Sideswipe

1 Detective-Sergeant Hoke Moseley, Miami Police Department, opened the front door of his house in Green Lakes, looked to the left and to the right. Then, barechested and barefooted, and wearing droopy white boxer shorts, he dashed out to pick up theMiami Heraldfrom the front lawn. At six A.M. there was little need for this modesty. His neighbors were not up, and the eastern sky was barely turning a nacreous gray. The paper was usually delivered by five-thirty each morning by an angry Puerto Rican in a white Toyota, whose erratic throw from his speeding car never found the same spot on the lawn. The driver was still angry, Hoke thought on those mornings when he stood behind the screen door waiting for the paper, because Hoke had returned the delivery man's stamped, self-addressed Christmas card without including a check or a five-dollar bill as a tip. In the kitchen, Hoke pulled the slippery transparent cover from the paper, wadded it into a ball, and tossed it into the overflowing grocery bag that served as a garbage receptacle. He read the first paragraph in all of the front-page stories. Another American hostage had been killed by a Shiite skyjacker in Lebanon. The new fare for Metrorail would (perhaps) be a quarter, a half-dollar, or a dollar, but the newest fare system would probably depend on which station the rider used to board the train. An eighteen-year-old Haitian, a recent graduate of Miami-Norland High School, had miraculously managed to obtain an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the congressman who had appointed him had just discovered that the boy was an illegal alien and was awaiting deportation at the Krome Detention Center. This item reminded Hoke of the tasteless joke Commander Bill Henderson had told him yesterday in the department's cafeteria. "How can you tell when a Haitian's been in your back yard?" "How?" "Your mango tree's been stripped and your dog's got AIDS." Hoke hadn't laughed. "That won't work, Bill." "Why not? I think it's funny." "No, it doesn't work, because everyone doesn't have a mango tree in his back yard, and not every Haitian has AIDS." "Most of them have." "No. I don't have a mango tree and neither do you." "I mean AIDS. Most Haitians have AIDS." "Not so. I think the figure's less than one-half of one percent." "Go fuck yourself, Hoke." Henderson got up from the table and left the cafeteria without finishing his coffee. Hoke's reaction to Henderson's crummy humor had been another sign, but Hoke hadn't spotted it and neither had Bill Henderson. Ordinarily, when Bill told one of his jokes, Hoke at least grinned and said, "That's a good one," even when it was an out-of-context gag Bill had written down from the Johnny Carson monologue. But Hoke hadn't smiled for more than a week, and he hadn't laughed at anything for almost a month. Hoke sprinkled a liberal helping of Grape-Nuts into a plastic sieve and ran hot water from the tap over the cereal to make it soft enough that he could eat it without putting in his false teeth. When the cereal had softened sufficiently, he dumped it into a bowl and covered it with half-and-half. He then sliced a banana into the cereal, upended a pink packet of Sweet 'n Low over the mixture, and took the bowl and the newspaper out into the Florida room. The sun porch had open, jalousied windows on three sides, and a hot, damp breeze blew through them from the lake. The Florida room faced a square lake of green milk that had once been a gravel quarry. The backs of all of the houses were toward the lake in this Miami subdivision called Green Lakes. Not all of the homeowners, or renters, had glassed-in porches like Hoke. Some of them had redwood decks in back; others had settled for do-it-yourseWilleford, Charles is the author of 'Sideswipe' with ISBN 9780345349477 and ISBN 0345349474.