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“What a life, huh?” he said.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Make mine rare, will you?”
“Rare it is, Loot,” he said, squeezing the grease out of a patty, wincing in the flare of smoke and flame.
I washed my hands before we ate. Dallas’s work uniform hung inside a clear plastic dry cleaner’s bag on a hook in the bathroom, the logo of an armored car company sewn above the coat pocket.
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BUT DALLAS DID NOT BLOW DODGE. Instead, I saw him talking on a street corner in Opa-Locka with Ernesto, the leviathan driver of the lavender Cadillac. The two of them got in the Caddy and drove away, Dallas’s face looking much older than he was. Twice I asked Dallas to go to the track with me, but he claimed he was not only broke but entering a twelve-step program for people with a gambling addiction. “I’ll miss it, but everything comes to an end, right?” he said.
Spring came and I disengaged from Dallas and his problems. Besides, I had plenty of my own. I was trying to get through each morning with aspirin, vitamin B, and mouth spray, but my lend-lease colleagues at the Miami P.D. and the cadets in my class at the community college were onto me. My irritability, the tremble in my hands, my need for a vodka collins by noon became my persona. The pity and ennui I saw in the eyes of others followed me into my sleep.
I went three weeks without a drink. I jogged at dawn on Hollywood Beach, snorkeled at the tip of a coral jetty swarming with clown fish, pumped iron at Vic Tanney’s, ate seafood and green salads at a surfside restaurant, and watched my body turn as hard and brown as a worn saddle.
Then on a beautiful Friday night, with no catalyst at work, with a song in my heart, I put on a new sports jacket, my shined loafers, and a pair of pressed slacks, and joined the crew up in Opa-Locka and pretended once again I could drop lighted matches in a gas tank without consequence.
That’s when I got my second look at the short man who worked as a collector for Whitey Bruxal. He stood in the open doorway, scanning the interior, forcing others to walk around him. Then he went to the bar and spoke to the bartender, and I heard him use Dallas’s name. The bartender shook his head and occupied himself with washing beer mugs in a tin sink. But the collector was not easily discouraged. He ordered a 7Up on ice and began peeling a hard-boiled egg on top of a paper napkin, wiping the tiny pieces of shell off his fingernails onto the paper, his eyes on the door.
Stay out of it, I heard a voice say inside my head.
I went to the men’s room and came back to my table and sat down. The collector was salting his egg, chewing on the top of it reflectively while he stared out the front door into the street, his shoes hooked into the aluminum rails of the barstool. He wore stonewashed jeans and a yellow see-through shirt and a porkpie hat tipped forward on his brow. His back was triangular, like a martial arts fighter’s, his facial skin as bright and hard-looking as ceramic.
I stood next to him at the bar and waited for him to turn toward me. “Live in the neighborhood?” I asked.
“Right,” he said.
“I never did catch your name.”
“It’s Elmer Fudd. What’s yours?”
“I like those platform shoes. A lot of Superfly types are wearing those these days. Ever see that movie Superfly? It’s about black dope pushers and pimps and white street punks who think they’re made guys,” I said.
He brushed off his fingers on his napkin and pulled at an earlobe, then motioned to the bartender. “Fix Smiley here whatever he’s drinking,” he said.
“You see, when you give names to other people, it’s not just disrespectful, it’s a form of presumption.”
“‘Presumption’?” he replied, nodding profoundly.
“Yeah, you’re indicating you have the right to say whatever you wish to other people. It’s not a good habit.”
He nodded again. “Right now I’m waiting on somebody and I need a little solitude. Do me a favor and don’t piss in my cage, okay?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Were you in ’Nam? Dallas was. He’s a good kid.”
The collector got off the barstool and combed his hair, his eyes roving over the crooked smile on my face, the booze stains on my shirt, the table-wet on the sleeves of my new jacket, the fact that I had to keep one arm on the bar to steady myself. “I stacked time in a place you couldn’t imagine in your worst dreams,” he said.
“Yeah, I’ve heard the bitch suite up at Raiford is a hard ride,” I said.
He put away his comb and looked at his reflection in the bar mirror. His cheeks were pooled with tiny pits, like the incisions of a knifepoint. He placed a roll of breath mints by my hand. “No, go ahead and take them. Gratis from Elmer Fudd. Enjoy.”
MY TENURE WITH the exchange program was running out in June, and I wanted to carry good memories of South Florida back to New Orleans. I boat-fished out of Key West in the most beautiful water I had ever seen. It was green, as clear as glass, with pools of indigo blue in it that floated like broken clouds of ink. I visited the old federal prison at Fort Jefferson on a blistering-hot day and swore I could smell the land breeze blowing from Cuba. I slept in a pup tent on a coral shelf above water that was threaded with the smoky green phosphorescence of organisms that had no names. I saw the ocean turn wine-dark under a sky bursting with constellations and knew that the truth of Homer’s line would never be diminished by time.
But wherever I went, a frozen daiquiri winked at me from an outdoor bar roofed by palm fronds; beaded cans of Budweiser protruded from the ice in a fisherman’s cooler; a bottle of Cold Duck clamped between a woman’s thighs burst alive with the pop of a cork and a geyser of foam.
Delirium tremens or not, I knew I was in for the whole ride.
During my last week in Miami, I drove up to Opa-Locka to pay my bar tab and buy a round for whoever was trying to escape the noonday heat. The bar was dark and cool inside, the street out beyond the colonnade baking under a white sun. I knocked back a brandy and soda, counted my change, and prepared to go. Through the front window I could see dust blowing along the pavement, heat waves bouncing off a parked car, a bare-chested black man drilling a jackhammer into the asphalt, his skin pouring sweat. I ordered another brandy and soda and looked at the order-out menu on the bar. Then I tossed the menu aside, dropped a half dollar into the jukebox, and kicked it on up into overdrive with four inches of Beam and a beer back.
