Cutting Loose in Paradise

by Mary Jane Ryals

  “Well, see you later—at the funeral, I suppose. Tomorrow.” I packed up brush, pins, iron. He released his arms from his chest as though he were unfurling. He followed me to the exit. The fierce-angled winter sun stung my eyes as I stepped out the door.

  CHAPTER 2

  IN THE CAR, warmth washed over my skin. My spirits lifted like a sea-bird aloft over the morning wind currents. Dollar Store sunglasses helped with the glare. The twenty-minute drive home would offer time to consider what I’d seen and let it sink in. In this rural county, we had little traffic, some thousands of acres of national, state, and local forest and plenty of salty-dog road life. Sometimes the place bored me, but then a coral sunset in a winter sky would pull me back to gratefulness.

  My master’s in English had gotten me as far as an oyster boat without a motor. So when I left my marriage in Jacksonville and headed home, I’d studied for a hair stylist license. I set up shop in the town where my dad and his mother lived, where my blood was salted.

  I drove past the now-empty canoe shop with its purple gorilla statue standing outside, frozen in a hello wave. On beyond the last pastureland with a few cows munching in the chill. Most cattle farms now were situated north of the city of Tallahassee, fifteen miles above Wellborn, and spilled into Georgia.

  The phone rang. I was relieved for distraction. They say we are all in peril with phone jabber and driving now. When you live an hour from pharmacies, clothing stores, dentists, the accoutrements of our twenty-first century lives, the phone assists in the business of life. I felt around on the seat for the cell. As rural as the road was, we had no stoplights for ten miles. What locals worried about most was fishermen and tourists partying too much and veering around on roads from Cureall. The town of Cureall promised a hundred years ago to dip you in magical waters and heal you. Now, it served as a tiny commercial fishing port.

  “Hello, this is LaRue Panther of Cutting Loose,” I said into the phone. I had passed a boiled peanuts stand and eight cars lined up, rusting bumper to bumper, near the beat-up old railroad line that took lumber down to the Gulf a century ago.

  “LaRue?”

  “Mac?” I said, in a cracked voice. MacKenzie Duncan, who lived on the island part-time, my connection to the well-to-do Capitol gang up in Tallahassee. Mac was one of a kind, a barrel-chested lobbyist with a white head of hair, cowboy boots, and bolo. A booming voice. He was approaching retirement, and his family owned land from the Gulf back north to the farm land two counties up into Georgia. He helped me out like we locals did for each other.

  Most lobbyists wore black or white versions of power suits. Mac didn’t care about the suit. He owned the only condo hotel complex on the Gulf on St. Annes. He booked special events in a big reception hall with glass that overlooked the water. He introduced me to those who could help me make a living. I was the only hairstylist on St. Annes. My shop’s name I’d decided on after I flew out of Jacksonville in the middle of the night with my kids. If their father had been awake, I’d never have gotten away. So I’d cut loose and in a hurry. Panther’s my Indian name, my father’s name. LaRue, my Christian name, came from my mother’s French Canadian name. She died giving birth to me.

  I passed the old whitewashed Bert Thomas Grocery and Gas Station and the Southern Spirits Lounge and Liquors, and headed toward the pine-, tupelo-, and bay-lined road that took me toward home—and turned my attention back to the phone.

  “The wedding tomorrow evening is yours,” Mac said. “They decided it best to wait and do the hair out at the island.” When folks decided on an island-theme wedding, they went all out. Politicians who dined and dealt with Mac had big bucks to spend on their preciouses, what we out in rural north Florida called their children. A mixed blessing, I’d discovered, weddings and hair styling. Perfectionism pervades weddings, and the hairdresser catches it when things don’t come out looking like heaven. Still, weddings paid well.

  “Thanks a million, Mac. You’re an amazing friend.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed.

  “Did you know about Trina Lutz?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Terrible shame. Didn’t expect her as a suicide type. Did you?”

  “Well, everybody year-round here knows each other,” I told him. I was avoiding answering the question. “When you have so few, it’s not hard to get a sense of most folks. You see them in the yard, at the post office. But Trina was great to my kids. Didn’t have any of her own.” With seven hundred year-round residents, we all knew when anything went down. Tourists were another matter. They came and went like the tides.

  “How old was she?” he asked.

  “Oh, you know, about fifty-five. A young fifties, you know?” A couple of small herons flew past, distracting me. They reminded me that I had approached wading bird territory.

  “Hmm. How’d she die again?”

  Heart staccato in my chest, I said, “I heard it was a gun to the chest. Guess you never know about people. Say, did the Tallahassee Times report this?” I realized as I said it that I’d decided to keep the new information close. Maybe the city paper had gotten a more factual account.

  “Shot herself, yeah? Sorry to hear it,” Mac said. “Madonna let me know Trina’d done herself in as she passed by this morning. Let me check the paper here.” I could hear paper rustling. “Shot herself. In the heart,” he said. “A shame. Sometimes the lonely island life gets to people.”

  I bristled a little at his cliché. Trina wasn’t lonely. At least I didn’t think so. I also shuddered at the taste of folks sometimes. A huge tacky blow-up Santa sat in a mildewy boat on a junky front yard I was passing. Our Gulf people could be described as a bunch of crazy old beat-up Floridians. Another cliché? Still, they were my crazy old beat-up people.

  “Right,” I said, my mind elsewhere.

  The island landscape did have a way, a gravity that pulled the locals backwards in time, possessing us with who we all used to be, dependent on the ocean and its terrain for survival. How would he know that? He was a loaded outsider. He had the bucks to hobnob with rich and infamous lawmakers. I headed through the light at the highway towards home.

  “Well, Tiffany is helping me by closing a real estate deal out by the Indian mound there, so I need to run,” Mac said. “I’ll be talking to you about the details of the wedding tomorrow. Say, can I get a trim while you’re over at the reception?”

  “Of course. We’ll celebrate being alive, okay? And your deal? And thanks, as always.”

  I wondered what he’d sold, out by the Indian mound. I didn’t know he’d invested in the land near the river as it wound into the Gulf. Still, I was relieved. Winter wanted to be the slowest season in north Florida. Slump time, the cold and misty months when businesses either made it or not. Fall and spring pulled in tourists with cash to toss around on fishing, excursions, a spa, a fancy hotel, and incredible views. In the off-season, making a living on St. Annes Key was, like island life everywhere, a precarious enterprise.

  I drove past the first island, Shell Island, which proudly announced itself as such, adding, “Welcome to a Golf Cart Community.” The fishermen loved to sneer at the sign near the wetlands where the St. Annes River met the Gulf. As I reflected back on my conversation with Mac and the Shell Island deal, I figured he’d probably either done a state park deal or arranged something from a rich Midwesterner who’d always dreamed of living on the fringe of an Indian mound where the weather hovered in the soft ranges.

  Then I wondered: Why had the paper gotten this cause of death so wrong? Had anybody else noticed it yet and complained?

  Was the “haves and have-nots” situation worsening? Bad enough that Wall Street suckered working people out of bazillions, but this past summer, oil had burst up out of a deep hole in the sea bottom created by the mega-company BP, burst up and into our TV screens for us to gawk at. On the Islands, this spit of coastal pineland, folks broke their backs on shrimp boats and serving margaritas and broiled grouper to tourists.

  And despite our country’s
brightest engineers, our massive machines, a wealthy world government, no one in this world could stop the oil gushing into our waters for months. Since shrimp are bottom feeders, and the oil was settling at the bottom, there could be no shrimp food. No water algae and plankton, and no shellfish. And without promise of sea-oated dunes, we had no tourists. The coast sat quiet, except for an occasional dead animal floating up to shore from Louisiana, the state that had seen the worst of the spill.

  Images of the western Gulf of Mexico coast broadcast around the world for months. And in the water, death underneath. Maybe for decades, the biologists were saying. Some even said our entire Gulf could actually smother and die.

  And like it or not, I needed steady money. I covered rent on the business and apartment in town. As well, I paid the mortgage on the family land back up on the St. Annes River near Newport where Dad and Grandma Happy lived. The twenty acres was about half paid off, but “half” does not equal “owning.” Just this year, the local city bank had tanked, and Old Man Patterson next door to Dad had sunk into foreclosure on the ramshackle cabin he’d lived in for twenty-five years. He moved himself into a nursing home up in Wellborn. Word had it he sat in a wheelchair covered with a plaid blanket staring out the window at the parking lot. His heart wouldn’t pump much longer.

  All around the islands, strangeness and loss showed on fishermen’s faces and on shop owners’ rounded shoulders. Whoever decided to put those oil rigs out into waters had forgotten how those waters rocked us all to the rhythm of the ancient, feral heartbeat. I passed a flock of turkey buzzards hulked together in a tree. They waited for me to pass so they could return to feasting on the dead possum in the road. I wound my way through the tall woodsy lowlands and down into the swamps. Herons, yellow grasses, with blue-water sky overhead.

  Laura, my news editor friend, had fallen in love with this place and never looked back after rocketing here out of south Florida. I myself had sworn never to return here, but the undertow had sucked me back. Laura did not get facts in the media wrong, but she’d gotten the cause of Trina’s death incorrect. I punched in her number.

  “Hey, you,” said Laura Knight, who’d reported Trina’s death. I’d wanted to try a new color on her thick, curling hair. As someone with straight hair, I was fascinated with curls. Maybe honey and ash blonde streaks to contrast, like a small boat wake in a sea of waves. “You’re on for Saturday night?”

  Occasionally, we tried to head to Tallahassee or somewhere for a movie, play, anything like culture on weekends. We made up the minority group on the island—those who didn’t haunt the bars from sundown to closing. Nor did we wake Sundays at dawn’s light to attend church.

  “Hey,” I said. “Can you meet me at the Rusty Rim Pub in ten minutes?”

  “Ten minutes?”

  “Really important,” I said. “Check the info on Trina’s death, will you?”

  “What’s wrong?” she said, her voice on alert. Even though Laura was from elsewhere, she was born with such earnest duty and a hard work ethic that she’d made her way to the trust of most locals.

  “I really want to talk in person—can you be there?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said in her low-affect, count-on-me voice.

  “I’ll tell the guy with the camo and bandana to leave you alone,” I promised. I was thinking of one of those barflies who drifted to our island from who knows where. This one came in and hit on her constantly. She chuckled.

  “See you in ten,” she said.

  CHAPTER 3

  I PASSED A STAND OF SLASH PINES and then a cluster of swamp chestnut. Then, the bald cypress, which clues you that you’re in woods and swamps. The whisper of reeds and grass. At dusk or dawn, deer grazed alongside the road. An occasional bobcat might dash across. I always felt like a mermaid along this wettish road—half woman, half fish.

  Next, the sandy swamps and natural canals of St. Annes Island. It’s not an island, but a good river port, the confluence of the St. Annes River and the Gulf. A laughing gull gave a raucous call in the chilly fog overhead as I pulled into the parking lot that had served Posey’s Bar. Posey’s had taken countless fishermen, shrimpers, and oyster men in her wild arms and rocked away the weariness of that life through beer, jukebox, and pool.

  Now Posey’s sat on the St. Annes River, battered, windowless, and wrecked from floods. A dead bar made me think of Trina. I slammed the car door and walked away, towards the Rusty Rim Pub, a homely cube of a cement block building hanging on to the bank of the river right next to the shell of a wooden building that had been Posey’s Oyster Bar before the last hurricane washed it out. The Rusty Rim had housed a fish storage in earlier days.

  Brrr. This was the coldest winter we’d experienced in north Florida. Newscasters said it might snow next week. Whiffs of snow teased Tallahassee every five years or so, but the Gulf, no. Not in written history had it snowed on our Florida beach. It had gotten to the 30s, and the newsman told us it was headed for the 20s and teens.

  I walked towards the pub holding my breath. Many brace themselves for the stink of the Rusty Rim Pub. No matter what, it always reeks like a wet dog. I walked across the concrete floor to the deck where there stood a skinny, leathery guy missing a few teeth. I’d stopped wondering where some of these folks blew in from. Many stray seagull types I knew, but other old birds flew in and out like dandelion seeds floating on a fierce Gulf wind. “Please do not Feed the Birds from Inside the Restaurant,” reminded the sign overhead.

  With relief, I spotted Laura sitting hunched over in her bright red sweater and down jacket. She was frowning into the booth. She glanced up through her huge red-framed glasses and waved, beckoned me to sit with her as she pointed to the round outdoor heater next to her.

  “You are so from south Florida,” I said, grinning as she huddled in her jacket, wrapping her scarf tightly around her neck.

  “This isn’t Florida.” She shivered, pointing out the window at the Gulf. Her mouth was twisted in a near smile. “It’s the north Georgia mountains on the Gulf, and it’s snow and ice in Atlanta right now.” She then glanced at the weather news looming in the corner TV over our heads. Laura took our place at face value and dug in, reporting news of environmental betrayals and local infrastructure disasters. Now she covered the economic plunge the community was experiencing with the damage of the oil spill. Like most humans, she was full of contradictions. She did not go outdoors, was allergic to a laundry list of natural and manmade stuff, yet she had a passion for protecting all things tree, sky, earth, air, animal.

  She’d most recently written an editorial that stated BP, the oil company across the Atlantic that made this mess in the Gulf, was made up of “a bunch of bankers and shysters.” They knew how to suck oil from the Gulf but had no idea how to deal with a blowout or a spill that would pollute the waters for thousands of miles. TV and wire services picked up on it and had begun calling Laura about the situation on our Big Bend “Forgotten Florida” islands. I tapped her head in affection and sat down.

  “Ash blonde,” I said, smiling, reminding her of my plans for her hair’s future.

  “What’s up?” she said, brow wrinkled beneath those square glasses. She called herself slightly Aspergers, but I thought of her as quirky-brilliant.

  “A funeral and a wedding to work tomorrow.” I sighed and looked around for a waiter. A plastic oversized crab and a seven-point stuffed deer head made up the décor on the wall before us, a stuffed mako shark to our right.

  I leaned in to talk to her. “Very weird, Laura. Who told you Trina had shot herself?”

  She shrugged, her green eyes puzzled. “The usual. The police report, of course.” Now she leaned in. “Why?”

  “Who fills that out?” I turned up the heater nearest us.

  “Cooter,” she said. Cooter Lutz. Local guy, ex-fisherman, brother-in-law to Trina, now cop. Bald as a potato at only thirty-two.

  “Well, he’s friggin’ blind.” I leaned deeper into the table, rested my elbow there, lowered my
voice as I said it. “Or he’s a big fat liar.”

  “Gossiping again, LaRue?” The voluptuous cinnamon-skinned Madonna stood over us, hip to one side, hand propped, and waiting. Exotic beauty, our friend Madonna from Cuban, African, and redneck heritage. Her curling dark locks washed across her shoulders. She had been born and raised in St. Annes.

  Laura scooted over on the bench and made room for Madonna, who plopped down. In a bigger place, the three of us were an unlikely trio—a brainiac science type, an English-psych major who cut hair, a sexy tri-racial bartender. We wouldn’t think of ourselves as friend material in a city. But on an island of under a thousand residents year-round, landscape is the common denominator.

  I glanced at Laura. I had thought this would be a private conversation about newspapers and police reports. “I told Madonna to come over.” Laura’s eyes apologized. I shrugged. Madonna shivered. She was loyal and intrepid. Magically, as always happened when Madonna was around, a guy showed up, this time a new young server guy in a pink polo who appeared out of nowhere and came over. Madonna asked for a pitcher of Coors, the only beer Laura wasn’t allergic to, and a platter of oysters. Laura filled Madonna in on the conversation. Perhaps Cooter was lying about a police report on Trina, I added.

  “Okay, what do you mean, was lying?” Laura said.

  “Okay, off the record, Laura, agreed?” I wanted to give her fair warning.

  “Huh?” Laura frowned. “Of course.” She shrugged. Madonna leaned in, amber eyes ablaze. We went quiet, leaned back as the waiter brought us three mugs and a translucent plastic pitcher. We poured a round while the young waiter hovered.

  “Hey, Madonna,” the guy grinned. Laura and I rolled our eyes. Men went gaga over our friend, who took it all in stride. She worked at the Hook Wreck Harbor down the street by the dock where all the action happened. She raked in more in tips as a bartender than Laura and I earned combined, even with our degrees.