Men in Miami Hotels Read Online Free PDF

silk kimono he’s never seen before, something only somebody who loved her would give her. Even with Connie just dead he wants to interrogate her about this, but he’s ashamed even as he thinks it and makes himself cut it out, and then he tells her Connie’s dead— Connie’s dead —and doesn’t know or won’t let himself know whether he’s said it in this straight-out way because he’s jealous or because that’s the best way to say it, or he simply can’t help himself. She winces, her foot turns half over so he can see the ligament stretch and she grimaces and catches herself on the rail and her mouth opens and she gulps air, grunts, and he can see in her face what she’ll look like when she’s old, her eyes without their scleral ring, her skin raked and tissuey, the same look of incomprehension she has now, the melancholic confusion as consciousness retreats along worn pathways into some convenience store of the soul with pickled eggs in a big jar on the counter and a clerk fossicking his teeth with a peppermint toothpick, death standing like a shadow right next to her, coughing quietly into its hand. Plus instant tears she doesn’t bother to wipe off—her tears not death’s. Ordell slides out as if he’s been lurking and asks if he wants some breakfast and Cot says no. Their big tabby cat sidles up and curls around Cot’s legs, but when he reaches to pet it the animal takes a swing at him, claws out. This seems the measure of things.

2
    C onnie was installed two days later in his family’s big coral stone mausoleum that he’d always said looked like the temple of a small, unlikely religion. Standing around on the thatchy yellow grass under the moving shadows of palm fronds, the whole town it seemed had come out, town minus tourist population (or maybe not completely, since CJ was a favorite: Miss Peculiar), the conchs come out to stand in the late afternoon sun and shadow weeping big loose island tears, someone here or there crying out in a strangled voice for Connie, for CJ, for the boy who had run seventy yards once hauling a punt back all the way to win the Marathon game and caught the passes Cot tossed, boy who’d become the dual personalities, maybe the triple or quadruple, or innumerable personalities, like everyone else, only his were public and unafraid to be pegged, this brave boy, man, now already—Cot knew and Marcella knew—growing old in his tracks, his inexpugnable lover Dover standing rigid and straight by the minister who from time to time placed his hand on Dover’s arm to steady him. CJ’s old parents wept. His father who, back at the house when he was told, had laughed out loud like a man gone suddenly crazy, and cried into a huge yellow bandana bought for him by CJ on his one trip out of the country, to Morocco where he’d been detained in jail for three months and hurt. Some went to their knees, Cot among them. He and Brady Overhall, CJ’s former sidelight, leaned over the gold-toned casket, both of them for a moment unable to get back up, both partially stupefied by the enormity (Cot not really, Cot even then watchful), by the calm, the doggedness, the power and intrusiveness of grief and by the thought of CJ’s body stacked in the musty smokehouse under its breadfruit tree that was a descendant of one of the cuttings brought west from Tahiti by Captain Bligh. Cot got up on his own, but Brady had to be lifted up, gone boneless as a cat, so they could go on. White butterflies flittered around the casket and seemed to dance as Childress Purcell sang his special hymn, “See You in the Yonder.” The late afternoon flight from Lauderdale coming in low nearly drowned the words out.
    Cot stared across the assembled at Pollack. Fish, trash fish—pollack. Ah, well, the man probably had problems too. Afterwards he went over and asked him how he was doing. Pollack cringed, stiffened, his long lower lip pursing a little so Cot could see the creases beside it like little healed cuts