And West Is West (23 page)

CHAPTER 46

South Beach

It is the witching hour, 2 a.m., the time of night most murders occur. Outside Ethan's door a crowd in the hall plays musical chairs with their hotel rooms. He pulls a pillow over his head but can't escape the voices . . . until, finally, the revelers disperse. But he's goggle eyed—overrested from the depressive daytime nap he'd initiated with a dose of Ambien after his fight with Alex. So there will be no return to unconsciousness for him.

Ethan sits up and browses the internet on his phone. He learns that the driving time from South Beach to Seminole City Correctional is fifty-six minutes. He also learns that he does not meet the requirements for a prisoner visit since he hasn't sent in the advance paperwork.

But there are exceptions. And what is transporting cremains to an inmate if not an exception?

After he maps the location of a car rental, Ethan's phone goes dark, its battery dead. He's hoping his brain will shut down, too. But he starts thinking of Alex.

Ethan's anger toward his friend slackens. Clearly, Zoe
had been
searching for something she couldn't find in him. Clearly, he
had
failed to give her the attention she needed. He'd made her secondary to his job, and not even a close second. What an idiot he'd been. What a fucked-up idiot!

He ought to call Alex, ought to charge his phone. Maybe Alex is trying to reach him right now. But drugged and emotionally wiped, Ethan turns his head on his pillow and gazes at the outline of Zoe's urn. These are his last hours with her. Alex will have to wait.

CHAPTER 47

Pompano Beach

Having waitressed at a Cracker Barrel while in high school, Jessica knows how to memorize daily specials, roll up silverware inside paper napkins and balance multiple dinner plates on one arm. Jeans and tees aren't quite the best interview clothes, so on the bus to her interview Jessica stops at a JCPenney for slacks and a long-sleeve blouse—and to ask a cosmetician for help with eye shadow. They settle on a color called Eternal Sunshine. Changing into her new clothes in the store bathroom, Jessica smiles at the mirror.

“Pleased to meet you. I'm Jessica Aldridge,” she practices. It's a good thing she can come out with her name because with her tattoos covered and her eye sockets high-beam bright, Jessica barely recognizes her reflection.

Down Airpark Road, Phantom Diner is a brick-and-clapboard building with a blue-tiled roof and quaint bay windows. It looks okay, and then Jessica is inside asking about the job.

“The boss isn't in yet,” says the day hostess. “We're not a chain and we don't have medical,” she adds discouragingly.

“That's fine,” Jessica says, smiling as though she'd be happy to work here for free. And truthfully, any lack of probing corporate benefit paperwork is all right by her. In a quiet corner Jessica fills out the one-page application.

When she turns in the sheet the hostess, glancing it over, doesn't inquire about her yearlong employment blank but merely says, “So long.” If this hard young woman has anything to say about it, Jessica will not be getting the job.

CHAPTER 48

Seminole City

Stubbornness with the guard at the prison gate gets Ethan into the warden's antechamber, a room as institutional as a principal's office. Likewise, a woman assailing an ancient keyboard attached to a boxy monitor incites further déjà vu. When her dot matrix printer begins to rattle out a sheet, Ethan is a sophomore again, in need of a hall pass. In this case his
pass
is the visitation request paperwork to see prisoner 82747L, Donald Alan Aldridge.

“That's all we can do till the warden gets back,” the efficient woman says when Ethan turns in the completed form. “He shouldn't be ten minutes now. You're quite welcome to wait here, Mr. Winter.”

“Thank you,” says Ethan and settles onto a bench near the outer door. An overhead vent blows pleasantly cool air down his collar.

Forty minutes later, a tall man in a gray suit bursts in and hurries across the anteroom. “Hold my calls, Ann,” he says without noticing Ethan. With a second bang the man disappears into the inner office.

“The
warden
,” Ann whispers unnecessarily. Her newly creased brow confirms that her boss is in a bad mood. At a double ring she snatches up her handset.

“Yes, sir. I'll get him on the line right away.” Ann signals for Ethan to be patient, then she dials a number. “Agent Daugherty,” she says to her caller. “Warden Eli Wagner at Seminole City Correctional would like a word. Hold on, please.”

Ethan is shivering now. The blowing air vent is chilling him and he gets out from under it. Standing, he can see that the line-busy indicator on Ann's phone is lit—Wagner's call. After a minute, Wagner is still talking and Ethan is still hovering. Ann looks up from her keyboard though her fingers keep typing. “It shouldn't be long. He does know you're out here. You can have a seat.”

Ethan gives Ann a resigned smile while thinking of his ex-supervisor, Dwayne Hoke. One of Dwayne's power plays was to make his subordinates wait. “I'll just stand a while. Unless you mind.”

“Suit yourself,” Ann says, assailing her keyboard. She must type 120 words per minute, like a computer coder on amphetamines.

Ethan puts down Zoe's cremation urn and leans left and right to loosen his spine. His vertebrae crack and he stays standing to burn off his anxiety. By the time the light blinks out on Ann's phone, his back is stiffening again. Wagner and whoever Daugherty is have had a lengthy talk—most likely, Ethan thinks irritably, so Wagner could demonstrate how irrelevant Ethan's time was compared to someone of importance.

Ann's intercom buzzes.

“Yes, sir,” Ann tells the handset, her manner militarily precise. Upon hanging up she offers Ethan an apologetic expression. “Warden Wagner says he can't authorize an inmate visit on an hour's notice. You'll have to come back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

Ann's face tightens. “Mr. Winter, the rules say you need to apply for a prisoner visit a month in advance.”

“The problem is”—Ethan leans over her desk—“I'm here about a death in the inmate's family that took place
three
weeks ago. So how could I have applied for a visit
four
weeks ago?” While Ann absorbs Ethan's logic he realizes that he's being a Hoke, an unnecessarily aggressive asshole.

“You know,” Ann says, “the warden is already giving you VIP treatment. Usually special visits like yours have to take place on visiting days—on a Saturday or Sunday. The warden is allowing you to come on a Friday.”

“All right,” Ethan says, capitulating to her reasonableness. “I'll be back tomorrow.”

“Nine on the dot,” Ann says. Then she studies the ash urn that Ethan has placed on the corner of her desk. “That's not for Donald Aldridge, is it?”

“Is that a problem?”

“The only items you're allowed to give prisoners are food from our vending machines or nonpicture books. You know, like Bibles.”

“Oh,” Ethan says. “But—”

“No, sir. There's no way you can leave behind anything like that.” Ann begins to square the papers on her desk. “And about tomorrow,” she says, looking uncomfortable. “We have your New York address, but the warden wants to know where you're staying in Florida. I mean, you know, just in case.”

“In case? Of what?”

“In case of . . . gosh, I don't know. I mean, the warden . . . he's in charge of three hundred staff and sixteen hundred prisoners. That's a lot of responsibility.”

Ann would make a lousy poker player. “I still don't understand,” Ethan says.

“Warden Wagner,” she says, eyes averted, “has his ways is all.”

“I guess I'll find out what they are tomorrow.” Ethan gives her his hotel and goes to the door.

“Mr. Winter!” Ann says.

Turning back to Ann's desk Ethan sees that, somehow, he's forgotten Zoe's urn.

CHAPTER 49

Pompano Beach

By midafternoon Jessica has been called back to Phantom Diner for an interview with the boss. One eyed, crop haired, and ramrod straight, Wilton Sheeler admits to having piloted Phantom jets in Vietnam, hence the name of his restaurant. Then he asks Jessica what it's like to drive a bird remotely—irrelevant though it was, she had included her drone flight experience on the job application.

“Sometimes you feel like you're right up there,” Jessica answers. “But not usually. Mostly you're sitting in a chilly trailer watching nothing happen on the monitors.”

“Even so,” Sheeler says, his good eye squinted, “don't you think waiting tables is going to be too much of a come down for you, Sergeant?”

“More likely it'll be a comeback,” Jessica says.

Sheeler seems sympathetic. “I'm not even going to ask you what you've been doing the past year. We're short handed. How about can you start tomorrow night?”

“I can, sir,” Jessica says, just managing to restrain a salute.

On the bus ride home, she finally reaches Miss Shelly.

“Seems like the reaper works both ways,” Shelly says. “When your time is up he's going to take you out no matter what. But try to hurry him along before then and you'll just grow old waiting. What the hell. I'm even going to put myself back on the kidney wait list. Might as well try to live all I can.”

“Me, too,” Jessica says.

“You have a home here if you ever come back.”

“Thanks. Thanks for everything you gave me.”

“You kidding me? More like thank you for all you gave us. Newt, he really loved you.”

“Oh, Shelly . . . ,” Jessica says, wondering if Newt might have tried harder to live if he knew that Shelly would end up alone. That Jessica wouldn't be there for her.

“I'm still here,” Shelly says into Jessica's long pause.

“I'm glad you are.”

CHAPTER 50

South Beach

After returning from Seminole City and settling Zoe by the window in his hotel room so that she could look out over Collins Avenue, Ethan fully reconnects with his phone.

“Dude. Let's talk,” reads his latest email alert. It's from Alex.

Alex's
dude
takes him back to their college days. The term was anachronistic even then, so, of course, Alex used it ironically. These days, though, Alex employs his
dudes
mostly when he wishes to remind Ethan of their long friendship.

Abandoning Zoe by her window, Ethan finds his way to a beachside restaurant. The hostess seats him under an umbrella on the sidewalk, and after the waiter takes his order, Ethan looks at his email. Saving but not reading Alex's messages, he begins deleting the dating, diet, and Cialis spam when he stops at a curious subject line—“Yo! Homie!” It's John Guan.

His food arrives and Ethan puts his phone face up on the table. He takes a bite of the burger, and then uses a clean pinky to tap open the email.

Buddy,

Sergei's putting on the pressure. Wants you to sign ASAP. Told me to get you hard. So let me tell you what we just got in. Fucking quantum mainframes. Bitches come out of Canada. I don't know if these boxes are really doing quantum whatever at the atomic level, but they scream like thousand-dollar whores. Combined, we are talking a hypothetical twenty petaflops at six gig, you hear. Give me a break. Get your ass out here and let's have some fun.

Smell ya later,

The Guanman

Ethan deletes the message and scrolls to Alex's email. Alex is sorry for talking shit. He respects Ethan more than anyone he knows. He feels guilty about not coming home for the funeral. He says that Ethan should take Sergei's job offer. That Sergei is okay. Except that he might have slept with Juliette. Though this was before he and Juliette met. He thinks. He doesn't know. “Skype me, dude,” he closes. “Anytime, day or night.”

Alex's operatic, egocentric life is too much for Ethan right now. There are things to finish here in Florida before he can refocus on his old life. Or does he mean his new life? Will it be Sagaponack after all? Ethan taps Reply and thumbs an excuse. “Dude, trashed my laptop. Back in city soon. Talk then.”

Ethan takes another bite of his burger and watches a cruise ship depart from the Port of Miami. He thinks of Walter and Elizabeth Leston traveling the world one last time on such a vessel. And this brings him back to Zoe's father, a convicted murderer, Don Aldridge stuck in a cell and going nowhere. What good can it do for Ethan to visit such a man?

CHAPTER 51

Pompano Beach

“Don't you look nice,” Kelso says as Jessica walks up. Kelso is giving his yard its usual late-afternoon watering.

“Job interview,” Jessica explains.

“Did you get it?”

“I did.”

“Congrats,” Kelso says. Then he takes something from his back pocket. An unopened letter. “This just came. It's got your apartment number. Ain't anyone you know, is it?”

The handwriting on the envelope is unfamiliar, almost a printed calligraphy. It
does
contain her apartment number. But it's addressed to an Arturo Ramirez in care of Kathleen Baker. Jessica doesn't know an Arturo Ramirez; Kathleen Baker, however, is her aunt in Ocala. The return address says Hector Ramirez, Seminole City Correctional Institution.

The letter is what Jessica has been waiting for. She had sent a “Wish You Were Here” postcard to her father's cellmate, writing on it only “Don't worry” and a nameless return address,
her
current address. Hector, the professor, had figured it out, or shown it to Don, who recognized her handwriting. A line of secret communication to her father is open.

“It's mine,” Jessica admits.

Kelso gives her a look. “You know, I never did a tenant screening to make sure you were who you said you were. You're not going to disappoint me, Miss Aldridge? Or is it Miss Baker?”

Jessica holds Kelso's gaze. She is not a good liar, but the fib she invents is close to the truth. “Baker is my aunt's name. My dad isn't supposed to write to me from prison so we send letters through his cellmate and disguise things.”

“Uh-huh,” Kelso says a little skeptically. “And what did your dad do?”

Jessica doesn't speak for a few seconds. “He's jailed for murder.”

That the offense is extreme seems to relax Kelso's suspicions, as if a liar would have downgraded the crime to a lesser felony. “Shame about that.”

“Yes. He's all I have now.”

“What about your aunt?”

“She's too religious for me,” Jessica says, easing herself toward the staircase to her efficiency.

“I hear you on that,” Kelso says. “Your aunt and my wife's family, both.”

“Yeah,” says Jessica, pausing on the stairs as though she's not trying to escape further interrogation. Then she starts climbing again. “Sorry, Skittles must be dying for a walk by now.”

When she reaches her landing, Kelso calls up. “That reminds me, there's one more thing I was thinking.”

“Oh?” Jessica says. Putting her key into the door lock, she is just able to stop herself from rushing inside to peace.

Kelso, large bellied in his cabana shirt, is smiling up at her. “Oh, it's just about Skittles. Why don't you leave her with me when you go to work?”

“I'll be doing a night shift.”

“That's no problem. Me and the wife can use the company.”

Closing the door behind her, Jessica is too tense to read the letter right away. She peeks from a window to make sure that Kelso is no longer outside and then escapes with Skittles for a walk. They go all the way to the public pier, the old fishing pier she liked visiting as a girl. But it's a dollar for sightseers now and no pets are allowed. So she and Skittles stick to the sidewalk, which is separated from the beach by a coral-embedded knee wall and a barrier of sea grape. When the trees' twisted trunks thin and Jessica can see down to the surf, she steps over the wall and has Skittles jump it, too. Settling themselves on the sand, the dog props her head on her paws and Jessica leans back against the wall. In the late-afternoon light, breakers shimmer a hundred feet offshore and Jessica watches the ocean. Then she takes out Hector's letter and reads.

Dear Nephew,

Your father tells me that you have a new love in your life and no longer stay at home. Thus I take it upon myself to write directly to your new abode in care of your girlfriend. Hello, Miss Kathleen Baker. I hope you do not mind my contacting my nephew through you. I'm afraid that you are the only trustworthy means of reaching him that I can think of, if you take my meaning.

Nephew, we have much to discuss. Yet I feel as though I can best sum up my thoughts by recounting a tragic event in the life of another. A man whom I shall refer to as don Malagueña—thus to honor a gift of music given to him by his deeply loved daughter, a child for whom his heart, like King Lear's, aches, so many tribulations has he caused her.

One moment, please. This don Malagueña, standing here by my shoulder, is complaining that this letter sounds convoluted. Gobbledygook is what he calls my sentences!—a criticism heard by many professors. But the don should know that I cannot communicate in a mode less baroque. If I did, then some unwanted eye, that panoptic reviewer of our prison missives perhaps, might suspect these words to be not my own. For the sake of a necessary obfuscation, please bear with the lingo.

As I was saying, Nephew of mine, before my amigo don Malagueña interrupted, he has experienced much upheaval of late. Principally, he has received a visit from an unexpected pair, a Mutt and Jeff wearing serious black suits and badges, who roughly interviewed the don in connection with an absent person—the very daughter for whom he pines.

Thus unfolds the tragedy, Nephew. The tragedy of an enforced separation. For despite our Lear's despair, despite “his wish to pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies with his lost Cordelia,” despite all this, if our don Malagueña could utter direct words to his child, he would ask her to harden her will. He would advise her against any closer approach. He would warn that she cannot visit him without consequence. He would counsel a retreat into the shadows. He would assert a desire that she remain aloof from the cavaliers known here as Mutt and Jeff, dangerous men who would take her from her life to destinations unknown, to a cell perhaps akin to his own. Such a tragedy, the don declares, would be far more lethal to his spirits than even the miserable lacuna of his Cordelia's absence. In brief, “follow him not, stay yourself” are the sad words he would paraphrase to her.

Now, in humble fashion, dear Nephew, I end my letter. I trust that there is in don Malagueña's circumstance a lesson for you. What this may be, I cannot judge. I am merely a presenter of particulars. I leave their unraveling to others. And so, from our cell, we send out a wish for your well-being—the don and I.

Your adopted uncle,

Hector Cabrera Domingo Ramirez