June was a slow time in Key West, slow for
culture as for everything else, and from week to week Ray Yates had
a tougher job finding guests and events to fill up time on Culture
Cocktail. The seasonal people had gone north, taking with them to
the Vineyard or to Provincetown their harpsichords, their
loose-leaf binders of lesbian love poems. Road shows didn't come
south in June, and no booking agent who wanted to keep a has-been
pop act would send them to this off-season purgatory of heat,
humidity, and empty seats. So Yates muddled through with the
occasional self-published author, a psychic or two, and the local
impresarios who spoke with relentless enthusiasm about the upcoming
winter season, a million years away.
Still, the talk-show host loved going to the
studio, loved it even more of late. It was a haven, a cloister, a
funkily pristine cell sealed off from the world of loan sharks and
mildew, losing bets and sudden hammering downpours. The studio
walls were soundproofed, heavily padded in vinyl like a
Barcalounger all around. The lights were recessed and soft as
stars. Wires were taped down, chair casters always oiled; nothing
raided, nothing squeaked. Intercourse with the universe beyond was
blessedly one-way: Yates's voice went fluently forth and nothing
came back in. It was safe, it was controlled, and the host had come
to crave his time in the studio like a therapy junkie craves his
time on the couch, as the only respite from the mayhem and disquiet
of his other waking hours.
And now Yates was just finishing the show.
The guests had left; he was wrapping up with an improvised and not
terribly persuasive ramble on the pleasures of the rainy season. He
glanced up at the clock above the engineer's window, and in one
crammed and befuddling instant he saw two things: He saw that it
was twenty seconds before seven, and he saw that Bruno had invaded
the production booth.
The huge thug stood there behind the
triple-thick glass, his massive arms crossed over his breakfront of
a chest. He had commandeered the engineer's headset, the earpieces
drew attention to the way his neck tapered to his head. The
quailing engineer, a trouper, managed to hit the switch that
started Yates's theme music, and Bruno's face took on an expression
that was uncomprehending yet transfixed, it bore the smallbrained
ecstasy of an ape at the opera.
The ecstasy didn't last long.
"Yo, crumbfuck." Bruno said it through the
intercom, and at the moment the barking voice bounced off the soft
walls Ray Yates's cloister was desecrated, his safe haven was
spoiled forever.
The violation made Yates mad; he mustered a
flash of feistiness that felt heroic but vanished as quickly as a
hot pee in a cold ocean, chilled to nothing by his fear.
"We got a meeting tuh go tuh," Bruno barked.
"Ya ready?"
*
It was buggy in the vacant lot at dusk, but
Roberto Natchez, dressed in black, didn't seem to notice.
Mosquitoes buzzed unharassed around his hair, landed on his neck
and bit; tropical roaches the size of mice slithered among
ground-hugging vines and over red-veined roots the thickness and
consistency of garden hoses. Fetid puddles between jagged chunks of
ancient coral sent forth a nasty smell of sulfur. Undaunted, the
poet continued on his mission. In one hand he held a wire cage, in
the other a bag of popcorn.
He found a small clearing, knelt, and set
his trap.
He sprinkled some kernels to draw his prey
to the first chamber of the cage. A more generous helping lured the
quarry to the second, narrower compartment. The mother lode of
popcorn was piled temptingly on the far side of a small
spring-loaded platform attached to the trip wire that would slam
the door.
Content with his snare, Natchez retreated to
the shadow of his building and waited. It was time, he had decided,
to put theory into practice. Credos, manifestos were necessary, of
course; they provided the rigorous logic without which human
activity was just so much pathetic silliness, so much blundering
around. Still, at some point there was no substitute for action;
action alone could prove the rightness and integrity of
intellect.
It was perhaps three minutes before the
chicken appeared from underneath a canopy of weeds and started
walking jerkily, obliquely, toward the popcorn. In the dim mix of
fading dusk and distant streetlight, the bird looked dull brown and
unkempt; its leg feathers were ragged and there was something
unseemly, slatternly, about the drunken way it waddled. Roberto
Natchez felt exhilarated: He watched the chicken and realized he
would have no trouble killing it.
No trouble at all, and that was fitting. He
was a true artist, and the true artist shrank from nothing. The
true artist protected the pure from the impure, the worthy from the
fake. There was between those things a gulf as broad and absolute
as the gulf between life and death, and to perform his sacred duty
the artist had to know both sides of that dread chasm. He had to be
willing to hold death in his hands. Only then could he consign the
true and the false to their proper places.
He watched the chicken. It had reached the
far end of the ribbon of bait and cautiously, deliberately at
first, was beginning to eat. It dropped its head, grabbed a kernel
with its beak, then vigilantly stood erect again and looked around
before it began the strenuous and unattractive job of chewing. Its
horny jaw labored up and down and sideways, shreds of popcorn fell
out the edges of its mouth.
The feeding gained momentum, the bird's
vigilance soon gave way to gluttony. Now the chicken ate like a
famished child, never lifting its eyes from the food; on its yellow
feet it followed the zigs and zags of the popcorn trail and soon
had entered the outer chamber of the trap.
Here it paused, and Roberto Natchez held his
breath. For what seemed a long time, the bird just stood there.
Could it be that it was sated? Was it bothered, perhaps, by some
change in the light as it filtered through the slender wire bars?
Caught up in the clenched and sanguinous excitement of the hunt,
Natchez narrowed his black eyes and willed the chicken onward.
The chicken obeyed. It dropped its head and
pecked at the little pile of popcorn at its feet, then, before it
was halfway finished, seemed to be distracted by the bigger pile on
the far side of the metal platform. It edged forward, placed a
single three-clawed foot on the trigger, then leaned over daintily
and not without a certain grace, rather like a dancer bowing low
across one leg. Natchez watched and felt his bitten neck grow hot
with anxiety as kernel after kernel disappeared and still the trap
did not clatter shut. Then, finally, inevitably, the chicken
overreached itself. Straining to seize the last few morsels, it
brought its other foot onto the steel plate; the trip wire let go
with a muffled twang and the door fell closed with tinny
finality.
Roberto Natchez exhaled like a dragon. He
was just slightly dizzy and he saw gold-green streamers behind his
eyes. He did not feel the ground as he strode forward to claim his
prize.
The chicken was still eating, did not seem
to know that it was doomed. Not until its captor bent low and cast
his giant shadow did the bird realize anything was wrong. Then it
wheeled in its small space and saw that its escape was blocked. It
retreated, squawked, flapped its futile wings so that its feather
tips raked unmusically against the bars. It leaped in an aborted
takeoff and banged its narrow head against the top of the trap. The
poet considered the moment, examined his emotions. So this was how
it felt to be in charge, to be enforcer, judge, and executioner. He
liked it.
Squatting down, he opened the cage and
gingerly reached inside. The bird shrieked and pecked at his
fingers. The beak was half sharp, like the tines of a fork; the
feel of it was less painful than bracing. He thrust his hand in
more decisively and grabbed the chicken by the neck. He felt
vertebrae beneath the scraggly feathers as he pulled his victim
through the wire door.
It had been Roberto Natchez's intention to
make the killing ceremonial, to invest it with the dignity and
slowness of a rite. He realized now with a certain
self-embarrassment that that would be impossible. The chicken, its
red eye fiery with terror, squirmed and swelled, and Natchez was
amazed at the quantity of senseless stubborn life that pulsed
within it. Its wings pressed against his grip in bony supplication,
its absurd pebbled legs still tried to run. To hold the creature
was appalling; its relentless squawking was a mayhem that made a
travesty of any sort of pomp, and Natchez admitted that the bird
and not himself was dictating the pace of its decease. Less like a
priest than a butcher, the poet pushed the chicken flat against the
ground and with his other hand he made a motion like opening a jar
of jam and wrung its neck.
The bird shat a yellowish paste between
Natchez's black sneakers. It went rigid for a moment, a final
rippling wave ran through its frenzied muscles. Then, belatedly, it
seemed to realize it was dead. The tension left the carcass,
Natchez felt the bones shift against the will-less meat.
He stood up, the slaughtered chicken
dangling from his hand. His shirt was soaked with sweat, he felt a
violent exultation mixed with fleeting nausea. He lifted the corpse
to the level of his eyes, peered at it, and was gratified to
discover that he felt not a whisper of remorse. He flung the bird a
few feet into the tangled weeds, retrieved his wire cage, and went
home to his garret to drink and write.
At the Eclipse Bar,
Detective Sergeant Joe Mulvane sipped ale from a frosted mug and
with his free hand pulled his damp blue collar away from his moist
pink neck, the better to expose the mottled skin to the chill
breath of the air conditioner. He swallowed, let forth an
exaggerated
ahh
of
satisfaction, then went on with his story.
"So this pretty little Cuban boy comes in,"
he said. "A strange bird, lemme tell ya. Walks like Daryl Hannah,
talks like Jose Jimenez with some night school and a lisp. He's all
excited, he's twitching. He's got this cake, apricot, he's holding
it like a fucking hand grenade. It's poisoned, he's sure of it.
This on top of the paranoid broad who comes in the other day. I
mean Arty, you been here longer than I have. Who are these
people?"
Arty Magnus sipped his wine, then dug his
elbows deeper into the thickly upholstered bar rail, an armrest
that conduced to drinking and reflection, mostly drinking. One of
the very few things he liked about being a newspaperman was the
chance it gave him to shoot the shit with cops. Information.
Everybody needed it, and in more discreet places there was never
enough to go around; in Key West, which was about as discreet as a
public bathhouse, there was generally too much. Information was
cheap as local mangoes and about as firm.
"The Silvers?" said the editor. "Some of our
leading citizens. He's one of the very few people down here who
isn't jerking off when he calls himself an artist. She's one of the
very few people still trying to run a quality business on Duval
Street instead of doing T-shirts and schlock. Maybe they're strange
like artsy-strange. But lunatics? No. The Cuban lad, him I don't
know."
"I do," said the fellow who'd come in with
Arty Magnus and was sitting on the other side of him. His name was
Joey Goldman, he was slightly built with dark blue eyes and wavy
black hair, and he had the earpiece of his sunglasses hanging over
the pocket of his shirt. The other two men looked at him like they
hadn't expected him to contribute, hadn't expected him to know
much.
"Yeah," Joey went on. "He used to work for
us. Before he went full-time for the Silvers. Worked in our
Cleaning Division."
He said this rather grandly, in the manner
of the newly successful. Joey Goldman was an oddity in Key West, a
place where many people of more privileged background came to fail,
to give up, to go pleasantly down the tubes. He'd come from dubious
roots, some thought criminal roots, and with a little luck and more
savvy than anyone thought he had, he'd become a businessman of
substance, a wheeler-dealer in real estate. In this his
questionable past had served him well: It was axiomatic that it was
easier to rob a place if you had a guy inside. Why shouldn't this
logic extend to legitimate business? Who knew before the
housekeeper when an owner was thinking of making a move, selling
out or trading up? Thus the Cleaning Division was what might be
thought of as the clandestine intelligence arm of Paradise
Properties, Joey Delgatto Goldman, boss.
"So what's his story?" asked Joe Mulvane.
"The Cuban kid."
Joey sipped his Campari,
dabbed his lips. "We got like sixteen, eighteen people cleaning for
us," he said. "Most of 'em I couldn't tell ya nothin'. But Reuben I
can, I'll tell ya why I remember: The first day he came to us he
was black and blue. Beat up. Big bruise on his neck, one eye not
open all the way. So shy he could hardly talk. Leanin' away like a
terrorized cat. Sandra's askin' 'im the usual questions.
Where d'ya live?
He lives
with his parents.
How old are ya?
He's twenty-three, twenty-four, somethin' like
that.
'Then I cut in, I couldn't
help it. 'Hey Reuben,' I say, 'who beatcha up?" With this, he
shoots me a look that really gets my attention, a look I recognize.
It's a look—how can I describe it?—it's not hostile, it's not even
strong, but it's defiant, it tells you he doesn't care who you are,
what he needs from you, you're out of bounds. And right away I know
that whoever beat him up is in his family. I just know it. Look,
he's obviously gay. Lotta old-style Cubans, a
maricon
, they get ugly, it's like a
blot onna family honor. I understand something about families,
trust me on that. The closer they are, the harder it is to be
different. So I feel for the kid. I look at Sandra. Sandra looks at
me. The kid is hired and he works out great. Reliable. Honest.
Loyal."