Air Dance Iguana

by Tom Corcoran

  Three doors swung open. Tim and his new roommates had come to call, each with a breakfast brew in a coolie. Not to risk running short, Tim also carried a twelve-pack. In Levi’s and loafers, he was James Dean with a one-day sunburn. His T-shirt sleeves were rolled close to the shoulder seam, and he looked broad through his shoulders and biceps. I wondered where he’d found time to work out. His hair was slicked to a pompadour, and his belt buckle rode his right hip.

  The young woman wore a ball cap, a gauze-thin tube top, pube-hugger shorts, and sunglasses. A tiny cell phone was clipped to her elastic waistband. She approached me with her hand extended. “We didn’t get around to formalities the other night. I’m Francie.” Her grip was firm and confident, and when she lifted her shades, her sleepy brown eyes glistened with mischief. “We put our informalities behind us, didn’t we?”

  “I rarely open my eyes that time of night,” I said.

  “Shit,” she said. “They were snowballs in a bowl of ink.”

  Tanker Branigan reached over her shoulder to shake hands. His forearm was as big around as my calf. His hand felt like a warm towel. “You know my name and it’s Irish,” he said. “Now we can close that topic. How you doing today?”

  I pointed to the blue sky. “How could I not be perfect?”

  “Right you are,” said Tanker. “Bird songs are crisp and the air is sweet. The barometer is spinning cartwheels.”

  Odd words from a man who looked as dense as his body. He carried the bulk of a pro wrestler, a barrel chest, and a beach-ball gut. All of it wrapped in a Sloppy Joe’s T-shirt, a half-acre unbuttoned Hawaiian overshirt, and black Bermuda shorts. His face showed no emotion, no judgment, but his eyes scanned beyond me as if danger lurked in the yard palmettos. I suspected that an agile man occupied the large torso.

  Tim hung back, raised his Michelob as a toast. “Hey, brother.”

  “Welcome to daylight,” I said. “How did you know where to find me?”

  “We ate breakfast at Dennis Pharmacy. I sat next to a lady who asked if I was related to you. We got to talking.”

  “Her name Carmen?”

  He shook his head. “This charmer was Teresa, and she was as tasty as the scrambled eggs.”

  “I didn’t know she had my new address,” I said.

  “She called somebody on her cell phone to get it. You didn’t mention the other night you were moving.”

  “Would you have heard me?”

  “I reckon not,” he said.

  Francie turned to me. “Me and Tanker are going to Big Pine, just the two of us. You got custody of your brother for the next two hours. I’ve never been to that giant flea market. I collect tacky tourist thimbles, and Tanker collects antique postcards.”

  “From the Keys?” I said.

  Branigan shook his head. “Pre-Castro Cuba. Spanish architecture and Art Deco hotels, and old Havana restaurants.”

  “Don’t get him started,” said Francie. “He won’t stop talking until you’re an expert, too.”

  A minute later the station wagon departed, lopsided with Tanker at the wheel and Francie shotgun, handing him a fresh beer. Tim had plastered rock-radio stickers on his Caprice’s back end. In the bottom corner of the rear window he had stuck a decal with PEACE in a circle, a line angled through it.

  He looked around the yard, waggled his bottle at the skiff. “Don’t let me get in the way of your labors. I love to sit on my ass and watch hard work.” He pointed to his twelve-pack. “You at least drink on weekends, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But only with girls in the morning.”

  “Very good, brother. Very fast.”

  Tasks were a fine way to pass the time of the surprise visit. I coupled that concept with the knowledge that my brother wouldn’t stop nailing his foot to the floor to accommodate me. I returned to the scrub brush and hose. Tim pulled a lounge chair from under the house and dragged it close to the skiff. He positioned it for sun-bathing and stripped his shirt. The width of his shoulders was no illusion, but his chest was so white it looked pale blue. Except for his hairstyle, his face resembled what I saw each day in the mirror. His premature age lines gave me an idea of how I might appear in ten years.

  “Brother,” I said. “You have a beer belly.”

  “My waistline goes in and out with the tide. One more black mark on my heap of family dishonor.”

  “Hey, I was only razzing.”

  “Daddy had a beer belly, too, Alex. I inherited the tail end of the genetic choo-choo.”

  “Always the victim.”

  He cast his eyes aside. “Always the speech.”

  “Haven’t we done enough Dad-loved-you-best routines?”

  “We could do it a thousand times,” he said. “It’s not going to fix me.”

  “The point I was trying to—”

  “It was always you making points. You and Raymond were the boys, and I was an outparcel.”

  “Like I said, the victim.”

  He let it slide and twisted another top. “Speaking of which, you see the paper this morning? Weird place you live.”

  “I don’t get it delivered here,” I said.

  “Two men hung from boat davits the day before yesterday, twenty miles apart. Then another yesterday, the same way, back down the road. It doesn’t synch with your Overseas Highway’s lightweight reputation.”

  “They were beyond weird. I had to photograph them.”

  “Shit, Alex. For the newspaper?”

  “The cops. I do part-time to help cover my cost of living.”

  He disapproved. “The police payroll?”

  “It has side benefits, brother. What do you think kept you out of the gray-bar motel?”

  “Did I thank you for that? If I didn’t, I appreciate your help.”

  Thirty years he had been spewing morning-after apologies and thanks. As usual he couldn’t talk without leaving me openings. They were easy shots but the process always fatigued me. This time I decided to stay quiet and roll with it.

  Tim sipped his beer and studied the canal, gauging the territory. I couldn’t guess how much of it he absorbed.

  “How did you get to be a photographer?” he said. “All I remember was a box with a plastic window that looked like a fly’s eye.”

  “The light meter?”

  “Whatever. I hated when you aimed it at me. I felt like that fly eye was inspecting me from a hundred angles, putting all my secrets, a hundred versions of me, on film. Secrets I didn’t know I had.”

  An old mystery solved. My first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, had disappeared from a crate of belongings I had left behind while I was in the Navy.

  “It was just a light meter, Tim.”

  He waved it off. “So back to your becoming a pro.”

  “When I arrived in Key West, I kept seeing things that we never saw in Ohio. Funky houses, shrimp boats, Cuban groceries, tropical plants, the crazy characters who lived here. It was like a foreign country. One night I saw some slides a friend shot with a new Olympus camera, and I couldn’t believe the colors and the sharpness. The next time I had a paycheck, I went and bought one. From that day on I’ve been the ultimate tourist, always a camera in hand.”

  “Self-taught?” he said.

  “I kept pressing the button, buying film, and throwing away bad ones.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Ready for that beer?”

  “I think it’s time.” I found another chair, and we sat and stared at the canal.

  “I still think about that night in the drive-in, Alex, when I let my mouth get ahead of my ass.”

  “You were about to have both handed to you,” I said.

  “And you saved the day, driving your date’s car. Or her father’s car, that old Buick Riviera. You pulled into the restaurant parking lot and saw me in trouble, you aimed right for that dude who wanted to rip me apart. He backed off, and you ordered me to jump in.”

  “I meant the backseat. You landed on Susan’s lap.”

  “Whatever,�
�� said Tim. “I knew what was good for me. But then that guy jumped in his buddy’s GTO, and the chase was on.”

  I stupidly thought that my silence would prompt him to drop it.

  He didn’t let up. “I probably didn’t tell you back then, but you scared the shit out of me. You outdrove that son of a bitch and you lost them doing figure eights in the city park. Susan loved it. You might’ve heard her breathing, but I was on her lap and I could feel her heart beating. I think it turned her on. Her perspiration smelled like an orgasm.”

  “You knew the difference between that and fear?”

  “Well…I always had a thing for her, too.”

  I had no response to that.

  “You did me a backup favor,” he said.

  No escaping now. “What was that?”

  “You dropped me off on the street behind our house so I could sneak through the Goldsteins’ yard and go in the back door and not get caught drunk by Daddy.”

  “Sounds right,” I said.

  Tim pretended to read the label on the beer bottle. “Did you also forget that you went back to the drive-in that night? You taunted that GTO dude yourself and got him to chase you again. Maybe you wanted to show him you were good instead of lucky.”

  “You know it didn’t go down like that, brother.”

  “You’re not still sticking with your old story, are you? Maybe today, all these years later, you can tell me the truth.”

  “Which truth would that be?” I said.

  “You got him to chase you through the same route, but faster. You took a right and a quick left and crossed the river bridge and that GTO fishtailed and disappeared from your mirror. It ran off the road at something like seventy, but you didn’t go back to look. You took your date home and put the Riviera in her father’s garage and made sure your stories matched—except you two couldn’t have known that the passenger died in the wreck and the driver would go to prison for DUI manslaughter. Then the hero probably hit a home run—or at least got to third base with her so ready—before you walked home. That about right?”

  “No.” I felt sweat sticking my shirt to the chair’s plastic webbing.

  “What was it, Alex—they were waiting on Susan’s street when you drove her home?”

  I nodded. “I turned into her driveway, they jumped out with baseball bats and started coming for us.”

  “Now I hear that echo from the past.”

  “I was about to take your beating, Tim, not to mention they’d hurt Susan and ruin her father’s car. Those boys called the tune and I bolted. My point of view is that I outran them twice.”

  “Okay,” said Tim. “Your side of the tale hasn’t slipped over the years. How was it they knew…oh yes, the driver knew her brother Jeff because he used to swipe his dad’s car and hang out with the big boys at the drive-in. He even sold the GTO driver some pot.”

  “I knew about his hanging out,” I said. “I never knew about peddling weed.”

  “We were never on the same grapevine, Alex. Did Susan ever have an opinion about that guy who died? Or the guy going to jail for seven years?”

  “I guess she agreed with my side of things.”

  “How’d you keep her quiet?” he said.

  “I didn’t do anything. After that night we stopped seeing each other. I think that was August, and a month later we were off to different colleges.”

  “Didn’t you expect some legal repercussion?”

  “I don’t know if I expected anything,” I said. “I sure feared it. I suppose the police knew the chasers were hoods. I heard they found the bats inside the wrecked car. Brass knuckles, too.”

  “So it was good riddance?”

  “Maybe so. They could’ve found witnesses to your fight and traced the Riviera, but they never did and nobody came forward. I waited for that other shoe to drop for months after that. Hell, I waited all through my freshman and sophomore years.”

  “But you skated, just like always?”

  “It’s deep in the past.”

  “You took part in two illegal car chases,” he said. “Speeding, reckless driving, stop-sign violations. How’s your conscience on that?”

  “Like I said, they made their move and I reacted. My conscience never came into play.”

  “Gotcha.”

  It was time to clam up. Once again Tim had shaped history to his favor, to put down someone else. In his smug slam of my conscience, he couldn’t grasp that my actions that night, right or wrong, stemmed from his grief at the drive-in. If I hadn’t had to rescue him, the two chases wouldn’t have happened.

  But Tim kept hammering. “The guy who wanted to punch out my lights has been deep in the ground ever since.”

  “His buddy bought the blame. Can we change the subject?”

  “But, Alex, you knew they’d smashed that GTO.”

  “I knew they’d left the road,” I said.

  “You didn’t go back to see if anyone was hurt.”

  “I could’ve learned the hard way that they were fine and ready for action.”

  “Didn’t that give you a weird sense of power?” said Tim.

  “Not wanting to be injured?”

  “Leaving them there to maybe die. You could’ve made a difference.”

  “What’s your fascination with all these details, Tim?”

  “Hell if I know. Why is it something you want to sweep under the rug?”

  “I had one thought in my mind,” I said. “I wanted my girlfriend, her father’s car, and my ass as far away from those fools as I could get. Now it’s history.”

  He was quiet for a minute before he said, “Ever wonder what ever happened to Susan?”

  “Mom told me a few years ago that she was divorced twice and finally landed a rich boyfriend. They live on an island near Spain.”

  He finally went quiet. I went back to work on the skiff, spritzing cleaner, scuffing my knuckles as I jammed the scrub brush into corners, finding pockets of mildew that Al had ignored all year.

  “After that summer,” said Tim, “with Raymond and you gone, I got to be the orphan.”

  “You mean ‘only child,’ right? I can’t imagine you stuck around the house much.”

  “Why bother?” he said. “The old man didn’t get it. Even when I was in junior high, he didn’t understand I wasn’t that bad. I was a fuckup, I won’t argue, but I wanted to be good. He didn’t believe I was smart, maybe smarter than he was. So I did what any red-blooded American boy in my shoes would do. I tried to prove to his nasty ass that I was dumb and evil, and I did it to piss him off and disappoint and embarrass him. Except it pissed me off, for some fucking reason, that you could ignore him. You didn’t let his bullshit get in your way. You went off to be good and smart on your own. I had to stay back and fight my little fight.”

  “So here we are today,” I said.

  “Yep, in your Keys.”

  “Having arrived by different routes of travel.”

  “More different than you can imagine,” said Tim.

  “What will you do here?”

  “Are you asking do I still want to be a decent human being,” said Tim, “or did I waste all those wishes living a shitbird’s existence?”

  “As pilots say, that’s the runway behind you.”

  He nodded. “And life is a long series of drag races and siestas. I know you’ve got this ledger in your mind where you owe guilt debt to the world or Mom or your friends on the island. But your debt just grows as you get older, gets heavier and never goes away. All I want is a balance sheet that zeroes out to a guilt-free ride. Anything wrong with that?”

  Out of Tim’s mouth, that assessment amounted to towering optimism. Maybe my kid brother was starting to grow up.

  “A zero balance sheet.” I laughed. “The old man died owing me money.”

  “He died owing me more than that.”

  “Like there’s a written guarantee?” I said. “I won’t argue that he started the wound. Maybe you need to get over it before you dig yourself
a deeper hole.”

  Tim drained the beer. “I suppose we all exist for a reason, pieces in the cosmic puzzle. I’m through digging my own holes, Alex. On top of that, I’m convinced it’s easier to be a decent human being instead of the alternative. I like easy.”

  “And it’s nice not to always be looking over your shoulder,” I said.

  “You bet. But, as great men have said before me, fuck it all. How fast will that boat go?”

  “That hull, that motor, I expect forty-five, maybe fifty with the wind on your butt.”

  “You need some kind of license to take people for rides?” he said. “Maybe that’d be the job for me.”

  “They call it a six-pack license. You take a course, take a test, get the Coast Guard’s approval. I’ve heard a few captains bitch that their income’s dependent on the weather.”

  Tim shook his head. “I smell insurance and permits and sales tax, too. They don’t make a damned thing easy these days. It’s all stacked against little guys like me.”

  The Caprice rolled in with a honk and a shut-down blat from its hollow mufflers. Tim didn’t move from where we sat. “Five-point-seven liters, 260 horsepower, and twenty-three miles per gallon. I paid two large and I should’ve paid less.”

  “Still sounds like a bargain.”

  “I never make good deals,” he said. “I might get lucky every few years, but one way or the other, even the good ones nail me in the ass. That station wagon’ll break down one day and leave me stranded when I need it least, you can count on it.”

  He pitched his empty behind him. It rose in a perfect arc but missed the trash barrel by a foot and landed in the grass. He stood, looked away, and made no effort to pick up the bottle.

  “All that anger inside you,” I said.

  “I think some of it’s drained out.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re not violent.”

  He grinned but it turned into a sneer. He picked up the bottle and flung it downward. It shattered in the trash. Brown glass flew and sprinkled his forearm. He brushed it off, unconcerned about imbedding shards in his skin, then stared into the trash can as if searching for truth. “I’m not violent? Who ever told you that, brother?”