The Same River Twice (22 page)

I changed clothes and he drove us through the swamp to Homestead. Occasionally he glanced at me and shook his head. Mrs. Jack was very large and treated me as though I were a son home from college. She served fish stew loaded with vegetables, my first real meal in months. Captain Jack nodded as she talked of her day—the perpetually failing garden, a bridge game partnered with a woman she didn't like, the price of lettuce. There seemed to exist between them a pact regarding communication, perhaps the result of her life spent wondering if he'd come home alive. I complimented the food and asked what it was.

“Shark,” she said. “The captain's favorite.”

He laughed silently, then took me to a screened-in back porch, where he smoked a pipe. He turned the bowl downside up, a habit from the sea. We didn't talk although I sensed he wanted to. Being inland forced a shift between us, a minor tectonic slip we couldn't bridge. At ten o'clock he said it was time for bed.

He showed me to a room with a life-size poster of John Wayne on the wall. A shelf held a row of model cars and a dusty baseball glove. Propped on a desk was a framed photograph of a young face, stoic in a Marine dress uniform. Beside it lay a small box. Captain Jack nodded to the photograph.

“My boy died saving three men. Damn foolish thing to do.”

He opened the box, which contained a Bronze Star on a faded ribbon. “Fat lot of good it did him,” he muttered. “Or his mother.” He closed the box, replaced it in the exact spot on the desk, and stepped into the darkness of the hall. “Damn foolish,” he said again.

I turned off the light and stood beside the bed for a long time. I undressed, rolled my pants into a ball, slipped them into my shirt for a pillow, and slept on the floor.

The next day the Haitian was gone from the park. He'd been arrested for possession while I'd been at the captain's house, and the scuttlebutt was simple—I had snitched. No one joined me at meals. If I sat with others, they moved. Even Bucky became more formal, slightly distant, as if giving me plenty of lead rope. Captain Jack and I continued to work well together aboard the
Heron,
but talked less. He was gruff and impatient. His son had come between us in a way I never understood. Captain Jack seemed to resent my knowledge of him, the way a man feels anger toward a friend who saved his life.

My official poetry notebook rapidly filled with journal entries. Friendless and stranded as I was, the journal became a prolonged scream into the swamp, the incessant chatter of a man talking to himself. This was my most productive period.

Hot air falling off the African coast had found a low-pressure spot fed by chilly wind. Heat and cold spun into a tropical depression which moved across the Atlantic, gathering force, following the traditional path of storms. I was elated when it achieved storm status and the name of Jacob, Several times a day the radio station in Key West gave its latitude and longitude, which I charted on my small grid. As the storm failed to dissipate, I became more and more hopeful, staying in my room, listening to the radio. The announcer spoke in a slow drawl. He had a habit of pausing between phrases long enough for me to pose a question in anticipation of what he'd say. When I was right, it was as if he'd answered the question and I was conversing with someone.

“Where you broadcasting from, Joe?” I asked.

“This is Joseph Grady in Key West . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“. . . with an update on tropical storm Jacob . . .”

“Okay, where is it?”

“. . . four hundred miles offshore with winds at seventy-five miles per hour. The National Weather Service now calls it a hurricane . . .”

I heard a noise outside my window. Half expecting to see a tidal wave pushed by Jacob, I jerked the curtain back. Dirt stood behind the glass. “Narc!” he snarled, showing both his middle fingers. “Fucking radio narc!” He backed into the darkness, slapping mosquitoes.

Two days later Jacob was sixty miles offshore, bearing for the coast. Life in the park hadn't changed except that the hostility toward me had become quite open after Dirt's discovery of my radio. I ignored everyone and focused on the hurricane. At the ranger station I compared my small chart with the big one on the wall. The numbers matched but the pinpoints on the map were different. My route showed Jacob aimed directly at us, but the wall chart had the hurricane missing Flamingo by two hundred miles. I copied the official numbers onto a new graph, recharted the path, and compared it to the one on the wall. Instead of finding my error, I discovered the ranger's mistake.

I rapped on the office door. The ranger was hunched over his radio, sweaty and tense. I expected Joseph Grady's voice but heard only fuzzy static. The ranger smacked his fist against the desk and moaned.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “They walked him.”

I showed him the discrepancy and his face became pale as milk. He swallowed twice.

“I've got to tell the head ranger,” he whispered.

The tourists were evacuated. The ranger packed equipment and left at dusk. Bucky decided to wait another forty-eight hours to save the expense of lodging employees in Miami hotels. Jacob moved thirty miles closer. Joe Grady warned that traffic out of the Keys was very heavy, and drivers should be careful. The sky was dark gray, the weather incredibly calm. The surf rose all day.

The next morning, Jacob sprawled like a monster on the horizon. At noon the hurricane's perimeter swept over the swamp in wind and rain. Strange wet leaves pasted themselves to every surface. The water had risen six feet, but it seemed as if the land had sunk. Employees formed a convoy that I was not asked to join. Dirt led the procession into the mangroves.

I went to my room and wrote a will, leaving everything to my brother, I tried to write a poem but couldn't get past the title—“Blue Flamingo.” I bundled my journal in a plastic garbage bag, put on a poncho, and carried the package outside. I had never felt so calm. Jacob was closer now. I climbed the superstructure of the breezeway to a roof support. The bay below chopped white, full of sticks. I tied my package behind a steel post facing away from the sea, toward the rest of America.

Years ago, I'd left. Kentucky and set into motion a pattern of repetitive exile that had ended by dropping me into a rapidly sinking swamp. I had entered the world to become a man and wound up truly caring about very little. Most of my life had been a sequence of halfhearted attempts at self-destruction. Somehow I'd always scampered away—you can't get me, I'm the gingerbread man. Now I faced a worthy death, a death of honor in the face of a stormy god. I felt as if I'd summoned the hurricane like a farmer calling hogs, or a shaman making rain. Jacob was coming for me and I would meet him freely. Hoka hey.

During a brief period of calm, I heard Dirt's big Harley in the parking lot. Behind it came the cars. I dropped to the catwalk and asked why they'd come back.

“Roads are flooded past my waist,” Dirt said.

I looked at Jacob hulking twenty-five miles away. He had turned us into an island. An arm of rain lashed my face. Everyone ran for cover and I began to laugh. No one had rain gear except me.

I stayed on the breezeway past dark and watched Dirt and Slim break into the bar. They made three trips, carrying out beer and liquor by the case, giggling insanely the entire time. The night was black as a cow's insides. Bored by my death vigil and exhausted from tensing against the wind, I left the breezeway. Through an open door to a room I saw several people naked, each holding a bottle of liquor.

I went to my room and woke with the sea twenty feet from my back door. Joe Grady told me the hurricane had stopped sixteen miles from the tip of Florida. I dressed and pulled on my poncho. Outside, Rafe was calmly vomiting, wearing only a bra. In the dining room two people ate peaches from a can while drinking beer. I fixed a sandwich and walked to the edge of land.

The eye of a hurricane is big enough for planes to fly into. From this central axis extend dozens of spiral arms composed of wind and rain. The farther they are from the hub, the more they blend together. With Jacob's eye so close, each arm was distinct from the rest. As the hurricane spun, one arm after another struck the coast, like spokes in a wagon wheel. Three minutes of incredibly fierce wind brought on a horizontal rain of pellets the size of rocks. The rain stopped abruptly, followed by three minutes of absolute calm between the arms. Then the cycle repeated.

I sat a few feet from the ocean and watched the horizon turn dark on the left side, clear on the right. As the hurricane rotated,* the colors switched sides. The sky seemed to spin like a top, flashing black and white. Time moved in a hypnotic cycle of wind rain calm, wind rain calm. The periods of utter calm were the most frightening, a feint before Jacob delivered another blast of power.

A large pelican tried to fly against the wind. Though it was a few feet from me, I could not hear the sound of its heavy wings. The bird appeared suspended in midair, unable to go forward regardless of effort. A sudden gust hurled it to the ground with killing force.

Night arrived early and I returned to the dining room for food. Shards of broken whiskey bottles glittered underfoot. Mold had already begun to form on the half-eaten food that lay on the tables and floor. Someone slept in a corner. Dirt sat in a folding chair like lost royalty in a demented kingdom, legs open to accommodate Vickie Uno woman on her knees before him. Her head rose and fell. Rafe crouched beside her. “Not bad,” he was saying. “Use your neck, not your shoulders.”

I made a sandwich, found some carrots, and went to the breezeway. The shadow of my wrapped notebook clung to the steel brace like a cocoon. The lulling, calm was at hand, a warm night in the tropics. From the bay below came the sound of the
Heron
steadily banging the dock. The mangroves and ocean blended with the sky in a vast darkness, as if the world had turned inside out to create a cave. Rain battered my poncho like buckshot. Water gushed along the breezeway.

I lifted my hands into the air as wind came from every direction, twisting the poncho around my face. A tremendous gust lifted my feet. My body tipped over the bay, held by wind to the railing, while my legs lifted behind me. For several seconds I hung in the air, waiting for the blast that would crush me like the pelican. I screamed at the hurricane, daring it to come, cursing it for its refusal.

The wind shifted and my legs dropped, knees striking the concrete. Another gust pinned me to the rail. I shrieked, unable to hear myself. The wind slowed as Jacob's tentacle followed its spiral path. In the sudden rain I realized I was crying, utterly frustrated by my failure to be defeated. I went to my room and took a shower for the first time in three days. My eyes hurt from airborne grit. I turned off the radio and lay shivering in bed, disappointed to be stuck with life.

Jacob was gone by morning.

Sunlight sparkled the water beneath a pristine sky. The hurricane had sucked the clouds into its bowels and the air was clear as that of a desert. The water had receded a few feet, leaving sodden mud where grass had been, flecked with debris. The
Heron's
awning was stripped away. The boat held three feet of water in which a long snake swam from port to starboard, seeking exit. Dead fish lay on land. As I climbed the steps of the breezeway, an alligator walked across the parking lot, tail scraping the tar, an egret in its mouth.

The bay lay motionless, filled with trees, planks, and a dead manatee. I shinnied up the framework for my notebook. It was damp but safe. In the dining room Bucky and Dirt were sweeping the floor. Bucky grinned at me.

“Knew we were fine,” he said.

“Shut up,” Dirt said. “My head hurts.”

Rafe squealed from the kitchen amid the sound of stainless steel pots crashing to the floor. Another voice began yelling in Spanish.

“Grab a broom,” Bucky said to me.

“I'm quitting.”

“Now's the best time to be here,” he said. “No bugs. No tourists. No humidity.”

“You owe me for six days.”

“The hurricane doesn't count.”

I stepped close enough that he couldn't wield the broom.

“It counts,” I said.

Bucky tried to grin, then looked at Dirt, who stared at me. Both smelled bad and needed shaves. Their clothes were as dirty as mine.

“Six days' pay,” Bucky said. “What's that after room and board? About sixty dollars.”

I nodded.

“I'll give you time and a half to help clean up. We got us a triple damn mess here.”

I shook my head. Rose stepped through the batwing kitchen doors. Her eye patch was damp.

“You got no way to leave,” she said. “If you don't work here, you're nothing but a tourist. You'll have to rent a room.”

“How much is a room?”

“About sixty dollars.”

Dirt watched me carefully. I looked at the wreckage in the room, knew the park would stink from rotting animals by nightfall. None of it had anything to do with me.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay, what?” said Rose.

“Yeah,” Dirt said. “Okay, what?”

His expression was one of genuine curiosity mixed with anger. I looked at him while I spoke, keeping my voice flat. Any trouble would come from him. I didn't really care, but I didn't need a sucker punch either.

“All I want is my pay.”

“Suit yourself,” the woman said. “Pay him, Bucky. He better be gone by noon.”

“He will,” Dirt said. “With me. I'll draw my check too. I hate this fucking place.”

“Leave and I'll make a phone call,” she said. “The state boys'll be waiting on you.”

“I'll come straight back here,” Dirt said. “I can outrun any car they got and I'll ride my bike across your other leg. If you set me up, it'll be worth it.”

She stepped backwards and bumped into the kitchen doors. They swayed in, swung back, and bounced against her. She stumbled on her false leg.