“It’s just a little fire,” she whispered. “Come back inside.”
But I didn’t. With the cool pavement underfoot I went out into the parking lot, where I watched men in firefighting gear direct traffic, rerouting cars as they kept clear of the live wires now lying across the street. The transformer atop the pole nearest our building had exploded, the wires severed, flopping. The top of the pole still burned. There was a short man standing near me. “It was the damnedest thing,” he said, offering his story to me with a confessional urgency. “I was watching CNN and I saw it happen right out that window. Just a big flash, then the bang. I called them,” and he pointed to the fire trucks. “‘Stay outside until they arrive,’ they tell me on the phone. Then they come and they’re yelling at me, ‘Get inside! Live wires!’”
I stood with the man, who I guessed from his Seminoles T-shirt, his drawl, and his deep tan, was either native to the state or a longtime visitor, which may amount to the same thing. While the firefighters stood around waiting for the utility people to arrive, he and I stood side by side watching the pole smoulder, a spent matchstick against an inky sky, a pair of men too tired to sleep, and the fire trucks with their lights flashing in the swollen Floridian night.
It might have been the next day, or the day after that, that Gary Holsapple, the pool and handyman at The Sands, and Stephanie’s father, first spoke to me. I’d seen Gary before. Sometimes he’d be crouched before a flower bed or an electrical panel, a bandana spilling from the back pocket of his dirty Lee jeans, a Tampa Bay Buccaneers cap up on his big, damp head. I’d hear him tinkering, or explaining a problem to himself, or breathing heavily just outside the window of my kitchenette. I’d say hello in passing, or mention the weather, or heap praise on the shape of the place. He’d nod without saying a word.
Early on in this whole mess I tried to will myself into believing Stephanie might be as old as twenty-one, but in the end that proved useless. Let’s be perfectly honest about this: I knew.
I was standing on the beach, between the Gulf and The Sands, watching sandpipers tease the surf, thinking about Stephanie, maybe even wondering idly about her age, when a big, leathery hand clamped over my shoulder.
“Let’s you and me talk,” he said.
He walked ahead of me, lumbering, and led me toward the building, down the central corridor, and past the pool, to what I quickly figured was his condo. He knows, I thought. He knows and he’s going to kill me. There was maybe something in his waistband. A shape. It looked solid, like the butt of a gun.
He unlocked his door and I mutely followed him inside. I stood in the doorway of the home of a large American man, a labourer, whose daughter I had touched and kissed and driven to restaurants and bought wine. Whose clothes I had removed. I stood in his home and wondered what kind of gun he had tucked into the back of his Lee jeans.
He motioned toward a flowery sofa. “Have a seat.” To my own surprise, I did. And while I did I tried to remember what I’d read about the screwy laws in Florida. By entering his home, had I just given him permission to kill me? Was I an intruder? Was he within his rights to shoot me and claim he’d only been standing his ground?
“Get you anything?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Sorry, we haven’t actually been introduced.” He offered me his hand. “Gary Holsapple.”
“Ted,” I said, and cut myself short of offering the fraudulent surname.
“Yeah. Ted. Get you anything?”
“Thanks, no.”
“Coke? Sprite?”
“I’m fine,” I said through the lump in my throat. He was proving to be an awfully friendly instrument of death.
He went into the kitchen area, just to the back of the condo, swung open the fridge and got himself a Diet Coke. He walked back toward me, cracked the can open, and sat on the recliner opposite the couch. He was quiet a moment. The place smelled like carpet cleaner.
“Stephanie’s seventeen, you know,” he said.
“Stephanie?”
“Stephanie. My daughter, your new friend. She’s seventeen.”
“Really? I didn’t—”
“Reason I’m saying this is, you’re not. Are you?” He sipped his Coke.
“Me? No. Not seventeen.”
“Right. I know. Hold on,” he said, and he stood, put his drink on a glass-topped wicker side table, and left the room. I flinched visibly as he walked by. My vision tunnelled in then, and my body broke out in a sweat. I became dizzy and I believed that the room itself had changed colour and tilted about forty-five degrees.
When, in a moment, he returned not with a knife or a club or a roll of plastic sheeting, but with a book in his hands, I was relieved and confused. It was a photo album, its cover pink and flocked, like the fur of a stuffed bear. The cover read OUR LITTLE PRINCESS. He sat next to me on the couch and opened the album.
“There she is,” he said, pointing to a photo of a tiny girl in white-blonde pigtails. “God. Adorable.” If he was going to shoot me I wished he would just up and do it. But instead he kept turning the album’s stiff, heavy pages, showing me more and more photos of Stephanie as a chubby toddler, Stephanie at Disney World, Stephanie as a gangly pre-teen. What cut me the most was just how well I remembered the years suggested by the decor in the pictures, the slogans and graphics on her T-shirts, the style of her running shoes.
“My little girl,” Gary Holsapple said.
“Mr. Holsapple, I—”
“Gary.”
“Gary. Look, I think I understand what you’re trying to say,” I said, then tried to chuckle. “And yes, okay, consider it done. I’m sorry about the whole thing. If you’d like me to find somewhere else to stay, I can do that, too. I was thinking about heading home any—”
“Just be careful with my little girl’s heart, is what I’m saying.”
“What?” I said, but he was distracted. He’d come to a photo at the end, which showed Stephanie perhaps only months younger than she was when I’d met her. She was sitting on the hood of her powder blue VW Rabbit, in short shorts and a tank top, flashing a peace sign.
“God, she’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he said. “She looks so much like her mother, rest her soul. Mrs. Holsapple was about that age when I met her, too. They’re hard to resist, aren’t they?”
“Wow.”
“Ted, listen. I know she comes off wise and sharp, all that. Wild, a bit tough. A big girl. But you remember being that age, don’t you? She’s just a kid. Be careful with her. Do you understand me?”
“Okay, yeah.”
“A father needs to know his baby is going to be taken care of.”
“Of course.”
“Good,” he said. “Good!” And he stood, and stepped toward me. “I’m glad we had this talk, Ted.” He opened his big arms to welcome me into a kind of collegial embrace. Two men, fools each, promising the safeguarding of a woman. A girl. He took me into his immense chest and I in turn wrapped my arms around his waist, and I moved my hands there, looking for the hard thing, the lump, the butt of a Colt, or a Sig Sauer, or a Glock. But I found nothing. Only fabric, and the leather of Gary’s belt.
That night Stephanie came to my room and when I opened the door she flounced in and sat across the loveseat in a manner not unprovocative.
“So you talked to Daddy,” she said.
“I did. Nice man. Where’s he from, originally?”
“Akron.”
“Do people from Ohio shoot people from Canada?”
“What are you even talking about, oh my god.”
“Historically, I mean.”
“Come on,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” she said. I changed and we fell into her Rabbit and headed off. We hadn’t gone ten blocks when she spotted a yard sale, wheeled around, and pulled up curbside.
“I love old junk,” she said.
It was a street sale, a dozen or more houses spilling their musty contents onto fold
ing card tables, women and men in lawn chairs taking bills for paperbacks, old golf shoes, furniture, board games. I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with bargain-hunters, sun-worshippers, registered Republicans, content Floridians. Their complaints, their laughter, their haggling all amounted to the same thing: “How will I forestall death?” And the fiery sunsets, the massive weather patterns like airborne continents looming over the Gulf, the storms being born in the Caribbean and churning their way north all contend: “You can’t.”
This is what Stephanie, for all her youthful beauty, will become. And, were I to, say, stick around here and marry this girl, this is what I, too, would become. It wouldn’t be better than life at home, despite the sun, despite the bikinis. It would take the same form of talk radio morning commutes, constant residual frustration like an almost undetectable white noise, doubt, moments of sudden exhaustion in wide-aisled grocery stores when my whereabouts and purpose temporarily escape me.
Say I made Stephanie my bride, Mrs. Ted Cruikshank—for the lie would have to be upheld, wouldn’t it? Thirty years from now, our intimacy long since having slipped away, a young girl might walk by on the beach wearing something she’d hidden from her parents, and something would move in me, a stirring in the old machinery. Shame and hot intimations of death, of wasted years, of animosity and self-hatred, and simple, animal impulse. God, how awful I would be, and how I’d hate Stephanie for allowing—or causing—me to become this leathery, sausage-limbed cartoon. Her tiny feet toughened and wrinkled. My right-leaning voting habits. And our children? Shipped off to FSU on track scholarships or academic bursaries. Our weekend air-conditioned Cadillac trips to school functions, to stadiums, wearing matching caps and sweatshirts, screaming “Go Seminoles” until we were hoarse. Weddings in Tampa-St. Pete. Family steak dinners in chain restaurants off I-75. Burial in a swamp.
Stephanie’s street sale purchase was a mustard yellow suede handbag that looked depressingly like something my own mother used to carry. We got back into the Rabbit and pulled away from the curb.
“Was that where you wanted to take me?” I asked.
“God no,” she said. “I just saw that. We’re going for the best grouper sandwiches in the world.”
Life is not composed of what we do, but of what we miss. I had then my first and, as it would happen, only glimpse of an Old Florida, the Spanish-moss draped enclave of the deep South, as we drove slowly down a shaded side street lined with once-great homes, arcaded, stuccoed—now crumbling and sagging, gardens reclaimed by the tangle and muck. A very old woman sat motionless in a chair on a down-sloping verandah in a queer greenish light, a small dog in her lap.
I had no way of knowing that I would not see that version of the world again, but something tugged gently downward on my heart then. I must have recognized that my contact with that hidden place could only ever prove fleeting, casual, and it stung me in the manner of personal loss. Most often and most painfully such things come to you in retrospect, but I felt it in that very moment, driving slowly by in Stephanie’s rustbucket VW, on our way to get what she promised me would be a sandwich I would not ever forget.
That night, in Ybor City, we danced. In buildings that were once cigar factories, now made over into nightclubs, we drank. In the very early morning we walked cobblestone streets that had once been Tampa’s Latin district, but were now the places where tourists searched in vain for something authentic. We searched for pizza, for margaritas, for cigarettes, for a place to lie down.
We tossed pennies into a fountain, made feeble wishes. And what did I wish for? What does anyone wish for, finally, after the wasted pleas for expensive things? A long and happy life. And the simple solution to the mess I’d found myself in: the soothing, seamless words necessary to extricate myself from this girl, her father, this condo, this state.
In the end I simply told her we were done. I left her a message. Sorry, I said. It had been a mistake. I left one for Beverley, too, asking him to call and tell me what I owed him. I placed the key on the counter of the kitchenette, got in a taxi, and was driven to the airport. And as the cab sped along, I said to myself it was okay, because I was never going to return to Florida again.
I ate a cellophane-wrapped sandwich while I watched CNN on a giant screen in the terminal, beneath an enormous pelican suspended by cables from the ceiling above.
Seventeen.
We boarded, and the plane taxied away from the terminal for what seemed a great while, then squared its shoulders to the designated runway. It powered up and began its hard acceleration. The sound filled my head, rattled my teeth and sinuses. I felt my stomach in my feet, glanced out the window at the blur, and then the receding ground, the swamp and sand and highways, green and brown. There was a shudder then, a small one, minor but unmistakable, followed by a larger one. It was a sideways shimmy, a break in the continuity of our forward velocity. It felt distinctly wrong, as though in the middle of staring down gravity we had blinked. And then who were we? We were seventy-eight souls—seventy-eight names recorded on the passenger manifest, seventy-eight beautiful accidents of timing, tissue, love—falling back to Florida as quickly as we had left it.
BELOW THE LIGHTED SKY
We were on our way to a concert in Wakefield, Quebec, which is a village up in the Gatineaus, not far from Ottawa. There was a little pub and inn called the Blue Moose there, a place where semi-prominent musicians gave concerts to a small room full of people. The economics of the thing seemed dubious, but the musicians kept coming.
It is true that obscure musicians played there, too, and I suppose the band that we were going to see qualified as that. Spiderbite were from Louisville, Kentucky, and they played a kind of music which sounded as though your favourite punk rock cassette had been left in the sun, and then dropped into the bathtub.
It was the late autumn of 1992, and we were barely in our twenties. Four of us packed into a 1980 Volvo wagon on a high, cool day, the sky a severe blue, a wind from the north bringing with it the earliest hints of winter. Gavin Harkness was driving. It was his car, one he’d bought for $500 when he was touring under the name Rat Lee, an act which involved him plugging his guitar into a complicated arrangement of pedals for delay and distortion which he would then activate by crawling all over the floor on his hands and knees. He played shows for a year, from Hamilton to Montreal, Columbus, Ohio to Burlington, Vermont, and recorded a cassette he sold at venues, before retiring the name. But he still had the car.
In the backseat was Donald Hewitt, an aspiring writer who typed up and photocopied record reviews and emotional reactions to shows he’d attended, folded and stapled them into zines he’d mail out all over the place. He was earnest and skinless. I suppose we all were. Tara Shaw sat next to him, a sardonic, serious, and dark young woman with a tattooed chain of paper dolls encircling her right bicep.
At the time I was living in a strange, rundown house with seven other young men above a jam space in the basement. I worked in a bakery, a job which I hated and which paid poorly, but I lacked ideas as to what else I might do. Everyone I knew was underfed and frail. We had prescriptions—pill bottles, inhalers, EpiPens for our varying ailments. Donald had to stay away from bees, nuts, and milk. Tara’s veganism left her anemic.
But what really bound us was that we all listened to the same bands. My older brother Philip called it “music for depressives,” a term I rejected but, if pushed, would’ve admitted was apt. The music and the scene surrounding it appealed to introverted kids who lacked drive, athletic ability, and social skills.
In some cases it is true that kids were the way they were because of bad homes, bad diagnoses, bad teachers. There was an undercurrent of nihilism against which I halfheartedly struggled. All the boys I knew had given up skateboarding in order to sit in dark rooms and listen to bands like Spiderbite. We became serious and dour. We did not smoke or drink.
It was oppressive, but there was something about it which felt safe to me, and it didn’t ask me to do things that made me un
comfortable. So I bought the records and went to the shows. Shows in basements, shows in Legion halls, in churches, in small, dark, damp clubs where these bands had to split time with metal acts and classic rock revivalists. The scene accepted my introversion and my timidity. It encouraged them. I found a community of people who, like me, basically lacked direction. The scene became our direction.
The geese were leaving, lifting up from the fields and moving in their great formations toward the south. It was late in the day and the cold sunlight slanted away from us as we drove out of Ottawa, across the bridge and into Quebec. We drove north and the city dropped away and we were among the deep reds and oranges of the changing leaves in the hills. The Volvo rattled and clapped. Gavin removed one cassette from the dashboard and shoved in another. Drums began thudding and a heavy guitar chainsawed away.
“Is this Crimpshrine?” Donald asked from the back seat.
“Yeah,” said Gavin. “Some of their early songs.”
“I don’t know,” Donald said after a moment, “I feel like maybe some of this stuff is hyped up because of who was involved, not because of how good it was.”
“Is that how you feel, Donald?”
Donald shifted about, sat up straighter in his seat. “Yeah.”
Gavin twisted his fists over the steering wheel. “Okay.”
“It’s got all this Bay Area feel to it, but, like, it’s not really political or anything.”
“Tell me, Donald,” Gavin said, “Tell me what to think of them.”
“Relax, Gavin,” said Tara, “he’s just expressing his opinion.”
“He’s always just expressing his opinion,” said Gavin, and kept driving.
The highway was easy enough; take the autoroute from Hull right up into the Gatineaus. Once we turned off, though, things became complicated. We each sighted landmarks we were certain pointed the way, but those landmarks were all different, and we couldn’t agree on which way they led.
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