Cold Florida

by Phillip DePoy

  EIGHT

  So, as I walked out of the hospital on a mild day in February, I had to wonder why the Tribal Council of the Seminole Nation would be interested in a pregnant junkie and a donut cook. It made no sense. I continued to think that it made no sense all the way back to my office. So, when I walked through the main door, I must have had a look on my face that betrayed my quizzicality. I knew this because Sharon, the aforementioned boss, got a look at me and stood up behind her desk.

  ‘Foggy?’ she says. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘You look like you can’t remember your name, your suit’s torn, and you’re a mess. You ought to be at home in bed.’

  I lumbered into her office. It wasn’t that much different from mine, only in slightly better order. She had pictures on the walls: a sunset over the sea and a big turtle swimming under water. Sharon herself was forty or so, dressed in the only thing she ever wore: a smart charcoal gray woman’s suit, a starched white blouse, and expensive black flats. Her hair was up on top of her head a little like a bubbling fountain. God only knew what held it in place that way.

  ‘Well,’ I admitted, ‘I am a bit puzzled, since you asked.’

  I took a seat in one of the two ratty chairs opposite her desk.

  ‘What’s going on in that troubled brain?’ she wanted to know. ‘I hear from my sources that you had quite a night. You stabbed a kid in the throat, shot a drunk in the knee, ran ten blocks, passed out, and still managed to save the kid. Thank God nobody had any kryptonite.’

  I had long since stopped wondering how Sharon knew the things that Sharon knew. Her sources were, in my estimation, most likely from the nefarious underbelly of our little hamlet. The thing was, she always knew things, and she was always right. So I always told her everything, because I figured she’d find out anyway.

  ‘I have a few troubling questions on my mind,’ I said, as I bit my upper lip.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as: A: Why did three teenaged hooligans menace me at Pete’s? B: Why did Lou Yahola pickle me with Seconal? And most of all C: Why did the Seminole Tribal Council abscond with the very wounded Lou Yahola and, even more surprisingly, a recently pregnant Lynette Baker?’

  She leaned back in her chair. It creaked like a haunted house. ‘That’s a mouthful.’

  ‘And I just hit the high points. Why did Maggie Redhawk want me to leave it all alone? Why was young Lynette Baker so anxious to get out of the hospital once she had her baby? I mean, the tyke was barely conscious and Lynette was still messed up. It had to be against whatever better judgment she had left. I mean, what is she so scared of that leaving the hospital in her condition, with a very sick newborn, seemed like the best idea?’

  ‘You mistake her for someone in her right mind,’ Sharon suggested. ‘She’s a junkie. She just wanted dope.’

  ‘That’s what I thought at first, but now maybe I think she was scared. Scared out of her wits.’

  ‘You could smell it, I guess.’ Sharon knew me. She sighed very dramatically before she said to me, ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘I mean to find out what’s going on,’ I answered, leaning forward to stand up. ‘Don’t you think? On the clock?’

  ‘Well,’ she told me, looking straight into my eyes, ‘that seems to be who we are. You really ought to go home and forget about this and go to bed. But you have to do what you have to do, so do it.’

  ‘Thanks, Sharon,’ I said, and I meant it.

  I was up and out the door before she could change her mind.

  I headed back over to the hospital first, but I knew I had to be careful what I did there. Something bad was up with Maggie, so I had to play the whole thing a little carefully.

  I did my best to saunter into the emergency room. It didn’t take. The second Maggie saw me, her face clouded up.

  ‘Foggy,’ she began, really irritated. ‘Didn’t I just get rid of you?’

  ‘What? I want to talk to the kid who jumped me last night at Pete’s. The one with the fork wound in his neck. I just want to make sure he’s OK.’

  ‘You just want to make sure he’s OK,’ she repeated, only with the sarcasm dialed way up.

  ‘I got a conscience,’ I told her.

  She didn’t seem to believe me.

  ‘I assume that the kid is here,’ I stood my ground, ‘and not off hiding in the swamp with Lou and Lynette.’

  ‘He’s here.’ Her face was made of granite. ‘Fat didn’t mention that you were the one who jabbed the moron, though.’

  I raised my hand. ‘That was me.’

  ‘He said the kids was in a fight, and he broke it up,’ she sneered. ‘You guys should really get your story together, just in case the local constabulary wants to know.’

  ‘They’ve been here?’ I asked as casually as I could manage to. ‘The cops?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Deputy Rodney and that other idiot.’ She let that sink in before she said, ‘But they’re gone now.’

  I tried not to let out my breath too loud. I was, in general, wary of law enforcement in any form.

  ‘So can I see the kid with the bad neck?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I see the baby that I saved last night, at least?’

  ‘What do you want to do that for, seriously?’ she had to know.

  ‘I saved a baby, for God’s sake,’ I snapped back. ‘How often does a guy like me do that?’

  ‘I guess,’ she allowed, begrudgingly.

  ‘Look, you said earlier,’ I told her, attempting to get on her good side, ‘that the little guy’s got problems.’

  ‘Little girl, but yes,’ she told me.

  ‘Little girl,’ I acknowledged. ‘So, what problems?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, a little more seriously, ‘like a lot of these girls who use heroin when they’re pregnant, Lynette had a premature rupture of the membranes.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ I admitted.

  ‘The bag of water that holds the fetus broke too soon,’ she said flatly.

  ‘There’s a bag of water that holds the fetus?’ I repeated, because I didn’t quite believe it.

  ‘Yes, dumbass.’

  ‘First you call me an igmo, then you call me a dumbass,’ I said, ‘but this is the first time I have ever heard about a bag of water around a baby. How did the little guy breathe?’

  ‘Little girl,’ she insisted.

  ‘Did I have a bag of water when I was a baby?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was very impatient with me by this point in the conversation.

  ‘So how did I breathe, I’m asking.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ she told me. ‘You had water in your lungs. You got oxygen from your mother – assuming you had one.’

  ‘So you’re saying that I was, like, a fish before I was born?’ I asked her. ‘I had water in my lungs?’

  ‘You weren’t like a fish, but you lived in water for nine months,’ she said.

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘It’s the miracle of life,’ she said, more irritated than ever. ‘Do you want to see the teenager you stabbed in the neck or not?’

  And that was the point of my sojourn into the miracle of life. It was a diversionary tactic to get her riled so that she would want to get rid of me, and also in order that she wouldn’t think I was too interested in anything about Lynette Baker. But it was, nonetheless, an interesting diversion.

  ‘OK,’ I answered. ‘If you say so, I’ll look at the troubled teen.’

  She hiked her thumb in a sort of obscene way, pointing down the hall. ‘He’s in room A-Eleven.’

  ‘A-Eleven,’ I repeated.

  She softened. ‘And then, if you want, you can go on down the hall – that’s where the neonatal care is.’

  I smiled, I nodded, and I was off.

  The hallway smelled like rotten meat and hairspray. I tried not to think about what that would mean.

  I veered gently into Room
A-11, and there was the kid with the bandage on his neck, sleeping.

  I stood at the foot of his bed and looked at him for a second. Asleep, he looked like he was about ten years old.

  I kicked the leg of his metal bed really hard, and he woke up. He saw me and tried to sit up. Sitting up hurt, so he went back down.

  ‘What?’ But that was all he could say, and it barely sounded human.

  ‘You jumped me last night,’ I said softly, ‘and all I want to know is why.’

  He closed his eyes.

  I kicked the bed again, only even harder than before.

  He jumped, and his eyes flew open wide.

  ‘You get to be in this nice clean hospital bed thanks to me,’ I explained to him, ‘while the rest of your little youth gang languishes in jail. So, you’re welcome.’

  He tried to talk again, but he just couldn’t.

  ‘You see that you’re really messed up,’ I continued, ‘whereas I am not only in the pink, but also not going to jail later on. So you realize that you’re in trouble and I’m not. Next you realize that I can do almost anything to you and get away with it. So you can save yourself some real pain by just telling me why you and the Hardy Boys menaced me last night. Just a quick couple of sentences, and I’m gone, like a ghost. Right?’

  He took a moment to think. I could see that he was unaccustomed to the process. But in the end, self-preservation triumphed. He reached for a pad and pencil that someone had placed on the nightstand beside his bed. He scribbled, then set the pad down on his chest and closed his eyes, like the entire effort was too much for him.

  I stepped around the side of the bed and glanced down at the pad. It said, ‘Jody called. Told us to hurt you.’

  I nudged his arm. He moaned and opened his eyes again.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  He struggled for the pad, and then wrote another couple of words.

  The words were, ‘For dope.’

  ‘No,’ I said very patiently, ‘not what was your payment. Why did she want you to do it?’

  He wrote, ‘Protect Lynette.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘Water,’ he wrote, and he tried to write more, but a shadow in the doorway of his room seemed to stop him.

  I turned around, and there was Maggie Redhawk, chart in hand, smiling a smile that I wouldn’t wish on the last cop who arrested me.

  ‘I figured out what you did,’ she said. ‘It took me a second, but I got it.’

  ‘Got what?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘You put a trick whammy on me. You distracted me, and I let you come see this menace to society.’

  ‘I just wanted to see was he getting the proper care and feeding,’ I said.

  ‘Uh huh. So, see?’ she said, trying to be casual. ‘He’s fine.’

  I turned to the kid. ‘You’re fine?’

  He closed his eyes.

  ‘He’s not going to be able to speak properly for a while,’ Maggie continued, fussing into the room, adjusting things like sheets and pillows and the bottle of fluid that went into the kid’s arm. ‘And when he gets out of here, he’s going to jail.’

  ‘Fat is a fairly unforgiving sort,’ I said, sympathetically. ‘It’s really best not to start anything in his place.’

  The kid never opened his eyes, and I thought maybe he was asleep.

  ‘So,’ I said to Maggie. ‘Can I see the baby now? The baby whose life I saved?’

  She shook her head like she was fed up with me, but she motioned for me to follow her.

  Down another creepy hall where one of the florescent tubes was out, I could feel the anxiety as clearly as I could hear the padding of Maggie’s hospital shoes. I couldn’t tell if it was coming from her or the general air of the hospital. Then it occurred to me that a place can hold on to the things that happen in it. Not exactly like a haunted house, more like an echo. Just because you can’t hear the echo any more doesn’t mean that the molecules of every sob or sigh or wince of pain don’t hang around in a hospital hall, bouncing back and forth off the grungy paint and the scuffed-up floors. This, I thought, was the anxiety I was sensing. With a capital A.

  I turned a corner, however, and got a whole new level of horror. I saw big windows along one side of the new hallway, and behind those windows I saw tiny little babies, all of them hooked up to machines like something out of a science fiction movie. It really got to me. There were five infant creatures, all of them looking like elf remnants. The lighting was low, and the place was quiet as a crypt. I had kind of expected at least one of the things to be crying.

  ‘They all look like some sort of horrible experiment,’ I mumbled to Maggie.

  ‘It’s a little like hell, yes.’

  ‘These little muffins,’ I said, trying to whisper, ‘are they all – what? Premature? Sick? Junkie babies?’

  ‘All sorts of weird problems,’ she told me. ‘One of them was born with omphalocele.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Born with a lot of the organs on the outside of the body,’ she said.

  ‘What the hell?’ My voice was a little louder than it should have been. ‘Organs on the outside? Like, what organs?’

  ‘Intestines, liver, spleen, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Why the hell would you tell me something like that?’ I stared in at the babies. ‘How am I supposed to sleep tonight?’

  ‘You asked.’

  I stood still for a second, but my mind was roaring around like a rocket.

  ‘I admit it,’ I told her. ‘This gives me no small amount of trouble in my mind.’

  ‘What I do,’ Maggie said, a little sweeter than before, ‘is try to think about one thing at a time. If I think about all the awful crap I got to do just today, I could go nuts. So, for instance, right this second I’m showing a guy the neonatal care unit.’

  I took quite a deep breath.

  ‘So, which one is my kid?’ I asked her.

  She looked for a second and said, ‘See the one with the red bandana close to her head? That’s her.’

  I saw the one she meant.

  ‘Where did she get the bandana?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know for sure,’ Maggie said stiffly, ‘but it looks like the one Lynette Baker had around her wrist at some point.’

  ‘So, wait, does that mean Lynette saw the kid since I brought it back here?’

  ‘No. It’s probably something she left with Lou Yahola,’ she suggested, ‘and it was just in the bundle you scooped up, right?’

  I didn’t answer.

  NINE

  I left the hospital wondering why Jody the drug dealer would care so much about Lynette? Enough that she’d call down hooligans to rain on my parade? And that was just one of my questions. They were beginning to pile up.

  Here are the questions, in chronological order, as they affected me: First, why did Lynette abscond from the hospital with a sickly newborn? Second, why did Jody send me to Pete’s Billiard Emporium to be menaced by teenagers? Third, why did Lou Yahola dose me with Seconal? Fourth, why did the Seminole Tribal Council want Lynette and Lou? Fifth, why did Maggie Redhawk care so much about getting the baby and then care not at all about anything else? In fact, sixth, why did she advise me to leave off in general?

  The sun was still high in the sky and doing its best to warm up the sidewalk, but the cold wind off the ocean was putting up quite a fight. I shivered a little, but maybe, I considered, I was hungry again. When I didn’t sleep, I got hungry like crazy.

  Now in Fry’s Bay, the real place to eat, for my money, was Yudda’s Crab Palace.

  Yudda’s was only a five-minute walk from the hospital. You just had to head toward the docks and, before you knew it, you could smell the barbecue, fresh fish, and salt water.

  I liked Yudda because he had an eclectic palate. He had a tuna wrapped in wet seaweed, dredged in flour, then dipped in egg, and finally covered with white cornmeal. He deep fried this and called it, right on the menu, ‘Southern Fried Sushi.’ And while I belie
ve that this insulted both of the cultures it evoked, it was also delicious beyond compare. Especially with the honey mustard and soy dipping sauce. But Yudda was always trying something new. The grilled zucchini in deviled crab was a disaster. The golden skate wing stuffed with grits was delectable. It was about fifty-fifty on the culinary front, which was fine by me as long as you knew which fifty to eat and which to leave alone.

  This particular day was a Thursday, and Thursday was always monkfish. Now, if the monkfish was fresh, it was better than lobster, but if it was old it was worse than garbage.

  I always steered clear of the monkfish.

  Within minutes I was in Yudda’s place, these various food items still on my mind. The slant of sunlight through the diner window gave the whole place a kind of cathedral-like ambience, even thought it was only the size of a railroad car. There were five booths, five tables, and five seats at a kind of bar. Everything was wood that Yudda had salvaged a long time ago from God-knows-where. The smell inside was like you were in the middle of an old barbecue oven. The ceiling was only the underside of the ancient rusted tin roof.

  The great man himself was standing at the door, a cup filled with Brunswick stew in one hand, and a thermos of martinis in the other. Beside him was Myrna, his sometimes girlfriend, sipping from a paper cup.

  Now, Yudda did not have a liquor license but, if you brought your own into his place, he wasn’t going to stop you from drinking it.

  ‘Jesus, Foggy,’ Yudda said to me as I took a seat at the first booth beside the door. ‘You’re supposed to be dead.’

  I took this very well, I thought. I said, ‘You see, news travels fast when it is both bad and wrong. I’m not dead.’

  ‘OK.’ Yudda lumbered over. ‘But somebody told me that you got poisoned by Lou Yahola, and then he shot you. They said you died in the street, and now Lou is dead or hiding out in the swamp.’

  ‘Who told you this?’ I asked. ‘I find this amusing. In fact, I did get poisoned, but I shot Lou, not the other way around. He’s not dead either, by the way. But we both had a rough night.’

  Myrna wiped her hands on the dirty yellow apron she was wearing and leaned forward on the counter.