Miami Noir (13 page)

Without thinking, Woody handed it over. Chip slipped the cell phone into his shirt pocket.

Woody waited, then said, “I thought you were going to use the phone.”

“Yeah.” Chip nodded, his eyes sliding around the yard.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

Chip laughed. “Like, half a mo, bro.”

“Make the call.”

“I’m taking it for a walk in the yard, okay? Gotta speak to this guy.”

“I want it back.”

“In just a minute, okay?” Chip, looking amazed and a little hurt, spread his hands and, turning to Isolde for support, said, “I hope you can find something in the medicine cabinet to calm him down.” Isolde looked steadily back at Chip and said nothing.

Woody asked how Chip had gotten over here. Chip said, “We found a bike.”

Woody laughed, said, “The two of you on a bicycle?”

“No, no,” Chip replied. “We, you know, found a bike.”

Woody said, “You stole a motorcycle?”

Chip grinned boyishly, then said, “Did you know you’ve got an alligator in your pool?”

“Karma,” Isolde said. The English lord with the bullet scars had come around the corner of the house and was moving, slightly bent over, toward them. He was a slim, good-looking man in his early thirties, with curly brown hair and the bluest eyes Woody had ever seen in man or woman. Woody thought he looked remarkably like the Byron of Count D’Orsay’s 1823 Genoa sketch, which made the poet appear thin, almost convalescent. In another life Woody had written his Master’s thesis on
Don Juan
.

This lord was shirtless, wore dirty khaki shorts and orange flip-flops, and had a thin gold ring in his left earlobe. His four bullet scars formed an irregular diagonal from right shoulder down to left waistline. He moved with a tentative air, and, smiling as he came up, he told Woody that it was awfully kind of them to take him in at such short notice.

Chip introduced Isolde and Woody to Peregrine Balfe, Lord Balfe.

“Please call me Perry,” the Englishman said. He nodded, friendly, but didn’t offer to shake hands. Perry said that he hoped Woody didn’t mind that they’d begun putting up the shutters. It seemed the right thing to do.

Woody said he was glad they’d begun.

Isolde, without a word, turned and walked into the house.

“Long flight?” Chip asked, watching Isolde.

“Bumpy landing,” Woody said. Chip glanced at Perry, then wandered into the yard, opened the cell phone, dialed, and began to talk. Perry was immediately at Woody’s side, obliging, cheery, picking up their suitcases with a grunt. Perry looked much too weak to carry both, but he insisted. Woody led the way indoors.

Isolde passed them, saying that she had to get to the supermarket before it closed.

The house, partially shuttered now, was dark and humid. The television muttered in the living room. They paused to check on Hurricane Ernestine. A weatherman pointed at the bright orange circle and said it would intensify and come ashore in the middle of the night. Woody led Perry into the master bedroom, where he put the suitcases down and then, turning away, leaned a hand against the wall for support.

“Those suitcases were monsters,” Woody said, fascinated by the bullet scars on Perry’s back. They were bigger than on the front: like smooth, fleshy flowers, almost.

“Light as a feather.” Straightening up, Perry looked around the bedroom with an expression of unbelief. “Right,” he said. Woody assumed he was speaking to himself.

In the living room, they paused again at the television as a man dressed in yellow foul-weather gear, standing under a torrential downpour, shouted, “It’s raining in the Bahamas!” Woody led Perry out the back door and onto the pool deck.

Perry said, “Chip told me you keep the alligator as a pet.” It was about ten feet long and lay motionless on the bottom of the pool. They stared at it. Perry asked how long it could stay down there. Woody shrugged and said he didn’t know, exactly.

Perry said, “So it isn’t a pet?”

“God, no,” Woody said. “It’s a pest. We think it’s male, because in May and June, mating season, it came and went and upset the neighborhood. Every time the Fish and Game wardens arrived to pick it up, it disappeared. They swore that somebody was tipping it off. It went away for a long while, and we thought, phew. But it came back last week.”

Perry said, “Does it have a name?”

“Mrs. McCracken.”

Perry’s laugh turned into a fit of coughing. Woody stared at him and said, “You know her?” Perry, smiling, said the name had a good, bone-crunching sound to it.

Woody said, “Tell me about your bar in Jamaica.”

Perry said, “In Negril. Perry’s, it was called. Not very original. Maybe I should have called it The Green Parrot.”

Woody said, “Everyone came to Perry’s?”

“That’s it,” Perry said. “Everyone came to Perry’s.”

Woody said, “I wonder if my wife ever went there.”

Perry frowned, thinking hard. He said, “You’re referring to Isolde?”

Woody thought, Who else would I be referring to? He said, “She used to spend winters sailing in the Caribbean. Maybe she came to Perry’s too.”

“Might have,” Perry said. “She very well might have. So many people did.”

Woody said, “My brother says you’re a lord. Is that true?”

Perry said that it was.

Ancestral acres? Woody asked. Marble halls?

Perry said, “Sadly, none of that. My grandfather was given—some say purchased—a peerage. He was a surgeon, rather famous in his day. He pioneered the use of rubber gloves during surgery, and said such memorable things as, ‘Every surgical incision is an adventure in bacteriology.’”

“That’s food for thought,” Woody said.

“I remember it,” Perry said, “every time I cut my thumb.”

Woody said, “You ever been married?”

Perry nodded. “I was, some time ago. Actually, I think I still am, in a way.”

Isolde was in shock from seeing her house wide open and Chip and Perry wandering around. Now, pushing an empty cart into the supermarket, she felt grateful for the cool air that soothed her sweating skin. She saw the coiling checkout lines, the aisles dense with shoppers, and she sensed their fear. Dizzy, thinking, This is all too much for me, she fought down the urge to turn and run. Where could she go? She’d worked so hard to create a new life with Woody. She ordered herself to concentrate on the task at hand.

The supermarket was about to close. The aisles were full, the shelves empty. The ululations of the disappointed rose into the fluorescent light. Isolde saw how fragile and transitory her life was. Her carefully constructed happiness was toppling. She hurried around, crossing unobtainable items off her list: water, Sprite, Coca-Cola, ginger ale, canned soup, canned tuna, sardines, salmon, Spam, baked beans, bread, crackers, Oreo cookies, nuts, potato chips, canned milk, long-life milk, powdered milk, peanut butter, jelly, batteries, toilet paper, paper towels, Chlorox, ice. Her cart was empty. Still, she had the stockpile of water and supplies at home. But with four people that wouldn’t last long.

Then she had an idea. Their stove was fueled from a propane tank. She’d cook pasta and vegetables. That might last until stores reopened. She found lots of pasta. She tossed boxes of it into her cart, then hurried into the fresh produce section. The fruit was gone, but Isolde filled her cart with onions, peppers, garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots, celery, fresh herbs.

Near her, the double doors leading to the back of the supermarket swung open and twelve policemen in riot gear, lace-up black boots, black bulletproof vests, carrying shotguns and batons, filed into the produce section and spread out across the back of the store. They took up positions at the ends of the aisles against the back wall and muttered into microphones on their left shoulders.

A voice blared over the public address system: “
Attention all shoppers, this store is shutting down NOW. All shoppers must report to the CASHIERS. I repeat, all shoppers must report to the CASHIERS. This store is shutting down NOW.”

The policemen yelled, “Let’s GO! Let’s MOVE it!”

Isolde froze. The supermarket, she’d often thought, was her last refuge. Now she thought, There’s no place safe for me. The nearest policeman, a giant block of a man with a thick black mustache, swiveled his body toward her, shotgun held ready across his chest. He yelled, “C’mon! MOVE it!” He stepped closer.

Isolde was shaking. Her voice came out in a bleat. “I need food.”

“Whatever’s in your cart,” the policeman said, “that’s it. Take it to the cashier.”

Isolde pushed her shopping cart to the front of the supermarket. She was weeping. The policeman, shotgun at the ready, kept pace behind her. Policemen with guns herded shoppers toward the cashiers. Isolde wept as the startled checkout girl rang up her pasta and vegetables, she wept as an old man pushed her cart of groceries out to the parking lot. He loaded the grocery bags into her car, and Isolde blindly pressed money into his hand and got behind the wheel. Leave, she told herself. Drive north. Outrun the storm.

She knew Perry Balfe’s crooked heart well. She saw how he’d deteriorated, how junk had taken over. And now Woody, the man she loved and wanted to build a life with, to have children with, a man who truly loved her, Woody would learn she’d been married to, had probably loved, Perry Balfe, con man, dope runner, junkie,
child murderer
.

In her heart, Isolde had known this day would come. She’d always expected Perry to reappear. The deeper her love for Woody, the sunnier her new life, the more certain Isolde became that it couldn’t last. She didn’t deserve it. She’d forfeited the right to happiness. She’d sent up clouds of prayers, and now they were falling like dead letters around her feet. Soon she’d have to explain herself.

By “explaining herself,” Isolde imagined telling Woody something like, “Woody, my love, it’s this: I met Perry and we got married and had a baby girl, Fiona, and one day when Fiona was almost two years old, she was playing with, of all things, a pair of rabbit-ear television antennae, and her daddy, who was supposed to be watching her
for just five minutes while Mommy takes a shower,
decided to shoot up. While Daddy’s nodding off in a chair, Fiona sticks the broken end of one of the antennae into an electric outlet, so when Mommy comes back and sees…what she sees, she goes clean off her rocker.”

She’d practiced telling Woody this every day since she fell in love with him. When she ran away to Key West, it wasn’t because she was shocked to learn he’d been married. It was because she saw that either she told him the truth about herself, or she was lost. But she worried that if she told Woody the truth, she might, probably would, lose him. How could Woody love her, once he found out about Fiona? How could Isolde find words to explain, to make acceptable, her desolation and her nervous breakdown? How could Woody believe she would ever be a fit mother again?

She felt that by not telling Woody, she was continually denying Fiona, who had the right to a public place in Isolde’s heart. But no amount of practice made it easier for her to say to him, My baby died. After she got married, she thought, I’ll wait until I get my degree in Early Childhood Education. It might help convince Woody that I’ll make a good mother. Every day brought a moment when Isolde yearned to tell Woody. And every day, for fear of losing him, she decided to wait for a better moment.

Now, in the Publix parking lot, Isolde dried her eyes and turned the ignition. She checked the fuel gauge. Half a tank. Not enough. She needed a full tank of gas. A Texaco station was just around the corner. That would be her final stop.

Woody, Chip, and Perry began putting up the remainder of the metal shutters on the front and back porches. These faced south and north, respectively, and had tall jalousie windows on three sides. The three men set to work exchanging hearty remarks such as, “That’s it! Great! Okay. We’ll soon get this sucker done,” but the afternoon was hot and windless, the sun oppressive. Chip and Perry soon tired. They paused, smoked cigarettes, scratched themselves, wandered into the yard to stare at the road.

Woody finished the metal shutters by himself, while the others set up the wooden saw horses and carried out the plywood from the garage. Woody had five big sheets, which, cut in half, would cover ten windows.

“Men,” he said, “here’s the plan. We cut the plywood with this electric saw. With this,” he held up an electric drill, “we drill holes in the four corners of each sheet. We hold the plywood sheet up over the window and mark the holes on the wall. Then we drill half-inch holes in the masonry and insert expansion anchors. We bolt the plywood over the windows with these three-eighth-inch lag bolts and then we tighten them with this—” Woody held up a wrench and saw that neither Chip nor Perry was paying attention.

Woody tested the electric saw and the other two flinched. They laid the first plywood sheet onto the wooden horses and Woody began to saw it in half.

When Isolde came back, everybody helped her unload the supplies and carry them into the kitchen. Chip and Perry drifted into the yard and exercised the cell phone.

A little while later, Woody went into the kitchen to drink water. Isolde was filling every container she could find at the tap. She embraced him, saying, “You don’t know how much I love you.”

“As much as I love you, I hope.”

“More. Much more.”

Woody pointed toward the yard. “Our junkies be waiting for The Man.”

Isolde said, “Not in my house.” Then, realizing that she wanted Perry happy, not strung out, for the next few days, she said, “Maybe we’d better let them.”

“We don’t want them freaking out during the hurricane.”

Isolde said, “They can smoke and whatever in the guest room.” Woody nodded and drank three glasses of tap water.

On his way outside, Woody paused at his desk in the living room and stared at a partially opened drawer. He’d shut it three weeks before. He pulled the drawer out farther. Inside were four unused checkbooks. Woody picked them up, telling himself, Think like Chip. He opened the fourth checkbook. The last check was missing.

Woody put back the checkbooks, closed the drawer, and went outside, calling for Chip and Perry. They came running around the corner like little boys and halted in front of him, winded and laughing. He asked them what was so funny.