That Old Gang Of Mine Read online

  That Old Gang Of Mine

  by Leslie Thomas

  Scanned by Bill

  one

  'This is Station WAIA, Miami, a bee ... utiful morning, people. We expect a high of seventy-eight degrees today, a low of sixty-two tonight, with a twenty per cent chance of rain. It's real good to be alive ... Station WAIA, your music way, serving the Golden Coast from the Palm Beaches to Key West.'

  The pelican cruising down from Palm Beach, Florida, towards the islands of the Keys that January day had fine flying weather. A gentle wind sniffed from the south-west but there were few clouds and the long golden arm of Miami Beach was in good shape. A remote storm in the night had disturbed the sea and there were surfers at Pompano; at Fort Lauderdale basking ranks of vacationing college students, boys and girls, blew bubble gum. Rich old widows in bikinis and pastel pink knee boots, which hid their varicose veins, sunbathed at the Fontainbleu Hotel and many blocks down, along Ocean Drive, South Miami, two thousand elderly folk sat on small chairs beneath the sea-grape trees.

  The Golden Coast to which radio station WAIA, Miami, refers in its call sign stretches for two hundred miles from Palm Beach on the Atlantic seaboard of Florida, through Boca Raton, Pompano, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, and a dozen other seaside conurbations, through Miami Beach, separated from Miami proper by fine lakes and lagoons, and then south to the curving small islands of the Florida Keys which terminate in the city of Key West, the most southerly in the United States.

  South Miami Beach lies roughly halfway down the distance, an area gradually diminishing to squalor, in contrast to the expensive real estate only a couple of miles to the north. Once it was the Miami Beach, but now it slips a little with each season. It has become a museum of art deco buildings of the nineteen twenties, inhabited by a tribe of old people, ninety per cent of them Jewish, many impoverished. They have colonized it with that special talent they have for colonizing;

  it has kosher shops and kosher hotels, synagogues, talking places like salt beef bars and selected shady trees and Jewish social centres. The accents and dialogue of twenty old countries can be heard on Washington Avenue or Ocean Drive. For these are the people who once arrived in America for a new life. Now they have almost had that life and they sit in their collapsible canvas chairs and watch the sail boats and the automobiles of the new generations.

  There is not much money about, the people do not live or eat extravagantly, but they stick together beneath the Florida sun. They believe that it lengthens their days, days spent in inactivity or in pseudo pastimes. The people are no longer useful. Frequently they have been sent to South Miami Beach by families who have ceased to have time or space for them. A cynic has called the place God's Waiting Room.

  As the ungainly pelican creaked on his journey that morning he might have spotted on the South Beach a solitary figure in red vest and shorts, running steadily with the shore line, a man known as Ari the Greek, sixty years of age. Although at that moment he was unaware of it, he was about to become involved in one of the most bizarre series of crimes in the history of the state of Florida.

  He ran every day on the beach. Most of his fellow pensioners sat where the grass was clean and cool beneath the sea-grape trees, but there were a few who were on the sand and they exchanged waves and words as he jogged by.

  'Hiya Ari! Still running?'

  'If I'm running I'm living!' the Greek called back, hardly panting. He had a strong Mediterranean face although he had lived in Jacksonville, Florida most of his life. In Prohibition days he had been a bootlegger, then he had operated a pancake house and later branched out into hotdogs. His hair was just a memory and his large nose seemed to have features all its own, like a second face. He drew abreast of a barefoot woman in a red dress, plump as a strawberry. They called her Molly Mandy and she was searching for treasure with a metal detector. She saw Ari call to her but she did not hear because of the dishes clamped over her ears. She obligingly pulled one of the dishes away and extended the exposed ear towards Ari.

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  'What d'yer say, Ari?'

  'I said have you found something? Like treasure?'

  'Jeez, I swear this machine makes you deaf.' She switched off the detector. 'Now what d'yer say?'

  Ari jogged on the spot as though fearful of letting his momentum run down. A dollop of sweat careered down his nose and hit the sand at his feet making a hole like a bullet. 'Molly, I said have you found anything?' he repeated patiently. 'Like treasure?'

  'Sure, sure,' Molly nodded. She had serene Jewish features, deep, dark eyes, broad forehead, hair grey but neat. She should have been sitting in the comfortable house of her elder son in White Plains, New York, where he was important with the telephone company, but his wife did not like her being around there. They had told her she would like it better down on Miami Beach in the sun. She had innocently believed them. 'Yesterday I found gold like Fort Knox never had, Ari,' she joked. 'Ten million dollars in gold! How about that! But I figured I just couldn't give up looking. Like it's a hobby.'

  'I know just how you feel,' nodded Ari understandingly. 'Like I.'m in the American Olympics team. It provides something to do.'

  He slipped into gear and started off again. "Bye now, take care,' Molly called automatically after him. She clamped the dogs around her ears and returned to searching the empty sand. Half an hour later she found a nickel and a dime.

  Ari habitually terminated the beach section of his run by the comfort station coyly labelled 'Boys' and 'Girls', near the place where the City of Miami, with a stroke of tactless genius, had erected a large concrete calendar recording the time, date, day and year. If there was anything the many people in that region did not need it was a calendar. Had they been more militant they might have blown it up. As it was Ari projected a spirited raspberry at the object's timeful face which brought a wry laugh from some old men playing dominoes in the shade. Ari did that every day. It was not much of a defiance, but it was something.

  The Greek crossed Ocean Drive, the street running parallel with the sea, but divided from the beach by the grass and the

  7

  sea-grape trees. He went up Eighth Street on to Washington Avenue. It was hot now and his padding feet made prints in the sidewalk dust. There was a kosher shop advertising guaranteed clean water at twenty-five cents a jug, bring your own jug. He curled his lip because he did not go along with all -these Jewish precautions, but it made him feel thirsty and he began to look forward to the lime juice he always drank after his exercise.

  There was a small funeral on Washington. They never had big funerals in those parts because, in general, people did not enjoy attending them. This was just two cars, one with the coffin and the other with a clutch of bland and blank mourners. The cortege had halted at the traffic signals and the driver leaned out and mopped his brow with an appropriately black handkerchief. Ari, as if he were a motor vehicle, pulled up and ticked over also, his old but muscled legs slowing carefully like pistons. He knew the hearse driver, a violently cheerful young man who also drove a truck for an anti-bug, delousing company doing business with the small hotels. They often joked about the young man scratching a living.

  'Who's travelling?' asked Ari, watching the traffic lights. He nodded casually back towards the coffin.

  'Guy called Sylvester, I think,' replied the driver. 'Resident at the Beau Park.'

  'Don't remember him,' shrugged Ari.

  'Not many do,' said Herbie casually. 'There was no interest He left ten dollars each to pay for some mourners.'

  'If it's gonna be like that I ain't going.' Ari snorted like a horse through his nose.

  'Maybe you'll be next, Ari,' warned Herbie cheerfully. 'All that running could kill you, man.'

 
'If I'm running I'm living,' recited the dogged Greek. The lights changed and he went into gear and got away ahead of the funeral. 'Goddamn you,' he said over his shoulder.

  The conversation had worried him, so he went to the Kress Bargain Store and paid the man a dollar to test his blood pressure. The man sat all day at a small table at the entrance and tested many people's blood pressures. Some came back every day, some twice a day. A doctor would have

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  charged ten dollars. At a dollar a pressure, it was a giveaway.

  The man, who wore a proper white coat, wound the tourniquet around Ari's arm, pumped on a rubber globe, while Ari watched both his arm and the registering arrow anxiously.

  'It's okay, Ari,' said the pressureman. 'Same as before. You ain't going nowhere yet.'

  T get these headaches ...' Ari began hopefully.

  The man pointed sternly to the notice which said: 'Please do not ask for medical advice.' He said: 'If I knew about headaches, Ari, I'd be a doctor now, wouldn't I? Not a gas pump attendant for humans. That'll be a dollar.'

  Loose Bruce got off the Greyhound bus at the depot just across the street from the Shelbourne Hotel where beauty queens used to imprint their feet in wet concrete on the forecourt. He was twenty-five years old, tall, stringy, with a casual face and a sloppy way of walking. He had been a car washer and a waiter in various parts of New York State and then had taken a job as an usher in a pornographic movie theatre off Times Square, but had been fired after being found asleep during working hours. He had taken the bus to Miami Beach because it was January in New York and he understood they had a different January in Florida. As he sloped from the bus depot with his canvas bag and his scarred jeans he was grateful to feel the sun on his face.

  Walking across the street he stood on the sidewalk examining the feet of Miss Americas and Miss Universes, immortalized in concrete. Ari the Greek, who was passing by at the end of his run, loitered too. The footprints had stopped when the district began to fade, when they started to build Miami again, forty blocks north.

  'Sure had big feet some of them beauties,' observed Ari. Loose Bruce nodded. The inhabitants of the district made a habit of talking to young people whenever they were available. They believed it kept them in touch.

  'Not many girls around here now, huh?' said Bruce, looking at the big toe of Barbara Ann Morley, of Gary, Indiana. A family of busy blank ants had gathered in its depression.

  'You have to look real hard,' admitted Ari. 'But we got

  some real nice old ladies. The young girls, they're all up at Fort Lauderdale and so's the young fellas.'

  'So I'm too far south,' nodded Loose Bruce. 'That figures. Know anywhere I can stay?'

  The Greek squinted at him with amazement. 'You want to stay!" he said. 'A young guy like you and you want to stay? Here?'

  Bruce chewed on imaginary gum. 'Don't they allow anybody under eighty?' he asked.

  'Eighty? Jeez. How old d'you think I am? Come on, take a guess.' Ari did a little trot on the spot and showed his teeth.

  'Oh, man, I don't know. I really couldn't tell at all,' replied Bruce cautiously. 'I guess about seventy.'

  Fury gathered like a cloud around Ari's great nose. 'Seventy! Goddamn you, you're ten years out! Ten whole years!'

  Bruce looked at him again. 'Mister,' he said admiringly, 'you sure look great for eighty,'

  'I'm sixty! You blind young bastard!' retorted Ari. 'Get a load of those legs, son.' He displayed the gnarled calves hanging from his running shorts. 'Take a look. They ain't no old man's legs.'

  'Sorry,' said Bruce genuinely.I mean I can never tell the ages of older folks - or babies either. I guess you look fine for sixty. I hope I look like you when I'm sixty. I hope I can still run.'

  'If I'm running I'm living,' recited Ari a little mollified. He seemed to be measuring Bruce. 'You could try where I live,' he said. 'I reckon they'll have a bed to fit you. Sunny Gables Hotel, on the ocean. It's real nice. They have a guy comes and plays the banjo in the evening.'

  'Sounds the place I could be looking for,' said Bruce doubtfully. 'What's the rate?'

  'Forty-five dollars a week, but maybe if the boss-woman likes you she'll give you a reduction. There's a vacancy right now because a guy fell out of bed last week and they took him to the hospital. I don't figure he'll be back.'

  They began to walk towards the beach, Loose Bruce tall, with his bag on his shoulder like a sailor, Ari, almost a foot shorter, loping at his side, pausing every twenty yards for a spasm of frenzied running on the spot.

  10

  'They got a burlesque up the street,' he said informatively. 'I took a look at it on my birthday. Jesus, the girls sure have got boobs these days. I figure it's the good food, the nutrition, that does that. In my day the young girls didn't get that sort of eating. Some of the older women around here ain't too bad. In fact some of them's real comfortable. But the routine takes so long you kinda lose interest. Your mind wanders. Know what I mean? And if you do anything to them - any little thing - it's a bet they start crying and thinking about their husbands, who are dead years ago. In the main it's no good. Not for women.'

  Bruce took the information in. 'Well,' he said, 'that don't worry me. I'm not planning too much in that way right now. I just feel I'll stick around and get the feel of the place. Forty dollars you calculate?'

  'Maybe less. Mrs Nissenbaum maybe would like a young face about the joint. And she's a widow too. South Miami Beach is kinda hung with widows.'

  'That's just the room, forty dollars,' said Bruce thoughtfully. He only had seventy in the world. 'For a week.'

  'It ain't for a year,' said Ari. 'That's for your room. Right. I got an efficiency, that's a room with a cooking pot. There's a stove to put it on, but mine don't work. The pot leaks anyway. It's a non-efficient efficiency, you could say. So I got it reduced. Maybe you could get a job.'

  'I'll sure need one,! admitted Bruce.

  'Mortician, that's a good deal around these parts,' said Ari somberly. 'Busy, busy. Never out of work.'

  'Black never suited me,' said Bruce, shaking his head. 'Maybe I could be a swimming instructor.'

  'You a good swimmer then?'

  'No, I can't swim. But maybe around here they wouldn't notice.'

  'They wouldn't,' agreed Ari.

  As though coming as a comment on their words they walked out on to Ocean Drive and Bruce saw what it was like. The beach and the sea were empty, just touching each other as if for company. But on the grass between the sand and the street there were hundreds and hundreds of old folk.

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  They massed like many-coloured penguins along a lonely shore, moving, still, chattering, silent, all bunched together beneath the fanned branches of the trees. Jazzy shirts and pants, bright hats above sunburned faces, extravagant robes and dresses. Bruce stopped in astonishment. They were around tables playing chess and cards and dominoes; they sang and danced in groups to the accompaniment of ancient violins and desperately blown trumpets; they wrote letters to remote loved ones who only occasionally replied, and read out extracts to their uninterested neighbours. They sat singly, a transistor radio clamped to the ear, they fed the seabirds and the sparrows, or they merely sat dozing or awake and staring at the enormous shining sea as if wondering what the hell it was.

  'Jesus Christ,' breathed Bruce.

  'Not too loud. He may arrive,' mentioned Ari. 'You get the feeling down here that he's kinda loitering. Eighty-five per cent of the people here are Jewish and they worry in case they did the wrong thing by Jesus, if you get me. When you get older you get things like that on your mind. I'm Greek Orthodox so He don't bother me.'

  'I just never saw so many old folks,' said Bruce.

  'They clear them out of the rest of the country,' said Ari. 'They get swept down here, like a corner. God's Waiting Room they call this place.'

  They walked south on Ocean Drive. A frail couple went in the opposite direction between them wheeling a supermarket basket trolley. It contain
ed their suitcases and other worldly belongings.

  'Moving,' said Ari, giving a brief nod towards the pair.

  'Very moving,' agreed Bruce. 'Real sad. Have they had to quit where they lived?'

  'That's what I said, didn't I? They're moving. I don't know where. Maybe they're going to the penthouse at the Fontain-bleu.' The commonplace sight had evoked no sympathy in him. He stopped on the sidewalk. 'Listen,, kid,' he said. 'Let me go ahead and do some negotiating for you. Mrs Nissenbaum, she respects me because I'm not Jewish, see? Maybe I can get you a good deal for your room. Okay?'

  'Okay,' said Bruce. 'That sure is nice of you.'

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  'To the Greek, kindness is only second to avarice,' said Ari baring his teeth. 'Stick around. Go and see the ocean, it's real neat. I'll be back.'

  He loped away, still pausing every so often to perform his strange running-on-the-spot routine. He threw out a few ghostly punches too before continuing on his way to the Sunny Gables Hotel. Loose Bruce watched him go, shrugged and grinned and, throwing his bag over his shoulder again, walked through the people and the sea-grape trees towards the beach.

  In contrast to the market-place atmosphere of the Ocean Drive lawns, the beach was almost deserted. The sea was clear, long indolent waves curling towards Florida, still echoing the storm of the night before. There was a lookout watchtower with a man gazing out over the empty waves to sky where the pelicans and the seagulls flew. Bruce sat idly on a low wall and watched the lookout. He could only see half his head, chopped grey hair under a ragged, dirty white tugboat cap.

  The half a head nodded rhythmically as though the man was talking or singing to himself. Bruce wondered what was the age limit for lifeguards. Not that there seemed to be any risk of ever having to make a rescue. The ocean at South Beach was empty.

  At that moment a fat woman in a rainbow bathing suit waddled on to the beach near where Bruce was standing and proceeded towards the shoreline. The lifeguard seemed to have been waiting for her.

  'Mrs Blum,' he called in a friendly way through his loud-hailer. The voice was firm, not old. 'Not today, Mrs Blum, you promised.'