Bone Island Mambo (16 page)

The lobby’s French doors swung open. Butler Dunwoody and two men in suits—therefore not locals—entered the lobby. Dunwoody stopped, shook my hand. He sent the men ahead, told them to follow signs to the beachside restaurant. No introductions. He’d see them in a minute. Butler eyeballed the desk clerk, then asked to speak with me in the motel’s atrium.

“Your photography . . .” He studied the water fountain, the broad philodendrons. He avoided facing me. “I need building progress documents for the big city bankers. After that ugly deal Sunday, all the rules changed.”

“Thanks for asking. I’m booked the next several weeks.”

He nodded, refused to show disappointment. “Crazy island you live on, Rutledge. I always heard in college that the farther you drove down the Keys, the smaller the islands became, the narrower the bridges. Somebody said I’d know I hit Key West when I found twenty naked people smoking weed around a sun-faded stop sign at the end of the pavement. I spent all day yesterday on city business, arguing with a woman who spoke no English. I mean, permits? Builders in Florida don’t ask permission. They ask forgiveness.”

“Those women speak English as well as you do,” I said. “If she stuck to Spanish, you’d already pissed her off.”

“This is stuff Engram handled for me. I explained to the zoning man, time is of the essence. Let’s straighten out this bogus dispute on fence height. He says to me, ‘I’m sixty-two. My only hurry in this world is to move my boongie
out of the path of a choo-choo train. And there ain’t one here.’ That’s the mentality I’m up against. Sweet Jesus.”

“It’s a bitch to get on their wavelength, Dunwoody. Sometimes even the townies complain. Not being from here, you need to watch your back.”

A family of four walked past in shorts and T-shirts. Canadians, unaware that every Key West resident was bundling up against the chill. Dunwoody delayed our chat until they’d entered the lobby.

“I thought I was on the right course,” he said. “I’d heard stories about classic business failures on the island, how the machine could grind you up, suck your money. It’d all happen so clever, you couldn’t blame any single person or official office. Leave you standing, thinking, I’m lucky to still have my shorts. The people in power call you ‘amigo’ and ‘bubba.’ They build houses on Key Haven and boats in Lauderdale. They sit around the Yacht Club packing in prime rib and twice-stuffed potatoes, and they won’t let me join. I heard about, what, three or four commuter airline companies in the seventies? Air Sunshine and a couple others. I heard tales of fifteen bistros, cafés, future five-star restaurants. Airplane tours of the Tortugas, electric car rental outfits, you name it All I’m doing, I’m knocking up a three-story, traditional-design shopping arcade.”

I said, “Some people don’t see it as innocuous.”

He looked at me, nodded. “Some people think I’m an asshole, too.”

“You begging an argument?”

“Look, I’m still alive, still working. Unlike my right-hand man. Tell you what. I’ve got to comply with the Monroe County Comprehensive Plan, the county’s Rate of Growth Ordinance, the Utility Board’s Advisory Committee, the Monroe County Tourist Development Council, Florida Keys Audubon, and the City Board of Adjustment. That’s just part of the list. Hell, I could be building nuclear warheads in a lean-to and not have to deal with so many damn rules, so much petty oversight. These people are trying
to preserve their island by passing laws. Laws never changed the mind of a community.”

“They’re meant to change the actions of newcomers,” I said. “For fifty years in the middle of the last century, poverty preserved the island. When money showed up, the laws came right behind.”

“So you claim a state of poverty’s ideal?”

I said, “There’s an excuse the real estate people use, that land tends to find its ‘highest and best’ use. But I see it like this: When hard cash and greed meet at closing, some piece of turf’s headed downhill.”

He shook his head. “Let me tell you something. I’ve been saving this up. You’re the lucky listener who gets to hear it first. Before I tore up that parking lot to build my building, before I closed on the property, I did my homework. I memorized the title abstract. I went to the library and got the local historian to help me research the land. It will pain you to learn that, in 1952, someone tore down a lovely piece of architecture to pave that lot. Before the destruction of that building, which had fallen into disuse as a sponge-storage shed and flop hotel, another building had occupied the land. That one had been designed by a boat builder named Sweeting out of Green Turtle Key in the Bahamas. It was damaged in the hurricanes of 1909 and 1910. Its owner decided to level it rather than repair it. Before that, a three-story building identical to the one that’s still at Caroline and Peacon Lane—on the southeast corner—was owned by a ship chandler and barrel maker named Allen. That one burned in 1886, when the city’s steam fire truck was getting repaired in New York. The fire started at Fleming and Duval and worked its way northwest to Whitehead and Greene and northeast to my lot. All those changes happened on a single piece of property.

“So I ask you, who’s the bad guy? The one who tears down? Or the one who builds? I just happen to be in line to build right now.”

I kept my mouth shut. I admired his absorption of history.

“Would you like this island so much if
nothing
ever changed? Like a song repeating itself three hundred and sixty-five times a year? Like every time you turned on your TV, you watched reruns of
Hee Haw
?”

He’d made good points. I didn’t try to interrupt.

“I’m unpopular,” he said. “I know that. I’m flamboyant My mannerisms get me ridiculed. I came to town, I wanted to turn a vacant lot into a source of income for me and my future tenants. I thought I could add some spirit to Old Town. Change is inevitable. And any change brings criticism. It goes with the territory. Wasn’t there a city commissioner who learned that change is unstoppable? After he left office, he went back to his profession—he was a builder, too—and worked on the same principle. If people are going to build, money’s going to come in. Why not have it be a guy with a sense of taste? Why shouldn’t I earn a profit, instead of the other guy? It’s the American way.”

“You’re a patriot, no argument.”

“And here I am, treated like a damn carpetbagger. My architect tried to mimic some old island designs. The building codes wouldn’t let him. That’s typical of the crap I see every day. The only person saving my sanity is Mercer Holloway. You know the man?”

“Everybody in town knows Holloway.” Dunwoody would find out sooner or later: “That’s who hired me for die next two or three weeks.”

He stared at me, nodded as his thoughts went inward.

I heard a shrill beep. Butler Dunwoody reached behind his back, pulled out a cell phone the size of an audiocassette. He said, “Right” Then, “Put him on.” He listened a while longer, then asked, “What time was that?” He closed the phone without saying good-bye.

“You had a visitor yesterday,” he said. “Lady in a Jag ragtop?”

Oh, boy. I hesitated, then nodded.

“Fuck, man. You’re standing right here, telling me to
watch my back with the bureaucrats. And you’re stabbing me in the gut”

“You don’t have to worry about Heidi.”

“I know that. I may not be her best memory, but I’m the best deal she’ll ever have. You, on the other hand . . . Jesus.” Butt Dunwoody spun away. He punched numbers into his phone as he hurried to the beach restaurant.

I leaned against the cement-block wall next to the Chart Room, listened to the hypnotizing fountain, stared at the pool area. I wondered how men like Dunwoody and Philip Kaiser made it day to day, coexisted with their inner fears and jealousies. On the other hand, Dunwoody, with his history speech, had not come off as a robber baron, or the sexist sauce abuser Sam and Marnie had described. He’d come off a planner and thinker. A good builder. Or a top-notch criminal.

Suddenly, Donovan Cosgrove, Holloway’s son-in-law, emerged from the west entrance to the pool-bordering walkway. He approached Dunwoody, shook hands, continued with him to the restaurant. An odd pairing. But Julie Kaiser had told me that Cosgrove was acting as her father’s on-site liaison. Maybe helping to calm the bankers.

Someone already had swiped my newspaper from the Pier House lobby. I used the courtesy phone. No answer at Sam’s house. No answer at Teresa’s office. No messages on my machine. I dialed Carmen Sosa’s number. In the background, when she picked up, salsa music full blast. The primary sign of her morning-afters, not hung over, but waking after a romantic encounter.

I said, “You’re not at work?”

“I couldn’t wake up. I called in sick.”

“Lovesick?”

“Bet your ass. I’m a brand-new woman.”

“Any two-toned four-doors in the lane this morning?”

“Two at once, until ten minutes ago. One city and one county. They were out there, kickin’ dirt, gabbin’, playing their police radios on high volume. One’s still out there.
The county guy. He’s got a kid on Maria’s Little League team. You rob a bank, my sweet man?”

The city? Liska had asked for help? “Worse. I ticked off our new sheriff.”

“Was that his girlfriend’s sleek roadster by your house yesterday?”

I said, “Did you come home with your cabana boy?”

“I came somewhere. Heaven, I think. Once at noon, twice last night. You wanna make something of it?”

“He ratted me out to his boss.”

“Don’t tell me. Not with that bimbo you bitched about . . .”

“No, Carmen,” I said. “Not what you think.”

“What I think doesn’t matter, my love.”

“You be home a while longer?”

“You know my rule—after the Bone Island Mambo, I wake up and dance the tango. I’ve barely begun. The bottoms of my slippers aren’t even warm yet. Please stay out of trouble.”

It took me four minutes to reach Cobo Pharmacy—less than a half block from the lane. I called from the coin phone on the store’s front wall, donated thirty-five cents to Phoenix Telecom LLC, wherever they are. You can bet they’re not in Key West. Out of breath, Carmen said, “All clear.”

It took less than two minutes to lock the Cannondale, change my shirt, chug a quart of OJ, grab my camera bag, extra film, my helmet, and Mercer Holloway’s list of prospective photo sites. I heard the momentary whoop of a police siren on Fleming. It alarmed me until I ran three rational thoughts in a row. Probably urging some motorist to move from the Eden House loading zone, to quit blocking traffic. No new messages on the machine.

Time to haul ass on the Kawasaki.

Near the door I saw the envelope I’d probably stepped on coming in. Tommy Tucker’s TNT Security letterhead on cheap bond. He’d slid it under the left-side French door that I never opened. A check from Mercer Holloway. Twenty-five hundred dollars. No note.

I rode south on White Street I had no idea what to do or where to go. I obeyed the speed limit I recalled a man saying that the only people who drive the speed limit in Broward and Dade are on parole. A traffic slip will send a violator back to the cement for another year. I couldn’t unload my road rage. An empty yellow antifreeze jug blew out of a pickup truck’s bed, made a hollow slap against my helmet. I smelled Cuban coffee, bacon on a grill. I wanted some but didn’t want to stop moving.

My mind drifted to Teresa’s words at Mangrove Mama’s. I’d worried that by working for Holloway, attaching myself to what he represented, I’d be part of the island’s growth problem, and not part of its solution. She’d suggested that my photography was not going to make a difference. In pattern with the previous hundred and seventy years, the island would change anyway.

She was right. Change is inevitable.

But
the flavor
of change is within our control.

There’d been a time when motor vehicles could meander to the end of White Street Pier. A driver could park, walk to the south wall, be the closest American to Cuba. It always has been a fine place for solitude. Folks there, fishermen and sightseers, would leave you alone to think. To ponder the crap that trespasses paradise. The county remodeled the pier a few years ago, created a pedestrian bridge to the old center pier section. The county commissioners claimed it would better appeal to tourists. But no one could ignore the fact that a prominent politician lived in the condo just east of die pier, and that Mother Nature insisted on depositing noxious seaweed on the condo’s beach. The remodeling included a spillway so the tides could reduce the buildup of stinky flotsam. Lucky break for the politician.

These days you must come on foot or bicycle. I parked the Kawasaki in a slot near the West Martello Garden Center. I carried my helmet past the AIDS memorial, crossed the new bridge, and hiked to pier’s end. The farther from land, the less lee effect. At the broad pierhead apron, the
wind, which had clocked slightly west, cut through Sam’s jacket. I’ve never known why fifty-five in Key West feels colder than twenty-five in Ohio. I felt new hunger and wished I’d stopped at Pepe’s or Harpoon Harry’s.

I looked at the south edge of the island. From a hundred yards off the coast, the place looked almost the same as it had when I’d arrived during the Carter administration. Builders had completed the four-unit condo, much to the disappointment of growth opponents. The “indigenous park” at White and Atlantic—once a large open area where weekly flea markets thrived—had been paved, turned into a parking lot decorated with a token cluster of native shrubs. A little green to please the protesters of asphalt. On a tree-shaded grassy field opposite that corner, an elderly man and his wife had operated a miniature train on weekends, sold rides to children for the coins in their pockets. That acreage had been annexed and fenced by Higgs Beach County Park. Another new condo, the Beach Club, squatted up east. To the west was the storm-ruined Higgs Beach Pier and Henry Flagler’s Casa Marina Hotel, shuttered in the 1950s, restored in the seventies by Marriott. Then the building called Southernmost House, though it wasn’t. From my angle, given the passing of time, not much had gone away.

Such vantage points were harder to find each year.