Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [4]
Meadows waved at a teller named Bert who stared morosely at the street from a drive-in window at the local bank. It reminded him that he had to pick up some money on his way home, even if it did mean passing the time of day with poor Bert. Bert had piles.
From what had once been a good neighborhood bar a blond youth appeared, wiping tears with a piece of blue silk. The silk matched his light T-shirt, which matched his pocketless jeans, which almost matched the tearful eyes. A circular gold pendant bounced uncertainly against the hollow, heaving chest.
Meadows let the bike coast. There had to be a second act. There was. The youth took a deep breath, marched back to the bar and pulled open the door.
“Bitch!” the young man screamed. “Cheating bitch. I hope he bites it off.” There was a commotion inside the bar. The youth walked swiftly away, clutching the silk handkerchief to his face as though it were an ice pack. Ah, to be young and in love, Meadows thought.
Arthur stood at his usual corner, where the road turned east to dip toward the bay. Arthur was hard to miss. He was six-four in splay-toed feet that were indifferent to the burning concrete sidewalk. He wore his hair in braids. A wrap of beige and white batik circled his waist and breached at his ebony calves.
“Hey, Chris,” Arthur called.
“How you making it?” Meadows asked.
“Lean time, brother. The heat is after me every time I turn around. A man can’t even stand on the street anymore without trouble.”
To the very tense Miami police assigned to patrol the Grove, the theorem was simple: Anybody who stood on a street corner all day was peddling something—dex, ludes, weed, coke, even heroin. The cops rousted Arthur regularly, but they never busted him.
“What you need”—Meadows laughed from his bicycle—“is a defense fund.”
“Shit.”
“I’ll get some T-shirts printed up. We’ll stage a rally.”
“Fuck off, whitey,” Arthur said. “How about some chess later?”
“Not tonight. I’m working on a project.”
“Make it pretty, Frank Lloyd.”
Meadows encouraged the old Raleigh down the gentle slope toward the library. Arthur was a friend. Meadows had seen him first in a neighborhood greasy spoon, where the black man had been engrossed in a battered book of chess openings. Good chess companions do not come easy in Miami, but your average citizen does not casually approach strange ragged giants and ask them for a game. So Meadows had simply eaten and left.
A few days later, however, Meadows had been buying pencils and ink in an art supply shop when Arthur had approached him nonchalantly dragging a teenager in each ham-sized fist. It seems he had caught them popping the door locks on Meadows’s aged Karmann Ghia. That night the two of them had played chess by the pool, and Meadows had learned to his dismay that he was overmatched.
“The man looks like a Rastafarian and plays chess like Morphy,” Meadows said to his beleaguered king. “OK, I give up. Who the hell are you?”
“Just another refugee,” Arthur answered. He was, in fact, a computer technician of some talent who had saved his money, let his hair grow and dropped out. At night he worked effectively as a bouncer in a small downtown jazz club. By day he manned his street corner in the Grove. Meadows had never asked what he did there. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“GOING TO PERU, Mr. Meadows? You seem to have just about cleaned us out of Incas,” said the pleasant round-faced librarian. “Ecuador. Northern branch of the same family, I’m told.”
When the last Incas’ sons had feuded, one had had his capital in Cuzco, the other in Quito. Would it have made any difference to the Incas, Meadows