The Way We Die Now (9 page)

Aileen and Sue Ellen giggled. Ellita looked at Hoke and smiled, but she blushed.

"You don't mean you're going out with Hutton?"

Ellita shrugged. "Donald came over this afternoon and asked me, so why not? He told me about the Buñuel movie, I haven't seen it, so I said I'd go."

"Have you got your pistol?"

"In my bag." Ellita patted her purse.

"Good luck then," Hoke said, "and have a good time."

"I intend to." Ellita left, and the girls, watching through the screen door, looked at her as she crossed the street.

"The table's set," Hoke said. "And I fixed sandwiches."

They moved into the dining room and sat down.

"Isn't Mr. Hutton a little old for Ellita, Daddy?" Sue Ellen asked.

"He's only forty-five, and she's thirty-three. Men like to go out with younger women, as a rule."

"That doesn't mean you have to go out with them." Sue Ellen frowned. "I was propositioned last week by an old man--he must've been sixty-five--driving a Datsun. I told him to grow up!"

"I'd better take a look at Pepe for a see," Aileen said, getting up from the table.

"Don't worry about Pepe," Hoke said. "Let him sleep. He knows how to yell when he wants something. Get something to drink from the kitchen. I didn't pour you anything because I didn't know what you wanted."

"Don't get anything for me, Sis," Sue Ellen said. "Did Ellita tell you where they were going for dinner, Daddy?"

"No, she didn't."

"The Biltmore, in Coral Gables. He made a reservation and everything, for ten o'clock."

"When I came to Miami, the Biltmore was a VA hospital--"

"Ellita said he told the man on the phone to have the wine opened and burping on the table when they got there. Isn't that funny?"

"Yeah," Hoke said, biting viciously into a pork sandwich. "That's funnier than a son of a bitch. I only wish I'd been here to hear him say it."

CHAPTER 7

They took both cars to the party for Tio Arnoldo Sanchez. All of his Miami relatives were there. Except for Ellita's parents, Hoke didn't know any of them. There were cousins and cousins-in-law by marriage and a few old men who had known Arnoldo back in Havana thirty years earlier.

Señor Sanchez (Ellita's father) ignored Hoke, as was his wont, and because everyone at the party was speaking Spanish, Hoke didn't try to mingle--nor did he want to mingle. The girls, both a little shy in this Latin gathering, stayed close to Ellita, taking turns holding Pepe so Ellita could talk unencumbered to her friends and relatives. Pepe began to cry, and Señora Sanchez, Ellita's mother, filled his bottle with two ounces of -jus- from the roast beef platter. He enjoyed this greasy treat and stopped crying immediately. Hoke, with a plateful of pig's feet and a long-necked bottle of Bud, shared a yellow velvet couch with two middle-aged, obese Cuban women who had no English whatsoever.

Hoke wanted desperately for Major Brownley to call him soon. No matter what Brownley told him on the phone, it would give him a chance to bug out early. This is why he had insisted on taking both cars, even though his Pontiac had ample room for the five of them, including Pepe's paraphernalia.

Hoke, when they first arrived, had shaken hands with Tio Arnoldo and welcomed him to America. The old Cuban--who wasn't really all that old in years but had been broken in prison and looked as ancient as God--had wept. He looked a little dazed and confused as well. He cried and smiled at the same time, exposing some snaggled teeth in his purple gums, and said something to Hoke in Spanish in a gargling voice.

This was a very emotional family, Hoke concluded--all of them. They laughed and cried at the same time as they talked rapidly and stuffed enormous quantities of food into their mouths.

Tio Arnoldo, Ellita informed Hoke, was the last one left in her father's family, and now there were no more relatives to get out of Cuba. It had cost her father more than thirty thousand dollars to buy Tio Arnoldo a visa in Cuba and to support the old man in Costa Rica until his entry visa to the United States came through. But everyone in the family had chipped in something or other, even if it was only a food package mailed to the old man during his four-year wait in Costa Rica.

Hoke admired the Sanchez family loyalty but didn't think that the old man would contribute much, if anything, to America. Mr. Sanchez would support him, but within a few days Tio Arnoldo would be signed up for SSI and Medicaid and would be hospitalized eventually, free, of course, because he didn't have a dime and was obviously going to die within a few months--certainly within the year. He was brown skin and frail bones, and the last job he had held--twenty-six years ago in Cuba--was that of a file clerk in an Havana bank. As a matter of "honor," Ellita had said, Tbo Arnoldo had refused to do any work in Castro's prisons, and the wardens had been hard on him.

On the table the pig's feet had looked appetizing, but now that Hoke had them on his plate he couldn't eat them. They weren't prepared the way he was used to eating pig's feet (pickled, and from a jar), but had been fried in bacon grease saturated with garlic. He couldn't cut the thick skin with the white plastic fork he had taken from the table, and the feet were so slippery with hot grease he couldn't pick them up with his fingers either. Hoke returned the uneaten plate of pig's feet to the table casually and went out on the porch to smoke a cigarette.

He finished his beer and put the empty bottle on the porch rail. There was a shrine to Santa Barbara in the front yard. It was surrounded by a well-tended bed of geraniums, and someone had placed a bouquet of roses in front of the three-quarter-size saint inside the concrete brick and stucco shrine. Hoke wondered if Señor Sanchez practiced -Santeria- and if he had sacrificed a goat or a chicken in honor of Tbo Arnoldo's arrival. He wouldn't put it past him, but he hoped that Ellita was too civilized for such practices. He didn't know for sure. He had thought he knew her very well, after working with her in the division and living with her for more than a year, but apparently he didn't know her as well as he had thought. He still couldn't get over the astonishment that she would actually go out on a date with Donald Hutton, a man who had murdered his own brother.

Hoke had fixed his own breakfast that morning and had heard Ellita and the girls talking in Ellita's bedroom while he ate his Grape-Nuts and toast in the dining room. When Ellita came out to fix her own breakfast, she hadn't said a word about her date. It was none of his business, and he hadn't asked. But his curiosity was high. If she didn't volunteer any information, there was nothing he could do to find out. He could always ask Aileen, who would tell him anything he wanted to know, but he wouldn't take advantage of his daughter's desire to please him.

Hoke flipped his cigarette butt into the shrine and wondered if he had been at the party long enough to leave without hurting the Sánchezes' feelings. He could drive Ellita's Honda home and leave the keys to the Pontiac so she could bring the girls and Pepe home later. Then Ellita appeared on the porch, holding a bowl of mixed rice and beans (-moros y cristianos-) and a plastic spoon.

"I saw you sneak those pig's feet back on the table," she said, smiling, "so I brought you something you could eat."

"You didn't have to do that." Hoke took the bowl and spoon. "There're plenty of things on the table I could eat. But those pig's feet are gross."

"Major Brownley hasn't called yet, Hoke. But I told my mom I'm expecting him to call, and she's been listening for the phone."

"There've been about a dozen calls already."

"It's always that way. At a party like this it rings off the hook. People who can't come want to talk to Tbo Arnoldo anyway, and people who're coming later want to know what to bring, or they say they'll be late--you know-- Cuban time."

Hoke nodded. "I didn't hear you come in last night. I watched the news but didn't stay up for -Saturday Night Live- because I was too sleepy."

This wasn't the whole truth. Hoke had gone to bed earlier than he had wanted to because he didn't want Ellita to think that he was waiting up for her to come home. There was nothing physical between Hoke and Ellita--no sexual sparks--and he had always considered her asexual. But as he had watched the eleven o'clock news, he had considered the possibility that Donald Hutton, after ten years in prison, had looked at Ellita as a desirable sex object and was probably trying to get his hand up under her dress as he sat beside her in the Trail Theater watching the old Bunuel film. And Ellita, being a mature woman, might very well open her legs and encourage such explorations. Why not? She was entitled, and it was none of his business what she did.

"-Los Olvidados- was a good movie, Hoke. It was in Spanish, with English subtitles, but whoever wrote the titles really didn't understand the street idioms. So I had to explain a lot of them to Donnie during dinner."

"Donnie?"

Ellita nodded. "He likes to be called Donnie instead of Don or Donald. His mother always called him that, he said."

"Jesus Christ, the man's forty-five years old! Isn't that a little old for the diminutive?"

"What about Ronnie Reagan? He's thirty years older than Donnie."

"But Reagan's primarily an actor, like Swoosie Kurtz."

"Donnie did some acting in prison, he said. They had a little theater group there for a while."

"I'll bet he did. He did plenty of acting at the trial, too, but it didn't help him any."

"He told me he was innocent, Hoke."

"You don't believe him, do you? Monday, if you like, I'll dig out the old files and bring them home so you can take a look at the evidence."

"I'm not a fool, Hoke," Ellita said with a little laugh. "I was a cop for nine years, remember? They -all- say they're innocent. I told Donnie he should try to put it out of his mind. Innocent or guilty, it didn't make any difference to me. He was free now, I told him, and he could start a new life. All of that was behind him."

"What did he say to that?"

"That he was trying. But inasmuch as he hasn't been given a new trial, and he accepted the parole, his name will never be cleared now. So when he thinks about it, it still galls him."

"We proved conclusively that he was fucking his brother's wife." Hoke put the untouched bowl of rice and beans on the porch rail next to the empty beer bottle.

Ellita nodded and smiled. "He explained all that to me at dinner. His brother wasn't altogether infertile, he just had a low sperm count, that's all. Marie Weller and Virgil had a regular sex life, but she was impossible for him to impregnate. So Donnie was doing his brother a favor, he said, because Virgil wanted a son. She really wanted a baby, too, and was planning to adopt one. So Donnie said he would impregnate her instead, and Virgil would then think it was his, you see. Being they were brothers, the baby would even look something like Virgil and Donnie, and Virgil would think it was his. Virgil and Donnie even had the same blood type--AB. But Donnie said he couldn't get her pregnant either, and he really tried."

"What a crock of shit! Jesus Christ, Ellita--"

"Isn't it?" Ellita threw her head back and laughed. "But he was wonderful, Hoke. He told me all this shit with such a solemn face and was so earnest about it. I could just picture him working on Marie Weller with this proposition. She did go to bed with him, you know. Not only in Key West that weekend, as they proved at the trial, thanks to you, but he met her several times at the Airport Hotel. They have reasonable day rates at the Airport Hotel, he said."

Hoke cleared his throat. "That's what I heard, too. Look, Ellita, give me your Honda keys, and you drive my Pontiac home." He handed her his car keys, which were attached to his old army dogtags with a small chain. "I'd better go home and wait for Brownley's call there. I've met your uncle and put in my appearance, so your folks'll understand if I have to leave for police work."

"There's going to be a cake later and--"

"Fuck the cake."

"I'll bring you a piece when I come home."

Ellita took Hoke's car keys and left to look for her purse and the Honda keys.

Major Willie Brownley called Hoke at seven-thirty. By then Hoke had finished three beers, and he suppressed a belch when he picked up the phone.

"Good!" Brownley said when Hoke answered. "I'm glad I tried your house first before I called the Sánchezes. It's always hard to get through to a Latin house. When they hear you speaking English, they think it's the wrong number and hang up on you."

"We do the same, Willie. When I get an answer in Spanish, I hang up, too."

"I never thought about that, but I do, too, now that you mention it."

"I went to the party, Willie, but bugged out as soon as I could. It's a madhouse over there. And just as I was leaving, a neighborhood group of kids was setting up to play salsa. The phone was tied up most of the time anyway. Besides, I was getting eager to hear from you so I can shave off this damned stubble."

"You haven't shaved, have you?"

"Not yet. I've let my beard grow since Thursday, such as it is, and my neck itches. If this is some kind of joke on your part, Willie--"

"It's not a joke. Here's what I want you to do. Wear some old clothes tomorrow."

"All my clothes are old."

"I mean some old jeans, maybe a blue work shirt, if you've got one. An old pair of shoes. And meet me at seven-thirty at Monroe Station."

"Out on the Tamiami Trail?"

"That's right. It's about forty miles out, maybe a few miles more, on the other side of the Miccosukee Trading Post."

"What's this all about, Willie? Are we going hunting?"

"Something like that. Have you got a hat, a straw hat?"

"I haven't got any hats. You've never seen me wear a hat."

"Okay, I'll bring you one. What's your hat size?"

"In the army I wore a seven and an eighth."

"With a straw, I guess it doesn't make that much difference. I'll see what I can find."

"What's this meeting all about?"

"I don't want to talk about it on the phone, Hoke. And don't tell Ellita about it either. I'll explain everything tomorrow morning. Now when you get out to Monroe Station, don't go inside. You can park out front where the trucks and dune buggies are, but then you take a little dirt trail on the right of the restaurant, the other side of the gas pumps. That's west of the building. There's a small clearing in the scrub palmettos and pines there called the wedding grotto. The restaurant owner's a notary public, and sometimes he marries people in the little grotto. You'll see the sign. I'll meet you there, in the grotto. The owner uses that clearing as a marriage chapel."