Florida Heatwave (27 page)

I tapped a Winston from the pack and tucked it into the corner of my mouth, hoped I could fool my stomach into thinking it was full. The first drag hit my lungs like sandpaper. The second drag tasted like smoke and blood, and that’s when I noticed the tightness on the skin of my fingers—the same metallic taste of years gone by and cuts on the job before Union coffee breaks.

I smoked that Winston and thought about Kenny racing towards the Pensacola Bay Bridge and beyond that, to Mobile.

The Chrysler was upside down, resting against the slash pines.

I tossed the cigarette out onto the road and pulled my car to a stop on the shoulder. I thought about getting out, but I’m not afraid to admit that it unsettled me the way the car was in the trees, and the nagging feeling that maybe I’d caught up to Kenny. I turned down the radio.

What I hoped then, was that another car, maybe two, maybe a cop would come barreling down Smith Creek, pulling over to see what was to see, but as the minutes passed, grinding like bone, it became clear to me that the only person left on Smith Creek was me, and whoever might have been in the Chrysler.

I opened the door, engine still running. As I was about to get out, my first foot already on the ground, he emerged from the darkness. Long haired. Bleeding. Arms stretched wide.

Christ-like in the glow of the headlights.

He stumbled forward, slow but determined. His mouth moved, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“Are you okay?” I yelled over the sound of my idling car. “Do you need an ambulance?”

“I’m hurt.”

“What happened?”

“I wrecked. Deer got me.”

I studied his face. He was cut up good.
Is this what Kenny would look like? Is this the look of a man who would stab his girlfriend and dump her on the side of the road?
Maybe. But he also did a convincing job of looking like a guy that had tasted his steering wheel at forty miles an hour.

“Where you goin?” I asked.

He took another step closer. His knee shook, then buckled. Collapsed into an awkward pile of limbs and grunts. Stretched out an arm towards me.

“Get me out of here.”

“Where you goin’?” I repeated.

“West.”

“Where you comin’ from?”

No answer.

“Where you comin’ from?” I asked again.

“Panacea. The beach. Man, I need a doctor, quit askin’ me so many damn questions.”

“You got a name?”

He paused, sized me up through squinty eyes. “Rick.”

“Anybody with you,
Rick?”

“What?”

“Anybody in the car with you? Anybody comin’ with you from Panacea?”

He pushed himself up to his knees. Rubbed at his jaw. Teeth grit. Squinting into the headlights.

“I’m by myself. Now help me get into your fucking car before I have to do something we’ll both regret.”

“You always drive like such a goddamn old lady?” he asked from the passenger seat. “Put you foot on the goddamn gas pedal already.”

“Trying not to wreck,” I said.

I turned to him, watching his hands, waiting for the knife to come out, to make its way into my chest. With the way the trees grew over the road, and with the closeness of us in the car, I felt even more trapped than before.

Then again, maybe
Rick
wasn’t Kenny. Maybe he was just some guy who had driven his car off the road. Such a thing wasn’t impossible to imagine. But why hadn’t he stopped for the girl?

“I’m trying not to die.”

I ignored his plea, kept an even pace with my high beams leading the way. In the quiet I could hear his breathing, labored as it was.

He let his head hang out the window.

“How far west you going?” I yelled. “California?”

When he came back in, he wiped at his eyes with the backs of his hands. “I ain’t thought that far ahead. It’s been a long day.”

“That was a bad wreck.”

“That ain’t all of it, neither. I found out today that my girl—one I’ve been meaning to marry—she’s been sleepin’ with
my brother.
Now can you believe that? Girl I’ve been givin’ everything to and she can’t even stop from taking up with my own damn brother.”

There was him. There was me. Somewhere in all of it, there was a knife.

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Not half as sorry as me. First damn time in my life that I think I found one good enough to marry, and what’s she gone and done?”

“There’s plenty of good ones out there …”

“I thought she’d be forever. Broke my damn heart.”

Whether or not she’d really slept with his brother, Kenny was convinced of it, and in the way he told it—it wasn’t hard to hear how much it’d hurt him. I actually began to feel sorry for him in the way I could feel sorry for a murderer riding shotgun.

“You know, I ain’t gonna lie, I wasn’t always faithful to all the girls I’ve been with. But I never looked at another when I was with her. I’ve been drunk, I’ve been high, I’ve been in jail, I’ve been everywhere but hell itself, and I ain’t so much as cast a sideways glance at another. You understand?”

He clutched his ribs, let out a groan.

“I think, yeah.” I looked again for the knife, but only saw his fists clenched, eyes shut tight. “You gonna leave her?”

“Whaddya mean am I gonna leave her?”

“Y’all gonna try and work things out, or are you moving on?”

“Work things out? It’s too late for that. Shit … work things out? How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know. I guess the way I see it, we all make mistakes. We all need forgiveness. Forgive us our trespasses and all that.”

“Some things can’t be forgiven.” He slumped a little more in his seat. “You go to church?”

“Not lately,” I said.

“I’ll tell you something—before you showed up, I prayed. I got close with Jesus and his old man, trying to make good.”

“And then I showed up?”

“Ain’t that the way it’s supposed to work? You tell them every bad thing you’ve done, and then you’re saved?”

I tapped the brakes as a raccoon cut across the road. He put his hand on the dashboard to brace himself.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Sounds like you ain’t completely saved,” I said. “What hurts the most?”

“Tired. Dizzy. My head. That’s where I got it worst.”

“How’d you cut your chest?”

He looked down at his shirt, at all the dried blood. “I don’t know. Don’t think I did.”

“You must be bleedin. All that blood gotta come from somewhere.” “Yeah,” he leaned towards the window, “I guess it must.” We drove five minutes in silence, Kenny with his head out the window, me keeping an eye ahead.

“You gotta get me a doctor,” he finally said. “I think my ribs are poking into my heart.”

“I’m doing the best I can.”

The needle hovered a little below thirty.

I worried that he was on his way out, twitching back and forth between awake and asleep, on the passenger seat. After he had gone still for a few minutes, I nudged him. “Rick?” No response. “Rick?” Stillness.

I thought about it then, maybe in his sleep he would give up secrets, would make things known. “Kenny?”

He rolled his head. Jerked a little. Then went back to sleep.

I had a choice to make by the time I got to the end of Smith Creek Road. “Hey man,” I shook his shoulder. “You okay?” He muttered something. Felt heavier than he should have. “You want me to go left or right? You want I should head to the clinic in Hosford or the hospital in Tallahassee?”

I idled under the trees waiting for a response that didn’t come, then turned around completely, got back on Smith Creek Road, filled with notions I didn’t completely understand, that I couldn’t make clean. Every now and then I asked him questions, told him stories about church.

We drove past his car, still on the side of the road, undisturbed. I kept the pedal heavy and the beams bright as I hurried back to her body, afraid that the longer it took the more likely it was for a stranger, some unfamiliar face to get to the scene, the kind of son of a bitch who would have questions and pointy fingers.

When we got there, it wasn’t hard to see her if you knew where to look. She was on her back, head on the soft dirt, hands on her chest.

“Is that your girl?” I asked. “She the one?”

“Where are we?” His eyes fluttered, he struggled weakly.

I opened the passenger door and grabbed him by his arms, dragged him out of the car. The heels of his boots scraped along the dirt as I pulled. I rested for a breath, the humidity filled my lungs.

“I need a doctor.”

I knew he needed more. They both did.

I let him drop, his head on her arm. He tried sitting up but couldn’t. Maybe that was all the energy he had left.

“We are gathered here tonight … Even in death we are reminded of … Kenny was a troubled man …”

Every eulogy I tried to deliver fell flat.

I bent down to lift her head onto Kenny’s arm, the two of them looking like stargazing lovers, staring heavenward.

Together.

BY TOM CORCORAN

Spontaneity leaves trails. Opportunity works best.

A close call years ago taught me to take my time. That approach has served me well. At this stage, this time around, the cruises—three of the dreary bastards—were the price to pay. Not a small cost, and not meaning money: talk about cigarette smoke and cattle-call dining. The damned ships are all-you-can-eat chow caverns with bow thrusters and harsh PA systems. You are insulated from the rolling ocean. Unless it’s on the schedule, the wind does not blow your hair. There is no scenery beyond foamy wavetops or, closer to land, sticks with red triangles, or with green rectangles. Once a day, unless clouds interfere, you get sunrise and sunset. In the days of film, Kodak loved the profits of sunsets. One thing, certain as hell. After this sailing I will never go back to Ocho Rios.

The hoteliers afloat think highly of their mission, their canned optimism. The hokey departure ritual in Ft. Lauderdale somehow combined a security screening with the issuance of stateroom keys and dinner tickets. The checkin clerks spoke as if the boarding pass—my Glee Ticket—was more important than my passport. Don’t we long for the days when our driver’s license would get us back and forth to Grand Cayman? Imperative at this stage: I requested the late seating for my evening meals. Sent off like a child in a school hallway, I waved my Glee thing at uniformed smilers and was directed down ramps and chutes. At some point I was no longer on land.

With each offshore trip the passageways became longer, the bulkheads and flooring more dreary. Carpet colored, I supposed, to mask stains of seasickness, though it contrasted oddly with incandescent lobbies, surreal lounges, and Art Deco snack bars. Walking behind a slow-moving couple, I carried my laptop case and camera bag to the aft end of the fourth deck. The couple appeared tormented by the concept that only odd-numbered rooms were accessed in the starboard corridor. I informed them that their even-numbered cabin was to port, thereby doubling their confusion.

A cabin steward in a gray uniform—a man in his mid-thirties—greeted me with a weird smile of despair. Already groveling for his trip’s-end tip. He quickly determined that my stateroom was in his area. His buzz-cut head was as round though not as large as a volleyball, his muscular neck a mismatch to his narrow shoulders.

I already knew his name but I glanced at his tag and pretended not to make out the bottom word. “Where are you from, Arso?”

“Bosnia,” he lied, with his guttural eastern European accent, “but I left that country twelve years ago. Now, when I am not working on this ship, which I do for seven years, I have a small apartment in Hollywood, Florida.”

“Wonderful town,” I said. “I’ve been there a few times.”

“My girlfriend from secondary school always told me I was such an actor, I would end up in Hollywood. Wrong one, don’t you think?”

“Wrong for the movies,” I said, “but a better place to live.”

“Many people tell me that.”

“And living is better than the alternative, eh?”

Arso smiled. “I have heard that, too, sir.”

I barely had time to find a Bushmills miniature in my shaving kit and chug the devil before they called their mandatory lifeboat drill. I followed color-coded arrows to the open deck where lifeboats hung from numbered davits. We hadn’t even left the dock. I was amused by the folly of a free-forall summons to our muster stations—as if an exercise might streamline an emergency evacuation of people too heavy to use stairways.

Arso stood with several other cabin stewards near the starboard entrance to a huge dining room.

“Arso, are there ocean charts in each boat?” I said.

He offered a pensive, puzzled look. “I am not sure,” he said. “But a very good idea. I will make a suggestion if this is not so.”

Inside, seated at tables among strangers, all of us wearing droopy, uninflated life vests, I noticed a woman thirty feet away scouting the assembly for signs of life. Forty years old, give or take, with a wistful Mona Lisa face but expectant eyes. It was a bad time to make a connection, but I made eye contact, smiled, and promised myself to find her during the cruise. The lifeboat drill—to make lawyers happy—lasted a full half hour. I returned to my cabin, took more time with my next Bushmills miniature, and slept for forty-five minutes. According to the daily guide to events, I missed a Krazy by Karaoke session, a raffle, and a cha cha class.

Here’s the short version. In 1995 three young Serbian soldiers in a city called Banja Luka killed two American soldiers in cold blood. The Serbs were arrested by NATO troops, quickly convicted, but let go on a wartime court technicality. They saved my brother from coming home with the war on his shoulders. But they fucking well kept him from coming home. His tags and flag arrived by UPS. I’ve already taken care of Nikola Bokaj, the barista in Portland, Oregon. It took me five weeks to learn that he was borrowing from a thug moneylender to buy abortions for two different women. I approached the thug, told him Nikola sent me. I tried to beg a loan, told him I needed to buy a special, collectible Corvette. The man told me in venomous words to walk away and forget that I had seen him. Two days later, some vicious maniac whacked the barista, which left two Serbs to be dealt with. After Arso Petrovic, I will visit Petar Djapic, the cab driver in Quebec City.