrilling lover?

"Been a long time," Michael went on, "since I met someone and everything just clicked."

"I'm happy for you," Angelina said. She meant it though it took an effort.

He heard the wistfulness. He swiveled to face her, put a hand on her ankle. "Hey, we both found our princes on the very same night."

"Go after him," Angelina echoed, trying out the feel of the words. They tasted too harsh. "Jeez, you make it sound so . . . so—"