Mangrove Squeeze (18 page)

But blame for what? How much did a person have to do? He had a father who needed watching and an anemic business that required constant care and feeding. He wasn't sleeping with Suki, they had no history together; he'd made her no promises, owed her no allegiance. Why should he adopt this lunatic jeopardy in which she'd placed herself? And yet...

And yet, in some unreasonable and undodgeable way, he felt responsible. Not because of anything he'd done. That was the bitch of it. He was not only blameless but incidental. He'd been cruising along and, like the guy who sees a crawling turtle in the middle of the road, was confronted by a clear and necessary duty. Such duties fell across the paths of decent people all the time. But usually the rescues required were small and quick—ease the tied-up dog tangled in its leash, save the bird being harried by a cat. Luck of the draw that the charge which fell to Aaron involved not a turtle or a sparrow but a human being; and not just any human being, but a woman he happened to find beautiful.

He drove, and he did not remember turning right on White Street.

Once on White, he could have taken Truman to head downtown, but when he got to Truman he didn't turn. His hands and feet realized before his mind did that he was heading back to Suki's.

He didn't know why he was going there, except perhaps to allay, if only for a moment, the shameful feeling that he was letting himself off too easily. He would see again the thick shrubs where he'd been brave enough to wait in ambush, the ratty patch of lawn on which he'd tackled poor Pineapple. He turned right on Newton Street.

From a distance off, he looked at Suki's house, the unlit windows, the dark porch under gingerbreaded eaves.

But then his attention was diverted by something he just barely glimpsed on the opposite side of the street. An elbow. An elbow propped on the window frame of a car parked across from Suki's house. The car was a poor choice for stealth—an electric blue Camaro, some non-production color, with a molded skirt stuck onto the bottom of the frame. It hunkered just outside the main splash of orange brightness from a street lamp.

Aaron took his foot off the accelerator, crept along as slowly as he dared. He didn't have the nerve to turn his head, but as he passed the parked car he saw out of the corner of his eye a dark suspender cinched down on a muscular and shirtless shoulder, a tangle of unruly hair falling on a massive neck.

Praying that his face had not been noticed, hoping that his leg would not slam down on the gas and draw attention, Aaron kept on. Hands damp around the steering wheel, he hung a left on Eisenhower Drive and headed home to the Mangrove Arms, trying not to imagine what might have happened had the strongman from the T-shirt shop staked out Suki's place an hour sooner.

Pineapple waited until he thought Suki was asleep, then quietly started gathering up the edges of his bedroll.

Sitting, he tucked his pillow in among the folds, then tried to stand without shouldering the sauerkraut steamer or stepping on Fred, who was snoring with his head beneath the sink. Stepping barefoot over Suki, who'd been given the choice spot next to the propane fridge, he opened the screen door as gently as he could and escaped down the piled cinder blocks into the uncluttered night, to sleep among the mangrove roots and the animate puddles that survived somehow in every hollow.

When he had gone, Suki let her eyes spring open.

From floor level, she looked at the moonlit rusted legs of the single dinette chair, the dust-caked recesses at the base of the idle appliances. She had a pillow and two blankets and a sleeping pad. She was not uncomfortable but she was getting more disheartened every minute. What was gnawing at her was the gradual understanding that, strangled, half-drowned, and rescued, she was not at the end of her trials but only the beginning.

Terror had come and gone and probably would come again—but terror was a fast emotion, and mercifully impossible to remember fully. What confronted her now was a slower and more grinding dilemma: How did she continue her life in the face of what had happened?

She couldn't stay long at the hot dog; that was clear. So what were her options? She could leave Key West, abandon Florida; a long retreat, she imagined, would be adequate to keep her safe. But goddamit, she didn't want to leave. She liked it here. The homemade boats, plywood painted lavender and green. The old Cuban guys playing dominoes in shady doorways. The funk and the geeks that made it feel like home. It was bad enough that fear of crime made you have to lock your bicycle; she was damned if fear of crime would make her give up the whole entire archipelago of Keys.

But if she stayed, what then? The cops could not be counted on. Her boss, for all his cheap cigars and city-room gruffness, quailed in the face of a real story as though it were a fatal infection. Which, perhaps, it was. Who, then, had the guts to risk contamination? Pineapple and Fred.

And maybe Aaron. But Suki hated the idea of involving him. What she'd liked about him from the start was precisely that he did not seem tough, did not have the Key West thorniness engendered by the climate and the transience, a passive hardness that defeated joy by expecting... not the worst, exactly, but just not much of anything. A cuticle around the heart like around the leaves of tropic plants. Aaron seemed free of it. His gaze was unguarded. He was actually trying to accomplish something here, and, amazingly enough, he seemed to believe in the value of his efforts. A long siege in the hot sun would probably simmer the tenderness and the belief right out of him.

Suki rolled over, faced the little fridge. Through the cracking propane hose she caught a faint whiff of the tracer gas they mix in with the fuel. Across the way, Fred's snoring had changed from a steady, almost restful purr to a syncopated rasping, a sort of nasal jazz. She couldn't stay here very long. But could she bring herself to go to Aaron's place? If he asked again, that is?

She tried to banish the possibility; it wouldn't go away. She imagined a hot bath. She imagined a window with a curtain on it, moving in a yellow breeze. She imagined Aaron's curly hair, the earnest tilt he gave to his head when he was puzzling something out. She could see herself at Aaron's place, it was pointless to deny it. And for just a fleeting second she admitted something else as well. She could see herself, maybe sometime far from now when all of this was settled, in Aaron's arms.

"Ya see," said Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia, "this is the part I don't like."

"Which part?" Aaron said.

It was morning at the Paradiso. Long shadows sprouted from the palms. A few old people were walking laps around the pool, none of them could exactly straighten out their knees. The pock of tennis balls echoed between the buildings of the complex; the tinny plunk of golf balls issued forth from the putting green.

Aaron had slept badly once again, he'd awakened in a sweat. He needed to do more for Suki and he had no idea what he should do. He woke up with the thought that
mafiya
was Mafia. That's what old man Bert had said, and it seemed that Bert should know. Besides, who else could Aaron talk to? Who'd had more practice keeping secrets? So he'd roused his father with a cup of tea and off they'd gone.

"The part I don't like," the retired mobster was replying now, "is this burglary bullshit. The part where the dead guy, what's his name?"

"Lazslo."

"Where Lazslo, they make it look like it's a robbery."

"You don't believe it?" said Aaron.

"Come on," said Bert, his silver eyebrows arching skyward. "On that night of all the nights? They rubbed him out. Course they did. But the way they did it—chicken-shit. No class."

Sam Katz was gradually waking up. In the mornings his mind came back to him in jigsaw pieces that slowly combined to make a map. Some days the map had rougher seams than other days. He said, "You cut somebody's throat. There's a classy way to do it?"

Bert petted his dog, which was splayed out like a Chinese duck on the metal table where the three of them were sitting. "My people," he said, "when they were faced with the unfortunate necessity of someone he had to be rubbed out, at least we tried to make a lesson of it, a learning experience. We left a calling card. A symbol. Bag a fish. The guy's tongue. Whatever. Sometimes, okay, the symbols got a little, like, mysterious. One guy he was found frozen in a car trunk wit' a candelabra on his head. Don't ask me. But the point is we didn't bullshit, make it look like something which it wasn't."

Sam ran a hand through the little pillows of his Einstein hair. "So maybe," he said, "these people aren't so much like your people after all."

Bert thought that over, tugged on the placket of his shirt. The shirt was somewhere between pink and red, the color of watermelon, in a shiny material that looked wet. "Similarities and differences," he said at last. "This robbery bullshit, okay, that's a difference. But the guy shoots his mouth off and gets dead, that's the same."

Aaron's mouth was very dry. His hairline itched. He said, "So where does that leave Suki?"

Bert frowned. He petted his chihuahua and watched short and brittle hairs flutter off its back and float in swaths of sunshine. "Aaron," he said, "remember that jerkoff, what's his name, he said something bad about God and the Moslems were gonna kill 'im and then they backed off and made him famous 'stead of dead? Well, if these people are anything like my people, it isn't gonna work like that. They follow through. Have to. Credibility. Ya know. If she's been sentenced, well, it isn't good."

"She's not a threat to them," said Aaron.

"They probably would disagree," said Bert.

"The cops, her own newspaper—no one'll listen to her," Aaron said. "She couldn't hurt them if she tried."

"And who's gonna tell the Russians that?" asked Bert. "Who's gonna convince them?"

Aaron's voice was getting ready to answer but then he began to see the problem.

"The person who tells them," Bert went on, "he knows the same stuff she does. Same knowledge, same sentence.
Capeesh
?"

There was a silence. People did their laps around the pool. A curse came from the tennis court.

Bert leaned lower across the metal table, his watermelon-colored shirt stretched along his skinny chest. He put his hand on Aaron's wrist, said, "Wit' due respect to your father here, I'm gonna talk like you were my own son. My world, Aaron, any world I guess, we had to learn that nobody could save nobody else. Hard thing, but true. Eh?"

He held Aaron's eyes till Aaron reluctantly nodded. Then he went on.

"Somebody got sentenced—Mafia, cancer, what the hell's the difference how it happens?—we had to learn to say goo'bye. Say it in our heart, wit' no words coming out and nothing showing on our face. Y'unnerstand? Shitty sometimes, but there it is. Ya see?"

He stared at Aaron till the younger man looked off, his smarting eyes stung further by the glare from the pool. "I see."

Driving away, Aaron said, "Pop, you understand what's going on?"

Sam Katz didn't answer right away. There was a certain bleak equity in what was happening to his brain. As he remembered less, he cared less, there was a balance to it. But there were moments when he had to care, and then it took a monumental effort to keep the understanding in proportion. "I think I do," he said at last. "But Aaron, is it me, or is this all a little crazy?"

"It isn't you, Pop," Aaron said.

They cruised up Smathers Beach. Vending trucks were already selling french fries, sno-cones. It was a carefree place. You could take a parachute ride hitched to a motor-boat and float weightlessly above the twinkling ocean.

After a moment Aaron said, "Bert's telling me to walk away. Whadda you think, Pop?"

Sam was slipping but he'd seen a lot of life and raised a son and he still knew things that Aaron didn't know. He said, "He's not telling you to walk away. He's saying it's okay if you walk away. He's giving you permission, freeing you."

Aaron drove and rubbed his cheeks. "And whadda you say?"

Sam looked out the window. The ocean was on his side of the car. "Isn't home the other way?"

"Yeah, it is," said Aaron. They were driving past the airport, the fenced-in stand of mangroves at the east end of the runway.

Sam said, "Wait a second. My hearing aid, it's acting funny. Funny noises, like."

He pulled out the device, squinted at it, turned it over and over in his hand. Aaron said, "If you'd stop experimenting on it—"

"What?" He put the hearing aid back in. "Better now," he said. "About this girl, this Suki, she have anybody else could do a better job of helping her?"

Aaron didn't answer.

Sam looked out the window. The island was curving, the ocean scouring through toward Cow Key Channel. "We going where she is?"

Aaron didn't move his eyes. "I guess that's where I'm heading."

His father watched the water and the wheeling sky. Then he reached across the car and put a hand on Aaron's shoulder. "I'm proud of you," he said. "The whole thing's crazy but I'm proud of you."

Suki was washing her hair in a bucket.

Aaron had walked in from the road and was standing in the shadows of the foliage. He saw her before she noticed him, and the whole scene reminded him of something from another century. A driftwood fire burning. The dented pail lifted up on rocks. Thin suds being wrung out of her hair in sunshine.