Read Online Men in Miami Hotels by Charlie Smith - Free Book Online Page A

direction. Cot was holding himself back for some reason, trying not to let himself think about anything, a practice he couldn’t sustain for long. The lane sheltered a bower-like entrance to his mother’s backyard. He let himself think about this; no good thoughts. He began sprinting. He dived through the big mass of bougainvillea behind the Colfield place and through the slat gate into his mother’s shady backyard. No Bert there either. Jackie was putting mackerel fillets in an old metal drum smoker. She was over at the garden teaching her class in sortilege, he said.
    “Anybody come around here?” Cot said.
    “Oscar Moreno dropped by to talk to Mrs. Sims.” Oscar was one of his mother’s lawyers.
    “That it?”
    “Yep. Except for the figments and cordial apparitions.”
    Cot felt faint—and depressed, as if the blow had knocked happiness out of him. Billy trailed in through the back gate. He was carrying a clutch of green coconuts. “D’jou catch him?” he said.
    “Catch who?” Jackie said.
    “This misanthrope been running around.”
    “Back here?”
    “Over at the Stampen place.”
    “They were camping on the back porch last week.”
    “Like us.”
    “Poachers.”
    “I got to get my bike,” Cot said.
    When he got back to the library he thought the bike was stolen but the man behind the counter, a skinny man who, Cot knew, liked to stand late at night under streetlights smoking thin aromatic cigars, said they brought it in and put it in the office. When he went to get it the head librarian, a woman with too much emotion for a librarian it had always seemed to him, scolded him and told him to stop leaving his bike unlocked at their door. Cot didn’t try to explain anything to her. He had generally quit that by the time he was ten. “I feel a headache coming on,” he said to nobody in particular as he pushed the bike down the ramp behind the library. Across the street workmen in do-rags were just finishing removing the last remains of the Crawford house. He had known the house all his life and now he couldn’t recall what it looked like. Only an expanse of raked coral dirt containing traces, like an empty gold mine, of what had once been an arena of desire and mortification. He walked over and spoke to Bucky Winters who was pulling a big rake across the surface. Bucky had a small Wake-up Andy doll stuffed in his back pocket. “I found it mashed against the fence over yonder,” he said when Cot asked him about it. “Last significations of habitation.”
    “The Crawfords still in town?”
    “Naw. They left right after the fire. Moved to Titusville.”
    “Fire did this?”
    “Drunkenness and bad behavior did this.”
    “I got you.” Despair and shame—terror at the bone—there was a list.
    “You want this doll?”
    “You don’t?”
    “It just made me feel bad to see it lying there.”
    Cot took the limp, goggle-eyed doll from him. He placed it in the basket on the back of his bike. Up ahead, just ducking around the corner by the Simeon Bros. grocery, he saw the flicker of an orange shirt. “I’ll catch you later.”
    He couldn’t however catch up with whoever it was, with Bert. Southard was as empty as the morning after a parade. Tatters and bits of what looked like flags fluttered in the poinciana trees—as if there had been a parade. Then Marcella came backing her Rover over the hill. She cranked the big car into a parking space, honked, and waited. “How about a snack?” she said when he pulled up beside her.
    “I got to get Mama out of town.”
    “I know.”
    “That’s what you always say.”
    “That man who you stripped and sent to jail got out this morning.”
    “I’m just waking up from where he conked me on the head.”
    She grimaced—from concern or disgust it was hard to tell. “Where’d you get the doll?”
    He told her.
    “Entices us into a life of nostalgia and other misrepresentations,” she said.
    “Not me. I’m strictly a present-moment kind of