American Tropic Read online

  “We are in love, my darling.”

  Joan’s fingers deftly open the top buttons of Luz’s shirt; her hands slip onto Luz’s exposed skin.

  Luz grips Joan’s wrists, pulling Joan’s hands away. Joan’s jaw tightens; her lips draw into a tight line.

  Luz rebuttons her shirt and gazes with concern around the kitchen. “Why isn’t Nina here? Where’s Nina?”

  “Don’t be such a cop on the job all the time. Nina is fine. She wants to get herself ready for school. She needs to be independent.”

  Luz shoves her chair away from the table and leaves. She walks quickly down a hallway and pushes open a bedroom door. She looks inside.

  Nina sits in her wheelchair before a dresser with a large mirror. Her fourteen-year-old body is frail, her torso shrunken, her head bald from chemotherapy. She turns around to Luz, her large brown eyes still luminous. “Mom, I’m glad you’re here. I need your opinion.”

  “About what, baby?”

  Nina holds out two long wigs, one blond, one brunette. She studies the wigs critically. “Who should I look like today? Marilyn Monroe or Cleopatra?”

  “Show me both wigs so I can judge.”

  Nina puts on the blond wig and purses her lips in a sophisticated pout. “What about Marilyn? Am I as irresistible as her?”

  “Marilyn never looked so good. Maybe it’s a bit too much for school—but you look great.”

  Nina pulls off the blond wig and puts on the brunette. She gives a sassy stare. “Am I as powerful as Cleo?”

  “Yes, you’ve definitely got the Queen Cleo vibe going.”

  “Mom, you can’t be such a pushover and like both wigs. Help me. Which one?”

  Luz steps close to Nina in the wheelchair. She picks up the blond wig and pulls it on over her cropped black hair. She stares at her reflection in the dresser mirror. The light-colored wig contrasts sharply with the darkness of her face. Luz mugs a sultry expression. “Do you think I’m sexy?”

  “Mom, you’re such a goof.”

  Luz leaves the wig on. “Come on, do you think I’m sexy?”

  “No. I think you’re funny.”

  “I think I’m sexy.”

  Nina studies Luz in the blond wig. “Okay, yes, you’re crazy nutzoid sexy!” Nina’s frail body shakes with laughter.

  Luz pulls off the blond wig. “Baby, I’ve got to go to work.”

  “Which wig should I wear, Mom?”

  Luz wraps her arms around Nina and holds her tight, then strokes her smooth bald head. “I want my girl as she already is. Shining more beautiful than Marilyn on the silver screen. Braver than Cleopatra on her war boat.”

  Far out on the ocean, the recorded beat of salsa music ends inside the pilothouse of Noah’s pirate-radio boat. He stops his dancing with an invisible partner. He sits back down on the worn chair in front of the makeshift broadcasting console.

  Noah speaks rapidly into the microphone. “I still don’t have any calls from my intrepid pilgrims out there. If you don’t want to show me the rage, let’s talk about the Powerboat Championship Race starting from Key West Harbor this morning. Those boats burn enough fuel in one race to fly a jumbo jet across the Atlantic. Hey, let’s not sweat the carbon emissions. Let’s disregard a monstrous guzzle of fossil fuel from the tit of Mother Earth when the scent of blood sport is in the air. Today, Key West’s native-son racer, Dandy Randy, is set to break his own speed record of more than ninety miles an hour. Problem is, Randy went missing after yesterday’s qualifying race. Where’s Randy? Holed up in a poker parlor? Adrift in puke after a night of prowling sleazy bars? At the bottom of the sea, entangled in a net with dead turtles? What’s up with Randy? What’s up with the turtle slaughter? Sea turtles are being killed by gill nets and long hook-lines by the millions. Show me the rage!”

  In front of Noah, on the console’s instrument panel, three cell phones are wired into battered wood speakers. A light flashes red on one of the phones, signaling an incoming call.

  Noah presses the answer button. “I’ve reeled in my first caller. I hope you’re a whopper.”

  A male voice booms from the speakers. “Hey, Truth Dog, I’ve been listening since you started your pirate-radio gig a year ago. You’re so righteous to call out those macho joystick powerboat racers like Candy Bambi.”

  “Dandy Randy.”

  “Whatever. Were you around back in the eighties, when Key West was Dodge City on the Gulf Stream? Totally lawless time, cocaine smuggling and high jinks par excellente!”

  “I was getting my degree in environmental law up in Miami then, but Key West has always been a pirate island, stolen treasures off of wrecked ships lured by false lights onto the reef offshore, rumrunners, gunrunners, drug runners, any kind of contraband. What ruined your little paradise?”

  “Not the smuggling. It’s that Key West isn’t a fishing port anymore. The shrimpers and their boats were kicked out to put in seaside condos. Hordes of tourists driving down here on the Overseas Highway. Giant cruise ships spitting out thousands of passengers. It’s the tourists who are killing the coral reef offshore of Key West.”

  “Now you’re showing some rage. But tourists, you think they’re killing America’s only continental reef? You think they’re killing a two-hundred-forty-million-year-old reef?”

  “Hell, yeah!”

  “No! Coral die-off is caused by the thermal stress of ocean warming. Added to this is the ocean dumping of toxic pesticides and chemicals. I want to expose the real culprits. I want to peel the lies off of their greedy hides, the same way the shark hunters used to knife-skin a shark with a one-bladed stroke. The reefs are the rain forests of the sea. Fifty percent of the Caribbean reefs are already dead because of warming, pollution, and net-fishing ships. Soon every coral reef on earth will be dead!”

  Noah punches off the caller and clicks on another phone. “I can’t hear you, talk louder, there’s static on the line.”

  A belligerent voice echoes through the static. “I want you to know, I’m a vet. I was in Vietnam.”

  “Is that supposed to be a cause for celebration or condemnation?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’m all ears.”

  “Perm … ian Ex … tinc … tion E … vent.”

  “Permian Extinction Event? What’s that got to do with anything? Happened millions of years ago. A volcanic methane-gas explosion that wiped out nearly every living thing on our planet.”

  “It’s also called the Great Dying. It’s what you’ve been quackin’ about and you don’t even see the connection. It’s comin’ again.”

  “Okay, Nam vet, I’m on the edge of my seat. Shoot me facts.”

  “This time the explosion of obliteration will be man-made.”

  “What’s the trigger? Nuclear war?”

  “It’s comin’ from beneath the boat you’re floatin’ on, from the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “And you say it’s man-made. So I figure you must mean that—”

  A thundering boom comes from outside Noah’s trawler. He looks through the window of the pilothouse. The radio-transmitter antenna bolted to the deck sways. The trawler rocks hard from side to side. Noah tries to keep the shaking electronic equipment on the broadcast console from falling. He catches his rum bottle as it tumbles from the table. He glances around, trying to figure out what happened. He looks down through the window and sees that a drifting raft has collided with his trawler.

  The raft is filled with a jumble of dead bodies. From among the bodies a bone-thin teenaged boy, shirtless and barefoot, rises. His black skin is sun-blistered and riddled with lacerations. The whites of his startled eyes loom large as he stares up at Noah in the pilothouse.

  Noah yanks the ship-to-shore radio mike from its holder and shouts: “Mayday! This is Noah’s Lark! Mayday!”

  A gray sixty-foot-long Coast Guard cutter tows the small wooden raft with dead bodies toward Key West Harbor. Noah follows the cutter in his trawler. The cu
tter slows to a stop. Noah motors alongside and shouts to a uniformed guardsman on the cutter’s deck, “What’s the holdup?”

  The guardsman shouts down, “Harbor’s blocked, powerboat race starting, have to wait before going in.”

  Noah cuts his engine. He sees around him an anchored flotilla of fancy yachts, paint-blistered skiffs, sleek ketches, and listing lobster boats crowded with beer-drinking revelers waiting for the spectacle to begin.

  From the harbor’s distant shoreline a cannon booms, signaling the race start. Cheers go up from the anchored flotilla. A roar of jet-propelled engines vibrates the air. Twelve long-hulled powerboats emerge from the harbor entrance. The waterborne herd thunders at full throttle, their boldly painted hulls nosed high, sharp bows tilting six feet into the air, their rear exhausts blasting water up behind them. Deep within the cocooned cockpits bolts of sunlight reflect off the driver’s and throttle-man’s crash helmets. The boats race in front of Noah’s trawler with an earsplitting engine snarl; white-hot jet exhausts plow a showering spray. Above the powerboats a TV news helicopter chases the action. From the copter’s open doorway a cameraman leans out, filming the boats as they roar toward the ocean’s distant horizon and over its edge.

  Noah’s boat rocks in the watery wake left behind by the powerboats. The Coast Guard cutter’s engines rev to a turbine whine. Noah follows the cutter towing the raft. Inside the harbor’s anchorage, the cutter slows to a stop, and guardsmen secure it alongside a cement pier. Noah steers his boat around the cutter and ties up behind the raft. He watches through his pilothouse window as a crowd gathers on the pier, gawking at the sight of the raft with its cargo of bodies.

  Among the crowd is Hogfish, straddling a rusty bicycle. From the back of his sun-faded fisherman’s cap hangs a ragged swag of graying hair. IPhone earbuds are jammed into his ears. A tight T-shirt on his bony chest reads DON’T KILL THE MESSENGER. A queer grin spreads over his forty-year-old face, remarkable for its smooth, unlined quality. Only his bulging eyes, washed of all color and seeming to spin in opposite orbits, indicate a man burned out from battles fought in distant wars. Between the handlebars of his bicycle is stretched a fishing line, dangling with barbed J-hooks. He pushes the bicycle’s front wheel against the taut rope mooring the raft to the dock.

  A bullnecked deputy detective with a slick sunburnt shaved head, Moxel, shoves through the crowd to Hogfish. A shiny badge is pinned to his crisp blue uniform shirt. His lips carry the arrogant expression of a young man barging through life based on a combination of brute force and triumph over his low social origins. He grips the handlebars of Hogfish’s bicycle above the line of dangling fishhooks and snarls in a Southern accent: “Get away from that rope. This is a crime scene.”

  Hogfish’s head bobs to the clash of heavy-metal guitars playing through his old-model iPhone’s earbuds. He pushes his front bicycle wheel harder against the rope to get a closer look at the grotesque scene in the raft.

  Moxel tightens his fists on the handlebars of Hogfish’s bicycle. “I’m talking to you! Back off! Didn’t you hear me? Take out your goddamn earplugs!” Hogfish’s head keeps bobbing.

  Luz, dressed in her dark pants and guayabera shirt, steps quickly through the crowd and grabs the scraggly ponytail hanging from behind Hogfish’s fishing cap. The muscles in her arm tighten as she tugs the ponytail, pulling him away from the rope. She leans into his face and shouts, “Dios da sombrero a quien no tiene cabeza!”

  Moxel elbows Luz and sneers. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “God gives hats to some who have no head.”

  “Why not just say it in English? Your kind are always trying to make this a Spanish-speaking country.”

  Luz ignores Moxel and steps to a guardsman protecting the raft with a rifle clutched in his hands. The guardsman nervously holds up the rifle, blocking Luz. “Ma’am, you’ll have to stay on the other side of the rope. This is official Coast Guard business. No one goes on the raft.”

  Luz pulls out her wallet, flips it open, and flashes her silver badge. “I’m Detective Luz Zamora, Key West Homicide. This dock is city property. I’ve got jurisdiction here, not the Coast Guard. I’m boarding the raft.”

  The guardsman looks at the badge and stands aside. “Yes, ma’am!”

  Luz steps over the rope onto the edge of the concrete bulwark. She winces at the rotting stench drifting up from the bloated bodies. She jumps down onto the raft and moves quickly among the jumble of dead people, feeling the wrists of stiffened arms for a pulse.

  A siren wails from the dock. The crowd parts for the arriving ambulance. The side door swings open; a paramedic hurries out. He jumps onto the raft and shouts at Luz above the still-wailing siren, “Is anyone alive?”

  Luz turns to the paramedic. “No one. All dead.”

  The medic gazes in astonishment at the bodies on the raft. He looks back at Luz. “Must be hard for you, seeing your people end up this way.”

  “What do you mean, my people?”

  “You’re Cuban. These are Cuban boat people.”

  “These people aren’t Cubans, they’re Haitians. But that doesn’t make it less horrifying.”

  Luz looks away from the bodies. She sees Noah on the fly deck of his trawler, docked next to the raft. She calls over to him, “What do you know about this?”

  Noah shouts back, “The raft was adrift, banged into my boat. I called in the Mayday.”

  Noah turns from Luz and goes back into his pilothouse. He grabs his bottle of rum off the console table. He walks over to a canvas curtain covering a storage closet in the corner. He pulls the curtain back, exposing the teenaged survivor from the raft. The boy appears terrified. Noah speaks softly in French: “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you. We’ve got to keep you hidden. If they find you, they’ll send your sorry ass back to Haiti.” He drinks rum from his bottle and looks sympathetically at the trembling boy. “Kid, you crossed seven hundred miles of shark-infested ocean to escape an earthquake-racked country of poverty, disease, and violence. Now you’ve got to do the hardest thing, you’ve got to trust me.”

  The boy mumbles in French, “My … name … is Rimbaud.”

  Noah responds in French. “What’s the family name?”

  “Mesrine.”

  Noah guzzles down the last of the rum and fixes the boy with a glassy-eyed philosophical expression. “Rimbaud Mesrine, damnedest thing. They named you after a famous gunrunning poet and a famous cold-blooded killer. They must have figured you were going to become a French politician.”

  Noah turns and looks down through the salt-streaked window of the pilothouse. He sees Luz on the raft moving among the dead bodies and speaks to her in words he knows she can’t hear:

  “Slaves and masters. Fucked up as it ever was.”

  Five miles out to sea from Key West, the twelve powerboats roar across the ocean’s surface at ninety miles an hour. The TV news helicopter overhead chases the boats as they make a turn around a large channel marker. They speed away from the floating buoy. The copter hovers over it. The side door of the copter slides open, and a cameraman looks down, shocked at what he sees, almost losing his grip on the heavy camera as he shouts back at the pilot. “Damn! It’s what I thought! Can’t believe it!”

  The copter’s blades whip the air as the cameraman leans perilously out from the doorway. He aims his lens down and films the naked body of a dead man tied by rope to the buoy’s metal pole.

  The downward force of wind from the copter’s blades above the body creates a churning circle in the water around the buoy. The copter pulls up and banks away. The buoy rocks in the watery wake left behind. The mutilated body tied to the pole sways beneath a relentless sun.

  The Bounty Bar faces the boat-filled Key West Harbor. The walls are hung with an array of seafaring artifacts, big-game fishing rods and reels and colorful mounted trophy fish caught in their plasticized death leaps. The humid air moves in a rush from ceiling fans spinning over the heads of sport fishermen, shrimpers, real-esta
te hustlers, deadbeats, lushes, lowlifes, and wide-eyed tourists wearing floral-print shirts.

  Commanding the scene from behind the long mahogany bar counter is Zoe. She emanates an effortless sophisticated beauty cut by a savvy aura of understanding the world of men. She moves quickly, with the calculated feline grace of knowing her ability to land securely no matter what situation she is thrown into. She pulls two bottles of beer up from the icy water of the large bright-red cooler and bangs them down on the counter in front of two Bounty Bar regulars, Big Conch and Hard Puppy.

  Big Conch’s cocked-up stature comes from the years when he outran Coast Guard cutters in his cocaine-packed cigarette boat across low-tide coral inlets. His face registers the righteousness of an outlaw who cashed out of his scam before being busted and left to rot in a federal slammer. His gray hair is dyed an unnatural blond hue and is slicked back flat against his scalp. Around Big’s neck dangles the circular gold weight of Spanish medallions. His blue-eyed stare is that of a thug feigning a legit life in a new world of real-estate pimps and condo hustlers. He grabs the beer bottle in front of him and ham-fists it to his lips, sucking out the foaming brew.

  Next to Big, Hard Puppy takes a slow, cool drink from his bottle. Hard is descended from a line of black Bahamian freemen who were once the property of British Caribbean overlords. He is outfitted in a flashy white silk suit and white alligator shoes, befitting his position as the number-one cash kingpin of illegal dogfighting from Key West to Miami. Around Hard floats in the air the lime scent of aftershave lotion that he slaps onto his sharp-featured face every day to keep away the scent of poverty he grew up with and that he always smells: the stink of unchanged shit in diapers and a drunk stepfather snoring on top of his puked-out, passed-out mother.

  Hard and Big straighten up on their stools to get a better view of Zoe behind the bar. They admire her long tanned legs captured by tight white shorts and, above that, a thin strategic halter top offering the right amount of provocative glimpse of her breasts.