Men in Miami Hotels Read Online Free Page B

sitting in a wicker chair on the beach, wearing an orange tam, picking at the sand with her toes and cursing softly as if curses are a form of singing, a hymn even. As a teenager he’d push his unit down between his thighs until just the V of hair showed and try to get off on that but it never worked. His imagination wouldn’t hold up to the blunt fact of him, no homemade woman for him. And no CJ around, but they’re sleeping in CJ’s bed in the larger of the two bedrooms, Jackie and his quick-minded mother. He sits on the bed and talks them awake, clucking their names and telling them about a pelican he took away from some boys who were torturing it. He’s at the part where the pelican kept nibbling his fingers as he pedaled it to the little nature rehab on White Street, nipping his skin with its outlandish and delicate beak. “It was nibbling my fingers so gently,” he says. “As if it wanted to let me know everything was all right.”
    “I like that part,” Jackie says, awake but not raising his head.
    “You’ve always been so tenderhearted,” his mother says lifting her hand to stroke his cheek.
    In another hour dawn would be washing its gray hands along the horizon. “You seen CJ?”
    “He’s usually over to Dover’s,” Jackie says. Love never dies, Cot thinks.
    “How come you’re over here?”
    “It’s restful,” his mother says. Her hair spiky, her face drained of color as if dreams have taken everything out of her; she doesn’t ask him why he’s scouting around before daybreak. “I’ll fix some eggs.”
    “That’s okay. I was wondering—did anybody come around the house?”
    “Rajah brought us some candles. It was nice of him—to do a favor on his way to prison.”
    Later they eat breakfast out on the big back gallery. Neighborhood roosters rustle up the dawn and a skinny yellow cat slinks around their feet and shies when they try to pet it. A tiny, ambidextrous breeze pushes lightly at blossoms in the big tamarind tree in the alley. The white flowers look like lights fading. On the wide flat rooftop next door a homeless family wakes and begins to go about its morning routines. I’m loose in the world, aflight without design or motive. This’s something he tells himself sometimes, sometimes when he stays up all night reading and then walks out on the beach to catch the sunrise. “Sometimes,” he says to his mother who is buttering a piece of local bread, “I stay up all night in a laundromat.”
    “The same one?” Jackie says.
    “One of two or three.”
    “You got somebody to do that with?” his mother says.
    Just then a couple of police in detective clothes come up the stairs. One of them’s hand goes to his holster when he sees people up on the gallery. Just as quickly the cop lets his hand fall to his side when he realizes who it is. “Hey, Mrs. Sims.” The other’s also a local fellow everybody knows, Oscar Kazanzakis, one of the Greek boys from Bahama Village. “You looking kinda musty, Cot,” he says.
    Cot’s heart has already caught on a sticker, his sense of things, local agonies fuming. He can tell in every way but words what’s up. A gnatcatcher bird clicks in the top of a skinny palm tree like it’s keeping time. “I’m waiting for the elaborations,” he says and feels the hollowness shift inside him, the desert island landscape rotate slightly until it shows scoured gullies and tidal washes crumbling under a gray sky—he doesn’t want to be where he is, but that’s how it is for most folks most of the time he thinks, and almost says: I feel faint , but doesn’t.
    “Well, uh,” the first police—David Bates—says. He was on the football team with Cot and CJ in high school. “I’m sorry, Cot—Mrs. Sims, Jackie—but CJ’s dead.”
    Though he hasn’t moved Cot loses his footing, sags helplessly, wondering where is the place —what place?—and drops into the chair he has just risen from. His mother, looking David in the face, says, “God