“You always treated me well. Not like some of the ones making the big money. Never a ‘Hello, Francisco.’ Most of them never knew my name.”
“Don’t take it personally,” I said. “Star athletes have been pampered so long they think the whole world exists to hand them towels and do their laundry.”
“What I mean, Jake, is that I have respect for you. My mother loves you. She wanted me to be like you, and that was very hard to accept. For a long time after I came to this country, I was jealous of you even as I respected you. So, instead of trying to be you, I did just the opposite. I got into trouble here, just as I did in Cuba. But now, I want your advice. You are the finest abogado in all of Miami.”
“That’s flattering, but I’m not even the best on this floor.”
“I’m going to listen to you, not Senor Yagamata.”
“Then you’ll have to tell me the truth.”
He paused, and I heard a television game show in the background. The announcer was gabbing away in Spanish, and the audience was cheering.
“Maybe there are some other things I remember now,” Francisco Crespo said.
I headed the convertible west on Luis Sabines Way, which used to be called Seventh Street, and headed into Little Havana. I passed Pedro Luis Boitel Avenue, General Maximo Gomez Avenue, and Luis Medina Munoz Marin Avenue. Then came Ronald Reagan Avenue. I don’t know, so don’t ask me.
Seventh Street turned into Eighth, Calle Ocho, and I hit every stoplight for thirty blocks. The heat rolled up in waves from the pavement and pressed down at me through the black canvas top. Maybe it was the blistering day that made me remember. Maybe it was the country music station I found while twisting the old AM radio dial. Or maybe it was because I was on my way to see Francisco Crespo, and he always brought back the memory of a night that would last forever.
I t was a hot Sunday in September after a home game, a one-point win over the egg-sucking Oakland Raiders. Clem’s was a tough country music place on Okeechobee Road between the airport and Hialeah. Half a dozen of my teammates were there, tossing darts, playing pinball, dropping quarters into the jukebox. But they all left early. Not me. Monday was a no-pads day, and tonight was for celebrating, so what’s the rush? I had two tackles on special teams and set an Eastern Division record for Gatorade consumed by a reserve linebacker in the second half, and now was having too much fun and too many beers. Three long-legged, fluffed-hair escapees from secretarial school had captured me, and I was demonstrating the swim move-or was it the snatch? — for getting around an offensive lineman on a blitz.
Which is when Big Mouth started yapping. A beefy, sunburned, greasy-haired guy in jeans, cowboy boots, and a tank top. He’d been at the game, and he was goddamned tired of all the faggot Miami Dolphins, half of ’em jigaboos, who never covered the spread, then come waltzing in here, talking big and waving their dicks around like they owned the place.
I ignored him, which only made him angrier. He stepped closer and breathed down the neck of one of the would-be secretaries, a redheaded kid from Pensacola with electric blue eye shadow and Clearasil-covered zits, who was clearly frightened of the big sloppy guy smelling of beer and sweat. I didn’t say a word until he ran his hand over her backside.
“Hey, pal, ease off,” I told him, as low-key as possible.
“You gonna make me, you bench-warming, second-string cocksucker?”
“Extremely clever riposte,” I told him. “Unfortunately, bench-warming and second-string are redundant, so you lose points for creativity.”
“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”
“Ah, a regular Cyrano de Bergerac in the wit department. But judging from your looks, pal, you know more about horse fucking than I do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean!” He was even uglier when he tried to think.
“Come on now, this is ridiculous,” I said. “Tomorrow morning, you’re going to wake up and feel like a shithead.”
He shoved the girl aside and stepped into my space. “Who you calling a shithead?”
“Nobody. Look, you’re making everybody uncomfortable.”
“Too fucking bad.”
Still looking at me, he reached out and grabbed the redhead’s breast. She jumped away, and he laughed. Around us, people were backing away. Big Mouth turned to little old me, as gentle a guy as ever walked into a bar, and I smiled, then popped him one, a straight left hand that didn’t have enough hip behind it. The punch bounced off a cheekbone made of granite. He blinked and backed up a step but didn’t fall or yell for his mama. Then he came at me with a saloon swing, a lunging roundhouse right. I could have read the comics waiting for it to arrive. I blocked it with my left, knowing I’d have a bruise on the tricep tomorrow, then tried to nail him with a straight right hand. This time I caught him on the forehead, doing more damage to my hand than his head.
He spit and cursed at me, then turned and scooped a Budweiser bottle from a table, held it by the top, and smashed off the bottom on the back of a chair, just like in the movies. Then he came at me, jabbing the ragged bottle in front of him.
I backpedaled, and he kept coming.
Where the hell were the bouncers, the police?
I brushed up against a table and nearly fell over backward. He took a long, looping swipe, and as I whipped my head back, the jagged edge just passed in front of my eyes. I backpedaled some more, then stepped to my left, picked up a chair, and slung it at him. Instinctively, he raised his right arm. The chair knocked the bottle out of his hand, breaking the glass. He yelped, cursed my ancestry, and licked at blood coming from the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. “You cocksucker!”
“You thumbsucker,” I said.
He bent over and reached into his boot. Either his feet were bothering him, or he was grabbing at something. His hand came out holding a gun.
It was a small gun.
Probably a. 32.
But it didn’t look small pointed at me.
The gun, blood dripping onto the butt, was four feet from my sternum. No one made a sound. Except for the Doobie Brothers on the jukebox, everything was quiet.
The song.
Now, I forced myself to remember the words, something about what a fool believes. I summoned up the tune. That’s how I chased the memory away, blanked it out. Let the image of the gun fade into a melody. It always worked.
Except at night.
In dreams, that’s always where the memory began.
F rancisco Crespo lived just past LeJeune Road in a trailer park tucked between a rent-by-the-hour motel and a cemetery. Across the street was a full-service gun shop-sales, service, and paramilitary fashions. Tamiami Sunset Park is not home to the double-wide, king-size bed variety of modern mobile homes with microwave kitchens and cable-ready built-in TVs. It is a collection of rusted-out trailers propped on concrete blocks. Torn screen doors hang cockeyed on sweltering metal boxes jammed shoulder to shoulder on a lot with no trees or shrubs, and even the weeds are parched and trampled.
The only open spaces are filled with dilapidated lawn chairs, discarded mattresses, and sofas whose springs had long since sprung. An occasional clothesline crisscrosses from trailer to telephone pole. In a hurricane, the air would buzz with metallic vibrations, and the trailers would be torn loose, bashing each other like so many bumper cars. In a storm the caliber of Hurricane Andrew, which hit twenty miles south of here, they would be torn apart, turned into chunks of shrapnel mowing down everything in their path.
I parked the car and picked my way between trailers, listening to babies crying, televisions blaring, and a drunken couple arguing in slurred Spanish. It was one of those South Florida days with no clouds and a brutal, relentless sun. Our midday sun is a firestorm that jars the senses, and combined with the humidity, drains the life from folks who cannot escape to cooler climes. Today, not a breath of a breeze worked its way this far inland. I had left my suit coat in the car, and paused long enough to loosen my tie and roll up the sleeves of my blue oxford-cloth shirt.
