He wandered, and he tried to figure out just why he was doing it. Was he being chivalrous or pigheaded? Maybe, at the end of this sleeplessness and disruption, it would turn out, pure and simple, that Suki had stood him up. Changed her mind. Got a better offer. Happened to some poor lonely bastard every day.
But he kept going. Past sunglass shops and ice cream stores, places that sold pornography and bathing suits. Tourists spun postcard racks in front of him, or sat on patios in silly hats, sipping cappuccino.
Then he saw something that didn't quite register until after he'd strolled past it: a shop that wasn't open.
It was a busy day in the midst of tourist season, pale visitors were milling and buying, and this one store was closed up tight and dark. Aaron backed up to look at it more closely. In its dim window were racks and racks of T-shirts. Some had spangles, some had pictures, some had slogans. Some racks said special today and some said decals free. On the big glass pane of the front door of the store, a hand-scrawled cardboard sign had been crookedly taped up. It said: close due to deth.
The message was only four words long, but Aaron read it several times, as if it held a nagging and laconic riddle. Suki was involved with Lazslo, and Lazslo ran the T-shirt shops. The T-shirt shop was closed and Suki had not been heard from and somebody had died. He walked on, turning the riddle this way and that, looking for the strand of logic that would make it all come clear. He walked past smoothie stands and bars, galleries and restaurants. Yellow sun bounced off metal roofs and a line of shadow ran down the middle of the street.
On the next block there was another T-shirt store. It too was closed and dim. It too had a cardboard sign in the window of the recessed front door. This one said: death in femily—not today.
But as Aaron was walking past, the door swung open and a young man stepped out, turning around to lock the place behind him. Aaron studied him a moment He wasn't especially tall, but his arms were huge and his back muscles quaked with even the smallest movements. He wore no shirt just thick suspenders crisscrossed on his massive shoulders. His hair was long and tangled; at the nape of his neck it merged indistinctly with the soft fur that grew in patches down to his waist.
His back looked unfriendly, show-offish, menacing. Aaron struggled against a reluctance born partly of shyness and partly of an idiotic jealousy, and approached him as the second lock was clicking shut.
He said, "Excuse me. By any chance, is your name Lazslo?"
The fellow spun toward him. His eyes were hard and narrow. For an instant they flashed suspicious or maybe spooked. He said a simple no and began to walk away.
Aaron followed, gesturing backward toward the sign. "Who died?"
The muscular man was breaking into the heavy flow of walking traffic on Duval. Grudgingly, a little off the beat, with a slightly guttural h and langorous vowels, he said, "Soon everyone will hear."
They were moving down the busy sidewalk now, Aaron dodging tourists and racks of souvenirs as he tried to keep pace with the other man's bounding steps. "Hear what?" he said. "This is what I'm asking."
The man with the suspenders kept rolling. Couples parted to let him pass between them. Without looking at Aaron, he said, "Is not your business. Leaf me alone."
"But—"
"I tell you go away."
Aaron didn't go away. He wanted to know and he made a mistake. He put his hand on the young man's shoulder, said, "Look, all I'm asking—"
The other man was tired of the questions and it made him angry that this annoying stranger had touched him. With the coiled economy of the practiced fighter, he pivoted quickly, almost nonchalantly, and grabbed two handfuls of Aaron's shirt.
Aaron just barely had time to be befuddled. He hadn't been in a fight since junior high school; he'd had neither strength nor conviction for it even then; fighting, he felt, was for kids whose fathers hadn't taught them reason. But now, by reflex, he defensively reached out and held the other man's arms. The arms were thick as fence posts and fibrous as snakes and they could not be held.
The man looked at Aaron with a calm, impersonal malice, gave a quick sharp pull and then a shove.
Aaron's head whipped forward as his torso rocked back, and he stumbled for a step or two until a parking meter caught him square between the shoulder blades. The impact knocked some air out of his lungs, sent arrows of hot pain up to his brain stem and down to his kidneys.
Nauseating starbursts appeared at the edges of his vision, and by the time his eyes had cleared, a sparse ring of passersby had gathered. They were staring at him. Not in sympathy but with embarrassed fascination for the loser. He'd become a part of their vacations, something they'd remember; a victim of the kind of brief and pointless sidewalk brawl that Duval Street was famous for.