Tropical Depression (7 page)

Self-pity is like masturbation. It’s fun for a while, but sooner or later you realize how silly you look. I finally managed to stand up. I had no real thoughts about where to go or what to do, but if I stayed here any longer I might want to buy a bottle of Mad Dog and sing “You Are My Sunshine.”

I rode my bicycle slowly up Whitehead Street to avoid the throng a block away on Duval. The street was quiet at this hour. The crowds had moved on from around Hemingway House. A cluster of black men sat on a porch and looked at me without expression. I crossed US 1 and, on an impulse, rode by the Blue Marlin motel. It was a small, clean motel with refrigerators in the rooms and in summer months it had the lowest prices. It was just the sort of place a cop might stay. I didn’t see a metallic blue car in the lot, but that might not mean anything.

I dropped my bicycle in the breezeway outside the office and went in. The night clerk was a guy of about fifty. He was balding but he had carefully brushed the side hair over the bald spot and given it a dye job. It looked like the sofa in a disco lounge. He looked at me over the top of a copy of The
Advocate.
“Help you?” he asked dubiously.

“What room is Roscoe McAuley in, please?” I gave him my best business smile and let him look me over carefully for signs of a concealed nuclear weapon. He finally decided I might not be a terrorist, sighed heavily, and flipped open a book. “How is that spelled?” I gave it to him and he scanned the book for a moment, flipping a few pages and following his index finger down the columns on four pages before asking, “When did you say he registered?”

“Today. Maybe yesterday.” And maybe not at all, I thought.

“We have no McAuley registered,” he said in a very final tone of voice, and lifted his newspaper again.

I thought about saying thanks, but it seemed like a waste of breath. Besides, I didn’t want to shatter his image of the rest of the world. I walked out of the little office and picked up my bicycle.

And then I was stuck, because I didn’t know where to point it. I could keep trying the hotels. I could go home and call around to the two or three dozen other hotels where Roscoe might be, and they might or might not tell me if he was there.

But what it came down to was that I didn’t know where to start looking for Roscoe, and wasn’t sure why I should or what to say if I found him. I suddenly felt like a thirty-year-old man sitting on a bicycle in the dark. Maybe it was a good thing I never made Detective.

I pedaled home.

After the bright light of the sunset at Mallory, the night seemed dark and quiet. It was a warm night and the feel of it on my skin was soft. It made me edgy. I went past the rows of houses. Most of them had one small light by the front door, usually yellow, and a purple glow inside from the television. This was another sure sign I was in a resident’s neighborhood; only people who lived here watched TV.

The streets here in the residential area were dark and nearly deserted. Most of the people who lived here year-round knew better than to go out after dark. For one thing, you might run into some drunken optician from Wisconsin who wanted nothing more than to follow you home and drink you dry and then throw up on your couch. For another, our island paradise had been catching up with the rest of the world, and over the last few years crack had come to Key West. That meant that the number of burglaries, robberies, and muggings were doubling every six months. Unless you stayed on Duval Street you ran the risk of becoming a statistic.

In fact, as I turned in at the corner of my street, I thought I saw a figure slip over the wall around my house. I wasn’t positive, but I wasn’t taking any chances, either; not when I might otherwise stumble over somebody who would gladly remove my liver with his bare hands if he could get over half a dollar for it, fast.

With the thought of a little bit of action I felt alive again. The sour taste was gone from the back of my throat and I could feel the blood pounding through my veins.

I took a deep, steadying breath and slipped off my bicycle. I put it quietly on the grass alongside the road and moved into the shadow of a huge oleander that grew up from the corner of my coral rock wall. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darker yard. Then I moved across the wall as quietly as I could, slinking to the cover of my key lime tree.

From the lime tree I could see the side and back of the house. Sure enough, at the corner of the house, moving jerkily up to the window, there was a small figure. It—he?—appeared to be straining upward on tiptoe to look in the side window, which made him a lot shorter than the six-foot-high clearance of the windowsill. A kid, probably, strung out and wanting to see if anybody was home.

I moved closer. As I did, the intruder grasped the windowsill and started straining upwards in a clumsy chin-up. His toes were about six inches off the ground when I hit him hard, hooking a fist just above the belt into his kidney. He husked out, “Ekkk,” very distinctly, and dropped to the ground.

I quickly grabbed his right arm and twisted it around behind his back. He rasped a little moan as I applied pressure, forcing his face down into the dirt.

“Can I help you with something?” I asked politely.

“Awwg, bloody fucking hell—!” I heard, slightly muffled from the mouthful of sandy soil he must have been chewing on. The accent was familiar, even with the voice muffled. I let go of the arm and, reaching under, grabbed a handful of shirtfront and hauled upwards. Sure enough, I pulled a familiar face straight up and held it a few inches from my own.

“Hello, Nicky,” I said. “Lose your way?”

“Christ on a fucking bun!” he gagged at me. “You bloody fucking near killed me, mate! Jesus’ tits, my fucking noggin is totally bashed in!” He spat a small amount of dirty sand.

“Sorry,” I said. “Thought you were a prowler, Nicky.” I set him down and brushed him off. Truth is, he was so light it would be easy to forget I was holding him a foot off the ground.

Nicky Cameron was my neighbor. He was an Australian by birth and had landed in Key West by some mysterious process similar to Brownian motion that leaves so many strange, dissimilar people on our island.

Nicky stood just about five feet even and weighed a full ninety pounds soaking wet with a beer in each hand. He was mostly bald, with a few scraggly brown tendrils of hair occasionally flopping over into his face. The face was dominated by two huge brown eyes. In between them was a foot-long nose that hooked slightly to one side, and a chin so far back from his face that it looked like a second Adam’s apple.

How he had come by it in Australia I never found out, but somehow Nicky was stuffed with every existing scrap of New Age lore. He knew all about astrology, crystals, shiatsu, channeling, aroma and color therapy, Atlantis, astral projection, herbal medicine, and reincarnation. He ran a shop not far from Mallory Square that sold crystals, New Age music, posters, and other stuff you would otherwise have to go to California to buy.

Nick tended to mind everybody else’s business, but I liked him. He was a pretty good neighbor, and those are hard to come by.

“Bloody fucking hell,” he mumbled, rubbing his neck and spasmodically twisting his head to one side.

“Sorry, Nicky,” I said.

“Put the Neighborhood Fucking Watch back ten years, mate. Can’t go ’round pulverizing fellas.”

“Sorry, Nicky,” I said again. But I knew there was really only one way to apologize, and surprisingly, I suddenly felt like company. “How about a beer?”

His leprechaun face lightened a little. “Too bloody right, a beer,” he said. “Reckon you owe me a fucking brewery for that one, mate.”

He shook himself like a terrier, said “Right,” to himself half under his breath, and led me up to my front door. I unlocked it and he pushed past me, making a beeline for my ancient refrigerator. By the time I caught up with him he had one of the bottles of St. Pauli Girl open and one-third drained. He was staring dismally into the back of the refrigerator, shaking his head with very real pity. “Oh, mate,” he said sadly.

Half-annoyed and half-amused, I stared past him into the refrigerator. I didn’t see anything to object to, but then I didn’t see much of anything at all.

Still, what there was was very neatly organized. I was a firm believer in Tupperware, and the largest shelf was neatly stacked with five containers. They all had labels: Two of them said
CHILI—JULY 5
. Another one was
LASAGNA—MAY 23
. The other two labels had somehow gotten smeared and were no longer legible. But I was sure that once I opened them I could probably figure out what was in them.

There was also a quart of Acidophilus milk, half-gone; a quarter stick of margarine, a lump of very questionable but neatly wrapped cheese, and a jar of jelly someone had given me for Christmas almost two years ago. It was all very well ordered and about as appetizing as a gravel driveway.

“What’s wrong?” I asked Nicky. He turned those two high-powered lamps on me full blast.

“Billy, lad, old son,” he moaned sadly, handing me the other beer. “This is fucking close to tragedy here.”

“Why is that, Nicky?”

“The Frigidaire, Billy,” he said, raising a finger into the air and then pointing it at me. “The Frigidaire is the window to a man’s soul.”

I looked at him, his eyes gleaming mournfully. Sometimes, when he went off on his monologues, it was hard to remember how much shorter than me he was. I sipped my beer. “That’s the eyes, Nicky. The eyes are the windows to the soul.”

He shook his head forcefully. “Never say it, mate. It’s the fucking Frigidaire. If old Johnny Keats had one, we’d be off on it all day long, ’stead of those bloody awful Grecian urns.” He stretched out the last word in his uniquely Australian way,
eeeeehhhhrrrrnns,
making the word into a long moan against all that was prissy and awful. “’Course, ’Strahlians”—he meant his countrymen—“our lot have that all figured out. Look in the Frigidaire and you know a man’s soul. And, mate—” He shook his head again. “Mate, your soul is on the shit-heap. Aside from the fact,” he added sadly, waggling a finger at me, “that I will now have to run off to the Seven-Eleven and get more beer, and something decent to eat.”

That reminded me of my mutton snapper, still sitting in the sink. “Uh, Nicky, I got a good piece of fish here—” I stopped since he was shaking his head again, eyes closed to shut out my nonsense.

“A piece of fish. He’s got a piece of fish. Billy, old sport,” he said, reaching up to put a hand on my shoulder, “a piece of fish is not something decent to eat.”

“I like fish,” I said.

“Yes,” he said with kindly logic, “but you’re a bloody loony. Where’s your veggies, Billy? And some rice? To say nothing of all the proper and necessary nutrients found only in beer?”

“You’re drinking my nutrients,” I pointed out.

“That’s mean and low,” he said with rising indignation. “You half-killed me and now you grudge me one of your horrible, tiny, watered-down beers. No, Billy,” and he held out his hand to me, palm up, “the only thing for it is for me to buzz down and grab some decent grub. Otherwise you’re going to harm yourself, and I can’t allow that.” He shook a finger so I would know he was telling the truth. “You need looking after. So fork over, mate.” And to my surprise I found myself handing him twenty bucks, even as I wondered what the hell it had been about his company I had thought I wanted tonight.

“Fry up the fish, Billy,” he admonished as he capered out the door. He vanished, then stuck his head back in again. “You
have
got an onion, haven’t you, mate?” he said, and then he was gone.

I turned back to the sink and rinsed off the fish. Every now and then I wondered why I actually liked Nicky, but I always ended up shrugging it off. I liked him. He was such an improbable guy. He seemed to move at about twice the speed of everybody else and was so full of manic rationality it was impossible to stay mad at him. He always had everybody’s best interests at heart, and never stopped telling us all about it. Nobody could stay mad at Nicky, even after watching him eat.

He was one of those tiny people, clearly evolved from the ferret, who must eat twice their weight every day, and Nicky was not refined in his attack. He ate with both hands and a wide-open mouth, spraying crumbs in all directions. He had a lot to say on most subjects and could not sit without wanting to talk. That usually made for problems at the table. I spent most of my dining time with Nicky dodging crumbs, trying to keep them off my food as they flew out of his mouth and across the table, rocketing high in the air, bouncing off the saltshaker, careening everywhere.

Still, there was an incredible charm to the man. I had seen women twice his size fall helplessly into those gigantic, luminous eyes and follow quietly, without struggle, as he led them off to his battered cottage next door. I didn’t think he could make an enemy if he wanted to.

I put the fish into a large baking dish and squeezed some key lime juice onto it. I’d let it soak in for a minute before I put it under the broiler. I smeared on a couple of pats of margarine. As an afterthought I sprinkled some cumin on top, then sliced on my last onion.

As I put the dish in the oven, the front door banged and Nicky was back with a paper bag under each arm. The bags looked bigger than Nicky. He roared into the kitchen and flung the bags onto my rickety kitchen table, already unloading them and opening two fresh beers before I could even open my mouth to speak. “Here we go. Not much to choose up there, bloody awful store, but thank you Jesus, they had two last six-packs of Foster’s. Not that Foster’s is my first choice, you understand, but it’s the best we can hope for in this benighted cultural backwater. Cheers, mate,” he said and drained off about half of the squat blue-labeled bottle. He slammed open the oven door, slammed it closed again. “Fish in? Lovely. Now piss off,” he finished, shoving me out of my kitchen. He had things flying out of the bags and into pots and pans before I even made it to my chair.

I sat. I was suddenly exhausted, whether from Nicky’s unbelievable take-charge energy or from the letdown of my total screw-up with Roscoe, I couldn’t tell. I leaned back in my chair and held the beer bottle without drinking for a long moment. The racket from the kitchen was near the noise level of a Concorde taking off, plenty loud enough to bring complaints from the neighbors except that they, like me, were used to Nicky, totally charmed out of their natural hostility by his wide-eyed dazzling animation.