Love and Death in the Sunshine State

by Cutter Wood

  The other inmates glory over the carnal hints in their own letters, but the things that delight Bill aren’t anything scandalous, just a strange turn of phrase or a word he doesn’t know and will have to look up. He likes the foreignness of her letters. She knows words he doesn’t, but he knows how to use them. When he’s read it through the final time, it is no longer the letter it was at the beginning. It has become something else entirely, a part of him almost, and he could point out with complete certainty—in his mind, he does point out—exactly where this or that word was on the page. With her phrases cluttering his thoughts, he smells the letter and folds it and puts it beneath his mattress and closes his eyes. But a moment later, he has drawn it out and is reading once more. He holds it up close to his eyes and sees the way she’s written his name.

  When Sabine finds one of Bill’s letters on the desk, she leaves it there, and at the end of the day, she puts it in her purse. She has nothing to hide, after all; she just wishes someone would realize it. She goes to the bank and the grocery store, the beach and the city council meeting, and all that time, the letter is waiting. She sees it sometimes, getting out her checkbook or the key to her car, and already there is the sense that she is bound on a sort of path. The letter could stay there at the bottom of her purse for days. More than once, she waits so long that another letter arrives before she’s opened the one previous. But finally, some morning when she knows she’ll have a few minutes to herself, she sits down at home with a cup of tea and reads.

  If her first letters are short and polite, his are long and full of questions. Written on state-issued paper, they feel greasy, like newsprint, on her fingers. Despite her calm, her thrill is the greater of the two, and though she doesn’t rush headlong through the reading, this is only because she pauses purposely between sentences to slow herself down. She enjoys his attention, the way his thoughts seem to run out onto the page unmediated, and she doesn’t want the pleasure of reading to drain away too quickly. When she finishes, she immediately writes a reply, addresses it, and affixes a stamp, and only then does she realize she’s forgotten to drink her tea.

  She mails the letter and drives home to have dinner with Tom, and it’s as if the knowledge that Bill is waiting for her reply has buffered her against the frustrations of everyday life. Rain, a flat tire, the lewd suggestions of an old man who stops to help her with the jack: What do these amount to in the face of another human being’s care? Tom cares about her, of course, but it’s not the same.

  For Bill’s part, the task of replying is always fraught. Days he carries one of her letters around with him everywhere he goes. He has become bashful about it and no longer shows it off. He has finally succeeded in leaving the letter behind, going down for a few minutes to the exercise yard or for his shift in the mess, but five minutes haven’t passed when he begins to wonder if it really was as sincere as he first believed. When his shift is done, he rushes back to his cell and pulls the stack of letters out from beneath the mattress. He reads the most recent one painstakingly now, word by word, and notices how certain passages have been oddly phrased, and he frets until lights-out. And for a long while after the room goes dark, he still is weighing how much she meant the things she said.

  In the morning, returned by a night of sleep to cautious confidence, he writes a careful reply, throws it away, then dashes off another and sends it without reading it.

  There is something holy in a friendship born like this in letters. The meditative mind-set so often absent from writing and from bodily love is heaped upon the letter. The mind traces every word as though it were the line of a cheek. There is the sense of being extrapolated from oneself, of sending one’s message by carrier pigeon across vast, dark, and lonely landscapes. We drift pleasantly into hyperbole and, describing the dull act of waking up, we are carried away into a lexicon made giddy with precision. It hardly matters what these letters say. Sabine might write about the rain, the dreary rain, as she lies alone in one of the motel rooms. Bill might write about that morning’s breakfast, or a dream he had, or a pair of inmates, both named Frankie. It doesn’t matter; that giddiness is all they hope to communicate.

  To her, he is earnest and enthusiastic. He could write for pages about his plans for the future and the obstacles he would easily overcome. As much as she smiles at his boyishness, his foolhardiness, she also finds it impossible not to be caught up in his galloping excitement. He is going to live by selling his art, by becoming a carpenter. He has read a book about cowboys and is heading west to rustle steer. The moment she puts the letter away with the others and goes out with a glass of wine to sit by the canal, she sees quite clearly the ridiculousness of his plans. She knows he is no cowboy, but still she sees him in a wide-brimmed hat.

  They fill their letters with questions. She asks him about the food in prison. He asks her about sea turtles. She asks whether his cellmate ever reads their letters. He asks if she would send him another twenty-five dollars. She asks how he will get out West. He asks what Germany was like. And these questions continue back and forth until finally he asks again if she’ll let him work at the motel on Saturdays. She will have to talk to Tom, she writes, and he probably won’t like the idea. In fact, she knows Tom will hate the idea of her bringing Bill Cumber to the motel, just as she knows she will do it anyway.

  She is surprised by the prison—a small building with a red roof—and by how easy it is to enter. She shows the guard her identification, and soon she’s in a windowless room, sitting with her legs crossed in a cold plastic chair. She doesn’t know what she’d expected, but not this. When he is led into the waiting room, she stands and smiles a little too purposefully, and seeing this, he can think of nothing to say except to remark what a beautiful morning it is.

  It is a beautiful morning. The sun is still low when they walk outside, and the heat is only beginning to paw at the edges of the day. Herds of clouds range across the blue sky with dignity and purpose, and as the two of them leave the prison behind, he is overwhelmed by the simple facts of the morning: a child running across a lawn with a doll and a spatula; the smell of bacon and bilge water; a pile of oranges in the shade on the roadside; a man at a deserted street corner, proclaiming the end of the world on a rumpled square of cardboard.

  She is older than he’d remembered. It hasn’t been so long—a year maybe—since he worked at the motel. He’d seen her a few times before the deputies arrived. He thought she had long blond hair, but now it’s cut to her shoulders and silver. Her hands are small and white, with short-clipped nails and smooth, thin scars along the fingers. From what? He pretends to look at a tanker out on the bay and examines her profile, silhouetted against the green blur of leaves outside her window. Her forehead is high; her nose, blunt. In her sunglasses, the road mercators out broadly, and behind them, her eyes, hidden in a pocket of shadow, look soft. He leans back and rests, and like the child who has fallen asleep on the drive home, he wants nothing more than for this ride to go on forever. When the car slows, and shells crunch beneath the tires, it takes him a few moments to remember he is looking at the motel.

  None of the guests are up yet, but Tom is sitting in the office, and the two men shake hands stiffly. Sabine leads Bill from one place to the next. Here are the cleaning supplies; here, the tools for sweeping, trimming, weeding. She ticks off a list of work to be done, and like that, she’s gone, and he is holding a broom.

  Amid the palms and pastel walls and the slapping water of the pool and the cries of aggrieved seagulls, he works as if consumed by a whole and private joy, a joy not simply in his speech, but in his arms and legs, as well. If he is hammering a part of the deck back into place, it’s certain that he’ll hammer a few other things—a loose piece of siding, a lounge chair—out of sheer magnanimity. He waters the plants as though offering a blessing, and when he’s cleaned the windows in a room, he spends a few minutes just staring out at the pool.

  At lunch, he takes a turkey sandwich down to the beach and eats it with his feet
in the surf. When a heron stalks up next to him, he says, “No way, buddy.” Two minutes later, he’s throwing her crusts. When there’s no sandwich left, he holds up his hands to show that it’s gone, but she knows better than to believe him. “Shoo,” he says, and she flaps her wings a little, not really flying, just making a show, and settles soundlessly out of arm’s reach.

  In the afternoon, a black-haired girl comes to sit behind the desk and hand customers their keys. And a woman appears in the hut by the pool to launder the sheets and towels from the night before. He doesn’t say anything to them, and they don’t say anything to him. Sabine is nowhere to be seen, but he keeps working as if she were standing over him with a stopwatch. His back aches; his knees are sore. Cleaning hair from the pool’s filter, he can’t wait for the work to be done, and he doesn’t even notice when she walks up beside him.

  “Time’s up,” she says, and he turns to find her smiling down at him with her purse over her shoulder. She goes and stands beside the car while he soaps his hands in the slop sink. He feels the irritable pride of work only begun, and holding his hands beneath the steaming water, he rinses them until they’re raw and red, and then pokes his head in the office to say goodbye to Tom.

  “It was OK?” Sabine says as he gets in the car.

  “I like the work.”

  There is a lightness to him when he returns to prison that day. “Next week?” he says, and when she nods, he saunters back into his cellblock.

  “You win the lottery?” says one of the guards.

  A few weekends at the motel are enough for Bill to understand the range of the clientele: a couple on their anniversary, a pair of suburban teens down from Indiana with fake New Jersey IDs, four stylish men from Scandinavia, an antiquarian bookseller, his glasses greased with fingerprints, waiting for a convention in Sarasota. By and large, the guests are there for only a night or a week, but out of their sex and disputations and lost room keys, a culture does flow. Bill only has to pause outside the guests’ windows to hear a man complaining to his wife about the hair in the sink; an Italian woman crying out just short of satisfaction; the hissing of two children over a plastic shovel; the scrape of pages turning in a book.

  When guests arrive, he leaves off what he’s doing, and heads to the office. The girl tells him the room number, and he picks up their bags.

  Tess is the girl’s name. She’s skinny, with an open hopeful face, and her aspirations aren’t a secret. Her mother likes nothing more than to talk to Tom and Sabine about how Tess wants to be in film, as though by saying it aloud she can make it untrue. Tess looks on her mother with pity, as she looks on most adults, whose lives—now that she’s begun to pay attention—seem mainly composed of doctor appointments, vegetables, and concerns about money. She is determined not to become like the sad couples who check into the motel with new suitcases and a sulking child, and each morning, before she leaves for work, she takes a Flintstones vitamin and a birth control pill. She isn’t haughty, as her mother said a few years ago; she simply refuses to be unhappy. She works as diligently as a person can who is waiting for her life to begin. She says little, does less, and passes the unbearable afternoons with crosswords, number games, anything to make it go a little more quickly.

  From this monotony, only Sabine offers some relief. Sabine doesn’t smile on her dismissively when she talks about her plans after high school. Sabine isn’t beholden to anyone. She does what she wants. And she once dated a movie star, though he was a German movie star. Tess has a passionate interest in movie stars, particularly in the deaths of starlets. If by twenty-seven she has not landed a role in a major motion picture, even only as a supporting actress, she plans to commit suicide, though even suicide, she has to admit, seems less fulfilling when one is not yet famous.

  She doesn’t even notice the man who’s started doing odd jobs around on Saturdays until Sabine tells her she’s brought a felon to work at the motel.

  “Am I crazy?” Sabine says.

  “What did he do wrong?” says Tess.

  “A few things,” Sabine says.

  Bill Cumber seems harmless to her. As far as she can tell, he’s perfectly content to sweep around the pool. In his blue jeans and tight white undershirts, he reminds her a little of pictures of James Dean from Rebel Without a Cause, which she should see.

  “Well, if you haven’t seen that,” Bill says to her, “then have you seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”

  “Is that James Dean, too?”

  “I don’t know what to say. You need to understand the quality of confinement . . .” Bill walks off with the suitcases, still talking to himself.

  Just as Tess’s dreams are of a life beyond Anna Maria, Britta’s dreams have led her to the island and to the little hut where she sits folding the laundry. She’s German, like Sabine, and she’s part of the shifting cast of expatriates at the motel. Two years ago she separated from her husband and came to Florida to forget him. She has not made much headway, but even trying feels like progress. Every morning, when the sun brightens her curtains, Britta wakes up in Germany. She hears the bus going around the traffic circle and sees outside her window, beyond the row of houses, a field of sunflowers, a low stone wall and a forest of spruces. It isn’t until the AC unit kicks on outside that the row houses fold up, the Wald flattens, and her husband’s car vanishes. She rolls over and looks out the window and between two large vacation homes, she can just make out a glittering patch of the Gulf.

  Britta has not made many friends on Anna Maria, but of the few, Sabine is the one who’s been most kind. Sabine found her an apartment, and it was Sabine, too, who hired her at the motel so she could stay in the country. She also took her to get her hair cut, dragged her along to parties, invited her on cruises, and one day showed up with two plastic tubs of scrapbooking supplies and a bottle of prosecco. Britta’s reward is that Sabine tells her everything and listens to everything she has to say. It is to Britta that Sabine confides the lack of love she feels for Tom, and it is from Sabine’s silence on the subject of Bill that Britta knows there is more than she is saying.

  Britta recognizes an insidious aspect of their friendship, as well. The pale-blue curtains through which the sun breaks each morning, these were picked out at Sabine’s insistence. The unused orange-juicer on the counter, it’s an exact replica of the one Sabine and Tom have at home. And the embroidered Mexican dress she wears as she sits by the pool, it was Sabine who told her she looked beautiful in it. It is not lost on Britta that, like the seagull with the broken wing or the cardboard box of kittens, she would be much less interesting to Sabine if she didn’t require mending.

  “Feel this.” Bill hands her a wrench he’s found in the workroom. “That sucker’s heavy, isn’t it? Now that’s a tool.” And he walks off, looking for things to tighten.

  He works hard, Britta can see, but he doesn’t have the faculties to occupy himself beyond his work. Any time there is a pause—when he must wait for a box of screws or a new battery—he smokes one cigarette after another, or goes out and disappears on the beach. Or he throws himself down into the chair beside her and launches into a story about a crocodile or the food at prison or a boy he once knew who was born with six fingers and six toes, pointing out the place on his hand where the scar was, and as he speaks, he twists a dirty rag into knots, or shreds a palm leaf until at last, having worked up a little havoc in himself, he springs from the chair and, still talking, goes out front to smoke another cigarette. He’s lost his train of thought by the time he returns, and now he wants to know what Sabine thinks of him, does she ever talk about him, what does she say?

  Only one building on the property is two stories. The second floor, reached by a set of wooden outdoor stairs, contains a large room with pink travertine tile, a California king bed up against one wall, and a bathtub with Jacuzzi jets. Sabine calls it the honeymoon suite. On the ground floor, beneath the suite, is a storeroom and workshop. On hot days, the air in this first-floor room is so thick you can har
dly breathe, but when the weather’s cool, Bill doesn’t mind hiding there awhile and resting his eyes. There’s a workbench covered in lug-wrench heads, bottles of dried-up wood glue, a rusted saw. A mattress with a terrific stain leans against one wall, and in front of it, a group of broken chairs sit in a circle as though to console themselves in one another’s company.

  Sabine has asked him to repair a number of the treads on the stairs to the suite, and he approaches the task with ceremony. The metallic snap of the measuring tape, and the bump of the pencil over the wood’s rough grain; the feeling of a piece of lumber in his hands, and the shuddering as the saw bites into the wood; the rhythm of the saw, its purposeful sliding back and forth, and how the board, which he has pinned beneath one knee, tries to wrest itself from under his weight; the sawdust dropping into a pile on the cement floor, and the lighter dust drifting up into the beveled sunshine; the furred edges of the wood along the cut, and the damp warmth that rises on his back: all these things carry a nearly religious weight for him, and when he touches the blade with his hand, he is surprised to remember that it’s hot.

  In this way, the stairs come slowly, piece by piece, a project scattered over a number of weeks. When he cuts one of the planks too short, he tells Sabine he will need to get more wood, and she is cross. She scolds him for his carelessness—it has not been the first time—and stands beside the stairs while he goes back to work. He loves this displeasure of hers, the half-stern look on her face as he sets to sanding, and so does she, he thinks. Already, she is incapable of being truly unhappy with him. They play their parts well, and when he sings “Sixteen Tons,” sawing with long dramatic strokes, he catches her smiling.