Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  But after a couple of miles of that, one by one we all fell silent, shut up, and just dug it.

  The Seven-Mile Bridge. Don’t pass up a chance to drive it.

  Four little Keys past the end of the bridge, on a fairly sizable and undeveloped one called Bahia Honda Key (Shorty suggested that Laheasa Honda was much better advice), we came up on the entrance to a big state park, on the left. We’d only been traveling a couple of hours or so, it was still before noon, but the sun was high enough in the sky to be hot as hell. All of a sudden I couldn’t stand it anymore and put on my turn signal.

  “Where you goin’, Jake?” Long-Drink inquired behind me.

  “You guys can do what you want,” I said. “I’m going swimming.”

  Erin and Zoey cheered. Long-Drink echoed it on the CB, and as I pulled off the highway I could faintly hear the cheer echoing back along the caravan. I imagine the first fifty drivers behind us cheered just as loud when the last of our big yellow monsters finally got off the road.

  The sign said campgrounds to the right, beach to the left. I took us left. Winding road through dunes thick with grass, speed limit of 15, speed bumps every few yards to enforce it. Then a seemingly infinite succession of blacktop parking areas on the right. No one of them had twenty-four open slots, but we managed to fit most of us into three adjacent areas. Fifty yards away was a line of shaded picnic tables with barbecue stands, occasionally broken by a large wood-frame shower-and-washroom building. Fifty yards of white sand beyond all that was that impossibly pale green ocean.

  Body temperature, it felt like. When you were in up to your shoulders, you could look down and see your feet.

  I’m not saying the Hawk Channel beach at Bahia Honda State Park is the finest place to swim on the planet. Just the finest I’ve ever immersed my personal body into, so far. (A friend of mine says good things about the beaches north from Cairns in Queensland, North Australia…at least, at the time of year when the box jellyfish aren’t running.) We had so much fun, at one point we got up a volleyball game, unhampered by our lack of a ball. Ralph von Wau Wau had some fun I think I won’t describe. I myself spent lazy happy time shielding my wife from the sun with my own body, and found the pay most agreeable. (Sunburn wasn’t a factor. Thanks to Mickey Finn, we’re both radiation-proof.) A warm, slippery, sleepy wife is a nice thing to kiss. Erin built herself a Sand Bar—that is, a sand castle in the spitting image of Mary’s Place—which struck several tourists dumb: as tall as she was, quite lifelike, and flanked by half a dozen little Sand Cars parked higgledy-piggledy. I looked at it and knew the tide would come in and dissolve it, eventually…and found I didn’t mind a bit. I got my daughter’s point, in other words—and so did many of my friends. The sea and sky and sun scoured a lot of scar tissue off a lot of souls that morning. We did a lot of grinning.

  When I could sense that we’d have to leave soon, I fetched Lady Macbeth from the bus, and sang exactly one song: “Hey Jude.” Most of my companions had jumped in by the end of the first verse, and I don’t suppose more than eighty percent of the people on the beach that day joined in on the coda. We might be there now if I hadn’t broken two strings.

  Anyway, half an hour later we were all desanded, desalted, partially dried, regreased against the brutal sun and the flying carnivores called “mosquitoes” by the natives thereabouts, fed and watered, beginning to itch in unaccustomed places, and back on Highway 1. To my astonishment, traffic in both directions halted long enough to allow our entire yellow boa constrictor to leave the park as a unit.

  Maybe five miles later, on Big Pine Key, one of the largest of the Keys, Willard Hooker lost a wheel. Fortunately he managed to coast to a stop without tipping her, and there was plenty of shoulder there, and we all pulled off the road to wait while he and Omar and Shorty dealt with it. It turned out to be good luck, of a kind. By the time Shorty reported that it was going to be a good hour, someone had spotted the sign we’d otherwise have driven right past, discreetly pointing the way north to the National Key Deer Refuge. Several of us decided to kill the time by checking it out. Luckily Omar knew enough about the place to head off our stampede with a brief lecture. He made us all squeeze into his bus—which since Omar owns almost nothing was the only one with most of its passenger space and seats intact—and made us promise to be “tantric,” as he called it. Respectful, that is, and quiet as churchmice. He impressed it on us so emphatically that the ranger who stopped us at a gate partway up the trail could read it in our faces, and passed us through on foot. And so we got to see a few of the fabulous Key deer.

  Full-grown deer—no bigger than dogs…

  Swear to God; if I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’. Perfect little miniature horned Bambis, somehow unmistakably adult; the elves of the quadruped world. They were the most breathtakingly beautiful animals I’ve ever seen, and I’d say that if Pixel were here. They’ll remain that until the day it is given to me to see my first unicorn. Erin, most uncharacteristically, seemed to regress emotionally to normal level for her age, fell daffy in love with the little things, and had to be firmly talked out of luring one aboard to take with us. The thing that made me uneasy was that Zoey didn’t contribute a word to the argument.

  Never mind; Pixel rubbed against my shin approvingly all the way back to the highway.

  Little Torch Key, Ramrod Key, Summerland Key, Cudjoe Key, Sugarloaf Key, Park Key, the charmingly named Perky Key, the Saddlebunch Keys, Shark Key, Big Coppit Key, Rockland Key, the huge Naval Air Station complex on Boca Chica Key—all flashed by in the next half hour. Maybe twenty-five miles after we left the Key Deer behind, the road made one last lunge into the sea for a mile or so, landed safely on Stock Island—primarily known as the home of the tallest known mountain of garbage in the world, Mt. Trashmore—skipped once, across Cow Key Channel—

  —and poured us into Key West in glorious early afternoon.

  We had left the United States behind and, with an appropriate total lack of border formalities, entered the Conch Republic.

  Maybe you never got the straight of that. A surprising number of people haven’t. Back in April of 1982, the federal government became embarrassed by the enormous number of illegal aliens and drug dealers it had justified its budgets by claiming were streaming up U.S. 1 into Florida every day. It had overplayed its hand a bit, and some people were demanding something actually be done. What the government of, by, and for the people decided to do was put a border crossing at the top of the Keys, just as though there were a border there, and then require anyone entering or leaving that hundred-mile strip of America to prove his or her citizenship—and, if he or she looked weird, to submit to a search. Hard to believe, I know, but it really happened. Those were strange and savage times.

  Anyway, the Keys nearly went up in flames, as normal commerce in both directions ground to a near halt—but the reaction way down at the ass end in Key West was both typical and admirable. They decided that since Conchs weren’t being treated like U.S. citizens, they wouldn’t be. They seceded, and formally declared the Conch Republic. Issued passports, designed a flag, opened an embassy and everything. I believe they even applied to the U.N., though they may not have gotten as far as actually mailing it. The head rebel was really good with media, very dryly funny on camera. The Conch Republic got so much good ink, around the world, that the feds finally scrapped the border-crossing scheme, and instead solved the problem by simply not inflating their estimates of northward alien-and-drug flow quite so outrageously for a while.

  That the Conch Republic concept is still alive today, and celebrated with a large and popular annual festival in which local boats pepper a “Coast Guard” vessel with rotten fruit until it surrenders, will tell you something about Key West.

  Our first ten minutes in town told us almost as much.

  At Doc Webster’s advice, we hung a left as soon as we crossed Cow Key Channel, and took the A1A loop that runs down along the southern shore of the island. The first street we passed on our right was called D
uck Avenue, which everyone agreed was a favorable omen. We went by the small airport (which Erin seemed to study particularly intently), and then saw on our left a remarkable strip called Houseboat Row. It’s just what it sounds like: a long row of squatters living in houseboats, moored to public dock. Some of the houseboats were exquisite and elegant, with little trellised entrances from the dock to their gangplanks, and some were run-down and listing and half-awash. I’d seen a houseboat community before, back on Long Island, but it was nowhere near as interesting as this one.

  But the people were even more interesting. Between Houseboat Row and the end of Smathers Beach, I saw just about every imaginable kind of human being there is, all sharing the sidewalk and sand and hot-dog wagons without friction or tension—and a startlingly high percentage of them fell under the loose general heading of My Kind Of People. Queers. Blacks. Cubans. Asians. Hippies. Drunks. Drag queens. Weirdos. Artists. Writers. Musicians. Beach bums and bunnies. Hustlers. All of them with an odd, indefinable shared quality that teased at the edges of my understanding.

  There were also scatterings of yuppies in uniforms, and a few rich lizard people with their young trophy pets, from the luxury hotels and condos on the north side of the road—and of course something like half the total throng were tourists, half of whom seemed to be drunken college students—but all of these seemed to be treated with great tolerance and forgiveness by the citizens.

  There were as many bicycles and mopeds as there were cars—but most people seemed happy walking, and why not? You could walk across the whole island in an hour. If you were impervious to beauty, that is.

  Past Smathers Beach we deked north and rejoined Route 1, now that it was safely past the mall district, and headed into the heart of town at a stately 20 mph. The colorful, raffish aspect of the people we drove past did not change; if anything they got a little funkier. And they still all had that ineffable shared quality in common, which I finally realized was fearlessness. None of them was remotely afraid that a cop was going to drag him into an alley and tune him up. The drunks knew they weren’t going to be rolled. The gays weren’t worried about being bashed. Beautiful women strolled along dressed in almost nothing but the confidence that they would not be raped. The few cops I did see wore short pants, rode bicycles, smiled a lot, and got smiled back at a lot.

  “Jesus,” Long-Drink said on the CB. “It’s okay to be strange here.”

  “Roger that,” Noah Gonzalez agreed.

  “I thought we were gonna start a riot, rolling into a place this size in two dozen yellow elephants—but look: nobody even notices us!”

  “Doc says per capita, this town has both more bars and more churches than anywhere else in America,” I told him. “We should fit right in, Drink.”

  “I wonder what that must be like,” he murmured.

  You could sort of sense the main drag, Duval Street, coming up—the tourist quotient rose to near saturation as it neared. A few blocks short of it we turned north again and followed that street to the end. Just short of Key West Bight, I pulled into a trailer court, followed by the first eleven buses behind me, that being the court’s capacity. The rest continued on a few blocks to Trumbo Annex, U.S. Navy territory, where Doc had arranged additional temporary accommodations for some of us.

  The Doc himself came bustling out of the trailer court office as I shut down the engine. Somebody came out the door with him, but all I could see was Doc. I’d known him for twenty years, and my first sight of him took my breath away. He had, as advertised, dropped at least fifty pounds, lost at least one chin—and his perennially pale skin had turned the color of mahogany. He wore a white straw fedora, wraparound shades, a pale green short-sleeved shirt, khaki shorts, and sneakers with no socks. Formal dress by Key West standards. He looked healthy and fit and happier than I had ever seen him. In that first glimpse of him I knew, way down deep in my bones, that I had made the right choice in bringing my family and friends here.

  My loves and I swarmed down from our bus and gang-hugged him: I hit him high, Zoey hit him low, and Erin got him around the knees. There was a lot of laughing and squeezing and rocking back and forth, and everybody was probably saying something but nobody was listening to anybody.

  Then Long-Drink hit, hard, and I had a rush of brains to the head and got out of that hug just before it turned into a pileup, scooping Erin up out of harm’s way too and carrying her out of range with me.

  I found myself facing Doc’s companion, and blinked at him in mild astonishment.

  My first thought was Saint Popeye. He had the bowlegged stance, battered skipper’s cap, corncob pipe, weatherbeaten face, and hyperdeveloped tattooed forearms of a fisherman—but the sparkling wise eyes and dreamy closed-lipped smile of a serious acidhead.

  Which would have explained the rest of his wardrobe. Put a rainbow in a blender for three seconds on high, spit it on cotton, nuke it till it glows, and you’ve got his shirt. I was wearing those new self-polarizing sunglasses, and that shirt made them darken. He wore it unbuttoned, displaying a broad tanned hairy chest and washboard abs. Instead of shorts, he wore what I guess was a sarong, or possibly some self-invented variant: a lot of loosely gathered cloth that covered him almost to the knees and looked airy as hell. His feet were bare, and appeared to have been bare for a very long time. He wore a small, tasteful gold ring on his left big toe.

  Back up to those glittering eyes. They were ice-blue, and locked on to mine like tractor beams. I already had a big goofy grin on my face—not just from greeting Doc; I’d had it more or less since we’d left Key Largo that morning—but the sheer benevolence of his answering smile made me grin even wider. This, I could already tell, was a Buddha.

  “Hi,” I said, shifting my grip on Erin so I could offer him my hand.

  “Good idea,” he said in a resonant baritone, and put something into my palm instead of his. I blinked down at it, and my keen jungle-honed senses quickly identified it: a split second after my eyes told me it was the thinnest joint I had ever encountered, my nose told me it was also probably one of the best.

  I looked back up to find him holding out a Zippo. My smile muscles were starting to ache, a little, and I found I liked the sensation. What athletes call a good burn. One good burn deserves another; I leaned into the flame. Thhhhhhppp—

  Oh, my…

  “Welcome to the Island of Bones,” he said as I passed the thing back to him.

  Seeing my puzzlement, he explained. “That’s what Ponce de León named it. Caya Huesos, the Island of Bones. The Calusa used it for Boot Hill at the time.” He took a hit. “Things have picked up a little since,” he croaked, and handed it back to me.

  “I’m Jake Stonebender,” I told him, because I could already tell that if I took a second hit of this stuff without introducing myself first, I would never get around to it.

  He held up a finger, listened to the cosmos a moment, then exhaled. “I’m Double Bill.”

  “You mean like a parrot?” Erin asked him. “Or a deerstalker cap?”

  He looked at her with obvious delight. “Naw, it’s my name. William Williams. My folks thought they were funny.”

  “So do mine,” she said sympathetically, grinning back at him.

  “S’cuse me,” I said, and let out my breath. “Double Bill, allow me to present my daughter Erin.”

  “I’m fifteen months old,” she told him, “and I’m kind of a genius.”

  “Sure you are,” he said happily. “Is it fun?”

  “So far.”

  “Well, good.”

  Everything had begun to sparkle, just perceptibly. I could tell I had about thirty seconds of responsibility left to me, max, and made a token effort. “Look, there’s a lot of stuff I ought to do before I relax. I should go in and get us all registered here—”

  “Covered,” he said.

  “—and meet our host, and thank him for taking on this many—”

  “You already have. You’re welcome.”

  “—oh.” Sh
ift gears. Cap’n Buddha manages this trailer park. Of course. No wonder they’ll take us. “Far out. Then I guess the only priority flag left on my list is to make a start on permanent housing.” I gestured toward the exuberant throng with Doc at the center, making atrocious puns. “All those folks need homes, and I got another load just as big over at Trumbo Annex—plus I need to find a nice place for us all to hang out together. Doc’s got a friend who’s supposed to be a big-time realtor, but the sooner I give him an idea of just what he’s dealing with—”

  “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I’ve had bigger challenges.”

  Shift gears again. Double Bill is the big-time realtor. He probably owns the trailer park.

  This is what a realtor looks like down here. I can’t wait to meet a beatnik. Interesting people, these Conchs.

  “Far out,” I said, and gave up. “Then I guess I’m off duty?”

  “I’m also an attorney,” he said, “and my best advice to you at this juncture is to let me relight that for you.”

  I shook my head. “Thanks—but let me see if I can pull Zoey out of that scrum and see if she’d—”

  He held out a fistful of joints just as slender and potent as the first. I have no idea where he got them from; he didn’t have a single pocket I could see. “Have her pass these around, and then come back and we’ll finish this one. I want to hear about just what kind of a bar you have in mind to run.”

  “Well…okay.” I set Erin down. “Be right back, love.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Double Bill said, and held out his swollen forearms. Erin hopped up into them without hesitation and nestled in, staring up into his sparkling eyes.