He aimed his sunglasses down at her for several silent seconds, trying to decide whether he’d really heard her speak or not. No, of course not. He returned his Ray-Bans to me and, since he didn’t seem to be getting through to me, raised his voice. “G’wan, git, nah!”
From somewhere down around my other foot, I heard a hissing sound. I glanced down. Pixel, back arched, hair lifting, teeth bared. He didn’t like Erin being dissed. The situation was deteriorating fast.
“Look,” I said to the rent-a-cops, seeking a logic that would appeal to them, “there’s got to be a bookstore in this marina complex, right?”
Both rent-a-cops stared at me.
“A gift shop?” I suggested, pointing over at a cluster of buildings in the near distance.
“Thur’s a gif’ shop,” the one on my side admitted grudgingly.
“Well, there you go. Undoubtedly they stock the works of John D. MacDonald there, and I can promise you these folks are going to buy out every copy, just so they can boast they’ve got a copy they bought here. We’re money on the hoof to Management.”
“Ever’ copy o’ whut?”
“Books! Books by John MacDonald, the man memorialized by that plaque out there. The creator of Travis McGee, for heaven’s sake!”
He turned to his partner. “They got any books in thet gift shop? Ah never seen none.”
The driver shrugged. “Half a dozen books on fishin’ is all. This Johnny Donald McGoo write fish books, boy?”
I opened my mouth, and was too shocked and scandalized to speak. I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder, turned to see Long-Drink McGonnigle. “Meyer said the place was under new management,” he reminded me.
“Sure,” I said angrily, “but he didn’t mention the new owners aren’t bright enough to put a bucket under a waterfall of money.”
“Think about it, Jake,” he said. “I kind of like it that way.”
I did think about it—and saw what he meant. If the present owners were that smart, we’d have arrived to find not a respectful plaque off the ass end of the parking lot, but some horrid sort of McGeeLand, commercialized to the hilt in the classic Florida style we were already becoming familiar with. T-shirts with Trav’s picture on them. Little plastic models of the Busted Flush, accurate down to the oversize shower stall, and of Miss Agnes the electric-blue Rolls-Royce pickup truck. Hairy Meyer action figures. Disposable heroine dolls. Thermal beach cups with the Plymouth Gin logo. Acres of books at inflated prices.
Extra money for Mr. MacDonald’s widow, I suppose—some tiny percentage of it. I can only hope she doesn’t need extra money that badly.
“You’re right, Drink,” I said. “Let’s split before somebody notices us and wises up.” I turned back to the security thugs. “We’re leaving now. Take us a couple of minutes.”
Badly confused by our exchange, and my surrender, they took refuge in nods. “Yew got fahv,” the driver said, and peeled away.
So I left Pixel to calm down and went back out on the dock and explained the situation to everybody, and with gratifyingly little argument was able to start the herd moving in the general direction of the buses.
“Come on, Daddy,” Erin called a few minutes later from her chair in the front of the bus. “Everybody’s ready to go but us!”
“Be out in a minute!” I was as good as my word, slid into my seat and buckled my seat belt before the flushing sounds behind me had ceased. “Roll ’em, baby,” I told Zoey.
“Key Largo, here we come,” she agreed, and put the beast in gear. As we moved slowly through the parking lot, I stared out my window, trying to memorize the place. I felt a strange, bittersweet sadness. How ironic, to find myself glad that so few people cared about John D. MacDonald’s memorial. He himself might have appreciated the humor in it.
“Daddy,” Erin said.
“Yes, honey?”
“The toilet’s still flushing.”
“Oh, my God—”
Suddenly there was a horrid sound from below, a kind of bass screeching, as if God were trying to log on to the Internet. Zoey took her foot off the gas at once, but it was already too late: with a final loud skrunk suggesting a successful connection, the sound stopped before we could.
“Was that what I know it was?” she asked calmly.
I unstrapped and went to look, just to be certain. Pixel came along and stared with me, licking his paws. “You know that plumbing problem we developed?” I called back.
“Intimately,” Zoey said.
“We don’t have it anymore.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now what we have is more of a no-plumbing problem.”
There was a silence in the bus that lasted perhaps ten seconds. And then all three of us, simultaneously, broke up—laughed so hard we rocked the bus.
“Talk about your Busted Flush,” Zoey roared.
Through the open windows, we could hear the laughter traveling back along the caravan. For a minute there, the whole parking lot echoed with it.
Then after a while the smell drifted in the windows, too, and at first that just made us laugh harder, but finally it reminded us that the rent-a-cops would be back to check on us soon. Still chuckling, Zoey put it back in gear and pulled out. The others followed us, detouring daintily around what we had left behind.
And the CB was suddenly full of congratulations.
Look, I’d been having trouble with that inboard sewage system the whole trip, okay? To this day, more than a decade later, despite repeated denials by me and my family, there is not one of my friends who doesn’t believe I did it deliberately somehow. There’s no justice.
On the way out the gate, Zoey handed the beachboy another wad of cash from the dwindling stash in the glove compartment. “For the mess,” she explained, and drove on. I couldn’t see his expression from where I was sitting, but I could imagine it.
Traffic outside was, if anything, worse. By the time the last bus finally made it back out onto the road (miraculously without any accidents), Zoey and Erin and Pixel and I were already outside Lauderdale city limits and getting back on the highway. We all met up at the first rest stop, where Omar and I did what repairs we could to the underside of my bus while everybody gassed up, and then we were back on the road again.
Zoey drives faster than me. Better, too. She put the hammer down, and we managed to reach the state park at Key Largo about five minutes before everyone was too tired to drive another mile.
There was no party tonight; it was too late and we were all too exhausted, from the emotional impact of the day as much as from the long drive. Everyone had already eaten, aboard, on the way. Nonetheless a few of us got out and milled around together briefly, speaking of all we had seen since sunup.
“What’s that smell?” Maureen Hooker asked suddenly.
Conversation ceased while we all sniffed the air and tried to identify it. I realized I’d been smelling it for some time now, without quite being aware of it.
“Salt,” Slippery Joe Maser said. “The sea.”
“Sure,” Maureen said. “But what else?”
“Iodine,” Fast Eddie said, “and mildew.”
Everyone slowly nodded.
“Limestone,” Long-Drink said. “Crushed limestone.” A few more nods.
“Zawdust,” Ralph von Wau Wau said positively. “Burnt zawdust. Unt somevere nearby, oysters.”
Jim Omar was just getting down from his bus. “Hey, Jim,” I called, “what’s that smell, do you think?”
He lifted his head, and his nostrils flared. He smiled. “That’s South Florida,” he said.
He was right. We smelled it again when we woke up the next morning, and occasionally throughout that day, and after that we hardly ever noticed it again. But it was always there. It still is today.
CHAPTER TEN
The Goldbrick Road
“May our nation continue to be the beakon [sic] of hope to the world.”
—the 1989 Christmas card of the J. Danforth Quayle family
> I WAS AWAKENED JUST
after dawn by a loud crash.
Oh God, I thought, sitting up in my bunk, the damn sewage system fell out. Then I remembered it already had. Besides, the noise had come from the wrong place—from up at the front of the bus. Now I was fully awake. Had we slipped our parking brake and hit something? I’d have sworn Zoey parked us on level ground. I climbed over her sleeping form and went to investigate.
Through the windshield I saw the front hood was open. No, it was missing. I’d been told Florida assayed out about as high as New York for sneak thieves—but could someone possibly be trying to steal my engine?
I dismounted carefully, and saw no one around. I located the hood panel lying on the ground beside the bus, with a dent in the middle. I hunkered beside it and looked around. There were no footprints visible in the sandy earth anywhere near it—nothing at all but a broken pair of sunglasses, two coconuts, and a cigarette butt. I squatted there, tapping my thigh with a large wrench I happened to have in my hand and trying to figure it out.
WHANK! Thonk! Thabibble…
Once I’d gotten back to my feet and brushed off the sand and recovered the wrench and combed the cigarette butt out of my hair, it wasn’t hard to figure out. Another fucking coconut had fallen from the palm tree overhead—just like the one that had woken me.
This one had flattened the air filter, ripped one of my spark plug wires loose, and was presently wedged between the radiator and the engine. Down near the bottom where it would be almost impossible to get at: the thabibble at the end had been it wedging itself in there good. I looked up at that palm tree, with the intention of cursing it, and may even have opened my mouth to do so—but all of a sudden it hit me.
I was looking up at a palm tree.
Oh, we’d been seeing the damn things for days, even before we crossed the Florida line. But this one was different. Don’t ask me how I could tell, I knew diddly about palm trees, but I was sure. Those other ones had been props, transplants, brought there from somewhere else to con the tourist or amuse the wealthy. This was the real deal. This one had just grown here.
The sun was coming up. The air was warm and damp and spicy. I was where palm trees grow. And heading south. Well, southerly. All at once I was too excited to even consider going back to sleep.
Just as well. By the time everyone else was up, I’d managed to get the damn coconut out of the engine compartment and make repairs. Only got hit by one coconut, and it almost completely missed my head.
It was a happily chattering group that pulled onto U.S. 1 that morning and headed off down the Keys, and our mood improved with every one of its hundred-odd miles.
Basically it is a highway through the ocean, which occasionally intersects lumps of sand-covered coral on its way west. These are the fabled Keys, where the people called Conchs live, and they range in size from mounds that a couple of kids with dirt-bombs could defend against their whole neighborhood, to comparatively enormous islands nearly as big as the Disney World parking lot. When you do cross a Key, the strip along either side of the road briefly becomes heavily encrusted with restaurants, burger stands, motels, boating and fishing and diving and tanning service industries, souvenir joints, swim-with-real-dolphins places, and assorted other tourist-milking apparatus. Nonetheless each Key was welcome, as the road usually briefly widened out to more than two lanes for a while, allowing at least a few cars to pass our elephantine caravan. I think that may be why we never actually drew any automatic weapons fire.
Only a lunatic could ever have dreamed of connecting all those featureless heaps of coral, sand, sawgrass, and mangrove flats with a 105-mile road to nowhere, and only an incredibly rich lunatic could have pulled it off. The longest and most expensive coral necklace on earth. Florida had produced a man who did it twice.
Evidence of his first effort, the one he had lived to see completed, kept appearing on our right as we drove: a second trestle bridge, much like the one our highway sat on and parallel to it. But the other one had nothing much visible on it but pelicans. It had gaps in it, every now and then, some of them big enough for a couple of Staten Island-sized ferries to pass through at once, with Conch kids fishing off the ends. Every once in a while it went away altogether for a few miles. It was the fabled Railroad That Went To Sea—or what was left of it.
One day around the turn of the century, the lunatic, Henry Morrison Flagler (the man who made Florida what it is today; John D. Rockefeller’s closest associate), took it into his head that Key West would be the finest resort destination in America…if only there were a way to get to it from America without getting seasick. There were no cars, then—but there was a railroad, from Daytona all the way down to a tiny-but-growing hamlet called Miami, and by an odd coincidence Flagler happened to own that railroad. (Among others.) So he gave orders, and men died in the mud, and by 1912 there was a reinforced concrete railroad bridge running the whole length of the Keys. You could get from Miami to Havana in twelve hours by train and boat. The terminus, Key West, until then primarily a place where the pirates and moonrakers kept their bars and brothels, began to boom.
But Mother Nature outboomed it. The Labor Day hurricane of 1935 (they didn’t name them in those days) came raging in off the ocean and tore that railroad to pieces, smashed forty miles of track and trestle into the sea, killing over six hundred people in the process. Today, more than seventy-five years later, the railroad bridge has never been repaired or demolished: either is more trouble than it’s worth.
The highway bridge that replaced it three years later is better built, and has outlasted many hurricanes. (Some three hundred of those killed by the ’35 ’Cane were WWI vets working on the highway at the time.) I never felt a twinge of worry anywhere along its length: compared to the best maintained bridge in, say, New York City, it was the eighth wonder of the world.
And I’ll tell you this: if there is a more beautiful drive anywhere on the planet Earth, I don’t want to take it. I don’t think my heart could stand it. But I don’t see how there could be.
It’s one of those things that can’t be described; you’ll have to take my word for it. I wasted several miles of the drive ransacking the English language for a word that might adequately convey to someone who’d never seen it even so basic a thing as the color of the water, there. It was a different color, a different kind of color, than any other ocean (or for that matter, thing) I’d ever seen before, a pale, translucent, jewellike, somehow subtly glowing green-blue, somewhere between turquoise and the color of lime juice. Here and there you saw large irregular darker green patches in it that had to be the coral reefs just under the surface. The weather was absolutely perfect: endless blue sky, with just enough majestic clouds to decorate it. Florida sunshine felt good on Long Island skin. The wind kept bringing pleasant smells in the window as we went. That ever-present South Florida smell I mentioned earlier, which we still found strange enough to register and savor, plus small piquant accents that came and went. Barbecuing meat. Suntan lotion. Woodsmoke. Limes. Bug spray. Beer. Neoprene. Just breathing got you high. Looking out the window and breathing at the same time was enough to make you see God.
The CB buzzed with happy talk as we drove.
“I can’t believe it,” Long-Drink said. “There’s hardly anybody here! And the ones that are, most of ’em look like actual human beings. I thought it was gonna be wall-to-wall rich people, in giant condo towers—but look: actual houses and stuff. Man, it’s like Montauk, thirty or forty years ago before they fucked it up.”
“It isn’t anything like Orlando was,” Maureen Hooker said. “I mean, most of the people along here milk tourists for a living too, obviously…but the Conchs don’t seem as—I don’t know—as desperate about it as they did back up there.”
“This is hard to take,” Slippery Joe Maser said. “It’s so damn pretty it makes me suspicious. Ow!” That last was doubtless one or both of his wives kicking him.
“Jake?” Fast Eddie called.
; “Yeah, Ed?”
“Ya made a good move.”
There was a brief hash of sound as everybody tried to agree at once. I felt warmer inside than the sunshine on my arm. “We all did,” I said when the commotion paused long enough.
“Fuckin A,” Eddie agreed.
“Hey, where are we up to now?” the Lucky Duck asked.
“Uh…” I peered out the window ahead to see…and cracked up.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” I promised as we flashed past the sign that said we had reached Duck Key.
Next after that was Grassy Key, which prompted Long-Drink to say nostalgically that he hadn’t seen a key of grass since the Seventies. It was followed by Fat Deer Key—Slippery Joe wondered aloud if that was a misspelling, and got kicked again—and Vaca Key—“Not the one in Hawaii,” Omar said deadpan—and when Boot Key gave way to Hog Key, Joe Quigley said, “Oh, of course: you gotta tighten up your skate boots before you can play hogkey”…it went like that. As I say, the air and the scenery were getting us high, and any silly little thing became hilarious.
Just a little farther on, at Little Knight Key (don’t ask), that damn road gathered itself, picked itself up by its bootstraps, flung itself into the air, and didn’t come down for seven miles. Swear to God. The Seven-Mile Bridge: it passes above Pigeon Key on the way but doesn’t come down until it reaches Little Duck Key. (More ribbing for the Lucky Duck, who took it with less ill grace than usual.) Damnedest view in the world: Florida Straits on the left, Gulf of Mexico on the right, infinite universe above, vast ocean below.
For a while we kept up the joking, turning to the map for inspiration—for that road connects a mere handful of the hundreds of Keys, and some of them have goofy names like Monk Key, Drink Key, Drunk Key, Waltz Key (“B flat, isn’t it, Eddie?”), Knockemdown Key, Little Knockemdown Key (but no Setemup Key at all, oddly), Rattlesnake Lumps, Snipe Keys (“You really gotta hunt for those.”), and Women Key (“The trick is getting close enough to wind it,” Slippery Joe said and got kicked a third time. He seems to like it.). Isham Latimer pretended to be offended by Coon Key and also by Eastern, Western, and Middle Sambo, and Tommy Janssen said it seemed wrong to have both a Squirrel Key and a Rock Key, but no Bullwinkle Key to accompany Moose Key. Fast Eddie, in a rare burst of loquaciousness, suggested that we’d seen so many camera-bedecked Japanese tourists, there ought to be one where they could hold sing-alongs, named Carry Oh Key.
Callahan's Key Page 16
