“Man, with my eyes closed, I can tell you’re lost in thought,” Gordon said. He hunched his shoulders and sat up, raising the yellow aviator glasses, rubbing his arm over his eyes, pushing the glasses back on the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “You understand I don’t have any special knowledge about what never got said when we were kids, right? But you want my opinion anyway. Okay: my opinion is that if he ever loved our mother, he stopped loving her pretty fast. He felt bad when he knew she was going to die, but that’s something else. And Evie — as I’ve said, looking back, I think Evie was always his squeeze on the side. Guy needed to get laid, is my guess. Our mother seemed like a ghost long before she got sick and died. I don’t remember her in any season but winter. That Bible she carried around. Always so unhappy. I know what he felt like: if something doesn’t work out, next time you go to the opposite extreme.” Gordon rolled his head to the side, looked up at Marshall, standing with his back to the water, holding a bottle of beer from which he had not yet sipped. “Are all these questions because your marriage to Sonja is breaking up? I mean this quite sincerely: I’ve been through this stuff before. At the moment it seems like the end of the world, but it won’t be. Whatever happens, I don’t think you’re going to get any answers about the present by raking through the past. By thinking about the previous woman, yes — but you’ve only been married one time.”
“I don’t care about what I’m doing for a living. I don’t — with the exception of a madman who’s no longer my friend, I don’t have any friends except you. Sonja and I had a bad year, but I should have seen it was going badly. I should have cared, and I didn’t. I’m shutting down.”
Gordon shook his head. “You make it sound like you’re a dangerous nuclear reactor, man. Who do you know who loves what he does, loves his wife, loves every fucking thing in the world? Things will work out. You’ve got to think forward, not back.”
Marshall nodded.
“I should also mention that you find yourself in a slightly strange place, bro. Boats bobbing out there on the water, people on their rented pink motor scooters. It seems easy. People talk like it’s easy. There’s flowers and sunshine. It’s like an illustration in a fucking children’s book. The Conch Republic’s not necessarily the best place to find yourself when you’re undergoing self-doubt. You pick up that conch shell and hold it to your ear, you know what you hear? A roar. A hollow roar. If you’re already down, you’ll take it as the absolute truth.”
At Mallory Dock, the air was suffused with the odor of meat and onions frying on a grill, the roar of fruit and juice liquefying in a blender, the triple blast of a cruise ship calling for the last passengers so it could sail away before dark. Smaller boats crisscrossed the water, sailboats and motorboats, people clustered on deck as the boats blew back and forth, turning to keep the sun in sight, bands playing at the open-air bars on shore, recorded music or an amplified guitar drifting off the water toward land, people drinking swampy margaritas and cheap wine included in the price of the sail that would give them instant headaches. Near where they stood, a bagpipe player puffed his cheeks and began to finger his next song, drowning out the Bob Dylan imitation undertaken beside him by a barefooted man who stopped singing every half minute to berate people in the crowd for walking on the cord that attached his guitar to the amplifier. People grabbed each other’s hands, snaking through the dense crowd, yelling over their shoulders for others to follow, evading jugglers, backing off to provide a small circle of space to a man who raised a shopping cart containing four bowling balls, with a bicycle tied to the cart, from his shoulders to his forehead, then moved it from his forehead to his mouth, taking small, bent-kneed steps while finally tipping it enough to balance the entire shopping cart by its handle on his teeth. Children were lifted to parents’ shoulders, teenagers tumbled against each other’s bodies, using shoulders and legs as springboards, their T-shirts rolled to reveal tattoos of the setting sun inked into their biceps, along with skulls and crossbones, Merlins with crystal balls, long-haired, big-breasted women galloping on unicorns. Dirty, shoeless men with caved-in chests stood squinting in the background, looking for abandoned hot dogs or half-full cans of Pepsi left on the ground. Dogs nosed through the crowd while others of their kind performed: a white dog in a bandanna who jumped over three Vietnamese pigs in graduated sizes, their tails braided, who in turn jumped over the expressionless dog, landing in a perfect line, one-two-three; a cat in red booties who jumped, at the crack of a whip, through a flaming hoop. He thought, suddenly, of Janet Lanier, telling him, “Your wife will be very sympathetic about the hoops you’ve had to jump through.”
As the sun inched down in its descent below the horizon line, music reached a fever pitch, soprano sax scuttling the bagpipes as stoned teenagers released Mylar balloons to drift over the Gulf and mingle with swooping seagulls and flapping sails. Piercing whistles and applause continued for a full half minute after the disappearance of the last sliver of orange sun, caps thrown up and clambered after as they landed in the infinitesimal spaces between bodies, or perched rakishly on other people’s heads. One man danced in place, shaking his tambourine, as the pigs once again flew forward to make their perfect nose-to-tail line. Quite possibly, this would be the most ludicrous place on earth to come if you were hoping for an epiphany. Though it made Marshall uncomfortable to think in those terms, he was looking for something, and furthermore, Gordon realized that he was. It was not an accident that Gordon had suggested this gaudy party at land’s end. If Mr. Watanabe had come, the plan had been to sail past Mallory Dock as the sun was setting, to be out there with the other boats, looking toward shore through binoculars, but when Watanabe cancelled, Gordon had still been intent upon showing his brother a sight he couldn’t miss.
He and Gordon had parked several blocks away, walked down Duval Street, then fought their way through the crowd streaming onto the dock, heading toward the table where Beth was selling her friend’s air plants. Marshall recognized her from behind, the tie-dyed tank dress she had put on that morning with its interlocking cobwebs of maroon and deep purple suddenly sedate in comparison with the extravaganza in the sky. Beth was barefoot, a gold clip in her hair, still damp from a shower. The air plants grew out of conch shells, to which her friend had glued button eyes and red felt lips: the green-gray plants looked like odd, miniature toupees. Playing grab-ass with her, Gordon had caused her to lose one sale, so she tried to send them off to watch the performers, telling Marshall to be sure to see the cat who jumped through a burning hoop. “Just like Morris the cat,” she said. “It was saved from a shelter.”
He trailed after Gordon, trying to stay calm. Moving deeper into the crowd, he had begun to feel claustrophobic. Faces began to take on a sameness: a fixedness of gaze; sweaty skin; people snaking forward without looking at one another. He was suddenly reminded of the travelling carnivals they’d been taken to as boys, the ones they begged to be able to attend, where they’d watched Punch-and-Judy shows and been given rides on straw-hatted donkeys. This spectacle was as unrelated to those summertime travelling road shows as crawling was to space travel. As he walked, passing dusty traveller’s palms and thorny sprays of bougainvillea growing weedlike in narrow patches of dirt near the buildings, he saw the brightening sky, lavender streaks dissipating like smoke, dark gray clouds like so many submarines rising to the surface. From where he stood he could not see the water at all, but the sky seemed a kind of sea, the clouds devolving into sea creature shapes, tentacles spiralling out and then retracting, nets of white flung toward the sinking sun.