Tropical Depression (7 page)

"I figured that."

"Want 'im?"

There was a pause. The sun hit the horizon, began to spill across the ocean like a broken yolk. The Indian looked flabbergasted and once again mistrustful.

Tommy regarded Murray, pushed his lips forward in a thoughtful pout. Who was this clumsy headlong stranger who talked too much and tried too hard, who seemed to be empty of malice and of bias, who fished with an ignorant purity and seemed as displaced as he felt himself to be? Who was this odd awkward man that would offer another a fine rare fish, the first fish he'd ever caught? The Indian gazed unblinking at the fiery horizon, then said, "Tell ya what. I'll take half the fish."

The Bra King had his breath back now, was mopping his brow with his forearm. "Half, whole, whatever you like."

The Indian hesitated another moment, scoured Murray with his judging eyes. Finally he said, "I'll take half, you take half. But if ya like, we'll leave the halves together, we'll grill 'im on the beach."

Murray couldn't talk. It was not uncertainty but the thrill of the new that stopped his mouth. A fish; an Indian; a campfire on a Florida beach he'd fled to by himself. Finally he said, "Ya mean we'll gather driftwood—?"

"Driftwood?" said Tommy. "Fuck that. Ya got a car?"

Murray nodded that he did.

"You'll go to the grocery, get some charcoal, the kind ya just light the bag. And while you're at it, grab a bottle of bourbon, Scotch, whatever. Something brown. Driftwood. Jesus, you really are a piece of work."

The demolished fish lay on a picnic table in a tiny unwalled hut at County Beach. Its head was still on above a naked skeleton. Its eye was seared opaque white, its tongue stuck out in a gesture of unconquerable defiance. Embers glowed softly in the barbecue grate nearby, red-hearted ash floated away on a mild breeze. Tommy poured bourbon from a bottle that had gotten pretty light.

Apropos of nothing very recent, he said, "Yeah, you're right, I'm bitter."

Murray nodded agreeably. He was smashed. He said, "Ya know, before I moved here, I really didn't drink much."

"I did," Tommy said. Then he added, "Aren't you?"

The Bra King ran a hand over his stubbly and slightly numb jowls. "Aren't I what'"

"Bitter," said the Indian. "I'd think anybody with a brain would be bitter."

Murray swigged liquor from a plastic cup, gazed off at the last mauve residue of sunset. Then he said, "No. I'm not bitter. I'm depressed."

Tommy Tarpon plucked a bone from the fish's carcass, picked his teeth with it. He knew the place Murray lived. He'd seen Murray's car.

"Fuck you got to be depressed about?"

"That isn't how it works," said Murray. "You don't get depressed
about
something. Not necessarily. You just get depressed."

"For no reason?" said the Indian.

"There's reasons," Murray said, "there's reasons. But the reasons are, like, a little indirect. Ya pay a shrink to figure 'em out."

"Then they go away?"

"Who said they go away?"

The Indian squinted off toward the purple ocean.

"But this bitter thing," Murray resumed, "you telling me you got reasons, crystal-clear, ya know just what they are?"

"You bet your ass I do," said Tommy.

But he didn't elaborate and Murray let it drop. They were solitary men at a dubious and bashful point along the road of possibly becoming friends. They weren't quite ready to talk about their reasons.

The silence went on longer than was comfortable. Then Murray said, "Hey Tommy—the Paradiso, you so much don't like it, how come you were there the other morning?"

Tommy drank bourbon, leaned out beyond the roofline of the tiny hut to glance up at the brightening stars. Bitterly he said, "I was summoned. I was summoned, and like a fuckin' jerk I went. Curiosity, I guess."

"Summoned why?"

"So LaRue could try to fuck up my life."

"Fuck it up how?"

Tommy plucked another fishbone, ran it along the skeleton, it made a sound like a fingernail on a comb. "Murray, stop asking me so many questions."

"Do I ask a lotta questions?"

The Indian didn't answer. In the quiet they could hear the soft hiss of tiny wavelets seeping down through sand.

Murray said, "If I didn't ask questions, your tongue would stick to the roof of your mouth, you'd get lockjaw, something."

Tommy coaxed a morsel of fish from the skeleton, absently scarfed it down. "Okay," he said, "okay. He wants me to open a store."

The Bra King rubbed his chin, scratched his ear, he didn't see what was so terrible. "A store? Zat all? Jesus, Tommy, the way you made it sound—"

"He just wants to use me."

"Use you how?"

"I don't know how," Tommy admitted. "But I'm not stupid. He's doing me a favor? Bullshit. Something he wants, some white-ass scam, he needs an Indian."

"Why an Indian?"

Tommy squeezed air furiously past his gums. " 'Cause Indians get certain crumbs that whites can fuck them out of. Cigarette concessions. Boating rights. The way it works, Indian front man signs the papers, white backers pull the strings."

Murray said, "Just cause it's a good deal for the other guy doesn't mean it's a bad deal for you."

"It would totally fuck up my life. Look, the way it is now, I do what I want. I sell a few shells; I fish. A store, there'd be schedules, records, cash registers, burglar alarms. All that white bullshit."

Murray considered. He'd seen some retail operations in this town. "That white bullshit," he said, "might make you pretty rich."

Tommy leaned low across his arms. "I don't wanna be rich."

Murray blinked at this novel sentiment, frowned down at his knuckles then looked straight at the Indian's eyes. "You sure?"

For a second Tommy didn't speak, Murray saw the slightest give in his bleary but steadfast gaze, saw for the first time a fleshly wrinkle in his bedrock certainty. "I don't wanna be rich," he said, "if it means I'm gonna be owned by these scumbag assholes who I hate."

The Bra King ran a hand through his hair, then sniffed his fingers and realized that they smelled like fish. "I still don't know what scumbag assholes—?"

"I don't know what scumbag assholes either," admitted Tommy.

"Then how do you know—"

"Murray, there's no shortage of scumbag assholes. Look, only Indians can sell these shells. One of our crumbs. That's why they need me. No Indian, no ball game."

"So that gives you some leverage—"

"But who's really gonna win this game?" Tommy interrupted. "The guy who's gonna win is the money guy, some turd who's in tight with LaRue. They'll throw me a few bucks, sure. But you think they're really gonna let me win?"

"Let you win?" said Murray. "
Let
you win?" He surprised himself by feeling suddenly feisty. He grabbed the bourbon bottle, poured himself a slug, briefly felt like someone else, someone tough and leathery. "Tommy, no one ever lets you win, I don't care if you're an Indian or a Jew or the fucking czar of Russia. You win because you win, because you find a way. And once you've won, you look back on all the scumbags who you know in your heart were rooting against you, working against you, and you think: How sweet it is, all you bastards can kiss my hairy ass."

He slammed his cup down, soaked his fist with whiskey, the klutzy denouement pulled him back to who he was. He looked at Tommy, saw a faint and furtive smile slip across his solemn mouth.

"Aha," he resumed. "Telling 'em to kiss your ass. You like that part."

The Indian's face was growing vague, but he did not seem drunk, just weary. "Yeah," he said, "I like that part. But Murray, I don't wanna spend my life sitting in a fucking store, and I can't stand the idea that my tribe dies out as the flunkey of these asshole scumbags."

"Maybe there's some other way," the Bra King said.

"Some other way what?"

"To make you some money without being a flunkey of asshole scumbags."

"Forget about it, Murray. I'm fine as I am."

There was a silence. The two men sipped liquor, looked at embers whose dusty glow rose and fell as though with the beating of some ghastly heart.

Then the Bra King said, "Hey wait a second. What's this about your tribe dying out?"

Tommy said bitterly, "It's not important."

"Of course it's important," Murray said. "Ya mean dying out, like, extinct?"

The Indian looked away.

"Jesus," Murray said. "Like how many people ya got in this tribe?"

Tommy just stared at him.

"You telling me," said Murray, "the tribe—"

"—is me," said Tommy.

"Jesus," Murray said again, and he looked at his friend like he was seeing a ghost, a prophet, a dinosaur. "What's the name of this tribe?"

Unconsciously, Tommy squared his shoulders, lifted up his chest. "Matalatchee. People think I'm a Seminole, but that's not even close. We're a branch of the old Calusas. The original Florida Indians."

"And proud of it," Murray thought aloud. "So you're not gonna be a flunkey and you're not gonna live on crumbs."

"No," said Tommy. "I
am
gonna live on crumbs. Seashells. But my own way. My way of saying, okay, you fuckers, this is all you're leaving me, this is all I need."

Breeze shook the palms, fronds dryly scratched. Murray put bourbon to his lips, had the sudden feeling that if one more sour drop passed his gullet he would surely retch. Instead of drinking, he said, "Jesus, Tommy, you don't make things easy for yourself."

The Indian didn't answer that. He put his hands flat on the table, lifted himself from the slatted bench, and said, "I'm tired, Murray, I'm going home."

"Just like that'" the Bra King said. Instantly he felt desolate, it took very little to remind him he was lonely and out-of-place and discombobulated. "We haven't finished our conversation."

Over his shoulder Tommy said, "No one ever finishes a conversation. That's why I think it's really better not to start one."

"But your tribe," said Murray, "the Hookasookie."

"Matalatchee," Tommy said. He walked to where he'd parked his clunker of a bike, and climbed aboard. With no farewell he rode away over the lumpy sand, his cart of seashells rattling with every bump.

Late the next morning, wrapped in the shade of the banyan tree, Tommy Tarpon leaned back against the Navy fence as a man in a turban and a woman in a sari approached his cart of shells. The man's face was the color of tree bark, as gray as it was brown; the woman took such tiny steps she seemed to be moving on mechanical feet. She picked up a lightning whelk and held it to her ear to hear the ocean.

The man smiled pleasantly, gestured toward the merchandise. "Verry beauteeful," he said. "These shells, some are same from Indian Ocean. Some I do not recognize. You are Indian?"

The wife listened to more shells, the husband slipped his fingers in a few. They were still deciding when a fat man in a sweat-splotched shirt approached the cart.

"Tommy," said the fat man, "I need to see your license."

The fat man's name was Fred, and Tommy had known him, distantly, for many years. He was a native, a Conch, whose patronage job consisted mainly of drinking coffee and eating greasy fritters as he made languorous and random rounds of Key West's souklike streets.

Fred screwed up his face to squint at Tommy's license, gave it back, then unclipped a tape measure from the moist and crinkled waistband of his pants. He placed the end of the tape against the cart of shells, ran it out toward Whitehead Street. "Y'only got a four-foot setback from the curb. That's a violation, Tommy."

The Indians, sensing the unease that goes with other people's problems and that spoils a vacation, sidled away, their money still securely in their pockets. "Perhaps we come back later," said the husband.

Tommy watched the sale depart, then said, "What is this bullshit? You see me here every goddam day for I don't know how long—"

The fat man wasn't listening. He'd pulled a stub of pencil from his shirt, licked the blunt and smudgy tip of it, and was writing out a citation. "Twenty-five dollars," he said. "Pay it at the courthouse. Another violation within a year, they take away your license."

The fat man didn't answer, didn't meet Tommy's eye. He put the citation on the cart, coaxed a wad of his trousers out from between his sweating buttocks, and walked away.

Tommy stewed. He stewed, he paced, he used his hip to bump his cart back one more foot, bring it grudgingly to code. He sat down on his milk crate, calculated how many hours he'd be sitting there to make the money to pay the goddam fine. He stewed some more, was still stewing when his attention was grabbed by the appearance of something unlikely and in fact ridiculous: Murray on a bicycle.