American Tropic

by Thomas Sanchez

  Beneath a full moon, Hard Puppy’s black SUV speeds on the Seven Mile Bridge. The bridge spans sixty-five feet above the ocean in a concrete blade crossing over the deep channel between the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Strait, linking the Upper Keys to the lower islands. Silhouetted in the moon’s glow alongside the bridge is the forlorn remnant of the old Overseas Railroad, blown away to its stubby concrete trestles during the 1935 hurricane that dumped four hundred men to their deaths in the shark-infested waters. Hard glances over at the old bridge and gives an appreciative whistle through his platinum teeth. High on meth and pumped on adrenaline, he steers the SUV ahead with jerky aggressiveness while singing along to the radio’s bass-beat thump of angry rap music booming from surround-sound speakers.

  On the front seat, next to Hard, the white party girl sits with her skinny ass rooted into the lap of the black girl. They both lean in next to Hard. Behind them, in the back cargo cab, the winning pit bull paces in an iron-barred cage. The dog’s stout body is ripped and bleeding from its recent fight.

  Hard shouts to the party girls above the rap music. “To men I give shit! To ladies I give favors!” He grabs the plump silicone breast of the white girl through her dress. She launches into shrill giggling. The caged pit bull in the back pricks up its ears to the sound and growls with deep-throated menace. Hard punches the SUV’s accelerator pedal to the floor, speeding the SUV to the end of the bridge and onto a narrow road with mangrove swamps pressed up against it on both sides. The rap music blasts, the pit bull growls. Hard turns down the volume on the radio. “This be bad music I be playin’. But I got badder. I can sing Civil War times bad ass.”

  The girls shout encouragement. “Sing it, Hard!”

  Hard snaps his fingers with loud cracks, giving himself the musical beat. He throws back his head and opens his mouth, his teeth glistening to the words of the song.

  “Goin’ to run all de night.

  Goin’ to run all de day.

  Bet me money on a bobtailed nag.

  Somebody be bettin’ de gray.

  Oh! De doo-da day!”

  Hard bangs his fist on the steering wheel. “Now, that be bad-ass nigga! It be written by a runaway slave.”

  The white girl screws her face into a perplexed expression. “That’s not a black song. That was written by some white dude. I learned about it in high school.”

  Hard backhands the white girl, one of the flashing gold rings on his fingers cutting a gash into her face.

  “Girl! Don’t you be messin’ with nigga music! You know nothin’ ’bout nigga!”

  The girl’s hand flies up to the blood gushing from her cheek. She screams in panic. The pit bull in the back sniffs blood and howls. Hard guns the SUV.

  Several miles ahead of Hard Puppy’s SUV, the narrow road curves into a pine-tree forest. Out of the forest, a Key deer emerges. The deer’s thin, graceful body is coated with apricot-and-fawn-colored fur, its short white tail stiffly upright. The deer sniffs the air for danger and waits. Other Key deer emerge from the pine trees; they follow the lead deer alongside the empty road to a patch of grass growing next to the asphalt. The deer graze on the grass, their noses down alongside the edge of the road.

  The tranquil night silence around the Key deer is broken by the rocketing whine from the SUV’s four-hundred-horsepower engine firing off on its V-8 cylinders. The deer stop grazing and look up. The SUV careens around the corner of the road into sight, the harsh rush of its large tires racing over asphalt. The deer bolt and scatter into the trees. One confused deer stays behind, frozen with fear in the center of the road. The three-ton SUV smashes into the deer. The small body catapults forward through the air.

  The SUV’s wide tires burn to a stop. Hard stumbles out of the vehicle into the beams of its halogen headlights. He squints at what the bright beams illuminate. Lying twenty feet ahead, on black asphalt, is the bleeding body of the deer. He turns away from the animal and kneels in front of the SUV’s crosshatch chrome grille. He runs his finger below the grille, along a dent in the thick bumper. He looks back angrily at the deer lying on the blacktop. “You little midget shit! Should be locked in a zoo! Messed with my ride!”

  A high-pitched, eerie whistling comes from the pine forest at the edge of the highway. Hard’s head snaps around. He looks belligerently into the trees, shouting toward the sound. “They be more of you midget fuckers in there? Come on out! I’ll put my pit bull on you! She chase you down and chew your asshole out!”

  The strange, eerie whistling stops. Hard sees no movement among the trees. He shrugs his shoulders impatiently and climbs back into the SUV. He slams the door and rolls down his driver’s-side window. He cocks his head out the open window to listen. He hears nothing. He rolls up his window and restarts the SUV.

  Next to Hard, the two party girls stare wide-eyed through the windshield at an apparition emerging from the dark forest. The girls shudder and lock their arms tightly around each other. Hard sees the apparition. His words spit out in surprise: “Fuck me! What be him?”

  Walking out of the forest into the SUV’s headlights is the Bizango skeleton, encased in tight rubber and skull mask. Bizango stops in the center of the road and holds up a speargun loaded with a sharp, cocked spear.

  Inside the SUV’s back cab, the pit bull sees the black-and-white skeleton. The dog’s deep, murderous bark reverberates in the cab as it hurls its body against the iron cage bars, thrashing to break through and attack Bizango.

  The girls scream hysterically. Hard shouts above the screaming and barking: “Everybody shut up!” He glares at Bizango through the windshield. “Don’t mess with me, mo-fo! You be doomed! Time to let the dog out!”

  Hard jumps from the SUV and runs around to the rear hatch door; he yanks the door open. The pit bull—inside its cage, behind bars—howls at Hard to be freed. Hard unlatches the cage’s steel lock and swings the door back. “Go, you hyena! Rip his asshole out!”

  The snarling pit bull leaps from its cage, knocking Hard aside. The dog hits the outside pavement running, its clawed paws digging in as it propels its muscular body upward and hurls furiously through the air at the skeleton standing in the middle of the road.

  Bizango whips up the speargun, aims, and pulls the trigger. The gun’s C2 cartridge fires in a whoosh. The spear springs free in a blurred trajectory, its flight meeting the opposite rush of the dog in midair. The spear pierces with a crunching thwack into the bone bulge of the dog’s rib cage. The dog howls, but its body keeps hurling forward through the air at Bizango. The dog’s weight falls from the air, drops with a bouncing thud at the skeleton’s feet. Bizango looks down at the dog, its barrel-shaped body inert, its bloodied tongue hanging out onto the asphalt, its startled, dying eyes staring up. Bizango reaches down and rips out the bloody spear from the dog’s rib cage.

  Hard jumps back into the SUV’s driver’s seat. He peers through the windshield at Bizango outside and grits his platinum teeth. “You killed my bitch! Nobody lives who kills my bitch!” He grips the steering wheel tight with both hands, jams his foot to the floor on the accelerator pedal, and yells above the whining engine, “Mother-fuckin’ spook! You die!”

  The SUV roars straight toward the skeleton. Bizango quickly reloads the gun with the bloody spear and reels back from the SUV as it speeds by, just an inch away, in a rush of wind. Bizango fires the gun. The spear shatters the glass of the driver’s-side window. It flies right behind Hard’s head and smashes out the window on the opposite side of the cab. The SUV keeps going. The snarl from its engine fades away into silence.

  Bizango walks to the small deer lying on the blacktop. The deer gasps for breath; its eyes bulge. Bizango’s black rubber fingers wipe blood away from the deer’s nostrils. Its body jolts with a life-releasing electric shock, then becomes deathly still.

  Bizango stares at the deer. From the surrounding forest, a throb of insects starts, crickets chirp, frogs croak. Bizango gently lifts up the deer in skeleton arms. Bizango’s masked skull head swiv
els up to the sky as the dead body is raised toward the stars above.

  Cackling bantam chickens scratch and peck in the dust outside the front door of a flimsy boarded shack beaten gray by weather and time. The chickens scatter as Noah walks between them and up the steps. The shack’s door is open; inside the shadowy depths sits a dark-skinned African-Cuban woman wearing a flowing white cotton dress. The bones of her nearly century-old body are twig-thin, and her small skull is pulled tight with wrinkled skin. She rocks back and forth in a creaky chair as she fans herself with a folded magazine in the stifling heat. She calls out to Noah from the shadows, “Comes ins. I bees ’spectin’ you.”

  Noah steps out of the sun into near darkness and stands awkwardly. “How did you know I was coming?”

  “All de mins, dey comin’ to Auntie sooner de betters. Dey gots de dollar problems, dey gots de love problems. An’ ol’ Auntie, she’s ’bout fixin’ de cure. Nothin’ Auntie cain’t fix, from an emptied wallet to a bustin’ heart. I sees yo got de womins problems. Dat’s why yo comin’ to me.”

  Noah pulls his pint bottle of rum from his frayed coat pocket and takes a swig, then wipes his lips. He stays silent. He slips the pint back into his pocket.

  Auntie waves her hand around the cramped room. Faded photographs of black saints torn from faith-healing magazines are tacked to the walls. The rafters are hung with bundles of dried herbs and flowers of every type, color, and scent. The countertops are piled with tins containing exotic powders, oils, and extracts. Dusty glass jars are filled with bent coins and rusted nails. Auntie claps her age-polished white palms together and stops rocking in her chair. She pushes up on an ebony cane toward Noah. “I be knowin’ ’bout womins makin’ de mins cry! Yo come runnin’ to me’s cryin’ like de lost boy.” She pulls a matchstick out of a box and strikes it; the flame flares. She lights a votive candle inside a red jar with the image of a Black Virgin painted on the glass. She hands the jar to Noah. “Hold dis tight.”

  Noah grips the jar. Auntie studies his illuminated face in the glow of the burning candle. Her trembling bony hand comes up and feels the contours of his face. She shakes her head; her stringy white hair covers her face as she speaks. “Yo mighty bad. Yo gots only de one womin in life to loves. Dat womin bees runnin’ away hard. Yo never goin’ catch her ’less yo listens to de Auntie.”

  “I hope it isn’t going to be expensive to win the race.”

  “What bees de price of love?”

  Noah sets down the votive jar and takes from his pocket a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. “I heard around town that you could help me win the race.”

  Auntie pushes the offered money away. “Put dat debil green paper back in yo pocket. Where I bees headed, dey don’ take dats. Dey takes only de pure of de hearts.”

  Noah slips the bill back into his pocket and pulls out the rum bottle. He takes a swallow as he watches Auntie hobble around the room on her cane.

  Auntie unhooks from the wall a straw basket hanging from a nail. She takes the basket to a tall cupboard and opens its door, exposing shelves rowed with glass vials filled with leaves and petals of crushed and ground plants and flowers. She pulls vials out, uncorking each and sniffing it, her nostrils twitching at the heady aromas. She recorks all the vials and packs them in the basket. She hobbles back to Noah and hands him the basket with a knowing wink. “Dese will wins back yo true love.” Her eyes glow with pride at the glass vials in the basket. She taps each vial’s corked top as she explains their ingredients: “Dis one bees de ginger root to entice her. Here bees dried strawberries to unlock her secrets. Of course, passionflower to soften de heart, and verbena oil to bees keepin’ her loves.”

  “How can I win the race with this stuff?”

  “Yo gots to trust de Auntie. Puts verbena oil in her water glass. Strawberries in de soup. Ginger root on de fish. Passionflower in her dessert.”

  “That’s everything? You sure you didn’t leave anything out?”

  “Dese will do de trick. Only one mo’ thing.”

  “Tell me.”

  Auntie hobbles over to a carved chest and creaks open its heavy lid. She pulls out a small purple velvet bag and smiles at Noah. “If yo gets close enough to her, rub dis on her earlobes. She bees a juicy peach for de pickin’.”

  “You don’t know my Zoe. Right now she’s more of a hard pit than a soft fruit.” Noah takes the velvet bag and feels its weight. “What’s inside?”

  “Rare in de natures. Royal jelly from de Brazilian queen bee.”

  “This is my last chance before my wife becomes my ex-wife.” Noah pockets the bag. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “No needs de thanks, only de belief. But de magics don’ works ’less yo gives up dat demon rum in a bottle yo suckin’ on all de day long like a starvin’ babies pulled from de mommies’ teet. Alcohol bees de magics-killer. Dat demon goin’ pull you all de ways down into de hells.”

  The outdoor food market is crowded with island locals and tourists jostling one another between open-air stalls piled with vivid mounds of tropical fruits and vegetables. Noah stops before one of the stalls and chooses from the exotic selection of purple plantain bananas, brown tamarind, yellow egg-fruit, orange loquat, blue-speckled mangoes, and green sweetsop. He moves on to a stall with a palm-thatched roof, protecting it from the overhead sun, where fresh sea fare is sprawled across iced trays. He studies the wet display of octopus, crab, horse conch, tuna, shark, dolphinfish, grouper, stingray, and snapper. He pokes a finger against an open-mouthed black grouper, then jabs a fat red snapper.

  The stall’s monger, gripping a curved-blade gutting knife in his hand and wearing a white rubber apron streaked with fish blood, suspiciously watches Noah poking the fish. The monger shouts with gruff irritation: “Why you pokin’ that snapper? You gonna eat it … or you gonna make love to it?”

  “Both.”

  “Then, buddy, that’s not the one for you.” The monger looks over the colorful fish arrayed on the iced trays. He slaps the bright scales of a yellowfin tuna. “Here’s the one. She’s got a firm body and clear eyes.”

  “I’ll take her.”

  On the Gulf side of Key West, known as Land’s End, where once shrimping, fishing, and turtling boats were docked years before, are anchored tourist sunset cruise and glass-bottom boats, elaborate yachts, and fancy sailboats. Facing this leisure-time fleet is an open-sided restaurant serving buckets of peel-your-own shrimp and platters of shell-shucked gritty oysters. At the edge of the farthest dock is a long wooden shed where shark bodies by the hundreds were once piled before being reduced to fillet slabs, severed fins, and skins. The shed is now filled with a selection of souvenir postcards, T-shirts, seashell necklaces, suntan lotion, and plastic sandals. To the side of the shed is a concrete saltwater holding pen. The deep-water pen is the last of the turtle kraals constructed in the 1890s, where captured turtles were dumped by the boatload from docked schooners to be slaughtered for steaks, soup, combs, and toothbrush handles.

  At the top edge of the concrete pen, Luz stands staring down into the water. She watches trapped snook and barracuda kept as a tourist attraction. The fish dart back and forth in silver flashes, searching for a way out.

  The Chief comes up behind Luz and stands alongside her. He hands over a thick manila envelope. “Here it is, promised I’d get it. I’ve got pull with the boys in a state-of-the-art Miami lab. Told them it was for an important case when I sent the blood samples. They fast-tracked it through.”

  “I suppose I should say thanks, but I don’t know what it says.” Luz takes the envelope. “Have you read it?”

  “I wouldn’t know how to read it—too technical, cutting-edge DNA-predisposition genetic stuff. Only a few labs in the country can do this. It’s what you wanted.”

  “You don’t have such a happy face. Did they tell you what it says?”

  “Of course they told me.” The Chief looks down at the circling fish in the water. “I don’t know how I’d react if I got this news. Jump off a
bridge maybe, stay at home twenty-four/seven with my family, go up on a mountaintop to meditate, or shoot heroin.”

  Luz scrapes her fingernails across the thick envelope, cutting into the paper.

  The Chief looks back at her. “I hate to say this, but, because of how the testing worked out, you should quit the force.”

  “Never.”

  “Go home and be with Carmen and Joan.”

  “No, they would know why I was there, just sitting around the house. It’s better if life goes on, and they are strong with that. It’s too much for them to bear after what happened to Nina. They couldn’t go through it. They’d be crushed.”

  “Given this new information, I could ask for your resignation. This can jeopardize your job performance. You’re still fit now, but any day that could change.”

  “I won’t quit while Bizango is still out there.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. Stay on until Bizango is caught, then go home to your family.”

  Luz turns and gives the Chief a firm handshake. “It’s a deal. I can live with that.”

  “It has to be. I can’t take the chance of keeping you on.”

  Luz peers down into the pen; she sees her own reflection on the water’s surface above the snook and barracuda making their futile runs at freedom. “I used to come here after school as a kid. Back then they kept a six-hundred-seventy-five-pound loggerhead turtle in this pen. He was a hundred thirty-nine years old, and famous for biting off the fingers of the turtle hunters who captured him in the ocean. Big George, they called him. He was a celebrity, a real tourist attraction, the biggest turtle in the world in captivity. Every day I’d throw a head of lettuce into the water for George. George would circle around the pen, then cut above the surface and give a big blow of water as he went for the floating lettuce. George wasn’t a meat eater. He loved lettuce.”

  The Chief stands closer to Luz, his shoulder touching hers. “The DNA results I brought you don’t lie. You don’t have much time left. You already knew your breast cancer came back, but this test turned up two different kinds of cancer waiting to spread. You’ve got a deadly trifecta going. I just want you to understand: should you change your mind and decide to walk away from the force now, no one will say you didn’t serve honorably. In fact, everyone will say how brave you were to hang in so long.”