Heart of Palm (5 page)

Frank regarded his property. The house was a compact bungalow, and the parcel of scrub it sat on grew thick and unchecked, as it had for thousands of years. A dusty driveway led up to the house from Cooksey Lane, and the porch was unadorned save for two unpainted rocking chairs he’d salvaged from the trash of a rich doctor’s house in Ponte Vedra Beach, and his yellow kayak, suspended from the porch ceiling by two lengths of rope. Frank had bought the house in 1995 for next to nothing, and it still surprised him to be reminded—incessantly, in fact—by a real estate agent named Susan Holm, that his property value had actually increased. Significantly. Nearly every lot on his street was up for sale.

In fact, the property next door to his had already sold to a corporate banker not a day over thirty. On it, a two-story house was under construction, the new Mediterranean style, with terra-cotta roof tiles, wrought iron balconies, and a four-car garage. Frank wanted to gag every time he looked at it. The banker, who told Frank he’d commute to Jacksonville from his new house, came out every weekend in cargo shorts and ski sunglasses to walk the perimeter of his property and observe the progress of construction. He’d supervised the clear-cutting of the entire lot and the painstaking laying of thick sod that spread like a noxious green carpet and stopped abruptly at Frank’s property line. One Saturday the banker had broached the idea of sharing the cost of a tall fence between the two properties’ backyards.

“What do I need that for?” Frank had asked.

“For privacy,” the banker had said, looking around at Frank’s land, where the palmettos grew thick and unrestrained and the catbrier weed threaded through the oak branches. “And maybe to keep your dog in,” he added, looking at Gooch, who had in recent weeks developed a preference for fresh sod for his daily constitutional.

But Frank had declined.

The fence went up anyway, on the banker’s dime, and now, instead of the thick curtain of green Frank had enjoyed for so many years, when he stepped out his back door he was confronted with an eight-foot-high wall of pressure-treated stockade crap encircling the banker’s backyard. Every time he looked at it, he felt violated. He’d redirected a few sprigs of climbing kudzu to the base of the fence and took some small satisfaction in watching them begin to inch up the boards and around the posts, but it was taking a long time, and he was disgusted, so after a while he simply quit looking in that direction.

There were a lot of directions he’d quit looking in.

Somewhere, not too far to the east, a bottle rocket screeched. Already? Sun not even fully up over the pines and already the revelers were getting going, probably unpacking their long-hoarded stockpiles of illegal fireworks, lining up the empty beer bottles and filling them with bottle rockets and Roman candles, throwing cherry bombs and M-80s into the woods. Frank knew the drill. Fourth of July in Utina. If they were setting off fireworks at dawn, they’d be drinking by noon. Which meant they’d be half-polluted by this afternoon. By the time they got to Uncle Henry’s.

He climbed into the truck and headed for town. And for coffee. Whatever was going on at Arla’s house was just going to have to wait until he’d gotten some caffeine into his system.

The town of Utina, perched on the eastern bank of an uncharacteristically straight stretch of the Intracoastal, was an old man, testy and gray, with little patience for fashion and a stalwart commitment to function over form. The town was broken into distinct halves—South Utina, a rambling journeyman’s neighborhood of small lots and uninspired Victorian homes that had never been much of anything to begin with and were even less today; and North Utina, where Frank’s and Arla’s houses both sat and where the homes were fewer, the land was largely unchecked scrub, and the residents were more Florida Cracker than American citizen.

Whereas North Utina was where Frank’s great-grandfather Alger Bravo and his fellow moonshiners had lived, back in the day, South Utina was where the market had thrived, with poor whites and blacks living side by side for decades more through pure economic necessity than any idealistic racial harmony. Didn’t
nobody
have money in Utina, people said, no matter what color you were. You had money, you went to St. Augustine or Jacksonville, pure and simple.

North and South Utina were separated by the town’s main road, Seminary Street, which was once a dusty one-track trail leading out of the woods to a humble Spanish mission at the water’s edge. The name evolved years after the mission had disintegrated, when the structure was clumsily mis-remembered by Utinians, who neither knew about nor cared for subtle points of distinction between a mission and a seminary. Now, Seminary Street was a quarter-mile stretch of potholes that began at Sterling’s Drugstore and ran due west down a gentle slope into a concrete boat launch at the Intracoastal, which meant a man who’d been bending his elbow for a while at the Cue & Brew, a block back from the boat ramp, could drive straight into the drink without expending much effort at all. And some had.

Perhaps it was their birthright, Frank thought. After all, Utina, inauspiciously named for the chief of a tribe of doomed Timucuan Indians, had been known historically for two things: palms and booze. The palms, at least, were an honorable venture, destined for Palm Sunday services across the country. The orders came in the fall and early winter, and the enterprising and godly residents of Utina (and there were a few, back then) got to work. They cut palm leaves by the thousands, bound them, bundled them, and loaded them up on the East Coast Railroad at nearby Durbin Station. It was a booming and profitable venture, with the added benefit of a beneficent and sacred purpose. It was God’s work, after all.

But even God can appreciate a bargain. So when the palms of Utina fell victim one year to an unseasonably late frost just a few weeks before Lent, church buyers around the country turned their attention to a new palm outfit in Tampa, and there was nothing for Utina to do but sit back and give up the ghost, at least as far as the palms were concerned. This was back in 1929, and when the pious lit out for more civilized territory, Alger Bravo, newly arrived from St. Augustine, led a handful of felonious stalwarts in turning to the only other prohibition-era industry that made a lick of sense in a thickly wooded Florida hideaway on the banks of a marine highway with a straight shot to the thirsty coastal towns of Georgia, South Carolina, and beyond.

Moonshine made money—real money—but it was a short-lived success for Utina. Just when Alger and his cronies had gotten the complexities of production and distribution as close to fine-tuned as they were likely to get, Uncle Sam repealed prohibition and the pendulum of supply and demand swung wildly out of Utina’s grasp and back into the waiting clutches of Jim Beam, Jack Daniel’s, and Anheuser-Busch, whose industrialists had been sitting on their asses and making ice cream and barley syrup for the past thirteen years. By Christmas 1933, Alger Bravo had married, fathered three children, burned down his stills, and drunk himself spectacularly into an early grave. Bereft of a captain, Utina had once again thrown up its hands, heaved a collective sigh, and settled into a posture of civic and economic lassitude that became, over the years, a communal chip on the shoulder of the surviving Bravos and indeed the entire town. The main line of reasoning, Frank had gathered, was that prosperity was a train that simply hadn’t bothered to stop here, and there wasn’t any use chasing a train on foot. So fuck it.

But even the unprosperous had to eat, shop, pray, and drink somewhere. Alger’s children grew and settled, and the poor whites and blacks who’d been drawn to Utina for the moonshine stuck around for the fishing and the newly reopened bars and package stores, so the business district of Utina had grown lazily, stubbornly through the years. Eventually downtown Utina consisted of some two dozen small storefronts and businesses along the three-block stretch of Seminary Street. Sterling’s Drugstore to the east, which faced the stoic white clapboards of the First Baptist Church on the other side of the street, shared a crumbling roofline with People’s Guarantee Bank before giving way to a rambling string of businesses that culminated at a Lil’ Champ convenience store, just adjacent to the boat ramp.

It was a town, Frank thought now, as he idled at the stoplight at Seminary and Cooksey, that time had largely forgotten, though he had to admit there’d been some changes in the last five years. New paving and a wider shoulder on County Road 25, which connected Utina to the beach seven miles to the east. A Walgreens springing up just a few blocks from Utina High. More than a few Prudential Realty signs stuck in the yards of homes in South Utina, and a convoy of Hondas and Nissans making their way down from Jacksonville and up from St. Augustine on weekends to troll the streets, expensively casual couples wielding cups of Starbucks coffee, peering out car windows and calculating property taxes, homestead exemptions, and the distance to the ocean. And
this
—he squinted through the windshield this morning and across the intersection, where the whole southeast corner of Seminary and Cooksey had been clear-cut to make room for a fancy new Publix supermarket. Already the frame was in place, already a three-acre parking lot was staked.

Publix in Utina. It was hard to believe, though it
did
make some sense, he admitted. All of Utina, including Frank’s own wooded lot, was within a ten-minute drive to the Atlantic. And much of Utina, including his mother Arla’s house and Uncle Henry’s, the adjacent family restaurant he managed, fronted the steep shady banks and clear deep-water channel of the Intracoastal. There were moments when it appeared that the village might actually hold some appeal to buyers looking for dwindling slices of Florida real estate. There were even moments when it appeared to Frank that, for once, something owned by the Bravo family might hold some merit, monetary or otherwise. But who knew? History painted a different picture. Part of him could envision the Publix in five years, vacant and failed, snaking kudzu and catbrier weed strangling the whole ambitious venture. Utina’s tomorrow, more than likely, would be no different from Utina’s yesterday. “Because you can’t polish a turd,” he said aloud. Gooch looked at him, then yawned. You just make a mess trying, Frank thought, idling at the light, headed for Arla’s, groggy and annoyed and waiting for a change.

Ten minutes later, Frank stood in the center of the Lil’ Champ, cursing his luck and hiding from Susan Holm. He crouched behind an aisle of shelves filled with bags of potato chips, pretzels, and pork rinds, and he peered out the front window, where Susan was jogging, making her way down Seminary Street toward the boat ramp, a long blond ponytail bouncing behind her. Frank knew from maddening experience she would run to the end of the rickety dock, stop, look left and right up the expanse of the Intracoastal, and then pivot and jog back up the street toward home. She executed the same ritual every morning, without fail, and why Frank had not had the sense to wait until after he knew she’d be safely ensconced back in her apartment over Sterling’s Drugstore before he came to the Lil’ Champ he didn’t know.

Another thing he didn’t know, couldn’t quite put his finger on, was why he was always trying to avoid her, had in fact been trying to avoid her since she’d made her unsolicited devotion to him known in elementary school. She was, by any measure, one of the most attractive single women in town, and most of Utina’s male population would have given considerably to be on her radar screen in any capacity. Frank was on her radar screen—no doubt. And he’d acted on it, too, on more than one occasion, the most recent having taken place last Friday following three sloppy pitchers of beer at Uncle Henry’s after closing. Susan had sat on his lap and had eventually convinced him to come back to her place, where the sex was jubilantly, enormously entertaining, but where the morning had brought with it an oversize portion of regret and apologetics, at least as far as Frank was concerned. She’d been good-natured about it, told him to come back for a rematch, anytime, but for Frank, Susan’s persistent propositions in matters of real estate, and in matters of a more personal nature, made him uncomfortable. It was ridiculous, he sometimes thought, that he didn’t settle down with her. She’d be doing him a favor. He watched her running. She was beautiful. She could do better. She turned around at the end of the dock and began running back toward the Lil’ Champ. He took a step to the left, made sure his head was concealed behind a tall rack of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Of course, there was always the chance Susan would notice Frank’s truck in front of the store and stop in to corner him, but with Susan, once she was in motion, tiny white iPod earbuds dangling from her ears, you could count on a certain amount of blindness. A blue truck, to Susan, was simply a blue truck, and she’d generally fail to make the obvious connection that the truck had an owner, and that the owner of the particular blue truck parked outside the Lil’ Champ today was Frank Bravo, the man who owned or had great influence over no less than three of the properties in Utina she’d most like to list. As if to prove this point, Susan jogged past the truck without a second glance. Gooch, seated in the cab, watched her pass, but did not attempt to attract her attention. Good boy, thought Frank.

“Ain’t nice to avoid people.” The voice was Tip Breen’s, and it came from where the man slouched, elbows on the counter, one hamlike hip wedged against the cash register and the other precariously balanced on a straining wooden stool. Tip had owned the Lil’ Champ for the better part of the last two decades. He’d lived in Utina all his life, a hometown poster boy, for Christ’s sake, master of inertia from day one, though he’d somehow managed to graduate Utina High with Frank’s older brother, Carson. Frank had often noted with displeasure that, given the unfortunate fact that the Lil’ Champ had always been the only place in downtown Utina to buy a few simple groceries and a cold six-pack, he’d been subjected to Tip’s questionable etiquette advice for pretty much half his life. When stopping in for a cup of coffee and a doughnut from the Plexiglas case next to the lottery tickets, Frank should have known that this morning would be no different.