American Tropic

by Thomas Sanchez

  “That polyethylene lead is stronger than steel. No wonder you campaigned in such a whopper.”

  “I’m not out there fun-fishing to catch and release, like you timid old-timers and castrated ecology boys.”

  The chained marlin reaches the top of the scale. A white arrow spins in a circle around painted numbers and stops on the weight of the marlin. The fishermen all exhale in surprise. Big moans with disappointment.

  The craggy old fisherman turns to Big. “Missed the record by only twelve pounds. Rare to catch ’em that big here—they’ve been fished out. Offshore of Cuba, yeah, maybe you can still reel in a whopper like this, but not around Key West. You should mount it, display it in the hotel lobby of your new Neptune Bay Resort.”

  Big stares at the marlin swaying on the pulley chain. He pulls off his cap and runs his hand over his head, slicking back his dyed blond hair. He claps the cap back on his head. “I only mount record breakers. I’ll have her chopped up so nobody else can claim her.”

  The old fisherman shakes his head in dismay. “Shame to do that. She’s a seven-hundred-pound beauty. You should have released her if you weren’t going to keep her. That would’ve been the sporting thing to do.”

  “Don’t talk to me about sport, old man. It’s not about sport. It’s about winning.”

  The old fisherman fixes his crinkly gaze on Big. “I been around a long time. I seen things. That fish is bigger than the record breaker Hemingway caught between Key West and Cuba back in the 1930s. Crime to chop her up. Any guy standing here will give you ten grand so’s he can trophy-mount her and call her his own.”

  “I’ll chop her up personally. She’ll be expensive sushi for the alley cats tonight.” Big’s broad tanned face breaks into a smile at the old fisherman. “And I don’t give a fuck about a fat, bearded dead writer who once caught a big fish in these waters.”

  Luz makes her way into the Police Chief’s crowded office. The Chief, Moxel, and a team of white-suited forensic investigators are huddled intensely over a black micro–digital recorder on the Chief’s desk. The Chief speaks with urgent anticipation. “Just got this—copy of the recording sewn into Hard Puppy’s mouth. Could be our big breakthrough.”

  Luz hunches toward the recorder with the others. The Chief presses the recorder’s play button. The recorder’s red indicator light flashes. The small speaker crackles with static and the eerie chant of an electronically altered voice.

  “Bizango … Bizango … Bizango

  Bizango … Bizango … Bizango

  Bizango … Bizango … Bizango.”

  The recorded voice stops. A low-frequency electronic hissing is heard. The recorder’s flashing red light dims and goes out. No one around the desk moves; they all barely breathe, waiting for the recorder’s dead light to flash back to life.

  The Chief slams his fist on the desk, jolting everyone. “That’s him, mocking us! Bizango won’t communicate anymore!” He turns in frustration on the forensic investigators. “What have you got from Blue Hole?”

  One of them shakes his head negatively. “Not even a footprint in the mud was left. Whatever prints had been there were compromised by those damn gators mucking around.”

  “What about prints on the forest trail? What about prints on the spear shot into the tree? What about prints on Hard Puppy’s mutilated head? Must be something?”

  “Nothing. It’s like he’s a ghost, or clever enough to know the tricks to stay invisible. We’re still waiting for more results from our lab up in Miami. They’re close to getting the true voice-sound identity of whoever is speaking on the recordings.”

  “The Blue Hole gators? You autopsied them?”

  “Killed them and ran tests on everything in their digestive tracts and the feces in their bowels. Everything was what you’d expect.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Half-eaten fish, frogs, and human remains. DNA testing shows that the human remains are from one person, Hard Puppy.”

  The Chief glares at the investigator. “I could’ve told you that. We don’t need DNA mumbo-jumbo to know those gators ate Hard. You guys are way above my pay grade and supposed to be brilliant, but you can’t figure out how one guy in a rubber suit is getting away with multiple murders.” The Chief fires a commanding look across the desk at Luz. “Don’t just stand there staring at me with those big brown eyes. What do you have for me?”

  “Well, give me a chance to get it out. I traced all the calls made to Noah’s radio show. None turned up anyone who can be considered a suspect. The only two callers I couldn’t get a location fix on were Bizango and that Nam vet who keeps talking about Permian extinction. They both were using different public phone booths. I questioned the people at businesses around those booths, but nobody remembers seeing anything unusual. I had Forensics scour the booths for prints. I ran the prints through our database, the FBI’s database, even Homeland Security’s database. So far, nothing incriminating.”

  “That Nam vet, he’s got me worried. You scare up anything, anything at all?”

  “I tried everywhere, even went around to the veterans’ bars. Problem is, most guys hanging in those places are so baked on meds they’re no longer tightly wrapped. They sent me on wild-goose chases. I never found the radio vet.”

  “What about Noah? You keeping him pointed in the right direction?”

  “He knows what to do. He’s throwing out more red meat to provoke Bizango into calling. The moment Bizango calls, we’re on him if we get the GPS location of where he’s phoning from. Noah knows the stakes.”

  “When’s his next broadcast?”

  “About an hour.”

  “Good. I’ll have the SWAT team ready to roll.” The Chief looks around at everyone in the crowded room. “I want you all to stay on the razor’s edge—stay on that edge until your feet bleed. We’re gonna get this guy now.”

  Truth Dog back on the air. Let me hit you with a pressure drop of info. One-quarter of all mammals and one-third of all amphibians are headed for extinction on this fouled-up planet in ten years. That’s a fact. Right here in Florida, we lose thousands of acres a day to development. Half of the Everglades have already been drained and bulldozed, devoured by greed. Check it out. Okay, I see I’ve got a brave pilgrim calling in. Show me the rage.”

  “I’m a young mother of three kids; I’ve got bigger problems than saving mammals and amphibians. I’m terrified about this Bizango character. He’s going to be at the Fantasy Parade. I don’t care what the cops say about how safe it is to be out, something horrible is going to happen. People I know are scared to death. They’re staying home. They aren’t going to the Fantasy Parade.”

  “Not everyone is afraid. The tourist bureau expects eighty thousand thrill-seekers showing up for our annual party. Anything goes at the Fantasy Parade—the shocking, the vulgar, the perverted. If the threat of a category-three hurricane couldn’t keep the merrymakers away from the parade some years back, what makes you think they’ll be afraid of our own homegrown Jack the Ripper stalking them in the streets? Just gives Fantasy Parade an air of spooky realism.”

  “You’re making me more frightened with talk like that. I’m hanging up.”

  “Wait! You’ve got to understand, a guy like Bizango, he has his thoughts banging and boiling in his head. He believes in his righteous crusade. He believes the voices that only he hears come from God’s lips to his ears. The problem is, the truly evil ones who walk among us in this world don’t show that they are evil—that’s why they are so lethal. They hide in the shadows of anonymity, hunker down in the crevices of their cowardice, waiting to strike.”

  “Now I’m really terrified.”

  “I’m trying to help you get a philosophical grip on reality. And, uh, one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “What are your kids going to dress up as this Halloween?”

  “That’s the last thing on my mind. I’m not letting them out of the house.”

  “I’ve got what they should be.”


  “What?”

  “Skeletons.”

  “That’s not funny! You sicko!”

  “Whoops, she’s gone. We need a good jolt of gallows humor when there’s a killer out there wanting us to jump through our assholes with fear. Hey, pilgrims, you’ve stopped calling. Maybe nobody is awake. Nobody except Bizango. I know you’re out there, Bizango. I challenge you to crawl out from your cowardly crevice. Put your serpent lips to the phone and kiss me with your hate.”

  At the Atlantic Ocean’s edge, Luz sits in her parked Charger in front of the monument marking SOUTHERNMOST POINT CONTINENTAL U.S.A. On the ocean’s distant horizon, toward Cuba, black clouds obliterate the stars. Jagged bolts of lightning stab down from the clouds; the flashes appear to be a fearsome army of bright giants marching in. Luz looks through the car’s windshield at the lightning as she listens to Noah’s broadcast.

  “I’ve got a call! Hello, who is this? Answer me! Don’t hang up! Why did you hang up? Call me back. I’m waiting. Punch me with your pain.”

  Luz turns the radio volume up and listens closely as a new call comes in to Noah.

  “Hola, Truth Dog, brave crusader. This is the Nam vet.”

  “Welcome back to the show, Permian-theory man. Extinction is your karma. Let’s talk about it. It’s now or never.”

  “Do you know how many oil wells are in the Gulf of Mexico?”

  “I used to be an environmental attorney fighting to keep corporate-oil bloodsuckers from drilling in the Gulf, so I know the answer to that. There are four thousand offshore oil and gas rigs out there. The disastrous Deepwater Horizon blowout caused millions of gallons of oil to flow into the pristine Gulf. The toxic dispersants used to break up the oil and hide the crime created a hypoxic dead zone in the Gulf bigger than the state of New Jersey, a floating black hole of death where nothing lives, grows, moves, or swims.”

  “You’ve got facts.”

  “Hell yeah, I’ve got facts. One of our planet’s great fisheries is becoming a gigantic dead pond. And people ask why I’m so pissed off!”

  “That’s right, but I’ve got even bigger rage! Homo sapiens are invasive predators who are goin’ to blow sky-high in a second Permian Extinction Event. Won’t even be enough time to load your Noah’s Lark with a few animals. It’s the Gulf of Mexico oil drillin’ that’s goin’ to bring it on. The corporations are crackin’ open the ocean’s floor, tappin’ into a mega-vault of methane gas. Those four thousand oil and gas rigs in the Gulf you mentioned are goin’ to detonate at the same time, creatin’ a force greater than pullin’ the trigger on every stockpiled atomic weapon. And you mumble, don’t fool with Mother Nature or Mother Nature will fool with you. I’m sayin’, man has fucked Nature, so Nature’s goin’ to obliterate man. The mother of all explosions is comin’!”

  Luz’s cell phone beeps loudly in her shirt pocket. She grabs the phone and holds it to her ear.

  The Chief’s voice shouts over the phone, “You hear what the Nam vet is saying?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “He’s our guy.”

  “That’s not the Bizango voice we heard on the recordings. He’s a different guy.”

  “No. It’s Bizango. He’s trying to head-fake us.”

  “Quick, give me a GPS if you’ve got it.”

  “Just a sec, something’s coming in. He’s using a landline this time. We’re tracking … getting a location. Here it comes.… One-four-five Hurricane Court.”

  Luz throws the cell phone down on the car seat, jams her foot on the accelerator, and roars the Charger away from the southernmost continental point. She speeds up Whitehead Street toward the lighthouse towering above the palm trees. She passes the long brick wall in front of the two-story Hemingway House, where tourists are lined up taking photographs. She wheels the car around a corner and comes to a stop in Hurricane Court with its circle of ramshackle houses. She jumps from her car and looks around. No other police are there. She sees across a dead lawn a shabby house with windows blacked out by inside blinds. The number on the house’s paint-peeling front door is 145.

  A police car pulls up to a stop, and Moxel gets out. “Hold up a minute, Luz.” He nods toward the house with the blacked-out windows. “That guy in there is a psycho killer. The SWAT team is on their way. Let’s wait.”

  “I’m not waiting.” Luz pulls her Glock out of its holster. “Back me up. I’m going in.”

  “That’s crazy. The guy’s a Nam vet. He could have the place booby-trapped to explode. He was trained to do that shit.”

  Luz ignores Moxel and runs across the dead lawn to the front door. She grabs the door handle; it is locked. She stands back, gripping her pistol tightly in both hands. She kicks the door, banging it open. She bursts inside a living room darkened by closed blinds covering the windows. She whips her pistol around in every direction, her head snapping from side to side, ready for someone to jump up from behind the shadows of cluttered furniture. She steps cautiously across the room toward a splinter of light creeping along the bottom of a closed door. She stops at the door and listens for sounds on the other side. She hears nothing. She places her hand on the handle and twists it quietly to an open position. She throws the door back, and a sudden burst of light from a brightly lit room illuminates her completely.

  Facing Luz on the far side of the room is a man in his sixties, his fierce face etched with a spider web of wrinkles, his large wedge-shaped head shaved; a thick gray walrus mustache hangs over his top lip and down the sides of his mouth. He sits at stiff-backed attention in a battered aluminum wheelchair with worn duct tape wrapped tightly on its two arched handles. A coarse green military blanket covers the man from the waist down. On the wall behind hangs a Vietnam-era Missing in Action flag with the silhouette of a soldier’s head bent forlornly in front of a prison guard-tower. The flag’s logo declares, in blood-red letters, POW-MIA, YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN.

  The man stares pointedly at Luz as if he has been expecting her. His words rush out. “Welcome to the Casbah!”

  “Police! Raise your hands and put them behind your head!”

  The man’s hands move quickly toward the blanket covering him below the waist.

  Luz grips her pistol harder and splays her legs apart into a firing stance. “One more move toward that blanket and I’ll blow you to hell. Hands up!”

  Moxel bursts in behind Luz, his gun out. He looks at the man in the wheelchair and whoops. “We got Bizango! Keep him covered! I’m cuffing him!” The man’s hands move toward the top of the blanket. Moxel shouts at Luz, “There’s a gun under the blanket! I can see its bulge! Shoot him if he moves!”

  Luz steps closer to the man, her pistol held in firing position at his head.

  Moxel grabs the edge of the man’s blanket. “I’ve got your Bizango ass now!” He rips the blanket away from the man’s lap and looks down.

  Aimed straight at Moxel are two blunt fleshy stumps of the man’s legs, amputated above his knees. He throws his head back and laughs. “You thought I was Bizango! Fools! Everyone with a brain and heart is Bizango now, even those of us who can only dream of what he does! Bizango said to boogie till you bounce, bop till you drop. I boogied in Nam. The parachute didn’t open fully when I jumped out of a plane and bopped down; I bounced. Lost my legs. And this country doesn’t give a shit now. I’m forgotten history, political roadkill. Just like that Vietnam girl runnin’ down the road with napalm burnin’ her skin off. Just like that pathetic pelican covered in oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, its wings spread out, tryin’ to fly. I’ll never be airborne again.”

  Behind Luz, a stomping commotion breaks out. She swings around as a SWAT team storms in from the hallway. The muscular men are protected by heavy body armor; antiballistic helmets are clamped tight over their heads; strapped around their waists are belts of bullets and grenades. Gripped in their gloved hands are submachine guns. They aim at the legless vet in the wheelchair.

  The vet raises his arms and flaps them in the air. His
mocking voice shouts at the armored men: “I’ll never be airborne again! You gonna napalm me too? You gonna drown me in oil? Bring it on! I’m ready to rock and roll! You chickenshit killers! You won’t get him, you know! Bizango is too smart for you! You dumb bastards only know how to kill. Bizango knows who to kill!”

  Light shines out in the night from an open-sided canvas party tent set up on the earth-scraped construction site of Neptune Bay Resort. Inside the tent, a band of musicians dressed as bare-chested mermen play a bouncy Caribbean tune. Cocktail waitresses in fishnet mermaid costumes circulate through the well-dressed crowd with trays of tropical cocktails and exotic appetizers. At the center of the crowd, Big Conch holds court. He is outfitted as Neptune, god of the sea, wearing a toga and leather sandals; a gold plastic crown circles the top of his long white wig. He grips in one hand a pitchfork, its handle and three sharp steel prongs painted silver to represent Neptune’s trident spear. He pumps the trident in the air. “Silence!” The band of mermen cease their music; the cocktail waitresses stop and balance their service trays on their bare shoulders.

  Big steps to a table covered by a cloth canopy. “It’s been a vicious four-year fight. I’ve had countless work stoppages and spent a fortune on attorneys. I was opposed by every environmental group. Today, the government approved Neptune Bay Resort. Free enterprise prevailed!” The crowd hoots their approval. Big puts down his trident and pops a bottle of champagne. He sloshes the bubbly liquid into a plastic silver chalice and raises it high. “Neptune Bay will stand forever as a monument to my dearly departed partners, Dandy Randy and Bill Warren. Damn, I miss those boys; I wish they were here to share this slam-dunk victory.” He grabs the edge of the cloth canopy covering the table. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present the most ambitious development ever built in the Florida Keys, a world-class resort that will put thousands to work and fatten our tax rolls with the fruit of hardworking capitalism, the fabulous Neptune Bay!” He whips off the cloth canopy. The crowd applauds at a fiberglass scale-model display of the vast complex. Big raises his silver chalice triumphantly in the air. “Construction of Neptune Bay resumes tomorrow. I will—”