Whale Season (9 page)

Then, even though it is a dream, he crosses the street to eat his breakfast as he did every morning, with the cigar-smoking old men at
La Tropicana
.

As soon as he walks into the café, just as it was in real life, the waitress brings him his usual—Cuban coffee and a guava turnover. He says grace, as he always does, and then listens to the men argue about Cuba, the old country.

Sitting with the old men was good for business. One by one, they came to him, and later brought their wives, grandchildren, and mistresses. But he never said much because every time he did, one or another of the old men would tease him.

“You call yourself a Cuban?”

Which of course Dr. Ricardo Garcia did. But isn't. So he had to be careful.

The dream is so real that it makes his heart beat faster. As he eats the sweet pastry, he can taste it. The old men speak of nothing in particular, slip in and out of English, as was their custom. They are sitting next to a mural of themselves that was painted on the wall a few years back. Life and art merge.

La Tropicana
and the old men are the bones of the history of the neighborhood, a history that Dr. Garcia had hoped to be a part of. And he is thinking this while he dreams. Thinking about how he misses the gossiping old men, and the trolley that runs down the street, and the wrought iron terraces, and even the Club Kids.

Then the dream shifts.

Suddenly, the one Dr. Ricardo Garcia calls “The First” is sitting across from him. Laughing. Just as he did the night of his death.

The First was a male nurse who worked at the hospice. Angelo. Forty-three years old. Divorced four times. Gold tooth, burly. Always smelled of meatloaf.

He didn't deserve salvation.

He'd come for a B-12 shot to “pep him up,” but when he saw the doctor's framed photograph of the pope and Poland's president skiing in the Alps together he said, “Wanna hear a joke, Doc?” Didn't wait for an answer, but continued on. “Two Polish hunters are driving through the countryside to go bear hunting. They came to a fork in the road where a sign read ‘
BEAR LEFT
.' So they went home.”

And then he said, “Heard about the Polish hockey team? They all drowned during spring training.”

So Angelo had to die.

And now he's in the dream.

“Hey, Doc,” he says. “You didn't have to get so sore. You can have just taken out the word
Polish
and inserted
Dan Quayle
. It's dated, but it still works.”

Then the dream ends. Leon's propane tank blows.

The explosion rattles the windows. A handful of oranges fall off the trees.

“Almighty!” Jimmy Ray says, still asleep. Out of reflex, he pulls the Luger from his pants and shoots into the ceiling fan. Then through the roof. The roosting peacocks trill and squawk. The ceiling fan flames, comes to a halt. Bits of plaster snow. The TV snaps off, as does the lights. The scanners are silent. The room is smoke dark.

Jesus is breathing hard and sweating. Jimmy Ray falls back onto the couch. He tosses the gun onto the floor, as if it's suddenly too hot.

“I could have killed somebody,” he says, distraught. Holds his head in his hands.

Jesus quickly tucks the fallen gun into his pants. The metal is hot against his skin. Burns. Doesn't matter, he thinks. Pain is good. Pain is right. Pain is all we have in this world. Pain is the only one true gift.

“You okay?” Jimmy Ray says.

“I'm okay,” Jesus says. His voice is calm, reassuring. “I'm fine.”

Jimmy Ray has that old man's shake to his voice. “I was dreaming,” he says. “I was just dreaming, man. Didn't mean no harm.”

The hot metal of the gun makes Jesus' skin blister. He likes that. “I know,” he says. “You're a good man. A man deserving of God's grace.”

In the distance, black smoke billows like storm clouds, clouds the moon once more.

“You are a man bound for salvation.”

Chapter 13

I
t's nearly an hour after the explosion before Trot arrives on the scene. Dispatch tracked him down in Miami, at his mother's house, stuck to the vinyl of her sofa covers making small talk with a rat-faced man who could soon become his new father. He's never been so happy to be called into work. At least until he heard the details.

“Mayor says there's not much left of Leon.”

Trot doesn't know what to say.

“You still there, Sheriff?”

“What about the girl?” he says. Can't even say Carlotta's name.

“There's just not much left of anything. You better come.”

By the time Trot arrived on the scene, the fire was out. There were still some embers, so he parked across the creek from the trailer. Stayed in his squad car. He just couldn't seem to get out and take a look at what was left of Leon. And maybe Carlotta, too.

Probably Carlotta, too.

The idea of Carlotta being dead made Trot's legs go numb, his chest tight, breath shallow. When he first arrived, he opened the car door, slightly, for a moment. The night air rushed in, propane heavy and hot. It smelled like BBQ, which unfortunately allowed Trot to imagine, in great detail, what it would be like to be blown up. The surprise of it. Body parts like confetti. He nearly threw up.

Trot closed the car door quickly. Sweat slid down the side of his face, even though the night was chilly. He started to shake. Over and over again, he imagined Carlotta falling from the sky like confetti, then sequins—and then like sparks from a bottle rocket on the Fourth of July.

“Sheriff!”

“Over here! Look!”

Trot rolled down the car window and squinted. Across the narrow creek, he could see that there were still a handful of townspeople standing around the burned trailer. They were muddy from fighting the fire. Some were holding hoses. Some still stamping down cinders.

“Go home,” he shouted. “Show's over.” Then rolled the window back up again.

It wasn't what the crowd expected to hear. A chorus of voices rang out in the night.

“Aren't you going to take a look?”

“Don't we get a medal or something?”

“We put it out!”

“Don't you want to see?”

Trot flashed his high beams and rolled down the window again.

“I can see,” he said. Rolled it back up.

“I mean up close,” a woman shouted. Her voice reminded Trot of that clicking sound chalk makes when someone is writing on a blackboard. “Trot? Shouldn't we be getting out of the car?”

Chalky, all-business, and stern—Trot knew he knew this woman, but couldn't remember her name, even though he was pretty sure he'd known her all his life. Not my mom, he thinks, she's in Miami.

“Trot?”

She gave his name so many syllables it was like she was singing a scale. Yes, Trot knew her. Knew her chalkboard singsong voice as well as he knew his own. Knew her pink hair and her pink housedress. He just couldn't seem to remember her name. Or anybody's. Shock, he thought.

Not good.

“Trot, honey, isn't it part of your job to get out of your car?” the woman said.

Trot turned his headlights off. “No, ma'am.”

There was some mumbling in the crowd. “Best friends,” a man's voice said. “They were best friends.”

“Oh,” the singsong chalkboard pink woman said. “That's right. Always mooning over that little Dagmar.”

Then the handful of people mumbled away.

Best friends, Trot thought. Leon. Me. Best friends forever.

The words made him feel bad. He hadn't really thought much about Leon until that moment, but it was true. They fished and lied and drank and lied and hated each other and lied and envied each other and lied and knew when to shut up and when to talk and when to lie—and they both seemed to always fall for the same woman. If that isn't real friendship, what is?

And Dagmar.

Who's going to tell Dagmar?

Trot knew the answer. It was his job, of course, but he hoped the singsong chalkboard pink woman got there first.

Trot shone the bright lights again. Kept them on for a minute, or two. The “scene” was impressive. There was a crater where the trailer once stood. Somebody did die, that was clear. Under the blue white light of the high beams, Trot could see a huge lump of something. A body. Maybe two. Probably two.

Not like confetti at all, he thought. Or bottle rockets. Or sequins. He turned the headlights off again. Closed his eyes and waited for the world to stop spinning.

A few minutes later, Bender, the mayor, dressed in a Hawaiian print bathrobe and high-top red tennis shoes, walked up carrying a bottle of cognac. He smelled of smoke. His eyebrows were singed, as was the hair on his hands. Bags of peanuts were stuffed into his pockets. Putting the fire out was his idea, so he'd gone back to The Pink to get everyone a beer. Then the phone rang.

“They were best friends, after all,” Mrs. Sitwell, the singsong chalkboard pink woman said. Mrs. Sitwell was Trot's former fifth-grade teacher. “Our little Trot needs a friend right now,” she said in that all-knowing fifth-grade teacher kind of way, so Bender traded the six packs for cognac. VSOP.

Bender taps gently on the window. There's no response. He remembers Carlotta and Trot dancing just the night before. Their shy grace. Then remembers a quote from Hemingway, “If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it,” then taps on the window again, a little harder.

Trot opens his eyes and rolls the window down. Sighs. Bender's red and green Jell-O–dyed hair glows in the moonlight.

“You know, I think it was inevitable that Leon would explode one day,” Bender says gently. He's always saying things like that. He has a PhD.

“Why are they making martinis?” Trot asks.

It takes Bender a moment to understand what Trot is saying. Bender's bathrobe features tiny grass-skirted hula dancers dancing in martini glasses holding even tinier cocktail shakers in their minuscule hands. Bender leans into the car and turns on the interior light. Trot doesn't blink.

Shock, Bender thinks.

“The robe,” Trot says. “Why are they making martinis?”

Bender runs a hand through his Jell-O hair. “It's a protest against the sociological implications of the stereotype of women in paradise. As a culture, we tend to see raw native beauty as lacking in refined skills. The martinis represent a sophisticated outlook.”

Trot looks confused.

Bender translates. “Big hair does not mean tiny brains.”

A look of profound revelation crosses Trot's face. “That's the real truth of the world, isn't it? The higher the hair, the closer to heaven.”

Then he rolls the window up and closes his eyes again.

Bender pulls the foil from around the cork of the cognac and takes a long swig.

It is going to be a long night, and Bender knows it. So he sits on the hood of the squad. Settles in.

Bender is the kind of man who knows when to push and when not to. He's been mayor, chief bartender, and self-appointed moral conscience in Whale Harbor for more than a decade. Like most in town, he's an outsider. A marine biologist by trade, he'd worked on the
Calypso
with Jacques Cousteau; his wife, Simone; and their son, Philippe.

He calls this part of his life “The Pirate Years.” And, after a few cognacs, he will tell the story of how it came to an end one New Year's Eve in Mexico.

“There was a full moon and it was quite balmy, a remarkable evening,” he always begins. “We were anchored beneath the cliffs of the Guadeloupe, home to hundreds of elephant seals. Snouts like real elephants.

“It was mating season. When the bull seals trumpet, your knees shake, the ground shakes.”

And then, always at this point in the story, Bender “trumpets” himself as if suddenly turned into a seal looking for a mate. The sound is thunderous. Somewhere midtrumpet his voice would arch, and then crack.

Most look away when he does this. He's usually sweating by this point, no matter what the season. The heat of the story always overwhelms him.

“I could see these huge ancient beasts crying out for love. I wanted to join them. So, I did.”

Jumped overboard. Never returned to the boat. Blames it on the moonlight.

“I just fell in love with the idea of love,” he always says. “There was a pretty one. I still swear she was a mermaid. ‘Selkie' they call them. My sweet selkie.”

Then he sighs so deeply his bones seem to rattle.

“Trot?” he says now, presses his face against the windshield and squints. “VSOP. Did I mention it was VSOP? Aged twenty years? The good stuff?” He shakes the cognac in his hand and then barks like a papillon. It is a butterfly-eared yip. Bender is working on a new theory about getting in touch with one's “inner dog.” He's still trying to figure out what breed his is. So he yips the papillon yip again, but it feels a little “too frilly.”

“Did I mention that this cognac is the stuff dreams are made of?”

“I'm on duty.”

“And I'm mayor.”

“That's true.”

“I could order you.”

“You could.”

“Or you could just open up.”

There is obviously no sense in arguing. Trot slowly leans across the squad and opens the passenger door. Bender rolls off the hood, gets into the car. He smells like smoke and well water, that rotten egg smell. Hands Trot the cognac.

“Cheers,” Bender says, but his voice is not cheery at all, just sad. He watches Trot take a long sip.

“Burns,” Trot says, a beer man by habit. The cognac makes him cough.

“You've called for backup?”

“County medical examiner. Dispatcher says it will be an hour, or more. Gang thing.” Trot takes another long pull, then coughs again.

“You want to talk about it?” Bender says. His voice is men's movement smooth.

Trot hopes beyond all good reason that the “it” in question is “baseball,” but knows he can't be that lucky.

“Sometimes it's good to talk about it,” Bender says again.

“I'm fine.”

“Can't always keep things all bottled up.”

Trot wants to explain that keeping things bottled up is good. Without bottles there'd be beer all over the refrigerator—but he just shrugs. “I'm fine.”

Bender leans over and says, “You know, I have some expertise with matters of the heart.”

Suddenly, the song “Feelings” pops into Trot's head. Makes him want to pepper spray himself. Please change the subject, he thinks over the din of the seventies slow-dance croon.

Feelings, wo-o-o feelings . . .

Bender touches him on the shoulder says, “Son, I have seen a selkie on a moonlit night and heard her call. I know that once that happens a man can never be content to be mortal again.”

And when he says this Trot can feel Bender's sorrow in his own heart and he thinks of Carlotta standing on the street in the rusted moonlight waiting for him. Thinks of how he ran to her, how she smiled. How she made him feel greater than himself.

“Damn,” he says.

“Man can't help himself.” Bender sounds wistful. “These selkies, they bewitch.”

“That they do.”

Trot takes a sorrowful pull from the bottle; a third of it is now gone. Passes it back to Bender.

“You know,” Bender says. “There's only one cure on earth when a selkie steals your heart.”

Trot knows. He's heard the story of Bender's last voyage on the
Calypso,
or “Collapse-O” as many call it, so many times it's as if he's lived it himself. And so, like bull seals in the moonlight, he trumpets as he has heard Bender do so many times. It is more of a howl, really. His voice wavers and cracks.

And Bender joins in.

And so, about an hour later, when the State Highway Patrol and the county medical examiner finally make it to the scene, they find the two men sitting in the moonlight like huge ancient seal lions—drunk, hoarse, and howling.

“Got to love a small town,” the medical examiner says, mostly to himself.