Men in Miami Hotels by Charlie Smith

Author:Charlie Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Retail, Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9780062247292
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

7

Ten hours later and just outside the reef they took the runabout in the six miles to Cow Channel, entered the canal below Roosevelt Drive, and ran down to the boat ramp on 11th Street. There they were met by Jake Muster in his cab and Jake drove them to Marcella’s family place where Cot took a bicycle and peddled over to his mother’s house on Regent. He had a feeling, he told Marcella. His mother was sitting barefoot on the front steps. Mayrene’s car was parked out front. Ella was eating a small papaya, scooping curls of yellow flesh out of the hull with a salt-corroded spoon. “I’m like an addict,” she said grinning. “I can’t stay away, and every minute without it I draw closer to it.” Cot stood in the yard looking at her. He didn’t quite get what she was saying. “Look at this spoon,” she said. “All my things have been spoiled and rusted.”

“I’d sue.”

“I’m not sure that’s the thing.”

High up, buzzards, small and tending to their business, rode the island thermals. Gulls, those busybodies, raved and cut along, headed for the beach.

“It’s stormed,” his mother said.

She looked down at her long feet, long slender toes that her husband on the beach at the fort, or between Cuban sheets, liked to take in his hands and hold. “When I was wading over yonder where we plane-crashed,” she said vaguely, speaking like a country woman and pointing in the wrong direction, “when I walked out of the Gulf waters, I could feel the rheumatism in my ankles. The bones hurt as if somebody had whacked them with a stick.”

She hadn’t meant to say that, say or think the trailing thought. But that was what age was, wasn’t it, that tendency toward expostulation?

From the little yard, under a half dead, peeling gumbo-limbo tree Cot looked at her. “They let you back in?”

“I borrowed on the house.”

“And did what?”

“Paid off that little squirrel.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’m sitting here, aren’t I?”

“I’m not sure you should have done that, Mama.” Thinking, well, she could have done that all along—thinking, now they’ll just take it from her in chunks of blackmail and scurrilous doings and put her in the street.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to see you living over in the park.”

“That isn’t likely.” She thought she might go to Cuba, rejoin her husband, learn afresh to live in his unacknowledged version of failed glory. That had been the trouble before: unacknowledgment—hadn’t it?

“I have a phobia about it,” he said.

“You don’t live in a park. And don’t you mean a precognition?”

“I live in a hotel. And I can’t stand the thought of sleeping outside.”

“Is that a non sequitur?”

“No, Mama.” He did have a phobia about it. He waked in the night sweating from fear of it. Sweating from fear of losing Marcella, his father, CJ when he was alive, even Spane and his cohorts in Miami snug in their hotels. What conceived shambles wasn’t he scared of?

Jackie came out the front door. He was eating cereal from a bowl.

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