Whale Season (6 page)

Chapter 7

W
hen Leon was a boy, Whale Harbor used to be a town devoted to fun. Used to be the streets smelled of blue snow cones. The sun shone caramel corn. Buddy's Snake Petting Zoo sat next to the Whale Harbor Municipal Go-Cart Park, and the famed Ishmael & Son's Whale Watching Charters. The town had its own Ferris wheel. The merry-go-round was open year-round.

Back then Pettit's All-Star Alligator Farm was the main attraction. Leon's grandmother, Lettie Pettit, opened the place in 1960, right after Hurricane Donna. Operating a tourist attraction was never what the steel-spined woman had in mind, but she would later say it was divine destiny. And on some level she was entirely right.

Donna was the worst hurricane Florida had ever seen. Its eye was twenty-one miles wide. Winds sustained at 180 mph, gusts clocked in at 200.

“Sounded like the hooves of a thousand horses,” Lettie later said. “Like the horses of Armageddon.”

Hurricane Donna changed everything for most in this small town. Seventy-five were killed. The oyster beds were ruined. Houses were tossed like dice.

And Pettit's All-Star Alligator Farm was born.

Lettie had no choice. Her house had completely vanished; a sinkhole swallowed it whole. There was just a small deep lake where the pink clapboard used to be.

When she saw the destruction, she stared at the murky water, the thin layer of green algae, and the occasional bubble that rose from it, and said nothing. The only thing that remained of what was once her home was a rambling white fence and its gate that nearly shut tight.

When she finally spoke, “God's will,” she said, and the words sounded more like a cough, rough and low. It was clear that everything was lost except for the Pontiac she and her daughter, Po, drove to the shelter with.

“At least we got some place to sleep,” Po said quietly. She was just seventeen years old and eight months pregnant. The father was long gone. She looked on the verge of tears.

“This sorrow is not part of our bones,” Lettie told her daughter. “It's just looking for a place to rest a while.”

And then Lettie, who was an oysterman's widow from a long line of oystermen's widows, did the only thing she could do, a thing she did well—she made do.

She and Po drove into the next town and bought five pounds of chicken necks and fishing line. Then, armed with the necks and fast footwork, the women lured more than a dozen gators from a nearby creek into the sinkhole that was once their house. Slammed the gate behind each one. Tied it tight.

Once the alligators, or “All-Stars” as Lettie had begun to call them, were rounded up she bought two hammers, a truckload of lumber, a case of varnish, fourteen sacks of flour, six gallons of green paint and one of red. Two straw hats to ward off sunstroke. Lettie had a plan.

“And a plan,” she told Po, “is more than most people have.”

Even though she had no idea of how to create a top-rate tourist attraction, Lettie knew one thing for sure—it needed an entrance gate that could not be forgotten, something that grabbed attention and created a sense of wonder and excitement. So, using the All-Stars as models, the Pettit women fashioned themselves a twelve-foot-high alligator head, complete with an assortment of pointy teeth and a long red tongue. Varnished it until it was rock hard.

It was, certainly, an entrance gate like no other. Leaned a little to the right.

“That sure do look pretty,” Po said and tried to mean it.

Over the alligator's huge gaping mouth a sign read, “You pays your money, you takes your chances.”

And the tourist attraction was born. Three days later, so was Leon.

And so, for many years, a steady stream of visitors lined up two deep and walked into the gigantic gator grin to see Pettit's All-Stars. The alligators themselves were huge and hungry behind the peeling fence. “Quite a sight,” proclaimed the one-line listing in Florida's official tour book. And it was. Every now and then something from Lettie's sunken house would make its way to the surface—a wedding photo or Po's old teddy bear—and the gators would rush toward it roaring and focused. Visitors would “ooh” and “ah.”

But the star attraction of Pettit's was Miss Pearl, “The Amazing One-Ton Wonder.” Pearl was toothless and too lazy to be mean. Older than anyone could remember. When Lettie saw the docile alligator, she tied a straw hat around its head. The hat had a band of pink daisies, the price tag still hanging from it.

“She looks just like Minnie Pearl,” Lettie laughed.

“You sure are a looker, Miss Pearl,” Po said and itched her scaly chin as if she were an old fat tabby, Moon Pie–
eyed, and low to the ground.

Miss Pearl just yawned.

After that, four times a day, at 10
A.M.
, noon, 2 and
4
P.M.
, Po, in a cheesecake-tight swimsuit, leaned over the fence and shook a whole chicken in front of Miss Pearl's gigantic face. “What you say, Miss Pearl?” she'd ask. “Can you say ‘howdy'?”

The other alligators seemed to look away in shame as Po would shake the chicken hard and the plucked bird would shimmy from left to right as if doing the Peppermint Twist. “Let's hear a ‘howdy' for the good ole folks, Miss Pearl,” Po would say, praline sweet.

And, four times a day, the enormous alligator who had never been to the Grand Ole Opry would rub up against Po like a fat spoiled cat and wail an unearthly high pitched wail. It was a wail that sometimes, under the unrelenting subtropical sun, sounded like the Nashville star, but most days just sounded as if the alligator had a one-ton case of indigestion from swallowing all those chickens without chewing first.

“Amazing, isn't it?” Po would ask the crowd, then smile. Back then Mama Po was an angel in Spandex: creamy-skinned and Esther Williams slim. No matter what she'd say, all the men would clap. The women, reluctant and slightly green-eyed with envy, would nod and cluck.

But when the new highway was finished, visitors didn't have to drive near Whale Harbor anymore. Didn't come to whale watch. The Ferris wheel rusted in place. Vandals took apart the merry-go-round, bit by bit, chewing away at it like field mice. At the zoo, the snakes just slipped away.

Lettie died that season. Leon was only twelve years old when it happened. He was teetering in that limbo between childhood and manhood. His body, an odd giant. He came home from school one day and found Lettie in the ticket booth, her blue eyes, skyless. Her hand was still holding a ticket, waiting for the visitors who never seemed to come anymore. Lettie had been dead for hours. Nobody noticed except for the flies.

After that, Po and Leon often went hungry, feeding the gators instead of themselves. “Them snowbirds will be back,” Po said. “Nobody can forget Miss Pearl.”

After two winters, it became obvious that the visitors weren't coming back to Whale Harbor. Not now. Not ever. Po applied for food stamps. The All-Stars were scheduled to be skinned, sold for shoes. Leon tried hard not to cry.

“Got to be done, baby,” Po said and ran a hand through his sun-bleached hair, kissed his cheek, and said nothing more.

The night before the All-Stars were taken away, Leon sat up with Miss Pearl, feeding her a last meal of her favorite, marshmallow cream and bananas sandwiches on Wonder Bread. She gummed them by the loaf full. When she was done, she licked his hand in appreciation, as she always did. Put her massive head in his lap. Let him scratch the cool leather of her chin.

“Howdy,” Leon said to her over and over again, but Miss Pearl wouldn't say a thing. She just rolled her eyes back in her head and looked at him. It was as if she knew. At least that's what Leon thought. Made it hard to look her in the eye.

The next morning when the men came to get her, Leon took Miss Pearl's hat and put it under his bed. He kept it there for a long time. His mama was right. Nobody could forget Miss Pearl. Leon never forgot her at all.

Not even now.

Chapter 8

A
s they drive past Lucky's RV Round-Up, Jesus waves. “It's an American Dream,” he tells Dagmar.

“Sure,” she says. “Not my dream, but somebody's.”

In her rearview mirror, Dagmar sees the tail end of something parked around back by Leon's office—something large, shiny, and new. Where would he get a rig like that? she thinks. Bob the Round-Up Cowboy seems to wink. Dagmar speeds up. Some things are better left a mystery.

“So what are you doing in Whale Harbor?” she asks Jesus.

“I'm here to save souls,” he says in a Jehovah Witness kind of way.

This is not the kind of discussion Dagmar wants to have with a Jesus guy on Christmas morning—or ever. But he leans in. The air feels colder, damper, smells more like dying fish than saltwater. She wishes she'd left the top of the convertible up. His dark hair whips around his face. Makes him look even crazier, more dangerous.

This was just not a good idea, she thinks. Her heart revs.

“Are you ready for life everlasting?” he asks.

Dagmar pretends not to hear. “I'm going to drop you off at The Pink. You can get a bus from there to wherever you're going.”

She drives even faster. He knew her name. And is now waiting for an answer. Just ignore it, she thinks. Lack of sleep is making her stomach grind. Her hands sweat. She turns on the radio. Bing Crosby is dreaming of a white Christmas.

Jesus shrugs, sings along for a while. He has a nice voice, a solid baritone.

When Dagmar pulls into The Pink, it's closed. She turns the radio off. From The Pink it's miles away to the interstate, too far to walk. She looks at her watch, nearly 7
A.M.
Jimmy Ray is waiting. She looks at the man closely. This is more than a costume.

She has no idea what to do.

Before she can say anything, he says, “You stopped to pick me up because you want to believe in miracles; that's not such a bad thing.”

When he says this it feels true, at least a little.

“Well, I just—”

“I can wait here,” he says.

“But they're closed until tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is only a day away.”

Now, she feels badly. That small-town girl still within her thinks, He's just sad and alone and confused. I'm just overreacting.

“Hang on,” Dagmar says. “I'll run you out to the interstate, maybe you can catch a ride there. I just have to stop by and drop these gifts off. It's down the road. Just take a minute.”

The voices in Jesus' head are screaming, “Take her now. Do it.” Makes his hand shake.

He knows it would be so easy just to lean across the car, snap her neck with one single blow. Run the bridge of her nose through her brain.

Simple. He could do it. Quick. Merciful.

But a man has to have standards. It isn't clear to him yet if Dagmar should be saved. And so, Dr. Ricardo Garcia, firm in the belief that he is Jesus—at least for the moment—sings the hit solo from
Annie
.

“Tomorrow! Tomorrow!

I love ya, Tomorrow! . . .”

And the voices go silent. They hate show tunes.

Chapter 9

L
eon never expected Carlotta to leave on Christmas Day, pack up and go without a forwarding address. A two hundred and fifty thousand dollar land yacht is his and Carlotta doesn't even get to know about it, doesn't even get to roll around in its silk sheets, doesn't get to have that Cold Duck and lamé feeling.

He picks up the note that has fallen onto the floor, next to a pile of his dirty socks. The writing is large and lacy. The “Os” are round as powdered mini-doughnuts.

You know where to find me.
Carlotta.

Leon doesn't have a clue. She doesn't have a car. It's pretty far to walk to the interstate. The nearest town is Flamingo. There's a shortcut through the mangroves, so she can have gone there but it seems unlikely. It's not much of a town, smaller than Whale Harbor and well known for its mosquitoes. Black clouds of them swarm both day and night.

Leon suspects she's gone someplace with a mall.

He calls her cell phone again. No answer.

“Leave a message after the tone,” a voice says.

“I'm an idiot,” he says. “But then, you know that.”

Then he presses the “pound” key for “faster delivery.” Sits down hard on the waterbed. Waves crash beneath him. He wants to slowly lie back, sleep with the cold water lapping under the heels of his feet. He's not used to staying up all night. He's so tired, everything around him is moving slow and fast at the same time. Everything's a little blurry.

Outside, the sky is turning to india ink. The vapor lights of the trailer court shine through the bedroom skylight. Makes everything look like pink lemonade. That's what Dagmar used to say. When they were first married, she and Leon used to sit on lawn chairs in front of the Airstream and drink pink lemonade with sloe gin. They used to talk about the days when they could have a real kitchen, one with a real stove, not a hot plate. The kind of kitchen you can make tapioca in—even though Dagmar really can't cook. It was just the thought of it. Somebody making tapioca for you makes it a home.

Leon loves tapioca. Mama Po used to make it for him all the time. In poker,
tapioca
is slang for
tapped-out, broke, busted
. Sometimes, Leon thinks his mama was preparing him for what the rest of his life would bring, filling him up with his future.

But, still he loves it. Misses it. And her.

He lies on the bed and watches the stars come out one by one. When the sky looks bruised with them, he dials Dagmar's number. It goes into voice mail immediately.

“It's me,” he says and wants to tell her about playing poker with Jesus on Christmas Day, but the more he thinks about it, the queasier he gets. Something about the man's eyes, the suffering in them, makes him feel ashamed.

“Just wanted to say ‘hey'.”

Hey, I miss you. Hey, I still love you. Hey, I won't screw up again. And hey—Leon can barely think about this part, about standing on the shore holding their young son, Cal, in his arms. His small lifeless body. The riptide.—Hey, I am so damn sorry I want to die.

He wants to tell Dagmar all these things, but it's just too painful. “So, hey,” is what he says. “Merry Christmas.” Then hangs up. It's the first Christmas without their son, without each other. Dagmar just couldn't forgive him. “You never pay attention,” she said when she left. And he knew she was right.

When the moon turns full overhead, Leon drives to the Wal-Mart, Carlotta's note in his hand like a grocery list. Inside the store the light is so bright there are no shadows, no dark places. He walks up and down aisles filled with young men in aprons and bow ties, slicing the tops of boxes with razors, stocking the shelves. Their acne is angry. Their hair, surprised. Leon hardly notices. He's too busy looking, but doesn't think to read the signs, or ask someone.

The store is as large as an airplane hangar; his footsteps echo. Hardware. Auto Repair. Lawn and Garden. The endless tombs of frozen foods. He knows he's getting closer. Two dozen kinds of brownie mix. Fluffy. With nuts. With white chocolate chips. With artificially flavored mint frosting. Fat free. And then he sees it. Shelf stable and the color of chalk. The pearl of fish eyes watching him alone. So he puts it in his cart. Case after case. Tapioca. Premade and ready for anything.