Tropical Depression (11 page)

"Of course I'm taking pills. I'm a Jew, I'm taking pills. Come to think of it, why am I feeling so Jewish today? Ya know what it is? I saw you out there being an Indian, it made me feel more like a Jew. Is that screwy?"

"You see me being an Indian every day," said Tommy.

"Ya mean the ponytail, the vest? Due respect, Tommy, that's just bullshitting around." He pointed across the harbor, toward the backcountry. "Out there you were an Indian. I saw the pride. I saw the loss. But what I was saying, I'm saying I watched you out there, I thought about this thinning out, and suddenly I had the name for our casino."

He leaned far forward now and scratched his legs ecstatically. Dried pink lotion flaked beneath his fingernails, blistered skin began to ooze.

"I don't think there's ever gonna be a casino," said the Indian.

"Don't get negative on me,
bubbala
."

"
Bubbala
"

"
Bubbala
. Like Jewish
kemosabe
. But look, what's the problem? LaRue's leaving us alone, this Estelle person's handling everything, ya don't even need a lawyer—"

Murray fought off feeling miffed. "Why don't ya wanna know the name?"

"I'm, like, superstitious, okay? If there's ever a casino, you'll say the name, I'll tell you if I like it."

"He doesn't want to know the name," Murray said to the sky. He leaned back in his tilted chair, feeling like an astronaut

"And this
bubbala
thing," said Tommy. "I don't know about this. Who ever heard of an Indian called
bubbala
"

*****

That night, Murray took a long and itch-relieving soak in his master-bath Jacuzzi, then, from bed, he called his wife.

He wanted the atmosphere to be just right. He fluffed up all his pillows, made sure he had an unobstructed line of sight through his open curtains, past his balcony, to the yellow moonlight gleaming on the Florida Straits. He put a glass of milk and a little stack of cookies on the nightstand. Then he dialed.

"Franny? Murray," he said, when she picked up. '"Zit too late to call?"

"In hours," she said, "or years?"

He relished her tartness, burrowed deeper into his pillows. "What reflexes!" he said. "Bustin' my chops before y'even say hello. How are you?"

"Hold on," she said. "I've got
Streetcar
on the video, lemme turn it off."

Murray blissfully ate half a cookie. When his wife came back to the phone, he said, "Marlon Brando? Marlon Brando you'll turn off for me?"

"Him I can always turn on again. How's your depression?"

"Much better," said the Bra King. "It's been days since I've been publicly catatonic. Only problem, I'm getting low on pills."

"Maybe you could stop the pills by now."

"What're you, crazy?"

"Zinc is good for mood things," Franny said.

"Zinc is good for making garbage cans not rust," said Murray. "Medicine, they don't put it on garbage cans. Medicine, the doctor calls a fancy drugstore, you pick it up, there's a price tag says a hundred dollars stapled to the bag."

"I thought you might be more open-minded than you used to be, Murray. You told me you were changing."

Too late, the Bra King realized he'd been losing points. He frowned at his half-eaten cookie, squirmed against his pillows. "I am changing," he insisted. "Just not about zinc."

"What about, then?" asked his wife.

Murray thought and sighed, looked out the window at the moonstruck water. "I haven't checked the stock tables for three, four weeks. How's that?"

"I'd call it less than a breakthrough."

"Ooh," the Bra King said. "I got one: I bought a bicycle, I hardly use the car anymore."

"Really?" Franny said, and he could tell she was impressed. "You must look pretty funny on a bicycle."

"I guess I do. I haven't really thought about it."

"Haven't thought about it? Murray, that's progress."

Now he was happy, he rewarded himself with the rest of his cookie. "Yeah," he said, "I guess it is."

There was a silence, it went on long enough for Murray to fear that he was losing his momentum. He groped for more evidence to lay before his ex, more proof that he was not the same old cranky selfish lout he knew she took him for.

"But wait," he said, "I haven't told ya the best one. I have a friend down here, guess who he is?"

"How should I know who he is?"

"He's an Indian. Great guy. Bitter. He's got a claim against the government, I'm helping him pursue it."

"Helping someone, Murray? You?"

"Hey," he said, "what's right is right. With all the shitty things that have been done to these people?"

For a moment Franny said nothing. Suspicion edged into her voice. "Murray, I was married to you for twenty-one years, the most political thing I ever saw you do was buy stamps. All of a sudden you're an activist'"

"I'm not an activist," the Bra King modestly replied. "It's a personal thing, one individual."

Franny paused again, put a skeptical finger on her lower lip. "There's a business angle in this, isn't there?"

Murray's voice was a low wail of offended virtue. "Franny! The guy wants this little island where his ancestors lived. It's got whaddyacallit, mittens on it."

"Middens," said his wife.

"See, I knew you were interested in this stuff. This is why I'm telling you. Tommy, this guy's name is. You'll like 'im, you'll meet 'im when you come down here."

"Who said I'm coming down there?"

"Franny," Murray coaxed. "Wouldn't it be nice to see each other?"

"Not especially."

"Come on, you'll bring me zinc, magnesium, I'll suck the iron out of a steak knife."

"I'm going back to Marlon Brando now."

"Marlon Brando? When you could talk to me?"

"Sweet dreams, Murray, and don't get cookie crumbs in the bed."

"How d'ya know I'm eating cookies?"

The phone clicked softly in his ear, it was almost like a kiss good night. He drank some milk, happily he looked out at the ocean. He was making progress with his wife; he had no doubt that he was making progress.

A couple of mornings later, Estelle Grau, dressed not for field work but the office, appeared at Barney LaRue's Eaton Street headquarters.

She sat in a straight-backed chair across the desk from the senator, pulled her khaki skirt down snug across her ample knees, settled her clipboard against the mesa of her thighs. "Your constituent," she announced robustly, "seems to have a legitimate claim."

LaRue smiled like he'd just been paid a personal compliment. Estelle couldn't help noticing how uncannily the smile matched the many others that grinned back from the pictures on the walls, the overflow of pictures that would not fit on the walls of the study in his penthouse.

"The Matalatchee do seem to be an offshoot of the Calusa," she went on, "perhaps a variant in name of a former Gulf Coast tribe called Apalachee. The main branch of the Calusa was pretty well wiped out by 1800—mostly from diseases brought by the Spanish. But a few sub-clans hung on, mostly living in the Everglades. That lasted until the Second Seminole War of 1835. The clans didn't want to fight alongside the Seminoles, who historically were enemies. They couldn't flee north against the white army. So they trickled south into the Keys. There were probably never more than a few hundred individuals."

LaRue feigned interest. He'd had a lot of practice feigning interest and did it very well. He cocked his head at the attentive angle of the Victrola dog. He disciplined his perfidious eyes to stay wide open. Now and then he nodded.

"Reservation records at Pine Hammock show quite clearly that Tommy Tarpon's family were not Seminoles," the woman down from Washington went on. "Shells taken from the middens on the island the applicant calls Kilicumba have been out of the water at least a hundred years, probably a hundred-fifty. It's very persuasive, all in all. So I'll be recommending to the Secretary that he recognize the tribe and cede the land to them. To him."

Barney LaRue was still feigning interest in the fate of Florida's Indians, his smile alternating with pouts of fellow feeling. But his mind had started wandering, he was getting a number of steps ahead of himself.

"What if he dies?" he blurted.

"Excuse me?"

The senator seemed as surprised by his question as was his listener. For just an instant he was nonplussed. He cleared his throat, strove to sound like he was being neither more nor less than thorough. "I mean, if the tribe consists of just one person ..."

"One person who's very much alive," Estelle Grau said. "So let's take one thing at a time. What I need to know from you, senator, is how much opposition to expect from the state."

LaRue unfurled his smile, light glinted off his mah-jongg tile teeth. He was once again composed and confident. "Expect none."

The woman from Washington shifted largely in her seat, rearranged her skirt with a touching jumbo daintiness. "None?" she said. "Senator, in all my experience with these things—"

Handsome, almost avuncular in a leering sort of way, Barney LaRue leaned across his desk. "Ms. Grau," he said, "I have been a Florida legislator for twenty-seven years. I know how to get things done in Tallahassee. You do your part in Washington. I assure you that in a case like this, where there are grave historic wrongs to be corrected, issues of justice at the forefront, the state of Florida will not stand selfishly in the way."

*****

Days passed; weeks passed.

In Washington, Estelle Grau rode herd on the bureaucratic beast that would process Tommy Tarpon's application. In Tallahassee, Barney LaRue sweet-talked, bluffed, and horse-traded with his colleagues. In Coconut Grove, Charlie Ponte waited to be handed the Indian who would lead him into the promised land of casino gambling.

The clipped month of February phased over into March, and in Key West the weather grew more reliably perfect. The breeze blew gentle but rock-steady from the east, as though pushed along by some slow colossal fan; the mercury hit eighty-two and stuck there, like all the thermometers had suddenly broken. Spring Break began, and Smathers Beach was paved in first-rate bodies from third-rate schools. Sometimes, when old man Bert the Shirt walked his stiff-legged dog along the promenade, Murray tagged along, and the two of them would appraise the youthful flesh—the buoyant chests, the thong bikinis—with the wistful calm of gallery-goers who'd been priced out of the market.

In the lengthening sunsets, Murray fished with Tommy, excess wattage crackling from their nervous brains, coursing through their fishing lines, vanishing like half-seen phosphorescence in the water. They had reached a point in their friendship that allowed for times—not many—when even the Bra King felt he didn't have to talk.

Then, one morning in the middle of the month, Tommy was asleep in his hammock when he heard somebody call his name.

The voice was smooth yet faintly needling, mellow yet commanding as it filtered through the houseboat's soggy planks. "Tommy!" it said. "Tommy Tarpon! Come out here, friend, and hear the news!"

Tommy was badly rested and slightly hung over. His eyes itched and his scalp felt like a garment that had shrunk up in the dryer. He waited for one more shout, to make sure he wasn't dreaming. Then he climbed out of the hammock, blinked against the slanting light from the glassless portholes. He labored up against the slope of the floor, and climbed the companionway ladder in his underwear.

Standing on the dock was Barney LaRue. He was wearing a blue pinwale suit and a beautiful red tie. His teeth gleamed and his upswept silver eyebrows shone bright as tinsel in the early sun. "Congratulations, Tommy," he said. "You've been recognized."

Tommy wasn't quite awake. "Recognized?"

"You're a tribe, man. A sovereign nation. You've got your island."

The Indian stood there, tired and numb, in his underwear on the top step of the ladder. It was great news, soiled somewhat by the bearer of the tidings, and Tommy was confused. Now that he'd got what he wanted, now that it appeared, for once, that the system wasn't going to screw him, he didn't know what to say and he didn't know what to feel. Pelicans flew low across the water, trees swayed on the islands across the harbor. He was sovereign, and nothing looked different from the way it looked the day before.

"Get yourself ready," the senator ordered. "We're having a press conference."

"Press conference?" said Tommy. "I don't want a goddam press conference."

LaRue spoke as if coaxing a sulky child. "Of course you want a press conference. Come on now, they'll be here in fifteen minutes."

LaRue looked down at his watch. "There isn't, time to get Murray. Now Tommy, please get ready, unless you plan to make your television debut in your BVDs. And do something about your hair. Make it look more Indian."

Dazed, Tommy Tarpon descended once more into his spookhouse of a cabin. Light slanted in, fish made tiny splashes in the sunken stern. He approached the table with two long legs and two short legs, threw water on his face from a chipped white basin. He regarded himself in the mirror that hung at an inexplicable angle from a peg. Vaguely, he wondered how it was that, back when he was one more bum, nobody ever woke him up and told him what to do, and now that he was sovereign, he was immediately being swept into things he didn't like by people he couldn't stand. He thought of resisting, but lacked the clarity of mind to do so; it was all too new, the granting of his application was too bafflingly at odds with the bleak logic of his pessimism. He picked up his comb, parted his blue-black hair precisely down the middle. He tugged it taut in back, tied it with a leather cord into a small ponytail. He pulled on blue jeans and the chamois vest with fringes.