Men in Miami Hotels Read Online Free Page A

carries, but he decides not to. He doesn’t feel up to it just now. Maybe I never existed , he thinks. He knows everything about what’s happening here; it’s not that much of a mystery.
    “I’ll see ya on the turnaround,” he says.
    “You going my way?”
    “Which way you headed?”
    Dup waves halfheartedly toward town.
    “Too bad. I’m going over here.”
    But as he turns away from Dup, whose disguise is accessibility, in that instant, he wants to give him another chance, give him a lead, let him in on secrets that’ll help him along. Maybe we could get your house out of hock too, buddy, old duplicitous Dup. The thought startles him, and he knows Dup can see this in his face. Dup starts to say something, then stops. It’s not because he’s letting Cot off. He wouldn’t do that. The street lamp shines in his eyes that gleam with a dark avidity. The situation’s one notch too public.
    Halfway down the street Cot turns—Dup’s still standing there pretending not to watch him—and says, “I liked that song you made up for the party over at Hal’s hotel.”
    Dup doesn’t say anything.
    “It was funny.”
    “Thanks,” Dup says.
    He walks slowly around the corner and then scoots up Grinnell, cuts over on Thompson Lane and up Francis across Fleming and on to Regent and his mother’s house. He stands in the street. No one’s about; the lights are off under the house. But he knows his mother is lying awake. She’s lying there making up her life, fiddling with the pieces, fragments and unraveled bits, knitting fresh strands of ridiculous makeshift into the fabric, a living example of how crazy we all are. He crosses the yard to the porch, but nobody’s under there. Nobody either in the backyard in the little pup tent Jackie’s set up under the almond tree. He tells himself they’ve found a more restful place to sleep. But he really thinks they’ve been caught by wrongful men. Help me. What’s the name—the inspector? Pollack—that’s it. Like the fish. Or was it Fish? Wilkins. He’s known him too all his life—hasn’t he? A slow-moving boy (become a slow-moving man) with a ragged purple wen on the back of his neck and a black mole above his upper lip like a beauty spot. Cot used to see him years ago at semi-pro football games. He carried the chains for the yardage markers. He remembers his earnestness, the way he smiled when somebody looked at him. He wants to smash him to the ground and makes a plan for it, the plan wobbling as he makes it. No matter, in the dark ironworks the instruments are already being forged. He knows this. He can smell the burning metal, even at a distance; it rides on a breeze that’s found him again.
    All this in seconds as he cycles over to New Town. Two short fat bare-chested old men wearing tattoo sleeves walk by laughing softly. The moon’s drowning in a small cloud pool. Around a corner he comes on two men in dark caps beating another man on the ground. He stops, wades in and batters the assailants back and forth, knocking one into a tree stump, the other onto his face on the pavement. “You okay, Pop?” he says to the man who was already down. The man’s propped on an elbow looking at him. “What do you know?” he says. “What the fuck do you know about it?” Cot remounts his bike and pedals off. The moon has risen from its pool and sails unobstructed across the sky. He pedals past the darkened houses, past the cemetery where he used to lie out at night with Marcella under a bitter orange tree near the graves of sailors who had gone down with the battleship Maine . They could hear the chains on the flagpole above the sailors clanking as if the dead were being raised and lowered, for what reason you couldn’t tell.
    H e finds Ella and Jackie up at CJ’s, thinking as he climbs the outdoor stairs that he’s finally coming to know the woman inside him like CJ’s always told him he needs to, coming to love her; it’s almost erotic, he can even picture her,