“Hush up.” Jacques’s and Paul’s eyes stayed on each other. Then Paul looked at the water. “We will.”
Jacques nodded. Bahy held on to Paul’s arm, darting her eyes between them.
Emania swayed with the water a few feet behind. She pointed to the beach and said, “Look!”
Jacques distinguished a man driving an ATV and scanning the water a few feet offshore with a spotlight. They all dropped to their knees, so that the waves frequently covered their backs or knocked them over. Then they heard the sound of a helicopter, but didn’t see anything.
“Maybe they are looking for us,” Paul said.
Jacques stared at the ATV. He wanted to swim to the beach right then, to get it over with before the sun came. Everybody would see them on the sandbar during the day, the lifeguard, the helicopter, the beachgoers. But the ATV wouldn’t leave. The driver finally parked next to a small dark structure on stilts fifty yards down the shore. He would see Jacques cross the beach no problem now, and might have a radio in there. Jacques supposed he could swim, then crawl across the beach. Or even run—they can’t catch him with a radio. The water looked dark and wild. He was scared of it. He stayed on the sandbar. They all fought the waves in silence, each trying to figure out their circumstances.
Bahy began protesting again and Paul moved her slowly through the crashing waves to the other side of the sandbar to talk things out, which frustrated Jacques. He wasn’t sure he wanted to wait for them, but he couldn’t leave while they were away. It would be rude. He cursed once, then remembered Emania was close. She held her crossed arms against her stomach and Jacques knew she must still feel sick.
“Can you swim?” he asked her.
“I think so.”
“You’d better know. You might drown.”
She was offended. “I can make it. Can you?”
“Yes, but I can’t carry you.”
She was silent. Then she said, “You don’t have to carry me. You don’t have to do anything for me.” She glanced at the beach and rung out a portion of her T-shirt.
Jacques looked at the water. “Your mother can’t swim. Your parents might have to call for help.”
“She’s not my mother. They are friends of mine.”
Jacques didn’t respond. He was curious, but didn’t want to waste time
“I am going to swim no matter what they do,” she said, then looked at Jacques. “And if I can’t make it, you will carry me on your back like a boat.” She smiled. Then she seemed o shrug off her nausea and Jacques couldn’t get her to stop talking.
She told Jacques that she was the citizen of no country; her parents had emigrated from Haiti to Marsh Harbour, Bahamas before she was born, and then conceived her there. She was not a Haitian citizen, in fact had never been to Haiti, and was refused Bahamian citizenship because her parents were Haitians. She had lived her whole life with her mother and father in a one-room plywood shelter in a crowded ghetto west of Marsh Harbour called Pigeon Pea, until eight months earlier when her parents had died from cholera within a week of each other.
Emania told Jacques that over the seventeen years her father was in the Bahamas, he had worked as a gardener for a large vacation estate, and after nine years had saved enough money to get all three of them to the U.S., but was swindled by smugglers who left him with nothing. He found out later that the three men who cheated him were brothers who never even owned a boat, and who used the money to travel to Las Vegas in the U.S. Her father started over and began saving again, but became paranoid. He kept all their savings in their shelter and wouldn’t let his wife and Emania have any friends, scared if anyone found out about the money they would be killed for it. He kept the savings in a steel padlocked box buried three feet deep in the ground beneath the ant-infested carpet, and would dig it up and rebury it every Friday when he was paid. To save money on dinner, he often collected shellfish from the shallow reef on the vacation estate’s property for himself and Emania’s mother, though Emania refused to eat them. For her, he would buy ramen noodle packages at the convenience store on the way home from the estate and she would boil them and eat separately. It was those shellfish that gave her father cholera, and he died before he could again make enough for all three to be smuggled, refusing to pay even a dollar for simple medical treatments that would have saved him, and with his haggard last words told Emania and her mother not to pay for a funeral.
Afterward, there was enough money for Emania and her mother to hire smugglers, but her mother had become paranoid too without her husband and was afraid to approach a smuggler. She fell sick to cholera (spread either from the shellfish or her husband’s vomit) and died before she could arrange anything. The bodies were taken and disposed of by the Bahamian government, and Emania was cleared of having the disease. They wanted to burn her shelter, along with others nearby, but her neighbors had gathered into a mob that wouldn’t let the police near. The Bahamians compromised and posted a sign at the entrance to the settlement warning of cholera. No one else there ever caught it.
Then she was alone and had seven thousand dollars, but was too scared to let anyone know. She kept it buried like her father had, and for eight months would occasionally dig it up in the middle of the night and take only small amounts for ramen noodles and wedding-planning magazines. She spent her nights praying like she had with her mother. During the day, she looked in the magazines at cakes, dresses, flowers, and planned for her day; she was to be married within the rose bush—bordered vineyards of the Ledson Winery in Sonoma Valley on a cloudless day—the groom (as of now, a nameless man who better behave himself) arriving on horseback and situating himself under the arch. Then Emania would appear from the winery’s castle, striding elegantly to his side, escorted by no one. She had the dress narrowed down to six choices and was going to wait to try them on before a decision, but most likely it would be the Alvina Valenta style #AV3159, the pink one with the side slit and deep cowl back.
“The Avrils said they would find me work somewhere,” she told Jacques. “They would help me find a place too. They were able to transfer the rest of my money to Bahy’s cousin in the United States.”
“You don’t know anybody else here?”
“No, do you?”
“No.”
“We should stay together then,” Emania said. She looked at Jacques firmly, then pulled herself to him so that they held each other. Their faces were close enough that Jacques saw her white eyes through the darkness, saw how desperate she was for someone, anyone, to know and to know her. He saw hope in her eyes too; she could see the Unites States now, it wasn’t a myth, and she had a man by her side. He knew she thought the Lord was answering her, affirming she had been right to faithfully wait in solitude. He wanted to pull her close and press her head against his chest and tell her she was right. He wanted to give her a place and a life where she belonged, and could afford the dress. But he couldn’t give that. He had been enduring for a long time too, and now it was the only thing he knew how to do; instinct wouldn’t let him give, no matter how much he wanted to. He wasn’t there yet.
The Avrils were arguing when they drew closer. Bahy still claimed she could swim, but in their twenty years of marriage Paul had never seen her do so.
“It is dumb, Bahy, to drown just because you do not want to go back to Haiti,” Paul said.
“I can swim.”
“Then swim now. Let’s see you swim.”
“Where am I going to swim? If I swim, it’s going to be to the beach.” She sounded angry, but Jacques could see she was crying. Paul took Jacques aside and gave him the contact information card for Bahy’s cousin in Weston. It was wet, but still intact, and Jacques put it in his back pocket.
“Let him know we did not make it,” Paul said. “Please.”
Before the top of the sun could glimpse over the water, Jacques and Emania began the swim together, and to Jacques’s disillusion, were followed by the Avrils.
Once Paul and Bahy jumped into the depths from
where they could stand, Bahy had begun swatting the water in hysteria while Paul treaded at her side, trying to calm her and keep her afloat in the current. They both became exhausted, and Paul used all of his remaining energy to hold her in his arms. Bahy responded by halting her frenzy to hold him. She held him so tight that it forced all his air out, but he didn’t let go. They sank until they were standing on the sand and coral, and in the darkness she gave him a quick peck on the lips while the surface heaved only four feet above. Their bodies were found still together two days later by a fisherman about a mile north, so bloated that they at first looked like the body of a single strange sea creature being carried in by the tide.
Jacques reached the beach first and ran to the shadows beside a hotel to wait for Emania, and to put on the tennis shoes he had wrapped around his neck for the swim. Five minutes passed and she didn’t show. He leaned his face as close to the shadow’s edge as he dared and squinted, but couldn’t see past the unlit beach to the water. The sound of squeaking wheels echoed off the wall, and he ducked behind a large shrub against the building in time to avoid a cleaning woman pushing her cart. The woman’s cell phone rang and she stopped the cart on the concrete path in front of him to spend valuable minutes scolding what must have been her child or husband.
After she moved on, Jacques came out from behind the shrub and saw Emania face down in the sand about thirty feet up the beach, toward the small building on stilts. He began to move in her direction through the knee-high grass along a low fence marking the upper border of the beach, then saw the headlight of the ATV turn on and heard the engine fire. Within seconds, the machine was roaring and bouncing at full speed toward her. Jacques stepped into the darker shadows, then leaned against the hotel building behind him. As he watched, he beat his palms against the concrete until his wrists hurt.
At last he decided there was nothing he could do. He cut through the hotel property and ran west as fast as he could—only stopping while crossing the deserted width of A1A to snatch off his sloshing tennis shoes and throw them into a cluster of shrubs beside a bank. He crossed a canal bridge and found cover in the semidarkness of a strip mall parking lot where the bridge reached the mainland, then keeled over and vomited.
After heaving a few minutes, he walked behind the strip mall and found a faucet on the building in the alley. He drank until he was full, and then washed his face to flush the sea salt taste that was migrating to his mouth from his face and hair. A light wind funneled through the alley and chilled his body under the wet clothes. Part of the sun appeared and poured through the hotels and across the canal. Jacques looked to the direction of the beach.
He tried to conjure the image Emania must have glimpsed as she struggled against the waves with her throbbing lungs and tight heart, choking on saltwater and tears: the silhouette of Jacques reaching land, then springing from all fours and running across the beach in panic. Then the hardness of the dry, dark beach after she had crawled from the waves and waited in exhaustion for Jacques to reappear and take her numb arm into his grip. She had told him she could make it, and she had. She had done her part, and now he was to come forth and carry her on his back, not like a boat then, but like a car or that ATV, all the way to Sonoma Valley. But she did not feel his grip, and not trusting her sense of touch, kept her eyes open slightly to see if she was being carried or dragged. And when she heard the ATV fire up, she must have realized he was truly gone, that he had already begun in America, perhaps had already made his fortune and was happily married. And again she was alone, and so this time gave up. Her face showed no indication, nor did she make a sound—she merely tucked her arms under her head like a pillow and fell asleep, oblivious to the dry sand pasted to the wet on her lips.
Jacques couldn’t know what happened after she was found; that she was given a bed in a clean hospital where she slept and was hydrated. That she was questioned days later and admitted to the officials that the middle-aged couple found drowned had been on the sandbar with her, but no one else. That she was transferred to Krome Detention Center outside Miami to be incarcerated for over a year and raped twice before being repatriated to Haiti, where she had never been and knew no one. He couldn’t have known all this, but still he dropped his gaze to the tangle of shadows on the concrete behind the strip mall, and began crying.
The ink had bled on the contact card Paul had given him, but the penmanship was still clear. He had seven American dollar bills, folded together and pasty. He washed his face one more time under the faucet, then shook the drops from his fingers and began to walk.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
KEVIN ALLEN has been a newspaper reporter, and is currently completing his MFA degree at Florida International University, where he also teaches. He is the fiction editor of Gulf Stream magazine and has lived in Florida since 1982.
PRESTON ALLEN, recipient of the State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, has authored the thriller Hoochie Mama, as well as the Sonja H. Stone Prize—winning collection Churchboys and Other Sinners. He teaches English and creative writing in Miami, where he is presently at work on the Hoochie Mama sequel, While Infants Wailed.
LYNNE BARRETT, recipient of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, is the author of The Secret Names of Women and The Land of Go. Her stories have been anthologized in A Dixie Christmas, Mondo Barbie, and Simply the Best Mysteries. She is coeditor of the anthologies Birth: A Literary Companion and The James M. Cain Cookbook, Guide to Home Singing, Physical Fitness and Animals (Especially Cats).
DAVID BEATY graduated from Columbia College and received his MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. His story “Ghosts” appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2000.
JOHN BOND has written articles and books about poker, real estate, travel, and scuba, and is coauthor of 2005’s Cooke’s Rules of Real Poker. He is a freelance writer, attorney, scuba instructor, boat captain, adjunct professor, realtor, poker playe and raconteur, living in Dania Beach, Florida with his wife Jeannie and their two Shi Tzus.
TOM CORCORAN is the author of five Alex Rutledge mysteries set in the Keys and South Florida. His most recent novel is Air Dance Iguana.
JOHN DUFRESNE is the author of three novels, two story collections, and a book on writing fiction. His most recent collection is Johnny Too Bad.
ANTHONY DALE GAGLIANO is a personal trainer and part-time English teacher who lives on Miami Beach. He is the author of the novel Straits of Fortune
CAROLINA GARCIA-AGUILERA is the author of eight books, the first six of which are in a series featuring Lupe Solano, a Cuban-American private investigator who lives and works in Miami. Garcia-Aguilera, who is a private investigator herself, has been the recipient of many awards, including the Shamus and the Flamingo.
JAMES W. HALL is the author of fourteen novels, including his most recent, Magic City
VICKI HENDRICKS is the author of the noir novels Miami Purity, Iguana Love, Voluntary Madness, and Sky Blues, as well as many short stories. She lives in Hollywood, Florida, and teaches writing at Broward Community College. Her latest novel of murder and obsession is Cruel Poetry
CHRISTINE KLING is the author of the suspense series featuring tugboat captain Seychelle Sullivan. She lives aboard her thirty-three-foot sailboat in Fort Lauderdale.
PAUL LEVINE is the author of Solomon vs. Lord, The Deep Blue Alibi, and the Jake Lassiter series. He is a former trial lawyer and winner of the John D. MacDonald Fiction Award.
BARBARA PARKER, best known for her Suspicion of… series set in Miami, left her legal practice to become a writer. With an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University, she has written twelve novels. Parker lives near the beach in Lauderdale by the Sea.
LES STANDIFORD is the author of ten novels, including the John Deal series, and two works of nonfiction, including Meet You in Hell He wrote a chapter of Naked Came the Manatee, and edited The Putt at the End of the World, a collective novel of golf.
GEORGE TUCKER grew up in t
he Ozarks of Arkansas, where he hunted for arrowheads in creek beds and cow fields. He received his MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. He is currently at work on his second novel.
JEFFREY WEHR lives and works in South Florida. He is currently working on his first novel.
Also available from the Akashic Books Noir Series
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Brand new stories by: George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, James Grady, Kenji Jasper, Jim Beane, Ruben Castaneda, Robert Wisdom, James Patton, Norman Kelley, Jennifer Howard, Jim Fusilli, Richard Currey, Lester Irby, Quintin Peterson, Robert Andrews, and David Slater.
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Miami Noir Page 30