American Tropic

by Thomas Sanchez

  Big glances at his gold Rolex as if time is running out, then looks back at Zoe and rattles off at her: “After your divorce is final from Noah, you’re gonna marry me. I’ll be richer than original sin itself when my resort is completed. Bank on that, girl. Big will have you farting through silk panties for the rest of your gorgeous life.”

  Zoe plants her elbows on the bar in front of Big; she leans her chin into her cupped hands and defiantly nails Big’s blue eyes with her own big blue eyes. “Everyone knows your Neptune Bay Resort is illegal. You bulldozed tidal lands before the environmental study came in. The ecologists stopped you. You’ll be lucky if they don’t hang you from an endangered gumbo-limbo tree before you make your first dime.”

  Hard Puppy snorts his approval of Zoe’s put-down of Big. His platinum-encased teeth shine as he speaks with a singsong Caribbean twang. “Baby doll, you don’t have to be marryin’ me for my monies. Just be givin’ me one hot honey night and we be doin’ the nasty black and white, then Hard’s fortune be yours.”

  Zoe spins around from Hard and Big. Her attention goes to a large television behind the bar. On the screen, a basketball game cuts away to a breaking news story. A headline scrolls across the screen, MURDER AT THE RACE, followed by a video shot from a helicopter of a race-marker buoy floating at sea. Tied to the pole of the buoy is the blurred image of a man’s body. Everyone in the bar stops talking and turns toward the television just as the blurred image of the dead body flashes off the screen and is replaced with DANDY RANDY FOUND DEAD. WE RESUME REGULAR BROADCAST.

  Big jumps from his stool and jabs his finger at the television. “That was my Neptune Bay partner tied to that buoy! What the hell happened?”

  Hard sneers. “Randy be gone, good riddance. He grew up on this island sellin’ bad fish to navy wives. In the end he be tryin’ to sell overpriced resort condos to retired military and New York divorcées. Fuck that. His white ass be fish bait now.”

  Big swings around with doubled-up fists. He takes aim to punch out Hard’s mouthful of metallic teeth as a wiry woman, Pat, steps in front of him. Pat wears rubber shrimper boots, blue jeans, and a tight T-shirt. She pulls up onto the stool vacated by Big. Wrapped around the bare skin of her left arm are purple tattooed tentacles of a one-eyed octopus. She nails Hard with a mocking smirk. “Don’t be mean about dearly departed Dandy Randy. Show him some respect. That’s not any way to talk about your brother.”

  Hard spews out a mouthful of foaming spit. “Dandy don’t be my brother! Dandy be a white cracker boy. My mama never let no rooster wearin’ white socks in her back door. No white chickens be in her yard.”

  Pat laughs at Hard. “Your mama should’ve ate whatever rooster was your daddy for giving her a big load of crap like you to haul.”

  Zoe pops open a bottle of beer and slides it across the bar counter. “Here you go, Pat, this one’s on the house. Let’s keep the peace.”

  Pat grabs the bottle and swigs the beer. She smacks the bottle back down and stares at Hard.

  Hard’s angry glare turns into a smile of glinting teeth. “Pat, you be a mean son-of-a-bitch. You should quit shrimpin’ and come workin’ for me. I could use a scrapper like you.”

  Pat swipes beer from her sun-hardened lips. “You want me to give up being captain of my own shrimping boat to rig dogfights for you?”

  “I be no dogfight gamer. That be a white-devil lie. I be a peaceful man, not like you. Word is you be the number-one killer of leatherback turtles in the Florida Keys.”

  “Yeah, Chinese dudes pay a fortune for leatherbacks. They believe leatherbacks can cure everything from cancer to limp dick.”

  Hard smirks. “Who you be accusin’ of limp dick? Nothin’ between your legs but eight inches of strap-on stiff rubber.”

  Zoe leans in between Pat and Hard. She beams Pat a friendly heads-up. “Honey, you should use turtle excluders on your shrimp nets. If you’re caught slaughtering endangered turtles, they’ll lock you up and throw the key away.”

  Pat shakes her head defiantly from side to side. “I got a right to fish anything from the sea. No one can stop me. No feds, no man, no woman. Not even a woman as sexy as you, Zoe, Miss Show My Cute White Ass in Shorts to All the Customers When I’m Bending Over to Get the Beer.”

  Big Conch’s eyes go to the television, where the basketball players on the screen are replaced by the image of Luz being interviewed by a reporter. Behind Luz is the Haitian raft filled with dead bodies. Big shouts at Zoe. “Turn the goddamned TV up, for Christ’s sakes!”

  Zoe raises the volume. Luz’s steady professional voice fills the room: “They died from hunger and exposure. No indication of foul play. Just a horrendous end for desperate people.”

  Pat whistles and calls out to Luz on the screen. “Look at you! You’re a gorgeous star. They should put you in a Hollywood movie. You could be the warden in a woman’s prison.”

  Zoe pushes a firm finger against Pat’s lips. “Quiet. Let’s hear what Luz is saying.”

  Hard bangs his beer bottle on the counter. “Luz be one black sister can’t be trusted. I hate cops, ’specially colored cops. Be bad for business.”

  The outside door to the bar slams open. In the doorway is Hogfish, backlit by a shaft of sunlight. His iPhone earbuds are clamped into his ears. He looks wild-eyed from beneath his long-billed fisherman’s cap and screams in panic: “This world is rigged for hurricanes! El Finito’s coming! I see the eye of his category-five hurricane winking offshore! Monster of destruction blowing two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds and pushing a fifty-foot-high storm surge before it! I’m the best fishing guide on this island, I read the weather. The ocean’s currents spell out the future to me! I see the ocean’s truth with my own eyes!”

  Big stomps his feet on the floor and shouts back at Hogfish. “You’re no fishing guide anymore! You can’t find your own pecker to take a piss, let alone find yourself a fish to hook.” Big grabs his beer bottle and hurls it at Hogfish.

  The bottle flies by Hogfish’s head, hitting the wall behind in a shatter of spraying glass. He ignores the shards around him, his head bobbing to music pumping through the earbuds. He lurches violently, seemingly caught by a great wind. He staggers, regains his footing, stands alone in the center of the room, with everyone fixed on his screaming rant.

  “Like the baby Jesus grown into a righteous monster, El Finito will shut your mouths and open your minds! You don’t need satellite photos to see him coming! Finito is speeding here to punch your lights out! Punch your teeth down your throat! Punch your civilization down the drain!”

  Along one of the many deep-water canals running in from the Gulf of Mexico side of Key West and crisscrossing the island stands Noah’s nautical-deco-style house. The 1930s structure is long past its glory days, the paint of its once-sleek exterior spider-cracked and peeling. In the hazy humid atmosphere of the setting sun, the rounded walls and porthole windows give the appearance of a formerly glamorous yacht now forsaken and stranded on land.

  Inside the sparse living room, a few pieces of worn-out dull-yellow bamboo furniture are scattered around, and piles of dusty hardcover law books and tattered paperbacks are stacked along the walls. Noah sits at a lone bamboo table, listening to the chorus of frogs outside croaking anxiously for night to fall. He takes a drink from his rum bottle and stares pensively through the open window, across a parched grassy expanse, at the still water of the canal. A fish leaps from the flat surface. It snaps into its gaping mouth an unlucky flying insect, then splashes from sight back into the depths of the canal.

  Behind Noah, in the rose glow of dusk, Zoe quietly walks in. She sits across from him at the table and watches him drink. The sound of frogs outside grows more insistent, at odds with the measured tone of Zoe’s words: “I need you to sign the divorce papers in two weeks. Don’t play any tricks.”

  A nervous twitch crosses Noah’s face. He takes another drink. He holds the liquor in his mouth, feeling its sting before swallowing. His throat is tight as his words come
out with a cut: “What’s the hurry? We haven’t been living together for a year.”

  “You haven’t been living for a year.”

  “Depends on what you call living.”

  “You’re either drunk or out there on your boat, ranting on the radio.”

  “I’m not an alcoholic. If a man drinks himself into oblivion, it means he doesn’t want to see the sun rise the next morning. I still want to see the sun rise.”

  “You haven’t obliterated yourself—yet—but you’ve given up. You used to be a damn fine lawyer.”

  “I didn’t give up, sweetheart. I was disbarred.”

  “What did you expect? You went ballistic in the courtroom.”

  “I was prosecuting corporate bastards drilling illegal wells in protected tidelands. Toxic sludge killing off wildlife. Politicians paid off. Nobody had the guts to stand up against them. Masters and slaves, same as it ever was. At least one day, in one courtroom, before the judge let the criminals off, I could expose them. You know what I always say: speaking the truth will set you on fire.”

  “I know the story by heart.”

  “Then don’t come in here and lecture me, saying I gave up.”

  “I don’t buy into your excuse of indignation. You didn’t have to storm out of the courtroom.”

  “You didn’t have to walk out of the marriage.”

  “I only walked out when you started drowning yourself in a sea of booze.”

  “A man who does not enter the sea will not be drowned by the sea, right? Don’t worry about me—I’m a good swimmer.”

  “Nobody is that good of a swimmer.”

  “What do you want me to say, Zoe? The usual muck: ‘Hi, I’m Noah, I’m an alcoholic’? Well, this boy won’t play that shtick, because it’s really a stick with one sharp end and the other end covered in shit. I will stand up and shout: ‘I’m Noah and I fucked up and I don’t want sympathy, antipathy, hallelujahs, or condemnations. It is what it is, between a man and himself, a void to swim in until it’s a win-or-lose.’ ”

  Zoe pulls the bottle from his hand. She slips the gold wedding ring from her finger and drops it into the empty bottle. The ring falls to the glass bottom with a clink. She hands the bottle back to Noah. “Congratulations, now you’re married to it.”

  “And you’ve finally got what you want: you’re free to date the Big Conchs of this world. That’s why you still run a bar, so guys like Big can get drunk and hit on you?”

  Zoe bites down on her lip, trying to suppress her fury, but she cannot. “That’s disgusting. You know good and well that I got into the bar business years ago only to support you through law school. Why do you try to hurt me like this?”

  Noah picks up a cork from the tabletop. He pounds the cork tightly into the bottle’s neck. He holds the bottle up and shakes it. The gold ring trapped inside rattles. He stares through the glass at the ring. “Haitian rum. There’s a prize in each and every bottle.” He shifts his intense gaze onto Zoe. “You are still my prize. My dazzling angelfish, my resplendent butterfly fish, my gorgeous queen triggerfish.”

  Zoe pushes up from the table. “I’m nobody’s fish. Stay here and drown in the drunken sea of self-pity you’ve created for yourself.” She walks out.

  Noah does not move; he sits alone in the stillness. Through the open window from outside, the sickly sweet scent of night-blooming jasmine drifts in. The blood in his veins hums with the sugar rush of rum. On a moisture-slick wall, he watches a gecko make its slow, paranoid way until it senses him watching. The gecko’s ghostly-pale color flushes to a bright bold green; the blow bulge under its chin balloons into pulsating crimson. It pumps up on its short legs and puffs its three-inch lizard body into what it thinks is an intimidating size that will back Noah down from any hostile intentions.

  Noah raises the empty rum bottle with the ring in it and salutes the gecko. “That’s right, buddy, you’re the man. You are the man. Don’t ever forget it.”

  Eighteen miles up from Key West, on distant Sugarloaf Key, an eighty-foot-high pyramid-shaped wooden tower looms at the dead end of a gravel road. The moon’s glow reveals that the tower is surrounded by a putrid mangrove swamp of twisted trunks and gnarly branches. From the swamp’s brackish green water emerges what appears to be a human skeleton. The skeleton is a person totally encased in a full-body black rubber suit stretched tight and painted with luminescent white skeleton bones. A rubber skull mask covers the face and head. The skeleton rises out of the dark water onto the hard gravel road. A coiled rope is slung over its shoulder. The skeleton peers out from deep black eye sockets to see if anyone is watching. It reaches back down and hefts from the swamp’s mud-suck of water a heavy object wrapped and tied in a canvas tarpaulin. The skeleton slowly moves along the road, the gravel crunching beneath its rubber feet as it drags the heavy object behind. The skeleton stops and bends its head back, its skull face staring up to the top of the tower’s point.

  In the blue light of a full moon, the skeleton continues dragging the object toward the tower.

  Sharp morning sunlight glares off the pyramid-shaped wood tower surrounded by mangrove swamp. A tour bus travels on the gravel road leading to the tower. The bus’s high black rubber tires kick up a cloud of white dust. The bus rolls to a stop in front of the tower. The side of the bus is painted with bright green words: FLORIDA KEYS ECO-AWARE.

  Ecotourists step out of the vehicle with eager purpose. Slung around the necks of the men and women are binoculars and cameras. They wear fashionable shorts and green T-shirts emblazoned with DON’T FOOL WITH MOTHER NATURE. They aim their cameras at the wooden pyramid tower.

  The last person out of the bus is a tour guide with a tight expression of righteousness etched on her youthful face. She motions for the group to gather around her. The tourists snap to attention at her words. “Many years ago, a real-estate tycoon had a grand scheme. He wanted to drain this mangrove swamp and build a city here. But first he had to eradicate the mosquito population that swarms by the billions from this swamp. So the clever developer built this eighty-foot-high wooden tower to house thousands of bats. The plan was that at night the bats would fly out from the tower to eat the mosquitoes. It seemed like a good idea at the time, an army of bats gobbling up bloodthirsty mosquitoes.”

  The ecotourists groan their disapproval of the developer’s scheme.

  A thin young man wearing a green silk bandanna tight around his forehead speaks up. “Are the bats still inside? I’d just like to—”

  A ruddy-faced Australian cuts off the question with his thick accent. “Hell, mate, if the bats are inside, all the bloody buggers will be hanging upside down asleep. Maybe Count Dracula is in there with them. Spoookyyy.”

  The thin young man looks nervously at the tower. “That’s not funny, dude!”

  The guide raises her hand for quiet and continues her story. “The developer’s grandiose mosquito-eating scheme didn’t work. The bats flew away and never returned. The guy went belly-up, lost all his money, and slunk back to where he came from.”

  The ecotourists give a congratulatory cheer.

  The Australian chimes in. “Bloody hell, that served the greedy grubber right.”

  The guide looks out across the surrounding fetid mangrove swamp of tangled tree trunks and branches. “The Florida Keys are a one-of-a-kind unique and fragile environment which we all must respect and protect. What is the lesson that I’ve been teaching you on this tour?”

  The ecotourists chant in unison: “Don’t fool with Mother Nature or Mother Nature will fool with you!”

  The guide beams her approval. “Let this tower stand as a living lesson to all those who want to come to our paradise and try to rip it off.”

  The ecotourists pump their fists, shouting, “Don’t fool with Mother Nature!”

  “Good. Now, let’s take a closer look at this tower and witness one man’s folly.” The guide leads the group across the crunchy gravel road. She stops beneath the tower’s base of massive wooden support str
uts. She beckons the tourists to gather around. “At one time this was the highest structure in the Florida Keys between Miami and Key West. The tower could be seen by passing ships from miles out at sea. Take a look up and see how high this is—quite a feat.”

  The ecotourists bend their heads back and look up inside the soaring shaft. In a stunned moment of silence, their eyes widen as they are transfixed by the vision they see in the clammy darkness far above, at the tower’s point. Their sudden shouts and screams echo up the shaft in panicked horror. They turn and run between the tower’s massive support struts and back onto the road. They attempt to knock one another out of the way as they scramble toward the bus. The thin man with the tight green bandanna is pushed aside and falls onto the road; the gravel cuts into his knees, drawing blood. The tour guide yanks him up by the arm. He looks back toward the tower and his body shakes violently. A spray of vomit shoots from his mouth and splatters at the tour guide’s feet. The guide tightens her grip on the wobbling man’s arm and runs with him toward the bus, where the others are cowering in their seats.

  Luz steers her white Dodge Charger down the skinny slot of Olivia Street. The street is crowded on both sides with century-old Cuban cigar-makers’ shacks, built when Key West was the cigar-producing capital of the world, rolling out a million smokes a year. None of the shacks retain their original bare-board anonymity, having been painted by affluent new owners to a pastel prettiness. Gone are the generations of Cubans who once stood on the porches calling out hot gossip to neighbors in hot weather. The humid air no longer carries the garlic scent of sizzling shrimp and the sweet aroma of Cuban bread. The white fences in front of the shacks have been trimmed of their overgrown red bougainvillea and riotous yellow allamanda blossoms. Everything is prim and calm, like a street in a proper New England port town, not the boisterous place where Luz grew up.

  Luz turns her car at the corner of Olivia onto wide Duval Street. She parks in front of one of the last Cuban expresso-buche shops on the island not retrofitted into a trendy franchise coffee palace. The shop is a nondescript narrow storefront with a slotted hole cut in a cement wall to pass the coffee through. Luz gets out of her car and orders her third buche double of the morning. She watches through the slotted hole as a broad-butted Cuban woman dressed in tight blue jeans works at the sputtering and hissing nozzle of a monstrous old burnished expresso machine. The woman turns with a triumphant smile and presents a cup of steaming buche to Luz, who cradles it in her hand.