American Tropic (2 page)

Noah clutches the microphone in his trembling hand and holds it close to his mouth. He leans back in his chair, takes a deep breath, and switches to a mellow tone.

“While you’re getting ready to put your sweet lips to the phone, let me serve you a hot cup of morning
amore
, get you in the mood with a beat brewed by our Cuban neighbors just ninety miles across the ocean.”

Noah punches one of the buttons on the broadcast console, starting a CD player wired to a pair of battered wooden speakers. A full-orchestra salsa beat from the speakers fills the pilothouse with an insistent throb. Noah
closes his eyes and sways to the seductive rhythm. He gets up from his chair. His arms reach out to an invisible partner, and he dances in a hip-strutting glide around the pilothouse.

Outside Noah’s anchored trawler, the sound of salsa cuts sharp as a musical knife across the ocean’s surface. With nothing to stop it, the music can be heard in the far distance to where a raft drifts. The raft is constructed from scraps of wood crudely lashed with fraying rope. Its sail is a patchwork of fabric stitched together. The ragged sail flaps forlornly in the slight breeze from a broken wood mast. Strewn across the raft are the sun-blackened bodies of men, women, and children. Their arms and legs are akimbo in grotesque contortions of death, the flesh peeling from their bodies, exposing white bones. Their eyes have been pecked out by marauding birds.

I
n a morning-bright kitchen, Joan at the stove hums cheerfully as she cooks breakfast. At the table, Luz watches her sixteen-year-old daughter, Carmen, brushing toucan-beak-orange-colored polish onto her fingers.

Luz shakes her head at Carmen. “Are you getting ready to go to school or to a nightclub?”

Carmen looks up, her long straight brown hair framing her face. She smiles. “Mom, I’m getting straight A’s.”

Joan turns from her pots and pans steaming on the stovetop and shoots Carmen a reassuring wink. “That’s
right, honey, you keep trotting those A’s home and you can paint your nails any color you want. How about painting each one a different color? Be bold.”

Luz loosens her stern gaze. “Okay, I get it. A’s equal painted fingernails. I’ll go with that, but no lipstick. I don’t want my girl wearing lipstick to school. It’s not acceptable in this family.”

Carmen screws the cap onto the nail-polish bottle and picks up her textbooks from the table. She gets up and kisses Luz on the cheek. “You win, Mom. No lipstick. I’m off.”

“And no tricks. Don’t put a ton of lipstick on when you get out of the house. Promise me.”

Carmen hugs Luz. “Promise, Mom. Jeez, no lipstick.”

Luz watches Carmen leave, the door closing behind. She notices Carmen’s plate of uneaten food on the table. “Left without eating again. She’s too skinny. Got to fatten her up on rice and beans and
ropa vieja
.”

Joan hands Luz a cup of coffee. “Don’t be so hard on her. She’s a good girl.”

“Carmen’s goodness is not what worries me. It’s the world out there around her that bothers me.” Luz takes a sip of coffee. The wrinkled look of concern across her smooth face doesn’t go away.

Joan nudges her playfully. “You were a wild teenager. Drove the boys crazy. You got knocked up when you were eighteen.”

“Nineteen, and it wasn’t boys, you know that, it was one guy. Twice he got me pregnant, I married him like a good Cuban girl—you know the story.”

“Sorry, hon, didn’t mean to bring that up. We won’t talk about him.”

“No, we don’t speak of the beast with no name. Story over.”

“But look at you now. A pillar of society, an officer of the law, and a cute one at that.” Joan strokes Luz’s short black hair and sings with a throaty purr, “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, my panther prowls for me.”

Luz tilts her head back; her worried expression fades as her brown eyes gaze up at Joan.

Joan’s hands caress Luz’s arched neck. “You want to fool around, panther?”

“You know I can’t on a workday.”

Joan leans over; her blond hair cascades around Luz as she whispers, “We could fool around and fool around and fall in love.”

“We are in love, my darling.”

Joan’s fingers deftly open the top buttons of Luz’s shirt; her hands slip onto Luz’s exposed skin.

Luz grips Joan’s wrists, pulling Joan’s hands away. Joan’s jaw tightens; her lips draw into a tight line.

Luz rebuttons her shirt and gazes with concern around the kitchen. “Why isn’t Nina here? Where’s Nina?”

“Don’t be such a cop on the job all the time. Nina is fine. She wants to get herself ready for school. She needs to be independent.”

Luz shoves her chair away from the table and leaves. She walks quickly down a hallway and pushes open a bedroom door. She looks inside.

Nina sits in her wheelchair before a dresser with a large mirror. Her fourteen-year-old body is frail, her torso shrunken, her head bald from chemotherapy. She turns around to Luz, her large brown eyes still luminous. “Mom, I’m glad you’re here. I need your opinion.”

“About what, baby?”

Nina holds out two long wigs, one blond, one brunette. She studies the wigs critically. “Who should I look like today? Marilyn Monroe or Cleopatra?”

“Show me both wigs so I can judge.”

Nina puts on the blond wig and purses her lips in a sophisticated pout. “What about Marilyn? Am I as irresistible as her?”

“Marilyn never looked so good. Maybe it’s a bit too much for school—but you look great.”

Nina pulls off the blond wig and puts on the brunette. She gives a sassy stare. “Am I as powerful as Cleo?”

“Yes, you’ve definitely got the Queen Cleo vibe going.”

“Mom, you can’t be such a pushover and like both wigs. Help me. Which one?”

Luz steps close to Nina in the wheelchair. She picks up the blond wig and pulls it on over her cropped black hair. She stares at her reflection in the dresser mirror. The light-colored wig contrasts sharply with the darkness of her face. Luz mugs a sultry expression. “Do you think I’m sexy?”

“Mom, you’re such a goof.”

Luz leaves the wig on. “Come on, do you think I’m sexy?”

“No. I think you’re funny.”

“I think I’m sexy.”

Nina studies Luz in the blond wig. “Okay, yes, you’re crazy nutzoid sexy!” Nina’s frail body shakes with laughter.

Luz pulls off the blond wig. “Baby, I’ve got to go to work.”

“Which wig should I wear, Mom?”

Luz wraps her arms around Nina and holds her tight, then strokes her smooth bald head. “I want my girl as she already is. Shining more beautiful than Marilyn on the silver screen. Braver than Cleopatra on her war boat.”

F
ar out on the ocean, the recorded beat of salsa music ends inside the pilothouse of Noah’s pirate-radio boat. He stops his dancing with an invisible partner. He sits back down on the worn chair in front of the makeshift broadcasting console.

Noah speaks rapidly into the microphone. “I still don’t have any calls from my intrepid pilgrims out there. If you don’t want to show me the rage, let’s talk about the Powerboat Championship Race starting from Key West Harbor this morning. Those boats burn enough fuel in one race to fly a jumbo jet across the Atlantic. Hey, let’s not sweat the carbon emissions. Let’s disregard a monstrous guzzle of fossil fuel from the tit of Mother Earth when the scent of blood sport is in the air. Today, Key West’s native-son racer, Dandy Randy, is set to break his own speed record of more than ninety miles an hour. Problem is, Randy went missing after yesterday’s qualifying race. Where’s Randy? Holed up in a poker parlor? Adrift in puke after a night of prowling sleazy bars? At the bottom of the sea, entangled in a net with dead turtles? What’s up with Randy? What’s
up with the turtle slaughter? Sea turtles are being killed by gill nets and long hook-lines by the millions. Show me the rage!”

In front of Noah, on the console’s instrument panel, three cell phones are wired into battered wood speakers. A light flashes red on one of the phones, signaling an incoming call.

Noah presses the answer button. “I’ve reeled in my first caller. I hope you’re a whopper.”

A male voice booms from the speakers. “Hey, Truth Dog, I’ve been listening since you started your pirate-radio gig a year ago. You’re so righteous to call out those macho joystick powerboat racers like Candy Bambi.”

“Dandy Randy.”

“Whatever. Were you around back in the eighties, when Key West was Dodge City on the Gulf Stream? Totally lawless time, cocaine smuggling and high jinks par
excellente
!”

“I was getting my degree in environmental law up in Miami then, but Key West has always been a pirate island, stolen treasures off of wrecked ships lured by false lights onto the reef offshore, rumrunners, gunrunners, drug runners, any kind of contraband. What ruined your little paradise?”

“Not the smuggling. It’s that Key West isn’t a fishing port anymore. The shrimpers and their boats were kicked out to put in seaside condos. Hordes of tourists driving down here on the Overseas Highway. Giant cruise ships spitting out thousands of passengers. It’s the tourists who are killing the coral reef offshore of Key West.”

“Now you’re showing some rage. But tourists, you think they’re killing America’s only continental reef? You
think they’re killing a two-hundred-forty-million-year-old reef?”

“Hell, yeah!”

“No! Coral die-off is caused by the thermal stress of ocean warming. Added to this is the ocean dumping of toxic pesticides and chemicals. I want to expose the real culprits. I want to peel the lies off of their greedy hides, the same way the shark hunters used to knife-skin a shark with a one-bladed stroke. The reefs are the rain forests of the sea. Fifty percent of the Caribbean reefs are already dead because of warming, pollution, and net-fishing ships. Soon every coral reef on earth will be dead!”

Noah punches off the caller and clicks on another phone. “I can’t hear you, talk louder, there’s static on the line.”

A belligerent voice echoes through the static. “I want you to know, I’m a vet. I was in Vietnam.”

“Is that supposed to be a cause for celebration or condemnation?”

“Fuck you!”

“Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’m all ears.”

“Perm … ian Ex … tinc … tion E … vent.”

“Permian Extinction Event? What’s that got to do with anything? Happened millions of years ago. A volcanic methane-gas explosion that wiped out nearly every living thing on our planet.”

“It’s also called the Great Dying. It’s what you’ve been quackin’ about and you don’t even see the connection. It’s comin’ again.”

“Okay, Nam vet, I’m on the edge of my seat. Shoot me facts.”

“This time the explosion of obliteration will be man-made.”

“What’s the trigger? Nuclear war?”

“It’s comin’ from beneath the boat you’re floatin’ on, from the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico.”

“And you say it’s man-made. So I figure you must mean that—”

A thundering boom comes from outside Noah’s trawler. He looks through the window of the pilothouse. The radio-transmitter antenna bolted to the deck sways. The trawler rocks hard from side to side. Noah tries to keep the shaking electronic equipment on the broadcast console from falling. He catches his rum bottle as it tumbles from the table. He glances around, trying to figure out what happened. He looks down through the window and sees that a drifting raft has collided with his trawler.

The raft is filled with a jumble of dead bodies. From among the bodies a bone-thin teenaged boy, shirtless and barefoot, rises. His black skin is sun-blistered and riddled with lacerations. The whites of his startled eyes loom large as he stares up at Noah in the pilothouse.

Noah yanks the ship-to-shore radio mike from its holder and shouts: “Mayday! This is
Noah’s Lark
! Mayday!”