Heart of Palm (6 page)

“What are you doing, avoiding that fine piece-a-ass?” Tip asked, with characteristic grace. He was an enormous man, fat in the thighs and hips like a woman, eyes red-rimmed and wet, a strangely boyish thatch of straw-colored hair protruding from beneath a soiled ball cap. In school he’d been a moose, thick necked and powerful, but his physique had melted southward over the years, leaving him lumpy and pear shaped, rolls of belly barely concealed beneath dingy T-shirts and elastic-waist shorts. It was terrible. Tip grinned, showing off the gaping space where he’d had an incisor knocked out back in 1989 when, fully loaded at 2:00
A.M
. on a Sunday morning, furious over last call, he’d tried to gain entry to the Cue & Brew through a roof vent and had instead become intimately acquainted with the asphalt pavement of Seminary Street.

“I’m not avoiding anybody, Tip,” Frank said. “If I was, believe me, you’d be first on the list.”

“Awww,” Tip said. “Sweet. Somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”

Frank filled a Styrofoam cup with weak-looking coffee. He fished two Krispy Kremes out of the case, slipped them into a waxed paper bag, and approached Tip at the register.

“Why don’t you talk to her?” Tip said, staring out the window again at Susan Holm’s receding backside, which was now running east up Seminary Street. Tip made no move to ring up Frank’s purchases. “Tell her to quit selling Utina to the damn yuppies. She wants to sell your properties, you know. And I guess you
would
make a fucking mint.”

“I have talked to her,” Frank said. “I’ve talked to her plenty.”

Tip shook his head, pulled his gaze back from the store window. “I’ll bet you have,” he said. Then he changed direction. “When’s Carson coming up here?” he demanded. “Me and him, we gotta go fishing or something.” Frank raised an eyebrow but did not reply. He was quite sure that his brother had no intention of going fishing with Tip Breen anytime in the immediate or distant future. He couldn’t even remember the last time he himself had gone fishing with Carson. But Tip had already forgotten he’d asked the question.

“You hear who’s running for sheriff?” he said abruptly.

“Don’t tell me,” Frank said, raising his eyebrows.

Tip jerked a fat thumb toward a pile of campaign signs propped against a rack of porn magazines behind him. The signs were designed in a bold red-white-and-blue star motif, and in the middle of the largest star read the candidate’s slogan:
DONALD
KEITH!
FOR
SHERIFF!

“Jesus,” Frank said. It was hard not to laugh.

For nearly as long as Frank could remember, Officer Donald Keith had harbored a personal vendetta against the Bravo boys of Utina and their associates, namely Mac and George Weeden and occasionally, when they could tolerate his company, Tip Breen. Donald Keith was ten years older than Frank, which meant that just when Keith was eking out a career in law enforcement as a rookie cop on the City of St. Augustine police force, before he made the switch to the county beat, Frank, Carson, and their younger brother Will were beginning to act upon their birthright in the areas of reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, and brilliantly wrought misconduct. They were their father’s sons, after all. But these were issues of lineage and fierce, if questionable, familial pride that held no water with Donald Keith.
Do-Key
, they called him then, enjoying the pleasing rhyme with
donkey
and the added connotation of “dookie” the nickname brought with it. When the Bravo boys, bored and looking for entertainment, wandered south of Utina into the Oldest City’s jurisdiction, they generally guaranteed themselves a tangle with Do-Key, which was, Frank admitted, probably the real reason they went there in the first place. St. Augustine. It was a righteous old place, by God, proud and pristine, but that didn’t mean it didn’t need its cage rattled now and again.

The first time they met him, they’d come down to St. Augustine from Utina through a thunderstorm: the three Bravo brothers, Frank and Carson still in high school, Will in junior high. They’d been driving around downtown with a box of bottle rockets, waiting for the rain to stop, past the Fountain of Youth and the antique shops and the hallowed grounds of the Catholic mission. When the rain eased up they opened the windows to throw jeers at the costumed conquistadors at the city gates and whistle at the coeds at Flagler College. They cruised the plaza and circled back through the narrow lanes behind the Spanish Quarter, growing hotter and more restless by the minute. Finally the clouds cleared and they ended up, panting and damp with sweat, in the parking lot of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium, where the wet asphalt steamed. And then, after a while, Officer Donald Keith showed up, evidently to represent the interests of those neighbors who objected to bottle rockets being launched from Ripley’s up to the bastions of the Castillo de San Marcos.

“Move on, kiddos,” Keith had said condescendingly. “Take your little games elsewhere.”

“Okay, Do-Key,” Carson said, looking at the cop’s name tag.

Keith’s face had darkened, and he looked from Frank to Carson and Will and then back to Frank again.

“You get your asses out of here, boy,” Keith said.

“I’ll try, sir,” Carson said, twisting his back and looking over his shoulder in a comic effort to regard his own backside. “But I tell you, I’ve only got the one.”

Do-Key won that round. He kicked the unlit rockets into a puddle and hustled them out of the parking lot. Oh, but how many little dances had the Bravos shared with Keith after that? Do-Key chasing them down after Utina High beat St. Augustine at homecoming and the Bravo boys had celebrated with four boxes of Tide poured into the Fountain of Youth; Frank and Carson decorating the back of Do-Key’s cruiser with Care Bear stickers; Do-Key once getting the upper hand by catching them in the act of stealing a six-pack from the Winn-Dixie and slapping them with a fat list of charges, from breaking and entering to disorderly conduct, but then the Bravos regaining their advantage when the judge threw the case out on the technicality that Do-Key had forgotten to sign the arrest report. Each skirmish was a brilliant battle in an epic war.

The score had been approaching even in the spring of 1984, the night before Easter, when it was already hot as hell and only April, still the long scorching summer licking like flames before them. Frank, Carson, Will, and their buddy Mac had been fishing, just
fishing,
for Christ’s sake, in a beautiful little estuary behind the Nombre de Dios mission in St. Augustine, where the shadow of a two-hundred-foot bronze cross fell across the reeds and spared them, blessedly, from the sizzling rays of the evening sun. The fishing was glorious there, always. The Holy Hole, they called it, where every time they cast a line they pulled back a fat, wriggling crappie or bass, no more than a minute’s wait every single time. They caught so many fish they couldn’t even keep them all. It was perfect. Then along had come Do-Key, ready to put the kibosh on everything.

“You can’t fish here,” he’d said. His uniform was taut across his belly, and he bent his knees a fraction to adjust his crotch as he stood in front of them.

“Why not?” Carson said.

“Because it’s private property.”

“Isn’t it God’s property?” Carson said, gesturing at the mission behind them, the tiny chapel of Our Lady of La Leche crouching in the shade of the live oaks. “I called God,” he continued. “He said we could fish here.”

“Don’t be a wiseass,” Do-Key said. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Rough day?” Frank said. “Dunkin’ Donuts close early?”

“I’m busy, you little prick,” the cop said. “We got the Easter parade coming through here in the morning, and I got bigger things on my mind than you little Bravo shits. Otherwise I’d bust your ass downtown so fast that . . .” He trailed off, seeming to lose sight of the hyperbole he’d planned to use. “So fast,” he concluded.

“You riding in the parade?” Carson asked.

“I’m driving the mayor, butt-head,” Do-Key said, and Frank had smiled inwardly, noting how the cop could not resist boasting that he’d been handed this prestigious task, to drive St. Augustine’s mayor in one of the most well-attended events in the city. Driving the mayor in the parade was a big deal, no doubt, for any city cop looking for advancement and recognition. Even Frank could see this, and he noted the way Do-Key’s chin jutted up just a tad when he made the announcement.

“Congratulations,” Frank said, almost sincerely. “Congratulations, Do-Key.”

Carson snickered, and Will elbowed Mac.

“You call me that one more time and all bets are off, Bravo,” Do-Key said. “I am an officer of the law, and I’ve had about all I can take from you little pieces of white trash. Now get your sorry asses off this property. Go on back up to the woods where you belong.”

“I still don’t understand why we can’t fish here,” Carson said, but he threw the last crappie back into the Holy Hole and snapped his tackle box closed.

“Because it’s not allowed,” Do-Key said. “No fishing. No loitering. No assholes.”

Frank sighed. “Officer Keith,” he said. “Why are you always so negative?”

They left the Holy Hole and sat under the Vilano Bridge for a few hours, sharing half a bottle of Crown Royal and plotting their next move. They were only a little drunk, but it was drunk enough, as it turned out, because by midnight they were in the dark parking lot of the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, staring at the eight-foot wooden fence that encircled the park, debating the need for a ladder. By the time they emerged from the park, wrestling a four-foot gator, his mouth tenuously clamped shut with Will’s leather belt, into the bed of Carson’s truck and arguing over who would have to sit back there with it, they were tired, dirty, and sweating like livestock. So they parked the truck at the end of a quiet lane on Fish Island and napped a bit, though Mac, who’d drawn the short straw and was sharing a pickup bed with an irritable alligator, complained later that he didn’t get a wink.

Before dawn, they drove across the Bridge of Lions to the St. Augustine police station, where the lights were on inside the precinct and the parking lot was full of cruisers. They positioned Mac and Will as lookouts for officers who might leave the morning briefing early. Then Frank and Carson located Do-Key’s car, worked a little magic with a slim jim, and deposited the pissed-off, wriggling, shit-covered alligator into the front seat. The gator thrashed mightily across the upholstery for a few minutes, doing God-knows-what kind of damage to instruments and official-looking police equipment before settling down with a groan across the center console, its now-unbound jaw resting precisely on the driver’s seat.

Oh, it was beautiful. Epic. The best move they’d ever pulled. The thunderstruck look on Do-Key’s face when the briefing dismissed, when he came out at dawn to get into the cruiser for his big day with the mayor. The howls from the other cops, the way even the commanding officer grinned, stood with his hands on his hips and stared at Do-Key’s car, where by now the alligator had renewed its efforts toward escape and was methodically thwapping its tail against the cruiser’s windshield, a thick smear of mud and dung being deposited on the window with each contact. The way Do-Key had turned around in the parking lot, his face like stone, peering in every direction into the pale light of the dawn, searching for the Bravo boys, the only shit-heads who possibly could have pulled this off. They knew it, and Do-Key knew it. But they were well under cover, watching the entire proceeding from the rooftop of the building next door, Carson’s truck tidily obscured four blocks to the south. When the other officers dispersed to begin the parade preps and Do-Key still stood, scratching his head, wondering what to do about his unwanted passenger, the boys slunk away, breaking into a run once they’d cleared the vicinity, laughing, hysterical, jumping into Carson’s truck and peeling out of St. Augustine, back up A1A to the thickly wooded roads of Utina, where the morning’s light was now coming hot and sharp through the trees, where the fog was dissipating like smoke, rising like a ghost through the hammock.

They’d laughed so hard Frank thought he’d be sick. At home they ran behind the house and jumped into the Intracoastal fully clothed, washing away the sweat and the alcohol and the alligator shit. Arla came out to the concrete picnic table and stared at them, angry at first, asking where they’d been all night, but even she was taken with the levity of their moods and the sheer lunacy of their laughter, the beautiful abandon of their young bodies floating in the tide.

“You boys,” she’d said. “Mac Weeden, don’t let your mama blame this on me.” But she smiled, and Frank watched how her gaze lingered longest on Will, on his sweet, wet, round face, the way he blew a spray of water from his mouth, the way he clung to Frank there in the current, holding on like an infant, in love and in fear and in awe of it all. “Frank the Prank!” Will said. “You struck again!”
Will
. He was fifteen.

Now, Frank’s coffee threatened to grow cold in the cup while Tip stared out the Lil’ Champ’s window, watching Susan Holm, and Frank could almost see Tip’s brain slide back from his reference to Do-Key’s campaign to their previous topic of conversation: Susan’s ass. “It was me, I’d do more than
talk
to her,” Tip said. “You know what I’m saying?” The absurdity of this observation, coming from Tip, who was no doubt the last man in Utina Susan
would
talk to, much less touch, was almost enough to make Frank smile.