Men in Miami Hotels Read Online Free PDF Page B

and said fine just fine. “Sorry about your mother,” he added or remembered to say or tossed in like a piece of meat distraction to a pursuing lion. He was sweating.
    “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
    Cot had one of his father’s old baseball caps in his hand. It had a New York Giants logo on it. He tapped it against his leg.
    “Nothing I could do,” Pollack said.
    “I know.”
    “It’s regulations.”
    “Meant to benefit the people of the community.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Did you ever find ten thousand dollars on the ground?”
    “I found a frozen turkey once.”
    “Lying around where you could pick it up?”
    “It was in Cleveland. Somebody’d dropped a turkey during a robbery.”
    “D’jou keep it?”
    “I would have but my buddy said he needed it. He was the one actually who spotted it.”
    “Sometimes you find money on the ground you get to keep it.”
    “I don’t know, Cot.”
    “Treasure all over this area.”
    “I don’t know, Cot.”
    “You know my mother’s sleeping under the house.” He didn’t want to take the conversation in this direction, but he couldn’t help it. This showed on his face and Pollack saw it.
    “I’m sorry, Cot,” he said.
    “I don’t want you to lose sleep over it.” Tiniest slip and things could go flying off the rails. Now he wanted to punch the guy. “I’ll see you, Wilkins.”
    “Mama said you came by.”
    “She lives inside y’all’s house, I see.”
    Ordell came up just then with his arm tight around Marcella who was streaming tears. “Would you help me with this woman?” he said, an anguished look on his face. Cot dropped the conversation and took Marcella in his arms. She felt alive and wonderfully intricate. The villains had knocked CJ in the head. Hit him so hard from behind that his skull was broken. A chill jerked Cot; he almost let Marcella go, but he didn’t. He was crying too. Way up, in the heat drafts, buzzards circled. The birds were an embarrassment, if you thought that way, especially in a touristical culture promoting everlasting life. Sometimes the birds came down to the cemetery and walked around. Bobby Johnson wandered up, and he pointed at them. “They could get to you,” Bobby said as if he and Cot had been in conversation. “Though I guess it’s true you never hear of ’em digging anything up.”
    Cot gave him a look and Bobby slid away, beating his white captain’s hat against his leg as he walked.
    “Who was that?” Marcella said. She looked up with eyes that looked like they had glue in them. “Oh—Bobby.”
    Her hair smelled of perfume, as citrusy as ever. Way across the cemetery, beyond the fence, upstairs in the old crumbling house on the corner that was half boarded up and leaning to the side, somebody played music on a machine, gay and heartless and loud. A bony, chlorotic beat stuffed under clash and wail. Then the music stopped, cut off. It was against the law to play loud music next door to a cemetery, maybe somebody suddenly remembered that or had it pointed out to them.
    H e tries to get his mother to leave town, but she won’t. She’s one of those old-timers who’ll still be sitting in the living room darning socks when the apocalypse blows through.
    “ I’ll leave,” Jackie says.
    They’re out back, eating yellowfin sashimi under the almond tree.
    His mother, tall and rangy, a jabbermouth her students call her, always up on things and alert as a bird, says: “If I had the money to go to Fort Myers”—that was where her sister, his Aunt Mayrene, lived—“I’d be able to begin to do something about turning this house around,” but she’s just talking.
    Last week—just a minute ago it seems like—he lost everything at the track and walked out into the dusk that seemed a different dusk outside the gates than in and stood by his car as two fat men carrying long horn cases walked by. He tried to get them to blow post time once more, but they wouldn’t.
    His mother