Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  Between the green dash and the illuminated Occupied sign over the toilet in back, the entire fuselage was an impenetrable darkness with the odor of a vehicle that had been making round trips between the Miami chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous and the El Paso cognate since Gulf War I, with the occasional side job of hauling raw kelp to a psoralen processing plant with the windows closed in order to trap nutritious edible insects as they bred. Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), for one example.

  On the other hand, nobody else had waited with Cedric in the terminal for this bus. Nor had anybody asked him for identification, nor scanned his shoes with a metal-detecting wand, or swabbed his sea bag for traces of explosives. Nobody had asked him for anything other than the price of the ticket. Sure it’s a hole in Homeland Security, Cedric reflected, but it’s a nice hole. Nostalgic, almost bucolic. Conducive to relaxation. He tripped over ankles and baggage straps in the darkened aisle and received not so much as a muttered remonstrance in return for the courtesy of apology. Two-thirds back he found two adjacent empty seats on the port side, right in front of the entire row of empty seats situated above the wheel wells, which had no leg room at all, and so stood a good chance to remain unoccupied for the entire trip. He punched a divot into one end of his sea bag, laid it transverse against the back of the window seat for lumbar support, and laid claim to both seats. The window was functional and he opened it, letting in the hiss of airbrakes, incomprehensible ruminations on the public address system, fumes of combusted diesel, and a damp amnion of tropical humidity, toward the latter of which his nostrils discerned greedily. A halo of four or five people watched someone shuffle luggage in and out of the cargo hold, just forward of the wheel well on Cedric’s side of the bus, directly beneath his window. Without exception these people looked worn out. They watched the baggage process as if it were yet another waiting-room television, as if, with absolutely no place better to be, they had surrendered to its presumed technological superiority, manifested as deft maneuverability of purpose, in this case, pneumatic hinges.

  Paranoia infuses the mountain

  Gnosis planktons the sea

  If nourishment sprang from fountains

  hinges would bear squeak free

  the weight of karma

  the weight of dogma

  but never the frolic of allegory!

  The first person to see her luggage placed on the concrete took it up and embraced it gingerly, her eyes darting shyly, her mouth partly open, her expression one of timid vulnerability. Clearly, this girl-woman had no place to go. She may not even have known she was in Miami. The features of the tall black man next to her had spent themselves almost entirely in a battle between rage and exhaustion. When his big plastic suitcase appeared, with half the cuff of a flannel shirt dangling from its hinge seam like a bookmark in a thick lucubration whose subject was despair, he manifested uncertainty, as if torn between punching out the baggage handler and getting hauled off to jail or crawling into the baggage hold—angling, in either case, for a good night’s sleep. Lastly stood a Cuban couple with a baby asleep in a blanket slung from his mother’s shoulder. Glacial resignation showed in both the parents’ faces. She was pregnant again. Work was seasonal. Here came one, two, three pieces of luggage, each more threadbare than the last. The man managed to wrangle all three, one in each hand and the third under his arm, and they walked away. Bien providencia.

  By the bluish-gray of the terminal lights coming through the window Cedric resumed the chapter entitled “Brother of the Snake” in The Rivers Ran East.

  “There is something here I don’t like!” he said.

  The Indian was nowhere in sight; the clicks stopped. We hurried along, and after half an hour, I experienced an unaccountable chill when Jorge suddenly halted in his tracks and I bumped up against him:

  “Be prepared to go back,” he said after some hesitation, in a very quiet voice. “There is a snake here.”

  For some reason I breathed in relief. “Go around it,” I suggested. “We don’t want to lose that Campa.”

  “No! Stand very still. I can’t see. But I know it is close—I just heard it hiss.”

  Not knowing whether the snake’s head was suspended in the darkness somewhere around our faces, or wriggling toward us over the ground, we must have stood there a full five minutes, not daring to move a toe or bat an eye. The mosquitoes were awful. I began sweating, while my lower leg muscles crawled and my face twitched every time a bug touched it. Suddenly, a yard away on our right—of all things—came the faint quack of a duck. It sounded pathetic and distressful, as if it were lost.

  Jorge sprang instantly ahead, crying “Hurry!”…

  Very tired after an hour of rough going, we rested on a fallen log, and the guide back-tracked, standing like a shadow twenty feet away. All about now was a thunderous ear-splitting orchestration of frogs, insects, animals, and night-birds. From the roaring the cochas on all sides must have been crawling with crocodiles. I remarked to Jorge that he usually didn’t sweat so much even on a burning hot night. His leather shirt was wringing wet.

  “That snake back there—” he answered, “was a shushupe.”

  When I failed to register, the Peruvian explained that this was a maroon-colored twelve-foot reptile of intense cunning, who lured unwary victims to him. It would attack man, and in five to eight minutes, the paralyzing venom would cause death by shock. “We lose three or four caucheros every year out of La Merced.”

  “I guess the snake was after that duck,” I suggested, adding, “lucky of us.”

  “No, it makes the sound itself—a decoy. To strike effectively, the shushupe calls his victim up close to him. Then strikes.”

  “There couldn’t possibly be anything more diabolical out here than that,” I ventured. Jorge made no answer.

  Cedric’s eyelids accrued density. The book fell against the sill. A muted conversation had begun several seats forward. Diagonally across the aisle, metallurgical insect noises leaked from an invisible pair of earbuds. His lashes fluttered, his lids lowered. He couldn’t decide what language the conversation was in. He couldn’t make out what kind of music was being listened to. That was fine. His eyes closed. Aft, below the toilet, the big diesel started. An initial burst of black fumes swirled past the open window. He let his temple lie against the window’s metal frame. Vibrations from it, conducted via the bone of his skull to his brain, felt oddly comforting. It was as if the quarter inserted into the slot of the coinbox wired to the VibraBed in an ancient motel room, with arrow-pierced hearts and pairs of initials carved into underside of the shelf above the headboard, actually worked. Eyes closed, Cedric heard the hinges creak on the awning door of the baggage compartment below his window. It’s all good, he thought, and he smacked his lips softly. If but only a momentary goodness. Maybe I can sleep through the seventeen waypoints to the first baloney sandwich. Although the morbid fascination of steamy ghost-lit tropical whistlestops is hard to resist. …

  Someone walking across the tile floor of the echoing terminal wore heel taps. It had been a long time since Cedric had come across anybody who nailed crescents of metal to the heels and sometimes the toes of their shoes, ostensibly to protect them. A lot of people, in the tropics, and sailors in particular, didn’t wear shoes at all; for that matter, despite “progress,” much of the tropics remains unpaved. Heel taps don’t amount to much on roadbeds of crushed seashells or pure sand. But here in Miami each footfall sounded of ceramic and steel. Clack-a-clack cla-clack. Cedric idly wondered if there were sparks. He supposed he might have cared. The baggage door slammed. Unexpectedly loud, its boom reverberated throughout the hall. Cedric opened his eyes.

  The baggage handler was walking diagonally across the terminal, away from the rear of the bus. Beyond him a rail-thin man in black chinos, cut fairly tight, with a long-sleeved flowered shirt, a sallow complexion, a pencil-thin mustache, and a black straw stingy-brim with a yellow band atop a full head of oiled black hair slouched through the terminal tow
ard the bus. Better to say that he modulated over the tiles like a tall saw-toothed wave with a short period. A new filter cigarette lay pinched between the flat of his head and his right ear, filter forward. For that taste of Macassar, Cedric thought sleepily, although the thought belied the alacrity of his wakefulness. Each footfall clicked, some of them twice, and with them the figure’s Information slotted into Cedric’s main board.

  Well well well, Cedric blinked, if it ain’t Felix Timbalón.

  The man in the flowered shirt carried a small brown and black tool tote, with pockets all around its exterior, of the type a cable TV installer might carry, who would require little more than a pair of pliers, a crimping tool, and a pad of invoices. Multiple pockets and sleeves for tools were stitched around the exterior of this bag, none of which contained anything at all, let alone a tool, let alone a comb or toothbrush. A copy of Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald’s Spanish language daily, protruded from the bag’s mouth.

  The man with the toolbag disappeared around the front fender of the bus just as the driver closed the door. Cedric had nearly closed his eyes again when he heard the door open and shod hooves mount the diamond plate entry steps. There was a brief, muffled exchange. The door hissed closed again. The pinion in the transmission under the bathroom at the rear of the bus chattered and slowed until it meshed the first ratio cog with a clunk. The driver revved the diesel, eased the clutch, and the Hound undertook to lumber.

  Cedric could practically feel the lights of the terminal as they slipped along the side of the bus and over his face. He could make out the various respirations of his fellow travelers within the sparsely tenanted vehicle, altogether not unlike a redolent den of hibernating bruins.

  The carpet, though abraded to a meager molecularity by decades of woeful brogans, would yet be damping the heel taps. The footfalls tentatively made their way aft down the darkened aisle, pausing here and there as if to suss a seat’s potential for maximum comfort with minimum company.

  At last the footsteps arrived at Cedric’s row, where they paused again. And though the bus now pitched and rocked its way diagonally over the gutter that separated the bus station exit from the street, Cedric affected sleep.

  The figure loomed over Cedric’s row, took two steps toward the rear of the bus, and stopped again.

  Long enough, thought Cedric, whose pupils strained to discern through their closed lids and in the dark the figure in the aisle not three feet away, plenty long enough to notice the carpeted sheet metal cowl over the wheel well.

  The man slid into the seat anyway. He slid all the way across the aisle seat and into the seat next to the window, directly behind Cedric.

  What, thought Cedric, a coincidence, and on this of all the clapped-out buses in South Florida. Not to mention how one marvels at the masochism sufficient to ride a nearly empty bus fifteen if not fifteen hundred miles while seated with one’s knees flanking one’s earlobes like moons to the minor and questionably inhabited planetoid of one’s head bone, his coccyx on fire and blood clots in his ankles—and for why? Because his daddy used to beat him for wetting the bed?

  What are the chances?

  I ask you.

  No, no, ask me. Thank you. Slim to none, is the answer. Very slim to totally none.

  Among hitchhikers, Florida’s Alligator Alley, more recently known as the Everglades Expressway, is legendary. It stretches some 110 miles across the southern tip of Florida, from Miami to East Naples, right through Big Cypress Swamp and the Everglades. There’s a fence on either side of it now, and it’s four lanes in many places. But not so long ago Alligator Alley was two lanes of macadam atop a dirt berm with not two feet of altitude bisecting ten thousand square miles of otherwise undifferentiated swamp with no fence in sight. And to this day there’s exactly one paved exit off Alligator Alley, about halfway across the peninsula, which, having provided access to a gas station and store, turns immediately to mud and disappears north, into the Seminole Indian reservation.

  For fifty miles in either direction there are no services, no lights, and no respite from the wildlife that inhabits the swamp. This includes alligators, of course, for the highway was not facetiously named, as well as cottonmouth water moccasins and mosquitoes, of which the latter’s profusion can envelope an exposed human with the claustrophobic efficiency of the thread count of a minus-fifty mummy bag. But even since the erection of the fence this is no highway on which to find oneself stranded after dark. Before the erection of the fence, certain locals would amuse themselves by picking up a naive, westbound hitchhiker in Coral Gables, say, at dusk, and transporting him about twenty-five miles down Alligator Alley before affecting to remember that they had left the stove on in the trailer. They’d drop the unsuspecting and often grateful hitchhiker in the middle of the swamp, giggle through a slow U-turn, and make it back to the east coast, guffawing over their poptops all the way.

  The only way to deal with the fauna was to walk all night. But in the face of invisible rapacious wildlife heeding nature’s imperative to get across to one or another side of the road, the most ginger ambulation failed. Plus, giant palmetto bugs, whose diminutive brethren are cockroaches, make themselves constantly available to be crushed blindly underfoot. It sounds exactly as if one is stepping on sodden boxes of kitchen matches, and is fundamentally unnerving. Excepting such muciferous evidences of passage, many’s the hitchhiker who headed out Alligator Alley only to vanish without so much as a habeas corpus. The stranded motorist disappears, too, leaving the sun to come up on the empty red one-gallon gas can, bobbing forlorn in black ditchwater, a mile or two from the abandoned vehicle.

  Those palmetto bugs can fly, too.

  And the literature says they’re only about an inch long?

  Hah. Double it for antennae, and square that for legs.

  It’s a romantic place.

  Cedric didn’t know why or how Felix Timbalón had come to be on this particular bus, but he knew what Felix was good for, and, as regards what Felix was good for, proximity counts.

  As the lights of civilization thinned away from the westbound bus vector, Cedric calculated Timbalón’s move. After he made it, as soon as possible, Felix could want to be stepping down; whether to meet a car, or catch the next bus eastbound, or whatever, Felix would want to be off this bus.

  Ochopee would be the only stop between Miami on the east coast and Naples on the west coast. Cedric had visited Ochopee once before and remembered it as a pretty rough place. A concatenation of unpainted board cabins for truck drivers, each one with an air conditioner roaring, a pair of canopied picnic tables on a plywood deck next to a pair of outhouses, the whole spread sharing a single bug light on an eight-foot post, a pair each of diesel and gas pumps, and, behind the store, a much-rutted dirt lot full of idling 18-wheelers. The store sold chips, beer, candy, country-western CDs, and truck paraphernalia such as chromium girl-silhouette mudflaps and pine-scented air-fresheners alongside ersatz Seminole artifacts—rubber-headed tomahawks, chicken-feather clutches labeled Eagle Medicine, and denim shirts with a yawning, well-fanged snake and “Moccasin Power” embroidered on the breast pocket. To the man seated behind Cedric, there could be only one genuine attraction to the place: a ride back to Miami.

  Would a car wait for him there?

  Cedric considered this. After a while he dismissed it. No car, he decided, for this would be a one-man operation. It would be more secure that way, and less expensive, for Felix would want to conserve money for his rapacious heroin habit. Not for nothing did Felix Timbalón wear long-sleeved shirts in the tropics.

  As the density of electric lights on either side of the highway thinned to none, Cedric spared little thought to how much he was worth and why he was worth it. He could wonder about that later.

  It would be a delicate thing, but he could predict how it could be handled. There were variables and considerations, but Felix was a specialist. It would be best not to make a big fuss on the bus, not to be noticed. No shooting, for an obvious examp
le. Or the thrashing and gagging involved in garroting, for another. Cedric knew, as he quietly opened both ends of his new knife, that not to make a big deal out of the job might be imperative, and to this end Felix had a stock in trade.

  Through the open window came the compound reek, sullen and unmistakable, of reptiles and mud. If it were daytime one might see any number of alligators ranked along the swamp side of the chainlink fence, black alligators, ten and twelve and even fourteen feet long, laid up like logs in a boom, deposited along the fence as if by a high tide or the Department of Tourism. Motorists in Disney World t-shirts, Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops would be tenderfooting through the saw grass on the highway side of the fence taking pictures. Every now and again one of the reptiles would yawn and cough, a hideous sound the direction from which true denizens of the swamp are cautious not to overlook. And Cedric fell into a reverie concerning the first time he’d encountered Alligator Alley, long before there was a fence, at a time when there was no night traffic at all along its 110 miles, at a time when even the sole exit at Ochopee offered no services, not even so much as a yard light sufficient for your inner Gregorians to chant by.

  The Lord is my shepherd, I shall perhaps bleat

  The Lord harvests those who form a line on the left

  The Lord addeth, the Lord subtracteth

  For Life exhibiteth the associative property

  For God so hard-wired the World

  Forgotten googol of centuries ago …

  He’d seen a cotton mouth water moccasin in a shoal alongside this road as thick as a barge hawser. … The passenger in the seat behind him unzipped a zipper.

  Cedric affected restless sleep until, forty-two minutes into the trip, he felt just before he heard a subtle pressure against the back of his seat, level with the top of his spine. Then came a slight pop, so quiet as to be almost inaudible, no louder than a raindrop on a calla lily.