Whale Season (14 page)

“I should go then,” he says. Stands.

“Sure.”

He's standing so close, she can feel the heat of his skin, smell the peppermint Life Saver.

She leans against his chest, exhausted.

Trot puts his arms around her. He feels tentative. He's unsure if she'll run away from him again. Or slap him. But still he holds her.

“Nobody gets to stay forever,” he says simply.

The moment is awkward: a mix of desire, fear, and sorrow. Without a word, she kisses him. At first, the kiss is gentle. Then the wanting takes hold, then the grief.

He pulls her closer. She can feel his heart beat.

Underneath their feet, the crowd yells, “Touchdown!”

“I really have to move,” Dagmar softly laughs and touches the side of Trot's face with the back of her hand. He blushes. It's been so long since she's seen him blush. She's forgotten how beautiful his smile is, how gentle.

He kisses her fingers. She closes her eyes. He holds her in his arms, tightly, as if it were for the last time—because it is. He can't do this anymore. Can't love her. It's too painful. Too complicated. Now, there's Carlotta—he can't stop thinking about her even though she may be dead. Her voice like crushed velvet.

As if on cue, Trot's cell phone rings. It's Bender, he's laughing.

“Guess what pretty gal just walked into The Pink?”

Trot doesn't have to guess. He knows.

Beneath his feet, the applause is deafening.

Chapter 21

A
ll Trot knew for sure was that Leon and Carlotta met in Vegas.

She was dealing cards in a small place just off The Strip called The Desert Aire. The Aire had a worn aqua charm with an all-meat buffet. “Fifty kinds of meat!” the sign read. “Bar-B-Que. Boiled Beef. Chipped Beef.” All fifty types were listed in alphabetical order. Painted on the wall. That drew Leon in. He's a man who likes his beef, especially for “The one low low price of $6.95!”

Once inside the revolving glass doors of The Desert Aire, Leon knew he'd made the right decision. The place smelled of bleach and gravy, reminded him of Sunday dinner at Mama Po's. Made him feel lucky. Leon hadn't felt lucky in a long time.

When he first saw Carlotta, she was playing solitaire at the poker table. She had no choice. It was 4
A.M.
and the place was deserted. In the dim light, she was sequin beautiful. Low cut and longing. “I like a woman who defies gravity,” Leon said to her chin-high cleavage. So she dealt him in.

A couple of hands, he thought, then I'll move on to somewhere else.

But once Leon sat down he never left. There was something about Carlotta that he couldn't walk away from. It wasn't so much that she was beautiful—up close she wasn't that beautiful at all—but she listened to him in a way he hadn't been listened to in a long time.

“How'd that make you feel?” she'd say every now and then. She sounded as if she really wanted to know. After a while, Leon found himself talking about all kinds of things he never really talked about with anyone. Carlotta had that way about her. She was easy to talk to and that made him think that he knew her, made him think she was his friend.

By the time sunrise came around, Leon was losing money, winning a little, losing a lot more. It didn't matter. He didn't care. He figured that she knew that. Listening was her job, helped the house win, but he still told her about Grammy Lettie, Pettit's Alligator All-Stars, and his beloved Miss Pearl, “The Amazing One-Ton Wonder.”

“‘Miss Pearl, you sure are a looker,' I used to say. ‘You are my best girl.'”

“Everybody needs a best girl,” Carlotta said softly, and it made him wonder if she was anybody's best girl. Or used to be. Or wanted to be.

Then he told her the part of the story he didn't even want to think about. He told her about Miss Pearl and the night he waited with her for the men to come and take her away. How she seemed to know it was over. Her head on his lap. How she looked at him.

“You know,” he said, “I still got that straw hat. All these years.”

Then Leon coughed. Rubbed his eyes. “That's messed up, isn't it?” he said. “Some kind of messed up.”

Carlotta had worked at The Desert Aire for nearly five years. She'd seen a lot of men, heard a lot of stories, took a lot of money—it was her job after all—but there was something about Leon and his love for a toothless alligator that touched her. Something odd, she had to admit, but something sweet. He didn't seem like all the other marks, so she leaned across the blackjack table and wiped the tear from his cheek with her cocktail napkin.

“The cold-blooded ones always break your heart,” she whispered. Her hair hung away from her face for a moment.

It was then that Leon could see the scar clearly. He figured it wasn't an accident, made him feel sad for her. So he kissed her. At first, it was out of pity. But by the time he kissed the scar all the way down her hairline, Leon found himself kissing her because he wanted to. He was kissing her because of the steel inside her—the knowing how life can sometimes turn on you, but you have to keep going, can't give up—that kind of steel. He liked that in a woman. Didn't see it often. So he kissed her until the security guards escorted them both out of the casino. He kissed her until they tossed her purse out into the street.

But, three weeks later, Leon and Carlotta were all razors and elbows. Leon figured it had something to do with the lack of large oceangoing mammals in Whale Harbor.

“The longing for large aquatic life is a powerful force,” Grandma Lettie once told him. “Not an easy thing to get over.” Now he understood.

Had Trot known all this, the real details of Carlotta and Leon's life together, he might have stopped by Pettit's All-Star Alligator Farm, or what's left of it, just to take a look. He might have suspected that she was there waiting for Leon in the one place that brought them together. She was there waiting to start a new life.

But Trot didn't know any of that. Didn't even suspect it. How could he? Nobody had been to Lettie Pettit's in a long time, over twenty years. There was no reason to go. The former alligator farm sat at the edge of town, on a peninsula, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the harbor. Nobody lived out that far anymore. Over time the road had become overgrown by passion fruit vines, deep red and purple. They crosshatched the canopy of live oaks, knit them together like fingers. They make the road impossible to drive though especially in spring when thousands of monarch butterflies come to rest, their burnished wings beating.

And no one would come by boat. The shore around Lettie's house had always been too shallow. Sandbars and swift currents hugged the coast.

At least, that's the way it used to be.

During the past forty years, currents have eroded the shoreline and caused the sand to shift. Now, at that point in the harbor, there's a bayou with a thriving ecosystem. Manatees breed freely. Shrimp swim in the fists of mangrove roots. Mullets and grouper churn the waters.

And, perhaps more surprisingly, the sand around Lettie's house has eroded. The house, with its rusted tin roof, has risen. The four walls, the front stairs—it's all there.

It's not really a miracle, although it appears to be one. The house was built in the early 1920s; constructed tongue and groove from “junk wood”—cypress trees that were cleared to put in the roads.

Cypress is an amazing wood. Ancient Egyptians used it for their mummy cases. Medieval craftsmen carved it into cathedral doors. It is naturally decay and insect resistant. It was once used for water tanks, water troughs, and well casings. It has little tendency to warp, twist, or cup. It will last forever.

But in 1920, in Whale Harbor, nobody knew that. All they knew was that it was free.

And so, all these years later, the tiny cypress house stands again, level as the day it was built. Saltwater and sun have bleached it into driftwood, reedy as knees, and the tin roof looks more like a rusted doily than a roof, but the walls stand. And only a few windows are broken. It looks, more or less, just as Mama Po and Grammy Lettie had left it. The curtains, now shredded and gray, still hang in the windows. Underneath, flower boxes seem ready to be planted. The white picket fence is peeling and rotted in most places. But the entrance gate, a gate like no other with its gigantic gator grin, is only slightly diminished. It leans a little more to the right than usual, but it still stands. Its pointy teeth appeared decayed. Its faux-gator skin is bleached to a pastel shade of green. But its sign, “You pays your money, you takes your chances,” still hangs and is still legible. Still provides fair warning.

“It's not so bad,” Carlotta said when she first saw the place. She rolled up the sleeves of her old gray sweatshirt, adjusted the crown of red and purple passion fruit flowers that she'd made from the vines, and carried her suitcase up the walk. She never expected the house to still be here. She really thought that all she'd find was a gate and an old ticket booth.

But here it was: Grandma Lettie's. The moment felt like Christmas was supposed to feel—magical and kind. The house felt like a gift. Its bleached silver driftwood shone. The shaded porch was hairy with algae, but the front door was open and she took it as a good sign.

“All this needs is a little bleach.”

Luckily, there was still a bottle under the kitchen sink.

Chapter 22

E
arly the next morning a crowd of patients came to see the man who was known as “Bee-Jesus.” They lined up outside of Leon's door in wheelchairs, some with IVs hanging from poles. Some were on oxygen; hoses lay across their bellies like snakes sunning themselves.

Bill, the security guard, was called in for crowd control.

“Good thing you called me,” he told Nurse Becker who was still recovering from the bee stings; looked plucked like a fat goose. “You never know when a mob can turn.”

“They're in wheelchairs,” she told him. “Some of them can't even walk.”

He gave a grave look, pulled up his pants.

“Just keep them out of the room until I finish my morning coffee,” she said.

After the bee incident, Nurse Becker had refused to go home. The hospital was critically understaffed during the holiday season. They needed her and she liked to be needed.

“Can I bring you back coffee?” she asked Bill.

“Just take care of yourself,” he said gently.

“If you can get them back into their rooms, that would be good.”

“I'll do my best.”

“You always do.”

The thought that Nurse Becker saw him as a competent man inspired Bill. As soon as she entered the break room, he pulled out his gun.

“All right, everybody, listen up.”

His voice rattled the breakfast trays that lined the hallway waiting for sunrise. “This is a restricted area.”

And then he told the story of how he saved Bee-Jesus from the swarm of killer bees. He didn't really mean to tell the story that way, leaving out Nurse Becker's heroic act, but since he had everyone's attention, and that didn't happen often, and he did have a gun in his hand, as all good heroes often do, the story just came out that way.

“They were African bees,” Bill said sagely, his voice was nearly a whisper. “Killers.”

He said this with such conviction that even he believed it. And, as he wove the stunning story of his heroism, total fabrication that it was, the truth became so fluid, so embellished with such courageous flourish, that even those who saw the mountainous Nurse Becker with honey in hand save the day nearly believed him.

“I kept a cool head,” he said, and then aimed his Smith and Wesson at an imaginary swarm of oncoming bees. At that moment, he looked a lot like a tiny John Wayne impersonator at the shooting gallery of the Florida State Fair. “BAM! BAM! BAM!” Bill said over and over again. Quarter after quarter. No stuffed flamingos.

And when every last imaginary bee had been blown away Bill said ominously, “I tell you this story because I can't guarantee the bees aren't still around. They could be lurking in the shadows just waiting to finish this poor slob off.

“These are wily bees.”

Then Bill “buzzed.”

He buzzed, long, loud, and hard. He buzzed as if he himself were a hive of killer African bees. It was an odd, thin, unerringly unnerving sound. His cheeks turned fat as goldfish. His face went red. At one point he even closed his eyes, enraptured. Bill wanted to give the crowd a sense of the danger that he had faced, a sense of urgency, and a true understanding of his newly imagined bravery.

However, he just ended up spitting on most of them until they wheeled away.

When Nurse Becker came back from her coffee break, she was impressed that the corridor was empty. “I'll take it from here,” she said.

“I don't think they'll be coming back.” Bill patted his Smith and Wesson and gave her a “John Wayne” nod. “When I disperse a mob, they stay dispersed.”

Nurse Becker didn't laugh. She never laughed at Bill. They were both odd-sized people who knew what it was like to dream odd-sized dreams. “Thanks,” she said kindly, and meant it. “I'm sure they won't be back.”

“They won't.”

Bill was wrong. Once breakfast was served, one by one, they came back. They lined their wheelchairs up outside of Leon's door. They wanted to see him. Wanted to pat his head for luck. Wanted to believe in Bee-Jesus.

Leon, however, wanted to sleep.

“I don't understand why they're out there,” he whined to Nurse Becker. “I know Jesus and I'm not him.”

“Glad to hear it,” she said. “I know him, too, and accept him as my personal savior.”

“Has he ever taken you for a ride in his dang cool RV?”

She added a bit more Valium to Leon's IV drip. “Sweet dreams,” she said.

Ever since the fever left, it's been this way. Leon would remember something about his life, and Nurse Becker would tell him that the doctors don't want him to strain his brain too much.

“Darling, you've had quite a shock.”

“But I'm a Round-Up Cowboy,” he said. “Bob the Round-Up Cowboy. I rope them in.”

“Uh huh.”

Nurse Becker often made very long notes on Leon's chart.

For example, after Leon's postbreakfast nap it became clear to him that he was an heir to the throne of some small country. So he buzzed her.

“It just makes sense,” he explained. “I can't stop dreaming of kings and queens.”

“They'll be plenty of time to figure that out later, sugar,” she said, and added a tiny bit more Valium to his IV. “You have to rest your brain for now. Just sleep.”

Sleep is good, Leon thought. The drugs made him sleep in the most amazing way. It was a deep gentle sleep with vivid dreams in which he invents ways to fly without airplanes, or makes friends with tall brown bears who wear sunglasses and have a striking resemblance to Elvis in his pre–Las Vegas years.

Dang cool.

After a while, it became clear to Leon that whoever he was before his brain got shook, he's pretty sure that he was the kind of man who needs plenty of sleep. The kind who needs to dream dreams big enough for an entire nation—hopefully one in a tropical climate.

But people kept sneaking in.

“Hey! Wake up, Miracle Guy!” said Sam. He was the first one who made it past Nurse Becker. There was a bedpan incident in Room 201, lots of screaming and chaos, so Sam made a break for it. Rolled right in while nobody was looking.

Sam was twenty years old, a bleached-blond mountain of a boy. Also known as “Gator Boy.” This is not because of his school affiliation, although he'd been a freshman at the University of Florida for over three years, but because when he was sixteen years old he sucker punched a gator who tried to make him lunch. The gator was fifteen feet long and hiding under Sam's foster parents' pickup—which was inconvenient because Sam was trying to steal it at the time.

The gator lurched at the punch. Sam lost an ear, but KO'd the reptile. A tabloid reporter picked up the story and renamed him “Gator Boy.” And it stuck. He used to be known as “Bubba.”

Sam was a young man ardently confident in his own abilities. He had a likeness of his own face tattooed on his arm with the phrase “In $am We Trust” underneath it—which is a lot snappier than “In Gator Boy We Trust.” He also pointed out to Leon that the “S” in his name had been replaced by a dollar sign. “Cool, huh? That's because I'm worth my weight in gold. Coach said.”

Leon, floating on a tranquilized cloud, waved down at Sam and smiled like the deposed prince he knew he was. Said nothing.

Sam is what Nurse Becker calls a hard case. Had a football scholarship from Gainesville, and a high-powered sports agent, until, drunk in Miami, he lost his leg in a motorcycle accident on Thanksgiving Day. It happened right after the bowl game. He killed the girl he was riding with.

“She was just a fan,” Sam told the press.

A month later, all his fans are gone and his agent won't return his calls. But Sam keeps thinking he's going to play again, even though the doctors haven't even fit him with a leg that he can successfully walk with, let alone run. He's just so big he's nearly impossible to fit. They will have to have a prosthesis specially made, but Sam has no insurance, and no donor is willing to step forward. His family abandoned him long ago. The comment about the girl did not endear him to the public. So hospital administration is trying to find someone willing to donate a wheelchair so Sam can be released. After that, he's on his own.

“I'm star potential,” he told Leon when they first met. “Always been a star. It's only natural that I'd be the first NFL player in history with only one leg. The draft is coming up in a couple of months. If I'm in, I'll see that you're taken care of. I'll be rich. You'll be rich, too.”

Nurse Becker arrived before Leon could answer.

“Sam, we got to get you back,” she said and started to wheel the boy away.

“Wait!” Sam panicked, grabbed Leon's hand. “Look, man,” he said, “if you could just get my agent to call me back.” Then he placed his football letter jacket at the foot of Leon's bed. “Kind of a down payment.” When he said this, he sounded a little less cocky. “If you fix it for me, that jacket will be worth something someday. I'll be the first one-legged player in the NFL. When I win the Super Bowl you can sell it on eBay and retire.”

Nurse Becker picked up the jacket and put it back on the young man's lap. She knew it wouldn't help Sam to tell him that there was no miracle. This Bee-Jesus is just another crazy fella in a sheet. Another whack job.

“Sugar,” she said gently. “While Jesus appreciates the gesture, being who he is he could not possibly wear a Florida Gators jacket. Would that be fair to all those good Christian boys and girls at Florida State University? Or Miami International?”

Sam thought about the logic of this. “Oh,” he said. “Makes sense.”

She knew it would. That's why Nurse Becker is Nurse Becker.

When she rolled Sam out into the hallway she told the crowd, “You all should just go back to your rooms. There's not much to see.” And she sounded sad. She hoped, at least a little, that this Jesus was different from all the rest. It was Christmas, after all.

During that first day, Bee-Jesus spent a lot of time sleeping. Every now and then, he'd cry out as if speaking in tongues. “The river card! Fourth street! Alligator blood! All in! Go all in!”

He seemed to be troubled in a way Nurse Becker had never seen before. Before she went home, she kissed the sleeping Leon on his forehead. “Good night, sweet prince,” she said. She couldn't help herself. He seemed like a little boy lost in his imagination. “I hope your kingdom is warm and always sunny.”

“Dang cool,” he mumbled and fell into a flying dream.

About 2
A.M.
Sam came back. “Hey, Miracle Guy,” he said and shook Leon by the arm until he was awake.

Leon opened his eyes. Sam looked tired. “Can I at least rub your head for luck?” he asked.

There was something about the lumbering boy that reminded Leon of a real alligator—the sad look in his eyes, a knowing—but Leon couldn't imagine where he'd gotten that idea. He was pretty sure he'd never met a real alligator, especially one this large. They don't seem to be that social a creature, he thought, too many teeth. But for some strange reason Leon felt affection for Gator Boy, although he had a disturbing urge to put a straw hat on him and ask him to say “Howdy.”

“I'll be bigger than William the Refrigerator Perry,” Sam told Leon. “You just got to get my agent to call me back.”

Leon, his eyes as wide as hamburgers, just nodded.

The next morning, the believers came again. It was Bill's day off, so crowd control was difficult. Outside his room, Leon could hear Nurse Becker tell the story of the bees.

“They had begun the waggle dance,” she'd say with such authority that those who have never been a Camp Fire girl knew the phrase meant something, something miraculous. Since the hospital was so understaffed, Nurse Becker was often called away. And so, one by one, the faithful wheeled themselves into Leon's room, told their story, asked for a miracle.

Every time this happened, Leon learned one more thing that he really didn't want to know.

“Do you know how long a man can live without a liver?”

Leon did know, and so he was planning to tell Nurse Becker that this couldn't go on any longer. He was tired of being Bee-Jesus: the Miracle Guy.

But then the miracle happened.

An old Mexican nun saw it first. Sister Inez Alverez came to the hospital for gallbladder surgery. “Four slits in your belly, and we'll yank that sucker out,” the doctor told her. He was speaking loudly, because he assumed the old nun knew very little English. “Have you back in ‘Ave Maria Land' in no time flat. Zip. Zip.” Then he grinned at her with his perfectly veneered teeth.

“Zip. Zip?” she asked, incredulous.

“Zip. Zip,” he shouted.

Had Sister Inez Alverez not taken an oath of humility, at that very moment she would have told the doctor that before she became a nun she was a medical exchange student and did her residency at Johns Hopkins.

Probably the year you were born, Gringo.