Bone Island Mambo (2 page)

“Suspicions?”

“Bad press, I suppose. Zoning pressures, typical hassles.”

“Understandable in Key West” she said.

“And a promise for newcomers. Except with his sister at the
Citizen,
Butler Dunwoody’s probably gotten a few
breaks with bad press. We know about public opinion. Zoning’s negotiable. The banks and the permit people and progress inspectors shape the rules as they go.”

Julie looked northward, pondered the waterfront development area. “It happens to my family, too,” she said softly.

“But not recently.”

“You’d be surprised. The city knows that my father wants to see this succeed. He’s been giving advice to Butler Dunwoody. My sister’s husband has been a part-time on-site liaison.”

Julie’s father, Mercer Holloway, had been our representative in Congress for three decades. He’d brought in the military when the Keys’ economy most needed help, moth-balled the Navy base once tourism regained its strength. With the economy at rock bottom, he had methodically acquired real estate in the Lower Keys. When growth and inflation arrived, his foresight became evident. His white elephants became prime property. He had put Julie and her notoriously unpleasant sister, Suzanne, through college and law school. Divorced before he left Washington, Holloway had retired to Key West to manage his holdings. His son Gram had died four years ago at age twenty-six. Tequila and speedballs, and a widely acknowledged death wish.

“How are things at home?”

Julie shrugged. “Hasn’t been great.”

I’d never felt comfortable around Julie’s husband, Philip Kaiser. After six years at Tulane in the eighties, her undergrad and postgraduate studies, she returned to Key West and began dating him. Within a year they were married.

“It’s been a third of your life,” I said. “Same old outlook?”

She looked me in the eye. “Philip thinks expressing jealousy is showing his love. He thinks you’re hot for my bod.”

“I thought you might’ve settled that before you rang the church bell,” I said. “Or else he’d chill out, all this time.”

She turned away. “You’re not the only one.” Her eyes returned to me. “He suspects every man on the island. I thought a long time ago about going to Atlanta, where his
folks moved. But he’d have the same attitude there.”

“How does he pat you on the ass, with a paddle?”

“It’s not quite that bad. He’s a good business partner.”

“So you put up with it?”

“Philip fears scorpions, poverty, and losing me. Aside from that, he’s not a bad person.”

A silver Infiniti honked and drove past us. Julie waved. The windshield reflected blue sky. I couldn’t see through it, or the tinted side glass.

She changed the subject “You keeping busy?”

“Paying the bills,” I said. “I did eight days in the Exumas, shooting next summer’s fashion for some Boston department store. Skinny, snotty models, but fresh fish three meals a day. Then I did a magazine piece up in Alabama, a photo essay on the last year-round waterborne mail route in the country. Beautiful river in Magnolia Springs.”

“Did you stay at the Grand Hotel?”

Way out of my price range. “My friend Sam Wheeler, the fishing—”

“I know Sam.”

“He’s had a camp for years on Weeks Bay, where the Magnolia flows into Mobile Bay. I stayed in his cabin.”

“Weren’t you doing crime-scene work?”

“Part-time. Not much since last summer. I did a couple minor things for Sheriff Liska in December. The city hasn’t called since Liska moved over to the county. I don’t think anyone at city hall remembers me. How about you?”

“The last six weeks, I’ve been slamming deals, thank goodness. I ruined October. I sold a condo to three twenty-four-year-old boys. Twenty percent down on a pricey party pad. Like a three and five zeros. They turned it into a crank factory with an ocean view, making the modern equivalent of bathtub gin. They used the tub to mix methamphetamine. And, stink? The chemicals could have blown the whole complex out to Sand Key.”

“They part of the justice system now?”

“I don’t know about justice. They’re neck-deep in the legal system. We managed to annul the sale. Of course, my
commission flew out the window. I’d already spent the money.”

I stared at the new version of Caroline Street the three-story shopping arcade about to fill the last “vacant” lot between William and Duval. I didn’t begrudge Julie Kaiser’s livelihood, the real estate business. But real estate and cooperative, sometimes crooked city officials had redefined the island since the Nixon years, the buying, selling, and expansions, the tear-downs and the new developments.

“So,” she said, “why
are
you taking pictures?”

“My unending documentation. The island. The changes.”

Julie looked through the chain link. “By changes, you mean progress?”

“Some people don’t use that word.”

“When’s your exposé hit the papers?”

“The people who’d care already left town.”

“Why shoot die pictures?”

“Habit. I’ve got boxes full, packed away in closets. I keep them for me. It helps me put everything in perspective, the twenty-odd years I’ve lived here. Someday, off in the future, maybe I’ll do a slide show at the San Carlos. A one-night excuse for old-timers to drink wine and laugh.”

Julie rolled backward, poised to skate away. “Or else cry. But I want to be there. Put me on your invitation list, okay?” Her departing wave suggested some great secret between us. If one existed, it fell within the realm of ten or twelve years’ flirting, a great promise of attraction, and a handful of innocent hello or good-bye kisses at parties or in restaurants.

Ninety seconds later, Julie came back around the block, down Peacon Lane, past swing chairs on porches, railings and cacti, stubby driveways and trash cans. Turning toward Simonton, she grinned and shook her head: “You bastard. You upset that poor girl’s exercise regimen. Now she’s over by the Laundromat on Eaton, leaning into the wall, intent as all hell, gabbing on her cell phone. Probably her therapist”

I went back to shooting the new arcade. I repositioned myself two or three times, tried to minimize the maze of overhead wires. With the water table in some locations a foot below the island’s pavement, there are no buried electrical cables. I let my mind wander as I shot, to memories of the seventies.

Caroline Street had been seedy territory. Winos in piss-stained trousers slept on benches in front of the shuttered Fisherman’s Café. At the east end of the street, people lived in cars and vans buried under mounds of fishnets and nautical gear. And there’d been tough saloons on Caroline: The Big Fleet, an unofficial petty officers’ club. The Red Doors Inn, with its all-day smells of stale beer and the previous night’s cigarette smoke. There had been Friday-night bloodbaths, shrimpers in drunken, pointless frenzy, city cops on the offense, pot smoke in the air. I’d wandered into the Mascot one night in 1976, when Curly and Lil were onstage. Forty or fifty shrimpers were packed into the tiny bar. Curly had little hair, but a constant smile. He played a beautiful double-neck hollow-body sunburst guitar. With a voice as tough and lovely as Dolly or Reba or Loretta, Lil had belted, “Has anybody here seen Sweet Thing?” Curly’s solos rang of Les Paul, with a touch of Scotty Moore. I’d left in a hurry after a staggering fisherman in rolled-down rubber work boots pointed out my huarache sandals to his compadres. They hadn’t approved. Time to go.

I’d ventured down Caroline with my camera one Sunday morning in 1977. A derelict had staggered from behind the marine-supply company. Dried blood stuck his hair to his cheek and forehead. His tongue worked a section of gum where a tooth had broken. Convinced that I’d done him the damage, he came at me with a broken beer bottle. I’d lifted my bike in defense. His first slash popped a tire. I swung the bike, bolero-style. It ended there. Two oceangoing brethren intervened, confiscated the wounded man’s weapon, walked him back toward the docks.

Historical perspective is a study of contrast A generation later, the only action on Caroline centered a block east of me. Every sports utility vehicle in South Florida was competing for eleven metered parking slots on the north side of the street Every angler south of Jacksonville and not on the ocean waited in an outside line for a table at Pepe’s. Hair o’ the dog higher on the priority list than breakfast omelets.

Despite its lack of visible threat Caroline Street still felt ominous.

Change is certain in the Island City.

From the direction of Pepe’s Café, I felt concussions of sub-aural bass. Rhythmic low tones preceded a black Chevy S-10 pickup truck lowered to within four inches of the pavement No high notes that I could hear. Opaque doper tinting, a black camper top. The vehicle rolled on bowl-sized, maybe twelve-inch chrome wheels, tires the thickness of licorice twists. Hearselike and ominous, the truck radiated evil. It yanked me from my ten-minute photo jag.

Thumpa-thump-boom.
So much for a quiet Sunday morning.

A tourist foursome near B.O.’s Fish Wagon, blue-coiffed seniors in pastel Bermudas, favored the sidewalk edge farthest from the curb. The elderly men squared their shoulders. The women shifted their hands to protect belly-packs, to shield credit cards and cash, a move doomed should the car stop, a door open, a muzzle or blade wiggle in the yellow sunlight. The cockroach grooved past the seniors. The threat lifted, the weight of the ocean had spared a bubble of innocence. Then it slowed to approach me, to pass more deliberately. A row of three-inch-high decals across the pickup truck’s rear glass, alternating Confederate flags and Copenhagen snuff logos. In the window’s lower left corner a NASCAR competitor’s stylized number. A chain-motif license tag frame, also chromed. I thought, Is that gaping hole under the bumper a tailpipe or a sewer pipe?

The truck stopped. An increase in stereo volume as the
passenger-side door opened. Two pasty-skinned specimens exited. Ratty tank-top muscle shirts and identical brush mustaches. One tall, thin oval sunglasses, a Nike beret. One short with a spiraling barbed-wire arm tattoo, his face stupid, frosted with malice. Gold jewelry equal in value to a Third World annual income. I caught a whiff of fresh-burned hashish.

These children were not promoting a fair fight They had been to punk school, where experts remove conscience and install weaponry. They had grown up ripping chains from tourists’ necks on Duval, had expanded their talents clouting BMWs and Acuras up on South Beach. In some other locale, they’d be kneecappers on the docks, or brass-knuck mob flunkies. The only style twist they knew was to slide gold chains before they yanked, to slash neck skin, to leave a wire-thin reminder of that visit to south Florida.

If this social call was aimed at get-rich-quick, the pukes had targeted the right bike—my eight-hundred-dollar Cannondale—but the wrong camera. My Olympus was almost twenty years old. They probably weren’t thinking too far into the future. The bicycle would upgrade the truck’s stereo. The OM-4 would barely buy an afternoon’s buzz.

I learned years ago, aboard sailboats, that stringing cameras around my neck caused their straps to tangle with the lanyards that kept my sunglasses from going overboard. I got in the habit of double-looping camera straps around my right wrist. It cured tangling and kept my gear from going into the drink when a sudden roll forced the use of grab rails. I was about to learn the benefits of wrist looping when the snatch-and-grab boys play games.

The short one moved first; the tall one hung back. Some kind of tag-team strategy. Two sharks chasing a minnow. They’d stupidly given me a fighting chance, if I didn’t lose track of the malevolent tall boy in the background.

“You want this?” I said to Shorty. “Take it away.” I held the camera body upright, the lens pointed at him. My thumb brushed the shutter button. On impulse I pressed it
Probably an overexposed, out-of-focus close-up of his shoulder. Or one of his drug-dead eyes.

Shorty stepped forward. Watery snot glistened on his upper lip. He stuck out one hand, held the other snug to his leg. A four-inch pigsticker pointed downward, threw glints of sunlight. The kid stank like a bucket of onions and cheap aftershave. His eyes didn’t look crazed—just emotionless—but I felt sure that his long-term prep had included hurriedly crafted pipes, chemicals and fumes, clipped straws, and stolen needles.

Where was tourist traffic when you needed it? No pedestrians in and out of the Caroline Street Market? No Conch Train rolling by? Had some out-of-sight witness already dialed 911? I pictured the sidewalk seniors locked snug in their LeSabre, making tracks for North Palm Beach. I smelled bacon on the breeze, drifting down from Pepe’s.

Shorty’s open hand came closer, his other hand twitched. I heard clicks from ten feet away: the tall one setting the blade of a plastic-handled carpet cutter. I was alone. I hadn’t lived my life in constant gang-banger readiness. I hadn’t gone to dress rehearsal. I would either eat street and shed blood, or pull off an out-of-character survival move. A few days earlier I’d read a newspaper article about martial arts schools teaching courses on fighting dirty. None of it involved graceful, dancelike moves. Most of die techniques would have gotten you kicked off the playground, or banished from the team. I tried to recall the text of the article. Difficult, on short notice.