Miami Noir (7 page)
Speck went to wait in the truck, but before he opened the door a man in a white shirt and bib overalls came walking over from across the street. He held a stack of papers and handed one to a passerby.
“I hate to trouble you, son,” the man said to Speck. He had the leathery neck and hands of a farmer. “My name’s Whitt,” he continued, handing Speck a flyer. “I wonder if you’ve seen a strange girl around. Her name’s Mary. We heard she may have come this way.”
“What?” Speck said.
“I’m her father,” the man said. “I’m afraid she’s mixed up with some bad sorts. I’ve been looking for her. I want her safe, I guess you might say.”
Speck nodded, took the handbill, and backed away.
“Don’t forget,” C.W. Whitt said. “She’s dear to us.”
Speck folded the handbill and put it in his pocket and sat and waited for the girl. He knew that C.W. Whitt was Marcy’s father, and whatever it was that she or Calvin had done he had already forgiven. He could tell her, and she’d be safe, free to go back to wherever she’d come from. But then he’d be left to go back to the mill where Calvin was waiting. He knew Marcy was right, that Calvin wouldn’t just allow her to walk away. He was afraid of Calvin. But he was even more afraid of losing Marcy. The two of them could find a way so that they could be together.
The boy was quiet on the drive back to the mill, and so was Marcy. Finally, he took the handbill from his pocket and studied it. Marcy pretended not to notice the paper.
“This changes things,” the boy said.
“Changes what?”
“That farmer back there in town gave me this. This is you. He was your daddy. Whatever you did to him, whatever made you think you couldn’t go back, you were wrong about him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be out searching the country for you.”
Marcy pulled the truck to the side of the road and took the paper from the boy. She read it several times before she spoke.
“I stole his truck and twenty dollars,” she said. “It was Calvin’s idea. He told me if I went back they’d throw me in jail.”
“Now you know better. We could just turn around.”
“There’s still Calvin. You seen him. You think he’d just let me go? You think he’d not bother you or your daddy?”
“Nobody’s looking for Calvin,” the boy said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that if he vanished from the face of the earth, no one would miss him. If he was to fall and hit his head on a rock stumbling through the woods, no one would mourn his passing. It’d be better than he deserved. I could make him just disappear.”
Before, when he talked about her leaving Calvin, it was just ignorance and fear, and he gave her no reason to trust him. She knew not to listen, for her sake as well as his own protection. Now, things were different. He knew full well what kind of man Calvin was, knew what danger he could be. He knew the truth about her. Killing was a sin, no matter what. But was it worse than keeping her from her tormented father? Was it worse than keeping him from Marcy?
“You can’t do it, Speck,” the girl said. “You’d be doing it for me, and I ain’t worth it.”
“To me you are.”
“But I wouldn’t be if I let you do this. I’m no older than you are, but I’ve seen enough to know that no one just disappears. The past don’t give up easy, no matter how far away you get from it. You think your daddy’d just let you walk away?”
“You could stay here. Without him here, you could stay.”
“I have to go back, Speck. And you have to stay.”
There was no sign of the sawyer or Calvin when Marcy and Speck pulled into the clearing.
“Quick,” Marcy said. “I’ll get my things, and then you can drive me back to town.”
Speck had grabbed the ax from the side of the building and was standing watch outside the shack when he heard the tractor engine start up and looked over to see Calvin move in place to hoist a pine log onto the carriage. When he glanced up and saw the truck, Calvin dropped the timber and headed directly for the shack. Before Marcy could get the suitcase back under the bed and hide the handbill, Calvin was at the door.
“Where’s my father?” Speck said.
“Mr. Talley is up in the woods cutting timber. But my question is where the two of you have been, and what’s that you’ve got there, darling?”
Calvin ripped the paper from her hands, read the handbill carefully, and smiled. “Well, well, now. This is quite a little bit of news, ain’t it?”
Speck could see the wheels spinning in Calvin’s head.
“Looks like the cat’s out of the bag,” Calvin said. “Looks like somebody needs you more than I do. Reward and everything. Hoo haw. Well, sweetheart, I tell you what, I’ve never been one to stand in the way of family harmony. I think what this means is our time together is come to an end. It’ll pain me to part with you, it really will, but you’re worth more in leaving me than in staying. I think I’ll just borrow this young man’s truck here and the two of us can go and find Mr. C.W. Whitt and see about that reward.”
“I’ll not go another step with you,” Marcy said.
“Oh, I think you will. I don’t see how you or anyone else’s going to stop me.” He grabbed Marcy by the arm and pulled her outside.
Speck followed them. He raised the ax, and Calvin released Marcy, but he advanced toward the boy.
“Get inside,” Speck told Marcy. But Marcy followed as Speck began backing toward the saw.
“So this is how it is!” Calvin said. He had to shout over the roar of the tractor. “You think you can take what’s mine, boy?”
He careened around the saw and had to lean on the carriage frame for balance, but Speck stood his ground, and when Calvin came close the boy swung the ax wildly. Calvin leaned away, and the blade stuck deep into the log on the saw carriage. While Speck struggled to pull the ax free, Calvin steadied himself and pounced. He grabbed a handful of the boy’s yellow hair.
“You’ll pay now,” he growled. He let loose of the boy’s hair and stood catching his breath as if he was plotting just how to resolve things. The boy crouched by the side of the
Speck looked up just in time to see Calvin’s arm come swinging around at his head. He didn’t try to duck away; instead, he lowered his head and threw his weight against Calvin. Calvin’s feet gave way and he reached out blindly for something to catch him from falling.
The sound of the man’s hand crushed in the mill’s flywheel was no more violent than the snap of a pine bough. The sound Calvin made, though, was long and loud and anguished. After a moment of struggle to withdraw his hand, he dropped to his knees and then slumped against the carriage frame. Blood ran back down his wrist and arm and then into the sawdust.
His arm was drawn up into the machinery of the saw well past his wrist. He was moaning in pain. The boy went over and shut off the tractor. Marcy had reached the saw, where she watched blankly as Calvin’s eyes rolled back and his head dropped. His face had been red with rage a few seconds earlier. Now it was the color of weathered lumber.
“Do something,” Marcy said.
“He deserves it,” Speck said.
“He’ll die, bleeding like that.”
“What do you want me to do? He’s caught in the gears. I don’t think I can take it apart. There’s no time to go get help. We’ll have to take him into town. But he’s going to have to go without that hand. You decide. I’ll do whatever you say, but you tell me what to do.”
Marcy looked at Calvin, still slumped against the machine. “You can’t ask me to decide,” she said.
“You can leave him and we can go for help, or we can get him loose and take him into town. I’ll do whichever you say.”
“How’re going to get him loose?”
Speck pulled the ax from the log and showed it to the girl.
She breathed slowly, watching the blood run down Calvin’s arm and drip off his elbow into a pool beneath him. She held her head up. “Cut it off,” she said.
Speck didn’t hesitate. He raised the ax and brought it down. The first blow struck just above the man’s wrist and produced a dull sound followed by Calvin’s piercing shriek. The second one sounded only of metal and bone. Calvin made not a whimper.
They wrapped the ragged wrist in one of Calvin’s white shirts, and Speck tied a piece of twine high up on the wounded man’s arm to keep him from losing any more blood. He and the girl dragged Calvin to the truck and loaded him onto the bed.
“Get in,” Speck told the girl.
She shook her head.
“Why not? He can’t hurt you now.”
“You go on. I did what I had to. Now I’m through. You go on and when they ask, tell it all just like it happened.”
Speck backed the truck in front of the log wagon. “Marcy, go on and get your things. There’s no time to argue.”
“My name’s not Marcy,” she said.
“I know it. But it doesn’t matter now,” Speck said. “Get your things.”
“I can’t go with you,” she said.
“If you don’t, I’ll dump him in the swamp where nobody will ever find him.”
“No you won’t. It’s all over, Speck. You go on.”
“You wait for me here. I’ll be back and we’ll tell my daddy. We’ll go to St. Louis to the fair.”
“That’s all over with, Speck. You go on now.”
She wore the white dress and carried the battered suitcase. She had cleaned up the main shack and then packed everything of hers and gathered Calvin’s things from the helper’s shack. She went outside and built a fire and fed the man’s clothes and finally his sailor’s bag into the flames.
Alone by the firelight, Marcy took the glass dome from the suitcase and held it out. At first it seemed empty, a void above the dark outline of the miniature city. But then she shook the thing in her fist and held it out again, and the tiny silver flecks caught the light from the fire and glowed there in the night, brief sparks, like stars you glimpse through boughs of pine.
She set the globe on the table between the two shacks. She picked up her belongings and walked off down the log road, toward the place—she didn’t know where yet—someone was waiting for her.
T
he roof was halfway peeled off the house; the Volkswagen was in the swimming pool; and for the past two nights I had fallen asleep watching the stars fade away into my dreams. Now, two days after the storm, I had taken to sleeping with my rifle because the looters were out, and night was their favorite time. The only good thing was that it was my wife’s car at the bottom of the pool and not mine. She had left me a few weeks before the storm, and I was still feeling a little bitter about it. The bad thing was that she had driven away with my car because it could hold more stuff, so it wasn’t exactly a total victory on my part.
The day after the hurricane, the sky was clear but the world I saw was broken, right down to the streets. I got lost every time I took a walk. Finally, I got my flashlight and dug out an old compass I had kept from the army. I took a bearing on the emptiness of the front door and started rambling around the neighborhood, looking to see what was left. People were creeping around like zombies and digging through the ruins of their houses. I passed an old man bent over like a prospector on a nameless street. He straightened up and looked at me.
“You got a cigarette?” he asked.
“I’m trying to scout some out,” I told him. “There a store around here somewheres?”
He pointed to the north. “I think over that way. See that flagpole? It used to be right by there. Maybe it still is.”
I looked out across the damage and the distance. The flagpole looked a long way off. In Miami you drive every place, and I wasn’t used to walking.
“What brand you smoke?” I asked.
He looked bewildered by the question. “I don’t know. I don’t smoke.” I noticed then that he was wearing underwear—a pair of polka dot boxers and a white tank top that was never going to be white again.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I’m not much of a smoker myself.”
I started walking, sometimes right through people’s houses, not to be mean or anything but because the houses were all in pieces spread out like a puzzle. It was hard to tell where a thing began or ended. I could see that my place had done better than most. At least my furniture was still inside. I just hoped it was still there when I got back.
I smelled a barbecue and came up on a group of people sitting in a ring of sofas like they were inside a living room. Some people were laughing. They looked like a big family, except that some of them were black and some of them were white and some of them were speaking in Spanish. A black man was standing over a barbecue made out of a pair of steel drums with a grate over them. He held a pair of tongs and was turning pieces of meat and chicken over with them. He looked at me, and I looked at him. Then he waved me over. The fire and the heat made him look like a Vulcan. It was the best food I ever had.
I finally found the store. Where, I don’t know. It was a 7-Eleven. The windows were shattered and people were climbing in and out of the place, carrying armloads of cans and boxes of cereal and cases of beer. I had never done anything like this before and for a moment I just stood there looking. Finally, I stepped over the jagged sill and into the store, feeling like I was crossing some kind of line, which I was, except it was a little hard to see exactly what kind of line it was. At least I wasn’t a cannibal, I told myself. So far, I had only made it down to shoplifting.
I was behind the counter looking for smokes when the squad car pulled up, lights blazing like wild Indians. Everybody started to run like roaches. The cop came in through the window with his hand on his gun. I stood up. I put my hands up. He was a black kid—not much more than a rookie, I thought—and everything about him said
soldier
. He pointed his eyes and his gun at me at the same time, shook his head, and holstered the automatic.
“Turn around and put your hands behind your back,” he said calmly. His voice was edgeless, as though he had said,
Give me a cup of coffee
“Officer—” I started to say.
“I know,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I got no choice. This shit has been going on all day and the captain wants to make a statement. Sorry, man.”
I rotated and he bound my hands with a plastic tie. It was like an episode of
Cops
“I’ve never been arrested before,” I said, more to myself than to the officer.
“Don’t worry about it. You’ll be out in the morning, maybe even later today.”
The cop seemed tired, though not physically; his movements were crisp and professional. He was tired in another way. I could feel it coming off him. He reminded me of a teacher who had made it to the end of a long day at a bad school. He walked beside me without holding my arm, as though we were a couple of buddies heading to the bar for a beer or two. Sometimes he even walked a little bit ahead of me, as though he had forgotten that he had a prisoner. I guess I didn’t seem that dangerous.
Right before we got to the cop car, he bent over and picked up a photograph that had blown in from another life. He stared at it for a moment, then held it up so I could see. It was the picture of a young woman, very pretty in a Nebraska sort of way: big smile, corn hair, gray eyes—innocent. I looked at the picture of the girl for a moment and nodded. Then, very gently, almost reverently, he placed the picture back on the ground on the exact spot where he had found it, as though it belonged there. Neither of us said anything. I felt a strange, indefinite sadness rise in me all the way up to my neck until I felt as though I were wearing a heavy curtain over my shoulders.
“You find stuff like that everywhere,” the cop said. To me he sounded like a tour guide in a ruined temple who knew the tale of ancient disaster so well that he had learned to tell it without words.
“I wonder where it came from,” I said.
“Somewhere,” the cop replied aimlessly.
He opened the door of the patrol car and gently pushed my head down as I crouched. I was glad there were no cameras around. We drove slowly, both of us looking from side to side.
“You live around here?” the cop asked.
I told him my address. He said he knew where it was. Then he asked me what I did for a living.
“I’m an English teacher,” I told him. “Edgewater High. Richard McManus.”
He looked at me through the rearview mirror. “That’s where I went,” he said. “I thought you looked familiar.”
“Were you one of my students?”
“No, my sister was though. Maybe you remember her? Her name was Taisha Duncan.”
The rolodex that is every teacher’s brain rolled, and a face appeared from a few years back.
“Sure, I remember her,” I said. “Nice kid. Very good writer. Said she wanted to be a reporter someday. I wrote some letters of recommendation for her. Last I heard, she had gotten a scholarship to Georgetown, I think it was.”
“That’s right; that was her. Hey, you know, I think she kind of had a crush on you.”
“That’s because I’m so debonair. Where we going, officer? I think the station’s on the other side of the canal we just passed.”
“You in a hurry to get to jail, Mr. McManus?”
“Not really,” I said. “But these plastic cuffs are cutting into my hands.”
He was silent for a few moments, then stopped the car suddenly and got out. I didn’t know what to expect, and it seemed to me, judging from the landscape, that I wasn’t going to know what to expect for a long time. I had a morbid vision of being thrown to the ground and kicked repeatedly in the stomach. There was fear and a weird kind of excitement that I didn’t understand.
The cop came around and opened the door. “Come on out,” he said. “This is bullshit.”
I got my legs over, stuck them through the door, and stood up. He told me to turn around and then, much to my surprise, he undid the plastic ties and threw them over his shoulder. He smiled at me as I rubbed my wrists.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“What were you doing in that 7-Eleven?”
“I wanted to buy some cigarettes.”
“This might be the omen to quit you been waiting for,” he said. “You want to take a ride with me? You know, just drive around, check things out, look for adventure.”
I must have appeared dumbfounded. He laughed.
“Sure,” I said lamely. “Why not?”
“You want to drive?” he asked.
“I think that might be against regulations,” I offered.
“The whole fucking world is against regulations. Look at this place. He spread his arms and peered around. I looked with him. He had a point. God had poured the city of Homestead into a blender and dumped the contents onto what was left of the street, and in that world nothing was impossible. In that world English teachers could be shoplifters and shoplifters could drive police cars.
“Okay,” I said. “What the hell.”
We drove around for about an hour, talking about everything and nothing. The young cop’s name was Robert Paulson, and he told me he had been in the Gulf War over in Iraq. I asked him what it was like.
“Not much,” he said. “We sat in the desert, doing squat for six months. Then we rolled. There was a lot of smoke and fire, but it was all over quick. I never even fired my gun. We were lucky; nobody I knew got killed or anything. You had to be careful of mines though.”
“You been out long?” I asked.
“It’s,
Have you been out long
? You’re not forgetting your stuff, are you, Mr. McManus?”
“Well?”
“A few months. Not long. It seems long though. It’s funny: You come back from a war and something like this hurricane happens. Shit,” he said. “This place looks worse than Iraq.”
“Maybe I should be getting back now,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
“Okay, but we got to make a stop first.”
“Where to?”
“My old place. I’ll tell you how to get there. Are you cool with that? It won’t take long.”
“What happens if another cop sees me driving you around?” I asked.
“Man, don’t you know? You’re undercover.” He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.
We drove west for a few miles. The sun that had seemed so high earlier in the day was plummeting now, dragging the day down with it behind a row of broken trees. With all the lights in the neighborhood out, the coming darkness affected me in some primeval part of myself, and for a moment something akin to panic began to overtake me. I wanted to go home. Even my house with its gone wife, its ripped-off roof, and its drowned car was better than the sprawling mess the world had become. I began to talk to dispel my nervousness.
“How’s Taisha doing? She must be in college now.”
For a moment the cop said nothing, and I wondered if he had heard me.
“Taisha’s dead, man. Didn’t you know?”
“Dead? What are you talking about?” I couldn’t turn to look at him. I had to keep my eyes on the darkened road.
“Drunk driver. You know how it is. About a year after she graduated from Edgewater. It was up near Gainesville, near her aunt’s house. Maybe that’s why you didn’t hear about it.”
“Jesus,” I said. “A young kid like that. I can’t believe it.”
“Maybe you heard about it but forgot. You must have had a lot of kids in your class over the years.”
He was right. They came and they went. Some students you would remember for better or worse for the rest of your life, while others left barely a trace of memory behind them when the semester was over.
“No, I remember Taisha,” I said, wishing in a way that I was lying. I didn’t want that sweet young face floating around in my head with night coming on, not in this shattered world.
“Turn here,” the cop said. “I recognize that tree.” He pointed to an uprooted banyan tree lying on its side.
“Where are we?” I asked. “What is this place?”
“My old crib. Go on down this way. I’ll tell you where to stop.”
I soon saw that we had entered a cul-de-sac. The houses were small wrecks of wood and lopsided roofs. At the end of the street I saw the silhouettes of a man and a woman sitting on the front steps of their house. I drove slowly. When my beams from the headlights hit them, they stood up and went into the house, shutting the door behind them. They had moved so quickly, I thought they might be looters. I glanced at the cop. He was looking straight ahead.
“Stop in front of the house,” the cop said. “That’s where I used to live.”
“You know those people?” I asked.
“That’s my wife, or rather she used to be my wife.”
“Who’s the guy?” I asked.
“A friend of mine, used to be. Since I got back, everything is
used to be,
seems like. I asked him to keep an eye on Doris when I was over in Kuwait. Sources say he got a little bit too dedicated to the mission. You know what I’m saying?”
I looked at him. He was still staring straight ahead. He was locked in position. There was a sphinxlike quality to his profile that I didn’t like.
“We had better leave,” I said. I put the car in reverse and turned around to see where I was going. That’s when I saw the pump action shotgun lying on the backseat, or rather, I saw its shadow. I didn’t like the look of it. Without warning the cop reached over, grabbed the steering wheel, and with his other hand shifted the car back into park. We jerked to a stop. We stared at each other. The next thing I knew, I was looking at his gun, its small triangular sight lined up quite nicely with the middle of my nose.
“That’s my house,” he said.
I got as close to the driver’s side door as a person could get without actually merging my atoms with the metal and pulled my hands way back behind my head like an extra set of ears.
“I can walk home from here,” I said. “I could use the exercise.”
“Not yet, professor. I want you to do me a favor.”
“Look,” I said. “Just put the gun down so we can talk for a minute, okay?”
He set the gun on his lap with the barrel still pointed in my general direction and his finger still on the trigger. I think he was afraid I might try to take it away from him. Little did he know how much like distant Pluto that thought was from my mind.
“I like you,” he said seriously. “But don’t try and do anything stupid.”