No trace of Spanish accent The pigmentation either sunburn or years of accumulated dirt Whatever there’d been of Wiley Fecko, there wasn’t much left. Frail, malnourished, he was in danger of being lifted aloft by a wind gust His wrists and forearms matched the circumference of a flashlight His neck dripped with extra skin.
I said, “I’m Rutledge.”
From twenty feet away he looked me over. “How you get money?”
“I take pictures.”
He squinted, continued to size me up. “Who from?”
The mind-set: It’s not gainful if it’s not a scam.
“I’m a photographer. People pay me. I use a camera to take pictures.”
Fecko had lost so many teeth, his gums and lower jaw had shrunk. His lips canted inward. “Saw one yesterday, over in the road.”
I checked a trash heap behind me. “A picture?”
Wiley stared, new concern on his wizened face. He waved away the bugs, then enunciated so I’d get his drift: “A picture taker.”
He’d meant me. On Sunday, with the deputies. Don’t push this too hard. “Was he taking pictures of the road?”
“Nope, corpse. Or most of a corpse. Lots of police hanging out. All of ’em afraid to look right at that dead man. Most of ’em too ashamed of their spit and polish to look at me.”
Right to the point Fecko was no softie.
“Did the police ask you questions?”
Fecko shook his head. His mannerisms became those of
a small kid being naughty, his furtive, distracting movements made not to duck punishment but to minimize pain. “I’d tried to talk to one, you know. He tell me to get on back, tell me I stink like Knights Key. He got some prissy cologne, I don’t tell him he stink like a French whore. Look like he shined his face with a floor buffer.”
Knights Key, the island at the north end of the Seven-Mile Bridge, often smells of rotting seaweed and plankton. Permanent halitosis.
“What were you trying to tell him?”
“ ‘Bout the funeral parlor truck leaving them goods in the open. Probably charged the kin for a pine box and a hole. But they ripped ’em. They left that dead man in the hot sun. Ugly black birds startin’ to think, Here’s supper.”
“Funeral truck?”
“Black truck, fancied up. Kinda like your minority automobiles. I’m not a prejudice guy, you know, but it’s a description.”
Bug Thorsby’s truck? When I was scrambling around the house, getting ready to shoot Dexter Hayes’s pictures on Caroline Street, I’d had an image of Bug’s pickup truck pulling up to the emergency room entrance at Florida Keys Memorial. That’s why I’d asked Carmen to follow up, to call the hospital. I’d wanted to identify the man with the busted face and teeth, the man now a murder victim. She couldn’t get a name because the man never made it to the hospital.
Had the victim’s teammates beheaded him because he’d failed to cause me pain? Was he punished for weakness in battle? Or was it so he couldn’t be identified? Was Bug Thorsby that cold? Would he kill to avoid being linked to a mugging?
He’d shoot his toe to cure an ingrown nail.
Why not shoot me, instead?
I suddenly was aware of an idling chain saw. I wondered for a moment if someone still was cutting tree trunks felled by old storms, but that made little sense. The instant I smelled raw gasoline, I knew what I’d heard. A loud burst
of high-pitched exhaust racket cut the silence. I felt dread, I knew—
My Kawasaki exploded with a percussive
woof.
I felt the blast against my back, heard the bike crunch as it toppled onto the pavement’s edge. With a rapid series of pop-clutch shifts, the dirt bike made its departure. I crouched in expectation: a moment later the tank exploded, then one of the tires, then the other tire. The complete package. The stench of scorched petroleum hit my nose, acrid fumes of melting plastic, burning rubber. Fecko had fallen straight to a sitting position, flat on his butt, mouth agape. I waited for movement, to make sure he hadn’t been struck by a piece of shrapnel. He moved. He was fine. I stayed where I was. I couldn’t bear to witness what I knew was happening. The torch had split, faded up the road. I wasn’t going to identify or nab anyone. My only reaction was to feel my pockets.
Shit. No coins for a phone call.
Inside of two days and six hours, two men’s lives had ended and I’d been either the unfortunate victim of repeated, random vandalism, or I’d received my third undefined warning. Would the spinning marble fall into my slot, or was I immune? Bigger question: If the motorcycle’s destruction had been planned, was Wiley Fecko in danger for my having been at his campsite?
Another ear-busting blast. I almost dived, ate dirt. From the west this time, a Navy fighter swooping on final approach to Boca Chica, crackling, spitting, shaking the ground. Hot pilots in training. Another jet came, close-stationed. A ribbon of ivory-toned condensate streamed from its port wing tip. The third jet followed, then faded fast. Again, in their wake, the huge quiet. Did campers in the mangroves put up with this racket every day?
“Fecko, I need your help.”
No Fecko. Between the road explosion and the thunder above, Wiley had beat feet I needed to chase him like a wounded deer, not to dispatch him humanely, but to rescue his emaciated butt from whomever.
I hoped Fecko didn’t ask me to identify the enemy.
My first steps through his camp were careful ones. I didn’t know whether he’d booby-trapped it, or had dug a latrine, or kept a box of trained snakes. I noted that he owned a balloon-tire bicycle, with two flats, no chain, and a mildewed seat. A tin cup and metal plate, hooked together by a twisted coat hanger. A stack of aluminum frames, maybe eighteen by twenty-four, motel art-sized, without glass or art. A collection of stuffed black garbage bags. No telling what they held. Wiley Fecko’s mini-museum of vintage trash, items discarded fifteen or twenty years ago: an RCA Victor 45-rpm record changer with a plastic one-inch center post. A mildew-encrusted vinyl carrying case, full of sun-warped eight-track tapes. His bed: the broken-sponge composite of carpet underlayment. A cache of unopened Vienna Sausage tins, Frito wrappers, and empty wine bottles. Fecko had shoplifted screw-top vintages. I grabbed a bottle to carry. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I’d have to fend off attacking bats, or one of Fecko’s soul mates, an opossum, a rabid armadillo.
I gained distance from the crackling fire, stopped to listen. Wiley was not a master of escape and evasion. It wasn’t a stepped-on twig that got him, but labored wheezing. I found him less than twenty yards away, on his ass in a patch of sand, swatting away gnats, rubbing his ankle. His eyes were those of the cowering, pissing dog I’d seen an hour earlier at Big Crab Fish House.
I said, “I want you to come with me.”
“I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
“Someone might try to kill you.”
He swatted. “I can live with that.”
“Humor is good.” I held up the bottle. “You into grape?”
He grinned, almost leered at his weakness. “Artificial energy. I was nine or ten, hiding under the trailer, beer-buzzed. My grandmother told me I’d turn into a drunk. I should’ve took her warnin’ way back then.”
“You saw something happen the other day. Something
a few bad people would rather not hear mentioned in a court of law.”
A hint of fear in his fogged eyes. ‘Tell ’em I didn’t see jack.”
“When do I do that? The next time I see ’em at Fast Buck Freddie’s?”
“Whatever.”
“Lemme see if I got this right, Fecko. You want to drink your next pint through your mouth, or bypass that? You want the express route down your neck? You can do it just like that man the funeral dudes left on the sofa. No tongue to get in the way, no swallowing. They might be kind to you, use a clean hacksaw blade instead of a dull rusty one. Unless a chain saw did it . . .”
He withered. “There’s people back in here. I go away, they rip me off.”
“How ‘bout you go with me now, we come back in a couple days, I replace anything that’s missing?”
He swatted, then shook his head. “Certain things, gotta carry ’em out.”
“Whatever you say, man.”
I will learn not to issue blanket statements.
Fecko took fifteen minutes to inventory his belongings. I waited for a fire truck, a sheriff’s department cruiser, or a curious passer-by to stop and ask about the smoldering Kawasaki. Maybe a shrimper in the dockyard, the caretaker aboard the
Lady Caribe I.
Maybe someone in Bernstein Park heard the bang. Nobody came to the party. I felt as isolated as Wiley. To the rest of the world, the explosion had been one hand clapping.
When he’d finally sorted the contents of his garbage bags, the contents of which I had no desire to examine, I asked if I could help carry anything.
“Whew,” he said in his strange high-pitched voice. “You could use a bath, my man. That reminds me. I gotta take my shower.”
“A shower?”
“Bring it with me, or some jackoff’ll rip me for it.”
Wiley Fecko possessed the innocence of a man too addled to imagine duplicity. Or else he strove for that ideal. He’d also developed the resourcefulness of an ocean-transit sailor. His shower was a contraption formed of a coral-colored douche bag, a hot-water bottle, a plastic funnel, and a maze of fifteen feet of translucent surgical tubing. Silver duct tape held all the parts together. I looked closely. Fecko had gotten his hands on a funnelator.
The first funnelator I’d ever seen had been aboard a sailboat in Antigua, during a photo assignment for
Outside
magazine. Two sailboats had shown up with them. The captains of four other yachts that I knew of had paid air-express rates—before FedEx—to have proper components sent to Nelson’s Dockyard. Funnelators were, quite simply, water-balloon launchers. Rigged correctly, with the surgical tubing lashed to pelican hooks and those hooks affixed to vertical stays, the funnel could be armed with a fat water balloon, pulled backward to the far gunwale, to the full stretch of elastic tubing, and released. The resultant pay-load, aimed with precision, fired with skill, could fly forty or fifty yards and put another sailboat’s whole cockpit awash. The liquid bomb became ceremonial, instant tradition, an irreverent, oceangoing party joke. Captains felt it a point of honor to return fire. Half the racing fleet scrambled to obtain rubber, plastic, and tape, no matter the shipping cost. Fecko, somehow, had found one that a sailor had discarded. He’d also had the cleverness to add the douche bag and water bottle that, filled with water and hung from high branches in direct sunlight, would create a hot-water shower.
The man was no dummy. I began to understand that he lived in the weeds by choice, for reasons that meant much to him.
We walked toward the road called, ironically, Fifth Avenue. I balanced a stuffed garbage bag on the flat-tire bicycle I’d volunteered to push. Atop the bag the toilet seat and lid, a toaster and a neon beer lamp. Items important to Fecko in his camp without electricity. Fecko limped along
clutching a metal folding chair. With his free hand he continued to shoo no-see-ums.
The trio of jets returned for another approach on Boca Chica’s runway. A chopper chugged westward four hundred feet above us. Paranoia runs deep. I felt like a refugee in exodus, traversing a conflict zone, running from enemy gunships. This chopper was not a military unit. A silver sheriff’s department star on its hull. I didn’t expect it to check out the still-smoking cycle.
It didn’t.
I thought, No more Kawasaki, no more imported motorcycle. The recovery of my all-American image would please Liska. He’d be pleased to know that I’d joined the new breed, the American victim. Free to walk.
We passed the site where purple birthmark found his ultimate freedom.
“Got friends in Key West?” I said.
Fecko’s thin hair fluttered as he walked. “Don’t reckon.”
“Not a single one, somebody to connect with?”
“My friends, mostly, they DBF.”
I’d heard of DBA—the Dis-Barred Attorneys club. But not DBF.
“That’s a street slang,” explained Wiley. “Dead by forty.”
I had three problems. Panhandling shouldn’t have been one. I defined humility; I assumed Wiley Fecko had the ability. But we lacked prospects.
Problem two, if I called Teresa Barga, even though her Grand Am was five or six years old, a survivor of her college years and eight months on the chuckholed streets of Cayo Hueso, there was no way she would allow Wiley Fecko inside her car. Finally, I didn’t know what to do with the Feck once I got him inside city limits. I may have been humanitarian of the week, dragging him out of the bush to save his life, but I didn’t want a houseguest. If I dropped him on Duval to join the buggy brigade, the residentially challenged old-pro bums, they’d chew him up and forget to spit him out.
“Maybe this’ll be the first step to getting you out of the woods,” I said.
“I’ll go back here,” said Fecko. “I know you mean well, but I have a pretty damned good sense of destiny.”
At the intersection of Shrimp Road and Fifth, I looked left, saw a deputy parked in the shade near the entrance to Bernstein Park. The deputy had his head down—maybe paperwork, maybe a snooze. What kind of vigilance? My taxes pay that man’s salary. Maybe I could tap on the cruiser’s window, get change for a buck. Maybe not I’d have to explain the toilet seat and the neon beer lamp.
I steered Fecko to the right We headed for the pole-mounted pay phone in front of the Rusty Anchor. I dug once more into my pocket hoping that by some miracle I’d find coins for a phone call.
“Little short?” said Fecko.
“No change, no ride.”
“You got money where you stay?”
I took out my wallet showed him twenties, tens, and fives.
Fecko grabbed his heart. I thought he’d cave in his chest. “Jesus, man,” he said. “Never show that to a man in hard times.” He checked the street walked down the side of the restaurant found a rusty coat hanger in the weeds. He looked around again to see if he was being observed. He pulled the cap off a cylindrical fence post the chain link that surrounds All Animal Clinic, stuck in the hanger, pulled out a Baggie. He unwrapped it as he walked toward the phone. He placed two coins in my palm, took out a small device, unlocked the square coin-box access door.