They'd trundled off to Aaron's bedroom then. Their arms were wrapped around each other, faces close, pulse singing in their ears; they would not have heard the dainty vandalism, if that's when it was done. And only now, the morning after, did it occur to Aaron to wonder if this pointless invasion was the work of the rude caller with the careful diction and the foreign cadences.
He went back to the kitchen. The woman who did the breakfast discreetly watched him fill a second coffee mug and move back toward his bedroom. Confirmed in her instincts that something large had happened in the old hotel, she dried her hands and went back to her bicycle with the bits of mirror on the fenders.
"Fred," said Piney, "ya know what I sometimes wonder about?"
It was late morning and they were wandering through the mangroves back behind the airport. Strung from one shrub to another, the tiny trampolines of spider webs bounced in a light breeze. Hot sun evaporated puddles, you could almost hear the gray water being sucked into the air like soda through a straw. Fred didn't answer.
Piney said, "Songs."
Fred said nothing, just stopped walking long enough to light a cigarette. The cigarette fit neatly in a notch in his walrus moustache, and around the notch nicotine had stained the hair like oiled oak.
Pineapple said, "The words and the tunes. The way they go together."
Without interest Fred said, "Yeah, Piney. That's why they call it a song."
"But ya think about it," said Piney, "it's a miracle. The tune's just a tune, the words are just words. Totally different things. A bird and a fish."
Fred smoked, kicked at porous rocks. "Fuck's a bird and a fish got to do with it?"
"Then someone puts the words and the tune together," Piney said, "and all of a sudden it's like they had to be together, like they were together from the beginning of time."
They walked. On their left, the airport runway showed now and then through gaps in the foliage; smears of rubber on the pavement testified to the violence of landing. Ahead and on their right, the ancient missile platforms loomed, fences rusted, concrete cracked. Fred said nothing.
Hound-like, Piney sang, "Blue-oo moon ... You don't think that's amazing?"
Fred flicked his cigarette into a gray puddle. "Yeah, Piney. Real amazing."
Farther on, beyond the platforms, the scrubby pyramid of the archaic fallout shelter broke through the relentless pancake plane of Florida. A cloud blew across the sun and a shadow slithered up one side of the pyramid and down the other.
"And another thing," said Piney. "Ever notice how, even when you just whistle, you're still hearing the words?"
"I don't whistle."
"Hum then," Piney said. "Same thing hum—"
He broke off because a mildly uncanny sight had caught his attention. Uncanny sights were a feature of the mangroves, after all; the tangled choking greenery cried out for the peculiar. Ospreys landed in the mangroves with crushed terns in their talons; drunks fumbled through their knotted roots, groping after lost prostheses.
The present strangeness was more subtle: a fat man, furtive and well-dressed, carrying a shovel and pulling a little red wagon. His big pants were of expensive cloth that billowed into perfect pleats; his shoes were much too good to be covered as they were in limestone dust. The wagon's handle was too short for him, and its front wheels dangled pointlessly a few inches off the ground as the back tires labored over broken stones.
The mangroves were a neighborhood, and, as with any neighborhood, there were people who belonged and people who did not. This fat man who did not belong seemed to be approaching the earthen pyramid from the part of the wetland called Little Hamaca Park. He was on a collision course with Pineapple and Fred. He saw them and he slowed. He'd been carrying the shovel on his shoulder, as if it were a rifle, and he himself a deranged campaigner who'd lost track of where the war was. Now he dropped the shovel to his side, tried to hide it with his torso.
Pineapple, bold in his own neighborhood, walked on and reached out for the fat man's eyes. They slid away.
The stranger hesitated just a moment and then he turned his back. His shirt was glued with sweat against his spine. He walked off the way he'd come, the red wagon waddling after him like a duckling.
Fred said, with a soft and general defiance, "I don't whistle and I don't hum neither."
Piney said, "That guy. Whaddya think he's doin' back here?"
Uninterested, Fred said, "Stealing plants. Too cheap to buy 'em from the nursery."
"I don't think so," Piney said. "Stealing plants, ya don't put on good shoes."
"Burying a cat then. Who gives a fuck?"
"No cat in the wagon," Piney said.