Apparent Wind

by Dallas Murphy

  The mangroves sprout long seedlings, shaped like miniature torpedoes, which develop into self-sustaining trees. By late summer and early fall, they drop from the parent tree. If the water beneath the parent tree is too deep for the foot-long seedling to touch bottom, it takes to sea, a colonizer in search of a safe haven. The seedling can survive afloat for a year or more. When it fetches up on a shallow sandbank, the seedling begins to grow, sending out rudimentary prop roots first to support, then to stabilize itself. Perhaps five years pass during which the prop roots grow strong enough to withstand the normal storms of autumn, and if a hurricane hasn’t blown it away, the tree will have produced other seedlings and dropped them into the water. The process continues, and the naked shoal turns green.

  And then something remarkable happens. The mangrove begins to create land. Land building begins when the mangrove sheds its own leaves among the jumble of prop roots. Turtle grass, shells, and other marine debris wash against and are caught with the shed leaves in the prop roots. There the whole mass begins to rot and turn into the unique conglomeration of detritus called muck. Then other trees, the buttonwood and the black mangrove, grow up behind the red mangroves on the now-favorable, less saline environment they have created. The naked shoal has become a forest. Varieties of birds roost in the branches, and oysters congregate on the prop roots, drawing raccoons and other mammals, which in turn attract predators. A new, more complex ecosystem is born. It takes the red mangrove longer to build land than man with his crawlers, grabbers, rooters, blasters, and peat-pullers, but it is better land.

  …Doom dismounted at the top of Main Street. The Annes pulled up and stopped their production vehicle, a beat-up VW van with no reverse. Doom and the Annes stood on the rise and stared down at what remained of Doom’s hometown, which now he owned. Anne shouldered her Arriflex 16 SR 11 Auteur, while Anne donned her Sony ECM 50 sound pack with twin shotgun mikes. In two minutes they were ready to walk.

  A fat chain had been dragged across the top of the street and padlocked to deep-driven pipes. A sign hung from the center links: NO TRESPASSING PER ORDER OF BROADNAX COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE. Doom and the Annes stepped over the chain and walked into Omnium Settlement.

  The western foot of Main Street slid straight into the tannin-dark water of Small Hope Bay as if it were a boat-launching ramp. There had never been much to Omnium Settlement—the island was only a half mile wide—but now there was less. The seawall was completely submerged, and only the top six inches of the town dock pilings poked through the surface at high tide.

  The inundated shoreside buildings—a failed fish co-op, a seafood restaurant with an alfresco patio, and several tourist bungalows—had rotted to rubble, only skeletal frames standing. Farther east up the rise, maximum elevation six feet, the buildings were boarded and shuttered, still intact but just a matter of time. There was a Shell station, brown pelicans perching on the pumps, a mom-and-pop grocery, and two motels, the Tropic Aires and the Little Oseola, each with a scattering of canting cottages named after indigenous waterfowl, a storefront post office, and Cal’s Bait and Tackle. Anne panned the street.

  What had he expected? Doom knew his town was sinking, knew the sight of it in broad daylight would not inspire cheery expectation, but he hadn’t imagined such bereftness. He had thought one could still buy a hat in Omnium Settlement. A skinny black mongrel slunk like a cat across the street and crawled through a crack in the wall of Fred’s Hobby Shop on which a vandal had painted in fat brush strokes Die Big Al! The salt air, hot sun, and passing time had leached the life out of everything.

  Something skittered in the dry, fallen palm fronds. Doom remembered that sound, reptiles and mammals moving in the vegetation, animal life going about its business in the kind climate. Doom remembered from his jailhouse reading that in the warm places of the world there tend to be great variety of animal species with fewer individuals; in cold places there are vast numbers of individuals, few species. And he managed to remember his own boyhood wonder at the identity of the thing skittering in the palm fronds. Perhaps it was that lizard with the long gray stripes or the chameleon he and his friends used to keep for pets. They’d ride around on your shoulder for a while, turning the same color as your shirt before leaping off and skittering away. Why did he remember reptiles but nothing of his own life?

  Wait—Doom remembered Fred’s Hobby Shop. Fred’s sign had faded to burnt umber, but Doom remembered when it was fire-engine red. He used to spend his allowance here. Fat and jolly, Fred was a beardless Santa Claus with bad teeth.

  “Lemme see your hands,” Fred would say. “Always wash up before you make a model and always follow the instructions to the letter.” To the letter. Doom remembered Fred’s red, enthusiastic face. Fred had lived upstairs, alone.

  The hobby shop was shuttered and gutted, but Doom peeked in anyway—right into a man’s grimy, bearded face. Doom leapt back.

  The face poked out through the chink. “You a cop?”

  “No,” said Doom. Anne shot the face.

  “I got my family in here, so I’ll fight you if necessary.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’m just looking. I used to live here.”

  “Yeah? That’s what we’re trying to do right now.”

  Doom was afraid of that. Living in the rubble of Fred’s Hobby Shop. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” He started to walk off.

  “It’s because of the economy.”

  Doom stopped, turned. “Pardon?”

  “We left Wooster because there ain’t shit left in Wooster. So we go to Houston. Houston turned bad before we even got there. So we come to Florida, but it’s sinking. Where do we go from here? Cuba?”

  “Do you need food?”

  “I catch fish.”

  “How many in your family?”

  “Seven, counting me and the wife.”

  “That’s a lot of fish.”

  “Right now we’re more worried about cops.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you parked up on the road. They hate that.”

  In fact, Sheriff Plotner had already spotted the van and a stupid-looking bicycle built for circus midgets. Skateboarders, probably, Mary Jane, death-head earrings, knees intentionally cut out of their jeans. Squalor and ruin always drew in disaffected youth. However, if he went down to roust them, he’d have to alight from his black-and-white. That would cause his heart to go pitter-pat in the heat. Zoo York plates on the van was reason enough to run the youth. Sheriff Plotner believed that the world would be a lot better place if Zoo York just dropped off the continent and drowned in its own sludge. The heat hit his temples like a sap when he dismounted to unlock the chain.

  “Are there others living here?” Doom asked.

  “Couple families in the motels over there. They come and go. We’re what you call a fluid population. We wait for shit to trickle down. You making home movies?”

  One day they’d find Sheriff Plotner dead with his tongue lolling on the pavement. He shivered in the air-conditioning, flipped on his flasher and siren, and stomped the gas. Tires spinning, sand flew in rooster tails, and the reinforced bumper knocked cardboard rubble out of the way. Lizards scurried. Once, skateboard vandals had strewn spikes in his path and he nearly careened ass into the drink. Often, however, the full bore and stroke roar was enough to set them running, swimming, sometimes, and he didn’t even have to crack a window.

  Cameras? People taking pictures? “60 Minutes”? The liberal press, Christ, that’s all he needed. Imagine what Mike Wallace would do to Big Al Broadnax on camera after Mike got wind of neo-Okies camping in the town that Big Al helped to kill. Sheriff Plotner skidded to an impressive stop, nearly losing the rear end. It was Denny Loomis’s kid— “What are you doing here?” he demanded without letting in too much heat.

  “Looking. I was born here.”

  “Then I guess you didn’t see the sign.”

  “What sign?”

  Crooked as hell, no question about it. “You’r
e in violation even as we speak. So are your lady friends. What are they doing?”

  “I think they’re making a movie.”

  “No movie-making without a permit.”

  “So tell them yourself. They don’t work for me.”

  “Hey, little lady, cut…cut now, you hear!”

  Cutting for cops wasn’t the Annes’ style. Anne crouched down and shot the sheriff through the passenger-side window while he twisted left in his seat to keep Anne at his back. “See any skateboarders?”

  “Any what?”

  “Heavy-metal youth, you know, skateboarding in defiance of statutes.”

  “I didn’t see any.”

  “See anybody else?”

  “Just you.”

  “There’s vagrants living all through here.”

  Anne tried to shove her shotgun mike through the crack in the sheriff’s window. “Now you better cut, missy, or I’ll be gettin’ out of this car after you, hear?”

  “Why don’t you help them?” Doom asked.

  “Who?”

  “The people living here.”

  “…Look, I’ll let it slip this time because you’re new in town, but don’t you become a thorn in my side.” Sheriff Plotner cracked reverse, roared up the hill, and intentionally ran over Doom’s bike.

  ROSALIND

  The wheel fork and down tube were bent, the front rim rippled, a half dozen spokes rent, but the bicycle remained rideable. Doom pedaled a dazed zigzag track to the south end of Omnium Key while the Annes followed, filming. Omnium and its new settlers were not his responsibility. He hadn’t caused either to sink. He was just passing through, learning to sail away. Why, then, as he pedaled across Hurricane Hole Creek onto the mainland, did he feel burdened by guilt as well as by a bent bicycle wheel?

  Everything changed when he joined Route One on the mainland and turned south. Omnium Key, its single road, was trafficless; Route One in both directions was choked to a crawl. Out-of-state vehicles sweltered cheek by jowl with local pickup trucks. Tourists had to fight this stretch only once, maybe twice in their lives, and the locals hated them for that. Route One traffic turned the locals murderous, impeded in the simplest errand by sunburned rubberneckers. Heat, stress, and natural enmity often erupted in violence. Twice a month, a tourist or a local, depending upon who was the more heavily armed, fell critically injured in traffic fracases. In several instances full-blown riots ensued, no sense to it, motorists venting their testosterone on each other’s vehicles. Smoke from burning personal transportation was seen as far away as Homestead.

  Faces contorted, drivers honked and screamed and pounded their fists on their dashboards, or on their wives and children. Since each vehicle was hermetically sealed to keep the climate under control, Doom heard no words as he pedaled past the bottlenecks on the crushed coral berm, just a pantomime of crazed rage no less dangerous for its silence. Occasionally, a motorist resenting his progress tried to snap open the passenger door in his path, but Doom outswerved them all. Doom didn’t remember this electric pitch of hostility and sweaty violence, but he remembered how to ride a bicycle. A rotten little urchin in a New Jersey car threw a chocolate milk shake at him. He outswerved that as well, deftly shooting the little pecker the bird.

  Doom was bound for Tequesta Key, the commercial hub of the northern Keys. Tequesta Key lay only a quarter of a mile south of Omnium Key, but that was across water in Possible Pass. There was no bridge across Possible Pass, just as there was no bridge across Bird Cut at the northern end of Omnium Key. In fact, there was only one bridge to and from Omnium Key. Big Al had seen to that.

  He got the idea back in 1968, when he saw how slickly the Republicans kept the Commie rabble away from the democratic process—simply by closing the bridges to Miami Beach. Three bridges would be a lot harder to close than one, should the need arise, so he dynamited the other two. He made it seem the act of terrorists. Seven radical groups claimed responsibility.

  Doom followed Route One across the causeway onto Tequesta Key. The Annes were nowhere to be seen, lost back there in the blue pale of exhaust emissions. Doom stopped at the first dive shop on his side of the road: Total Immersion Diving Ltd.

  Rosalind Rock had run Total Immersion alone since her husband, Claudius Broadnax, died of an air embolism in sixty feet of water off High Hat Reef. Rosalind suspected suicide. Death by embolism is said to be swift and sure, a painless lapse into permanent sleep. Mostly, embolisms kill the inexperienced or panicky diver who bolts for the surface holding his breath. That diver often arrives there dead because nitrogen and other compressed gas bubbles have expanded under the lessening pressure of ascent. If breathed off through normal exhalation, the bubbles remain harmless. If they are not breathed off, their expansion obstructs oxygen flow to crucial organs like the heart and brain. Yet Claudius Broadnax was not a diver to panic, and he certainly wasn’t inexperienced. He had been an advanced instructor for seventeen years, a commercial diver on North Sea oil rigs for five. He had dived to the Andrea Doria in 250 feet of cold, dark Atlantic water, and he had dived beneath the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. That kind of diver simply did not blow out his bloodstream by holding his breath on the ascent. No matter what. Claudius Broadnax had been gone three years now, and Rosalind continued to grieve.

  Doom found her bent from the waist, her back to him, so that the stretchy black spandex bathing suit gripped her parts gleefully. She was doing something mechanical with a motor, but Doom didn’t even think to notice what, because her thighs didn’t touch at the top. The sight of her bent like that made him ache with loneliness. Her legs were long and sinewy. She wore no shoes, and the effort of her task caused her toes to curl and uncurl spasmodically against the naked concrete floor.

  Doom moaned softly. Perhaps prison had scarred him.

  Did she hear him or did she by some subtler sense feel his covetous presence? She snapped upright and spun to face him. There was alarm in her brown eyes. Doom was sorry.

  “Can I help you?”

  She had sharp, intelligent eyes. She wore her hair short, combed straight back, accentuating her long, slim neck. Her upper jaw was too narrow, causing her confined front teeth to overlap. Doom was sorry he couldn’t look longer at her face, but her nipples, erect from effort and air-conditioning, poked lovingly against her tiny black top. Doom waged a rigorous campaign against his own eyes, which with a will of their own tended to address her nipples directly. Just like the average ex-con.

  “I’d like to buy some scuba diving equipment. I’d like to see the Gulf Stream.”

  “Are you certified?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I can’t sell you life-support gear unless you’re certified. It’s against the law.” And didn’t he look just the type to go drown himself on his first dive? “I can sell you masks, fins, snorkels, like that, but not tanks or regulators.”

  All Doom knew about scuba diving he had learned from Jacques Cousteau reruns on the rec-room TV, locked and mounted halfway up the wall at Longfellow. “How about hats?” He pointed to Total Immersion T-shirts and baseball caps displayed on a pegboard over her head.

  “Hats are fine,” she smiled. The skin at the corners of her eyes crinkled. Her tan was dark and thorough, but her sunglasses had left a paler mask around her eyes.

  “I’ll take the red one, please. And the red T-shirt, please. How do I become certified?”

  “You need to take lessons. I have a class starting next week. If you’re going to be in town that long.”

  “I live here now. In Omnium.”

  “Omnium?”

  “I live on my boat.”

  “You’re a sailor, huh?” He didn’t look like the average boat bum who came and went along these shores.

  “Well, not yet. I’m learning.”

  “What sort of boat do you have?”

  “A forty-footer named Staggerlee.”

  “Oh. You’re Denny Loomis’s son.”

  “Guilty.”

  “I
heard you were in town. My name’s Rosalind Rock.”

  Rosalind Rock. Wow. “How do you do? I’m Doom. I mean, that’s what people call me.”

  She could see why.

  “Could I take private lessons? I mean alone?”

  “…Sure. When would you like to start?”

  TAMARIND FINANCIAL

  Mask, fins, snorkel, and textbook in his bent bike basket, Doom Loomis pedaled north on Route One feeling happy expectation for the first time since his release. He was taking private diving lessons from Rosalind Rock. Even now he wore her hat and shirt. There was a kind of intimacy in that. But happiness didn’t last long in the angry traffic. It soon turned back to uneasiness, then plain fear. The motorists despised his relative ease of movement and wanted him dead.

  The sun had done something depressing to the shitburger joints, cheesy motels, seashell shops, and drive-up banks. It had cooked away their franchise facades and burnished their plastic signs, leaving dilapidation and gloom. Shadowless white light made this strip seem a place conducive to neurosis and heedless violence. Low-tide smells mingled incongruously with overheated exhaust. The dense traffic, which should have brought business to local merchants, only discouraged it, because tourists and other itinerants dared not leave the line for fear of never regaining it.

  Then he spotted it. The Snowy Egret Shopping Plaza. Wasn’t that where Bert and Marvis said this Tamarind Financial front was supposed to be? Some traffic-crazed passerby hurled a full can of Bud Lite at him from a metal-flake purple pickup truck as he stopped beside the road and dismounted, but the missile whizzed harmlessly overhead, striking the thirty-foot-tall red neon snowy egret, taking out its legs with a flash and a tinkle. What was the point of stopping at all? His father’s flimflam had nothing whatever to do with him. Why mess with it? Why not pedal out of this hell? Why not let it ride?