Grimhaven, page 2
He floated on his back for awhile to rest, and then swam leisurely back to the beach. He put his dark glasses on, and, carrying his slippers, one in each hand, ran a half-mile up the beach to a driftwood log. During the summer, the condos along the shore were only about thirty-percent occupied, and most of the condo dwellers preferred their swimming pools to the sea. They liked to look at the Atlantic, but they preferred fresh water for swimming. Hoke sat on the log for five minutes, then ran back to his starting point. He went into the water again to rinse off the perspiration, then returned to his apartment. His arms and legs ached with fatigue, and his chest felt as if there was an iron band around it. He took a long hot shower, slipped into his gray gym trunks, and stretched out on his canvas Army cot to rest. He followed his daily regimen whether it rained or not, seven days a week, but it didn’t seem to be getting any easier. His deep tan got darker every day, and his muscle tone had improved, but the swimming and the running still exhausted him. If and when the routine became easier, Hoke planned to extend it—to run one or two miles, to swim forty “laps” instead of thirty. Not only was it not easier each day, on some days, like today, it seemed to be harder. What would be pleasant now, after his swim and run, would be a cold bottle of beer and a cigarette. He had given up smoking and drinking as an important factor in simplifying his life, so he tried, without success, to think of something else. But he wanted a cigarette so much he couldn’t think of anything else, so he got up from the cot and went into the galley. He poured sugarless iced tea into a glass, added ice cubes, and looked out of the living room window into the municipal lot as he drank his tea.
The lot was beginning to fill with a different crowd. The sunbathers were going home, but the kids from the mainland who came over to the beach to play the games in the arcade were taking up the empty parking spaces, and soon there would be another rush as working people came over to eat dinner at Joey’s or Portofino’s Italian restaurant; to shop; to eat hotdogs and burgers, or just to sit in the Green House garden patio drinking beer. Tourists from the motels and condo dwellers would also wander over, having nothing better to do, and the sidewalks on both sides of the shopping center would be busy and noisy until after ten-thirty. Then, except for the booming of the jukebox at the Green House, which played until the beer garden closed at midnight, there would be relative quiet. On some nights, Hoke could go to sleep as early as ten p.m. and not be bothered by the jukebox, but on most nights he couldn’t sleep until the beer garden closed and there was no noise at all. It was just a matter of time, he thought; eventually he would be able to shut out the music, and it wouldn’t bother him.
In every other respect, the small apartment suited Hoke perfectly. It was small enough so that he could keep it scrupulously clean, and there was very little furniture to polish or dust. Except for a canvas sling chair, a folding TV snack table, and a reading lamp, the living room was devoid of furniture. There were no pictures hanging on the white walls. There was an Army cot in the bedroom that Hoke had purchased from the Eagle Army & Navy store, a standing bedlamp, and an aluminum footlocker at the foot of the bed. The footlocker held his few personal possessions, and they were papers mostly—birth certificate, Honorable Discharge from the U.S. Army, his marriage and divorce papers plus a thick folder of letters and commendations from the Miami Police Department.
Hoke wore Nike running shoes, red and gray striped, the most conservative colors he could find in the store, and because the shoes were padded and lined with leather, he had thrown away all of his black lisle policeman’s socks. He had kept a half-dozen T-shirts to sleep in at night, but he had dispensed with his boxer shorts. He didn’t need shorts with his jumpsuits as long as he wore a clean one every day, so he had tossed out the shorts with the socks. His other yellow jumpsuit hung in the closet, together with a heavy Navy blue pullover sweater and a light and expensive well-worn Burberry trenchcoat. In Florida, Hoke might wear the sweater three or four nights in a year, but when it did get cold in Florida, he knew he would need it. So he had kept the sweater; and the trenchcoat would be useful during heavy rains or hurricanes. He kept a half-dozen large bath towels in the bathroom, however, which he took to the Laundromat on Saturday afternoons after closing the hardware store at noon. His toilet articles were in a leather Dop-Kit in the bathroom, and he had a large cardboard box filled with little bars of soap he had taken with him when he left the Eldorado Hotel, his longtime residence in Miami Beach. He figured it would take at least three years before he ran out of the tiny hotel-sized bars of soap.
The small galley-kitchen was well-furnished with pots, pans and a coffee-maker, all left by previous tenants. There was almost a complete service for four in orange Melmac. One cup, a salad plate and a soup/cereal bowl were missing, but inasmuch as Hoke had no intention of ever inviting anyone to his apartment for a meal, there was no need to replace the missing dishes. There were a couple of dozen assorted glasses and a chipped martini pitcher with a glass stirring rod. The refrigerator, a new Kelvinator that the old man had installed when the old one conked out, had an ice-maker as well as a freezer compartment. There was a small but effective two-burner electric stove with a waist-high built-in oven next to the sink. Hoke ate his meals at the narrow counter, usually sitting at the open end to the kitchen, where he could look out at the ocean while he ate. When it wasn’t too windy, he sometimes ate his meals on the porch, sitting on his cot, and using his footlocker as a table.
Hoke took the crock-pot out of the refrigerator, plugged it in, and turned it on to Hi. There was only enough beef stew in the crock-pot for one meal. That meant he had run out of stew a day early, because today was only Thursday. Perhaps he was measuring his servings wrong? He had intended for his last meal to be on Friday, not Thursday. Hoke did his shopping for the week on Saturday afternoon at the Grand Union, buying everything he would need for the next week. Then, on Sunday, he made a four-quart crock-pot full of either beef stew one week or chili con carne, which he ate each evening for dinner through the week. This made his cooking problem simple, and he did not have to worry about what he was going to have for dinner every night.
Hoke’s breakfast consisted of one poached egg, one slice of rye toast, and three or four cups of thick Cuban coffee. The Cuban coffee was the only thing Hoke missed about Miami. As a cop, he had picked up the Cuban’s habit of having eight or ten one-ounce hits of Cuban espresso during the day at the dozens of small cafeterias in the city. But now, when he made his own in an espresso pot, it didn’t come out exactly the same as what the Cubans made in Miami. To make it perfectly, a person probably had to be a Cuban, but at least his coffee was strong enough to get him through his long days at the hardware store. He also packed a thermos of Cuban coffee for his lunch, together with one hard-boiled egg and an apple. At night, after eating either one bowl of beef stew, or one bowl of chili, depending upon which week it was, he ate another apple for dessert before going to bed.
On this diet, Hoke maintained his regular weight of 180 pounds, down from a paunchy 205 pounds in only two months time. The daily exercise had helped him reduce, too. Although Hoke had been ravenous on this diet during the first two weeks, now he was merely hungry most of the time instead of ravenous. But it disturbed him to run out of the beef stew on Thursday, because now he would have to do something different on Friday night. Any deviation from his planned routine made him apprehensive and irritable. Hoke was like a machine held together with one loose lug nut, and with the daily vibrations of life the machine loosened the lug nut a little more each day instead of tightening it. Hoke was fully aware of his condition. If he kept his life simple enough, he was fairly sure that he could keep the machine running indefinitely. The only real pressures he had now were of his own devising, and he remonstrated with himself for getting so upset simply because he had eaten all of the beef stew a day early. There was no big deal involved here. Tomorrow night he could go out and eat a Big Mac at MacDonald’s for dinner. Perhaps a small break in his routine would do him good. A slight deviation, in fact, would only serve to make his strict routine more attractive.
Hoke washed the crock-pot, his bowl and spoon, and took his chessboard out of the closet. He set up Problem Number 28 from his book of chess problems. He had thought hard about the matter at first, whether to get a radio and a TV set when he had moved into the apartment, but he had decided against them. Instead, to fill the long evenings before he could fall asleep with any degree of safety, he had decided on the chess board and the beginner’s book of chess problems instead. He allowed himself one problem each night, and when he had finished solving all of the problems in the book, he planned to get a book with more difficult problems. Right now, this beginner’s book was already getting too difficult for him, because he had been working on Problem Number 28 for two nights now without mating the white king in three as the problem indicated. He was tired of 28, even though he couldn’t solve it, and he wanted to move on to Number 29. But he had to finish 28 first; otherwise he would be cheating on his system. As he studied the board, the maudlin voice of Jimmy Buffett singing “Stars Fell on Alabama” came drifting in through the open windows from the jukebox in the beer garden. Some nostalgic cracker sonofabitch was playing the song for the fourth time in a row. If it wasn’t Jimmy Buffett it was The Clash on the jukebox, although, once in a long while, someone played Ferlin Husky’s “Don’t blame the chirren, it’s the parents to blame,” an idiotic song if there ever was one. As long as the record changed each time, Hoke didn’t mind the music too much, but when someone played the same song three or four times in a row, it was damned distracting for a man who was trying to work a chess problem that was either impossible or designed by some Russian Commie sadist— Hoke swept the chess pieces to the floor, stared at them for a long moment, and then put them back into the box. He folded the board and returned the chessmen and the board to the shelf in the closet.
Hoke felt his clean jumpsuit, but it was still too damp to wear. He pulled his other jumpsuit over his gray gym trunks, and slipped into his running shoes. He tied the strings tight, tucked in the loose ends, and left the apartment. He crossed the parking lot and walked toward the Blue Heron causeway. If someone is fishing, Hoke thought, I’ll strike up a conversation with him. Fishing from the bridge was illegal, but old men fished there anyway. Hoke had been on the Riviera Police force for three years before he went down to Miami, and he knew that the ‘no-fishing’ law was rarely enforced. At most, a cop would tell a fisherman to go home. No one was ever arrested because there were still enough poor people in Riviera Beach who needed fish for their dinners.
Years ago, Riviera Beach had been almost all Conchs, just like Key West had been before the Gay Invasion, and old Conchs who had fished all of their lives had never been keen on regulations of any kind about fishing. Besides, the ‘no-fishing’ from the causeway law wasn’t concerned with fishing; it was passed by the city commission because motorists were afraid of getting hooked by some fisherman as they drove across the bridge. Something like that, as far as Hoke knew, had never happened. Perhaps it had happened once or twice, and then they had put in the law to prevent it from happening again. All the same, it was a foolish law.
But tonight, no one was fishing from the bridge. Hoke watched the bridge lights dance and shimmy on the water for a few minutes, and walked back to the 7-Eleven store in the square. The night manager was cutting the strings of The Miami Herald for Friday morning. The bundle had just been delivered. Hoke wandered aimlessly around the store, but there was nothing he needed. He picked up a copy of the Herald, however, and put a dollar bill on the counter. The manager, a bald, middle-aged man in an orange 7-Eleven shirt, made change.
“When I was a kid,” Hoke said, “there used to be a grocery store over on Division Street where you could buy cigarettes for a penny apiece. The owner kept them loose in a water glass on the counter. He couldn’t sell you a pack if you were under eighteen, you see, but he’d sell you one cigarette for a penny. That way he beat the law. You can’t sell cigarettes to a kid under eighteen, but one cigarette is singular, not plural, so he figured he wasn’t really breaking the law.”
The bald man shook his head and smiled. “He was breaking the spirit of the law, and he knew that no cop would bust him and do all the paperwork for only selling one cigarette.”
“That’s right, “ Hoke nodded, “he was never busted. A cop would’ve felt like an asshole, busting a man for selling just one cigarette to a minor.”
“Today,” the bald man reflected, “he’d have to sell a single cigarette for seven cents if he wanted to make a profit.”
“I’m trying to quit. If I bought a full pack, I’d probably smoke the whole thing.”
“Here,” the night manager said, taking a package of king-sized Kools out of his shirt pocket. “Have one of mine.”
“Thanks.” Hoke took a cigarette from the pack.
“Need a light?”
“No. I’ll just save it for now, and maybe I’ll smoke it later. In fact, I may not smoke it at all.”
“If you do, you’ll probably be back up a pack a day by tomorrow. Anyway, give me seven cents.”
Hoke put two nickels on the counter. “Keep the change.”
The manager pushed the coins back toward Hoke. “I don’t want your money. I was only kidding, for Christ’s sake.”
Hoke shook his head and slipped the cigarette into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit. He left the store and headed back toward the lights of the shopping center. He tossed the Miami Herald into a trash can at the corner of the parking lot. The sodium vapor street lights that encircled the shopping center made it a small island on another island in the dark night.
When Hoke reached his duplex, there was a teenaged girl sitting on a suitcase alongside the narrow stairway leading up to his apartment. She was wearing headphones and she held a tiny Sony Walkman primly in her lap. She was wearing jeans, open-toed high-heeled pumps, and a light blue T-shirt. There were black palm trees imprinted on her cotton shirt, with white lettering between them that read, FORT ‘LUDERDALE.
She was blocking Hoke’s way to the stairs. He looked down at her.
“If you’re waiting for the bus back into town, it stops on the other side of the center, in front of the arcade.”
She looked up at Hoke and smiled. She removed the headphones and clicked off the tape-player. She gave Hoke a long luminous brown-eyed stare. Her eyes reminded Hoke of Patricia Neal’s hot-eyed look in the movie, Hud, in the scene where she was raped by Paul Newman.
“Hello, Daddy,” she said. She stood up, wrapped her arms around Hoke’s waist, and managed to kiss him on the chin as he pulled his head back. Hoke didn’t recognize the girl, but he didn’t doubt for a single second that this was one of his daughters. She had his eyes.
The last time Hoke had seen his daughters, one had been six, and the other four. He didn’t know whether this girl was Sue Ellen, the sixteen-year-old, or Aileen, the fourteen-year-old. In Florida, girls developed early, and Hoke could rarely tell the difference between a fourteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old girl, even though he saw them every day on the beach.
“Where’s your sister?” Hoke said, disengaging her arms from his waist.
“She went to Grandpa’s house. Aileen was afraid you wouldn’t take us in...”
Sue Ellen began to cry.
“Hey, hey,” Hoke said. “Come on upstairs. I’ll get you settled in, and then I’ll drive over and get her.”
Hoke picked up the suitcase, and Sue Ellen, wiping her eyes with the backs of her fingers, followed him upstairs. Hoke unlocked the door, flipped on the light in the galley, and turned on the reading lamp by the sling chair.
Sue Ellen, calmer now, put her Sony on the counter and climbed onto one of the stools. She took a package of Lucky Strikes out of her leather drawstring purse, and lit a cigarette with a Bic disposable lighter.
“Let me borrow your lighter,” Hoke said. He took the crumpled Kool out of his breast pocket and lit it with his oldest daughter’s lighter. Hoke’s first long drag, after not smoking for almost two months, made him a trifle dizzy, but nothing had ever tasted better, and he knew that he was going to start smoking again.
Chapter Three
HOKE HAD TRIED TWO OR THREE TIMES TO SEE HIS DAUGHTERS AFTER THE DIVORCE, but he had to admit that he hadn’t tried very hard. He had merely made token gestures. One of the reasons Patsy left him in the first place, she said, was because he spent so little time at home with the children. But the two little girls made Hoke nervous and when he hung around the house with nothing much to do, he soon got into an argument of some kind with his wife. She had been a quiet studious girl in high school, and a more or less dutiful wife in Riviera Beach, but after they moved to Miami her character had changed radically. After she joined a neighborhood “consciousness raising” group, she had started to have “opinions.”
Hoke was studying for the sergeant’s examination at the time they separated and it was difficult to concentrate on his books at home with two boisterous little girls running around screaming. He was relieved, in a way, when Patsy had packed up and left for Vero Beach. Perhaps, if the girls had been boys instead of girls he could have established some kind of rapport with them, but they were girl girls, not even tomboys. When he had tried to play with them a few times, one or the other would get hurt and start crying.
He spent as much time at the police station as he could, and took overtime and off-duty assignments every time they became available. During the football season, he had worked crowd control at the Orange Bowl every weekend until he finally got out of uniform and became a detective.
At any rate, the personal insults that Hoke and Patsy had hurled at each other during the last three months or so before she left for good had been too vitriolic and nasty for either one of them to ever forgive. There was absolutely no chance of reconciliation. Even so, they hadn’t filed for a no-fault divorce for three years after the separation, although Patsy lived in Vero Beach, and Hoke remained in Miami. He was paid twice a month, and he sent the first check to Patsy and lived on the second check. She sent him a receipt each month, but never volunteered any information about the girls. Not even a note—just a receipt, with an occasional curt request for extra money to buy Easter outfits for the girls, or to pay a pediatrician bill. He often ignored the requests for money—not having any to send—even though, according to their separation agreement, he was supposed to pay all of the doctor bills. Then, when she started to make a good deal of money selling real estate in Vero, she wanted to claim the kids on her income tax return. He had to go along with it because she could prove that she was paying more than half of their living expenses.
