White Shadow (11 page)

DODGE JUST rode for a while, driving his car in and out of streets. Down to Ybor City and around the port. From Ashley Street downtown to the river and the Switchyards and back into Hyde Park and Palma Ceia. By two a.m., he rolled back near Franklin Street, parked, and found his way to The Hub bar, a gathering place for cops, priests, socialites, derelicts, and whores. The building opened onto a wedge of the street, with a door at the far corner. Green neon and beer signs lit the bar, which smelled strongly of smoke and perfume and desperate people.

Dodge was glad he didn’t recognize a single one of them. He ordered a Miller and a side of Jack Daniel’s and drank and smoked a cigar and thought to himself about Janet and all the ways she stuck his nose in it.

He drank three more beers in succession without the side of Jack, letting his cigar burn out on its own, and didn’t seem to hear the bartender when he kept asking him questions about the weather.

Because from there going north on Franklin Street, Ed Dodge could walk right past the Rialto Theatre and see himself as a twelve-year-old boy. The door was open to the bar, and soft tropical rain started. He watched the cigar burn and remembered.

He was on his own, working the darkness in rickety movie house seats and waiting for perverts to come and touch his leg and make a quarter from a beat cop named Joe by raising his hand. If he kept walking, he’d pass the flophouse hotel his mom ran for years, when she didn’t disappear on him, and he remembered cleaning toilets with his sister, six years his senior, who left when she was thirteen to get married to a Fuller Brush salesman. And he could recall the soldiers who slept end to end on the floor of the hotel for a buck so they wouldn’t be picked up as vagrants after midnight. And he remembered twice seeing the man who was his father when the man came down for the spring to stand on the street corner with his huge, leather-bound Bible to scream at the girls in the burlesque shows while his son ran cigarettes and booze out of their dressing rooms. The man his mother said was his father would stand there in the Tampa twilight and call those working women whores and Jezebels and look down at Eddie Dodge with absolutely no recognition and with a brilliant, insane fire in his eyes and ask the boy if he’d found Jesus. Dodge would clutch a carton of cigarettes and gaze up at the wild-haired man, and later study his own face in the rusted mirror of the hotel wondering how they could be the same.

And then there was Sulphur Springs, after they moved out of the Scrubs with a new man for his mother, but still late nights at the Rialto when he would walk home with his schoolbooks and maybe an old sandwich someone had left in the theater. There was darkness under the great pockets of live oaks with their ghostly beards and under the bending skeletons of the palms as he cut through the streets, walking miles and miles to get a few hours’ sleep, almost getting run off the road by drunks, and strange voices calling out to him from open cars. That’s where two cops would follow him for a while and then double back, flashing their side light just beneath the siren on him, casting a wide, bright berth, almost turning the night into day for him to walk.

Sometimes they would give him rides. Always they checked up on the kid.

One would hold the door open for him, looking like a super-hero from the comics he bought for a nickel, in that dark blue uniform and hat and shield, and he’d look up to the cop and thank him, and the man would wink back, telling him to stay out of trouble.

Cops had always looked like giants to him.

IT WASN’T another low hum of a landing plane, but silence that startled me awake on the hood of my car. The light still cut over the landing strip and through the darkness, and I rolled from the hood and lit a cigarette, walking and staring down the long alley of red and blue blinking lights. There was a warm breeze off the bay, and I heard a late-night report flash on the radio from WDAE with news from Washington and Tallahassee, and then the announcer started talking about Charlie Wall and how there were no suspects at this time. I could still smell Eleanor’s perfume on the cuff of my dress shirt as I buttoned my sleeves, straightened my tie, and climbed back in my car to head off the little island, embarrassed it was so late and that I’d fallen asleep.

I made a U-turn back onto East Davis Boulevard and cut through a little shopping village on the island—a hardware store, a flower shop, and pharmacy—and soon I was on the tiny little bridge back to Bayshore Boulevard.

As I followed the road curving along the edge of the water, I noticed a car trailing me. I drove slow and easy, because I was relaxed and smoking one of Eleanor’s cigarettes, enjoying the late-night news and wondering if there was anything that I may have missed and kind of thinking about what the next day’s work would be like.

I noticed the car because it didn’t pass me.

I slowed down more. And so did the car. A black sedan. Chevy. Ford. Plymouth. They all look the same behind blinding light.

I only saw the headlights in the dark as we passed all the millionaire homes facing the bay. A way down the road, I took an early turn onto Dakota and into Hyde Park.

The car followed.

I passed Hyde Park’s little squared-off bungalows and apartments wedged off the main Bayshore strip. Big oaks canopied the streets with their old-man moss while streetlights broke in patterns across my face and dash of my car.

I took a left on Swann, the light cutting through the tree branches and over my knuckles.

I turned again on Howard Avenue, making a loop back to my apartment.

My breathing was shallow as I made a hard left onto West Hills and down a narrow little brick street.

I ran into a driveway and cut my lights. I slumped into the seats, peering out the window.

The car passed in my rearview, and disappeared.

There had been two men in the front seat, both with hats. I could not see their faces.

I sat in my seat for several minutes, my hands shaking. Under the streetlights, thin white T-shirts broke and popped on a line in the early morning breeze, almost skittering loose from tenuous pins.

I stayed there for another ten minutes before doubling back and walking quickly into my building and empty studio.

THE OCTAGON wall clock read three, and the bar thinned to a sallow-faced old man in a holey coat. The man was talking to himself and absently fingering his reddened hairy ears. He spoke about God and demons, but Dodge really wasn’t listening to too much except the jukebox playing some old Glenn Miller.

So damned long ago.

“Old music is sweet music,” a woman said to him.

He turned.

She was brunet, with heavy red lips and a soft, dark tan. Big liquid brown eyes and a pretty little dimple at the base of her heart-shaped face. She wore her hair up like the women in Hollywood magazines.

She sat down next to him without being asked, and he noticed she wore a black sweater with a high neck. The sweater was soaked, and her hair, although still tight and perfect, was flecked with water. She ordered a Lord Calvert with a side of water.

Some limes and a cherry.

She smoked and didn’t say anything for a long time. The door to the bar was open, and the rain pattered the asphalt streets and ran fast in narrow gullies. She had tiny blond hairs at the nape of her neck and smelled like wet flowers. She played with the moisture on the glass.

He wanted to leave and stood up.

“Better stay put,” she said. “It’s going to be a fast shower.”

“It’s been a while.”

“About an hour back.”

He smiled.

“My name is Edy,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Nobody,” Dodge said. “Just Nobody.”

“Restless night,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

It was then that he noticed the reddish welt over her eye and the long fingernail scrapes—that he’d seen too many times—against the flesh on her arms. He touched her arm and examined her skin.

“I fell,” she said.

He looked at her.

“Okay, I’m mad at my husband,” she said. “I hate him.” Dodge nodded.

She grabbed his hand and squeezed it underneath the cover of the linoleum bar all through two more songs and the rain, and for some reason Dodge didn’t try to free the grip in the least.

AN HOUR LATER, Dodge walked Edy to her car parked in an alley beside Maas Brothers department store. And he fucked her there, in the backseat with cars going past and bums roaming the sidewalks, and still within the echo of where his father had stood on apple crates and yelled to the masses. She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the back of her station wagon, a Ford Country Squire, and pulled off her panties and handed them to him. He was on top of her immediately, and she clutched her arms and legs around him and kept giggling and stared up at him like this was just a huge wonderful joke and a beautiful revenge that made all kinds of sense.

He came in her like that, with her laughing and not knowing what he was thinking. Gathering himself and pushing himself up onto the seat, he just listened to her laugh, her dress still hiked up, panties in a wad on the floor. Her long thin legs still spread wide.

She bit a long, red nail and smiled. Quiet and content.

“It’s all over, Mr. Nobody,” she said. “I took it all away from you.”

“What?”

“You are an angry man.”

“Is that why you are laughing?”

“What else is there to do when you’re getting screwed in a station wagon and you’re a married woman?”