Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  Errol considered the ways he could put this all to an end, but the third night in his shack as he plucked pieces of scorched pig from a piece of greasy paper, he found himself liking the clarity that pushed through the ache of his muscles. Then he stretched on the bunk and congratulated himself on declining Angela’s offer to bring him a Kalik with his meal. He asked again for water. Not long after, it was dark. He had managed to get the blackened window open and the fragrant square of stars consoled him as he drifted off. One night a mongoose stood in his doorway like an amiable visitor, then hopped off for better prospects.

  “What day is today?”

  “Why you want to know?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me.”

  “What I tell you for? You want it to be the weekend?”

  “I just wondered what day it was.”

  “You needing a day off?”

  “I need a bath.”

  “Of course you do!” She fanned her face with rolled eyes.

  Angela took him to her quarters, the first time he’d seen them, a wooden house on cinder blocks, a concrete cistern, very tidy, laundry on a line, and chickens in the yard. On the edge of the trees a pen held a nursing sow and her piglets. Angela lit a propane flame beneath a copper coil and directed him to a faucet beside the cistern, saying she’d be on the porch. A plastic cover from a car battery, nailed to a tree, held the soap. Errol undressed, glancing warily; after washing himself under the warm sprinkle, he quickly put his clothes back on to sit on the porch with Angela, foursquare in a homemade blue dress that came to her calves and some kind of recycled military boots. Her hair was tied in a tall topknot with a strip of blue rag.

  “You been working like a mule. Ain’t give out?”

  “Not yet.” Errol laughed. She stared at him rather than share the laugh.

  “Aks you something. What wrong with you? Look like something eat you up.”

  “Doing okay. Changes I’ll let you know.”

  Errol merely smiled at the thought of a rant his dad would go on about blacks and the many children of the poor and the hopelessness of improving their circumstances through education: “We’ve been educating the sonsabitches for a hundred years and it has done no good whatsoever. We’re gonna have to spray them. Now that I think of it, let’s not spray them. Aviation fuel has gone through the roof.” His cousins in Missouri were even worse, “nigger”-this and “nigger”-that, and if he argued with them, they told him he was plumb ate up with the dumbass.

  “Look here,” said Angela. “You keep goin’ up to the cave with your wheelbarrow until you figure out what’s the matter with you, and then I’ll try to get you on home.”

  “I’m fine!”

  “Sure you is, li’l man!” Is it that funny? Errol wondered. “You haves a home anyway?” Errol felt like arguing, but the feeling passed.

  It seemed that by the time he had fertilized each papaya tree and gotten to one end of the grove, it was time to start at the beginning again. He had hauled hundreds of pounds of fertilizer, fanning away disgruntled fruit bats as he worked shirtless—hardest part being to stabilize the load on an iron wheel as he worked his way down the hill, zigzagging around sloping ledges and trying, not always successfully, to keep the whole thing from toppling. On one such failure, he found himself crying “Bat shit it’s just bat shit is all it is” to the firmament, then thinking how funny it was that it could have easily applied to him rather than the guano he hauled daily to these damn trees. Possibly he had acquired a degree of detachment now from this condition. At a bare minimum he recognized some of it was funny.

  One night a storm came in from the sea, and because so many parts of his shack were minimally adjoined it made a tremendous noise until finally his anxiety grew. Lying abed he could see parts of the ceiling moving. Summoning figures from the past he masturbated, and when he reached his end a huge piece of tin blew off his roof to reveal clouds racing against a yellow moon. He heard the tin tumble away and pulled the flimsy blanket over his head. Who was that last one? He troubled himself over the image of a girl who bit her tongue during intercourse. It was…New Port Richey was as far as he got before nodding off, awaking abruptly to No, Crystal River! and falling asleep again, still without a name—wait: Homosassa? But no dice, a desirable girl lost to memory. When he awoke in the morning, the storm had passed, and a glistening white egret stood in the opening overhead looking down at him past its jet-black beak. His fingers were sticky from ejaculating into his hand.

  That’s when he remembered her, Chattanooga and her name was Denise. They’d been headed to Jazz Fest in Nola and wound up where there wasn’t shit-all going on unless it was hillbilly clog dancing. There would be no reason she’d remember him now, probably got off drugs and had a Ph.D., living in a mansion with a litter of King Charles spaniels and driving a German car. Time to fix the roof, and he struggled to drag that sheet of tin from the Brazilian pepper seedlings and love vines where he found it entangled. Reaching up, he wedged the piece into the rooftop to keep it from sliding off, setting a jar of nails and a claw hammer beside it before using the window ledge to climb up. He saw his shoes aligned next to the bed, covers crumpled from struggles over the lamented Denise on her way to Jazz Fest via Chattanooga to hear Professor Longhair and Clifton Chenier.

  He had trouble holding the tin in place while he tried to nail it down. Every time he started a nail, the tin moved and he lost the nail, which fell with a clink to the floor below him by the bed. He put some nails in his mouth, clutching the hammer in one hand and easing his weight onto the tin to secure it. But as he reached for a nail, the tin shifted under his weight and he wound up sliding out onto the dirt yard twenty feet in front of the shack, where he continued to lie moaning until discovered by Angela, with her hands characteristically on her hips as she surveyed the scene, shaking her head from side to side, and marveled, “Good night!” He gazed back at her but said nothing.

  “Can you move?”

  “I don’t know why I would.”

  “Do you want to be examined?”

  “I suppose, but everything seems to work. I’m quite sore, it says here.”

  “Let me help—” Angela stood him up, though he was aware that he was crouching, not standing, and he seemed to be testing all parts of his back as he straightened it. “There. Or—”

  Angela put him in bed and told him in so many words that she would review his condition at the end of the day but bring him something to eat meanwhile. He looked up at the leaves of a tall palm that swayed against a sky so attractive it enlarged his sense that he was missing something. While Angela fussed about the shack, he searched for what he missed until he found that it was his wheelbarrow. He sorely missed his wheelbarrow and its noisy iron wheel, and the weight of the fertilizer. He fell asleep.

  He was awakened by the arrival of three of Angela’s sons, Winston, Benson, and Isaiah, who introduced themselves as they peered at him in bed, eliciting broadly awkward responses and toothy embarrassed smiles. Shrinking back was a young woman, well along in her pregnancy. No one introduced her. Except for Benson, the eldest and a carpenter, the boys, both approaching young manhood, were fishermen—powerful youngsters all, they charged the shack with their energy. Benson had brought tools, and Errol could see his rusty Japanese truck in the doorway. Errol’s father would have sprayed these fellows given aviation fuel at the right price. His Missouri cousins didn’t bear thinking about. When he sat up and offered to help, Isaiah said, “We got it, mon. Stay where you at.” So Errol lay amid all this activity like something inanimate, listening to the hammering and squeak of the corrugated tin as it was shoved into position. When they signaled they were done by the ostentatious dusting off of their hands, Winston reached to Errol and helped him to his feet; then Isaiah led the pregnant girl into the shack. She grinned shyly as the men helped her into bed while Errol, crouching in pain, tried to smile solicitously. “And you are—?”

  “Pregnant.”

  “No, your name.�
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  Benson called out, “Dat Shonda. Shonda havin’ me baby!”

  Then the three men swept Errol out the door and into the truck, Winston at the wheel, Benson and Isaiah riding in back with tools and lumber. “Where are we going?” asked Errol to gales of laughter. Finally, Winston said, “Get you some tomatoes.”

  “Tomatoes?”

  “You don’t like tomatoes?”

  “I do like tomatoes, but why are you taking me for tomatoes?”

  Benson said with extraordinary solemnity. “You better off wit’ dem. You be rollin’ in tomatoes.”

  Errol got a first look at the settlement, a handful of tiny homes made of assorted scavenged materials, driftwood, parts of wrecked boats—two had roofs like the tops of cabin cruisers—and surrounded by substantial piles of crawfish traps. When people could be seen in yards, Winston blew the horn of the truck and the merriment thus occasioned suggested a real event. At the settlement wharf, other small rusty Japanese trucks were gathered at the last stages of loading a low-slung forty-foot wooden boat with tomatoes, most in boxes but some in loose piles. At the stern of the boat was a modest pilothouse beneath which a smoky diesel engine rumbled and spat cooling water from a pipe at the stern. An old man stood in the pilothouse, cigarette hanging from the center of his mouth; occasionally he removed it, leaning to one side to call out orders for the loading of the vessel.

  Errol and the others climbed from the truck, and one of them propelled him toward the boat with light fingertips at the small of his back, just coercive enough that Errol turned to look at him. A stern elder in a weathered Miami Dolphins cap gestured to the group, indicating that Errol was to be brought to him. This was the fellow in the pilothouse who’d directed the loading. Errol boarded the boat and shook the horny hand of what must have been the captain. Glancing back Errol saw that Angela had joined her sons and was blowing him kisses perhaps a bit sarcastically, elbowing one of the boys to share her point of view. Since he wasn’t sure how to take this, Errol returned the gesture, and the resulting comic uproar confirmed it had been sarcasm. Observing this, the captain said, “Nothin’ bettah to do,” and identified himself as Wellington. Then he shouted, “Behave! And cahst me off.” The three sons scurried obediently and untied the ropes from the rusty bollards, tossing them onto the boat with a thud. Wellington engaged the engine, and as the boat moved away from the dock toward a dark green channel in the pale shallows, Japanese truck horns blared farewell. Angela was still blowing kisses but now toward the houses where others returned the gesture, sharing some joke about who it was that was really departing.

  Errol was not uncomfortable being led about like this, even onto an outbound vessel of dubious seaworthiness, but it did seem time to ask where they were going. “To West Palm to sell dese tomatoes.”

  “Are those people always trying to be funny?”

  “Dey nevah busy. Angela make dem rich.”

  Errol saw they were headed for the Gulf Stream and thought early on he could make out its purple light. Wellington was not talkative and only replied with ill-concealed annoyance as he kept an eye on the compass and tried to steer in a way protecting the tomatoes from sea spray. Errol was exalted to be on the ocean again and could tell that while Wellington took his perfunctory glances at the compass he would regularly pick a cloud to steer by, using the plunging stemhead as a sight.

  The laden hull created a steep stern wave, and in the first miles, dolphins slipped up its face and somersaulted back into the sea, skimming barely under the surface with electric energy between vaults. They angled off into a shower of flying fish and were gone. Checking the compass, Wellington raised his eyes to a better cloud.

  Errol was tired and sore from his nighttime struggles and asked if there was a place he might stretch out. Wellington suggested he go forward and find a place among the crates. Errol left the pilothouse for the rush of ocean breeze and mist and the intense smell of the tomatoes. He found a place where lengths of cordage had been stowed, probably for the anchor, and lay down feeling bottomless physical relief. He laced his hands behind his head and, watching a frigate bird high above, immediately fell asleep, awakening only occasionally to change position and twice from imagining he heard voices. Once he was sure he had but talked himself out of it and fell into an even-deeper sleep, glancing up to the stars wondering vaguely when night had fallen.

  He was awakened by the silence of the engine and the roll of the boat and concluded by its motion that they had crossed the stream. Sitting up, he could make out the loom from the lights of Florida on the far horizon, and he could hear Wellington speaking on the radio. Looking forward in the light from the moon and stars, he could see two figures. Wellington emerged from the pilothouse and seeing Errol awake said, “Say hello to Mr. and Mrs. Higueros. Is dat how you say it?”

  “Yes,” said the gentleman forward.

  “I’m Errol Healy.”

  The Higueroses were dressed as though for a business meeting, he in a gray suit of an early broad-shouldered style ill befitting his small shape, and Mrs. Higueros in a kind of black jumper with a wide-winged white shirt that seemed like a schoolgirl’s uniform. They were not very old.

  Silence. Wellington returned to the pilothouse and sat by the radio, which squalled presently, bringing him out on deck again with something in his hand. He pulled sharply downward from it, and a flare shot up, parachuting an umbrella of white phosphorous. It was dark again except for starlight. They waited in expectant silence until a mobile speck of light appeared in the west at sea level, enlarging steadily until it became the running light of a low blue-gray race boat, entirely open except for the helm and windshield, behind which stood two men in night-vision goggles, one with his hand on the binnacle and the other resting on a machine gun attached to a clip on the side of the console. They slid their boat alongside deftly. The man at the wheel said, “Morning, Wellington,” shutting the engine off to drift alongside. “Hugo here will do the banking. Who’s that third guy?”

  “Called Air Roll.”

  Errol made a rather feeble gesture of greeting.

  “He staying with you?”

  “He going with you.”

  “Angela didn’t say nothin’ about him.”

  “She just put him on, say you wouldn’t mind.”

  “But I do mind, Wellington.”

  “It up to you. I can take them all to West Palm.”

  “They’ll be arrested.”

  “It up to you,” said Wellington firmly, easing toward the pilothouse.

  “Naw, goddamn it, Wellington, come here.” Errol could spot this amiable abuse as roughneck stuff racists used with blacks. Wellington went to the gunwale, balancing against it with his waist, and reached out his hand. Hugo began counting out money into it. When he went too fast, Wellington raised the palm of his free hand to slow things down. Hugo said, “That’s a lot of U.S. dollars.”

  “They still good,” said Wellington blithely. “More next time. I don’t want to count it, I want to weigh it.”

  “Make sure Angela gets hers. Don’t need to be hearing from her.”

  Wellington and I helped the Cuban couple, frightened and clinging to each other, into the boat. The pilot put the boat in reverse and it chugged backward in the wash around the tomato boat, turning ninety degrees, and was immediately up on plane in the thrust of its big engines. Once out of sight of the tomato boat, the race boat stopped again, and Hugo brought a hamper of clothes to Mr. and Mrs. Higueros. “Oye, change into these,” he said, “you don’t need to look so fuckin’ balsero.” Mr. Higueros cut his eyes at Hugo, but nothing came of it. Hugo returned to the stern, and the three turned away while the Higueroses changed. To Errol, he said, “Cubans. If they got the money, honey, I got the time.” When it was polite to do so, they looked back: the transformation was remarkable. Both wore baggy shorts and logo fishing shirts, Mrs. Higueros sporting a leaping blue sailfish and Mr. Higueros a livid map of the Caribbean with associated fishes and on his back, COM
E ON DOWN AND KICK SOME FIN! They had identical ball caps from the Dania greyhound track and beheld each other with comical admiration. Errol glimpsed right away that these were clever people.

  Back to full speed: standing next to the driver and glancing at the GPS, Errol knew they could not be far from the coast. The fathom lines on the screen rolled past swiftly showing a virtual roadway, a long narrowing yellow band ending at the word JUPITER. The boat seemed to touch the water only delicately, a kind of lengthwise flutter beneath the hull, and the engine sound seemed astern of them. “How did you get on this load, Air Roll?”

  “Friend of Angela’s.” He had no idea how it had happened or why he had not resisted or where he was even going exactly.

  “Old Angela, man, she makes it happen. I don’t know where she’s burying all the money unless it goes to West Palm under a load of papayas.” He jerked his head toward the passengers. “Slipped this duo out of Camagüey. Doctor and his wife. Relatives paid for it. Gotta hand it to ’em, don’t none of ’em stay po’ long.”

  “Are you planning to drop them off on a beach?”

  “Naw naw naw, we go right into the marina”—he tapped Hugo on the shoulder and wiggled his finger at the machine gun; Hugo took it from the side of the console and stowed it in a side locker—“where nobody’s worried about nothin’. The little doc’s gonna be just fine. He probably speaks better English than we do. Hey, what’s with the dreads? You a octoroon or something? I have a octoroon cousin, only he don’t admit it. Hey, this is America, we gotta get along.” He let it ride, Air Roll the octoroon.

  In a while the well-lit coast grew clear, and the motion of the boat changed with the waves on the shelving bottom. Errol saw that the running lights were no longer on; the boat and its passengers just seemed part of the darkness. At length, the corners of an inlet emerged with long breaking rollers flowing to the interior, and at much-reduced speed they struggled to the top before sliding down inside the wave as the bow plunged with the elevation of the stern and the whine of cavitation. Increasingly house and yard lights massed on either side, until the boat slowed to steady idle, then abruptly turned into a wilderness of docks and finger piers. They seemed to vanish between rows of yachts, then on to less occupied docks until turning into one and shutting everything off. The new quiet seemed to go along with the huge shapes of the vacant boats all around them. At the base of the dock the windows of a black Lincoln Town Car shone in the security light. Hugo and the driver helped Dr. and Mrs. Higueros onto the dock. The minute their feet touched down, all the lights of the Lincoln went on. The Higueroses tossed off perfunctory kisses and hurried to clamber into a rear door, which had barely shut as the car drove off, away and gone. “New Americans,” said Hugo. “I hope they like it.” He shook his head and climbed out with Errol, and started to secure the boat with bow-, stern, and spring lines. As Errol helped tie off the boat, the pilot came forward, glanced, and said, “Man knows how to tie a knot. Someone coming for you? No? So where are we taking you?”