After the launch they slept again in the car. Jamie then dropped Troy at the bus station in Orlando and headed back to Gainesville for football practice. Young Troy felt that he was a new person, that he had been transformed by his experience. Throughout the next week he obsessively followed the flight. Burford became his hero, his new idol. During the first two quarters of the following year, he applied himself avidly to his school work. He had a goal. He was going to be an astronaut.
Little did Troy know that on a March night only seven months later he would have another experience, this one devastating and deeply disturbing, that would completely overshadow the thrill he had felt at the shuttle launch. On that later March evening, his brother Jamie would stop by his room before leaving the house around eight o’clock. ‘I’m going over to Maria’s, bro,’ Jamie would say. ‘We’ll probably take in a movie.’
Maria Alvarez was eighteen and still a senior in high school. She had been Jamie’s steady girlfriend for a couple of years. She lived in Little Havana together with her Cuban family and eight siblings.
Troy had given his brother a hug. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Jamie. There are so many things that I want to show you. I made you a set of headphones in school—’
‘I want to see everything,’ his brother had interrupted him. ‘But tomorrow, first thing in the morning. Now don’t stay up too late. Astronauts need plenty of sleep so they can be alert.’ Jamie had smiled and walked out of Troy’s room. It was the last thing Troy would ever hear him say.
Troy never could remember what he had heard first when he had awakened in the middle of that night. His mother’s wild wail had mixed with the screech of the nearby sirens to create an imbroglio of sound that was unforgettable and terrifying. Troy had raced to the door and into the front yard wearing only his pyjama bottoms. The sound of the ambulance siren was drawing closer. His mother was at the end of the short walkway in front of the house, bending down over a dark body spread partly in the street in front of Jamie’s Chevrolet and partly in their yard. Three policemen and half a dozen curious bystanders were huddled around his distraught mother.
‘Somehow,’ he heard one of the policemen say as Troy, in a panic, tried to figure out what was happening, ‘he managed to drive home. It’s incredible after all the blood he lost. He must have been hit four times in the stomach….’
His mother’s cry intensified again and, at that moment, Troy put all the pieces together and recognized the body lying on its back. A chill went through him, he gasped, and then Troy fell on his knees beside his brother’s head. Jamie was struggling for breath. His eyes were open but they did not seem to be focusing on anything.
Troy cradled Jamie’s head in his hands. He looked down at his brother’s stomach. His red shirt was awash in blood that seemed to be flowing in a continuous stream from an area just above the genitals. Blood was on Jamie’s jeans, on the ground, everywhere. Troy felt himself gag, then retch involuntarily. Nothing came up. Hot tears filled his eyes.
‘We think it was a gang shooting, Mrs. Jefferson,’ the policeman droned on. ‘Probably some kind of a mistake. Everybody knows Jamie wasn’t mixed up with that kind of crowd.’ Reporters had arrived. Lights were flashing from cameras. More sirens approached.
Jamie’s eyes went blank. There was no sign of breathing. Troy pulled his brother’s head to his chest. He instinctively knew that Jamie was dead. He began to sob uncontrollably. ‘No,’ he mumbled. ‘No. Not my brother. Not Jamie. He never hurt anybody.’
Someone tried to comfort him, to pat him on the shoulder. Troy shrugged them off violently. ‘Leave me alone,’ he shouted between sobs. ‘He was my brother. He was my only brother.’ After a couple of moments, Troy tenderly placed Jamie’s head back down on the ground. He then collapsed in total despair beside him.
At almost three-thirty in the morning some ten years later in March 1994, Troy Jefferson would be at home, alone in his duplex, awake with the memory of that terrible moment when Jamie had died. He would feel anew the heartbreak of that loss. And he would realize again, very clearly, that most of his adolescent dreams had died with his brother, that he had forsaken his dreams of college and being an astronaut because they were inextricably coupled with his memory of Jamie.
Somehow he had stumbled through high school in the three years that had followed Jamie’s death. But it had taken the combined efforts of his mother and the school and the city authorities to keep Troy from abandoning school altogether. Then, as soon as he had graduated, he had left Miami. Or rather, had run away. Away from what had happened and what might have been. For over two years he wandered in a desultory manner throughout North America, a young, solitary black man, bereft of love and friendship, looking for something to overcome the feeling of emptiness that was his constant companion.
So I finally came to Key West, Troy would think, years later, as he settled back in his bed in the middle of the morning for a couple more hours of sleep. And for some reason made myself a home. Maybe it was just time. Or maybe I had learned enough to know that life goes on. But somehow, although the wound has never healed, I got past Jamie. And found the lost Troy. Or so I hope.
The dream that had been interrupted by the siren suddenly came back into his mind. Angie was beautiful in the moonlight in her white bathing suit. And now for some unfinished business. Troy laughed to himself, concentrating on the image of Angie as he returned to sleep.
2
‘Good morning, angel,’ Troy said with a grand smile as Carol approached the Florida Queen. ‘Ready to do some fishing?’ He hopped out of the boat and shouted at Nick, who was around at the back on the other side of the canopy. ‘She’s here, Professor,’ he called. ‘I’m going out to the parking lot to get her stuff.’ Carol gave Troy the keys to her car and he took off in the direction of the marina office.
Carol paced for a few moments on the jetty before Nick emerged from behind the canopy. ‘Come on down on the boat,’ he said, scowling a little as he wiped some heavy dredging chain with a dark cloth. Nick felt terrible. He had a bad hangover. And he was still bothered by the events of the night before. Carol didn’t say anything at first. Nick stopped cleaning the chain and waited for her to speak.
‘I don’t know exactly how to say this,’ she began in a firm but pleasant voice, ‘but it’s important to me that I say it before I get on the boat.’ Carol cleared her throat. ‘Nick,’ she said deliberately, ‘I don’t want to dive with you today. I want to dive with Troy.’
Nick gave her a quizzical look. He was standing in the sun and his head was aching. ‘But Troy—’ he began.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she interrupted him. ‘He doesn’t have much experience and it could be a dangerous dive.’ She stared directly at Nick. ‘That doesn’t matter to me. I have enough diving experience for both of us. I prefer to dive with Troy.’ She waited a few seconds. ‘Now if you’re not willing—’
This time it was Nick who interrupted Carol. ‘All right, all right,’ he said, turning away. He was surprised to find that he was both hurt and angry. This woman is still pissed off, he said to himself. And I thought maybe… Nick walked away from Carol and went back on the other side of the canopy to finish preparing the small rented salvage crane he and Troy had installed the night before. Since they had used this old equipment several times on other excursions, the installation had been straightforward and without major problems.
Carol climbed on to the boat and put her copy of the photos on top of the counter next to the steering wheel. ‘Where’s the trident?’ she called to Nick. ‘I thought I’d take another look at it this morning.’
‘Bottom left drawer, under the nav equipment,’ was his swift and sharp reply. She took the grey bag out of the drawer, opened it, and pulled out the golden trident. She held it by the long middle rod. It felt funny for some reason. Carol put the object back in the bag and pulled it out a second time. Again she held the heavy trident in her hands. It still didn’t feel right. Carol remembered graspi
ng the rod underneath the overhang in the water and wrapping her hand slowly around the central rod. That’s it, she said to herself. It’s thicker.
She turned the object over in her hands. What’s the matter with me? she thought. Have I lost my mind? How could it be thicker? She examined it one more time with great care. This time she thought that the individual tines of the fork had lengthened and that she could detect a perceptible increase in the overall weight. Good grief. Can this be possible? she wondered.
Carol pulled out the photos she had brought along. All the images of the trident that she had with her had been taken underwater. But she was certain that she could discern two subtle changes since it was first photographed. The axis rod did appear to be thicker and the tines of the fork did indeed look longer.
‘Nick,’ she said in a loud voice. ‘Nick, can you come here?’
‘I’m right in the middle of something,’ an unfriendly voice responded from the other side of the canopy. ‘Is it important?’
‘No. I mean yes,’ Carol answered. ‘But it can wait until your first available moment.’
Carol’s mind was racing. There are only two possibilities, she said to herself with logical precision, either it has changed or it hasn’t. If it hasn’t changed, then I must be spooked. For it definitely seems thicker. But how could it change? Either on its own or someone changed it. But who? Nick? But how could he…?
Nick came up to her. ‘Yes?’ he said in a distant, almost hostile tone. He was obviously annoyed.
Carol handed him the trident. ‘Well?’ she said, smiling and looking at him expectantly.
‘Well, what?’ he answered, totally confused by what was happening and still angry about the earlier interaction.
‘Can you tell the difference?’ Carol continued, nodding at the trident in his hand.
Nick turned it upside down as she had done. The sunlight glinted off the golden surface and hurt his eyes. He squinted. Then he switched the object from hand to hand and looked at it from many different angles. ‘I think I’m lost,’ Nick said at length. ‘Are you trying to tell me that there’s some change in this thing?’
He held it out between them. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Can’t you feel it? The central rod’s thicker than it was on Thursday and the tines or individual elements of that fork on one end are a little longer. And don’t you think the whole thing is heavier?’
Nick’s headache continued to throb. He looked back and forth between the trident and Carol. As far as he could tell, the object had not changed. ‘No, I don’t,’ he said. ‘It seems the same to me.’
‘You’re just being difficult,’ Carol persisted, grabbing the trident back. ‘Here, look at the pictures. Check out the length of the fork there compared to the overall rod and then look at it now. It’s different.’
There was something in Carol’s general attitude that really irritated Nick. She always seemed to assume that she was right and everyone else was wrong. ‘This is absurd,’ Nick nearly shouted in reply, ‘and I have a lot of work to do.’ He paused for a moment and then continued. ‘How the hell could it change? It’s a metal object, for Christ’s sake. What do you think? That somehow it grew? Shit.’
He shook his head and started to walk away. After a couple of steps, he turned around. ‘You can’t trust the pictures anyway,’ he said in more measured tones. ‘Underwater photos always distort the objects….’
Troy was approaching with both the cart and Carol’s equipment. He could tell from the body positions, even without hearing the words, that his two boatmates were at it again. ‘My, my,’ he said as he walked up, ‘I can’t leave you two alone for a minute. What are you fighting about this morning, Professor?’
‘This supposedly intelligent reporter friend of yours,’ Nick replied, looking at Carol and speaking in a patronizing manner, ‘insists that our trident has changed shape. Overnight I guess. Although she has not yet begun to explain how. Will you please, since she won’t believe me, explain to her about the index of refraction or whatever it is that fouls up underwater pictures.’
Carol appealed to Troy. ‘But it has changed. Honest. I remember clearly what it felt like at first and now it feels different.’
Troy was unloading the cart and putting the ocean telescope system on the Florida Queen. ‘Angel,’ Troy said, stopping to check the trident that she was extending toward him with both hands, ‘I can’t tell whether it has changed or not, but I can tell you one thing. You were very excited when you found it the first time and you were also underwater. With that combination I wouldn’t trust my own memory of how something felt.’
Carol looked at the two men. She was going to pursue the discussion but Nick abruptly changed the subject. ‘Did you know, Mr. Jefferson, that our client Miss Dawson has requested your services as a diving partner today? She doesn’t want to dive with me.’ His tone was now acerbic.
Troy looked at Carol with surprise. ‘That’s real nice, angel,’ he said quietly, ‘but Nick is really the expert. I’m just a little more than a beginner.’
‘I know that,’ Carol responded brusquely, still chafing from the outcome of the previous conversation. ‘But I want to dive with someone I can trust. Someone who behaves responsibly. I know enough about diving for both of us.’
Nick gave Carol an angry look and then turned and walked away. He was pissed. ‘Come on, Jefferson,’ he said. ‘I’ve already agreed to let Miss High and Mighty have her way. This time. Let’s get the boat ready and finish setting up that telescope thing of hers again.’
‘My father finally divorced my mother when I was ten,’ Carol was saying to Troy. They were sitting together in the deck chairs at the front of the boat. After they had gone over the procedures for the dive a couple of times, Carol had mentioned something about her first boating experience, a birthday on a fishing boat with her father when she was six, and the two of them had moved comfortably into a discussion of their childhood. ‘The breakup was awful.’ She handed the can of Coke back to Troy. ‘I think you might have been luckier, in some ways, never to have known your father.’
‘I doubt it,’ Troy replied seriously. ‘From my earliest days, I resented the fact that some of the kids had two parents. My brother Jamie tried to help, of course, but there was only so much he could do. I purposely chose friends who had fathers living at home.’ He laughed. ‘I remember one dark black kid named Willie Adams. His dad was at home all right, but he was an embarrassment to the family. He was an older man, nearing sixty at the time, and he didn’t work. He just sat on the front porch in his rocking chair all day and drank beer.
‘Whenever I went over to Willie’s house to play, I would always find some excuse to spend a little time on the porch sitting next to Mr. Adams. Willie would fidget uncomfortably, unable to understand why I wanted to listen to his father tell his old, supposedly boring stories. Mr. Adams had been in the Korean War and he loved to tell about his friends and the battles and, particularly, the Korean women and what he called their tricks.
‘Anyway, you could always tell when Mr. Adams was about to start one of his stories. His eyes would begin to stare in front of him, as if he were looking intently at something far off in the distance, and he would say, as much to himself as anybody, “Tell the truth, Baby Ruth.” Then he would recite the story, almost as if he were quoting from a written book, “We had driven the North Koreans back to the Yalu and our battalion commander told us they were ready to surrender,” he would say. “We were feeling good, talking about what we were all going to do when we got back to the States. But then the great yellow horde poured out of China….”’
Troy stopped. He stared out at the ocean. It was easy for Carol to see him as a young boy, sitting on a porch with his embarrassed friend Willie and listening to stories told by a man who lived hopelessly in the past but who, nevertheless, represented the father that Troy had never had. She leaned over to Troy and touched his forearm. ‘It makes a pretty picture,’ she said. ‘You probably never knew how happy you made t
hat man by listening to his stories.’
Around on the other side of the canopy, Nick Williams was sitting by himself in another deck chair. He was reading Madame Bovary and trying without success to ignore both his residual hangover and the scattered tidbits of conversation he was overhearing. He had programmed the navigation system to return automatically to the dive site from Thursday, so there was nothing else he really needed to do to pilot the boat. Nick almost certainly would have enjoyed sharing the conversation with Carol and Troy, but after his earlier confrontation with her, in which he felt she had made it clear that she didn’t want to associate with him, he was not about to join them. It was now necessary that he ignore her. Otherwise she would conclude that he was just another wimp.
And besides, he liked his book. He was reading the part where Emma Bovary gives herself over completely to the affair with Rudolph Boulanger. Nick could see Emma sneaking away from her house in the small French provincial village and racing across the fields into the arms of her lover. Most of the time in the past, whenever Nick had read a novel about a beautiful, dark heroine, he had pictured Monique. But interestingly enough, the Emma Bovary that he was envisioning while he was reading on the boat was Carol Dawson. And more than once that morning, when Nick had read Flaubert’s descriptions of the passions of Emma and Rudolph, he had imagined himself in the role of the bachelor from the French landed gentry making love to Emma/Carol.
Cradle Page 25
