The value of real estate rose by 10 and 15 percent a year for a hundred years. And as the price per square foot of land rose the height of the hotels and apartment buildings rose and now the Barriers are lined for twenty miles with terraced pastel-glass towers filled with northern retirees and tourists, South American entrepreneurs and drug lords, European fashion models and the men who photograph them, aging out-of-work Latin American dictators and generalissimos. Most of the people who serve them, sell to them, park their cars, and clean their condos and hotel rooms live on the mainland north of downtown Calusa in barrios, slums, ghettos, and subsidized housing projects and ride the buses across the Causeway and bridges to work and back. Most of their supervisors and managers live west of downtown in middle-class suburbs and gated communities and drive east in their cars daily through ten, twenty, and even thirty miles of clotted traffic to the Barriers and in the evening drive back again through the same jams.
The Kid listens to the rumble and roar overhead of day’s-end traffic crossing the Claybourne Causeway and trying to hear his thoughts he turns and looks south across the lower Bay at the clustered skyscrapers of downtown Calusa — fifty-story towers of smoked glass and gleaming sheets of aluminum and steel high-rise hotels here too, but these are Marriotts and Hyatts and Holiday Inns built for business travelers instead of tourists. There are domed convention centers and international banking and insurance company office buildings and whole colonies of condominiums stacked on top of one another like gigantic poker chips. A condo downtown would be fine, he thinks. He doesn’t need to live on the Barriers. Even a small studio on a low floor without a view would do. He’d furnish it simply for one person alone with a single bed and a table and two chairs and a lamp or two and a dresser. Maybe a few small pictures. Some dishes and pots and pans. Sheets and blankets and towels. Keep it simple. Keep it neat and clean. He doesn’t really require a view but it would be nice to have one. To stroll to the fridge and take out a frosty Corona and crack it open and flop in his La-Z-Boy recliner and check out the city below.
At this time of day he’d watch the glass and metal towers cast their long shadows over the cluttered port where cranes and gigantic elevators load and off-load rows of room-size steel shipping containers from wheezing freighters headed to or from China, India, and Brazil. He’d consider the three creamy cruise ships lined up like floating amusement parks beside the docks and warehouses sleepily waiting to be restocked with food and liquor and refilled with fresh island-hopping limbo-dancing tourists from the North. If the Kid were a deckhand he’d have his own bunk in one of those ships. He’d have access to a galley where the cook prepares meals and the crew eats them. A recreation room for watching TV and movies on DVD. He’d be able to travel to Asia or South America or to the islands of the Caribbean.
Out where the sprawling city dwindles and finally ends, beyond where the malls and bungalows and gated communities of the suburbs turn into trailer parks and the trailer parks eventually merge with palmetto scrub and cane fields and mangrove marsh, out beyond the Great Panzacola Swamp a flattened red sun glimmers near the low unbroken horizon. Streaked with tangerine strips of cloud the western sky turns turquoise and then orange all over and finally scarlet. The Kid can see that evening sky from here beneath the Causeway but only if he walks out to the end of the concrete peninsula and stands at the water’s lapping edge and looks up. A pair of 747s departs simultaneously from the international airport west of downtown. Parallel white contrails scratch the darkening sky. Then directly overhead one plane slowly veers northeast in a long arc toward England while the other bisects the dark sky above the blackened green Gulf Stream on a line that follows the Tropic of Cancer straight east all the way to North Africa and beyond.
Here below the Causeway he gazes along the smaller Great Barrier Isles and the canals between them and the bayside backsides of the palatial homes of singers, professional athletes, and movie stars and the men and women who import and export drugs and manage and launder other people’s ill-gotten and sometimes inherited money in hedge funds and offshore accounts in the Caymans, Turks and Caicos, and Bahamas. Along the canals the mostly Moorish-style estates hide floodlit manicured gardens, terraces, and Olympic-size pools behind ten-foot walls alarmed and topped with razor wire. Looking east beyond them he can see the tall seaside hotels, their pastel walls splashed with warm light. Neon signs chum the names of the hotels against the purple eastern sky and blot out the stars: CONQUISTADOR. CASA CALUSA. MONTAGUE. MIRADOR.
The cars, buses, and trucks on the Causeway and bridges and the north-south Interstate and the traffic-jammed turnpikes to the suburbs have switched their headlights on. In the high-rises and skyscrapers downtown fluorescent night-lights ignite floor after floor as the cleaners and janitors and watchmen begin their night’s work and from the rooftops and penthouses slender beacons reach like long pale arms into the darkness. An offshore breeze puts a sudden chill in the air. Night has fallen in the city of Calusa and along the Great Barrier Isles and down here under the wide loud Causeway that connects the two.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE KID CLICKS HIS HEADLAMP ON. HE shuts off his stove and holds the hot tin can with a gloved hand and spoons chili con carne onto a paper plate and starts eating his supper, washing it down with a warm can of Corona beer. The iguana settles in beside him and watches while he eats as if waiting for leftovers but there are none. Iggy’s an herbivore anyhow. Pure vegan. The Kid crushes the chili can underfoot and drops it into his recycling bag and lights and burns the paper plate on the ground. He opens a second Corona and places the empty into the bag where he stores returnables.
Waste not want not. Carry out what you carry in. The Kid is a good camper. His habits go back to when he was fourteen and behind his mother’s house pitched the same Boy Scout pup tent that he lives in now. He placed it in the shade of the mango tree where the toolshed that became his bedroom had been located before his mother’s then-boyfriend Kyle attached it to the house. That first summer he rarely spent more than a single night at a time out there but he discovered that he loved the privacy and solitude of it. When later that summer his mother got her own computer and a wireless router he had Internet access in the tent. He strung a long extension cord from the house to the tent for charging his laptop and cell phone. In the fall when he started attending North Village High where he didn’t know anybody and no one wanted to hang with him and wouldn’t let him join any of the sets which were mostly black kids anyway he made the tent his semipermanent residence.
Next to his tent he built a new outdoor cage for Iggy six feet high and four feet wide and deep with a perch, a bathtub, a bed of mulch, and a heat lamp. Nights when he needed company or when the temperature dropped into the fifties and occasionally into the forties as winter came on he brought Iggy into the tent with him and visited the house only when his mother wasn’t home for food supplies and to use the toilet and every few days to shower and do his laundry. Most of the time when he wasn’t at school or taking care of Iggy or the two of them were just sitting there staring at each other he watched pornography online and charged it to his mother’s Visa.