Heat of Night
Authors: Harry Whittington
H
e sank to the couch beside her, gathered her to him, found her more liquid, more fiery than ever. Her legs were hot against his hands.
She clung to him and kissed his face. He closed his eyes tightly and didn’t breathe. Then he sighed and said, “I hope you feel this way the rest of your life.”
“No, not this way….” She writhed under his hand. “It would kill me.”
HEAT OF NIGHT
HARRY WHIITINGTON
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
I
T WAS THE DAMNEDEST SCREAM
he’d ever heard. It ripped the peaceful Sunday morning out by the roots, raging through the murmur of flies, muted breezes and village church music into the sick place where his hangover cringed. The scream rattled around inside him.
“Police.” He whispered it first because he was, for the moment, petrified. He leaned forward, hackles bristling along his neck. Then, able to move, shaken and white-faced, he jerked himself upright in his rocking chair on the hotel veranda. This time he heard himself yelling, “Police!”
“Relax.”
He turned, staring at the hotel clerk leaning against the doorjamb. Didn’t these Florida crackers ever get excited about anything?
“What you mean — relax?” Anguished, he jumped up from his chair, a rotund man with a pot belly and an incredible hangover. “There’s a dame being killed.”
“Relax.”
“Sound came from down on the waterfront.”
The clerk shook his head. “ ‘Tain’t nothing, mister. Just Big Juan Venzino making time with his woman.”
“But he’s killing her.”
The clerk shook his head. About forty, he had a lean red-flushed face under pink hair and a mild tic in his left eye. He chewed on a match stick.
“Reckon not,” he said. “Reckon to see Big Juan die long before she does.”
“Man, you heard her scream.”
“Well, he’s been trying to kill Big Rosa that way as long as I can recollect and it ‘pears to me her yells get stronger every year.”
“You mean — he’s
loving
her?”
“That’s right.” The tic worked frantically. “Whenever Big Juan pleasures Big Rosa, the squeamish cut bait and run for cover. And that’s a fact.”
The clerk continued, lazily, unhurried, describing Big Juan as a colossal monolith of a man, huge in every aspect. His large head bristled with thick black hair, graying some at the temples. Big Juan had entered his forties, the clerk said, thrusting his way into middle age without detecting any lessening of the desires that fired him all the days of his life, any more than he’d noted any improvement in his fortunes. Whenever the clerk saw him, Big Juan still moaned about the new boat he needed, debt that overwhelmed him and how there always seemed to be a new mouth to feed every time he padded up from his nets to his house. He’d tell the clerk he was no different from the way he’d always been but that he should burn more candles. There’d been no slackening in his prowess, either. Big Rosa still screamed as loudly and as agonizingly as she had the first time he drove home to her the scepter of his devotion over thirty years ago, three days before they were married.
Listening to the clerk, the drummer licked his lips. He felt slightly calmer; the butterflies in his head had laid down their anvils. He went back to his chair on the hotel veranda and flopped into it. But he sat tense, ear tuned, waiting for another scream….
• • •
The drummer walked off the Havana Hotel lobby that afternoon and strolled along Dead Bay’s Main Street. He told himself he didn’t have any destination in mind. But he went straight, as if irresistibly drawn there, across the deep-rutted sand road to the waterfront where Big Juan Venzino lived.
He walked past the unpainted frame house to the water. He stared at the rickety wooden piers where Big Juan strung his nets and secured his boats and sank his bait wells. Broken piers had sagged and rotted and had been abandoned to crabs and barnacles. The beach before the house was cleared but was ringed on each side by mangroves and cabbage palmettos, with sawgrass and slash pines in the salt flats out back. Before the beach stretched a quiet bay with small islands separating it from the lime green Gulf with faded sky and clouds and lazy gulls.
The front door of the shack slammed and the drummer turned quickly to face it.
Big Juan Venzino walked to the edge of the stoop, started down the steps. He saw the drummer and stopped. For a moment they stared at each other. Even across the yard, the drummer could sense the darkness behind Big Juan’s eyes.
The drummer gave the barrel-chested fisherman a tentative smile, tipped his straw hat and backed away toward the road. The clerk hadn’t exaggerated in one respect, at least: Big Juan was the kind of man he’d heard about but never seen, an aging giant of a man. The muscles in Big Juan’s chest were like steel-braided cords broiled and tempered by forty-seven years of Gulf suns.
Still backing away, the drummer glanced around, by now possessed by the need to view Big Juan’s woman for himself.
“Howdy, mister.” There was no friendliness in Big Juan’s tone. “You lost?”
The drummer tried to smile again. Nobody had to tell him how these people resented intruders. “Must be, sir,” he said and kept backing away.
• • •
“But what about those kids?” he asked the clerk when he returned to the hotel. “What do they do with them when they start flogging it to death?”
The clerk smiled and the tic produced something like a perky wink.
“The kids?” The clerk glanced around the deserted lobby and nodded. The drummer clung to every word. The clerk was the local Chamber of Commerce extolling the wonders of his town, the beauty of his village that you couldn’t find anywhere else. He admitted that other towns had mansions more imposing than the Hollister place on the bay-bluff west of town, that other places got hotter in summer, colder in winter.
He leaned his elbows on the desk.
“Well, suh, when Big Rosa notices Big Juan stacking up for a party of a Sunday morning, she packs them kids off to church.”
The drummer smiled at this idea.
“What else?” the clerk said. “Real religious folks. Big Rosa has to get to early Mass so’s she can be home by the time Big Juan wakes up growling for her.”
“Off to church? That’s a good one, all right.” A drummer needed wild tales like this in his mental files.
“Yeah. Sundays they do. But it don’t make much difference. When Juan starts exciting her, you can hear them two yelling and laughing ten blocks away in the Baptist Church.”
“Ten blocks? You’re giving me the business.”
“Like hell. What’s ten blocks here on the bay of a quiet Sunday morning? Sound carries. Man, when Big Rosa gets to laughing, hymns ain’t loud enough to drown her out. The women get to twitching in the pews and the men give each other the eye, trying not to grin in church — and I tell you, mister, nobody in this here town draws a relaxed breath until finally Big Rosa screams like you heard her screaming this morning. Big Juan and Rosa — they’re quiet for a spell after that.”
The drummer frowned. “Must be hell on them kids growing up where something like this happens a few times a week.”
“Now wait. Mister, it’s as natural as breathing to them Venzino kids. You never laid your eyes on better or happier kids. I reckon where kids grow up to accept their bodies and sexin’ as a natural thing they’re unspoiled — like birds or little animals.” The clerk laughed, shaking his head in rhythm with his tic. “Now, with Big Juan, there’s one thing he won’t tolerate. His kids are not allowed to see horror movies, or murder pictures. Not even on TV. Big Juan says it’s bad for them.”
The drummer sighed; he now possessed the kind of conversational nugget he could always polish and improve upon.
Another angle occurred to him. “This Big Juan. He must be quite the stud. All that advertising every Sunday morning. Men keep their women chained to home around here?”
The clerk shook his head. He fiddled with the ink pen on his desk.
“Mister, rich women, winter tourist dames, the mayor’s wife — ” he whispered this with a sharp glance around, “and Ruby the prosty down at Jake’s Bar — all of them have tried to get in with Big Juan. And no dice.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, sir. You ask them dames. Things like this is nothing to joke about.”
“I can see that, all right.”
“You don’t have to tell women when a man’s got what they need. They know.”
“I’ll grant you. But what’s wrong with Big Juan to pass up all that stuff?”
“Big Juan don’t want ‘em. First time he ever saw Big Rosa — she wasn’t more’n fifteen then — why he went into Jake’s Bar and he cried like a baby.”
“Cried?”
“He’d seen the woman he wanted and he knowed he was such a sinner that surely even the Mother of God Herself couldn’t intercede and get Big Rosa for him. But — he’s got her — and he’s never stopped burning candles, and in thirty years everybody in this here village can swear he’s never stopped wantin’ her. Man, even if he wanted another woman, and he’ll tell you hisself he don’t, he’d be scared to touch her for fear lightning from a sunny sky would strike him dead. Something about a vow he made to the Mother of God.”
• • •
Big Juan was repairing nets the next morning, contentedly listening to the scream of his children in the shallows of his bay. Something caused him to turn his head and when he did he saw the drummer staring at him.
Big Juan stood up with his fist tightening on his net hook. The drummer tipped his straw skimmer again and crab-stepped sideways toward the roadway, frantically looking for something around the house.
• • •
That night the drummer went into Jake’s Bar. He tanked up on beer laced with moonshine. He joked with Ruby and said a few things to her that were not joking but which she interpreted as jokes.
He felt the floor of Jake’s Bar tremble and Big Juan strode in. Big Juan stared at the drummer, then came to the bar and squatted on the stool beside him.
“Seen you around my place a lot.”
“Yes, sir. Don’t mean no harm, Mr. Venzino. Just that — I heard a lot about you — big man and all, you know — just wanted to see you — and your family. No harm meant.”
Big Juan studied him a moment and then laughed.
“Sure,” he said. “That’s all right. You’re all right.” He was as friendly and unsuspicious as a child. “You come down. Fish. Any time you want to, huh?”
He talked loudly to everybody then, draining off the beer schooners laced with moonshine. He would stop in the middle of some incredible tale and grin at the drummer.
“Heard a lot about me, huh?”
He monopolized the conversation for three straight hours, consumed two dishes of potato chips and hush puppies and a dozen schooners of shine-laced beer. You could hear him above the caterwauling jukebox, cursing his leaky boats that were not fast enough to overtake his competition any more, growling because he never had money enough for the new boat he needed and because even the Good Lord must know he had too many kids. He talked louder and louder, planning to get together everything he owned so he could sell it and buy himself the sleekest thirty-foot inboard this town ever saw.
Big Rosa never came to Jake’s with him.
• • •
The next morning the drummer fished with pole and line from the end of Big Juan’s wooden pier. He sat tenderly, as if poised on a keg of high explosive, darting quick glances toward the front door of the unpainted frame house.
“These piers. All my private property,” Big Juan shouted from the water where he’d waded waist-deep to repair a leaky boat. “Own forty acres both ways. All mangrove swamp. Not valuable. But I don’t like neighbors too close, you understand?” He laughed. “When a man can’t take a leak in his own front yard, the neighbors are too close.”
Big Juan came out of the water, wearing only dungarees rolled above his ankles and drooping below his navel. They were soaking wet but Big Juan was accustomed to this. Sand crabs skittered, buzzing, around his bare feet.
The drummer darted a glance toward Big Juan’s pants, as Juan hitched them up.
“The test of your manhood — this is your heart,” Big Juan said in an accent as thick as the salt-brine smell of mullet on the nets and piers. “When a señor desires his señora with all his heart and his mind, then he is a big man, so big that the horses walk softly around him. This is where a man is big and rigid. Right here.” Big Juan’s fist pounded against his muscle-swollen left breast.
The brutal sound it made was like a blow on a taut drum. A man could be staggered by a lesser blow. The drummer noticed that Big Juan’s skin didn’t even turn red under his fist.
“You know at once when
el hombre
and his
dama
are right, one for the other. Ah. When she bites at her mouth and chews a bruise on the palm of
el hombre’s
hand to hold back her screams and screams anyhow, and don’t even know she’s screamed … this is how it is when
el hombre
has found his
dama
of all
damas.
”
He waved his arm in a gesture that proclaimed that here was the final word on this matter.
“I — hear your wife was a beauty when you first saw her.” The drummer darted an anxious glance toward the house.
Big Juan suddenly began laughing with his head thrown back.
“Listen. These Cuban girls. There are no prettier on the face of God’s earth — and Rosa was the loveliest, with black eyes and red lips and already the faintest down of a mustache and she was then just past thirteen. Agh … and breasts. Breasts like hard ripe melons, standing firm and full and ripe and ready to burst. Agh … she was lovely then, but she is lovelier now.”
• • •
Years later, when the drummer got talking about Big Juan, he would tell with some awe about his meeting with Big Rosa, that week he remained in Dead Bay….
“You see, I never really met her. No. Now, Big Juan showed me all the kids underfoot, girls not in their teens yet and giving you a preview of the heartbreakers they were going to be. And his small, barrel-chested sons, scale models of their old man — chunky Cuban boys who could swim under water three minutes at a time, handle a boat and nets and who weren’t afraid of the biggest manta ray in the bay. And he told me with great pride about his oldest son Alberto — born three days before Big Juan and Rosa had been nine months married, and of his nineteen-year-old daughter who was so soft and beautiful that men trembled when she walked past. A Cuban blonde, if you got any idea how rare they are, with her mother’s black eyes and full ripe beauties. I never saw her, either, but grown men whimpered a little in Dead Bay village when you mentioned her name. So much. So much. Men had been after that girl since she was twelve, yelling for her from behind the cabbage palmettos on moonlit nights — and sometimes crying for her in the middle of storms — and not even Big Juan’s fists could overcome their urge to be close enough to see Dolores and smell her.”