Bonefish didn’t consider himself part of civilization. Bonefish considered himself smart. He didn’t only run over to the rock grotto, harboring the life-size linen cloaked statue of Mary Immaculate in the shadows of the Catholic church’s two towering metal-roofed steeples, to pray for his survival from the Devil’s trades when the weather was fixin to be boisterous. No. Bonefish prayed every day of the year at the grotto. Bonefish was a man of simple faith. The hare could outrun the hound if the hare didn’t stop to shit in the woods. Each day Bonefish got down on his knees, clapped his hands together in prayerful salute and raised them high to the Immaculate Virgin. Bonefish was a thankful man. Bonefish had more than his own day-to-day survival to be thankful for, he had friends and family. What a family. Bonefish considered the island his family, his special domain, his rock of everyday hope upon which he banked his faith for humanity. Bonefish was an old saltwater Conch, born and bred to the island long before the time of the lethal yellow blight killing off the coconut palms, before the walls of condominiums threatened to block a man’s rightful view of the broad blue sea beyond, and the ships upon it, passing with one-quarter of all the world’s mercantile freight, from Florida oranges to Arab oil to Latin American tin and cocaine. Bonefish was a saltwater Conch, and as such an optimist who cashed the check of his trust in people everyday. Which meant he carried on a tradition of dropping round to chat with folks in order to move along the important concerns of human commerce, such as whose cat just had kittens, whose dog had died, whose grown grandchildren no longer called on them, and this after near raisin those kids one’s self. Bonefish was always to be seen walking along the shaded side of the street, stopping to call out a greeting, or lean against a white picket fence, peering over at someone who happened to be outside fetchin the newspaper or waterin the bougainvillea, and droppin the just for your information news that Y’s wife was meetin a sailor stationed across the Cow Key Channel bridge at Boca Chica Naval Station every afternoon at the Overseas Fruit Market, or R’s son, the one who never graduated high school, but drove a fast shiny car with Miami plates and had three Cuban girlfriends that he loaded up with diamond watches and gold chains, was busted the night before south of Torch Ramrod Channel runnin a two-million-dollar boatload of marijuana onto a coral jut instead of into safe harbor. At sixty-two years of age Bonefish had his common senses, his knack for listenin an tellin, and his bony straight body, which earned him in a town of nicknames a very early and obvious one. What Bonefish didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing, what was worth knowing he was bound to find out. One thing he did know was last night someone bound a goat by its hind legs, slashed its throat and hung its lifeless body from a rope tied to a high rafter inside that crazy ol bat tower out on Sugarloaf Key. What Bonefish didn’t know was why.
Sacrificial goats and mosquito-eating bats were the least concerns churning round in Bonefish’s brain. Hurricane coming was much closer and realer, right round the corner of the Gulf, lurking and looming, not leaving Bonefish much time. Bonefish had lots of stuff to get rid of, didn’t want to get caught with it, let someone else tote it off this ol rock, not his job. His job was to figure the future and tell its truth, its truth was disaster over the thin blue horizon. Bonefish had to get himself flashlights and batteries, canned goods and bottled water, get rid of all the other stuff that could go flying round to bop him over the head in two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. Bonefish was staying put when the Big One blew, wasn’t going to get caught on the Seven Mile Bridge with lots of panicked rats in cars loaded with dumb stuff like television sets, toasters and family photos. Bonefish saw clear the true fact of life, the Florida Keys are the most likeliest part of America to get knocked by a hurricane from each and every side. The truth looming even larger was in the Keys there was no high ground, there was no ground at all to speak of, nothing that would peak above a storm surge of seawater once Finito delivered his knockout punch.
Bonefish was in one big hurry, almost running down the street, going through the churning in his head looking for something he might have left out or forgotten altogether. Spam. Got to get lots of cans of Spam. Air-condishner, there was one item he forgot to unload. Got to get that ice-breathing monster out of the bedroom window and out of the house. He turned the corner in front of the Shrimp Docks and headed directly into Diver Dave’s Diner with his urgent message.
“Anybody need an air-condishner? Got a brand-new one! Just bout year old!”
Everyone was always glad to see Bonefish. Their faces lit up like bright beams of the flashlights Bonefish intended to buy to light up the dark world after El Finito roared through. When Bonefish entered the diner door it was open season to talk about anyone one knew. It wasn’t like talking behind people’s backs, it was like talking in front of them, because Bonefish himself was a social institution needing tending and respect. Bonefish wasn’t simply a pillar of the society, he was the torch of grapevine gossip, which in its time-honored way was to be passed from buche shop to buche shop, café to diner to restaurant, stoop to porch to veranda. In the old days the moment a person turned the corner onto one of the island’s crowded streets word reached folks at the opposite end who it was that was headed their way.
“How much you want for it?” Marilyn at the end of the counter on the last stool let her spoon drop into a bowl of conch chowder and spun around on the vinyl swivel seat. “My trailer’s real hot. Could use a breeze.” Every day Marilyn was at the counter right at noontime eating with the workingmen. Sometimes the diner was crowded with Shrimpers fresh from the boat in their mucky white rubber boots. Other times the diner was filled with Charter Boat captains moaning in their beer that the wind was up, making the sea too busy for weak stomached tourists to venture out on. Very often there were also a few of Marilyn’s old Cuban friends playing dominoes at the corner table beneath the big window facing high-hulled shrimp boats docked in deep water on the far side of a weed-covered field. A rusting radio relay tower from World War I rose in the center of the field, its crisscrossed steel platform legs capped at the top by a man-size cage. Tense young soldiers once guarded for saboteurs from the lofty aerie, now empty as an abandoned eagle’s nest. Marilyn’s first husband once manned this tower, or one like it, she couldn’t remember, since many towers still stood on the island, decades beyond meaningful use, dilapidated monuments to past paranoia and a dubious future. The towers loomed as talismans from a not so primitive, but confused society. Island people are by tradition the most superstitious. Marilyn was an island woman. “Could use me a cool breeze, a cold beer and a hot sailor. Could use me that, brother.”
“Don’t have the hot sailor. Got the cool breeze.” Bonefish squeezed onto the stool next to Marilyn. He was in a big hurry, hurricane was comin, but now there was some important business to unfold, new things to be learned and passed. Hurricane could wait a few minutes.
“Here’s couple a beers for you two.” Diver Dave popped the tops of two cans and banged them on the counter, their contents rushing with a foaming spurt at the fresh openings. Diver Dave popped a can for himself, worked his big lips over the entire top and sucked the can empty easily as a thimble full of tea. He tipped back on his heels to announce his pleasure with a loud barrel-burst burp of approval.
“Asshole!” the Amazon parrot perched on Dave’s right shoulder scolded.
“Up yours, Amigo!” Dave shouted back.
“Up yours,” echoed the parrot.
Dave loved his parrot. Some people said Amigo was never off Dave’s shoulder, day or night, certainly the powdery dry white river of parrot poop permanently trailing off the sleeve of Dave’s beer-stained T-shirt made that idea one of fact more than rumor. Some people even claimed Amigo was on Dave’s shoulder whenever Dave had the pleasure of female company in his bed. Certainly Amigo’s cocky attitude on Dave’s shoulder, his cavalier eye and unerring raucous two-toned whistle aimed at all good-looking women, made this seem more believable than not. Amigo never whistled at Marilyn, although she was not without
her own peculiar attractiveness. A sturdily constructed woman in her late fifties, Marilyn kept her hair dyed a girlish light brown, styled in a dated but carefree hint of a bob. She was a woman who loved the sort of outdoor activities mostly reserved for men. Marilyn had spent a large part of her youth toiling in a Key West pineapple cannery. She worked not as a canner, but as a dockhand, unloading ripe tonnage of spiny-hulled fruit barged over from Cuba. Marilyn worked through the middle section of her life on shrimp boats, normally the exclusive domain of men. She did not spend that time slaving over kerosene stoves in hot galleys, or frolicking beneath sheets of narrow berths, while far below pink crustaceans had their migratory underwater path from the Dry Tortugas intercepted by miles of dragging nets. She toiled topside in the dreck and dross of slippery decks alongside the men as a net hauler. Marilyn displayed the fleshy tanned muscles of a healthy laborer, attractive in a handsome sort of way for her time, handsome still. Except Amigo didn’t think so, never whistled at her. Sometimes, when Marilyn thought she looked particularly attractive, and even wore a pair of new jeans, she would wait for Amigo’s whistle of approval. Marilyn never got it. She never hesitated to let Amigo know what she thought about his insulting lack of taste. “Fuck you,” Marilyn would shout her disapproval at the parrot. “Fuck you,” Amigo would mock, then roll his green head and whistle mightily, as if Marilyn had a ravishing sister in the back room of the diner no one else could conjure except him with his jungle-piercing eyes.
“Now don’t go and start a fight with Marilyn, Amigo,” Dave cooed to the ever-vigilant bird as he popped another can of beer open. Amigo ignored the advice, craning his neck and screwing up one beady eye as he surveyed Marilyn, a fowl judge at a beauty pageant whose studied opinion was not to be summarily dismissed.
“That bird don’t deserve no attention. He ain’t no movie star.” Marilyn sullenly slurped her soup while keeping a defiant gaze fixed on the parrot. She knew exactly how to get at the short hairs of Dave. Her slurping grew more pronounced as her defiant gaze melted into a smug grin of triumph.
Bonefish could see what was coming and tried to turn the tide of conversation, banging his empty beer can down as if it was the metal period at the close of a chapter, and he was turning the page. “Okay, Marilyn, you get the condishner. Got to help me get it out the window though. Too heavy for me alone.”
“Is it same size as the one you gave me last year?”
“No. This one’s top of the line. Could freeze carrots in front of it.”
“Bullshit!” The word bellowed out of Dave’s barrel belly, his big body puffing up red. “Bullshit Amigo ain’t no movie star!”
“Ain’t,” Marilyn slurped.
“Then what in hell you think those are? Polaroids of Lassie?” Dave jabbed his finger at a gallery of faded black and white photo glossies tacked to the side wall beneath the phony fiberglass glory of a mounted leaping blue marlin Dave caught off the coast of Cuba the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Dave had nearly been bombed out of the water by his own countrymen that day, scariest day of his life. “Just you look at those photos, why don’t you? Amigo’s a fame-ass world-renowned bird!”
Marilyn refused to turn to peruse the wall covered with photos, she had seen it all before. In the 1950s a Hollywood film crew came to Key West to shoot a movie about the fierce battle during the 1920s between the local Conchs and Greek immigrants, bloodying one another over who had proprietary rights to the sponge beds of the Florida Keys. The Conchs won out, forcing the Greeks three hundred miles north, above Tampa Bay to Tarpon Springs. Key West was an island the Conchs were not about to be pushed from, having been over the generations pushed from almost every other island, but in the end Mother Nature’s irony prevailed. The mysterious blight of ’34 killed off the sponge beds in the Lower Keys.
Diver Dave was a dashing man in the 1950s, with oil black hair slicked back from his sun-darkened face. The Hollywood types thought Dave looked Greek, so they put him in their movie. Dave’s job was to wear tight blue jeans, a striped blue-and-white Greek fisherman’s sweater, and shout the line: “Start your boat-engines boys, the Conchs are comin back!” It took three days of shooting for the Hollywood types to get that scene right. All during the camera takes of Dave rising from his swinging hammock, looking to the sea and shouting his line, Amigo was perched overhead on the arc of a palm frond, playing the part of a pet parrot kept by the Greek Spongers. Amigo’s only line in the movie was to discharge a licentious whistle whenever he spied the blond starlet of the film in her pretty ruffled blouse dipped daringly low off one shoulder. During those long hours of shooting Dave’s big scene Amigo excreted his powdery white pearls of wisdom onto Dave in the hammock below. Dave couldn’t change his position from one take to the next. After a while he learned to judge just how long it would be between the time Amigo snapped a sunflower seed in his beak and an inevitable plop of parrot poop would descend like featherweight hail to rest upon his cheek. The photos on the diner wall showed Amigo with the cast and crew of the film, everybody smiling and waving. There were many photos of the blond starlet laughing hysterically as Amigo buried his green head into the fleshy valley of exposed cleavage between her breasts. Dave got very close to that bird during the shooting, bought him and brought him back to the diner. The two were inseparable ever since. Dave loved that bird with all his might.
“This bird’s a phony!” Marilyn jabbed her soup spoon at Amigo. “He’s not the same as the bird in those photos. He’s a pet-store fake, a scrawny chicken dyed pukey green!”
Dave’s big hands clenched into fists, he placed them both on the counter in front of Marilyn’s bowl of chowder and leaned over on stiffened arms. “Up yours,” Dave hissed. “Up yours,” the parrot squawked.
“The conch in this chowder is past its prime.” Marilyn batted her short gray lashes at the beefy man bearing down on her. “I think you’re using three-day-old amberjack in it again.”
Everybody knew Marilyn loved Dave, always had. Marilyn figured the only thing that kept her unhappy all these years, after her fourth husband died working on the new Seven Mile Bridge, was the parrot never gave Dave the whistle of approval to go to bed with her. Dave never went to bed with a woman Amigo didn’t call out his craving for. The only thing different about this particular afternoon was Marilyn normally didn’t insult Dave’s lack of culinary expertise, and his best friend, until after she finished her second piece of Key lime pie. Something was nagging at her.
Bonefish figured whatever nagged Marilyn, at her age it couldn’t be her female time of month. No, Bonefish deduced the prompter of the problem was El Finito headed this way, made people jumpy. “Got to go. Can’t wait.” Bonefish spun on his stool. He saw the eye of El Finito wink offshore, a monster of destruction pushing a fifty-foot-high storm surge before it.
Marilyn knew how to get Bonefish to stay. She tossed him some bait. “I heard some stuff about that goat found hanging upside down in the bat tower.”
Mile Zero Page 18