Charles Willeford - Way We Die Now Read online

  Elena opened the door, and Hoke took one more drag before stripping his cigarette and going back inside. Elena had taken off her elastic top and denim skirt and was removing her panties and bra when Hoke sat at the little table to finish his Diet Coke. Without her high heels she was much shorter--about four-nine--and despite her small breasts, she had long dark brown nipples. Her short legs were noticeably bowed. She had an abundance of pubic hair; but it hung straight down, like a lamp fringe, and there wasn't a single kinky hair. Hoke had never seen straight pubic hair before, and he found it exotic but not erotic. That was all he needed, he thought, a case of AIDS to take back to Miami with him.

  Hoke took out Adam Jinks's wallet, removed the fivedollar bill Mr. Sileo had given him and put it on the table. He weighted it with the catsup bottle so the breeze from the air-conditioner wouldn't blow it away.

  "I'd like to fuck you, Elena," Hoke said, "but I'm a married man. I've got a sick wife up in Lake City. Are you a Catholic?"

  She nodded.

  "Then you understand why I can't make love to you. But I'll give you this five if you let me take a shower in your bathroom and sleep here tonight. This table pushes up and the cushions make into a bed, right?"

  She nodded again. "But bed is too short for you. You take back bed, and I'll sleep here." She went to the alcove closet and pulled out a gray-and-white seersucker wrapper. "You go ahead. Shower. I'll stay up and watch TV." She slipped into the wrapper and tied the sash into a bow. "No hot water in shower, but it's not too cold."

  Hoke took off his shirt and went into the bathroom. The zinc-lined bathroom was cramped, and so was the narrow shower, and the water came out in a drizzling trickle. There was a brown bar of Fels Naptha soap in the dish, and he soaped his body and his hair. Elena opened the door and came in.

  "You want a slow hand job in shower? Hand job not the same as adultery."

  "No, thanks, Elena. If I wanted a hand job, I could do it myself. Women don't know how to do it right anyway."

  "I know how. You like?"

  "No, but thanks anyway."

  The lukewarm water felt good on his body, and Hoke took his time rinsing away the thick suds. After drying with Elena's clean pink bath towel, Hoke took his clothes to the bedroom and lay down on top of the bed. There was a sheet on the bed but no covers. None was needed. The chilly air from the air-conditioner didn't reach this far back in the trailer, and he was soon perspiring again. Hoke set his mental alarm for 4:oo A.M. and fell asleep immediately on the rubber mattress.

  Hoke awoke with a start in the dark, feeling uneasy, not knowing where he was for a moment, and then he sat up and dressed. As he pulled on his white socks, he regretted not washing them when he showered. The toes were sticky, and they were still stiff with sweat. The living room-kitchen overhead light was on, and Elena got up from the couch when she heard Hoke open the sliding door to the bathroom. When Hoke came out of the bathroom, she was stirring a pot of oatmeal on the tiny twoburner stove. She put two slices of white bread into the toaster.

  "What time is it?"

  "Four-fifteen," she said. "It's too early to get up."

  "I've got to find the farmers' market, and I'm not sure where it is."

  "In the big lot behind Golden Packinghouse. You'll see all the lights."

  Hoke rearranged the seats in the eating nook, pulled down the Samsonite tabletop, and locked it in place. He had slept well, but he was still sleepy. He rolled a cigarette. "Aren't you going to make coffee?"

  "No coffee." She poured a glass of Diet Coke and brought it to the table. She then served Hoke a bowl of oatmeal and handed him a spoon. Apparently she was out of milk as well. Hoke crumbled his toast into the hot oatmeal. Cawing sounds came from the closet, and Elena gave Warren a nippled bottle of Diet Coke. The caws stopped, and she filled a smaller bowl with oatmeal for Warren and placed it on the counter to cool. She sat across from Hoke and watched him eat.

  "You want to shave? I'll boil some hot water for you."

  "No. Yes, I want to shave, but I'm trying to see how I'll look with a beard. Aren't you going to eat anything?"

  "Too early for me. I'm going back to bed."

  "I'm sorry I took your bed, but there was room enough if you wanted to sleep with me."

  "You said you no like me."

  "I didn't say that. I said I didn't want to fuck you, that's all, and I explained why."

  She shrugged and made a face.

  "Have you got a social worker? D'you take Warren to a clinic for checkups?"

  "Sometimes. You want more oatmeal? Toast?"

  "No, but thanks for breakfast."

  Elena got up from the table and picked up the small bowl of oatmeal and a teaspoon. Hoke didn't want to watch Elena feed Warren or even take a final look at the kid in his box. He patted Elena on the head, said good-bye, and left the trailer. There was a buzzer on a post that opened the gate from inside. Hoke pressed it and walked down the street. The city was dark, except for a brightly lighted area down by the tracks. Hoke headed for the lighted area.

  The farmers' market was well lighted, and there was a great deal of activity in the large lot. Stalls were set up, and there were overhead strings of light bulbs crisscrossing the area. The larger hotels and restaurants from Naples, Fort Myers, and Marco Island sent cooks to buy produce in the market, and small farmers had regular booths. The buyers prodded and squeezed produce, and there were excellent bargains. Cantaloupes that sold for $1.39 apiece in supermarkets could be purchased here for thirty-five cents apiece. There were lugs of lettuce, tomatoes, turnips, and other vegetables that sold for only a fraction of the prices they sold for in supermarkets, Uoke noticed. Eight cents' worth of broccoli could be transformed by a Naples -nouvelle- chef into a $5.95 side dish. An old lady was selling doughnuts and coffee in a booth, and Hoke bought a twenty-fivecent Styrofoam cup of coffee. Carrying his cup, he strolled slowly through the lot, looking for Mr. Sileo. He found him in the parking lot. Mr. Sileo was hefting a fifty-pound sack of potatoes into the back of his Impala station wagon. The back was already loaded with vegetables. There was a dead naked child on the passenger side of the front seat. Startled, Hoke took a closer look and recognized that the body was the carcass of a dressed lamb.

  "Good morning, Mr. Sileo."

  "You ready for a good day's work?"

  "I'm always ready to work, Mr. Sileo. But I haven't had a chance to talk to Mr. Bock yet. You told me you'd point him out."

  "Anyone here could do that."

  "There's a lot of people here. I didn't expect to see so many."

  "If you get here early, you get the best shit. And if you come late, you get what's left a hell of a lot cheaper. See that fucker sleeping in the back of the Ford pickup?" Sileo pointed. "He drives all the way down here from Sarasota once a week, waits until nine or ten, and then loads up on what's left at rock-bottom prices. He has his own little grocery store up there in Sarasota, and he cleans up. I could buy the same way, 'cause I'm right here in town, but I'd rather be successful selling good food at reasonable prices."

  "Sure," Hoke said, remembering that he had worked for less than a dollar an hour for this cheap Levantine bastard. "How do I find Mr. Bock?"

  "He's in a tent on the other side near the coffee stall. He'll have a half dozen Haitians with him probably. I'll wait here for you, and you can ride back to the cafeteria with me."

  "Don't wait. If Bock doesn't hire me, I'll work for someone else. I can't work for ten bucks a day."

  "I'll pay you twelve."

  "Give Marilyn my love."

  Hoke got another cup of coffee before he went to the tent that the coffee lady pointed out as Mr. Bock's. Hoke realized that he was acting much too arrogantly for a man who was supposed to be a mendicant fruit tramp. He looked the part, but he still didn't feel like a migrant worker. After all, he was a detective-sergeant earning thirty-six thousand dollars a year. The farmers here were living marginally, and except, perhaps, for a few chefs from the better hotels in Napl
es and Marco Island, who were buying produce, Hoke probably had a higher annual income than anyone else in Immokalee.

  The tent was a pyramidal army surplus top. All four sides were rolled up to waist level. Tiny Bock sat inside at a card table on a folding metal chair. He had a clipboard and a stack of vouchers on the table, the latter weighted down with a small chunk of brain coral. Bock wore a Red Man gimme cap, a blue work shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders, creaseless corduroy trousers, and lace-up work shoes. His bare arms were muscular, and there was a blue rose tattooed on his left wrist. The forefinger of his left hand was missing down to the second knuckle. His thick eyebrows were gray and black and formed an almost straight line above his dark brown eyes. His tanned face was crisscrossed with hundreds of tiny fine lines. There was a sun cancer the size of a half-dollar on his right cheek, bordered by a quarter-inch hedge of gray stubble. He had a slight paunch, but it looked hard. He was probably a few years older than he looked, but he could pass for fifty-five.

  Hoke rapped the doorway post but didn't enter the tent. "Mr. Bock?"

  "The load's been sold," Bock said, without looking up.

  "I'm not buying, sir. I'm looking for work, and I was told you needed a crew chief."

  "Who told you that?" Bock looked at Hoke but raised his eyes without lifting his head.

  "Mr. Sileo told me, down at the Cafeteria. I was a crew chief down in the Redland, working tomatoes."

  "Why'd you leave? There's plenty of tomatoes left down there in South Dade."

  "I was fired. I got into a little fight in Florida City."

  "What happened to your teeth?"

  "I had a set, but they were lost during the fight. When I got out of jail, I went back to the bar, but nobody'd seen them. Somebody probably found and pawned 'em, I guess."

  "Follow me."

  When he got to his feet, Bock was a much bigger man than Hoke had thought he was when he had been sitting. His thighs were so large they stretched his corduroys tightly, and Hoke figured that he was at least two hundred and forty pounds. Hoke followed Bock to the far edge of the lot, where five black men were unloading a semitrailer of watermelons and loading them onto another trailer. The two trailers were about fifteen or twenty feet apart. There was a man on each truck, and three men were on the ground passing the melons. The men were talking in Creole, and one man was laughing. But as Bock and Hoke approached, they fell silent. The pace of the work did not speed up, however.

  "What's wrong with this picture?" Bock said, looking at Hoke with narrowed eyes.

  Hoke scratched his neck. A rash had developed at the bottom of his beard, and scratching and perspiration had made his neck a little raw.

  "The three men on the ground are all facing us," Hoke said. "If the guy in the middle turned around the other way, it would be easier to pass the melons. But that's not all that's wrong. If the trailers were backed up bed to bed, you wouldn't need anyone on the ground. Two men could transfer the melons instead of five."

  "Then what would you do with the other three men? Have them stand around with their fingers up their ass?"

  "I'd give 'em some other work to do."

  "You're talking logic, but what we're dealing with here is Haitians. Two Mexicans could do it your way, but two Haitians would take all day to do it. If I made the man in the middle turn around, the other two would think he had an easier job than they did, and they'd squabble about taking turns in the middle. That would add at least another half hour to unloading the truck. D'you see what I mean?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Neither does the State Agricultural Commission. Two white men, or two Mexicans, can outwork five Haitians. And that's why I pay these five bastards only as much as I would pay two Mexicans. Besides that, Mexicans wouldn't break melons accidentally on purpose so they could eat one."

  "What's the right answer then?" Hoke said.

  "There isn't any right answer, and there ain't gonna be. Things are gonna get worse, not better. With the new immigration law, the supply of illegal Mexicans will dry up to a trickle. These Haitians will become legal residents, and they'll demand a minimum wage. If I don't pay it, the Labor Board'll fine my ass. If I hire the few illegal Mexicans who sneak through the net, I'll be fined or sent to jail. So next year my watermelons'll probably rot in the fields. Over in Miami fine restaurants put a three-inch slice of watermelon on a plate with a hamburger, and then they can charge six ninety-five for a dollar-and-a-half burger. But I can't get three bucks for a thirty-pound melon. I need a man who knows how to work Haitians. You ever hear of Emperor Henri Christophe?"

  "In Haiti? Yes, sir, I've heard the name, but I don't know much of anything about him."

  "He's the man who built the citadel on the mountaintop above Cap Haitien. Big square stones weighing hundreds of pounds were pushed by hand up the mountain trail. When fifty men couldn't move one of them big stones, Christophe would remove ten men and kill them. The remaining forty then found out that they could push the stone with no trouble at all. See what I mean?"

  "Yes, sir. I see what you mean. But Florida ain't Haiti."

  "That's right, and that's too fucking bad. My foreman does the hiring, not me. If you want to talk to him, you can ride back to my farm when the truck's unloaded. You can either help 'em unload now or stand around and watch 'em. I don't give a shit what you do."

  Tiny Bock returned to his tent. Hoke watched the Haitians work, not knowing what else to do. The man in the middle dropped a melon, and it broke into three large pieces. The two men in the trailers jumped down. The Haitians divided the broken melon. One of them offered Hoke a small piece.

  "-Guette mama!-" Hoke said, grinning.

  All five of the men laughed, and they ate their pieces of watermelon. When the melon was gone, they tossed the rinds aside and went back to work. Hoke found that it was boring to stand there and watch, so he went back to the coffee stall for another cup of coffee. He sat on an overturned crate where he could see the two trailers. When the job was finished, about forty-five minutes later, the sun was coming up across the Everglades, and the cloudless sky was the color of steel.

  When Bock left the tent, Hoke joined him at the truck.

  "Get in the back," Bock said.

  Hoke climbed into the back of the trailer with the five Haitians, and Bock drove away from the market.

  Bock's farm was about ten miles away. After Bock crossed the wooden bridge over the canal, he drove down a twisting gravel road for almost a mile before he pulled into the farmyard. A sagging barbed-wire fence surrounded the vast yard. Beyond the fence, a field of skeletons, with little round knobs on the ends of the stems, stretched out for a hundred yards or more to the Glades. Brussels sprouts--as ugly in their natural state as they were in a bowl, Hoke thought.

  There was a one-story concrete brick house with a wooden veranda in front, a barn, three rusting trailer homes behind the barn, and a dented yellow school bus. A few oaks, twenty feet tall, shaded the bus and trailers. A black Ford pickup was parked on the right side of the house. Instead of a license plate, a piece of cardboard, with "Lost Tag" written on it in black ink, was Scotch-taped to the rear window. This was an old trick. In Miami, unless a man got stopped for a violation, he could drive around with a homemade "Lost Tag" sign for years without buying a license tag.

  Two pit dogs, with clipped ears and tails, were chained to a column of the veranda. Their chains were long enough to reach the porch and the doorway. The dogs stared stupidly at the semi, but they didn't bark. There were three loose goats in the yard. A black-and-white nanny bleated as she came over to Tiny Bock and rubbed against his leg when he climbed down from the cab of the truck. The Haitians jumped down, went over to the trailers behind the barn, and entered the one in the middle. Hoke dismounted and rolled a cigarette. He lighted it and joined Bock. Bock patted the nanny goat on the head. She bleated again and then trotted over to a wooden box and climbed on top of it. Her udder was full, and she wanted to be milked, Hoke thought; but he d
idn't see any kids around the yard.

  A man came out of the house and crossed toward them. He said something to the dogs, and they both went under the veranda and crouched on their bellies in the dirt. The man was almost as big as Bock, with long black hair that reached his shoulders. He wore a yellow bandanna headband, a white Orioles baseball shirt, low-slung jeans, and pointed cowboy boots. His hand-tooled leather belt had a silver buckle in the shape of a horseshoe. There was a wide scar on the left side of his face that went through his eyebrow and ended at his chin. His left eye was missing, and the skin had been gathered and sewn over the socket, leaving a star-shaped scar. His face was slightly darker than his brown arms, but he looked more like an Indian than he did a Mexican, Hoke thought.

  "Chico," Bock said, "this fucker here told me he wanted to be a crew chief. If you look at his hands, you can see he's never worked a day in his life. He was willing to ride in back with the niggers instead of joinin' me in the cab. Find out who he is and what he wants."

  The Mexican nodded and hit Hoke in the solar plexus with a right jab that didn't travel more than eight inches. Hoke doubled over and fell to his knees. The cigarette flew from his lips, and Tiny Bock stepped on the cigarette before he crossed the yard to the house without looking back.

  Hoke clutched his stomach with both hands and tried to regain his breath. The griping pain went all the way through to his spine. The Mexican kicked Hoke in the right side, and Hoke heard his ribs crack. A sharp, searing jab inside his gut made him yelp--just as his breath returned--and he felt as if his side had been pierced with a spear as the Mexican kicked him a second time in the same place. Hoke vomited then and his breakfast came up-- coffee, Diet Coke, oatmeal, and bread chunks. Hoke was kneeling, with both hands on the ground supporting his upper body, and trying not to breathe. Even a shallow breath increased the pain in his side. The Mexican went behind Hoke and kicked him in the buttocks. Hoke's arms gave way, and he sprawled in the dirt, his face in the pool of vomit. The Mexican then picked up Hoke's feet and dragged him, face down, arms trailing, across the yard and into the barn.