Free Men in Miami Hotels by Charlie Smith Page B

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.

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    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