Bharati Mukherjee - The Middleman and Other Stories

Then I noticed the snakeshit. Python turds, dozens of turds, light as cork and thick as a tree, riding high in the water. Once you’d seen them, you couldn’t help thinking you’d smelled them all along. That’s what I mean about Florida, about all the hot-water ports like Bangkok, Manila and Bombay, living on water where the shit’s so thick it’s a kind of cash crop.

Behind me, one of those frosty British matrons whispered to her husband, “I didn’t know they did such things!”

“Believe it, Queenie,” I said.

That snakeshit — all that coiled power — stays with me, always. That’s what happened to us in the paddyfields. We drowned in our shit. An inscrutable humanoid python sleeping on a bed of turds: that’s what I never want to be.

So I keep two things in mind nowadays. First, Florida was built for your pappy and grammie. I remember them, I was a kid here, I remember the good Florida when only the pioneers came down and it was considered too hot and wet and buggy to ever come to much. I knew your pappy and grammie, I mowed their lawn, trimmed their hedges, washed their cars. I toted their golf bags. Nice people — they deserved a few years of golf, a garden to show off when their kids came down to visit, a white car that justified its extravagant air conditioning and never seemed to get dirty. That’s the first thing about Florida; the nice thing. The second is this: Florida is run by locusts and behind them are sharks and even pythons and they’ve pretty well chewed up your mom and pop and all the other lawn bowlers and blue-haired ladies. On the outside, life goes on in Florida courtesy of middlemen who bring in things that people are willing to pay a premium to obtain.

Acapulco, Tijuana, Freeport, Miami — it doesn’t matter where the pimping happens. Mr. Vee in his nostalgic moments tells me Havana used to be like that, a city of touts and pimps — the fat young men in sunglasses parked at a corner in an idling Buick, waiting for a payoff, a delivery, a contact. Havana has shifted its corporate headquarters. Beirut has come west. And now, it’s Miami that gives me warm memories of always-Christmas Saigon.

It’s life in the procurement belt, between those lines of tropical latitudes, where the world shops for its illicit goods and dumps its surplus parts, where it prefers to fight its wars, and once you’ve settled into its give and take, you find it’s impossible to live anywhere else. It’s the coke-and-caffeine jangle of being seventeen and readier to kill than be killed and to know that Job One is to secure your objective and after that it’s unsupervised play till the next order comes down.

In this mood, and in a Civic newly liberated from a protesting coed, I am heading west out of Miami, thinking first of driving up to Pensacola when I am sides wiped off the highway. Two men get in the Civic. They sit on either side of me and light up cigarettes.

“Someone say something,” I finally say.

They riffle through the papers in the glove compartment. They quickly surmise that my name is not Mindy Robles. “We know all about this morning. Assault. Grand theft auto.”

“Let’s talk,” I say.

I wait for the rough stuff. When it comes, it’s an armlock on the throat that cuts air supply. When they let me speak, I cut a deal. They spot me for a vet; we exchange some dates, names, firefights. Turns out they didn’t like Mindy Robles, didn’t appreciate the pressure her old man tried to put on the police department. They look at our names — Robles and Marshall — and I can read their minds. We’re in some of these things together and no one’s linked me to Chavez — these guys are small time, auto-detail. They keep the car. They filch a wad of Mr. Vee’s bills, the wad I’d stuffed into my wallet. They don’t know there’s another wad of Mr. Vee’s money in a secret place. And fifty bucks in my boots.

Instead of an air-conditioned nighttime run up the Gulf coast, it’s the thumb on the interstate. I pass up a roadside rest area, a happy hunting ground for new cars and ready cash. I hitch a ride to the farthest cheap motel.

The first automobile I crouch behind in the dark parking lot of the Dunes Motel is an Impala with Alabama license plates. The next one is Broward County. Two more out-of-staters: Live Free or Die and Land of Lincoln. The farther from Florida the better for me. I look in the windows of the Topaz from New Hampshire. There’s a rug in the back seat, and under the rug I make out a shiny sliver of Samsonite. Maybe they’re just eating. Clothes hang on one side: two sports jackets for a small man or an adolescent, and what looks to me like lengths of silk. On the rear-view mirror, where you or I might hang a kid’s booties or a plastic Jesus and rosaries, is an alien deity with four arms or legs. I don’t know about borrowing this little beauty. These people travel a little too heavy.

The Dunes isn’t an absolute dump. The pool has water in it. The neon VACANCY sign above the door of the office has blown only one letter. The annex to the left of the office has its own separate entrance: SANDALWOOD RESTAURANT.

I stroke the highway dust out of my hair, so the office won’t guess my present automobileless state, tuck my shirt into my Levis and walk in from the parking lot. The trouble is there’s nobody behind the desk. It’s 11:03; late but not late enough for even a junior high jailbait nightclerk to have taken to her cot.

Another guest might have rung the bell and waited, or rung the bell and banged his fist on the counter and done some swearing. What I do is count on the element of surprise. I vault into the staff area and kick open a door that says: STRICTLY PRIVATE.

Inside, in a room reeking of incense, are people eating. There are a lot of them. There are a lot of little brown people sitting cross-legged on the floor of a regular motel room and eating with their hands. Pappies with white beards, grammies swaddled in silk, men in dark suits, kids, and one luscious jailbait in blue jeans.

They look at me. A bunch of aliens and they stare like I’m the freak.

One of the aliens tries to uncross his legs, but all he manages is a backward flop. He holds his right hand stiff and away from his body so it won’t drip gravy on his suit. “Are you wanting a room?”

I’ve never liked the high, whiny Asian male voice. “Let’s put it this way. Are you running a motel or what?”

The rest of the aliens look at me, look at each other, look down at their food. I stare at them too. They seem to have been partying. I wouldn’t mind a Jack Daniels and a plate of their rice and yellow stew stuff brought to me by room service in blue jeans.

“Some people here say we are running a ‘po-tel’.” A greasy grin floats off his face. “Get it? My name is Patel, that’s P-A-T-E-L. A Patel owning a motel, get it?”

“Rich,” I say.

The jailbait springs up off the floor. With a gecko-fast tongue tip, she chases a gravy drop on her wrist. “I can go. I’m done.” But she doesn’t make a move. “You people enjoy the meal.”

The women jabber, but not in English. They flash gold bracelets. An organized raid could clean up in that room, right down to the rubies and diamonds in their noses. They’re all wrapped in silk, like brightly colored mummies. Pappy shakes his head, but doesn’t rise. “She eats like a bird. Who’ll marry her?” he says in English to one of his buddies.

“You should advertise,” says the other man, probably the Living Free or Dying. They’ve forgotten me. I feel left out, left behind. While we were nailing up that big front door, these guys were sneaking in around back. They got their money, their family networks, and their secretive languages.

I verbalize a little seething, and when none of the aliens take notice, I dent the prefab wall with my fist. “Hey,” I yell. “I need a room for the night. Don’t any of you dummies speak American?”