American Tropic (9 page)

Sitting next to Luz in the passenger seat is Chicken, the one-eared scarred pit bull. Chicken licks his chops as she takes a deep-fried conch fritter from a bag wedged between her thighs. She munches on the fritter as she continues to drive with one hand on the steering wheel. She glances over at the dog, sitting patiently on his haunches, waiting for a handout. “Chicken, you want a fritter?” The dog whines with pitiful expectation. She plucks a fritter from the bag and holds up the greasy ball to Chicken’s mouth. “Careful, don’t bite my fingers off.” The dog’s pink tongue slurps the fritter gently from between her fingers. He swallows with a loud gurgle. She pats his broad head
affectionately. “You really are a lover, not a fighter. I like that in a man.”

Luz turns off Duval Street and drives out of town, past streets lined with palms shading eighteenth-century wood houses painted in bright Caribbean colors. She continues on to the outskirts of Key West, with its sleazy motels, fast-food drive-in joints, and run-down shopping centers. She heads up the Overseas Highway, crossing bridges linking the islands of the Keys. The farther Luz travels, the less man-made distractions line the highway, until, finally, there are none. On one side are the Gulf of Mexico’s turquoise-colored waters. On the other side, the vivid indigo of the Atlantic Ocean. She looks through her car’s windshield; the atmosphere is pristine, dominated by the changing light reflected from the two great bodies of water. In the pale-blue sky, spread-winged white herons sail between columns of clouds. The herons soar high on hot wind currents, then swoop down, gliding to graceful landings in a flutter of wings on distant mangrove islands dotted across the horizon.

A large billboard looms up on the side of the highway declaring
COMING SOON! NEPTUNE BAY RESORT!
The billboard’s visual depicts a vast resort of luxury condos, hotels, golf courses, and a yacht marina. Towering above the resort depiction is a giant image of the bearded sea god Neptune clutching a trident spear. Luz turns her car abruptly off the highway onto a dirt road leading into the center of an abandoned construction site stripped of all vegetation and empty of any people. She parks the car and gets out. Chicken follows her as she walks across a scraped-earth landscape dominated by rows of hulking, dust-covered bulldozers, earth-graders, dump trucks, and
cement mixers. She continues, zigzagging between incomplete cement building foundations with rusted iron rebar struts sticking up from them. She arrives at a concrete pier jutting out into a brackish backwater inlet coming in from the Gulf of Mexico. She walks to the far end of the pier, where a canary-yellow forty-foot powerboat is tied, its high jet-exhaust chrome spoilers gleaming in the harsh sunlight.

In front of the powerboat, Big Conch sits in an aluminum slingback chair, wearing only a tight red Speedo swimsuit. His sinewy suntan-oiled body is shaved of all hair except for the dyed slick blond hair of his head. On his chest glint heavy antique Spanish medallions that dangle from a gold chain around his neck. He shucks oysters with a broad-bladed knife. Scattered around his bare feet are empty shells. Chicken trots up, sniffs the shells, and starts nibbling on them. Big looks up and greets Luz with a smirk as he nods toward Chicken. “I see they finally gave you a better partner than that Riviera redneck, Moxel. At least this one’s got a pair of balls.”

Big pulls a gnarly-shelled oyster from a wooden crate next to the aluminum chair. He deftly knifes open the shell and scrapes free its meat. He holds out the glob balanced on the knife’s blade. “You want an aphrodisiac from the sea? Neptune’s original Viagra. It’ll give you a hard-on for that hot blond-bombshell girlfriend of yours. Oh yeah, you can’t get a hard-on. What is it you get, anyway, if you can’t get a stiff dick? Come on, have an oyster. It might even make me attractive to you.”

“I just lost my appetite.”

“No appetite from stuffing fritters all day. You won’t die from a bullet to your heart but a grease hole through
your gut.” Big holds the knife up to his mouth. He lets the oyster balanced on the blade slide off between his lips.

Luz looks over at the name emblazoned on the powerboat’s sleek hull:
Big Conch
.

She looks back at Big. “Since you know so much about the sea, did you know that if a conch’s johnson is bitten off by a hungry eel, the conch grows himself a new johnson?”

“Is that why you eat conch fritters all day, hoping to grow yourself a wiener?” Big glances over at Chicken, crunching a mouthful of oyster shells. “Dumb bastard’s gonna puke.” He turns back to Luz. “You didn’t drive all the way out here to give me a lesson on the sex life of the conch. What the hell do you want?”

“Dandy Randy and Bill Warren were both murdered.”

“So were the Kennedy brothers. Ancient news. Get to it. You’re here because you figure I killed my two partners.”

“No. I’m here because I believe whoever did kill your partners is now after you. You should back off developing this resort and lay low.”

“Lay low? Never. I don’t give a shit if half the people accuse Neptune Bay of destroying the habitats of everything from white herons to blind manatees to one-armed nuns. The other half of the people love me for this hundred-million-dollar resort I’m developing. It means jobs to build it, jobs to sell it, jobs to service it. We’re coming off the worst economic times in the history of the Keys since the Great Depression, and I’m the man leading the way out with my Neptune Bay.”

Chicken bumps up against Big’s knees and vomits a gut-load of half-eaten oyster shells onto Big’s bare feet. “Get out of here, you one-eared mutt!” Big kicks the dog
in the ribs. He shouts at Luz as she pulls the yelping Chicken away: “And don’t you come around trying to trick me by pretending you care about saving my hide from some psycho killer. And I damn well don’t need lecturing about how conchs grow their dicks, especially since you don’t have a dick and balls. Hell, you no longer even have tits. You’re a sorry-ass situation.”

Luz glares at Big. “You’ve got balls … balls for brains.”

“I’m a sympathetic man, so I won’t respond to that, but answer me this: why, after your mastectomy, didn’t you get some fake titties? You’re a good-looking woman. You’d be a knockout if you bolted on a pair of Vegas-showgirl silicon hooters. That way you wouldn’t look so much like a …”

“Dyke.”

“Like a guy trying to be tough but he’s a punk.”

Luz’s eyes narrow. She nods at the thick gold chain glinting around Big’s neck.
“Un mono que lleva cadenas de oro es todavía un mono.”

“Speak American.”

“A monkey wearing gold chains is still a monkey.”

Big roars with laughter. “Fu-fuck … ing … monkey. That’s great. A goddamn fucking monkey.” His laughter turns to a snarl as he jumps up and slashes the blade of his knife in the air. “I’m not a fucking monkey, you dumb dyke! I’m a goddamn two-hundred-pound male gorilla with five-pound balls and a swinging foot-long dick! Don’t you ever forget it!”

Luz faces Big. “I can see from the tiny bump in that Speedo you’re wearing that there isn’t much swinging between your legs. You don’t have enough juice to knock up a tick.”

L
uz nervously chews on a conch fritter as she watches the Duval Street night action through the windshield of her parked Charger. She keeps her eyes on the front of a nightclub. A neon rainbow sign arches above the nightclub’s doorway:
LITTLE ORPHAN TRANNY’S
.
The sign’s garish pastel light reflects on three six-foot-tall drag queens with big hair, wearing sequined ball gowns, sashaying back and forth on the sidewalk on six-inch-high stiletto heels. The queens wink false eyelashes, blow kisses, and call out in basso male voices at passing locals, tourists, and high rollers to enter the nightclub and experience the wild side.

Inside her car, Luz slips another fritter from the paper bag between her legs. Chicken sits beside her, expecting a treat. Luz hands the fritter to Chicken, and he tongues it from her fingers. She continues watching the people going in and out of the nightclub, looking for drug pushers and their clientele of tweaked, cranked, and cracked users and abusers. She flips on her car’s AM-FM radio and switches through the channels until she locks into a weak station. She turns up the volume and listens to the animated voices of Noah’s broadcast coming in through the static.

“Hey, Truth Dog, I’m a Key West shrimper.”

“Welcome, shrimper. You’re on pirate radio.”

“It pisses me off that so many of your callers are against commercial shrimpers and long-liners here in the Keys.
We’re seen as rednecks who don’t give a shit about marine ecology. Hell, we’re the ones who make a living from the sea. You won’t find stronger guardians of marine life than us.”

“I’m with you. Many of the old-timers here were the original ecologists, against the slaughter of the turtles, whose meat was being turned into steaks and soup, their shells made into combs and toothbrushes.”

“Right, we were the first to use excluders on our boats. We were the first to use safety O-hooks instead of J-hooks on our longlines.”

“My rage is against those who refuse to do that. You know how many endangered female leatherback turtles are left laying their eggs in the sands of Florida’s east coast?”

“Not many.”

“Fewer than two hundred. Down from tens of thousands. Turtles have been around a million years and we’re wiping them out. We’re snagging, tangling, drowning, hooking the last of the turtles every day with gill nets, drift nets, drag nets, and J-hook longlines.”

“And the plastic bags?”

“Don’t get me started! Billions of bags dumped into the ocean each year, choking, gagging, and strangling turtles to death!”

“Goddamn shame.”

“God had nothing to do with it. Man did it.”

Luz cuts off Noah’s radio voice, her attention caught through her windshield by a man and a teenaged girl down the street, coming out of the Trouble in Paradise cocktail lounge. The man and girl walk away with their backs to Luz. She blurts out to Chicken, sitting next to her,
“That’s my Carmen! She snuck out of the house!” Chicken licks his chops for more fritters.

Luz starts her Charger and steers it onto Duval Street, following behind the man and teenager. The girl’s long black hair hangs down to the top of a yellow miniskirt hugging her bottom so tightly that her firm butt cheeks are prominently outlined. The man runs his hand over her butt as she walks.

“I know my own daughter when I see her. I shouldn’t have let her paint those damn fingernails. I knew it would lead to no good.”

The man and teenager turn suddenly off of Duval Street toward Grunt Bone Alley. Luz presses down on the accelerator pedal and speeds up. A fast-moving line of hooting college kids on loud mopeds shoots out from the alley. Luz honks her horn at the riders blocking her car, but the mopeds keep coming. She spots an opening in the line and guns into Grunt Bone Alley. The narrow lane is deserted except for cars parked along its sides. She pulls over and cuts her engine. She studies the parked cars. Chicken looks at the bag of fritters and whines. She pats Chicken’s head. “Shush. They’re around here somewhere.”

In the dark distance of the lane, there is no movement except from a rusted 1961 Pontiac GTO parked in front of a row of garbage cans. The GTO slightly bounces on its tires. Luz keeps her gaze fixed on it. In the car’s back window, a man’s head suddenly pops up in silhouette. The head quickly disappears back down.

“He’s raping Carmen in the back seat!”

Luz jumps from her car and runs down the alley to the GTO. She yanks open the car’s back door and shines her flashlight beam in on a man’s bare white ass as his body
humps up and down on the teenager beneath him. Luz grabs the man’s hair with one hand and jerks his head around. She beams the flashlight into his eyes. “You’re under arrest for raping a teenager!”

The surprised man yells, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The girl’s only sixteen!”

“Like hell! She’s eighteen!”

Luz swings her beam at the girl spread-eagled on her back beneath the man. Her long black hair is tangled over her face. Her bare breasts heave from rapid breathing. Her skirt is pushed up and her panties are pulled down. In the dark V between her naked thighs glistens a worm of spilled cum. The teenager shakes the tangled hair away from her face. Luz stares at the face brightly lit in the flashlight beam. The teenager is not Carmen.

The girl glares at Luz. “I can prove I’m eighteen. My driver’s license is in my purse.”

Luz takes a deep breath. “No, you’re not eighteen. I recognize you. You’re the Munoz girl. I know your family. I was at your Quince party two years ago. You’re just seventeen.”

“That was three years ago! I’m eighteen now!”

Luz steps out of the car and looks at the man. “Pull your pants up, you chicken-hawk bastard.”

The man gets out of the car. He shoves the still-hard stub of his prick beneath his underpants, hitches up his blue jeans, and winks at Luz. “I bet you wish you could whack off a piece of her yourself. She’s not underaged. She’s street legal. You can’t arrest me. Can’t do a fucking thing.”