Gallatin Canyon (22 page)

“By the way, it’s sure nice nobody smokes in here. I can smell all that longleaf pine just like the day your granddad nailed it up. When you used to get us to do a little work around here, we’d run into those gumbo-limbo joists and break our tools and you’d just laugh. I think me and Raymond pretty much covered that old turtle route in that black Nova Scotia ketch we had together, a real little ship. We probably saw as much of the tropics as anybody.”

He looked off to one end of the room where the tall windows had darkened and a breeze lifted the long curtains. The four live bulbs in the chandelier were little help and Errol was at the point of thinking Florence had passed away.

“That last trip, coming across the stream in a northern gale, a big wave took Raymond right off the helm and away. I came up for my watch and there was no one at the wheel. Not a soul.” He delivered a hearty laugh but there was a scream buried in it. “I realize there are plenty of people who said it didn’t exactly happen that way, and I
hope
you believe me. But I got the boat home, got her tied up at the desalinization plant, and walked to Caroline’s house. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t going to
be
there. Well, what do you know about that, Florence? I’ll bet you imagined you were through with all that. I kind of wish you’d answer me or say something. I’ll bet you figured we had used you about up. Surprise, surprise. You know what? Just goes to show you, Raymond is the legend we all knew he would be. I can tell you that I have failed to make—uh, to make an appropriate accommodation. I am a drunkard and I really felt I better get back down here for a little visit, see what you had to say about all this, help a person more or less sort of
stand
it.”

Florence Ewing did not say a word. Errol could feel her opal eyes enter his soul. He knew that if he did not tell the truth she would not offer him absolution, and even then there was no certainty, no promise, no assurance that her powers would work or that he would ever be whole again. It had been half his life since he’d known what hope felt like. In Florence Ewing’s face it seemed everything was accepted as morning accepted light. He was joyous that he’d had enough mother wit left to make the trip, to place himself in the way of this illumination.

“Florence, you don’t have to talk.”

He rose from his chair and sat at the corner of her bed and thought. Carter and Castro were going to show the world we could be friends and they declared a race from Key West to Cuba. Errol and Raymond entered the race with no hope of winning, and they agreed they wouldn’t try to bring any souls back with them. The manifest showed just the two of them in both directions: Errol Healy and Raymond Fitzpatrick.

Errol couldn’t tell if he was talking or just thinking. Florence’s eyes took him in with even greater opalescence, and he wondered whether she was reading his mind. He thought he could hear himself speaking, maybe just part of this dream, a disquieting dream that suggested the possibility that he wasn’t even here at all, that he would be awakened by an attendant of some sort, someone he would be unable to recognize. He never wanted to be in any form of custody.

All the boats knew a gale was predicted. Everyone leaving the ship channel at sundown thought they would reach the middle of the stream sometime after midnight. There was a crowd by the coast guard dock, all the sunset watchers and dogs and jugglers there to see them off, grand prix yachts and cruisers and local dope captains in anything they could lay hands on, from J24s to backyard trimarans. It had the feeling of a big parade, with Errol and Raymond’s the only ship customarily dedicated to profiteering at the misfortune of refugees.

They were going to Cuba! The sun set behind them kind of cold, and for a few hours right into the darkness they were on a beam reach in fifteen to eighteen knots from the north, and the ketch had her rail right at the water, pulling a quarter wave higher than the transom. They had an overlapping jib that was almost too much for her, but this was perfect sailing for a heavy English ketch, and her rock-elm ribs creaked under her. They had a bottle of Courvoisier to sip, and Errol chattered about all the good things in their lives, all their tax-free money, and about Caroline and sailing forever and someday settling down with her, with their own crabbing pier for the kids, with a flounder light and maybe a picture album of the days when Raymond and Errol were young in a dangerous trade, when everyone they did business with had a gun.

At some point, Errol realized that Raymond hadn’t said a word. He was a very direct man, an honest man. He never spoke for effect and Errol had long ago learned that something was coming when he was quiet like this. Well, something
was
coming. Raymond said that he had never intended to join this race. He came so he could talk to Errol man-to-man. And what he had to say was that when they got back to Key West, he and Caroline were moving to New Orleans. That by the time they got back she would already be gone.

“Raymond was at the helm and I was sitting in the foot well with my back to the companionway. I could see all the way to the last glow on the horizon, and Key West was under the western horizon except for the loom of its lights. I felt I should say something. I actually felt I should say something
out of our friendship.
But nothing would come. I kept trying to picture Caroline, and she would come to me all outlined; it’s hard to explain. But I couldn’t say
anything.
I guess I thought we should go back, but if I said we should go back, that would really make it . . . really make it official. So I never said, Let’s go back, and we pushed on toward Cuba.

“At about two in the morning, the gale was rising and we put a double reef in the main, a real adventure because she had an old-fashioned boom that overhung the transom by ten feet, and getting the bunt tied in all the way to the leech was dangerous.” Again, the thought returned that he was not actually speaking and this was only a dream, but Florence’s gaze seemed to indicate absorption and whether he was thinking or speaking seemed not to matter. In fact, this is how he remembered it was with Florence Ewing. It was what they’d all looked for: the trance she’d cast from her past mysteries.

“The wind really came up fast, and since it was blowing against the direction of the stream the seas were bad. At first we could see the spreader lights of the other yachts, and then we couldn’t even see that and all around us it was just the black wave faces in our running lights. Without saying anything, I changed places with Raymond and took the wheel. He went below and stayed there for a long time as the seas built and the ketch began to groan under the strain and yaw worse and worse, especially as we came down the faces. Several times I could feel her try to broach, but I was able to head up and keep her on her feet. I later heard the seas had been over twenty feet. Boats were dismasted and
Black Magic,
a Great Lakes yacht, killed her helmsman in a standing jibe. One of the dope captains on a Stone Horse disappeared entirely, the only boat out there without a self-bailing cockpit. No one ever found the tin cans full of money he’d buried all over Key West, but his girlfriend went around in a haze, carrying her shovel and knocking on doors, trying to get in people’s yards.

“Raymond came partway up the companionway and I could barely hear him over the storm. He said, ‘The jib’s got to come off before we lose control.’ I knew it was true, but all this time I had been thinking, and I wasn’t sure if I cared whether we controlled the boat or not. As it was, I had trouble. Even twenty-five tons of oak and lead seemed to lose traction in those seas.

“Typical Raymond, he went forward hand over hand toward the foredeck. I kept her on course until he eased the halyard and the jib started down. I turned her upwind and the jib collapsed, Raymond on top of it lashing it with wild, violent exertions of his arms. I bore off, and as I did so we were lifted on a huge wave. We stayed atop it for a long moment, Raymond facedown on the foredeck, and then we started into the trough, which was just a long, bottomless hole. What had made me change direction? I felt the boat pick up speed as we went down and it had begun to yaw as the sea hissed out behind the keel. It seemed like it yawed harder and harder. The spokes on the wheel just tore at my hands, and either I lacked the strength or I—or I—it got away from me. The wheel got away from me . . . and we broached. The next wave buried us from starboard and the bow went under, beyond the forward hatch, then over the brow of the house. She stayed like that for a long time, and when she came up, the ocean was pouring off the crown of the foredeck. There was no one there.

“The Cuban came aboard in Havana and read the crew manifest. He said, Where’s the
otro hombre
? I said I came by myself. He left and came back with another guy in a green uniform with a machine gun. He spoke English. I said there had been a language problem with the first guy. I told him the
otro hombre
washed overboard on the western edge of the stream where it changed color. He believed me. I don’t think it’s that unusual to Cubans to wash overboard.”

The gardener came quietly into the room. Errol couldn’t tear his gaze away from Florence, because he felt any second now she might speak. He was hoping she would. She pulled herself up and looked at him intently, all phosphorus gone as her eyes blackened and some beads rolled off the counterpane and tinkled to the floor. Errol could tell she was going to say something.

“Are you with the termite people?” she asked. Errol didn’t reply and Florence repeated her question, this time with some agitation.

The gardener pushed past him and leaned over Florence so she would be sure to hear him. “They can’t come without they tent the place,” he said to her. “And they can’t tent the place if you in it, ’cause they pump it full of poison.” She let out a moan. The gardener spoke in a more conciliatory voice. “The exterminator been every week,” he told her, as if he was singing her a song. She seemed crushed at the news.

“Is he the one with his car all fixed up like a rat?” asked Florence urgently. “Has big ears on it like a rat?”

The old house on Fleming was the obvious choice, as long as they had a room with a tub available. He stopped first at Tres Hermanos for some supplies. The front door was wide open to the air, and a desk had been set up in the front hall. Here sat the clerk reading the newspaper, his treated blond hair swept forward from a single spot. Without looking up, he asked how he could help and Errol told him he wanted a room with a tub.

“No can do.”

“No rooms?”

“Not with a tub.”

“There’s a tub in the last room on the second floor.”

“That’s a
suite.
You said you wanted a
room.
”

“I’ll take the suite.”

“It’s not the same
price
as a room.”

“I understand.”

The clerk looked up finally. He regarded the paper bag from the Cuban
tienda.
“Is that all you have to your name?”

“Yes.”

“Usually, when we rent the suite, it’s to someone with a
suitcase.
”

“I’ll bet that’s right.” The clerk had no idea what a problem lay before him.

Despite all the heavy, almost operatic furniture and tasseled drapery, the room was recognizable. He remembered its old bare wooden bones, the sparse secondhand furnishings of that time, the Toulouse-Lautrec poster and its rusty thumbtacks. The names were streaming at him. The gardener had told him he was wasting all that noise on Miss Ewing; he declared that Miss Florence Ewing had upped and cleared out during a previous administration and wouldn’t know him from Adam.

The water made a deep sound in the old tub. Errol pulled a chair next to it and placed the bag where he could reach it. He filled the tub, calculating how deep it could be without the mass of his body overflowing it. The water looked so still, so clear, with light steam arising. He undressed and got in, sliding down until the water was as high as his throat. Errol remembered taking bread scraps to the birds in the small town where he grew up; and when he reached toward the chair next to the tub, he saw the birds again, how they rose in a cloud. He was alert enough to enjoy this slide into oblivion, to picture a million oranges rotting on trees as his mestizos dispersed into Florida barrios, and at first he confused the shouts he heard with those of his boss, the cracker, the juice king of Arcadia and citrus oligarch who made his life so wearisome. A cloud of blackbirds rose from the rotting oranges around a small man shouting in the grove. . . .

It was the desk clerk and two police officers, but the desk clerk alone, soaking wet, was doing all the shouting. “He ruined my beautiful hotel!”

One of the officers, a small portly Cuban, asked, “You call this a hotel?”

“Get him out of here! Pump his stomach, do something!”

To the skeptics in the emergency room, Errol said, “Must be some kind of bug.”

Grisly days at Keys Memorial passed slowly. The nurses knew what he had done and several considered it a mortal sin, a view that produced grudging service and solitude beside otherwise busy corridors. At checkout, the accounting office having assumed indigence expressed surprise at his Blue Cross. He started to explain but all that came out was
citrus.
He was too numb to speak and wondered whether he had done himself permanent harm. Perhaps I am now feeble-minded, he thought. But really his heart was lighter for having survived the outcome of a long obsession.

He spent the rest of the morning buying provisions. The yawl was just as he had left it, but for a light coating of ash from the island’s heroic burning dump. A fishing boat was being swabbed down by two Cubans in khakis and white T-shirts who from time to time tossed a fish from the scuppers to a pelican waiting modestly on the transom. The tide had dropped, leaving a wide band of barnacles around the pilings, and Errol moved his spring lines until the boat stood away from them. Provisions were stowed in the galley; the water he had acquired on the mainland was still in good supply. He washed the deck down with seawater, sweeping the ash over the stern, and checked his watch. The bars had just opened. He stepped off the boat and headed uptown, stopping at a phone booth to call his employer, the owner of the groves and juice plant. He told him he’d gotten a much-needed rest and would be back among the oranges in no time flat. He’d left the Latino crew detailed instructions sure to see them through every waking moment. “I’ll just bet,” the grove owner said, adding, “You’re the damnedest feller I ever met.”