Next morning, the 17th, he noted that the lifeless muck was actually burning flamelessly, not merely smoldering, beneath the crustal surface. He noticed this because the “land” level had dropped three feet overnight, and the air was dense with black smoke. How could he have known that would happen? No one had ever removed a bay before. In light of this unforeseeable development, he had two options. He could let the muck burn itself away right down to the oolitic limestone bowl below, or he could fight the fire before it grew too hot to approach.
He settled on the latter option, because the former would cost him thousands to truck in fill from the mainland. He exhorted his men out of their tents to do battle with the subterranean blaze. Steadfastly, they refused. When he impugned their masculinity, they began to throw chunks of refuse at him. Unchecked, that insubordination quickly escalated into full-blown mutiny, while the muck fires burned on unopposed.
But then it began to rain.
The colonel exulted in the old Broadnax lucky streak. Ha! Nature was pitching in where Negroes would not. It rained hard all day, eight inches every five hours, and the colonel frolicked with his lieutenants in the downpour. By nightfall the fires were extinguished. A rising east wind then blew the smoke away, and everyone felt refreshed.
But something was wrong. The air began to feel funny on the skin, heavy and hard to breathe. Survivors recalled a strange, pressure-popping sensation in their ears.
Shortly before midnight on the 17th, it struck.
It wasn’t like wind at all. It was something wild and remorseless, like incoming artillery. Dreams and visions and the endeavors of man stood no hope in the teeth of its fury. The colonel and his lieutenants drove away in the colonel’s Auburn, while the workers, who could not flee, searched for shelter, anything, a mangrove tree, something they could lash themselves to. But the colonel had killed and plowed off all the trees and shrubs within eight miles. There was nothing. Some of the work force burrowed like small mammals into the earth itself, only to drown in their holes. The wind wailed all night, and pieces of the obliterated Oseola Hotel flew before it at killing velocity. Later, many of the dead were found to have been eviscerated by two-by-fours.
Then just as suddenly as it had struck, the wind fell to dead calm. Men crawled out of their pits and pathetic makeshift shelters and gasped at the sight. Nothing was left standing. Destruction was utter. The corpses of their fellows sloshed against their knees. Snakes darted in crazed circles. The Atlantic Ocean had swept over the barrier beach and refilled Small Hope Bay as if Colonel A.C. Broadnax had never existed. Only a single piece of his handiwork remained to outlive him—the fat bulge he had dredged up on the western side of Omnium Key as the site of the Oseola Hotel. In time, Omnium Settlement would arise on that very bulge.
Survivors spoke of a queer, prickly feeling on their skin during the calm, others of a ringing in their ears. Something was still very wrong. An ominous force, dwarfing the affairs of mankind, lurked nearby. That the morning sun shone brightly overhead only enhanced the terrible foreboding, more frightening even than the corpses and the crazy snakes and the hotel debris afloat on Battlefield Bay.
The wind struck again, harder, this time from the west.
The Big Blow of 1926 spelled the end for Colonel A.C. Broadnax and his vision and, temporarily at least, for Florida real estate. Property values plummeted to nil. Smart-ass Yankee wags wrote about suckers who buy Florida real estate “by the gallon.” Prentiss Throckmorton, fully diversified, was able to weather the downturn as well as deliver the final killing blow to the Broadnax fortune after he got wind of the colonel’s plot to cut him right out of the picture. Nature, of course, had rendered the plot moot, but Prentiss didn’t care. It was the principle of the thing.
“I’ll smash that perverted climber of a Jew crook beneath my brogans!” he swore to his underlings on the board of directors.
“But, sir,” said one underling, “I don’t think Broadnax is a Jew.”
“Of course he is! What is he, then?”
“A Lutheran.”
Prentiss Throckmorton didn’t like that one bit—his sainted mother had been a Lutheran—and he glared malevolently at his mouthy underling.
“Of course he might be a Jew posing as a Lutheran.”
HABITUÉS
Next day Doom was up with the dawn. He felt refreshed after his first night aboard, Staggerlee rocking maternally at the dock. Doom spent the morning exploring her nooks and crannies, pulling his father’s arcane gear from drawers and lockers, examining and replacing it. Below, Staggerlee smelled of old wood and damp clothes. Doom ran his fingers over her joinery, the hand-tooled seams and joints in the cherry wood imperceptible to the touch. You didn’t have to be a sailor to see she had been built by people who knew the sea and cared about their job. Doom sat at the ship’s table in a cozy wraparound banquette and looked about his boat. Vainly, he tried to call up memories of boyhood, the misty coasts of Newfoundland, Windy in his arms. How could he not remember?
Staggerlee had been built in 1950 of steel on the river Clyde in Scotland to a design by John Alden of Boston. She was old-fashioned. Her stout construction, full keel with cutaway forefoot and attached rudder, was the conceptual antithesis of the modern light-displacement, round-bottom racing boat with its skeg keel and separated rudder. Her interior stripped out—pipe berths, propane camp stoves, and port-a-potties—a good racing boat would far outperform Staggerlee on any point of sail, “a horizon job,” in modern parlance. But when it blew, when the sea got up, Staggerlee could continue to sail toward her destination long after a similar-sized racing boat (Staggerlee was 42 feet overall, with a 13-foot beam and 6-foot draft) had resorted to survival tactics or retreated to safe harbor. She was built for sea kindliness, not speed, yet her narrow entry, fine turn of bilge, and long waterline gave her a hull speed of seven knots. Even an ex-con trail boss who hadn’t been aboard a sailboat since he was a toddler could tell she was a thing of quality and strength.
She was laid out below in traditional sea-boat fashion, frill-less and functional. Her galley, at the foot of the companionway ladder on the port side, was compact, almost tiny, the stove gimballed and guarded by a steel rail to prevent the sea cook from being bucked against it when things turned nasty. On the starboard side, opposite the galley, there was a sit-down navigation desk. Doom could tell that this was a place of serious purpose, but he had certain questions about its design and function. Why, for instance, did the navigator sit facing backward? And what were the purposes of all that obscure apparatus—an SSB radio, loran, compass, barometer, 24-hour clock set to Greenwich Mean Time, indicators of boat and wind speed and apparent wind direction? Toward the bow, where the hull narrowed, there was a head with shower, and forward of that was a vee berth, perfect for lovers. Alone, Doom had decided to sleep in the starboard berth opposite the table.
He noticed a tiny brass handle in the floorboards. He pulled it up, and there were the boat’s innards. It seemed to him almost an invasion of privacy, but that’s where he hid Ozzie’s goods, just forward of the big manual bilge pump.
Doom had no idea how to operate the head, so he used the Flamingo Tongue’s restroom. The charter-boat skippers were there again, in a knot at the counter. They fell silent when Doom entered the restaurant and again when he emerged from the john, but he pretended not to notice. The cook was a skinny guy in his late forties. He had a bony face with sharp cheekbones and a little black Latin-lover mustache.
“Good morning,” Doom said to him. “Do you have a phone?”
“Sure do, right over there—”
Good, thought Doom, it hung on the wall near the screen door in reasonable privacy. The cute young waitress stopped pouring coffee for the skippers and watched Doom drop his coins. The skippers were watching, too.
A woman answered.
“Hello, this is Mr. Rivera with Florida Power and Light. There’s been a billing error, and a credit is due,” Doom said, cupping his hand around the receiver
and turning his back on the nakedly curious at the counter.
“Oh…Just one minute,” said the woman.
Almost immediately Ozzie came on the line, and Doom repeated his Florida Power and Light bullshit.
“Well, that’s just fine, Mr. Rivera. May I call you right back?”
Doom read him the number and hung up. Doom wished he hadn’t gotten entangled with Ozzie and his goods.
“Ain’t you Denny’s boy?” the cook asked. “You look just like him. Have a cup of coffee? On the house?”
Surprised to hear a friendly voice, Doom sat at the counter two stools south of the skippers. “I’m expecting a call,” he said to the cook.
“Sure, sure, anytime at all. Eggs? How ’bout the blue plate breakfast special? Denny was a good friend of mine. All ours. He was in here all the time. This was like his informal office. I’m Archie.” Archie actually had tears in his eyes. “Dawn, get Mr. Loomis a cup. This is Dawn, my daughter. She goes up to the college.”
College? She looked like a child, untrammeled complexion, blond and blue-eyed, a face glistening with innocence. “How do you do, Dawn?”
“Fine, thank you, Mr. Loomis.”
“Most people call me Doom.”
“Doom?”
“Yes.”
Archie pointed to the skippers. “This here is Billy Houser. That there is Bobby Thorpe. Beside him, you have Arnie Cox and his first mate, Arnie Junior.”
They shook Doom’s hand with somber condolences, saying things about his father without moving their lips. To Doom, they were indistinguishable in their starched khaki uniforms and nylon-mesh baseball caps advertising tractor-trailer trucks, fishing tackle, and chewing tobacco. They all had enormous hands.
“You was in yesterday with old Captain Bert,” stated Billy. Or Bobby.
“Yeah, poor old Bert,” said Arnie.
“How so?” asked Doom.
“ ’Cause he’s stuck on the hill. They pulled his ticket.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Drowned some folks here in Bird Cut, what, six years ago?”
“The Cut can get real nasty when you got a east wind blowin’ against a ebb tide. Big seas. You got to be on the ball goin’ through Bird Cut in them wind-against-tide situations.”
Doom nodded, seaman to seaman. “What happened?”
“Bert was operatin’ a drift boat called…what the hell was she called?”
“The Amberjack,” said Arnie.
“Yeah, right, the Amberjack. Well, Bert got into trouble, overran the wave ahead, the bow dug in, and the next one caught his stern, rolled him up on the jetty and right on over.”
“Sunk like a piano.”
“Bunch a Baptists from Alabama drowned.”
“Coast Guard jerked his ticket. He’s on the hill forever.”
“Bert ain’t been the same since.”
“ ’Course, he fucked up bad, real bad.”
“Don’t talk like that in front of Dawn,” said Archie.
“That’s okay, Pop, I’ve heard worse.”
“Where?”
“You know who dug old Bert outta his funk?”
“Who?”
“Your daddy.”
“Laugh a minute, your daddy was.”
He hadn’t left Doom laughing, but Doom didn’t say so. Doom liked Archie and the gossipy skippers, not to mention Dawn, who he tried not to look at, lest he throb with visible loneliness. “Why aren’t there more boats at the docks?” Doom asked. There were thirty vacant slips, Staggerlee the only boat present.
“That’s because of Big Al Fucking Broadnax,” said Arnie.
“Language,” cautioned Archie.
“Oops.”
“Nobody comes on the Key no more because it’s out of the way what with only one bridge and Omnium sinking.”
“See,” said Bobby or Billy, “Big Al wants it to sink so’s he can buy cheap and dredge it back out on his own sweet time, put up some condos for rich Yankees.”
“He’s just like his old man. That colonel was a prize asshole. Sorry there, Arch.”
“It’s okay,” said Archie. “That’s exactly what he was.”
“The whole family is, except for the son who died.”
“Big Al was to keel over dead as a hammer today, there’d be Mardi Gras tomorrow.” Because none of the skippers moved his mouth, it was hard to determine exactly who spoke. Doom thought it might have been Arnie. The words came from his direction.
“How long you plan to stay, Doom?”
“It’s kind of up in the air. I’m going to learn how to sail, then I’m going to sea. Maybe to Newfoundland. In the Gulf Stream.” Doom couldn’t get that Gulf Stream blue out of his mind, and the gratuity he expected from Ozzie might finance the voyage.
“So you gonna live aboard Staggerlee in the meantime?”
“Yes.”
The phone rang.
“That’ll be for me,” said Doom.
“Doom? That you, Doom boy?”
“Are you at a public phone, Ozzie?”
“Sweating the old bazookas off in a booth on Route One.”
“I’ve got your goods.”
“Oh Doom, that’s music to my ears. I’ll make it right by you, don’t worry. We’ll both get nice. Ain’t it paradise down here? You’re a lucky man to have been born down here. I’d of never left. Hey, you know we’re in the same area code. I’m in this sweet-as-you-please subdivision down on Cormorant Key with my honey, Doris. Where are you?”
“I’m not far.”
“So great, come over tomorrow. Spend the day. We’ll catch us a mess o’ snook, like the crackers say, and drink an Igloo cooler.”
“Was that Doris I just spoke with?”
“That’s her, yeah. You’ll love Doris.”
“Ozzie, if it’s safe for me to visit you there, why are we doing this public-phone song-and-dance?”
“Just because it’s fun, Doom boy. I thought you were the big one for the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
“Have you spoken to the Lady in Black?”
“…Uh, no. Tried. Been trying. No answer.”
“Then are you aware somebody beat hell out of her?”
“…What do you mean?”
“I mean I couldn’t tell how old she was from three feet away!”
“Oh, well, she often gets in scrapes. She’s kinky, you know the kind I mean. So never mind tomorrow. How about I come on out there and meet you today. Where you located?”
“I need twenty-four hours to think about this, Ozzie.”
“Come on, Doom, don’t dick me up here.”
“I won’t. Call me at this number tomorrow nine o’clock.”
“Come on, Doom—”
“By the way,” Doom said, “the Lady in Black asked me to tell you that you owe her.”
OMNIUM SETTLEMENT
Doom discovered a cleverly collapsible bicycle with tiny wheels and a high seat stowed in Staggerlee’s lazaret. Pondering the Ozzie problem and his own future, he pedaled from the dock at Bird Cut toward Omnium Settlement. Before he had pedaled two hundred yards, Doom recognized that he had blundered. He wore no hat. His brain began to fry. The edges of things shimmered, mutated. He made a mental note to buy a hat in his hometown, perhaps a sombrero. He had forgotten the power of this southern sun, but then, he hadn’t been beneath it since childhood. The wind had died overnight, and by now, noontime, the Atlantic had fallen slack, lakelike. Nothing moved but heat waves. Doom barely moved, but, being filmed, he tried to make it look good. He mused on the indignity of a fatal heat stroke aboard this funny little bike. He’d slow, waver, then keel over sideways like a comedy act, thunk, dying funny for the cameras…
The Florida peninsula, particularly that necklace of islands at the extreme south, is a geological infant. The world’s landmasses had inched into their present positions eons before there ever was a peninsula at the bottom of North America. Dinosaurs had lived and died, mammals had risen to ascendancy, and the first trick
le of humanity had crossed the land bridge from Asia while south Florida was still submerged.
Once, the earth was warm, but then it turned cold. Four successive “Ice Ages” followed. Glaciers plodded south, gouging out the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basin, and melting glaciers deposited as rubble such features as Long Island, Cape Cod, and Martha’s Vineyard, literally forming anew the eastern half of the continent. While most of the world’s water was locked up in ice, sea levels fell, and bumps in the bottom of the shallow sea that had covered the Florida peninsula emerged as dry land. Finally, after the Wisconsin Ice Age, about fifteen thousand years ago, south Florida and the Keys had assumed roughly their present form.
But this was not land in the sense that a Kansas farmer would use the word. There was no soil. Along the eastern rim the land, once the seaward face of a coral reef, emerged as naked limestone. To the west, in the bays, the “islands” were nothing more than shoals and sandbars in the oozy, marly sea bottom. The only aspect this land shared with Kansas farmland was that it wasn’t underwater.
No one knows how long the islands baked naked in the sun before vegetation arrived. Perhaps it was a long time, because not just any plant would do. It is a rare plant able to survive in saltwater. But one can.
The red mangrove.
Though red mangrove forests reach a mature height of thirty feet, the first generation of Florida pioneers reported primeval mangrove forests along the western side of Omnium Key and the shores of Small Hope Bay soaring over a hundred feet tall. Tough prop roots arc out from the central bole to grasp the bottom and eke out whatever nourishment is available in the hostile saline environment. Even before the forest is mature, the maze of prop roots and trunks is impenetrable to man. He can and does destroy the forest with machines, but he cannot walk through it.
Terrestrial trees drop their seeds into the soil, where they germinate and sprout, but that simple strategy for survival would fail in the mangrove’s environment, where the seeds would drown in seawater. Instead, the mangrove propagates viviparously, producing its young directly on the parent tree.
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