Who'll Stop The Rain: (Book One Of The Miami Crime Trilogy) (14 page)

Logan

Sunday, July 3, 2011

8:40 PM

S
UMMER
TWILIGHT
DREW DOWN
over the island in its usual gentle way. Gray dusk silently surrendered to the
deep, inky blue of the coming evening. Down by the sea, the darkening water had
lost its Caribbean-green shine, slowly turning to black. Early evening rains
had washed over the island and everything smelled fresh and clean, just like it
was supposed to. I walked out of our apartment, heading down Margaret Street
and turned the corner at Virginia.

A
slow piano blues tune purred from the back apartment in one of the houses along
there. I knew the guy. Joey something. He played down on Duval Street every
night. Probably loosening up for his gig later on.

Farther
up Virginia, a whiff of dinnertime cooking streamed out the open windows of a
couple of kitchens. By the time I turned onto White Street, I caught a slight
breeze brushing by me from the ocean down at the south end of the street, and
it made me smile. It all reminded me of why I love my hometown.

Yes,
the day was wrapping itself up perfectly. Good thing, too, because I don't know
if I could've gone through with this otherwise.

The
house sat on Catherine Street, a little ways up from White. It wasn't set back
too far, only a few feet from the street itself. Sidewalks hadn't yet arrived
in this neighborhood, but the small homes were neat and well-tended. I walked
up to the door of one of them. It was unlocked, like always.

I
poked my head in. The TV in the cramped front room was on with the volume down,
tuned to what looked like a cable cooking show. The couch showed off its 1970s
origins without shame, but it always seemed right for the room, even in the
later decades. A couple of shelves on the wall displayed a few Key West-y
knick-knacks from the Conch Tour Train gift shop. Souvenirs which supplied a
tangible memory for the real thing, mostly aimed at tourists. I could never
figure out why she had those things, since she was born and raised in Key West,
just like me.

I
spotted her back in the little veneer-walled den she used as an office. Her
back was to me. She wore a halter top and shorts, sitting at what passed for a
desk, hunched over her laptop, furiously clicking away. I approached the den.

"Hi,
Ma," I said.

She
snapped up straight from her slumped posture, as if she'd suddenly sat on a
thumbtack. Her figure resumed its girlish form, filling out her halter top
nicely. I had to admit, she looked pretty good for her age, which I think was
somewhere a little north of forty-five.

"Hoo!
God damn, son! You startled me. Don't be creeping up on me like that. You know
I don't like it."

"Sorry.
I didn't mean to scare you."

"You
scare me just by showing up here. You only live a few blocks away and you never
come to see me. I could be dead in here and you'd never know. But then, you
don't give a shit."

"Ma,
that's not true. I came to see you, I came to see if you had any plans for
tomorrow night. I —"

"You
don't care. You spend all your time with that fat whore and you never come
visit your mother."

Same
old shit. How long had I been hearing this? I tried another angle.

"Hey,
you're a blonde now. When'd you do that? Looks good on you."

She
ran a quick hand through her new color, cut stylishly with soft waves tumbling
down the sides, hugging her still-pretty face.

"Oh,
now you notice." But it was her hair, so she wanted to talk about it. She
softened. "I got tired of the red. So many years. I didn't have the right
clothes to go with it anyway. Two or three weeks ago, Emily — you know
her — she suggested I try blonde."

"Well,
you can tell her I think she did a great job. It looks really good on
you."

She
preened again, lightly pushing up the hair in the back of her head. "You
think so?" Finally, the beginnings of a smile. "Mariela down at
Fausto's liked it, too. She said I should've done it years ago."

"Mariela?"
I wanted to put this off as long as possible, so I continued the discussion of
Mariela, the girl at the food market. "Do I know her?"

"She's
that cute little Cuban girl who used to be a cashier but now she works back
there in the deli section. She's been there a long time. Now
there's
someone you should take up with.
She's about your age, and she'd certainly be a lot better for you than that
fifty-year-old sweathog you've got now."

"Ma,
don't talk about Dorothy that way. And she's not fifty. She's just turning
forty next week."

"That
Mariela's real cute. Single, too. And she's Cuban! You know those Cuban girls.
They know how to take care of a man."

I
brushed aside her clumsy stab at matchmaking. "Well, I think she's right
about your hair. You should've changed it, like, years ago. Makes you look
younger, you know?"

Her
old face came roaring back, pushing the smile away. Intensity returned to her
cold, blue eyes. Her voice skidded into a downturn. "Okay, that's it. When
you start telling me I look younger, something's up. You either want something
out of me or, or you got bad news. Which is it?"

"Ma,
come on. I can't pay you a compliment? Tell you you look nice?"

"No,
you can't. Not without you wanting something. Now, what is it?"

I
sighed. "All I was doing was —"

"Tell
me now."

"I
only wanted to see what you —"

"Hurry
it up. I got work to do."

"Work?
What, your latest Internet scam?" I gestured toward the computer screen,
which showed a long database-type list of names and personal information, no
doubt designed to separate a lot of suckers from their money.

"Never
you mind what I'm doing. Tell me why you're here."

I
spied the folded metal chair leaning against the wall, probably stolen from
someplace God knows how long ago. It had always been there, that chair, as long
as I could remember. Gray metal chipped away from its edges after decades of
use. Indelible black wear marks smeared the wall where it touched. I unfolded
it and sat down.

I
recalled her husky voice telling me years ago in this very room, right in these
very chairs, "Crime is in our genes, sonny boy. Yours and mine. My
brother's. My father's, too, worthless son of a bitch that he was. It's what
runs through our blood. What we were born to do." I heard it the first
time at the age of eight, and God knows how many times since.

I
believed her. Shit, who else did I have to listen to? Where else was I going to
find inspiration? Between her and the slam-bang crime movies we watched on VHS,
it was all I ever saw or heard. I never knew anything else. Never knew the
world could be any other way. So, hey, I did the crimes.

The
years of growing up in this house with this woman-child, those years hung over
the two of us, swirled all around us loosely, like spun cotton candy around the
paper cone in its center. We always needed money, so one of my earliest
memories is of her getting a job dancing down at the Wild Thing. Her lying
about her age and learning how to pry the customers loose from their dollars
while she writhed naked on a stage in front of them. Or lap-humping them in the
back room and giving them blowjobs for a few extra bucks, as I later found out.

And
me? I learned how to steal.

I
remembered our great uncertainty during those times when City Electric cut off
the lights or when food was in short supply, leaving us with what few things we
could shoplift. Our fears showed their ugly selves during those times, and I
often wondered why other kids didn't have the same problems we had. We always
seemed so different.

During
my early years, all we had was an old transistor radio to entertain ourselves
when we didn't have power. But later on, I boosted this portable blaster along
with a few old cassette tapes down at the beach one day while the owner was
swimming. I can hear those singers now, crooning off the cassettes softly in
the black, humid nights. Bryan Adams, Mariah Carey, Randy Travis, and her
favorite, Reba McEntire. Just the two of us listening to battery-operated taped
music, sitting, staring off into the dark, not knowing if we would eat the next
day or what would happen to us. What was I then, twelve? Thirteen?

That
was what made this so difficult.

I
said to her, "I'm getting out of the life. Going straight."

"Hmph!
Don't make me laugh."

"No,
I mean it, Ma. I'm going to play it straight from now on."

"Straight?
Hah!" Her tone turned hateful. I flashed on an old song, something about a
mean, spiteful, straight-razor-totin' woman. I half-expected my mother to whip
out the razor any second and start waving it around. "Who you trying to
kid? Your line of work's the only thing you've ever made any money at."

"That
may be so, but I'm getting out just the same." I didn't want to go into
what happened in Miami and I
definitely
didn't want to have to explain the temporary thing with Trey Whitney and
Sharma.

"And
just what do you plan to do now? Run for governor?"

"Run
for — what are you talking about? I can earn a living."

"Yeah.
You can earn a living all right. But how you gonna do it, my boy, at —
what are you now, thirty-two? What're you gonna tell them when they ask for
your experience? That you went straight from high school into a life of
crime?"

"I've
got a line on a real job. Where they won't ask me that stuff. It's in the
landscaping business. Good outdoor work."

"Outdoor
work, my ass. You gonna want to get up at six AM so you can go pick up palm
fronds all day? Trim fucking trees? In ninety degree heat?"

When
she talked this way, with that snotty tone in her voice, it made me feel like
total shit, I'm telling you. Especially at a time like this when I felt I was
doing what I needed to do. The right thing.

"I'll
get up early," I said. "I've been giving this a lot of thought. It's
the right thing to do, you know? Dorothy and I can be —"

She
said, "I knew it! It's that fucking bucktoothed cow, isn't it! She talked
you into this. Was that it?"

"No,
that wasn't it. She didn't —"

"She
prob'ly buried your face in those big ol' titties of hers till you caved in!
Was that it?"

"No,
Ma. And I told you, don't talk about Dorothy that way. She's the only one who —"

She
made a sweeping motion with her arm. "You're giving up all that you've
worked for to satisfy
her
. You been
with her what, ten years now? And she's still got you by the balls. She never
wanted what's best for you."

"Yes,
she
does
." Although I have to
admit, at that moment, I did wonder for a split second.

Her
face reddened and her tone moved upward. "Bullshit! She's been leading you
around by the nose for years now. I've told you that a bunch of times. But you
never listen to your mother. What do I know? I only gave birth to you. I only
raised you up."

I
said, "Come on, you know I'm grateful to you. You know I love you."

"All
right, look. I'll admit I don't know what happened to make you lose your mind
like this and frankly, I don't want to know. But you've done all right by
yourself over the years. You're living pretty good. Don't throw it all away
just because you had a queasy moment with that whore."

"It's
not
a queasy moment. And she's not a
whore! The life just drained everything out of me. You gotta understand that!
It was all these years with my head under the dripping faucet, one drop of
water at a time. There just comes a day, you know, when you can't take it
anymore. You can't take it!"

"Because
you're getting weak in the knees! And now you say you want a straight
job?"

I
had to collect myself, so I rose from the chair and started pacing the small
room. My mind went back to that night last weekend in Miami. There were three
of them, all armed. Three guns I faced, all pointed at me, and not only did I
walk away and leave the three of them dead, I didn't come unspooled. And now
here was my own mother talking to me — throwing all this shit in my face
¾
and I was shriveling like a
two-week-old Key lime.

"Ma,
you know I don't take this lightly. You know I love you and I —"

"Oh,
sure. You love me all right. You love me so much you come around to visit me
every month or two when you have a minute, even though you only live right down
there on Margaret Street."

"Okay,
this is going nowhere. I have to leave now." I picked up the chair and
folded it back up. I leaned it against its familiar, worn spot on the wall and
said, "So long, Ma. I'll keep you posted."

I
headed for the door and I heard her voice harping behind me, the usual shit
about crime in our genes. I thought I could still hear her out in the street.