American Tropic (10 page)

“Don’t count on it. I see you with her again, I’ll toss you
into lockup, where your new boyfriends will be waiting for your white ass. Get the hell out of here!”

The man takes off running. The teenager climbs out of the car. Luz grabs her wrists and handcuffs her.

“You can’t take me prisoner! What are you doing! I didn’t do anything wrong!”

Luz stays silent. She marches the teenager to the Charger, shoves her into the back, and slams the door. In the front seat, Chicken turns around and puts his front paws on the seat separating him from the teenager. He cocks his one ear, wanting to lick her hello with his tongue. Luz jumps into the car next to Chicken. She looks into the rearview mirror at the teenager in the back.

The handcuffed girl stares defiantly. “This is illegal. You can’t do this. My dad’s brother is a big-time lawyer in Miami. Manny Munoz—you ever heard of him? He’ll sue you!”

“Let him sue.”

“And he’ll sue you for having this mangy mutt in a cop car. I bet that’s against cop rules. Hey, but this isn’t a cop car! What’s going on?”

“I’m not a cop. I’m a plainclothes detective.”

Luz starts the Charger and drives off. She hears the teenager crying in the back seat. Luz weaves through dark back streets until she arrives before the twelve-foot-high bullet-shaped concrete monument lit up in the car’s headlights. Bold black-painted words declare
SOUTHERNMOST POINT CONTINENTAL U.S.A.—90 MILES TO CUBA
.

Luz drives behind the monument, where the street abruptly ends and the Atlantic Ocean begins. She turns off the car’s engine and rolls down her side window. The ocean’s surface ahead is a black mirror in the night. A
rush of salt-scented air fills the car. She looks in the rearview mirror at the crying teenager. “You smell that?”

The teenager sniffles. “Please don’t tell my parents about my boyfriend. I beg you. He’s thirty-two. They’ll kill me.”

“Take a deep breath. Smell the air.”

“It’s salty.”

“It’s the air of Cuba blowing in from across the Florida Strait.”

“I beg you not to tell my parents.”

“That’s the air of your great-grandparents. People who immigrated to Key West in the eighteen hundreds with nothing and built a life. Hardworking people who had pride and morals. People who brought those qualities with them.”

“I’ll just die if you tell my parents.”

“The problem now is, no pride, no morals.”

“Listen, lady, we’re friends, right? I remember you at my Quince. You were there with your girlfriend.”

“Not girlfriend. Life partner. Love of my life.”

“Whatever.”

Luz turns on the car radio. She switches through the stations, playing rock, country, and Latin music. She stops on the voice of Noah coming in. She glances at the girl in the rearview mirror. “Do you know who this is?”

“Isn’t he that pirate guy?”

“Yes.”

“Nobody I know cares about him.”

“You should care. He’s about saving what counts. He’s fighting for what good is left in this world for your generation.” Luz faces the girl. “Listen to Noah, then I’ll let you go.”

“You won’t tell my parents about what happened?”

“I won’t tell them if you learn something here tonight.”

Luz turns up the volume on Noah’s voice.

The girl slumps in the back corner of the car. Her face turns sullen as Noah’s words crackle from the radio.

Y
ou’ve got to work with me tonight, pilgrims, or ol’ Truth Dog is going to sail away back home. We’ve got four endangered turtle species here in the Florida Keys: the leatherback, the loggerhead, the hawksbill, and the green. Why can’t we stop the slaughter? I’m waiting for your answer. Okay, here’s a pilgrim. Talk me some sense.”

A woman’s shaky voice answers. “I never called before. I’m so nervous.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“You know, uh, there’s been, uh, extensive scientific research into cancer. They’ve scrutinized Neanderthal fossils and found no evidence of cancer. Cancer only shows up two hundred years ago. It’s modern times that have surrounded us with cancer and …”

“Don’t stop. I’m here for you.”

The nervous woman’s voice becomes emboldened. “Remember when you said the dumping of toxic stuff by the military around the Keys might have poisoned the water?”

“Military’s been here since the Civil War. Ships, submarines,
fighter jets, you name it. Toxic dumping is our legacy.”

“Now we have abnormally high rates of cancer.”

“I always say, you want the true picture, you’ve got to connect the right dots.”

“The picture is,” the woman says, sobbing, “everything is being poisoned. People, coral reefs, sea life, everything is going to die of man-made cancer.”

“You’re right. It’s all connected. Next caller, you’re up. Connect the dots.”

A squeaky male voice begins excitedly: “What’s that ditzy dame talking about? She’s got cancer on the brain. Everybody wants to cure cancer, but it’s the witty bitty we should worry about.”

“Witty bitty?”

“The Key Largo cotton mouse. It’s on the official endangered list. It’s being wiped out by runaway cats from trailer camps.” The squeaky voice drops to a confidential tone. “Truth Dog, I’m reaching out my hand to you. Will you pray with me?”

“Whatever floats your boat. Okay.”

“You got my hand?”

“I got it. It’s sweaty.”

“We pray thee, Lord, to keep safe all your creatures great and small. Especially the witty bitty.”

“Maybe the Head Man up above will hear your prayer.”

“Oh, he will. He’s listening right now. He’s going to show you the light. Good-bye, brother.”

“Next caller. Go. I’m waiting.… I said, go.”

The baritone of a man’s belligerent voice slams through the silence. “I’m the vet who called before.”

“Welcome back, vet.”

“I saw bad shit in Nam. Shit that makes what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan look like a Disneyland ride. A famous photo was taken durin’ the Nam war. It showed a naked Vietnamese girl runnin’ up the road. Her village had been napalm-flamed by us. She was on fire. Blobs of smolderin’ napalm burnin’ off her skin. That stricken look on her face—fuck, man—that look! That was the look of innocence destroyed by our evil.”

“That’s it, show me the rage.”

“I was one of the guys napalming those Nam villages. I was nineteen years old. I still see that girl’s smolderin’ skin in my dreams, nearly half a century later. The smell of burnin’ flesh wakes me up every night.”

“The smell of rage.”

“I saw the same look that girl had in another photo more recently, when that oil well blew in the Gulf.”

“Deepwater Horizon blowout. Worst ecological disaster in American history. Total cover-up.”

“It was a photo of a pelican flounderin’ in a sea of oil. The bird’s body was drenched in brown slime, its wings stretched out, tryin’ to fly, but it couldn’t. Its eyes were huge with fear, like that girl’s eyes, that girl with her skin on fire runnin’ up the road. We’ve got to stand against innocents’ being slaughtered.”

“We’ve got to stand up to the war machine that runs on soul-sucking oil or our days are numbered.”

“That’s why I called before about the comin’ Permian Extinction Event. Next time I’ll call with proof that it’s all gonna blow sky-high.”

S
eagulls swarm in the sky above Pat’s shrimping boat as it plows through heavy ocean swells far out at sea. The boat’s long-poled twenty-foot outriggers are winged out on both sides of the vessel, their unfurled dragnets roiling the water. Pat swings in one of the outriggers and cranks up its dripping net. The net breaks the surface of the water, weighted with a squirming catch of pink-shelled shrimp. Pat pulls the rip cord on the net as it swoops in over the deck. A small catch of briny shrimp drops from the net onto the deck. She yanks off her canvas captain’s cap and whacks it in frustration against her blue jeans. She whips around to her boat mate, standing next to her. The mate is shirtless, the sun-darkened skin of his broad upper torso swirled with wicked-looking interlocking tattoos. He hikes his tight jeans up and takes a boxer’s stance in his white rubber shrimper boots, expecting a punch from frustrated Pat as she shouts: “We’ve been out here for three days, and all I get is a twenty-buck load of pink bug-eyes! I can’t even pay my fuel with that!”

The mate cocks a hand over his eyes and squints at the sunlight’s glare on the ocean. “Looks like your luck is taking a turn.” He points to a bubbling break on the water’s surface. A pod of fast-moving dolphins leaps from the water into the air, their bodies twisting in muscular turns as they approach the side of the boat.

Pat claps her hands together. “Hallelujah, let’s get some bait for the longlines!” She runs into the pilothouse and races back out with a shotgun. She takes a position on the prow of the boat as the pod of dolphins nose-dive back beneath the water and disappear. She aims the shotgun
at a calm spot in the water in front of the boat. She waits. The dolphins break through the surface of the calm spot in a gushing spray of saltwater; sunlight shimmers on their sleek, wet bodies arched high in the air. She fires a blast from the shotgun. Blood spews from one of the arched dolphins. The others dive from sight, leaving the dolphin with its side blown open floating on the sea close to the boat. Pat puts down the shotgun, grabs a long gaffing pole, and whams its steel hook-point into the floating dolphin. The mate short-gaffs the creature from the other side. Together they heft the dead weight up onto the deck.

Pat grins with delight at the mate. “Hurry, get that bucket of J-hooks.” She pulls out her knife from the leather holster belt strapped around her waist. She grips the knife and slashes at the dolphin’s thick dorsal fin, curved up high from the center of its back. The blade cuts through the fibrous veins of the fin in a spurt of blood.

The mate comes back with the bucket of barbed J-hooks. Pat pushes sliced bloody dolphin meat onto the hooks. She wipes sweat off her face and looks up. “Perfect bait—the turtles always think it’s drifting squid.”

Pat goes into the pilothouse and throws the engine switch. The engine growls to life in a loud metallic clang of firing pistons. She steers the boat out on a new course. The mate feeds the baited hooked longline off the stern into the slashed V-wake of the propeller-churned water behind the boat. The longline whirrs away into the distance, sinking from sight beneath the water.

T
he sun smacks down on Pat at the back of her boat; she is cranking the wood handle of the line-winch, which reels in the longline trailing in the water. The mate works next to her, hoisting the longline onto the deck. All the longline’s barbed hooks are stripped of dolphin bait. Pat keeps cranking the handle; the veins on her neck pop out purple. The last of the longline left in the water jerks, goes taut, whirs back out. Pat grips the handle tighter, puts all of her strength into trying to stop the line from stripping farther out behind the boat. The mate grabs the handle with Pat. They strain together, groaning as their muscles burn, holding the longline. The tension reverses toward Pat and the mate; they crank the winch handle harder. The longline in the water comes closer to the boat.