Clutching at Straws

by J. L. Abramo

  The day after he’d signed the plea agreement his mother died.

  And although he’d blamed the assistant prosecutor at the time, he’d decided later that he was as much at fault as anyone. He’d petitioned the court to go to the funeral—his father had been dead for years—but the judge denied him because, he said, a man such as Dixon Sweeney, who knows about boats and knows too many people and traffics in human misery, can’t be trusted.

  Alvin Scopher got a promotion for his diligent efforts at enforcing the law, while Sweeney went off to get an education at Gladiator State.

  Yes, Dixon Sweeney was a cracker all right, a native Floridian, a dying breed put on this earth to serve the people of the “New South.” And now he had a record—a personal history that set him even further apart. He hoped like hell he wouldn’t be forced to wash dishes, mow lawns, or dig ditches for a living.

  That would really suck.

  2

  Two hours later the bus stopped in Pahokee, a hamlet along the banks of Lake Okeechobee. Sweeney had a half hour to kill so he took a little stroll. He fished around in his box, dug out a prison-issued, brown bag lunch and stepped off the bus. The sky was still clear, the sun was still hot, the seersucker still clinging. Yet for the first time in all those years there wasn’t a twenty-foot stone wall to contemplate or razor wire to navigate. This would be his first walk as a free man. A new day was dawning for Dixon.

  He’d been to Pahokee once with his dad when he was a kid. There was a fishing legend there by the name of Hodie Grubbs who’d made the best split-bamboo fly fishing rods in Florida, and Sweeney’s father wanted one in the worst way. Pahokee back then was a quaint little town with one filling station, a sprinkling of greasy spoons, and a single traffic light. Sweeney could see the place had grown but not much; there still wasn’t a Starbucks or McDonald’s to spoil the ambiance. And sure enough, the old Wylie-Baxley funeral home was still there on the corner across from the bus station. He never forgot their slogan: “You Better Bereave It!” He’d often wondered over the years if the undertaker was Japanese.

  A block from the station Sweeney found himself on a cracked sidewalk that fronted huge gabled houses shaded by hundred-year-old oaks. So far so good. Nothing had changed. He smiled as he turned the corner into the neighborhood.

  The world’s still the same. Thank God for—

  “Get ’er, Bingo!” squealed a morbidly obese lady in a flowered housedress. Her legs were swollen blue logs and she was hovering over two Chihuahuas fucking on one of the sagging porches, filming the furry little porn stars with her iPhone. “Move it, little buddy, we’re goin’ viral!” she said to the little jackhammer. His eyes were bugged, his tongue wagging.

  Well. Maybe some things have changed…

  Sweeney turned away. Across the street, a trio of bare-chested, Middle Eastern street toughs in baggy jeans were popping ollies and power slides on their new-fangled skateboards. He was just about to wave to the lads when they regarded him in his seersucker outfit and laughed. One called him a “straight up faggot.” Another called him a “dick-sucking, butt-packing, felching Mo.”

  A veritable fountain of eloquence, that one. He could be president!

  Sweeney walked on, the spring in his step was waning. He pulled his tuna sandwich from a Ziploc and took a bite. It crunched. Celery? He took another bite. Another crunch. Sweeney knew there was nothing like prison food to dull the senses but he didn’t recall eating crunchy tuna fish at Raiford. He peeled back the bread and saw the three giant half-dead cockroaches nestled into the fishy goo and promptly threw up in his mouth. He gagged again and spat his vomitus onto the sidewalk then wiped his mouth and looked into the paper sack where he discovered a note under the semi-rotten orange that came with the sandwich.

  “FUCK U,” it said, signed by Dimmit Hardin in childish scrawl.

  The “C” was backwards. Of course.

  He dropped the sandwich and the bag in the gutter.

  “Litterbug!”

  Sweeney wheeled. A large Jamaican lady in a pink spandex jumpsuit was steaming out the door of a tumbledown, concrete-block shithole wagging a finger, brow furrowed. Sweeney was transfixed. At first he thought she was wearing a forward facing fanny pack. Then he realized what he was witnessing was the most spectacular camel toe he’d ever seen, hanging below a navel indentation the size of a pie plate.

  “No-o-o, mon, dis ain’t soom fukkin’ Babylon ghetto, no! You gather dat shit, motherfucker! Where you t’ink you is, you fukkin’ whitehead?”

  He snatched up his brown bag and deposited it in a nearby trashcan. Then backed away—eyes still on the Jamaican lady, gag reflex in overdrive—and straightaway stepped in a mountain of fresh dog shit.

  Wow. It had been years since he’d done that. He’d forgotten what that felt like. After all, there were no dogs in prison. He’d also forgotten the smell. Until now. And immediately began hacking and gagging again, by now almost running back to the bus depot, where just as he was stepping onto the bus, he managed to befoul the sole of the other shoe with a gigantic wad of bubble gum.

  When Dixon got back on the Greyhound after a trip to the men’s room, he thought, I’m free. I’m a free man now. That’s all that matters.

  Then he said it aloud. “I’m free.”

  ***

  The sun was going down when the bus reached Yeehaw Junction. He didn’t get off the bus this time. He didn’t want to risk it. And there was too much noise and neon lights. Huge trucks were parked in rows that spoiled the air with mirage-making exhaust. Big men sat or stood at dirty picnic tables eating fried gizzards and wiping their hands on their pants, talking about trucking.

  They were talking about women, too. Because across the highway there was a strip joint with a sign that read: 12 BEAUTIFUL GIRLS! 23 BEAUTIFUL LEGS!

  He cocked his head and wondered if one of the girls was an amputee, or maybe they had a double amp and a lady with three legs. Or maybe someone couldn’t add.

  He closed his eyes and tried not to think about it.

  ***

  In a town called Corkscrew, Dixon bought a box of saltwater taffy. He climbed back aboard the bus just in front of a family that smelled like fish. Every one—the four boys, the father, even the mother—all smelling like clams.

  Dixon recognized the aroma. He knew it well. They were a family of clammers, folks who lived in a trailer somewhere by the Intracoastal Waterway and raked clams off the mud bottom, selling them by the bushel and scraping out an existence.

  Sweeney hadn’t smelled a real clam in a long time. But if you’re a cracker, you don’t forget. He liked the seaweed stench and the salt tang. He smiled. Then the mother smiled back at him and sat in the seat in front of the latrine with her husband, while the children piled up in a tumble of clam-smelling clothing that took up the next row. Sweeney passed out some of the taffy to the kids. They acted like they didn’t know he’d just come from prison. They seemed to think he was normal. The father made them say “thank you,” and the guy sounded like he had marbles in his mouth because of the Red Man, but he made his kids behave, which Sweeney thought was cool.

  The bus trundled south. Everyone seemed happy as, well, clams. They didn’t know about Sweeney. Somehow he’d fooled them. Maybe the world had other things to think about after all.

  ***

  Corkscrew was a clam-smelling town and a saltwater-taffy-with-a-thank-you town. Lauderdale and Miami and Homestead were nothing—blurry images in the night. At dawn the bus stopped sixty miles south on US 1, the Overseas Highway. Dixon claimed his box and his taffy from the overhead rack and got off. He surveyed the surroundings amid a swirling vortex of dust in front of a sign that read “Welcome to the Florida Keys.” The Greyhound pulled away, while thunder pealed and the heavens crackled and rent the air with the smell of ozone and rain. Then the sky fell and thick drops tumbled down in angled sheets of white.

  As my dad used to say, timing is everything.

  “Timing is everything,” he s
aid aloud.

  3

  But Dixon Sweeney wasn’t about to be discouraged. In fact, he started dancing.

  He moonwalked and he shouted and he threw his box of taffy high in the air. And even when the rain turned his black prison brogans into slapping seal feet, and even when all that water whipped the sandy berm into mush, he didn’t let up. He’d been gone so long, damn near a decade, and he missed his home and his wife and he jumped up and around like an idiot, in the rain, in the mud, in the dumb seersucker suit that was given to him as a prison guard joke. And he missed his wife, and his people and his house, and his wife…

  The rain shut down like a faucet, which made Sweeney stop, dizzy with exertion.

  He blinked. Across the street there was a brace of palm trees and a sandy trail. Beyond, through a cluster of sea oats, there was a glimpse of blue.

  He started running, kicking off his shoes, ducking under his string tie, yanking away his coat, ripping through his pajama-top shirt, tossing everything aside. He began hopping on one foot at the water’s edge, finally falling and rolling as the double-pleated seersucker pants split over his toes and his underwear disintegrated. He ran headlong into the sea, naked as a jaybird, babbling incoherently about his true love, his baby, the love of his life, a presence since he was born that had been denied too long—the sea.

  When he was sent away, he knew he would miss a lot of things. He would miss pizza and pancakes and popcorn and the taste and feel of his woman. Yet he denied there would be any real damage. After all, he was still relatively young, not ugly, a Florida man with a Florida tan and a good chin. He was tall, with blue eyes and plenty of wavy yellow hair. He would come back strong, he thought. He would forget about his losses, become himself again and regain those long years of stagnation.

  But he never counted on the big loss. The real loss. The eight-year death knell that made him cry inside and ache with longing. He never understood about his connection with the salt and the sea and the currents that could take a man and pull at him and mold him and float him away.

  He’d been raised on the ocean. He’d first met the Gulf Stream when he was only a year old. He’d fallen off his father’s lobster boat into Hawk Channel when he was two. By the time he was eight he was running his own skiff, pulling his own traps. And when he graduated from high school, he didn’t get a wad of cash or a trip to Disneyworld or a car. He got a brand new Evinrude. He was an ocean guy.

  And the ocean absolutely did not suck.

  So he stood buck naked in the ocean, looking at his white toes in the gin clear water, eyes welling with tears.

  What a baby, he thought. But hey, this is my ocean.

  “My ocean,” he said.

  Then he said it again, louder. And he dove in and splashed and rolled like a sea otter. He stuck his hands in the sand of the bottom and luxuriated in the taste and the smell and the feel of all he had missed for all those years. The sun was out, the sky was blue, there was only one cloud he could find—a little puffy number—and everything was going to be put right. He knew it. Before him a school of jacks ripped through the water. Welcome home, Sweeney. Off to his left a breaching dolphin went airborne. Nice to see you again, Sweeney. Away to his right a flock of roseate spoonbills picked at the tide line for goodies. Long time, no see, my man. All he had to do now was take advantage of his opportunities and recover his attitude, reclaim his piece of the pie.

  His mother once told him, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” One thing was certain, though—he was a free man.

  And from here on out things were gonna be different.

  Click here to learn more about Gitmo by Shawn Corridan and Gary Waid.

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