by Les Goodrich
Dolph’s jaw dropped, “Holy shit! What did you do?”
“I told him that mom might not find out if he let us take the Aston to Key West. So here we are.”
“You should have asked him for the seaplane; we could be pulling into the marina by now.”
“I did but he said it’s being worked on.”
I can’t believe you anyway. I mean seriously Man. I know it’s your mom or whatever but that shit’s risky. Give the old man a break. Okay. Far be it from me to judge. And I do get it, but fuck with your dad like that and he’s playing rough with you from now on. I hope you know.
Dude I’m sick of his bullshit already. But no doubt you’re right about him playing hardball now. So do me a favor and try not to get us arrested down here. Rather not spend the week in Monroe County jail.
A vision of that building’s tree-lined sidewalk flashed through Dolph’s head. He thought of the time he and Colin were escorted up that sidewalk by a very unsympathetic deputy with a decided lack in sense of humor. Ironic, he thought, that a place could be somewhere so beautiful outside and be such a drag inside. Dolph remembered the night they were arrested. The charge was drunk and disorderly. At eleven thirty-six p.m. Saturday night in downtown Key West? Every person for twenty square miles was drunk and disorderly. What a crock. Of course Colin and Dolph had been the only drunk and disorderly people within that twenty square miles who had unshackled a horse-and-carriage horse and ridden it into the World Famous Sloppy Joes Bar. A photo of the performance hung strategically on a smoky back wall in a dim corner of the bar to give bartenders and certain patrons a laugh but to keep from giving any drunken tourists ideas of imitation. Dolph laughed to himself.
***
Mile markers flew past the car at the rate of one every forty seconds. They would be in Key Largo inside the hour and Dolph dreaded the tourist traps. He wondered how the keys he knew as a kid had changed so quickly. One year he and his family had come down to what was an unspoiled paradise. Tall coconut palms, wild bougainvillea, and thick mangrove covered every inch of the land not occupied by small family owned motel/marinas that popped up about once every three islands.
Now you couldn’t drive ten feet without passing a hotel, a t-shirt shop, or a fast food chain. Dolph considered the Key Deer. Any that were left were congregated in a few areas of Big Pine Key. Maybe a few here and there on one or two more islands. Even the fist-pounding hand-wringing environmentalists who fought so long and hard to help the poor, homeless endangered little deer did so from office buildings that sat on what used to be mangrove swamp and buttonwood hammocks. Dolph wondered if this would be good conversation. He decided for no real reason to not bring it up. They had been through that conversation before.
The car passed a Largo gift shop with an immense concrete conch shell perched upright in the parking lot. Dolph shook his head and looked over at Colin. Colin was miles away, on a tropical beach, with the Cuban toll booth attendant.
Chapter 3
Traffic thinned out on the section of US Highway One known as the Overseas Highway that strung the Florida Keys together like so many beads on a chain. Long stretches of road ran along narrow strips of crushed coral built up just enough to hold pavement above the ocean. The shimmering blue-black Aston glided swiftly across the Seven Mile Bridge (bright green water forever in every direction) skimming the line where the Atlantic Ocean blended with the Gulf of Mexico.
Colin slowed to a respectable speed as he crossed the bridge connecting Stock Island to Key West. He approached the red light at the northernmost end of the island, rolled through it turning right, and continued past the Holiday Inn. Fatigue mixed with boredom and pushed his right foot to the floor as he shifted into second gear entering the long left curve that ran along the water and lead into the cheap hotel and grocery store section. The right rear tire slid up onto the curb and sprayed coconut palms and seagrape shrubs with seventy mile per hour white limestone gravel.
The burst of speed and noise woke Dolph from a twenty minute sleep. He grabbed the dash with both hands as the dusty confusion of a fresh falling dream bolted instantly from his wide-open eyes. Before his eyes focused a blurry palm crown flew overhead and a far-reaching frond ripped across the back seat on its way over the trunk. The rear tire bounced back onto the road and, after a bit of left right lunge, the car straightened out and purred again. Colin had regained control of his father’s baby.
Dolph, his heartbeat shaky with adrenalin, spoke for the first time since Summerland.
“What the hell was that?”
“Relax. Just waking you up.”
“Oh yeah?” barked a still shaken Dolph. “We come all this way and you just have to push it at the very end. Stupid. Just like the time you drove across the fairway at Pinewood at six a.m. not a freaking mile from your house after we had been all the way to South Beach and back. Remember that?”
“Yeah, that grass was smooth.”
Dolph grabbed a handful of ice from the cooler threw it in Colin’s face. Colin punched him in the shoulder and lit it on fire. The car swerved. Colin grabbed the wheel in both hands again as Dolph ejected the CD from the radio. Bruce Springsteen was Colin’s favorite. Dolph had heard it from Ft. Lauderdale to Key West. His most sincere wicked grin met a frozen stare from Colin who looked, for a second, like a father confronting his daughter’s kidnapper. Dolph gave a quick smile and, without loosing eye contact, flipped the CD out of the car into the slipstream. Colin turned to look at the highway ahead. He shook his head. He was silent for exactly one minute and just as it felt that he would say nothing, “What a dick,” came involuntarily from his mouth. It was Dolph’s turn to laugh. He kept that laugh to himself as he did so many things.
At the First Street intersection, where tourists go straight, Colin took a right onto Palm Avenue: the back road that main-lined them into old town. Neither of them ever went into or out of Key West any other way. The bridge crossing Garrison Bight afforded a high arching view of the marina. They both sat up and looked down onto the sailboats. They had looked every trip since Spring Break of their second year in high school. The story of Colin’s dad wrecking his dad’s Buick station wagon into the bridge guardrail, when he and his college buddies spotted a girl sunbathing nude on a sailboat in the marina, had designated Key West as their Spring Break destination that year. They saw no naked girls in the marina on that first trip nor on any of the many trips since. They had seen and done plenty down there that made that old story seem tame but traditions die hard. So once again they drove over the Garrison Bight Bridge. Once again they looked. And once again they didn’t see a damn thing.
Colin turned right onto Grinell Street and left on Caroline. While Duval Street was the most famous, Caroline was Dolph’s favorite. It ran from the docks on the northeast end to Whitehead Street which was about as far southwest as they ever got.
“Four hours in this car and finally a road I want to be on,’ Dolph yawned. “I have never been bored on Caroline Street.”
The Aston rolled leisurely down the cobble and concrete paved lane. Crunching brick echoed among white picket fences. Old island houses built by ship carpenters and boasting gingerbread fretwork lined the street. Canopied tropical trees shaded native flowering plants and vines that sprung from every crevice and enclosed the road in a fragrant glowing green tunnel. A sleeping wino lay slowly dying on the sidewalk; he longed for his youth and days in the sun with laughing girls.
Colin too was run down from the drive.
“Smell the lime blossoms?” he asked as botanical perfume filled the car then slipped by.
“Plumeria” Dolph answered.
“Don’t tell me. I was born in Florida and I think I know lime blossom when I smell it.”
“Well you must not because that smell was from a big blooming plumeria back there. It was hanging over the street and dropping flowers as we drove under it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay. Turn back and we can find the lime tree that�
�s blooming. Maybe it’s a citrus grove. We could pick tangerines. Take some back to your mom.”
“Colin just steered on instinct through the winding streets to their hotel. Park this car and get a drink he thought. Dolph watched the decorated houses pass by and wondered how many hurricanes they had survived. The wino on Caroline Street was finally asleep; he dreamt of pirates and square-rigged ships.
Chapter 4
The lime blossom dispute was forgotten by the time they pulled up to the Pier House. They coasted a corner and Colin revved the Aston as it slid under the canvas sail and into the yellow shade it cast over the entrance to the finest hotel on the island.
“Here we are,” Colin said stepping from the car, “Key West!”
“The bottom rock,” Dolph replied and the two continued as they pulled bags from the trunk.
“The end of the line”
“Southernmost point.”
“The Conch Republic.”
“Ninety miles north of Havana.”
“Old Town.”
“Cayo Hueso,” Dolph said in Spanish with a quick Cuban accent. A soaking pause lingered before they repeated together with reverence, “Cayo Hueso,” and laughed.
Colin gave the valet a five and watched him park the car. Dolph tucked his kelly green golf shirt into his pale Palm Beach yellow Bermuda shorts. He knew it would be the last collared shirt he wore for a week but he figured to make a good impression through the hotel door while he was still relatively sober.
The hotel key was not a key, but a credit card with holes in it. Colin looked it over as they walked the paisley carpet to their room. “Bloody James Bond,” he said and pushed it into the door handle slot.
The room, lavish in a Keys kind of way, opened onto a central living area floored with Spanish tile and set nicely with comfortable furniture and everything was colored peach and aqua. Two bedrooms flanked the living room, a balcony overlooked a corner of the charter boat harbor and on the left wall a coralstone bar beckoned.
“I’m gonna move to Boynton’s Beach,” burst Colin in his worst Jersey accent, “and I’m gonna paint the whole goddamn house peach and aqua!” Critiquing Florida houses, their styles and those who lived in them had become one of Colin’s favorite pastimes. He and Dolph spent hours in the summers driving through the upscale neighborhoods of Lauderdale or Miami, drinking beer and appraising real estate. Getting into private gated communities was a sport they reveled in being experts at. Get your hands on the guard house phone number, then just call yourself in posing as a resident expecting a guest. Or once Dolph pulled two tennis rackets from his back seat, held them up for the guard at Oak Grove and, with an urgency, implored the guard to let him through to take Mr. Duncan’s rackets back to the pro shop but please please don’t call them or I will lose my job restringing for the club. He had read that Mr. R. J. Duncan was recently promoted to Head Tennis Pro in an issue of Ft. Lauderdale Magazine. Once he pulled that off, they could usually get right through with a raised racket and a wave to the guard. They could never crack Lost Tree Village however. One of these days. One of these days.
Dolph, being the son of one of the State’s most successful real estate investors, had developed an instinctive sense of the subject. Colin’s interest had been fueled by the fact that his father built or bought a new house at least every two years. Mr. Stone’s latest effort had produced a 28,000 square foot ocean-front tribute to smooth white stucco and glass. Colin also had a taste for the South Florida minimalist style. Anything boasting those new Florida colors that the transplants loved so much reminded him of how many people were moving to Florida every day—literally thousands every day. So Colin continued.
“They build a pastel house on Boynton’s Beach, put a Dole yellow Fleetwood in the driveway and think they’re natives.”
“You know tourists and snow birds bring tons of money into the economy here,” Dolph interjected. “If we didn’t have them we’d have to pay a state income tax.”
I say let’s pay a damn state income tax. Use the money to build a wall. We could refit the cannons at the fort. Castillo De San Marcos. Man we could hold ‘em off from there for years.
Dolph’s brow lifted at the idea and his thought strayed. He heard the cannon’s boom then the lightning fast click-click-click of a brass telescope opening as he brought it to his eye. Through it he watched the cannon ball strike a Cadillac grill and fold the car like a nine iron hitting a beer can.
A sunny wind in his hair, he breathed gunpowder smoke amid gunnery crew cheers and raised fists, high atop the coquina fort.
“They’d bloody well deserve it,” Colin said, as if he had shared the vision.
The exodus of retirees to Florida was a subject that the two used to vent frustration. Apart from the overall influx was the especially irritating subset who, by Colin’s and Dolph’s standards, thought they were rich. They tended to congregate in cities named with the suffix Beach. The retired men flooded the golf courses in plaid hats and khaki windbreakers when the temperature dropped below eighty-five and took six hours to play eighteen holes. They hit drivers on the par threes and rambled on about changes in the market since they left the textiles industry. The women, their gray hair ruthlessly dyed blonde and their skin un-heedfully tanned, descended upon the overpriced beach shops in their plastic visors and white-on-white tennis garb that showed way too much thigh above their ridiculous looking ankle socks with the little pink pom-poms on the heel. They double parked BMWs and continually griped about the prices and the heat and the radio stations and God forbid if it rained and the fact that stores up north stayed open until nine. And if any one thing could be said to have bothered Colin and Dolph the most it was when the transplants invoked the possessive apostrophe s to emphasize the fact that they lived on the beach side of town. Boynton’s Beach. Delray’s Beach. Vero’s Beach. The town was named Vero Beach regardless of which side of the intracoastal waterway you lived on and adding that s for the sake of being snooty always worked Colin’s last good nerve.
“Did you ever notice that no one ever says Palm’s Beach like that?” Colin said once.
It even sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? Palm’s Beach. You know why you never hear them try to pull that apostrophe s shit in Palm Beach? Because the people with houses in Palm Beach are actually fucking rich as hell and they don’t give a Hoover’s Dam if you know where they live or not! They don’t even know. You know who lives in those Palm Beach mansions? Maids. The people who own them have ten other houses and they’re not even sure where the one in Palm Beach is.
Once in a bar at home, after Colin told a lady he was from Florida, she went on to sarcastically ask him where he was from originally. Dolph had to drag Colin from the bar in a slur of drunken curses.
Dolph opened and dumped his duffel bag on the bed in his room. Out tumbled three pairs of faded and frayed khaki shorts, a pair of salt encrusted leather boat shoes and a half dozen white tee shirts. Dolph owned more white tee shirts than Fonzi. White shirts splashed with paintings of leaping sailfish, crawling lobster and advertising all manner of technical marine equipment. He pulled on a Moldcraft Trolling Lures shirt and a pair of the shorts. He stepped into the shoes and walked them on as he ambled to the AC thermostat. He flipped down the little door and clicked the fan lever to cool and blue-lined the slide lever somewhere around sixty degrees.
Colin did the same in his room and was cranking down the one in the main room when Dolph walked in. Dolph threw open the curtains and squinted across the boats below to the silver water beyond. A few people walked the docks under wheeling seagulls. Blinding sun and the sound of struggling air conditioners filled the room.
Colin sat on the sofa facing the balcony’s sliding glass doors and crossed his feet on the coffee table.
“What I gotta do to get a drink around here?” he asked in his best Jerry Reed voice, “Kidnap the Pope?”
Dolph pulled a bottle of rum from under the bar and called room service to send up a pitcher of orange jui
ce. It was two-thirty p.m. and they knew it would be a long night. Colin carried his fresh drink onto the patio, sat in the white strapped chair and put his feet on the rail. The first sip of his drink reminded him he had not eaten.
“Dolph!” he yelled over his shoulder. “Let’s clean up now so we can go eat before we go out.”
“Yep,” Dolph said stepping through the doors lighting a cigarette. “Conch sandwich and fritters at The Half Shell.”
“Hell yes,” Colin enthusiastically. But rather than move to take showers they stayed on the balcony and each had another drink. They were already on island time and now meant anytime between now and manana. Not being in a rush for anyone or any reason was something Colin loved about the keys. He had even locked his Rolex in the room safe and probably would not think about it again until he was halfway back to Lauderdale. Dolph had not always been as laid back as his friend. He used to get frustrated with the slow waiters or slack bartenders. He learned to adjust and was now quite at home on the unhurried salty island but he still wore his watch. They made drinks and said something about taking showers.
Chapter 5
Colin and Dolph spent three hours in The Half Shell Raw Bar: an open-air dockside restaurant that stood face to face with shrimp boats. They took their time getting there (stopping at the marina for Colin to pay for a fishing trip they chartered for Wednesday). They drank half an hour at the bar waiting for a table, starved half an hour at the table waiting for a waitress, ate the best food on the island for an hour, then spent another hour drinking pitchers of beer. “No hurries, no worries,” they must have said a dozen times.
They laughed at tourists who had stumbled into the wrong place for a five-minute cheeseburger. Some groups got up and left. A drunk husband shouted at a waitress. Entire families turned around like herded livestock in the crowded space between the hostess and front door. And proverbial sunburnt weekend warriors in Hawaiian flowerdy shirts shook their heads pushing starving kids back to the car telling them they were going to Burgertown.