Fever Tree

by Tim Applegate

  All manner of craft crowded the harbor: oyster boats, yawls, dories, shrimp trawlers, that canvas of riggings strung against the morning sky like a classic painting a mariner, in his dotage, might hang on his living room wall. From the bay’s clear and unpolluted waters, shrimp and oysters had been harvested for centuries, sponges too, and farther out in the Gulf, grouper, sea bass, reds. But shellfish remained the mother lode—the oyster boats and shrimp trawlers outnumbering the charters five to one—and most of the fishermen Dieter observed that morning depended for their livelihood on the health of the harbor’s beds.

  In the muggy afternoons, he drove out to Christopher Key to swim in the warm aqua Gulf. At low tide he could walk out a hundred yards into water no deeper than his ankles, but when the tide finally turned, the shelf gradually deepened, allowing him to dive headfirst into the rollicking waves. Later, lying in the shade of a cabbage palm, he finished the novel he was reading—Wise Blood—while munching on the handful of grapes he’d purchased that morning at a fruit stand on his way out of town; Dieter at his leisure until the incessant heat raised beads of sweat on his skin, coaxing him back into the waves. Sometimes he swam to his limit, stroking out past the sandbar, his chest pounding from the exertion and his arms as limp as the sea whips he sometimes stumbled across in the tide’s foamy wrack. Back on shore he knelt in the sand, gagging on the saltwater he had inadvertently swallowed paddling back in.

  Earlier, on the pay phone outside the lobby of the Gibson, he had called his sister Laurie to let her know where he was, to describe how he had drifted south into the mountains and just kept going, mile after mile, until he ended up here.

  Jesus, Dieter, what the hell?

  It hasn’t changed much, I’ll tell you that.

  Thanks for letting me know.

  Know what?

  That you were leaving!

  He heard the exasperation in Laurie’s voice but how could he have told her when he hadn’t known himself? Tell Dad for me, willya? Tell him I’m okay.

  The last time he’d seen his little sister she had grilled him good. Was he taking the vitamins she’d sent him? Was he drinking again? Did he ever join the Y? Now, when similar questions elicited the same silent response, Laurie tried another tack. Fine, you don’t wanna talk about it, fine. So what are you reading these days?

  After a pause he answered O’Connor.

  Flannery, right? Not Edwin?

  Right, Flannery.

  He flopped around in the shallows off Christopher Key, thinking about Hazel Motes in Wise Blood. After failing to establish his Church Of Christ Without Christ, Hazel blinded his eyes with lye, tied a strand of barbed wire around his chest, and put broken glass in his shoes. Dieter swallowed another grape. Driven to lesser extremes, Sir Thomas More, he recalled, wore a hair shirt underneath his Renaissance finery.

  Well at least that was one thing he didn’t have to worry about. Like Hazel Motes and Sir Thomas More, Dieter was a glutton for self-punishment, just not the physical kind. The voice in his head at 2:00 a.m. was torture enough. Besides, he wasn’t sure they even made hair shirts these days.

  4

  One evening as he was strolling back to the Gibson after dinner at the Delta Café, Dieter stopped to watch a man on the other side of the street try to wrestle a chifforobe into the darkened interior of Paterson’s Antiques. Curious, he crossed the pavement.

  ‘Scuse me. You need some help?

  The man bore a striking resemblance to the poet James Dickey, the same wave of white hair, patrician nose, ironic southern mouth. As Dieter approached him, he placed his right foot against the base of the dolly the chifforobe was balanced on and slowly lowered it to the ground.

  Matter of fact, son, I believe I do.

  With Dieter’s assistance the man carefully maneuvered the ungainly wardrobe until it was inches from the entrance of the store. Then, as Dieter held the door open, he coaxed the chifforobe inside and set it down in a slot next to several others.

  Frank. The man wiped a large, bony hand on the seat of his pants and offered it to the stranger. Frank Paterson.

  Dieter.

  Well I surely do appreciate your help, Dieter. Frank stared sideways at the chifforobe with a trace of a frown. Not sure I could have wrangled that in here without you.

  Dieter surveyed the room. Cavernous, with a high open ceiling that exposed a puzzle of rafters and beams. Inadequate lighting, all manner of scrappy furniture, and shelf after shelf of odds and ends: decorative tins, musty encyclopedias, glassware.

  Encouraged by the stranger’s apparent interest, Frank Paterson showed him around the store, pointing out, with an endearing sigh of pride, a fine old secretary desk once owned by a former ambassador to Belgium, a collection of plume hats, a walnut sideboard. On the dusty bookshelves Dieter noted Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, Ford Madox Ford.

  And then, as Frank escorted him past a workroom near the back of the store, Dieter caught a whiff of lacquer and felt the floor sway. The sudden associations triggered by that unmistakable odor were overwhelming, and he had to grab on to the back of a Windsor chair to keep from falling. His father’s face, masked by a respirator, as he sprayed the maple cabinets Dieter had stained the night before. Jen wrinkling her nose the first time she stepped foot in the shop: Good God, Dieter, what is that smell?

  Dieter?

  Lost in time, he didn’t hear Frank Paterson’s voice or notice the look of concern on the older man’s face. His hand floated out and nudged open the door to the back room, and at the sight of boxes of rags and cans of stain and reams of sandpaper, the random associations continued; Dieter sanding length after length of mahogany trim while his father shaved, with the blade of a chisel, dovetail joints.

  You okay, son?

  With a faint smile Dieter nodded at a rocking chair in a shadowy corner of the workroom. The arms of the rocker were stained but the rest of the chair remained unfinished.

  You do your own refinishing.

  Well, let’s just say I used to.

  Used to?

  The boy that did the work? Took a powder. Just up and left!

  A woman, it had to have been a woman, Frank groaned. Or maybe—a long pause, a dark look—it was drugs. He shook his head in dismay. The world was no longer a sensible place. Didn’t even pick up his final paycheck! I mean who walks out on a paycheck?

  At the front door Frank clamped an affectionate mitt around Dieter’s shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze. Thanks again, son. And you all come back some time, hear? We’ll set a spell.

  Set a spell. In his room at the Gibson, Dieter slumped down in the ratty upholstered chair he’d placed next to the open window, nursing a glass of whiskey. He tried to remember where he had heard that quaint phrase before, and then it came to him: a seedy neighborhood in the village in Quintana Roo where he had lived in his early twenties. Walking back one afternoon to the apartment he rented above the dive shop, he had taken a wrong turn. Late sun scorching the cracked sidewalk blazed in the windows of a row of modest homes. Nearby, a car horn blared, and Dieter hesitated. Was he lost? Earlier, at the Yucatan Café, he’d slammed back several shots of tequila so he was feeling a little queasy now, and the heat didn’t help. As he spun around, looking for a recognizable landmark, he noticed a middle-aged man sitting on a front porch stoop, carefully eyeing him. The man was an American, a local gringo who sometimes stopped by the restaurant, where Dieter worked as a prep cook, for a plate of rice and beans. With a nod in the gringo’s direction Dieter turned west, toward the falling sun, but after a few tentative steps he suddenly stubbed his toe—he was wearing soft tennis shoes—on a concrete block, that someone, for some reason, had placed in the middle of the sidewalk. He yelped like a small dog and then the man on the stoop was standing next to him, holding his arm. You better take a load off, son. You better set a spell . . .

  Dieter nursed his whiskey. If h
e drank the rest of the bottle tonight and took one of the blue pills he might be able to sleep. At least the day’s insistent heat had finally lifted—that would help—and the wind was picking up too, wafting off the harbor into the open window of his room.

  Mexico. Nights when the moon rose orange as a rotten melon over the slough. The river was sluggish, the village alongside it little more than a grid of dusty streets, a handful of shabby neighborhoods, and a single hotel catering to the divers who came for the reef. It wasn’t much to look at, but in the counterculture enclaves of America, the village had developed a reputation for sexual promiscuity, pristine beaches, and primo weed. Best of all, you could live there on next to nothing, working part time on the dive boats or as a housekeeper at the hotel.

  And so expats like Dieter had trickled in, gathering at the Yucatan Café to drink and flirt and swap stories of the road. At dusk, they played guitars and harmonicas and built bonfires on the beach. They smoked a little dope and watched the sun dissolve in the water and talked about whatever popped into their heads, however erratic or profane. What they didn’t talk about—not much at any rate—was home, as if to seal an unspoken pact to plunge headfirst into the future by denying, as if such a thing were even remotely possible, the past. The Vietnam vets, languishing yet again on the shores of another foreign country, were especially enamored of this attitude. Live for today, they said, or the past will catch up with you. That was their mantra, because in their minds the past represented Satan, bloodletting on an unimaginable scale. When the war came up in conversation the vets kept quiet, or silently shuffled away. Only one of them, a kid named Parrish who had spent two years deep in the bush, encouraged by Dieter and his friends, shared what he had seen over there, what he had done, the stuff of his nightmares. Parrish kept a packet of photographs in a black leather satchel and sometimes showed them around when he was drinking. Everyone but the other vets recoiled in horror: dead babies, fire-clouds of napalm, a necklace of human ears. If this was a form of expiation, Dieter thought, Parrish was doomed.

  At the Yucatan Café the expatriates bartered trade, a carton of French cigarettes Parrish shipped back from Saigon for a few buttons of peyote, a crate of tomatoes for a stolen macaw. Unless you were out on the water, the days slipped by in a glare of heat but the evenings were long and tribal. Steady drink, a spontaneous rendition of Norwegian Wood, tears of joy or sorrow depending on what drug you had just consumed. In the kitchen of the hotel where the divers stayed for a week or two to explore the outer reaches of the reef and sample the local smoke, Dieter slashed open chickens and diced the meat. Rice and beans, the sweet peppers he cored and cut down the middle for rellenos. After work he strolled over to the Yucatan Café, hoping Jen would be there. Stoned, he studied the photographs Parrish fanned open on the bar then stumbled out onto the dark sands, terribly lonely. He thought about Indiana, his father, and Laurie. He wondered what he was doing in Quintana Roo, and how long he would stay. And then on yet another otherwise unremarkable Tuesday evening, the purpose was revealed: at the bar, Jen slipped her arm inside his and leaned her head against his shoulder.

  In his room at the Gibson, Dieter chased one of the blue pills with the last finger of whiskey and lay down on the bed. A few minutes later he was back in Quintana Roo. From the crest of a hill he gazed down at a moonlit beach where Parrish, kneeling over a small fire, burned the photographs he had taken in Vietnam.

  5

  As he drove back home from his meeting with Teddy Mink on Christopher Key, Colt brooded. Deep, black, primal brooding; lacerating thoughts. He had been the target of Teddy’s wrath a few times before but never like this, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to respond. He gunned the engine of his gold Camaro, racing across the causeway, seething. He wanted to break something, to smash something to pieces with his bare hands, to roll open his window and scream. But what good would that do? Reminding himself that it was precisely this—his uncontrollable rage—that had gotten him into trouble in the first place, he eased his foot off the accelerator and slowed down. Taking a deep breath, he glanced out the window at the harbor lights sparkling in the dark, but even that familiar tableau—the ships, in silhouette, rocking on their anchors—failed to calm his rattled nerves.

  Turning onto Pheasant Hill Road he pictured, once again, the scene out by Teddy’s pool. It had been, in a word, abhorrent. For not only had Teddy given him a major tongue lashing—that he had expected—to add insult to injury, he had also done what a man in a position of authority should never, in Colt’s opinion, do. He had let one of his bimbos witness the humiliation. To a bouncer like Colt, strippers were a dime a dozen, they came and went, leaving little or no lasting impression, but it would take a long, long time for him to forget the look of amused derision plastered across Nicky Meyers’s face when Teddy announced that he was giving Colt one last chance. As if some two-bit hustler who gave dirty old men lap dances had any right to pass judgment on a guy like him. On the other hand, he had to admit that it hadn’t been Nicky’s fault, exactly; Teddy was the one who had invited her to watch Colt squirm. It was a power play. Occasionally, the boss liked to show one of his minions what it would be like if they ever tried to cross him.

  A few miles north of town he turned into a gravel driveway camouflaged by two ragged towers of pampas grass, and wound back to the cabin he and Maggie rented in the woods.

  She was waiting at the kitchen table, furiously smoking a cigarette despite having announced, two weeks ago, that she had quit.

  Well?

  Colt opened the refrigerator and grabbed a can of beer. Well nothin’.

  Great. You cut up a friend and spend a night in jail and get bailed out by your boss’s sleazy lawyer and that’s all you have to say? Nothin’? Maggie took another angry puff of her Marlboro. So you still got a job? You still a bouncer?

  Yeah, I’m still a bouncer.

  Still a mule?

  Colt set his beer down on the kitchen counter, trying to remain calm. Don’t say that.

  Don’t say what?

  That word, mule. I don’t like it.

  Maggie stabbed out her cigarette, beside herself now. And you think what, that I do? Say, what’s your boyfriend do for a livin’, Maggie? Oh he’s a mule, didn’t you know? He’s one of Teddy Mink’s mules.

  Colt took a long swallow of beer as Maggie stormed out of the room. A minute later, hearing the spray of the shower, he walked down to the end of the hallway to finger open Hunter’s door. Inside, the kid was already asleep, his face in repose turned toward the glow of a nightlight. Colt padded quietly across the room and leaned over to rub his son’s shoulders, careful not to wake him. Then he sat down on the side of the bed. His legs felt like water and he was afraid he might cry, even though the notion of tears was too absurd to dote on. When was the last time he cried?

  Later, following a tense, silent supper, he went outside and lifted the battered red canoe from the rack next to the cabin. A harvest moon in a mirror of black water, the stars on their orbits, the idle splash of an oar; on any other evening rowing out across the pond like this would put the world into perspective. For a few minutes, under the starlit sky, his worries would disappear. But tonight, even out here, his mind continued to whirl.

  When he arrived at Teddy’s palatial estate on Christopher Key, he had been pleasantly surprised by the boss’s reception. At the front door, Teddy had shaken his hand. C’mon in, buddy. How you doin’?

  I’m all right, Teddy. I’m okay.

  How about a drink?

  That’d be great.

  Scotch, right? Neat?

  On the rocks, please.

  On the rocks it is. Hey, how ‘bout we go sit by the pool. It’s a little cooler out there.

  Taking a sip of Teddy’s excellent triple malt scotch, Colt began to relax. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all. Cutting Jimmy Santiago had been a bonehead move, a terrible mistake, but
hey, who didn’t make mistakes? He watched Teddy place his own drink, a gin and tonic, on the glass top table that separated their chairs. Dressed for leisure—denim shorts, muscle shirt, flip flops—Teddy slipped his sunglasses on and stretched out his bare legs. He asked about Maggie and the kid, even remembering that this was the year Hunter was scheduled to start peewee baseball. Then he gave Colt a thumbs up. Chip off the old block, huh Dad?

  He’s a great kid, Teddy.

  ‘Course he is! Teddy lifted his glass in a toast. Parents like you and Maggie? ‘Course he is.

  And then as their glasses chimed in midair Teddy presented Colt the full glare of his unreadable smile before inquiring, out of nowhere, without segue, By the way, guy, I was wondering why you cut up Jimmy Santiago like that.

  Colt froze, then shuddered. What could he say?

  Jesus, Teddy, I’m sorry, man. I’m really fucking sorry.

  ‘Course you are! But that doesn’t answer my question, does it. I mean why would you go and do something like that, cut up a friend? Why would anyone in their right mind do that?

  In the ensuing silence the only sound was a tinkle of ice in Colt’s glass, a hand tremor. Out past the pool, across the flat white sands, silent waves rolled in.

  I’m sorry, boss, I don’t know what to say.

  Then don’t say anything!