Майкл Коннелли - Tampa Bay Noir

He didn’t react, instead stepping into the trailer to push the mattress out. I thought that was so strange. I could count on one hand the number of times my parents had hit me, but saying something like that to them would have surely added to the count. And here was such a nice man doing kind things for us at her behest, and this was how she treated him. I stopped crying, mostly from feeling like I should behave extra obediently to make up for Nicole’s brattiness. I decided to please Jake, to be as invisible as I could while they brought stuff inside. I let myself feel his kindness and the warmth of hopefulness.

In less than an hour, Jake and Cory had taken everything inside and dumped the ant-riddled sofa back on the curb. I went to get some iced tea, only to find them sitting on it when I got back. The thick August air made my hair stick to the back of my neck and my clothes feel heavy, as if I’d been swimming in them. The men’s faces dripped with sweat, and they drank in big gulps and talked about other people they knew. Even though they looked so different, they seemed like the same person. They modeled each other the way children do their schoolmates. They both seemed good humored. They wore the same clothes and moved in the same jumpy, birdlike way. Both had patchy beards and wore chains that linked their wallets to their belt loops, but neither wore a belt. After they drank the tea, Jake took out a pack of Newports, gave one to Cory, and put one in his mouth. I could tell it was the same for everything else — they liked the same music, the same food and drink, the same women.

Nicole stood by the chain-link fence that separated our duplex from the one next to us, kicking the grass with her pristine sneakers and sending the gray sand that had been resting among the brown blades up in the air. This was how all the yards on our block looked — spotty, brown, equal parts grass and sand from the soft Florida soil.

“Why are you here and not there?” I asked Nicole.

“They don’t want me there. They keep whispering shit to each other, so I might as well not fucking interrupt them. They’re probably talking about my mom anyway. God, he’s such an asshole.”

“Your mom?”

“All they do is fight, and then they do shit like this — throw parties, volunteer at school, give away stuff. She hasn’t even slept in their bedroom for months. She calls him an idiot for all the nerdy, creepy shit he’s always been into that she knew about from the beginning. So then he brings Cory over and they stay up all night listening to music and watching their weird-ass movies at top volume and smoking weed. He yells at her for not letting him enjoy his life. They’re both assholes.”

“Don’t they care? When you call them that?”

She shrugged. “My mom’s threatening to move back to Oklahoma where my grandma lives. Anyway, if you ever want some weed, I can steal some of his.”

Nicole’s dad got up and crushed his cigarette stub, while Cory threw the iced tea cans in the garbage and shook off the ants that had managed to crawl up his legs. They both laughed softly at something one of them had said. I couldn’t imagine Jake yelling at anyone, much less his wife.

“Does your mom work on Saturday?” Nicole’s dad asked.

“No sir,” I said.

“If she’s going to take care of your dad, I’ll take you and Nicole to the beach.”

“If you let me drive, you wouldn’t have to take us anywhere,” Nicole said.

“You’re not going to drive this huge-ass truck, honey,” he said.

“Can you even reach the pedals?” Cody said, and laughed until he was out of breath. I didn’t know whether his face was flushed from the heat or the laughing.

“God, you two are such fucking dicks,” Nicole said, then climbed into the truck and slammed the door.

Indian Rocks Beach was one of the hottest places I’d ever been. There was nowhere to hide from the light here. Even in the late afternoon, the air smelled of sulfuric heat, just as it had on the day we landed in Miami after our flight from home. On that day, as we drove up that lonely four-hour stretch of highway to Largo, to the apartment we’d be kicked out of a month later, I could see waves of heat rising up from the pavement. Before Jake brought me and Nicole to this beach, I had only been to Clearwater Beach once, when my aunt had brought me and my mom to eat ice cream by the pier. Mine was promptly stolen away by a seagull. That had been when my mom didn’t have any job at all, and we all still pretended my aunt didn’t have a drinking problem. We played the game of getting along, while I slept until noon every day and told myself repeatedly I liked this quietude, hoping the day would come when I’d believe it.

Now, Nicole, her dad, and I sat on towels on top of sand coarsened by millions upon millions of shells, and I wondered why the only people in the water were parents with their young children. Otherwise, we were surrounded by a few older people, often sitting in pairs on beach chairs and reading magazines or thick paperback novels. Nicole’s dad said all of them lived in the condos that lined the shore behind us, their pastel facades a rainbow.

“Most of them only come in the colder months, so a lot of those apartments are empty now,” he said. “It gets pretty cold up north. But some of them move down here for good. I’d like to own one of these myself when I get older.”

I wondered how anyone could afford these beachfront properties in the first place, let alone as second, winter homes. I couldn’t understand how I was here now, surrounded by luxuries I’d seen in movies, when only a few months ago our neighbors had pooled money so we could pay our power bill, so my mother could cook dinner and I didn’t have to do my homework by candlelight. It was hard to understand how these places were within reach now, but I still had to wonder whether we’d make rent next month.

“I don’t think I’ll ever live in one of them,” I said, pointing behind me.

“Sure you will,” Jake said. “Anyone that comes to this country gets the same chance.”

The air smelled like the older people who moved here wanted to be burned alive. Nicole had slathered on an oily lotion that smelled of coconut. She lay on her back with a towel covering her face, not saying much. Jake asked me a few questions about my family, like where in Colombia we were from and why we’d come to the States and how we’d ended up in Largo. There was so much I could have told him about those candlelit nights that came after the men who’d killed my uncle started directing their threats my dad’s way, so his usual clients wouldn’t do business with him anymore for fear of ending up like my uncle. I could have talked about the block parties the neighbors threw at Christmastime, about getting up at four in the morning to take the bus to the metro so I could be on campus in time for my six o’clock English class, and how sometimes I didn’t have money for the fare and couldn’t go. There was so much I wanted to tell him, so much that got stuck somewhere between my brain and my tongue, so I just said the things I knew how to say.

“Oh, Medellín!” Jake said. “Pablo Escobar, right?”

I smiled and nodded, holding in a sigh. He took a sip of his light beer and readjusted his black baseball hat. His brown eyes glinted in the inescapable sunlight. His face was covered in wheat-colored scraggly hairs that didn’t do much to protect him from the sun. I hadn’t seen him put on any sunscreen.

“I’ve read all about that guy,” he said.

“He was a bad guy,” I said.

“Oh, no doubt, but I’ve read all these articles online about all the money he stashed in all these places that people still haven’t found. I mean, it’s been like six years since he died, and no one has found it. That’s awesome! But that shoot-out where he died was crazy, right?” He slapped his thigh. “The photo of all the soldiers posing with his corpse on that rooftop — that’s hard core. I’m pretty sure I have it somewhere at home if you want to take a look at it.”