Fever Tree

by Tim Applegate

  Two or three days a week he worked in the back room of Frank Paterson’s antique store sanding the doors of an armoire or reattaching a loose veneer. At noon, Frank went over to the Delta Café and came back with paper bags filled with cheeseburgers and coleslaw, onion rings and French fries, slices of apple pie. In between bites he talked about his daughter Lureen and her husband Charley, who one day would inherit his father’s newspaper. Then he reached into his wallet to show him a photograph of his other daughter, Maggie, and Dieter heard the adoration in Frank’s voice but the pain, too, the disappointment. Frank made it clear that Maggie’s live-in boyfriend was not much of a catch, and that even though his oldest daughter could take care of herself—because Maggie, Frank assured him, was what used to be called sassy—he and Janice were worried about the boy. What kind of role model was a bouncer at a strip club for a six-year-old boy?

  In the afternoons, Dieter drove out to Christopher Key to swim, cruising past the old abandoned saltworks at the edge of the estuary then turning right onto the key. He favored solitude, avoiding the developed southern end of the island for the unspoiled beaches of the north. From the little-used parking lot, a sandy path strung with chains of morning glory meandered through a grove of sea pines and up over hillocks of dune. Then a hiss of waves and the first sight of the glowing water, a blue carpet woven, here and there, with white threads. In the shade of a cabbage palm he set up a folding chair and unpacked his gear: beach towel, fruit and water, paperback book.

  One day on the beachside trail, he encountered a black snake as long as his leg and pulled up short, awed by the size of this serpent. He recalled a water moccasin sliding past his shoulder one day as he swam across a limestone quarry outside Bloomington with Jen. College students came to the quarry to dive off the cliffs or to lie naked in the sun, tanning their backsides, and at first Jen had been too shy to skinny-dip alongside the others. But by the third or fourth visit, she began to worry that her refusal to disrobe like everyone else might be viewed as arrogance, so she finally relented, quickly flinging off her swimsuit before diving off a shelf of rock.

  The languid waters of the Gulf were still tepid from the heat of summer unless you ventured out past the sandbar and the safety of the shelf. There, in the deeper water, the temperature abruptly plummeted as Dieter dove toward the sandy floor, kicking his legs against the current until his muscles began to cramp. Back on the surface he swam in long lazy strokes, striking a line parallel to the beach in the draft of an incoming tide that further impelled his momentum. He swam until his arms grew weak and his lungs burned from the flame of exertion. Then he flipped over on his back and floated, allowing the waves to carry him into the shallows and eventually onto the shore, where he dried the saltwater off his skin, peeled one of the oranges he had purchased at the roadside stand that morning, and cracked open the book he was reading now, a novel by Thomas McGuane.

  In the late afternoon, thunderheads as thick and dark as beef broth roiled in from the west and the wind quickened in the cabbage palms, rattling the fronds. Dieter had become adept at anticipating the speed of these storms, and he liked to wait until the last minute to gather his gear and jog back to the parking lot moments before the first drops spattered the ground. Driving back into town, he thought about the deckhands out on the water monitoring the approaching clouds even as they winched in yet another fishnet bulging with oysters or shrimp. If the rains came early, the deckhands would gather at The Tides to hoist pints of lager to the vagaries of the sea, refusing to acknowledge how worried they were about reduced paychecks in this season of storms. Sometimes when Dieter strolled into the bar the deckhands called out his name, knowing he would buy the next round even if they insisted he shouldn’t.

  Once a week, on the pay phone in front of the Gibson, he called Laurie.

  What the hell, Dieter. When are you coming home? When he failed to respond, she raised her voice. I want you to listen to me now. Come home.

  It’s not that easy.

  Sure it is. Hop in your truck. Point it north. There’s nothing for you down there.

  You don’t know that.

  You may as well be in Singapore. In Spain.

  Yeah well, I reckon those are some good places too.

  I’m not talking about places, Dieter.

  Barcelona. Seville.

  And neither are you.

  He pictured Laurie at her kitchen table with the phone in one hand and a pencil in the other, grading exams.

  I’ve been doing some writing, Laur.

  A long silence then Laurie’s voice again, subdued now. Yeah?

  Yeah.

  What kind of writing?

  Notes.

  Notes?

  About the town.

  Another long pause. He could hear her fingertips, or perhaps the eraser-end of her pencil, tapping the table. Talk to me, Dieter. Tell me what I need to know.

  With an ease that surprised him he described the harbor at sunrise, the abandoned saltworks, the beach at Christopher Key. He told her about Frank Paterson and Consuela the housekeeper and good old Mr. Gold; about the deckhands on the trawlers, Uncle Billy in his flowerbeds, the statue of General Lee. He even related the incident between the two Mexicans and Colt Taylor at the Blue Moon the other evening, deprecating his own integral role in that affair. And when he ran out of breath Laurie gave him a minute to recover before saying, More, Dieter, give me more. So he took out his notebook to read to her what he had written today on the beach at Christopher Key, the way he used to read to her when he was a teenager, tasting the words on his tongue and wondering if some day when he released them into the blind air they might assume a kind of resonance, like birdsong, or wind.

  He flipped open the notepad. That afternoon he crossed over the last mountain pass and dropped down into the valley, into hardwood forest, hardwood swamp. Hill country for the next twenty miles but bottomland too, brackish water the color of iced tea swirling around trunks of cypress, the swamp’s oldest trees.

  On cue, Laurie chimed in, co-authoring it the way she had when they were children sharing this, their first great secret.

  Slowing down.

  Yes.

  Taking his time.

  That’s right.

  Avoiding the less traveled roads to satisfy . . . to satisfy what, Dieter?

  An urge. An ache.

  For real country. In her muted voice, this sounded like a prayer.

  Exactly, Dieter said. For real country. For red clay.

  12

  In response to one of Mr. Gold’s gentle, if insistent, queries, Dieter sheepishly admitted that he had indeed polished off his entire order of banana pancakes down at the Delta Café that morning, with a side of fried eggs. Which was why, he declared, it was time for some serious exercise. He patted a belly that remained, despite his robust appetite, washboard flat.

  Gotta hike off some of that maple syrup, Mr. Gold.

  With a wisp of a smile the hotel manager adjusted his ascot. The subject of food was dear to the man’s heart, a portal into the past. Tried the pecan pie yet?

  Oh yes.

  And the butter, Mr. Dieter, did they remember to put that little pad of butter on top?

  They certainly did.

  The smile widened, the bifocals glittered, the ascot flamed red against the starched white collar of his shirt. And you let it melt first, right, before the first bite?

  I assure you, sir, that I let it melt.

  Mr. Gold flushed, as pleased as a proud father beaming down on his dutiful son. Well that’s fine, young man, just fine. You know my mother was the one who taught them that little trick. Did I ever tell you the story?

  No sir, I don’t believe you did.

  Five minutes later, after hearing how Mr. Gold’s mother burst into the Delta Café one evening to inform the bewildered owner that he was not serving his pecan pie i
n the traditional southern manner, with a little pad of butter on top, Dieter patted his belly again, steering the manager back to the present day.

  Exercise, you say?

  Removing a trail guide from his back pocket, Dieter pointed out the stretch of the Wakulla River he planned to hike that morning, a streamside footpath weaving through a tract of deep, piney woods. He had recently purchased a new camera, he said, and he wanted to snap some photos.

  Well now you be careful out there, young man. You carry, I take it, a first-aid kit?

  Dieter assured Mr. Gold that indeed he did, concluding that a little white lie was preferable to the truth as long as it tempered the hotel manager’s absurd but touching concern.

  And a snakebite kit?

  Oh yes.

  Aloe vera?

  You bet.

  At the trailhead he parked his truck along a gravel pullout, conducted a quick inventory of his backpack—canteen, camera, binoculars—compared the map in the book to the one on the trailhead sign, and set off.

  The air was muggy, the ground still damp from yesterday’s rain, but as soon as Dieter marched back into the shadows of the loblolly pines, he forgot, for the time being, about the heat. Strolling along the harbor in Crooked River or the beach on Christopher Key were pleasant enough diversions, but a wood like this was where Dieter felt most at home. When he was a boy, his father had taught him the pleasures of hiking, clearing an old deer trail that curled back through a tangle of trees behind their property to a hidden pond where catfish as long as Dieter’s arm swirled the muddy depths.

  Half a mile past the trailhead, the path crossed a rickety wooden bridge and from that point on more or less skirted the Wakulla River, twisting past quarter-moons of sugary sand exposed by the sluggish current or occasional cut banks where the channel ran clear. There were small hills heavily shaded by live oaks and the air was dense in there, breathless, close. Dozens of birds flitted in and out of the shadows mostly unseen, though Dieter could still identify, by their songs, red-winged blackbirds, some kind of warbler, and a scrub jay. Jen was the one who got him started, referring to the panels in Petersen’s Field Guide as they hiked a trail behind the house Dieter built for them a few miles south of Bloomington, not far from his dad’s, a leafy path skirting a narrow stream for two or three miles before the water plunged into the mouth of a cave so dark and labyrinthine the fish inside the cave remained albinos, schools of minnows as pale as summer clouds.

  It all came back to him now, the stream spilling over a cairn of boulders, the cattails nodding in the shallows, the wrens and sparrows that nested in the dark towers of beech that crowned the canopy, erasing the sky. And Jennifer, Jen . . . If he closed his eyes he could see her skipping down the trail into the next clearing, twirling around like a ballerina as she must have done when she was a little girl in New Hampshire growing up in the shadow of the White Mountains, hunting mushrooms, fishing, like Dieter, with her father, and hiking through woods like these.

  Think about it. How lucky we are. You and me, Dieter! She had flung up her arms, spinning. All this!

  Dieter knelt on the lip of a cut bank to photograph the serrated blades of a saw palmetto but he had lost his focus. Crushed, he capped the camera lens and slumped down with his back against the trunk of a tree. You and me, Dieter! All this!

  After awhile he wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands and stood up. It was no good now but you had to go on. The days would unwind like clockwork, without meaning, but you had to go on. He cinched the backpack, scraped the mud from his boots on a spear of rock, and set off again. The trick was to think, if possible, about nothing.

  A mile later he stopped to consult the map, to confirm that this was the far end of the loop, the juncture where a fork of the river swerved off to the left before draining into a small pond on the edge of the forest, while another tributary circled back to the road.

  The heat was oppressive, a blanket of steam. Dieter studied the miniature blue bowl on the map, the unnamed pond, and wondered if it was deep enough to swim in. The weight of the past had induced a kind of lassitude that made him yearn to lie down in the leaves and fall asleep, but that wouldn’t do. You had to go on. One way or another you had to go on. Pocketing the trail guide, he opted for the left fork, hoping that a vigorous swim might revive his energy, perhaps even salve, for a time, his broken spirit.

  The trees opened up, revealing the boomerang-shaped pond. On the far bank there was a sturdy dock, a trim lawn with a canoe rack, and farther back, a cabin in the woods. Dieter swept his binoculars across the property. When he didn’t spot a vehicle in the drive or anyone moving around the cabin he loosened the backpack, unlaced his hiking boots, and stripped off his clothes.

  Having finished her morning chores, Maggie shuffled into the kitchen and peeked out the window at the sky, the trees, the reeds in the shallows and the slender bars of shadow they cast. Then a swift cloud passed in front of the sun and in the sudden gloom of that moment she saw, to her astonishment, a naked man on the far bank glance up at the same passing cloud before wading, step by cautious step, into the water. The chiseled body, pageboy haircut, genital thatch: in an instant Maggie took it all in. Transfixed, she watched the man lift his arms, knife the surface, and emerge moments later to swim—gracefully, effortlessly—the length of her pond.

  13

  One night Colt agreed, or more accurately allowed himself to be coerced, into watching a foreign movie on TV. No fan of subtitles, at first he had balked at the idea of wasting a perfectly fine evening on some dark and depressing foreign film. But when Maggie, who had finally allowed Colt back into her bed, strongly hinted that if he made it through the entire movie she would consider performing that little erotic trick he had recently become so obsessed with, he had finally relented, settling into his recliner with a bowl of popcorn and a cold can of beer just as a soaring helicopter, in the very first scene no less, lofted a statue of Jesus over downtown Rome.

  A few weeks before, when her sister Lureen returned from a road trip to Tampa raving about the new art museum she and Charley had visited while they were there, Maggie had decided that her life lacked Culture with a capital C, and so had begun a campaign to correct this oversight by dragging home from the local library coffee-table art books, postmodern novels, and collections of poems. With the passion of a true convert she also scoured the single shelf of the Crooked River video store devoted to foreign titles, determined to watch every last one of them. Thus dreary old Bergman for a solid week followed, tonight, by her first Fellini. Colt hoped it was all a passing fancy, but with Maggie you never knew.

  The next evening Colt recalled how strange and confusing the movie had been, what with that flurry of dialogue racing across the bottom of the screen. The only scenes that had held his interest were the ones that took place in the string of nightclubs along the Via Veneto. The grotesque close-ups of the denizens of those swanky joints had reminded him of the sorry patrons of the Black Kat Club, because the air of malaise that hung like smoke over those chic Italian trattorias wafted across the Kat, too, particularly on a humdrum Tuesday evening like this one. Bored strippers going through the motions while the usual crowd tried to rise to the occasion, no pun intended, when the deejay in his glass booth entreated them to put their hands together and extend a warm Crooked River welcome to Bambi, the newest addition to Teddy Mink’s ever-growing stable of top-heavy babes. Bambi? Colt shook his head in dismay. What kind of fucking name was Bambi?

  Standing at his outpost at the end of the bar where he could monitor both the patrons and the front entrance, Colt allowed himself a brief fantasy. As Bambi coiled her naked limbs around the stripper’s pole the front door banged open and there was the great Fellini himself sweeping into the Kat, trailing in his wake an entourage of fans, to film a scene for his next movie. With theatrical flourish the famous director air kissed Colt on both cheeks before inquiring, in broken English, wh
ether the bouncer would be interested in playing a small but key role in the sequence he was getting ready to shoot.

  Colt? Outside, the paparazzi whizzed by on their little Italian scooters while Anita Ekberg sashayed past the Kat in a dress that left nothing to the imagination . . .

  Colt!

  Snapping out of it, Colt glared across the smoky room at Jeb, the night bartender, who was wiping down the counter with a greasy rag.

  What?

  Closin’ time, man, last call.

  While Jeb dimmed the lights and counted the cash in his register, Colt collected the last of the empty bottles from the horseshoe counter that surrounded the stage. He thought about La Dolce Vita, his first foreign film. Anita fucking Ekberg, man; now there was a real woman. You’d never see her humping a pole. He placed the empties in their cardboard cases, conducted a quick tour of the dressing room to make sure none of the strippers had passed out back there, and told Jeb that he would lock up.

  At the back door he secured the double lock and flipped on the security switch. He was looking forward to going home and heating up some dinner and watching a late movie, an American movie, on TV. Since he and Maggie had reached a sort of truce—since they had decided, that is, to be civil around each other—he had begun once again to enjoy his time at home.

  ‘Scuse me.

  Startled by a woman’s sudden voice he spun around, surprised to discover Nicky Meyers, pale as a wraith, standing next to the stage.