* * *
—
After watching his mother leave the parking lot without him, Spencer first considered going back into the school, but trying to explain to Mr. Cooper or anyone else how his mother just got caught up in her thoughts seemed beyond him. He was sure that if he waited she would eventually realize her lapse, but meanwhile if he just stood there alone people would start wondering about him, so he set out walking, though it was almost dark and getting cold. If she hadn’t driven off so fast, he would have been in his bedroom by now with his aquarium light turned on, the guppies and angelfish swimming around the bubbler or darting for the flakes of food he dropped.
He hadn’t seen this street before. Of all the houses along it, only two had lights bright enough to show where the sidewalk was. Spencer looked back and tried to remember how many turns he had made and why he thought he had been heading toward more lights instead of fewer. He stopped. His hat was in his desk at school, and his head was getting cold, but the idea of knocking on a stranger’s door to ask for a hat overswept him with shyness and desperation.
A car turned onto the darker end of the street and, as its headlights hit Spencer, it slowed to a crawl. Its lights were so bright that he covered his eyes, until the car drew alongside him and stopped. Still blinded, Spencer could see no more than the outline of a man’s head in the driver’s window. It seemed a long time before the driver spoke. “Hello, mister, you look like you could use a ride. Care to hop in?”
When Spencer opened the door to get in, the interior light came on, revealing an older man with a white crew cut that stood straight up and a cardigan with an elk embroidered on its wool. Spencer caught only a quick look, because once he closed the door the light went off and the man was only an outline again.
“Where are we headed, young man?”
Spencer didn’t know what to say and so said nothing.
“Better tell me where or I’ll run out of gas idling here like this.”
Spencer felt anxious trying to come up with a plausible answer. The driver had put the car in gear but took it out again and sat back and crossed his arms. Under pressure, Spencer wanted to blink. Finally, he said, “Bayreuth.”
“Buy-Rite? Jeez, that’s way on the other side of town. And it’s closed. Is someone picking you up at Buy-Rite?”
Spencer couldn’t speak.
“I wish you’d say something. You want to play the radio? You want me to play the radio? Okay, no radio.”
It occurred to Spencer that this was like school; he was always tongue-tied just when people wanted to help him. This would all get worked out at Bayreuth, he told himself, even if it was closed at this hour. His mother would take over the situation. She hadn’t meant to forget him and would soon have him back with his aquarium. Today was Thursday, and sometimes on Fridays his father brought him a fish in a water-filled Ziploc bag. Last time it had been a Siamese fighting fish, but it was floating upside down in the bag and it had to go into the toilet. Then his dad did some research and explained to Spencer that, until they got a better bubbler, they really couldn’t get another fish. So they wound up getting the one with a little deep-sea diver with bubbles coming out of his helmet, but so far no new fish.
The car stopped under the LIVE WELL—PHARMACY—PHOTO CENTER sign. “Is this it?” No one in sight. The pulsing red neon reflected off the dashboard and lit the side of the driver’s face. Spencer needed his mother here to do the talking.
He managed, “Maybe not.”
“Son, you gotta help me. Where do you want to go? I was supposed to be at the legion ten minutes ago.”
“Maybe back to the school?”
“School is closed, too! Okay, please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have raised my voice, but this is getting to be a problem. There’s a Buy-Rite Auto on the frontage road. That sound like it? No?” The driver gripped the wheel hard, then rested his head on it. “Please tell me where to take you. Wait. Stop, don’t open the glove compartment!”
“Is it loaded?”
“Yes, yes, put it back now. I have a permit for that. I need it. I’m a traveling salesman. Thank you.”
“Someday I’ll have a gun.” And a big mustache, he thought.
“When you’re old enough and have received proper training. So now where are we headed? Son, tell me the truth, do you actually want to go home?”
“There’s the road,” Spencer said, pointing to a road that angled off to the west, a road he had never seen before.
“How far?”
“It’s quite a ways.”
Soon all the houses dropped away into the dark. It was possible to see the shapes of bluffs and, well back from the road, barely different from the stars, the occasional yard light at a ranch. A jackrabbit paused, lit up in the headlights, then vanished. For a while, the only sound was the pop of bugs against the windshield. The car came to a stop in the middle of the road, and the driver scratched his crew cut frantically with both hands, then covered his face. “I see it now: kidnapping, child molester, the whole nine yards. Son, you have to get out of the car.” When he uncovered his face, Spencer was playing with the gun again.
“Oh, boy, how were you raised, anyway? That’s not a plaything.” The man reached over and took the gun from Spencer. “I tried to help you. My conscience is clear. Out you go.” Spencer gripped the seat and wouldn’t budge. He wanted to keep going down the road. The man’s voice came in a roar. “Get the fuck out now before I hit you over the head! You’re starting to scare me.”
Spencer opened the door, hoping the driver would change his mind, then got out and closed the door. He had wanted to speak, but as he searched his mind nothing came to him. It was wonderful how the night smelled and how huge the stars seemed as the car pulled slowly away, pushing open a strip of road with its headlights. Once the sound of its motor had faded, a roar of insects filled the emptiness. Spencer was very still as he followed his happiness to its source and smiled to think, No one knows where I am. The driver was a nice man, but maybe this is better.
Then the lights of the distant car seemed to circle, and Spencer saw that it was coming back. He looked quickly to his left and to his right, but he couldn’t move.
The driver leaned over to thrust open the passenger door. “Get in.”
Spencer did so and closed the door.
“Son, I can’t leave you out here by yourself. Something might happen to you.”
“I wasn’t scared.”
“You don’t know enough to be scared! God almighty!” As the car pulled forward, Spencer looked longingly into the dark. He thought of his mother and wondered if she would remember to feed the fish. He pictured them at the surface of the aquarium looking up at him, expecting to be fed. “As soon as we get to some town, I’m going to find a phone. Yes sirree, Bob, I’m gonna find me a phone and figure out where you belong.”
They crossed a creek on a noisy bridge where telephone poles had been stacked. Just beyond was an empty house and a car on blocks, then the road climbed slowly on a straightaway toward the first lights they had seen in a long time. As they approached, the driver slowed down, holding the top of his head with one hand: a sheriff’s car was parked there and several officers stood on either side of the road near it. “An accident? Doesn’t seem like there’s enough cars to have one.” The driver rolled his window down. “But this is good, son. Maybe you’ll talk to these fellers.”
Two officers came to the driver’s door. They looked hard through the window at Spencer, glanced at each other, pulled open the door, dragged the driver onto the road, and handcuffed him behind his back. The opposite door opened, and Spencer was swept into the arms of a burly deputy. There were lights everywhere, and Spencer cried, but not for the reasons the worried lawmen believed.
* * *
—
On the radio, in the papers, but mostly in people’s mouths, news of the kidnapper ballooned. In town, the driver’s relatives were dismayed to learn of this side of his character and anxious to put
some distance between themselves and him. The interrogator from Helena was delayed by a passing hailstorm, and, by the time he got to the town jail, the driver had done away with himself, an expression that Spencer failed to understand but which his mother explained by using her hands to illustrate a bird flying away. Even so, he knew that he was being misled. Now the newscasters were filled with questions as to whether it had been mothball- or golf-ball-sized hail. A widow up at Ten Mile was on TV with a hailstone the size of a grapefruit, but subsequent investigation revealed it to be something from her freezer.
PAPAYA
Errol Healy should have retired by now from his marine-insurance business, but it was such a going concern that it was hard to let go, and anyway he feared retirement. He was widowed and his only child, Angela, named for a friend in the Bahamas, had gone up to Gainesville, graduated, and moved with her husband, a marketing consultant with a great job at the Seattle Art Museum. Each year, Errol traveled to Seattle to see Angela and her husband, Dylan, and lately his granddaughter, Siobhan. But Key West was always and intensely home, where his life had resumed, and it amused Angela to see his rush to get back. She missed Key West not at all, certain that having survived Poinciana Elementary and Key West High was as much as she needed despite having been elected Miss Conch in the eleventh grade. She’d been a conventional sorority girl at Florida, and if a word could describe her life thus far it would be “smooth.”
It was more than peculiar that Errol had made a career insuring ships and boats, mostly commercial fishing boats, trawlers, long liners, northern draggers, and even a processing ship half a world away. He had begun as the janitor to two old Conchs named Pinder and Sawyer, who had been insuring shrimp boats for half a century and were part owners of a chandlery. When Pinder and Sawyer died in successive years, seemingly in response to the shrimp boats leaving Key West for good, Errol, with his modest understanding of how the business ran, was the last man standing, and he made the most of it. To this day, he loved salt water, and his only recreation was sailing his old boat Czarina, stolen long ago but recovered, a derelict tied to a piling in the Miami River, repaired ever since at unreasonable expense.
He was attached to her not only because he’d nearly lost her in a gale in the seventies, and to theft in the Bahamas while running from his problems, but because she had carried him on to the life he had led ever since. He had been a boy of his time and place, Florida in the latter third of the twentieth century, one among thousands who thought he could sail away to happiness, either tropical escape or riches, bringing home square groupers from Cartagena. Wooden sailboats with light air rigs, acoustic guitars, and reckless girls, the reckoning was always a bit closer in time than he and his cohorts quite imagined, but at that age a little time seemed like a lot. Now all that was long ago and far away, while the layers of familiarity at home and among friends were plenty good enough. He watched his own rising complacency with amusement and contempt. Today the dreadlocks of his youth would be viewed as cultural appropriation. He had annoyed his late wife with all his versions of “Funny How Time Slips Away”: Joe Hinton, Al Green, Willie Nelson…Enough! she cried. I got it!
Personal summarizing was often Errol’s indulgence on his numerous visits to Dr. Higueros’s office on Flagler, to which he always took a big paper bag from Fausto’s market to bring home mangos from the effulgent tree that shaded the doctor’s driveway and eventually made it slippery with rotten fruit. Errol used them in his breakfast smoothies, staple of his widower’s life and one of many reasons to visit a friend he’d known since their days as refugees, Dr. Higueros and his wife from the north coast of Cuba, Errol from a kind of detention in the Bahamas.
Today was a good day to see the doctor, a wet squall from the Gulf bending the palms along the street to Higueros’s office, people hunching from awning to awning. The recurrent problem of wax in his ears, substantial buildup affecting his hearing, required Dr. Higueros’s attention, hydrogen peroxide to dissolve the impaction and then vigorous syringing over a white ceramic bowl, something Errol found stirring as the wax fell into the water and leftover peroxide. It took time, since the fluid had to bubble in his ears, and as he awaited blasts of the warm water syringe, he talked with Juan, as he called the doctor, about things big and small, big like Mrs. Higueros’s advancing dementia, small like the latest car models, of which Juan was a devoted fan. He told Errol, chopping his desk with his hand, that he was “over SUVs” as being too hard to park in Key West’s intense street scene and was waiting for the Tesla to come down in price so that he could recharge at home rather than beating his way across town for gas. He had the same roughly ten-block life radius as Errol, who rarely left it, except to go to his boat or Dr. Higueros’s, or to his club to play dominoes.
Out of friendship with Juan, Errol had learned to play dominoes, though his limited Spanish vernacular kept him a bit detached at the various iterations of the Centro Asturiano. He eventually quit but kept his cigar habit. The Higueroses also had a daughter, Jaquinda, an ophthalmologist at Green Cove Springs on the St. Johns. When Jaquinda was a teenager, Errol had stayed away from the Higueros household for perfectly good reasons: briefly a wild high schooler, Jaquinda had shared with him her little supply of cocaine, and things very nearly went off the rails before Errol sensibly fled to his insurance office. He saw her again when she was out of school, and she displayed a jocose formality toward him that he found quite brilliant in its way, and a relief. He took her new husband sailing, and when Jaquinda joined, he mused about time slipping away in his curiously segmented life.
Just when Juan thought he’d syringed enough, Errol urged one more shot because he could still sense his right ear was occluded. This time the doctor gave it a good blast of warm water, and a real gold nugget fell into the ceramic bowl to the great satisfaction of them both. It was, as they had devised, lunchtime; and they sent out for masita de cerdo, their favorite pork dish, which arrived in a big flimsy Styrofoam carton and which they split on paper plates with plastic forks, washing it down with beer from Dr. Juan’s fridge. Then they settled in as usual, Juan’s turn to pick the topic. Dr. Higueros believed his problem getting to the United States had been unlike Errol’s. “You were stranded, but you were stranded in a friendly country, not fleeing los barbudos.”
“My boat had been stolen. I had nowhere to go. I was running away and I didn’t want to go back. It was nothing to be proud of.”
“You were a slave of that black woman!”
“I must have needed it.” Errol raised his arms, palms opened. “More than that, really!” He left his arms wide like that as though beholding something neither he nor the doctor could see.
* * *
—
The memory was clearer to him now than nearly anything since. When he had awakened in the sand, hungover, tormented by sand flies amid the extinguished buttonwood coals and smell of old meat, the Bahamian woman helped him understand that he had been robbed, his boat stolen. The news had the effect of emptying his mind entirely. He was not able to imagine what might be next while Angela, the Bahamian woman, seemed to find his bewildered appearance entertaining. “Boat gone!” she cried happily. The momentum was hers, and Errol found a bleak luxury in being taken over. Angela led Errol to a shack at the top of a ravine overlooking the papaya fields and gave him the task of cleaning the palm rats’ nests out from under the sagging pipe bed. The window had been painted black, and Angela laughed as she pointed it out, saying, “You might want privacy! I am tellin’ you, there could come a time! Woo-hoo!” She made a little furrow between her eyes to offset her teasing off-center smile. She had never seen a white boy with Rasta braids before, and if someone hadn’t stolen his little sailboat, she would never have seen this one.
“Where’s the nearest town?”
“Why you want a town for?” Angela tipped her head skeptically. She looked into the middle distance and asked, “Town?”
“Maybe have a drink with friends.”
“Ha. Ha
! You don’t have no friends here! I’m your friend.”
Errol thinks: No drink. The papaya trees, once Errol got out among them, struck him as a bit creepy—barkless, branchless, but lovely in the evening in their otherworldly shapes against the stars and oceanic clouds. He managed a fitful sleep before Angela arrived with porridge and half of a papaya, whose black seeds she scooped and flung outside his door. She brought a wheelbarrow, a cumbersome thing with an iron wheel and stripped branches for handles. Inside rested a square-headed shovel, its handle polished by long hard use. His job would be hauling bat guano from the cliffs above the papaya grove to fertilize the trees.
He was weary before he got to the cave and had to rest, but the elevation revealed some settlement to the south and a glimpse of the sea to the west. He felt a familiar pull at seeing this strip of blue above the green highlands and succeeding karst ledges, some of which seemed to have bigger caves than the one he had been directed to. The sea was so close. But what good would it do him to get to it? Still, that’s what he wanted.
He entered the cave, pushing the wheelbarrow on its noisy iron wheel. Arawak petroglyph swirls were cut into the walls, and the nitrogen stink of guano was overwhelming. He was already sick from life, and this was too much: he let himself spew onto the floor. Then he began to dig, filling the wheelbarrow a shovelful at a time, staring from the shadows at the hard light outside the cave.
As he started back downhill to the papayas, he lost control of the wheelbarrow and had to refill it from the rough ground. He poured with sweat, and his eyes stung. Hands on her hips, Angela watched from below; and when he reached the grove, she directed him as he deposited the guano around a few of the trees. Then she gave him a drink of water. “Two more,” she said, “and then I will bring you some food.”
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