He kept inhaling deeply, surprised after his long absence at the familiarity of Key West night air, the particular humidity, the scent of more flowers than occur in nature, salt water, and faint indications of humanity: tobacco, perfume, automotive exhaust. It was a perennial aroma occasionally subsumed by a single smell, new house paint or Sunday-morning vomit. All in all, it made his heart ache.
Key West seemed a most appealing landfall. Old-timers used to tell him that before the aqueduct and plentiful fresh water, the place was a kind of gooney-bird island, not much greenery and plenty of exposed cap rock and coral. Now it was as lush as Hawaii, an easier sell.
The bartender had a deeply fissured, weathered face, a gold chain around his neck, de rigueur before Key West went literary; also, solidarity with the Cubans. He returned with Errol’s drink.
“I quit drinking over eleven thousand days ago,” said the bartender, whose name was something to do with dog: Coon Dog, Hound Dog, Blue Dog — Errol forgot. “And it was no mistake.”
Dog-something seemed to be studying Errol, probably remembered Errol no better than Errol remembered him. Errol clearly recalled that the bartender drove in one day from Boston about a quarter-century ago with a blue-eyed dancer he was very proud of and who wasted no time in absconding with one of the entrepreneurial hippies, a corrupt prep-school boy from Columbia, South Carolina, who was restoring a conch house.
“What about that Caroline? You still see her?”
“That was quite long-lasting, wasn’t it? No, I haven’t seen her in ages.” Caroline was from New Orleans, a beautiful girl with thick auburn hair who reminded everyone of Gene Tierney. She had a genuine New Orleans Brooklyn-Southern accent. She was languorous and virginal, with a promise of depravity so instinctive in New Orleans girls that it must have been devised by their ancestral mothers. Some logged feverish turns in town before going home, marrying Tulane doctors, and raising little magnolia aristocrats to replenish the Garden District. But Caroline was different from all the others; she and Errol had been engaged to be married. He hadn’t cared about anything else at all. He stood beside his stool and said, “Well, I suppose.”
“Nice seeing you.”
“Same.”
“You remember West Coast Anita?”
“I remember Anita.”
“There were two Anitas, Anita and West Coast Anita.” Errol was anxious to go. Looking toward the door, he asked, “Which one had the flag in her tooth?”
“West Coast Anita.”
“What about her?”
“Anita stayed too long at the fair. She had an out-of-body experience in the Turks and Caicos, and they had to take her down on the beach and shoot her.”
Errol said, “I must be missing something.” He counted out his tab on the bar. “Well,” he said, “I’m off to see Florence Ewing.”
He didn’t know why he was not cordial to Dog-something, one of those citizens you can’t quite remember, though he tells you that you and he go way back. Perhaps it was the sense that one was about to be drawn into something or discover that one had failed to recall a debt. A group strode in, three women and a man with low gray bangs who cried out, “But wait: right after the car crash, we come in with the Japanese flutes!” The women were awestruck as he swept his arm toward the table he had selected for them. One, forefinger to a dimple, hung back, contemplating the flutes in her imagination.
Night Dog! That was it!
From here he could see shrimp boats between the buildings on Lower Caroline Street. He and Raymond had backed the old ketch in here one winter to pull out the Vere diesel that had turned into a half ton of English rust in the bilge. They’d built a gallows frame of old joists they got when the Red Doors Saloon was remodeled, and all the wallets fell out of the walls from a century of muggings. They lifted the great iron lump on a chain fall and swung the dead engine to the fish docks. Thenceforth, they sailed her without the engine. She went that way into Havana, but Raymond was not aboard.
Florence Ewing lived on Petronia Street, a street frequently in the Key West Citizen for scenes of mayhem; but this was the more sedate upper Petronia, now part of a district renamed by realtors the Meadows, a tremendous leap of the imagination. Florence was born in the house over eighty years ago and, though Errol hadn’t seen her in some time, his every hope was pinned on her being still alive.
She had gone to sea with her father, a turtle captain, when she was eleven and could still describe the Moskito Coast of Nicaragua in detail. By sixteen, she was a chorus girl in New York; she married at seventeen back home and stayed married for over sixty years to her physician husband. A precondition was that they never leave the Petronia house. Dr. Ewing, an Alabaman and a sportsman, struggled with this, turning the old carriage house into a kind of dominoes hall for his cronies, building a stilt shack past Mule and Archer keys where he fished and played cards on weekends in his old Abaco launch. He delivered thousands of Key West babies, who stayed until the tourist boom pushed them up A1A to the mainland; some were even his own, begotten on lissome Cuban teens. When Raymond Fitzpatrick and Errol Healy went into partnership, they lived around the corner from Florence; and during some of the fraught hours of their business life, Errol found himself being quietly counseled by the very sensible and spiritual Florence Ewing. You could say they became close, cooking meals for each other or watching Johnny Carson. And it was not a matter of an old widow needing company. Errol needed the company; Florence was wholly selfsufficient. Errol was cautious about imposing on her, though he supposed he must at times have tested her patience. He never went there high, more consideration than anyone else got, and he tried to keep the more outrageous ladies from battening onto her and declaring her a role model. He didn’t know how she created such peace. Others noticed and sought her out; they believed she had the power to sanctify and heal those who had lost hope. He marveled that she didn’t run them all off, or even judge them, or, just once, tell them she was too tired. They were her subjects. For some she was an oracle; for a few a last chance. She had learned forgiveness and discovered its mighty power.
He made the trek from the bar in the fragrant early evening, taking enough time to gaze upon the Laundromat still lifes, those all-night getaways where girls of yore rode the tumblers and fornicated on the washing machines. Notions and grocery stores still open were nevertheless somnolent. Here and there among the renovated houses miraculously a few remained tumbledown as before, with gutted refrigerator kingfish smokers in the backyard. Many of the houses were tall and attracted the eye, making you look upward, at a sky that let you know that you were surrounded by the sea. Elsewhere, rainwater cisterns had been converted into atmospheric soaking tubs, leaves and rotting fruit were made to disappear, and services created to secure the things bound to fail when the city was astonished by some intrusion of nature, such as a storm. Life sometimes tested absentee owners. When, after a half year, remembering the fresh air and clean linens, the truce with vegetation, the ringless tubs and toilets, the owners returned to find fetor and mildew, the inconvenienced rats and fleeing roaches and bellicose fighting chickens who had moved into the lap pool, there was seldom anything so untoward as a demand for return of caretakers’ fees. Slaves of their own vacations, the owners began by negotiating.