Hemingway's Girl (44 page)
Authors: Erika Robuck
Tags: #Fiction, #Biographical, #Historical, #Literary
As Papa pulled the
Pilar
up to a lone piling within jumping distance of the road, the smell hit. Mariella’s
eyes grew wide and she covered her face with her arm.
“Mari,” he said. “This isn’t a good idea. It’s really bad.”
“I’m getting out.”
Papa sighed and reached for the piling. He passed Mari the wheel and climbed up to
tie the
Pilar
to the piling. Then he hopped back down in the cabin and found an old towel. He bit
one side, tore it in two, stepped over to her, and wrapped the towel around her face.
Then he did his own.
Papa climbed out first on the wall of land where the roadbed used to lie. He reached
back to help Mariella, and they set out.
The dead were mostly naked, the clothing having been ripped off their bodies and,
in some cases, their limbs taken with it. Most of their faces were bloated beyond
recognition, and flies buzzed in their eyes and between their legs.
Mariella looked up in the sky and wondered where the buzzards were. Then she saw one
lying in a clump of gray-black, waterlogged feathers. At least they wouldn’t start
on the bodies. They were all dead themselves.
They picked through the mess of men and mangroves. Mariella and Papa came upon a tree
and saw two naked, swollen women under a swarm of flies. Mariella had to turn away.
“Jesus,” said Papa. “They used to work the sandwich shop at the ferry.”
Papa moved ahead of Mariella while she tried to catch her breath amid the devastation
and the odor. She was trying to be brave, but the horror was unimaginable.
She looked ahead and saw Papa stopped down by the water’s edge, and was shocked to
see him turn and vomit. After what he’d seen in his life, Mariella thought he’d have
more of a stomach for this.
Then he met her gaze, and his look of panic filled her with a dread she’d never before
experienced. She started toward him.
“Stop!” he called, putting up his hands. “Don’t come any closer.”
“What is it?’ She continued to move toward him.
He wiped his mouth and rushed toward her, pushing her away.
“Stop,” he said. “Go back!”
“No.” Mariella pushed at him. He tried to hold her, but she broke free of his arms
and stumbled over to the corpse.
There was a body floating lifeless in the water, its face covered with rope. It was
its arm that stopped her short. On it, grotesquely enlarged on the bruised and mottled
skin, were the numbers
11-11-18
.
She gasped and felt her heart beating in her ears.
She was vaguely aware that Papa had pulled her into his arms.
Several workers nearby came forward and tried to untangle the body from the coils
of rope. Then she screamed and tried to move toward the corpse. Papa pulled her back,
and she kicked and clawed at him. She fought him while he tried to drag her to the
Pilar
. He finally lifted her and carried her to the boat. Once they got to the
Pilar
he dropped her over the side and jumped in after her.
She tried to climb back out.
“Stop!” he yelled.
“Why?”
“Just stop.” He held her face between his hands. She was losing strength. The fight
was draining out of her.
“No, oh, Papa, no.”
She finally gave up and let him hold her.
CHAPTER
T
WENTY-NINE
Mariella cried herself to sleep on the way back to Key West that day. When they arrived
at the dock, the stragglers wanted details, but Papa ignored them as he roused her,
pushed through the crowd with his arm around her waist, and led her to the car. He
drove her to his home and carried her up to the sofa in his writing cottage, ignoring
Pauline’s questions and those of the staff.
“I’m going to John’s,” he said, while she stared into the room at nothing. The words
barely registered. “I’ll be back.”
Mariella stayed in his cottage for six days. She allowed only Papa to bring her food.
She didn’t bathe or move from the couch unless she had to use the bathroom in the
corner. She didn’t cry; nor did she speak a word. She just tried to dig out of her
pain and memories to a place where she was capable of making decisions.
Six days after he put her in the cottage, while the family sat at breakfast, Mariella
walked down the stairs and into the dining room. She was pale. Her hair hung in greasy
waves around her face. She was alarmingly thin—just a ghost of what she’d been—but
her eyes were lit again.
“I want to go home,” she said.
Papa stood and left his eggs and toast half-eaten on the table. The boys looked at
each other, for once subdued. Pauline couldn’t seem to bear to make eye contact with
Mariella.
Papa drove her to her home, which, luckily, had survived the storm. When he pulled
up, Eva was in the yard with Estelle, tending to the new flowers she’d planted. Lulu
sat on John’s lap, reading a book with him. When they saw Mariella, Lulu jumped up
and ran to the car with her mother and Estelle. They swept Mariella away in a wave
of tears and thanks to Papa. Mariella looked over her shoulder at him before she walked
into the house and sent him her gratitude in her thoughts. She knew he could feel
it.
Mark Bishop looked up as Mariella walked toward him on the dock. She wore Gavin’s
white shirt and dungarees rolled up to her knees.
“Hey, Mari.”
She nodded, eager to speak but unable to find the right words.
“I’m very sorry to hear,” he said, allowing his words to trail off over all the hard
things. “Damn shame, what happened up there.”
She stared at the water behind him, as serene as a lake, without the least hint of
the violence that had recently passed over it. The sun winked off the surface, and
small waves broke in a hush around the pilings of the dock.
She found her voice.
“Glad to see you sticking around,” she said.
“Hell, I tried to leave but I just couldn’t. I’ll ride it out.”
She looked at his boat and back out to the water beyond it. She reached for the stern.
“That’s what I came to talk to you about,” she said. “I’ve got an idea that might
save both of us.”
She was drowning here, on dry land.
Mariella lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to her sisters
breathe around her. She couldn’t stop shaking, tears wetting her pillow, sweat soaking
her nightshirt. It was Gavin’s shirt, and it still smelled like him.
How many days had passed since she’d come home from Papa’s house? Four? Seven? Ten?
She didn’t know. All she knew was that Mark had thought her idea about the charter
boat business might work, and that would save her. She had to get back to the water
or she’d die. She might die anyway, but at least she’d do it where she felt at peace.
She tried to conjure Gavin’s face, but all she could see was the bloated, lifeless
corpse. The bodies with skin slipping off as the men tried to pull them from their
watery graves. She felt the urge to vomit, but suppressed it.
Papa had been by the previous afternoon to give her a copy of the piece he’d written
about his anger over the death of the vets. It was full of bitterness and contempt,
and she couldn’t help but read it again, her eyes seeking the most graphic places
with morbid desperation. If she kept reading it, she might believe that what had happened
really happened.
WHO MURDERED THE VETS? A FIRSTHAND
REPORT ON THE FLORIDA HURRICANE
By Ernest Hemingway
Who sent them down to the Florida Keys and left them there in hurricane months?
Who is responsible for their deaths?
The writer of this article [Hemingway] lives a long way from Washington and would
not know the answers to those questions. But he does know that wealthy people, yachtsmen,
fishermen such as President Hoover and President Roosevelt, do not come to the Florida
Keys in hurricane months. Hurricane months are August, September
and October, and in those months you see no yachts along the Keys. You do not see
them because yacht owners know there would be great danger, inescapable danger, to
their property if a storm should come. For the same reason, you cannot interest any
very wealthy people fishing off the coast of Cuba in the summer when the biggest fish
are there. There is a known danger to property. But veterans, especially the bonus-marching
variety of veterans, are not property. They are only human beings; unsuccessful human
beings, and all they have to lose is their lives. They are doing coolie labor for
a top wage of $45 a month and they have been put down on the Florida Keys where they
can’t make trouble. It is hurricane months, sure, but if anything comes up, you can
always evacuate them, can’t you?…
Who sent nearly a thousand war veterans, many of them husky, hard-working and simply
out of luck, but many of them close to the border of pathological cases, to live in
frame shacks on the Florida Keys in hurricane months?
Why were the men not evacuated on Sunday, or, at latest, Monday morning, when it was
known there was a possibility of a hurricane striking the Keys and
evacuation was their only possible protection
?…
When we reached Lower Matecumbe there were bodies floating in the ferry slip. The
brush was all brown as though autumn had come to these islands where there is no autumn
but only a more dangerous summer, but that was because the leaves had all been blown
away. There was two feet of sand over the highest part of the island where the sea
had carried it and all the heavy bridge-building machines were on their sides. The
island looked like the abandoned bed of a river where the sea had swept
it. The railroad embankment was gone and the men who had cowered behind it and finally,
when the water came, clung to the rails, were all gone with it. You could find them
face down and face up in the mangroves. The biggest bunch of the dead were in the
tangled, always green but now brown, mangroves behind the tank cars and the water
towers. They hung on there, in shelter, until the wind and the rising water carried
them away. They didn’t all let go at once but only when they could hold on no longer.
Then further on you found them high in the trees where the water swept them. You found
them everywhere and in the sun all of them were beginning to be too big for their
blue jeans and jackets that they could never fill when they were on the bum and hungry.
I’d known a lot of them at Josie Grunt’s place and around the town when they would
come in for pay day, and some of them were punch drunk and some of them were smart;
some had been on the bum since the Argonne almost and some had lost their jobs the
year before last Christmas; some had wives and some couldn’t remember; some were good
guys and others put their pay checks in the Postal Savings and then came over to cadge
in on the drinks when better men were drunk; some liked to fight and others liked
to walk around the town; and they were all what you get after a war. But who sent
them there to die?
They’re better off, I can hear whoever sent them say, explaining to himself. What
good were they? You can’t account for accidents or acts of God. They were well-fed,
well-housed, well-treated and, let us suppose, now they are well dead….
So now you hold your nose…up to that bunch of mangroves where there is a woman, bloated
big as a balloon
and upside down and there’s another face down in the brush next to her and explain
to you they are two damned nice girls who ran a sandwich place and filling station
and that where they are is their hard luck….
And so you walk the fill, where there is any fill and now it’s calm and clear and
blue and almost the way it is when the millionaires come down in the winter except
for the sandflies, the mosquitoes and the smell of the dead that always smell the
same in all countries you go to—and now they smell like that in your own country.
Or is it just that dead soldiers smell the same no matter what their nationality or
who sends them to die?…
You’re dead now, brother, but who left you there in the hurricane months on the Keys
where a thousand men died before you in the hurricane months when they were building
the road that’s now washed out? Who left you there? And what’s the punishment for
manslaughter now?