Men in Miami Hotels Read Online Free

that goes on most nights on Duval as jakes from the states cut loose. But he likes it. It makes him feel, he says, as if his particular detachment of the human race is not about to be overrun.
    “I could grope my way to it,” he says, speaking of the gems.
    “You know somebody?”
    “I expect I do. Why don’t you leave the merchandise with me?”
    “I don’t know if that’s best.”
    “You afraid I’ll lose ’em?”
    “No. I don’t want any burn scars on your precious flesh.”
    “I’m a lover of pirate treasure. That’s my whole thing.”
    “Mine too.”
    He hands over the Cambo’s candy-box tin he’d put the stones in. CJ presses the box to his heart then holds it next to his ear and rattles it gently. The box is bound around the edges with adhesive tape.
    “You want to open it?”
    “I’d rather picture them.”
    “How’s Dover?”
    “Dover’s out looking for the . . . bluebird . . . of paradise.”
    “Me too, man. I been looking for that bird all my life.”
    “We already know that about you, dear.”
    L ater, in bed at the Constance Hotel where he is given a quarter-priced room by Aldy Tillman, hotel owner and former cheerleader from their high school gridiron days, he sits in bed reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries. “All the formulas are now a mere surface for gangsters,” she says. He feels queasy, dislocated, a foolish person following wisps and stinks down blank-sided alleys. He gets up, washes his face and drinks water from the tap, gulping it down before he remembers he’s in KW where the local water tastes like Milk of Magnesia. Jeez. He wipes his mouth. In the mirror he gets a glimpse of a partially rectified soul whose face retains blips and streaks of a confusion as yet not completely erased. He throws on his discarded clothes and walks down the street to the harbor. Lights are on over at the Coast Guard docks; they are readying a boat to go out, paid fetchers and rescuers, men in trimmed beards sporting tattoos on their legs like South Sea Islanders. Somewhere way out there in the dark somebody lost and wallowing in a big distant rolling trough, and he thinks: no, I still wouldn’t go, why would I ever have thought I might.
    By the Flagler monument, in a spot where the streetlights don’t quite reach, he runs into Dup Randle, a sporting goods salesman from Miami. He’ll remember this moment: it’s like an ice cube down the back of his shirt. He flinches or thinks he does, he’s not sure and catches himself; a thin twist of . . . not panic—discombobulation—slips along his spine. Dup fronts baseball gloves and scuba gear, but he’s also a Business contract man. He says he’s glad to see Cot—“Man, as I live and breathe . . .”—and offers him a Tums that he accepts but hesitates a sec before putting in his mouth as if it might be poison. The flat, chalky taste of what’s left when everything else is eliminated. Dup actually seems glad to see him. He’s been walking around alone over by the old turtle pens. “Kraals,” he says. “ Corrals . I never knew what that meant until just this minute.” Waving vaguely back toward the docks. “I thought it was just the name of some guy, Kraals.”
    “Nope.”
    “How’s your mother?”
    Cot’s sure then something’s up, has to be. “She took the late ferry to Fort Myers. Gone to see her buddies in Tampa.”
    “I met her several years ago. She’s a nice lady. Snappy sometimes.”
    Dup passes a hand over his forehead as if he’s wiping away sweat. He has a round plain face that creases into a translation of happiness when he smiles. He once told Cot he was born in a tent behind a tobacco warehouse in Virginia. It was part of a joke he was telling. Cot thinks of those video games where what you shoot disintegrates as if it never existed. He thinks of walking Dup over to the little byway near the Coast Guard compound and throwing him off one of the floating docks, cuffed with the set of handcuffs Dup always