Matecumbe (12 page)

“Ever since yesterday I’ve been psyching myself up to leave. And perhaps I really am getting a little homesick for Philadelphia. The suitcase full of dirty laundry tells me it’s time to go home.

“But there is one thing I can’t do when I’m in my house,” Melissa noted, pointing to Joe and smiling a bit wistfully.

“While I’m lying in bed at home, trying to fall asleep, I can’t listen to the ocean.”

“Someday soon, my lady,” Joe commiserated, with his arm around her shoulder, “there’ll be another time, another dance.”

Joe led the two-car convoy, driving his personal automobile, not the police cruiser. And Melissa kept her rental a constant six lengths behind him as they traveled along two-lane Route 1.

The traffic was minimal until they reached Key Largo, where the road split briefly into a four-lane configuration.

Once they passed over the drawbridge at Grouper Creek, there was still about a half-hour stretch to go of narrow, deserted macadam—with highly visible water on both sides. Melissa hoped that the sea level was already at its highest tide, because, during several brief moments, the glistening waters to the right and to the left seemed to be higher than her shoulders.

At one point during the drive, Melissa noticed the remnants of an old Burma Shave advertising sign perched in the hard coral just off the highway.

“All of Islamorada was like one big step back in time,” she told herself. “The charm of the entire Florida Keys is in being able to get a taste of rural America as it was in the 1950s, or maybe even the 1940s, without having to travel somewhere far inland in the Midwest, hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean.”

Joe had planned a brief respite on the way to the Miami airport—a visit to the sprawling grounds of the Everglades National Park.

For about twenty minutes of travel time to the west of Route 1, through vast fields of sprouting tomato plants, they zoomed their way toward a meeting, face-to-face, with Florida’s famed alligators.

“This is definitely farm country,” Melissa told herself, surveying the acres of tomatoes and what she perceived to be an occasional field of green peppers.

She was charmed at the sight of the single-engine crop dusters that flew but a few feet over the roadway, spreading white, artificial clouds that covered the vegetables.

When she and Joe arrived at the visitors’ center, they saw that there were only a handful of other tourists in the park.

“This is a good luck stop for us,” Melissa told Joe. “I just saw a cat walking behind those bushes. Cats are always good luck.”

Melissa was especially glad to be able to step out of her air-conditioned car and into the warming sun again—with Joe at her side. She wished, however, that she could be wearing a comfortable pair of shorts and a tank top instead of the prim brown skirt and high-collared, matching blouse that she called her “take an airplane outfit.”

The park itself provided two main paths. The first was much like a boardwalk, the kind that made Atlantic City famous. This version stretched for about a half-mile, in a huge circle, through and just barely over the lush green swampland.

Melissa was bending over the railing when she took her first look at a live alligator. It was swimming, ever so stealthily, through what appeared to be shallow water.

At one point, a group of three other alligators, much smaller, congregated directly under the boardwalk. They were vocal, too, making the guttural sounds that dogs emit when they expect to be fed.

“I think they’re barking,” Melissa told Joe.

“They are.”

“If I close my eyes,” she joked, squinting, “it sounds like the Key West greyhound track.”

“You’d better walk quickly, my dear,” Joe counseled, “it must be feeding time.”

The second of the parkland walkways coursed through an overgrown tropical jungle. Soon after entering this pristine setting, Melissa and Joe beheld a sunken grove filled with wide-bodied divi-divi trees that lay sprawled before them, leafless and sporting outgrowths of gnarled wood that gave the appearance of a school of giant octopi brandishing their menacing tentacles.

Multicolored flowers were plentiful on both sides of the path, as were towering patches of bamboo.

“It looks like an immense floral arrangement, designed in heaven,” Melissa offered, “absolutely breathtaking.

“The way the long-stemmed flowers are bunched together, hanging over both sides of the path, makes it look spooky. I expect to see the eyes of a lion cub peering out at me.”

A brief, five-minute walk took them to the far reaches of the path. And except for the chirping of an occasional bird and the whispering of the warm air as it whistled through the scrub pines, they were alone.

Melissa and Joe, arm-in-arm now, were soaking up the solitude of the forest and luxuriating in the warm feelings generated by two people who truly care for each other.

“If I could go back in time and be twenty years old again,” Melissa revealed, “I’d attack you immediately, and we’d be lying in the grass under the shade of that tree.”

Without saying a word in response, Joe brought her closer to him and hugged her gently. Quite naturally, they stopped to kiss.

Rubbing noses together, like two enraptured high schoolers on a first date, they pecked at each other’s lips a number of times and then hugged, again, while swaying, ever so slightly, to the rhythm of the tropical breezes.

But before their minds, or their desires, could leap to any more erotic activity, they heard the sounds of oncoming footsteps. Muffled voices indicated the approach of children.

Within seconds, Melissa and Joe were smiling and saying hello to their fellow tourists, a family of four.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” the father of the group offered, as he held onto the tiny hand of his blonde and toddling daughter. “Makes you kind of wish you could live forever.”

“No, not quite,” Melissa thought, as she clutched Joe’s hand even tighter. “LOVE forever would be more like it.”

In less than an hour after leaving the Everglades, they had arrived at the airport in Miami. The first step was to turn in the rental car. Also, Melissa made it a point to check her luggage—far in advance of the flight’s departure time.

Soon afterward, she and Joe were headed off for a bit of last-minute sightseeing.

They visited for a while at the famed flamingo exhibit in the nearby town of Hialeah. Although the Hialeah racetrack itself was closed and would not begin its yearly thoroughbred meeting until February, the exotic bird exhibit on the grounds was open all year round.

Hundreds of beautiful pink birds make their home alongside the racetrack’s two man-made lakes.

Occasionally, a group of flamingos will soar skyward, flying off for a few seconds in a wave of color before landing effortlessly on their long, spindly legs.

“They look like one big pink cloud, don’t they, flitting across the sky?” Melissa commented, “as graceful in the air as they are on the ground.”

“The fact that they’re pink sets them apart, I guess,” Joe noted. “It makes them unusual. No one would care if they were gray, or if they were blackbirds, or pigeons.”

“Sort of like blue food, is that what you’re saying?” Melissa countered. “That’s why I always love to eat blueberries. They look so neat. And, really, there isn’t any other food that’s blue.”

“No other food, you say?

“Hmmmm, now you’ve got me thinking,” Joe admitted, deliberating. “Before the end of the day, I guess I’m going to have to come up with the name of another kind of blue food.

“Just you wait, lady. Just you wait.”

The final stop on their itinerary was at yet another of southern Florida’s many wagering emporiums—the Miami jai alai fronton, where they relaxed over lunch.

“Horses, dogs, jai alai, they’re all separation centers,” Joe wisecracked, in reference, sarcastically, to the separation of money from wallets.

The game of jai alai, extremely popular in the Miami area, is of Basque origin, Joe told her.

Distantly similar to racquetball, it is played either as a series of singles matches, man against man, or in pairs, with two teammates doing battle against two other teammates.

Instead of a racquet, though, each player uses a wicker “cesta,” a basketlike mitt strapped to the wrist. The ball, called a “pelota,” is caught in the cesta and hurled toward a wall at speeds that can reach in excess of one hundred miles per hour.

Just as in tennis, the ball must be returned by an opponent before it bounces twice. Two bounces or a failure to catch results in a lost point.

“The word ‘fronton’ refers to the building in which jai alai is played,” Joe explained. “Aside from animal racing of one kind or another, this is the only other sport in America that you can bet on—legally, that is.”

Melissa enjoyed watching the games, seeing the short-sleeved, helmeted players jumping, running wildly, and literally climbing walls to return a steady series of difficult shots. The balls most often dropped were low, spinning volleys that hit the cestas and popped out.

Melissa also noticed that the “standing room only” section, with its fifty-cent admission charge, was jam-packed with fans. “Most all are men,” she noted, while surveying this Miami crowd. “Cigars, gray beards, and rumpled baseball caps. From the looks of this group, yuppies aren’t the targeted audience for jai alai.”

“Definitely an older crowd,” Joe said, “with few women.”

“It’s great fun to watch this game,” Melissa beamed. “And everybody here seems to be really getting into it, what with all the loud yelling.”

“Half of the cheers are in English,” Joe added, “while the others sound like Spanish.”

“I think I hear a third language,” Melissa stated.

“What’s that?”

“New York.”

“Jai alai doesn’t need betting to be fun,” Joe believed. “All the players look evenly matched. There doesn’t seem to be any need for scientific betting strategies. It’s like playing a roulette wheel or putting money on a throw of the dice.”

To spur Melissa’s interest level even higher, Joe bought her a win ticket in the third game on the number eight player, Carlos.

“He’s doing well, isn’t he?” Melissa exclaimed, as she watched the action.

“Yes. He looks quick.”

“Go, Carlos, go,” she encouraged.

Near the end of his match, Carlos was only a single point away from a victory at betting odds of six-to-one. At that point in the action, he just barely missed an attempt to catch his opponent’s tricky backhand shot, which had ricocheted, at a horrendous angle, off the back wall.

“He dropped it,” Melissa screamed. “Oh, that was stupid. Really dumb. Did you see that? He just dropped the ball for no good reason.”

“Tough luck.”

“Don’t buy me any more tickets,” Melissa told Joe, half-jokingly. “Frustration like this is something I don’t need.”