Gateways. Part 4

Luke was Corley's half brother, and he was special too. Not in ways you could see so plain like Corley's, and not in ways that was much good on the beggin' front. So he mostly just ferried the beggin' folk around. But Luke was special in his own way. Maybe too special. He'd tried the beggin' thing, takin' off his s.h.i.+rt to show the little fins runnin' down his spine and all the big scales that covered his back, but he was a flop. Didn't collect a dime. People was heard to say it looked fake, that no one could really have a back that ugly, and wouldn't drop a dime. The cops tried to arrest him for public disgustation or somethin' like that, but he run off before they could catch him.

Semelee was glad she wasn't misshapen like Corley or Luke or the other members of the clan. But she was special too. She had a weird look that had been enough to bring her a lot of pain, but not weird enough to bring in loose change. She was special in another way. In her own way. Special on the inside.

"Ain't like this is the first time you ever done this," she told Corley.

"I know, but I hate it. If'n I do it a million times I'm still gonna hate it. That thing could take my leg off with one bite if it got a mind to."

"Not just one leg, Corley," Luke said with a grin. "When you think about it, she could take both off at once-if she got a mind to, that is."

"Or if I got tired of your whining and told her to," Semelee added.

"That ain't funny!" Corley said, dancing in place like a little boy who had to take a wizz.

"Stand still!" Luke said. "We're tryin' to catch fish, not scare 'em away! Just be glad it ain't Devil doin' the herdin'."

Corley's hands shook. "If'n it was Devil, I wouldn't be in the water! h.e.l.l, I wouldn't even be on the bank!"

Semelee spotted a dark shape, maybe a foot or two deep, slidin' through the water toward them, rippling the surface above as it moved.

Dora was comin', drivin' the fish before her.

"Get ready," she told them. "Here we go."

Corley let out a soft, high-pitched moan of fear but held his ground and his end of the net.

The shape glided closer and closer to Luke and Corley, and then suddenly the net bowed backward and the water between them was alive with fish, frothing the surface as they thrashed against the net. The two men pushed their poles together and lifted the net out of the water. A coupla dozen or more good-size mollies and even a few ba.s.s wiggled in the mesh.

"Fish fry tonight!" Luke cried.

"She touched me!" Corley said, looking this way and that. If his neck would've allowed it, it'd be swivelin' round in circles. "She tried to bite me!"

"That was just her flipper," Luke said.

"I don't care! Let's get these things ash.o.r.e!"

"Don't forget to leave me some," Semelee said. "Dora'll be very unhappy if you don't."

"Oh, right! Right!" Corley said. He reached into the net and pulled out a wriggling six-inch molly. "The usual?"

"A couple should do."

He flipped one and then another onto the deck, then headed for sh.o.r.e.

Semelee picked up one of the flopping, gasping fish and held it by its slick, slippery tail over the water.

"Dora," she sing-songed. "Dora, dear. Where are you, baby?"

Dora must have been waitin' on the bottom because she popped to the surface right away. The snapping turtle's mountainous sh.e.l.l with its algae-and gra.s.s-covered peaks and valleys appeared first, runnin' a good three-four feet stem to stern. Then her heads broke the surface, all four beady little eyes fixed on her, both hooked jaws open and waitin'. Semelee could see the little wormlike growth on each of her tongues that Dora used like fis.h.i.+n' lures when she sat on the bottom during the daytime and waited for lunch. Finally the long tail broke the surface and floated behind her like a big fat water moccasin.

Semelee was sure scientists would give anything for a look at Dora, the biggest, d.a.m.nedest, weirdest-looking alligator snapper anyone had ever seen, but she was Semelee's, and no one else was gettin' near her.

She tossed a fish at the left head. The sharp, powerful jaws snapped closed across the center, severing the head and tail. The right head s.n.a.t.c.hed those up as they hit the water. A pair of convulsive swallows and the mouths were open again.

Semelee gave the right head first crack at the second fish, with similar results, then she stretched her hands out over the water. Dora reared up so that her heads came in reach.

"Good girl, Dora," she cooed, stroking the tops of the heads. Dora's long tail thrashed back and forth with pleasure. "Thanks for your help. Better get outta sight now before the dredgers come."

Dora gave her one last look before sinkin' from sight.

As Semelee straightened she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the churned-up water and took another peek. She didn't hold much with mirror gazin', but every once in a while she took a look at herself and wondered how different things mighta been for her if she'd had a head of normal hair-black or brown or red or blond, didn't matter, just so long as it wasn't what she'd been born with.

The surface of the water showed someone in her mid-twenties with a face that wasn't no head turner but not ugly neither. If heads did turn, it was cause of her hair, a tangled silver-white mane that trailed after her like a cloud-a very tangled, twisted stormy cloud that no amount of combin' or brus.h.i.+n' could straighten. No amount at all. She should know. She'd spent enough hours as a kid workin' on it.

That hair had been a curse for as long as she could recall. She didn't remember bein' born here, right here on the lagoon, and didn't remember her momma leavin' the lagoon and takin' her to Tallaha.s.see. But she did remember grammar school in Tallaha.s.see. Did she ever.

Her earliest memories there was of kids pointin' to her hair and callin' her "Old Lady." n.o.body wanted Old Lady Semelee on their team no matter what they was playin', so she used to spend recesses and after school mostly alone. Mostly. Being left out would have been bad enough, but the other girls couldn't let it go at that. No, they had to crowd around her and pull off the hat she wore to hide her hair, then they'd yank on that hair and make fun of it. The days she came home from school cryin' to her momma were beyond countin'. Home was her safe place, the only safe place, and her momma was her only friend.

Semelee remembered how she'd cursed her hair. If not for that hair she wouldn't be teased, she'd be allowed into the other kids' games, she'd have friends-more than anything else in the world little Semelee wanted a friend, just one lousy friend. Was that too much to ask? If not for that hair she'd belong belong . And little Semelee so wanted to belong. . And little Semelee so wanted to belong.

Since hats wasn't helpin', she decided one day at age seven to cut it all off. She took out her momma's sewin' scissors and started choppin'. Semelee smiled now at the memory of the mess she'd made of it, but it hadn't been funny then. Her momma'd screamed when she seen it. She was fit to be tied and that scared Semelee, scared her bad. Her only friend was mad.

Momma took the scissors and tried to make somethin' outta the chopped-up thatch but she couldn't do much.

And the kids at school only laughed all the harder when they saw it.

But they ain't laughin' now, Semelee thought with grim satisfaction as she threaded the holes in the eye-sh.e.l.ls through the slim leather thong she wore around her neck. At least some of them ain't. Some of them'll never laugh again.

She watched the ripples and eddies that remained behind on the surface in Dora's wake. Something about their crisscrossing pattern reminded her of her dream last night, the one about someone coming from someplace far away. As she watched the water she had a flash of insight. Suddenly she knew.

"He's here."

10.

Miami International had been a mob scene, far more hectic and crowded than LaGuardia. Jack wound his way through the horde of arrivees and departees toward the ground transportation area. There he caught a shuttle bus to Rent-a-Car Land. In order to help them out of second place, Jack decided to rent from Avis. He settled on an "intermediate" car and chose the most anonymous looking vehicle they had: a beige Buick Century.

The hospital had given him directions from the Florida Turnpike but Jack chose US 1 instead. He figured it would take longer. The red-vested guy at the Avis desk gave him a map and highlighted the way to Route 1.

He was on his way.

All around him South Florida lay flat as a tabletop under a merciless sun, bright in a cloud-dappled sky, blazing through a haze of humidity that hugged the land. Someone somewhere had called Florida an oversized sandbar hanging off the continent like a vestigial limb. Jack couldn't see anything to contradict that.

He'd expected more lushness, but the fronds of the palms along the side of the road hung limp and dull atop their trunks, their tips a dirty gray-brown. The gra.s.s and brush around them looked burned out. No doubt the result of the drought Abe had mentioned.

He reached Route 1-also known as Dixie Highway according to the signs-and ran into some traffic at the southbound merge. People rubber-necking an accident on the northbound side slowed him for a while. He saw the strobing police and ambulance lights and felt a flash of resentment, wondering if people had rubbernecked his father's accident like these yokels.

As soon as they pa.s.sed the crash, the road speeded up again.

For a while the view along US 1 threatened to devolve into Anytown, USA-at least an Anytown warm enough for palm trees-with a parade of Denny's and Wendy's and McDonalds, and Blockbusters and Chevrons and Texacos. Further proof of the depressing h.o.m.ogenization of America, its terror of the untried, its angst of the unique.

But then he started noticing taquerias and tapas joints, and billboards in Spanish. The Cubano and Mexican influence. He pa.s.sed a place offering "fishes." Okay, this wasn't Anytown. This had a flavor all its own.

The colors of the buildings struck him between the eyes. Standard granite gray had been banished. The palette here was way heavy on the pastels, especially turquoise and coral. The buildings looked like molded sherbet-orange, raspberry, key lime, lemon, watermelon, casaba, and maybe a few as yet untried flavors. He spotted a mall done up in what might be called rotten-lemon-rind yellow.

Further south he pa.s.sed one car dealers.h.i.+p after another, every make from every nation that exported cars, all interspersed with AutoZones and Midas m.u.f.flers, Goodyear Tire Centers, and dozens of no-name auto parts shops. People must be nuts about cars down here.

He realized he was hungry. He saw a place called Joanie's Blue Crab Cafe and pulled off the road. The place was pretty much empty-this was off-season, after all-and decorated with local crafts. Paintings by local artists studded the wall. The other three patrons were glued to the TV where the Weather Channel was showing green, yellow, and orange swirls that were supposed to be tropical storm Elvis. They were asking when the h.e.l.l they were going to get rain.

An air conditioner or two might have expanded the comfort zone in Joanie's, but that would have detracted from the funky Florida ambiance. Jack hung in there under the twirling ceiling fans and asked the waitress for a local brew. She brought him something called Ybor Gold and it tasted so d.a.m.n good he had another along with a crabcake sandwich that was out of this world. This lady could open on the Upper East Side and clean up.

Belly full, Jack stepped outside. Elvis might be dumping tons of water on Jacksonville and the rest of north Florida, but down here, though the sky was speckled with clouds, none of them looked like the raining kind. The forecast was bone dry. Dry at least as far as precipitation went, but the air itself lay thick with humidity and clung to his skin like a sloppy wet kiss from a least-favorite aunt.

Back in the car he searched around the radio dial for some music- rock, preferably-but all he found was country or folks speaking Spanish or sweaty-voiced preachers shouting about Jay-sus Jay-sus.

If you want to believe in Jay-sus Jay-sus, he thought, fine. If you want me to believe in Jay-sus Jay-sus, fine too; you can want anything you wish. But do you have to shout?

He finally found a rock station but it was playing Lou Reed. He quickly hit SCAN. Through the years Jack had come to the conclusion that Lou Reed was a brilliant performance artist whose act was a lifelong portrayal of a singer-songwriter who couldn't carry a tune or write a melody.

The tuner stopped on a dance station. Jack didn't dance, the beat was monotonous, and he'd arrived in the middle of a woman doing a double-time version of "Boys of Summer." He bailed when a cheesy organ attempted to duplicate Kootch Kortchmar's riffs from the original. What had Don Henley ever done to deserve that?

Next stop, one of the country stations-"Gator Country One-Oh-One Point Nine!" He liked some country, mostly the Hank Williams-Senior, preferably-Buck Owens, Mel Tillis brand of mournful n.o.body-loves-me-but-my-dog-and-he's-got-fleas-so-pa.s.s-that-whiskey-bottle-over-here-if-you-please ballad. He lasted maybe fifteen minutes on 101.9. Three songs, three singers, and they all sounded exactly the same. Was that the awful truth about modern country music? The one they'd kill to keep? One lead singer performing under a gazillion different names? Jack wasn't sure about that part, but he had no doubt that the same guy had been singing backup harmony on all three songs.

Okay. Can the radio.

He saw a sign for Novaton and hung a right off US 1 onto a road that ran due west, straight as a lat.i.tude line. Looked like someone had given a guy a compa.s.s and a paver filled with asphalt and said, "Go west, young man! Go west!" It made sense. No hills or valleys to skirt. The only rises in the road he'd seen since leaving the airport had been overpa.s.ses.

He checked out the sickly palms and pines flanking the road. He'd worked with a landscaper as a teen and knew northeast greenery, but even healthy these trees would be a mystery to him. Dead gray fronds lay on the shoulder like roadkill while some skittered onto the pavement when the breeze caught them.

All the houses along the road were squat little ranches in overgrown yards, with carports instead of garages; they hunkered against the earth as if hiding from something. Every once in a while a warehouse would soar to one-and-a-half stories, but that was an aberration. The favored exterior shade seemed to be a sick green like oxidized copper, and here and there a pizza-size DTV dish would poke up from a roof. He'd been expecting lots of red-tile roofs but they seemed a rarity; most were standard asbestos s.h.i.+ngles, pretty threadbare in many cases. Oddly, the shabbiest houses seemed to sport the most magnificent palms in their front yards.

Even if he didn't know much about tropical or subtropical trees, he did know banyans; their distinctive aerial roots gave them away. The road to Novaton was loaded with them. In some stretches banyan phalanxes lined each side of the street and interwove their branches above the pavement, transforming a b.u.mpy secondary road into a wondrous, leafy green tunnel.

He recognized a couple of coconut palms, only because of the yellowing nuts hanging among the fronds. Plants that in New York grew only indoors in carefully watered and fertilized pots flourished like weeds down here.

He pa.s.sed a tall white water tower emblazoned with the town name and shaped like one of those old WWI potato-masher hand grenades the Germans used to toss at the Allies. At its base lay a dusty soccer field flanked by a high school, a middle school, and a senior center.

He pa.s.sed a feed store. Feed what? He hadn't seen any cattle.

Abruptly he was in Novaton and quickly found the center of town-the whole four square blocks of it. The directions from the hospital told him how to find it from there. Two right turns off Main Street and he came to a three-story cantaloupe-colored brick building of reasonable vintage. The sign out front told him he'd reached his destination.

NOVATON COMMUNITY HOSPITAL.

A MEMBER OF DADE COUNTY MEDICAL SYSTEMS.

He parked in a corner of the visitor lot next to some sad looking cacti and headed through the stifling late-afternoon heat toward the front door. An arthritic old man in the information kiosk gave him his father's room number on the third floor.

Minutes later Jack was standing outside room 375. The door stood open. He could see the foot of the bed, the twin tents of the patient's feet under the sheet. The rest was obscured by a privacy curtain. He sensed no movement in the room, no one there besides the patient.

The patient...his father...Dad.

Jack hesitated, advancing one foot across the threshold, then drawing it back.

What am I afraid of?

He knew. He'd been putting this off-not only his arrival, but thinking about this moment as well-since he'd started the trip. He didn't want to see his father, his only surviving parent, laid out like a corpse. Alive sure, but only in the bodily sense. The man inside, the sharp-though-nerdy-middle-cla.s.s mind, the lover of gin, sticky-sweet desserts, bad puns, and ugly Hawaiian s.h.i.+rts, was unavailable, walled off, on hold, maybe forever. He didn't want to see him like that.

Yeah, well that's just too d.a.m.n bad for me, isn't it, he thought as he stepped into the room and marched to the foot of the bed. And stared.

Jeez, what happened to him? Did he shrink?

He'd expected bruises and they were there in abundance: a bandage on the left side of his head, a purple goose egg on his forehead, and a pair of black eyes. What shocked him was how small his father looked in that bed. He'd never been a big man, maintaining a lean and rangy build even through middle age, but now he looked so flat and frail, like a miniature, two-dimensional caricature tucked into a bed-shaped envelope.

Besides the IV bag hanging over the bed, running into him, another bag hung below the mattress, catching the urine coming out of him. Spikes marched in an even progression along the glowing line on the cardiac monitor.

Maybe this wasn't him. Jack looked for familiar features. He couldn't see much of the mouth as it hung open behind the transparent green plastic of the oxygen mask. The skin was tanned more deeply than he'd ever remembered, but he recognized the age spots on his forehead, and the retreating gray hairline. His blue eyes were hidden behind closed lids, and his steel-rimmed gla.s.ses-the only time his father took off his gla.s.ses was to sleep, shower, or trade them for prescription sungla.s.ses-were gone.

But yeah, this was him.

Jack felt acutely uncomfortable standing here, staring at his father. So helpless...

They'd seen very little of each other in the past fifteen years, and when they had, it was all Dad's doing. His earliest memories of home were ones of playing catch in the backyard when he'd been all of five years old and the mitt was half the size of his torso, standing in a circle with his father and sister Kate and brother Tom, tossing the ball back and forth. Dad and Kate would underhand it to him so he could catch it; Tom always tried to make him miss.

His lasting, growing-up impressions were of a slim, quiet man who rarely raised his voice, but when he did, you listened; who rarely raised his hand, but when he did, a single, quick whack on the b.u.t.t made you see the error of your ways. He'd worked as a CPA for Arthur Anderson, then moved-decades before the Enron scandal-to Price Waterhouse where he stayed until retirement.

He wasn't a showy sort, never the life of the party, never had a flashy car-he liked Chevys-and never moved from the west Jersey house he and Mom had bought in the mid-fifties. Then, without warning, he'd up and sold it last fall and moved to Florida. He was a middle-cla.s.s man with a middle-cla.s.s income and middle-cla.s.s mores. He hadn't changed history and no one but the surviving members of his family and steadily diminis.h.i.+ng circle of old friends would note or mourn his pa.s.sing, yet Jack would remember him as a man who always could, as Joel McCrea had put it in Ride the High Country Ride the High Country, enter his house justified.

Jack stepped around to the left side of the bed, the one opposite the IV pole. He pulled up a chair, sat, and took his father's hand. He listened to his breathing, slow and even. He felt he should say something but didn't know what. He'd heard that some people in comas can hear what's going on around them. It didn't make much sense, but it couldn't hurt to try.

"Hey, Dad. It's me. Jack. If you can hear me, squeeze my hand, or move a finger. I-"

His father said something that sounded like "Brashee!" The word startled Jack.

"What'd you say, Dad? What'd you say?"