A Second Chance in Paradise (3 page)

It took me five minutes to walk to the parking lot where my van was waiting – gassed up, tuned up, and loaded up. I turned the key, took one long deep breath then began my 1500 mile journey south, to Key West, Florida.

Chapter 3

Down in the lower reaches of the Florida Keys, a bit south of Big Pine, there’s a speck of an island called Wreckers Key. Roughly 100 miles below the mainland – linked to it by a long chain of bridges, it lies inconspicuously between the Atlantic Ocean and The Gulf of Mexico. A one-square-mile island full of lush tropical flora and a just handful of residents, it was originally settled on by a ship-salvaging hermit named Thaddeus Bell.

Legend has it that on stormy nights
, during lean times when wrecks were scarce, Bell would ride his horse along the white, sandy shoreline while displaying a bright kerosene lantern. To the wooden ships offshore this moving light appeared to be another ship, and seeing its glow in the darkness, the light gave many a hapless captain a false sense of security. Since there were no lighthouses marking the shallow, treacherous reefs back in the 1830’s, this trick worked far more often than one would think. Time and time again an imprudent skipper, thinking he was still in deep water, would steer his vessel too close to shore, only to run helplessly aground on the shallow coral reef that stretches the full length of these Florida Keys.

When the sun would rise the morning after each wreck, old
Thaddeus
would take his salvage boat out into the Atlantic and proceed to claim its cargo. And only after the survivors loaded everything of value onto his boat would he take them to safety in Key West. It was all perfectly legal, except of course the part with the horse and lantern.

Almost two
centuries later the few inhabitants of Wreckers Key still enjoyed the rare sense of freedom that lawlessness and detachment from modern society affords. This state of mind, along with the key’s unfettered beauty is what attracted each and every independent soul who called this subtropical utopia home. Other than Pa Bell and his son Buster, all the other residents of the tiny island had drifted down from states “up north.”  They’d done this for personal reasons and, collectively, to escape what they saw as the meaningless, robotic existences they had been living in other places.

Fall-down-tired after two-and-a-half days on the road,
I steered my minivan into the marl parking lot of a shabby convenience store on Wrecker’s Key. With crushed shells crunching beneath my wheels, I slowly pulled up to a 1950’s era Texaco gas pump – the one without a scrawled, cardboard “out of order” sign on it. Squeezing the nozzle’s handle, starting to pump unleaded, I leaned back against the van and studied the gray, weathered, clapboard building before me.
Looks like one of those old feed stores they have up in New England
, I thought. Side by side, two businesses sat beneath the same roof. The faded plywood sign over one read, “Wreckers Key Grocery” the other, “Barnacle Bell’s Bar”. Dragging the palm of my hand across my already damp forehead, I squinted through the blinding sunlight, watching heat vapors dance upward from the old shingles on the roof. Shifting my eyes a bit, I saw some huge gumbo limbo trees to the side and behind the low-slung building, dwarfing it, giving it an oasis-like appearance. The peculiar trees held my attention with their red flaking trunks. I’d never seen them before and had no idea the locals called them “Tourist Trees” because of the bark’s resemblance to peeling sunburnt skin.

After filling the tank, I hung the nozzle back up and went
inside to pay. With the wooden screen door creaking closed behind me, I saw a young girl with long, sun-bleached hair standing behind a worn counter. Wearing faded denim cutoffs and a pink halter, with her back to me, she was slowly refilling a cigarette rack. I stood there a moment, seemingly unnoticed, surveying the low-beamed ceiling and sparse shelves. She still didn’t turn around or acknowledge me so I just let my stiff, tired legs carry me to the back of the store. From the cold water of “Coca Cola” cooler far older than I was, I fished a bottle of Gatorade out from beneath two miniature icebergs then creaked across the wooden floor, back to the counter where the girl was still stuffing cigarettes. Her back was still to me.

“Excuse me,” I said, “can I have a pack of Carlton 100’
s in a box ... please?”

Though she
turned around slowly, indignantly, she seemed to blush slightly when she looked at me. Then, with a bit of interest, she said, “Oh sure, how much gas did you pump?”

I said “Thirty-four
fifty,” but was thinking,
That’s weird. She took my word for it. That would never happen back in New York.

Punching keys on an
ancient NCR, she casually said, “Hope you’re not heading for Key West.”

“As a m
atter of fact I am. Why?  What’s up?”  In my dog-tired condition, I had no room for bad news.

“
You got reservations?”

“
No. Why?”

“
Heard before on the radio that every motel from Key West clear up to Key Largo is full up.” Then, in a motherly fashion far too mature for her years, the girl said, “
You know
this is Memorial Day weekend, don’t you?”

“
Yes I do.
So
?”  I came back, shrugging my shoulders.

“On a
ny of the big holidays, you can’t get a room nowhere ’round here without advance notice.”

“Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“No rooms anywhere?”

“A lot of places are booked a whole year in advance.”

“
Fantastic. That’s just wonderful,” I said, my tone weary, defeated. “I’ve been on the road three days now. I’m burnt out. Now I’ll have to sleep in my freaking van?  Shit, what’s next?”

“
That’ll be $41.92 please,” she said.

With
a road-grimy hand, I extracted a wad of bills from the front pocket of my jeans. I peeled off three new twenties from the final withdrawal I’d made from Long Island Savings and Loan – twenty-two hundred dollars – that’s all there had been.

The girl flashed a look at
me, counted the change into my hand, and looked up at me again. I managed a hint of a smile then headed for the door.

“
Wait a sec,” her voice suddenly came from behind me. “I can ask Pa Bell if he’d be willing to rent you Mr. Doyle’s trailer. He doesn’t usually rent short term, but who knows.”

“
Who’s Pa Bell? And where’s this trailer?”

“
Oh, Pa’s a great old guy. He owns this here store, the bar next door, and the trailer park –  the only things on the whole key. Yeah, there’s a little bitty park behind this here building, back in the woods a ways. The sign out front of the parking lot says so, but you can’t see it. Pa ain’t trimmed the hibiscuses in so long they’ve damn near covered the whole thing up. I love them pretty red flowers, and there’s a mama Mockingbird nesting in there too. She’s got two young’uns so there’s no way Pa’d trim it down now. Besides, even when you
could
see that old sign, most folks didn’t stop here anyway, not with Key West only 20 minutes down the road.”

“
Well ... if you don’t mind, maybe you could ask him, but I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“
Never hurts to ask, I always say. C’mon, he’s next door.”

As
we walked to “Barnacle Bell’s Bar,” I noticed that the girl was barefoot and had a small, red rose tattooed above her left ankle. Glancing at her angelic face alongside me, her features put me to mind of a teenage Sally Fields; cute smile, dimples and all. She was cute as a button. Even the slightly-chipped tooth I’d noticed inside the store didn’t take all that much away from her.

Coming in from the hot Florida sun, the dark
, cave-like barroom was refreshingly cool. A window-mounted air conditioner whirred as two ceiling fans overhead circulated slowly – Casa Blanca style. There was nobody sitting on any of the dozen or so stools or at the three tables. It had the feel of a place that was just about to open. A few life rings, each with different faded names of boats or ships, hung on the dark wooden walls along with a scattering of fishing rods. Like the vacationers who sometimes stopped into “Barnacle Bell’s” I had no way of knowing the planked walls once formed the deck of a Peruvian schooner. There were photographs scattered on the walls here and there, mostly black and whites from the 50’s and 60’s of successful anglers with phenomenal catches. Baseball great Ted Williams was in one of them. He was holding a thirteen-ound bonefish and standing alongside him was his guide. Though I had no way of knowing it at the time, the man to Williams’s left was a very young, and obviously very able, Pa Bell.           

Behind the circular bar a
tall, solidly-built old man was mopping the Cuban tile floor with what smelled like pine disinfectant. His white brows arched high above two eyes the color of sea water. The deep creases in his forehead attested to his living eighty-two years beneath Florida’s unforgiving sun. Studying me as he spoke, he said, “What’s up Sissy?”  Pa Bell was not one to waste words. He only spoke when he had something to say and then he never rushed into it. He had that slow, easy way of a blue-blooded Conch.

“
Pa, this here’s, um ... um ... ” Sissy stuttered, looking up at me.

“
Sonny, Sonny Raines. Glad to meet you,” I said, extending my hand over the mahogany bar.

The old sea captain
looked directly into my eyes as he slowly took my offering into his own calloused hand. Feeling slightly intimidated as his sausage-like fingers encompassed my hand, I couldn’t help but notice the tattooed anchor and “USN” beneath the white hair on his forearm. Like the sign on the front of his building, the image and letters had lost much of their clarity.

“
He needs a place to stay, Pa. Everything is filled up already.”  Sissy said.

“
Hmmm ... how long for?”

“
Probably just till Monday or Tuesday,” I said, “by then I think I’ll be able to get something in Key West. That’s where I’m headed.”

Pa took a long
swallow from a can of Busch that was sitting on the bar and after that a hit from a Lucky Strike that had been smoldering in a glass ashtray. With all that out of the way he said, “I’ll rent ya Doyle’s Airstream, twenty-five a night. Sissy, take him back to see it. I’ll keep an eye on the store.”

Desperate for a place to stay, without
even seeing it, I reached in my pocket and said, “I’ll pay you now, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“
No son,” Pa said, “you ain’t stayed yet, so you don’t owe me nothin’.” Then he began filling a stainless bar cooler with cans of Bud. With his head bowed now, the back of his wide neck put me to mind of the dried and cracked red Georgia clay I’d seen alongside the highway the day before.

Once we were outside again,
Sissy climbed into the van with me to show the way to the trailer. With a trail of hot, white dust rising behind us, we drove past the hibiscus-shrouded sign and turned down an unpaved road alongside the store. A few hundred yards back through slash pines and saw palmettos she directed me to turn right. A moment later the trees opened into a clearing and an aging, yet homey little trailer park appeared. About a dozen single-wide mobile homes and travel trailers sat side by side each other in a half-moon configuration. Although the aluminum dwellings were decades old, they were all neat and tidy, and each of them allowed their occupants an unobstructed, million-dollar view. Just steps from their doors there was a narrow strip of beach bordering acres and acres of shallow, gin-clear tropical water. Farther out, beyond the tidal flats, the deep aquamarine waters of Wreckers Channel flowed gently with the slackening tide.

Taking this all in from beneath a canopy of tall coconut palms, I couldn’t help feeling like
a modern-day Robinson Crusoe.

“Wow,” I said to Sissy, “look at all these coconuts lying around here. Are they diseased or something?”

“Diseased?” Sissy said, scrunching up her face, yanking her chin in, “What the heck are you talking about – diseased?”

“Oh!  Sorry, nothing! I didn’t mean the place is diseased or anything like that. It’s absolutely gorgeous here. This is unbelievable. It’s just that back in New York anything of any value that isn’t tied down disappears in no time. If this was back there, those coconuts would have been
scoffed up as soon as they hit the sand.”

A moment later
Sissy directed me to pull alongside one of the trailers, and I obeyed. Looking through the van’s windows while rolling to a stop, I couldn’t get over how much the travel trailer’s bare metal exterior, with its rounded corners, resembled the fuselage of a small airplane.

When we entered the narrow, unlocked doorway
the heat only intensified and the odor of dampness and mildew invaded my nostrils. But the place was clean. And there was a window- mounted air-conditioner that I turned on immediately. The compressor may have kicked over grudgingly, but once it did she was humming like a soothing song and spewing cool refreshing air.

T
rying not to appear overzealous about the bargain-basement price, I quickly told Sissy that everything looked fine and that I wanted to rent it.

That seemed to make her happy and a
s she left with a smile, the teenager said, “My real name is Vanessa, but everyone here on the Key calls me Sissy.”

“
Is it okay if I call you Sissy, too?”  I asked, trying to come across as seriously as I could.

I could tell s
he liked hearing me say her name, even if I hadn’t called her Vanessa.

“
Sure. That’ll be just fine!”

After I thanked her
and said goodbye, I watched through a window as she trotted and skipped back toward the store, seemingly unaffected by the heat.

I
nstinctively, I locked the door before dragging myself directly to the shower. The pressure was low, the water hard and warm, but to me it felt heavenly. After luxuriating for quite some time, I dried off, took two steps down the trailer’s tiny hallway, one more into the bedroom and plopped right onto the mattress. Lying there on my back, clean and content, I drank the no-longer-cold Gatorade and smoked a cigarette. I was tired, but I had finally managed to leave New York, and the long drive was all but over. I just laid there for a while, enjoying exciting thoughts about finally being in Florida and what the future might hold.

But then things changed. That bright feeling of contentment was suddenly overshadowed by something else. Looking up at the unfamiliar low ceiling above, I now felt misplaced. Painful memories of
that
morning – my last birthday, started rolling through my psyche, shrouding my newfound sense of hope and optimism.

Rolling to my side, watching
the green frond of a saw palmetto scratching away at a window the size of a porthole, I thought
, God ... why can’t I get over this?  Will I ever get over it?  I go a few days thinking it’s getting easier then, poof, I’m hurting all over again – just as bad as I was in the very beginning. I wonder what Wendy’s doing right doing now. How she feels at night when she goes to bed alone. Oh, no ... she’s probably still seeing that bastard Silverman. She’s probably going to bed with ... oh man, put that out of your mind right now. You don’t want to even think about ....

I went on and on like that until the huge Florida sun melted like hot red lava into the Gulf of Mexico. After that,
exhaustion mercifully set in and I fell into a long, deep sleep.