Red Tide

by Jeff Lindsay

  Anna stared at me. First with anger, then scorn, then a kind of puzzled concern. And as I slowly folded to the ground to sit helpless on the curb, she stood over me, looking down, then looking around for help, then folding her arms and just standing over me.

  And just as I thought I might be able to breathe again, she said, “And so when you can’t win argument you try for sympathy to kill your self with coughter.”

  It almost killed me. I think I laughed for several minutes, choking and fighting for breath.

  Anna watched me. She stood with a face like one of those Greek statues, towering above me as I crouched helpless below her. And after a few more moments she snickered. Then she made the same kind of snorting sound I had made. It caught her by surprise. She laughed. And pretty soon there were two of us rolling on the pavement choking with laughter.

  And just when we began to get it under control, catch our breath a little, an elderly gentlemen in a white suit walked by, trailed by an attentive elderly Filipino. White Suit stopped and stared at us with a look of the most complete disapproval I have ever seen.

  That set us off again, and as we rolled together, howling with laughter, the Filipino took White Suit by the elbow and led him away, turning once to glare at us.

  It was several hours and seven uncontrollable fits of laughter later that we ended up on the end of the long wooden dock at the end of Duval Street. When you laugh that long and that hard with somebody it gives you a feeling that you’ve known them a long time, and we were struggling to figure out what to do about this new-old friendship.

  A kind of funny tact came over us. Neither one of us wanted to say anything that would break the illusion. So we leaned on the rail side by side, talking of things that didn’t matter, listening for what was behind them.

  She liked dogs. But she found it impossible to turn down a cat. She thought there was nothing on American TV that wasn’t bad for you, except wrestling. She loved wrestling, because for her it was like a great theatre where Good battled Evil and myths were worked out.

  She had also become passionate about American peanut butter, but she thought of it as a dessert item.

  Pretty soon I became aware that the bars were closing all around us and the loud music had been silent for a while. And suddenly we were in the middle of that awkward moment that comes at the end of an evening when you know it has to end but you don’t want it to and the way it’s going to end hasn’t been worked out yet.

  As I walked her home it still wasn’t worked out. She lived in Old Town, in an alley off Eaton, in a guest cottage attached to one of the big old houses. She shared it with two Polish women who worked as maids at one of the hotels.

  “Thank you for most interesting evening,” she said in her wonderful accent, standing at the door of the small green house.

  “Maybe we could have another one some time,” I said.

  She looked at me for a very long time and I found myself moving closer a little at a time. Just before my face touched her she said, “Perhaps,” very softly, and slid away into her house.

  I watched the outside of the door for a while, but it didn’t tell me anything, so I walked home.

  Chapter Ten

  The last time I’d been to a demonstration I’d been in uniform, standing in front of the Iranian consulate in L.A. I’d been to a couple more before that, all of them as a cop. So Nicky’s little get-together was a brand new experience for me.

  I don’t mind the idea of standing in the street and waving a sign while you chant cute rhymes, but I’d always looked on it as either work or a kind of spectator sport.

  So it still isn’t clear to me how I ended up in front of the Key West Court House carrying a sign that said GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR WHITE MASSES and shouting, “Haitians Are Humans.” The shouting part was sort of halfhearted on my part; in fact, really only when Anna was looking.

  I say it wasn’t clear how I ended up there, but of course it was. I was there because I thought Anna would be there. No matter how stupid I felt doing it, the thought of seeing her again made stupid seem like a good idea.

  Of course I had a lot to tell myself on the subject. I still wasn’t over Nancy. And getting interested in someone else so soon was shallow, not like me, the mark of a butt-head.

  But no matter what I told myself, I managed to work it around to where I should just go take a look at her and prove it to myself that I wasn’t really all that interested in her. And I somehow even made that justify going to Nicky’s demonstration.

  And when I got there and she saw me and her face lit up, I would have gone into a snake pit to protest venom.

  Bad news. I was shallow.

  And so for the next couple of hours I stood around watching her profile and trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. I didn’t come up with anything, and anyway I was distracted thinking about what was so right with her.

  At the climax of the rally, Nicky stood in front of the nearly fifteen people and gave a speech. He said that he wasn’t born here, and he knew some of them weren’t born here, and that was part of what made the country such a great place. He managed to imply that it had been a pretty smart thing for the U.S. to let in somebody like him, so they should listen up when he said Haitians should be allowed to enter the country.

  Everybody yelled and waved their signs. I saw a couple of people taking pictures, but since one of them was holding a little girl by the hand and the other was in the middle of a cluster of Japanese tourists, I figured the only media exposure Nicky was going to get was going to be in a slide show in Osaka.

  The most you could say we accomplished with all that marching in circles was that I decided Anna’s profile was not actually perfect: her chin was just a little too strong. Realizing that made me feel a lot better, like I could be objective now. Thinking in a really objective way, I decided I preferred strong chins.

  When we broke up I walked Anna down to Mallory Square and watched her evening show. She got a good crowd. I kept an eye on the bucket she used to collect money. I stood beside a fat guy, from New Jersey by his accent, who thought he was funny enough to compete with Anna’s act. I convinced him he was wrong without disturbing her, and his finger probably wasn’t actually broken.

  Afterwards we walked again. I bought her a piece of fish at a restaurant and we walked some more. We ended up outside her door again at around midnight. She was gone inside before I could even think about going beyond her smile.

  The pattern held for the next few days. I got to know the outside of Anna’s door really well. And I thought I was getting to know her, too, from our long talks, but it’s easy to be wrong about that.

  I am only a human being. I try to be better than average at it, but there are parts of the job that are bigger than all of us. When two human beings of different genders spend a lot of time together and want to spend more time together, a certain question comes up. In this case, as far as I was concerned, the only question was, “How soon?”

  I appreciated the fact that Anna came from a different culture. I respected her right to make a decision, whatever it might be. And if she didn’t make it soon I was going to pop a seam.

  After a few more nights when nothing changed, I walked Anna home after her show. She seemed moody, withdrawn and tense. When we got to her door, she turned where she usually said good night and stared at me for a long moment. Then she launched herself at me. Her lips were all over my face and her hands fluttered all over me. Her breath came hard and fast and it took me a few fast heartbeats to realize that it wasn’t passion.

  I tried to step back, disengage, but she clung to me with a furious strength, pressing her cold face into the hollow of my neck and shoulder.

  “Anna?” I said. She pushed her body against me tighter. “Hey, Anna?” She made a muffled sound that might have been anything. “Damn it, Anna!” I got my arms free and grabbed her in a bear hug, pinning her arms to her side.

  She didn’t struggle. Her body got very stiff,
and seemed to increase in weight until she was as heavy as me. Then she went limp, and as I held her the light from a streetlight showed a line of tears down her face.

  “Anna, for God’s sake—” I started.

  “They are saying me I must sex you or you go away,” she said.

  “What?”

  “They are saying me, big handsome man who does not like boys, this is most rare in Key West and I must not let you go. And I do not want to let you go. So I must sex you.”

  “What the—Who said—?”

  “And I am thinking only of the soldiers when I am thinking of this, I am not ready yet to sex and they are saying I must be ready, in America is quicker for ready. And with you I want to try again—I must try again—But I can think only of the soldiers—” And she collapsed into wracking, gut-wrenching crying.

  It took me a few minutes. First I had to wait for Anna to pull herself together. She was not a person who could be jollied or gentled. The strength I had seen in her carried over to her emotions, which couldn’t be persuaded by anyone or anything. They had to run their course.

  When Anna was back in control she told me that her roommates—who had been in this country much longer than she had, more than a year now—had explained to her all about dating in America. They told her that a woman must sex the man or he would think she was a bad person. I guess they watched a lot of soap operas while they made the beds. Or maybe I’d just dated the wrong women.

  And so Anna had tried. She had come to like me very much and did not want me to think she was a bad person. She did not want me to stop being with her. So she had tried to sex me. But all she could think was what happened at home when the soldiers came.

  We sat there on the front step of her small bungalow and she told me things that didn’t seem possible if you heard them under the moon in Key West, with the small evening breeze pulling at her fine blond hair.

  It was a pretty simple story and Anna told it simply. The sobbing stopped and her voice froze over as she told me. There was no emotion in her for this.

  She had been raped. Her family had been killed. The soldiers had left her for dead, too. She had lived, buried the bodies, made her way slowly to the West. Come to Key West by a sort of drifting motion that brings so many people down here.

  I couldn’t think of a whole lot to say. I kept one arm around her, making small circles on her back with my hand. I don’t think she noticed.

  When she finished telling me, Anna sat stiffly, not looking at anything. So did I.

  “So,” she said after a while.

  “Anna,” I said.

  “I like you, Billy, very much. I would like to do love with you. But I am thinking of doing this and I can think only of the soldiers.”

  “It takes time, Anna. I understand that.”

  “But how are you now feeling about the soldiers?”

  “I want to kill them.”

  “You do not think me a trash?”

  “For God’s sake, Anna.”

  She nodded. “Yes. But my friends are saying me, if I say to you what happened you are no longer wanting to be with me. Because I have been so much raped and you will no longer want to sex me.”

  I kept an arm around Anna. I didn’t know what else to do. “I’d be happy to sex you,” I said. “But only when you want to.”

  She would not look at me. “This is not true, this is just talk. Men have the pressure to build up and they must sex often. I will lose you.”

  I hadn’t tried that line since high school and it hadn’t worked then. Maybe I should have gone to high school in Ukraine.

  “Listen,” I said, “Men have the pressure build up, yes. But a man can control it. I’ll wait until you’re ready. You won’t lose me.”

  Now she looked up at me. She combed my face for a sign that I was lying. I didn’t think I was, and after a minute I guess she didn’t think so either.

  “We will see,” she said at last.

  “Yes,” I told her. “We will.”

  Chapter Eleven

  We did see. Over the next week I saw Anna every night, and every night I said goodnight to her outside her door. It was easy. All it took was a strong will, the memory of her story, and an ice cold shower every fifteen minutes.

  I guess it could have gone on like that for the rest of that awful August and no one would have noticed that anything was wrong. But nature doesn’t work that way. Wherever things are locked into existing one way, there’s something chewing at the corner of the picture, trying to change it. And the change is almost never for the good.

  Nicky came to my place on a Friday afternoon as I was stepping out of my third cold shower of the day and into a pair of shorts.

  “Well, mate,” he said. “I guess you’ve seen it.”

  I pulled on a shirt. “Seen what?”

  He threw a copy of the morning paper at my head and I snatched it out of the air. “Page seven,” he said.

  I folded the paper open to page seven and found, halfway down, a headline that had been circled in red ink.

  BODIES FOUND. I looked up at Nicky.

  “Read the story, Billy,” he said. “Read it.”

  It wasn’t much of a story. Just a couple of paragraphs saying that on two different occasions, the Coast Guard had brought in three bodies. Some fishing boats had found them in the Gulf Stream off the lower Keys. All three were thought to be Haitian nationals.

  I looked up at Nicky. “Haitian nationals,” he said significantly.

  I threw the paper back at him. “Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry for the Haitian nationals. I wish these three weren’t dead. But it happens a lot, Nicky. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  He pulled out one of those charts of the Keys they give to tourists and opened it in front of my face. “This does,” he said. “Look here. We found our man on a Thursday, right here.” He pointed to where he had written in a big red one on the chart. “Right here, on a Friday, off Marathon, the next two. And here, right close to number one, a Thursday again.”

  He jammed his elbow into my ribs. “Eh? Well?”

  “Well what?”

  He blinked at me as if he couldn’t believe anybody was so slow. “It’s a schedule, Billy. Somebody is keeping an exact schedule, killing these people by the clock.” He pointed to one and three on the chart. “Thursday, Thursday. And Marathon is one day’s sail North.”

  I shook my head. “Nicky—”

  “There’s more, mate. All four of ’em had empty pockets, no ID, no money, nothing. Highly unusual, mate, you said so yourself.”

  “You’ve been hassling the cops again.”

  He looked indignant. “’Course I have. They’re not doing bloody fuck-all about this. ’Course I’m hassling the bloody cops.”

  Nicky hadn’t said a word about Haitians or murder for a week and I had been dumb enough to think it meant he had let the whole thing slip away into his New Age Conspiracy network. But he had obviously been spending the time building his case instead.

  “Why?”

  He blinked. “Eh?”

  “Why hassle the cops? Why hassle me?”

  He looked at me with real pity. “Somebody’s gettin’ away with wholesale murder. Isn’t that the sort of thing we’re all supposed to try and stop?”

  “There’s no evidence of murder.”

  “There’s four dead bodies, mate. All found in the Stream, all with empty pockets. And if they’ve found four, how many you reckon they’ve missed, eh?”

  “That doesn’t prove—”

  “Prove is a word for lawyers. We’re not lawyers. Just simple human fuckin’ beings. Just like the ones turning up dead. Get your fuckin’ head out of the sand, mate.”

  And he was away out the door, madder than I could remember seeing him before.

  It wasn’t right to say I didn’t know what had gotten into him. I did; I just hadn’t known it had gotten that far into him,

  And anyway, what the hell was I supposed to do about it? Even if he was righ
t—even if some cold-blooded maniac, for whatever reason, was killing Haitians and dumping them in the Gulf Stream—what did Nicky think I could do to stop it?

  I knew he had a warped picture of me as a sleepy, sun-dazed killer. Nicky saw me as a kind of human alligator, dozing until lashed up by the smell of meat. He had an almost supernatural confidence in my ability to handle anything physical.

  But this was far beyond anything he had ever expected from me before. Find a hypothetical killer working on a hypothetical ship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean—this wasn’t even a job for Superman. He would politely decline and ask for a little more evidence first. Because damn it, the world didn’t work that way.

  Besides, I had come to Key West to retire. The only thing I wanted to find was fish.

  I explained all that to Anna that evening. I laid it all out for her, almost word for word, telling her exactly what had happened and trying to tell it in a light, funny way. It was hard to get her to smile, but it was worth it and I was hoping she would try it when she heard of Nicky’s innocence.

  We were sitting at a small table overlooking the water. It was Friday night, after all, and I was celebrating. Spending money I didn’t really have on an unclear relationship to celebrate the end of a week in which I had done no real work; Friday night in America.

  I had pulled out all the stops and taken Anna over to Louie’s Back Yard, one of the classiest restaurants in the Keys. Anna had been so impressed she had even had half of a glass of white wine.

  But a slow flush was climbing up her neck and onto her face. I trickled to a stop.

  “Why is this funny?” she said slowly.

  “It’s not funny,” I said. “Nicky’s funny.”

  “He is having very high opinion of you, of what you can do.”

  “He is wrong.”

  She looked at me for just a moment, then pushed back her chair. “Yes,” she said. “I think so, too.” And before I could do more than drop my jaw she got up and walked out of the restaurant.