In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  “The Marines are a department of the U.S. Navy—the men’s department. That’s an old joke. Anyway, I’m nineteen, I’m a pretty big fuckup. I’m from a military town, as you’ve seen. I was around the stuff a lot. I guess I loved America. A lot of guys I knew, they came back, and they were like, ‘I decided to give my life to my country, you know, because I had faith that my country would use my life well.’ And there’s some truth to that. When I was nineteen, the United States Marine Corps had better ideas about what I should be doing than I did.

  “But—if I’m being honest. My mother was a nurse. One day, she explained death to me. That you get old, you get weak, and then you succumb. Me, as a five-year-old—I said that I’d prefer to go to Africa. Try to fight a big cat. Get killed by a lion. Rather than just wait to get old and die. And that’s probably why I signed up. If I’m being honest.”

  “What was it like?” Glenn wondered. “I know that that’s a hackneyed question. But I’m from Canada. I don’t know anyone who served in any capacity.”

  “You want a war story?”

  “Sure.”

  “OK, here’s a war story: I’m back from Iraq. I head over to some buddies’ place, to play Call of Duty. We’re playing, and one of them turns to me and goes, ‘I thought you were supposed to be good at this.’ So, I get up, I wrap the controller cord around his neck, and I garrote him half to death.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They wanted to charge me with assault, but I convinced them to drop the charges. I can be very convincing, Glenn.”

  “That’s not quite what I was expecting,” Glenn said.

  “Whatever you think war stories are, they’re not,” Noah said. “They’re not, like, tales of valor, most of them. If some guy says he’s a veteran and then tells you a ‘war story’ that has a moral—don’t believe a fucking word that guy says.”

  Here Noah turned to me. “Kent knows,” he said. “Your dad ever tell you any glorious tales of battle in Vietnam?”

  “They were pretty embarrassing, yeah. Nobody acting particularly heroic. Most of them funny, and pretty obscene, I guess. What he would say was that anybody who loves sappy war movies and all that—‘Watch how they vote.’ ”

  “But what about feeling a part of something greater than yourself?” Glenn asked. “I thought that was the whole thing. Even with a volunteer army, and nobody in the country cares, you’re still fighting for the guy who’s got your back, right?”

  “You want to believe that what you’re doing has a purpose, sure,” Noah said. “You don’t want to think your friends are dying for nothing. But—I’ve been a civilian for more than a decade now. And the fact that America has more or less forgotten about Iraq only makes me feel worse. If anyone even bothers to ask—anybody but you, Glenn, I mean—bothers to ask, What was it like over there? all I wanna do is scream as loudly as I can while shooting around their silhouette with a handgun. Then I’d say, ‘Exactly like that.’

  “Fuck, man,” Noah continued. “Like, teenagers today, a lot of them don’t even have memories of 9/11. Eighteen-year-olds enlisting now—they might know that it was something. They might not know what it was, what led up to it, what happened because of it. They might know, like, ‘It was bad.’ That’s it.

  “I endured hellish, block-by-block urban warfare during the siege of Fallujah. I’m not trying to brag here. That’s just the truth. I remember a lot of it. Or, like, I think I do. It’s just hard to separate what happened from what seemed to. Like, what happened when that IED went off? I’ll be fucked if I know. But I can tell you what it felt like, to me, when it went off. I’ve told the story of what it felt like when it went off so many times that it’s become what happened. You know what I mean? Does that make sense?”

  The strengthening wind was pushing clouds like watered ink across the gibbous moon. If I didn’t know any better, I’d never guess we were right in the middle of hurricane season. Mean Season, as we natives have christened it. Glenn had drifted off to sleep by this point, but I mentioned nothing. Noah was feeling pensive. That was rare enough to let ride.

  “My exit interview was administered by one of the surviving men in my company. He goes, ‘You’re gonna give the right answers, right?’ Then he asked me: ‘Do you feel suicidal? Do you feel homicidal? Yes? No? Indifferent?’

  “Again, no offense. But how do I tell you or some eighteen-year-old stories about that, that you’d understand?”

  Noah fell silent. “Should’ve bought a quart of something to help us get to sleep,” he said after some time. This was his way of indicating that his expressiveness was spent.

  Not mine. I was too flooded with esprit de corps, lying there between my friends, the moonlight on the sand foaming like peroxide, to fall asleep. And that, I thought, may be the best definition of male friendship I can muster: sharing the same space, purpose, and perspective while moving shoulder to shoulder in the same direction, drawing however much nearer to the horizon line.

  In this moment, I felt my heart fall open like a clam with a severed adductor muscle.

  —

  MILE 183 — APALACHICOLA

  HELL IS TRUTH SEEN TOO LATE

  Greetings, friend! I am on a shrimp boat, and I understand now that we’re all going to die.

  The three of us are seated in the galley of the good ship Cracker Style, a vessel manned by Captain Gabriel and his younger first mate, Wesley. In fact, Wesley has just strode into this galley to microwave another frozen hamburger. Judging from the humid mists floating in his eyes, he and Captain Gabriel have gotten quite high in the pilothouse. I am digressing. What I mean to tell you is that we are doomed.

  Glenn, Noah, and I got here by trudging twenty miles through the Box-R Wildlife Management Area yesterday. Box-R is a chute of bare pines, laser-straight and continuing as far as the eye can see. The thin trunks were like beds of nails on either side of the road. Between that road and the trees: moats of stagnant water. Here, a man was at a loss to understand how or even why the Spaniards persisted in pushing deeper into the La Florida quagmire some 450 years ago. They, like the three of us, thought they were making a go of it, alive and sinning. They, like the three of us, were set upon by carnivorous bugs the instant they stopped forcing their shadows through the vegetable siss. I wonder now whether this wasn’t the force impelling the conquistadores: not God or country or even wealth and renown—it was biting flies.

  Box-R was hell. Technically the first day of fall, yet what we got was: popsicle-blue skies, no cloud cover, 120 degrees at pavement level, total humidity. We took turns waving a sweat-rusted hand towel at one another’s ankles and knees. The flies especially liked to settle into and bite through my socks. There was little there to stop them, for I wasn’t wearing my hiking boots; I was wearing the shower sandals I’d brought along. (The night before, in the sopping tent in the pitch dark, I’d accidentally degloved my pinkie toe while attempting to change a “second skin” blister bandage, leaving this little piggy with “zero skin.”) The flies also covered our gear, our damp clothes laid out to dry, our fogged Gatorade bottles half-filled with spigot water—they covered every square inch of Rolling Thunder. I felt bad about this. I wished I could give her a tail.

  Late in the day, we crossed into Apalachicola, a still-charming town on Florida’s Gulf Coast. There we found long lanes of wooden homes overhung with Spanish moss; wrought-iron balconies; a cemetery on a mound; a few pioneering retirees walking with their hands clasped behind their backs, inspecting For Sale signs. That weepy sort of Old South haunt that is just glimmering with dappled sunlight, and idle bigotry.

  Apalachicola is also where America’s best oysters come from. Came from, I should say. There was a period between the 1880s and 1980s when Apalach was exporting fifty thousand cans of the plump, slightly sweet bivalves per day. But in 1989, Georgia rerouted the flow of one of the tributaries that feed Apalachicola Bay in order t
o water Atlanta. Now, the bay is more saline, and there are new predators feeding on the smaller, nutrient-starved oysters. Apalach is hurting, and has been for decades. Time was, you could find four hundred oystermen out on the water any given day; presently, you’d be lucky to spot eighty or ninety. Many of them have done like Captain Gabriel and first mate Wesley and traded in their oyster tongs for shrimp nets.

  Perfect, Glenn decided. A down-on-his-luck oysterman turned shrimper would make for a compelling character study. So, after a night spent camped behind a burned-out Quonset hut, we went down to the Apalach docks. We ambled among the trawlers and seiners moored a few dozen paces from the gift shops, bars, and boutique hotels across Water Street. We knocked on hulls, saw if anyone would oblige.

  A shriveled redhead from some Melvillian fish town explained that he would love nothing more than to give us a harrowing experience at sea. However, his trip tonight had to be all business. “Got no time except for making money, fellas” is how he put it, one foot on the gunwale, hands in the rigging. “No time to fart around.”

  We asked why that was. He said it’s because your average fisherman can’t really hang around Apalach, much less operate out of here. “It’s all tourists now,” he said. “It’s like what happened to Key West. Key West used to be a real fishing village.” But then came the tourists. “And they wanted it to look like a fishing village, only without guys like me there.”

  The redhead tossed us two beers each, waved us on our way, wished us well. “There’s no place to even buy supplies here anymore,” he added. “I gotta do that in Panama City before I come.” He told us to try the packinghouse on the docks. They’re the ones who buy ships’ catches, set prices, and control the local market.

  We moved down the waterfront to Buddy Ward & Sons Seafood. Inside, we met the scion of the business, one T. J. Ward. T.J. was a fifth-generation fishmonger, a strapping lad in his late twenties who at that moment was more concerned with the Florida State football game on the small television than he was with our questions. Still, he humored us.

  It’s extremely unlikely to find Apalachicola Bay oysters outside of a few restaurants in Franklin County, T.J. said, his eyes on the screen. And even if the restaurants do say they have them, you should make sure and ask for them special, since a lot of the restaurants supplement Apalach oysters with oysters from Louisiana or Texas. “I just came back from a trucking run delivering oysters to a restaurant in Indian Pass,” he told us. “Hardly had anything to give them. We got a problem with overfishing now.”

  If we could go back in time ten years, we’d find this wholesaler teeming with thirty or forty trucks loaded with product, T.J. said. Back then, Buddy Ward and sons delivered to businesses in Florida, Alabama, Georgia—as far away as South Carolina. “We get maybe two oystermen a day now,” T.J. said. “And they average maybe three to five bags a day.”

  What was also a problem, though maybe not in the way you’d expect, was the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Apalachicola Bay didn’t see a single drop of oil—yet the fear of contamination led state officials to recommend the preemptive harvest of everything in the waters. Scheduled harvests were months away, yet the oyster beds were cleared. A whole generation of juveniles was completely wiped out.

  T.J. said that his father has lobbied to have Apalachicola Bay closed for a year, and for the state’s $6.4 million subsidy from British Petroleum to be earmarked for the unemployed oystermen—but to no avail. “You gotta replenish the substrate,” T.J. said. “You have to shell it, you have to nurse it. You gotta let the oysters do their thing.”

  Onscreen, Florida State’s soon-to-be-pro tailback broke off a thirteen-yard touchdown run. All else was expunged from T.J.’s consciousness. We returned to the dock.

  That’s where we found Captain Gabriel and Wesley loading up the Cracker Style. They needed little convincing as to letting us aboard. Suspiciously little convincing. We went out with the tide on cobalt water just before sundown. We puttered past collapsed processing plants adjacent to waterfront hotels under construction. Birds crowded the exposed boughs of sunken trees near tawny stands of high grass. The bay was glassy, hot, and treacherously shallow. Southwesterly waited marauding storms.

  When we’d hit deeper water, Captain Gabriel left the pilothouse and joined us at the stern. He’s a thin, hard man wearing a graying ponytail and a T-shirt with motorcycles on it that read Ride Free. He smiled a picket smile at us and said: “Time to get to work.” He and Wesley removed their rubber boots and clambered barefoot up the rigging like a couple of ring-tailed lemurs. They dropped the boat’s trawling nets, asking Noah and me to hit that switch or flip that lever at the winch. Glenn ducked between the swaying parti-color nets, scrambling to film the scene.

  “I make all these nets myself,” Gabriel said, turning from on high to drip his accent into the camera. “I do shrimping, crabbing. I’m a third-generation net maker. Logging. All depending on the season.”

  Wesley dropped to the deck, ran into the pilothouse to correct course. His stout, shirtless torso was slabbed with work-related muscle as well as carceral-looking tattoos. He returned with a lit Marlboro, which he smoked to the butt in five puffs. He said to the camera: “I’m a little glad the oysters are going. I’ve seen the old oystermen. They have strong backs but weak minds.”

  “Idiot sticks!” Gabriel called down. “An oysterman used to could make two hundred dollars before lunchtime just playing with his idiot sticks. But with this here,” he said, clinging to the rigging with his legs while gesturing with his arms, “with this here a guy in Georgia owns this boat, takes half the catch right off top. That’s why we don’t deal with no wholesalers on the dock. [The Wards] pay out only three dollars per pound of shrimp. And if you want to sell to restaurants, you need a license for that. But we can charge five or six dollars per just peddling to friends and individuals.”

  Gabriel flipped down the rigging, dismounted. “Where’d you boys say you was walking to again?”

  “Key Largo, maybe,” Noah answered.

  “Where that at?” Wesley wondered.

  “South Florida?” I said.

  “That ain’t real Florida,” Gabriel said. “Anyway, c’mon then, you said you wanted to do an interview.” He led us into the pilothouse. He sat in his captain’s chair, steering now and then with his bare feet. He produced a small jar of marijuana from the console cabinet. “You know how you know I’ve been at this longer than him?” Gabriel asked, nodding at Wesley. He swiveled his chair, pointed to the back of his neck. It was scaly with sun-charred skin. “I promise you it’s still red deep down, though,” he amended.

  Noah and I set up the microphones, Glenn hit record. We started with some basic biographical questions. The story Gabriel and Wesley told was the opposite of the transient Floridian story. They were part of Old Florida, North Florida, had roots sunk deep into this part of the earth. “Some people think beaches,” Gabriel said. “But I think pine trees, palmetto ridges, and shrimping—that’s Florida to me.”

  “This life,” Wesley added, “it’s definitely something you grow into. It’s not something you show up and decide to do.”

  Outside, a pod of dolphins escorted us toward the molten cylinder of setting sun. The boat slowed appreciably as its nets filled.

  Noah, holding a boom, asked why they’d taken us on such short notice. “Because I want people to know,” Gabriel said. “I want people to know what’s happening to hardworking American people.”

  He and Wesley were caught in a trap, he explained. On one side, they had the one-percenters who owned the packing plants, who did their damnedest to rip them off on the distribution. On the other, they had cheap, farm-raised Chinese imports flooding the seafood market.

  “Don’t nobody know the kind of shit we go through to get you New Yorkers your seafood cocktail,” Gabriel said.

  “I’m actually from Miami,” I corrected
.

  “Same difference,” Gabriel shot back.

  “We’re getting it in both ends,” Wesley solemnly affirmed.

  “We want to draw attention to this,” Gabriel said. He fretted his feet over the wheel.

  “We’re American people,” Wesley said, sweeping his gaze to take in the three of us. “And we can’t live like this anymore.”

  “There’s an election coming up…” Glenn ventured.

  “And there’s the one man in it who can do something about all this,” Gabriel agreed.

  Glenn laughed. Then he said, “But surely you don’t think…”

  Gabriel and Wesley looked to one another, and then back to us. Gabriel said: “I think the Donald knows the American people, and cares about them, unlike some other people.”

  “He eats KFC on his plane,” Wesley solemnly affirmed.

  “You guys watch the debate?” Noah asked. “You think he did good?”

  “Better than her!” Gabriel said. He put his hands on his shoulders, pantomiming shoulder pads, I guess, and crudely impersonated Hillary Clinton. He said: “Every answer was a straight lie. Every answer was some bullshit like ‘Back when I was sucking pussy in Africa…’ ”

  Wesley did a spit take of the Mountain Dew he was drinking.

  And that was the moment, friend. That was when it clicked for me: Donald Trump is going to win North Florida, and then Florida at large, which’ll give him a more-than-fighting chance at the presidency. All those Trump signs that had been canyoning the highwayside? The many ramshackle homes we’d passed on which owners had painted messages like Lock Her Up and No to One World Government? The latrinalia in the construction site Porta Potties we frequented—“UR going back to Mexico” and the like? It’d all seemed incidental, just more examples of how, shall we say, suboptimal the Panhandle could be. But whenever I’d try to joke the clues away, Noah would shake his head and say: “I don’t know, dude. This place is the canary in the coal mine.”