Brutal, late May. Wet blankets of hot weather, suffocating. When the midday heat receded, Thomas nixed the novellas (Mattie’s legacy), filled a tall glass with seltzer and ice, and padded into the yard. He sprayed the concrete and his chair, sat on the damp fabric facing east toward the fishtail palm and the privacy fence, looking up at the eaves of the cottages the far side of the street. Old Florida. Wood and stucco. Termites and social security checks. Not yet gentrified.
Mattie had loved this time of day, The first cooling breezes. Beyond the street, the lagoon. Beyond the lagoon, the Atlantic. Could Thomas forgive him for leaving? Mattie lying in the hospital bed, morphine pump in hand, telling him about the hot man he’d just met: “Long black hair flowing, burnished chest and stigmata bleeding. Both palms.” He had enough strength to stretch out one arm, palm outward. “I could do that. Hot piece of ass.”
Thomas bet he was having a ball up there. So many men. No viruses. He missed him.
They’d constructed the privacy fence together forty-five years ago. Embedded the uprights in cement. They’d been so supple, he and Mattie, muscular, tolerant of the heat. Two young men in lust. In closeted lust, given time and place. The fence was bleached white from heat and sun, stained dark where the fishtail cast a shadow, smudges spreading out like the map of some dissolved empire. “It’s fared better than us!”
This coast, once swamp, now drained and developed. Clapboard houses, gardens of pineapple, orange groves, all manner of vegetables. Optimism and opportunity: farmers had migrated from plantations north and west, bought swampland. The recently emancipated. Property bought property. Mattie’s people.
Heat. Thomas sprayed himself, sprayed the garden chair, the cement, the fake grass. Over the lagoon, he watched a dense confection of cloud build before the deep blue background. Mattie would’ve known whether it was cirrus or stratus, cumulus or nimbus. Thomas marveled as the wet air structured itself upward in buoyant layers, a rising soufflé hovering above a plinth. He peered through the tall glass, the bubbling seltzer a magnifying lens, and saw more clearly: distant turrets with flags fluttering, high defensive walls, a magnificent portcullis and wide marble steps ascending grandly to the sparkling cathedral or celestial city or grand mosque above. Before he’d met Mattie, he could never have imagined this. Open your mind to possibilities, Mattie had said. Repeatedly.
More freshly formed clouds folded onto the mound, directing Thomas’s eyes upward beyond the fortifications to snowy Alpine fields. A creek fed by snowmelt gurgling through water meadows, sluicing downward, rushing beneath bridges into canals floating above the lagoon.
Thomas took the Eldorado’s keys off the hook by the door. Mattie had loved this car, scarcely heard the comic dissonance of the gears. A classic. A tribute to her era. A mechanical drag queen in metal, rubber, and leather. Thomas pulled out onto the street, a blast of hot pumping from the a/c, and made a left toward the lagoon, his eyes on the road ahead, city above, alpine coolness above that. Was it snowing up there?
He parked at QuikMart, leaving the engine running, keys in the ignition. Next door, a new hotel rising from an older building. Gone for the day, the renovation crew had left the security gate ajar. Fighting pain in his knees, Thomas mounted the rough cement stairs, four flights, to a flat roof, listened to a dog barking below. Frantic. A hot and airless monotony stretched to the western horizon one way and the ocean the other, a relentless vista.
“Where’d you go, Mattie?”
He caught sight of a portal. Strange he’d not seen it before. Two stucco pillars, cracked to reveal brick beneath, holding up a rusting iron gate that he pushed. Oiled by the crew, it swung in soundlessly. A marble stairwell, polished and gleaming. He ascended, each easy step gifting him a cooler spot, an eddying breeze, an inviting coldness.
#
The Eldorado was out of gas and the sky over the lagoon shifting to black by the time the officer responded. Un hombre viejo, the boy said, pointing. Muy viejo. A dog was barking. There was no one downstairs. She made her way to the roof. Again no one. She peered over the edge, expecting a broken body, but nothing. Moisture fell on her cheek and she raised a finger to brush away the drop and was puzzled. Not warm rain, rather a flake of whiteness, frigid.
Image: Kevauto, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons a pale blue 1963 Cadillac Eldorado convertible
literally stories 