Heart of Palm (7 page)

“Tip, I’m in a hurry. You going to take my money, or what?” Frank said. He placed a five-dollar bill on the counter and waited. At the Lotto stand, two tiny, gray-haired women were penciling in numbers on a long sheet of paper, and Tip glanced at them, then leaned in to Frank conspiratorially. “Susan comes in, you want me to tell her I haven’t seen you?”

“You haven’t seen me, Tip.”

“What?”

“You haven’t seen me.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Because I’m not here,” Frank said.

Tip blinked. “Well, you
are
here. But I’ll tell her you aren’t. I mean, weren’t.”

“Right. Unless of course, I was.” Frank gave up waiting for Tip to ring him up. He put the five-dollar bill into a tip jar on the counter and fished out two singles, leaving Tip staring at him in complete confusion. “I gotta go, Tip,” he said. “Make sure you’ve got me covered now, hear?”

Outside, he glanced to the right and saw the back of Susan’s lime green T-shirt still moving east along Seminary Street. Up the road at the First Baptist Church, the marquee had a new message:
JESUS WROTE A BLANK CHECK
.
CASH YOURS TODAY!

Frank climbed into his truck and started the engine. He peered at the sky in the direction of Uncle Henry’s. Still no smoke, but he caught sight of a faint trail of sparking light behind the trees as a Roman candle climbed fifty feet into the air and then sailed back, defeated. Pitiful. They ought to have been able to get it to launch higher than that. He pictured the amateur pyrotechnicians who were probably standing around a cinder block at that moment, setting up the rockets and trying to get the angle right before lighting the fuses and shuffling backward. It was all in the angle. Get the bottle set up correctly, get the angle of the launch just right, and you could get those sons of bitches to sail eighty, sometimes a hundred feet or more. Beautiful. But he hadn’t set off a bottle rocket in years. Maybe decades.

When he was a kid he loved Fourth of July. Loved the recklessness, the noise and heat of it. Once he’d watched a fireworks display from the top of a mountain in western North Carolina. They’d been staying in a cabin near Cullowhee—all of them: Arla, Dean, Sofia, Carson, Will, himself. It was the first and only time he remembered a vacation with his family. Dean had scored the cabin as a bonus for working on a relief team servicing an exploded boiler in Asheville. The plant’s owner had put the techs up in vacation cabins to keep their minds off the fact that they were, in effect, rebuilding the deadly weapon that had killed seven men two weeks before, and though Dean had returned to the cabin each night looking pale and drained, the rest of them had had a fine time, an unexpectedly buoyant time, in fact. They’d been teenagers, all of them, Will maybe thirteen at best, and Frank had loved the mountains and the cabin so much, loved the soft cool grass under his feet every morning, the water so cold in the creeks it hurt the bones in his feet. He’d never imagined water so cold. He’d never felt it since.

The Cullowhee cabin was at the crest of a mountain, and on the Fourth of July Dean had the day off from the boiler repair. They all drove into the valley to eat breakfast and buy bait, and then they parked the Impala back at the cabin and hiked through a narrow path to a deep rushing creek, where the rhododendrons hung like lace curtains along the banks and the stones clicked like castanets in the licking current. On the hike they took turns walking with Arla, holding her cane and helping her maneuver the steeper descents. When they reached the creek they got the bait wet for a while but caught nothing, so finally Frank and his brothers whooped and belly flopped into the ice-cold creek, taunting and daring the others until all of them—Dean, Sofia, even Arla!—held their breath and dunked their heads under water so frigid Frank thought he’d have a heart attack. Then they sat on a huge flat rock in the sun, hearts pounding, close together, waiting for their bodies to warm again.

That night Arla barbecued chicken and corn and cut up a watermelon, and then they stood on the back deck and looked down through the trees into the valley below, where the little downtown was setting off a fireworks display. They watched, waited, heard the distant whistle of each shell’s launch far below the pine-covered mountain. But the fireworks couldn’t reach them. Again and again, the shells burst before they breached the cloud cover hovering in the valley, and Frank remembered how his entire family had been annoyed at first, disappointed, but had eventually grown silent, awed, as the clouds were lit from below with a shuddering, diffused arc of color. He felt they were privy to a private vision, an exquisite misfire. The skyrockets never did break through the clouds; instead, the colors spread out low and soft through the mountains, like fire behind gauze, like lightning through rain. The vantage was a gift, rare and unexpected. It was one of the most beautiful things Frank had ever seen. They remained silent for long moments that stretched into minutes as the clouds flickered again and again—red, blue, yellow, green, orange.

“We’re above it all,” Will said, finally. “We’re above the explosions.”

“Can you beat that?” Dean said. He had a bottle of beer in his hand but he backed up to the table behind him, set the beer down and came back to the railing. He put his hand on Arla’s shoulder, and she let him.

“I want to come back here,” Will said, leaning into Frank, and Frank could feel the warmth of his two brothers’ shoulders against his own. “I want to live here. Don’t you, Frank?”

Frank drew a cool breath, felt the rush of it in his lungs. He looked at Will. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.” Will grinned, leaned in closer.

And then the valley exploded in color again, and the light came soft through the clouds, and the Bravos watched the thwarted fireworks together. In the foreground, the trees were straight and narrow, like bars, but beyond and below, the clouds swelled and the very mountain shook from the effort of holding down the great rainbow explosions.

That was a long time ago. A lot of Fourths ago. Now, in front of the Lil’ Champ, Frank fished into the wax bag and fed one Krispy Kreme to Gooch and then, on second thought, gave the dog the other doughnut as well.

“You might as well,” he said to Gooch, who responded by thumping his tail against the back of the truck’s bench seat. “I can’t eat that shit.” Indeed, his stomach had begun to gnaw at itself with the familiar malaise that he’d been growing steadily accustomed to for the past few months, a feeling like hunger that did not respond to food, a feeling like corrosion, like decay, like dread.

He started the truck, drove toward Aberdeen.

T
WO

The Bravo family house was in North Utina off Monroe Road, which led northward off Seminary Street, out of Utina’s business district. The road twisted and turned as it wound deeper and deeper into a tangle of ancient Florida hammock and sagging clapboard houses, farther into the woods until it came to the banks of the Intracoastal, to the towering shape of Aberdeen.

Aberdeen
. Shortly after Frank’s parents had moved into the big house, his father had named it. Dean had always
wanted
to live in a house with a name, and this one had the personality and austerity to warrant it, even if it was more than a little rough around the edges. It stood like a sentry on the Intracoastal, a towering structure at three stories high, with a spindly turret climbing the northwest corner. Once a vibrant blue, the house had faded over the years to a gunmetal gray, with dark patches of green mildew under the windows, an effect not unlike the kohl eyeliner of an Egyptian queen, or, depending on the light, an aging hooker.

The funny thing is that the name stuck. With a vague notion of some faraway Gaelic adventure, and because he’d seen the word once in a magazine and liked the feel of it, Dean called the house Aberdeen, and so did everyone else, even today, twenty years after Dean had run out on his family and left Aberdeen and Utina for what everyone assumed was forever.

With the name, the house, once just a house, became something like a person. Which was a weight, it occurred to Frank as he pulled down the long, pine-lined driveway, that he’d never fully considered. Most people just dealt with
houses
—buying, selling, fixing, razing. But Frank had to deal with
Aberdeen
. He parked, looking up at the front of the house. The jasmine was as unruly as ever, and now an aggressive sweet potato vine had begun to thread through the floorboards on the porch. The screening on one of the windows was torn. A gap under the front door revealed the pale light of a lamp inside the hall. Frank sighed. He thought, not for the first time, about lighting a match to the whole thing. It was the only sensible thing to do.

He drained the last of his coffee and stepped out of the truck. Gooch followed, tail wagging, having spotted the enormous frame of Biaggio Dunkirk, Aberdeen’s tenant, caretaker, and chief referee, walking up the drive.

“Saw you pull up,” Biaggio said, holding up a hand to Frank. This was no surprise. Biaggio’s trailer was parked fifty yards in from the road, on the south edge of the Aberdeen property, and it was, in fact, impossible for anyone to drive up the long driveway to the Bravo house without being spotted by Biaggio, if he was home, which he usually was, and if he was seated on the steps of his trailer, which he usually was. Frank clapped Biaggio on the shoulder, feeling glad, as always, to see him.

Biaggio Dunkirk was one of those West Virginia corn-fed badasses who’d seen the inside of a jail cell more than the high school cafeteria. But by the time he hit forty, lit out for Florida to avoid a petty theft sentencing, and moved into the trailer on the Bravo property, he’d decided enough was enough. He’d settled down to a quiet life of peace and the systematic avoidance of extradition, at least until the statute of limitations ran out. Biaggio earned his living as a self-employed moving man, growing busier by the week as fresh arrivals moved into the new homes and developments springing up around and through Utina. And he enjoyed—if you could call it that—a modestly paid but rent-free position at Aberdeen which he’d brokered with Frank in exchange for keeping a general eye out for Arla, Frank’s older sister, Sofia, and the ongoing decay of the old house, which, as Biaggio put it, was less an actual
house
at this point and was more a concerted effort of termites holding hands. They’d struck the deal while bobbing down Pablo Creek more than a decade ago in a leaky canoe, a cooler of freshly caught redfish between them, and Biaggio had moved into the trailer the next week. The arrangement was no bargain for Biaggio, if you asked Frank, but Biaggio didn’t seem to mind.

As to Biaggio’s name—now
there
was a story. He’d shared it with Frank one night on the steps of his trailer. His mother, Mary Lou, had been a sixteen-year-old high school dropout who’d bewitched a thirty-year-old Vietnam veteran named Bodie Dunkirk, a man with a puny conscience but a healthy respect for the American judicial system. Bodie had looked up “statutory rape” in the county library. “Finish school,” he told Mary Lou, “and I’ll take you anywhere in the world.” So she did. The day after graduation they boarded a plane for Italy and set up housekeeping in a one-room Naples apartment with a communal bathroom up two flights of stairs. The morning Mary Lou found a family of rats nesting in her underwear drawer was the same morning she found out she was pregnant with Bodie’s second baby and—coincidentally—the very same morning the romance officially began to lose its luster.

“I want to go home,” she told Bodie, one-year-old Jimmy on her hip and the latest piece of good news hiccupping inside her.

“Baby, now stop that,” he said. “You know we can’t afford to go nowhere.”

But he managed to go a few places himself. Bodie got out a great deal, in fact—down to the piazza bar to drink Campari and get friendly with the local women. So friendly there came a night he never quite made it home, having forgotten himself in the considerable charms of a dainty Neapolitan
ragazza
on the rebound from a disaffected suitor. Poor thing, he said to her,
poverina, belleza
, and next thing he knew they were naked and sweating in a twin bed with musty sheets and the sounds of a rollicking street fight on the piazza below.

Well.
Mary Lou was not one to be messed with. She took the news lying down, so to speak, in the arms of a dashing Italian gentleman by the name of Biaggio Antonio DiMaria, who bought her a dozen blood roses, served her a breakfast of figs, flatbread, and limoncello, and set up little Jimmy with a Bullwinkle cartoon in the kitchen before carrying Mary Lou, four months and showing with Bodie’s second child, into the bedroom and closing the door. When she and Jimmy returned home that afternoon, Mary Lou was disheveled, satiated, and more than a little drunk. She found Bodie near frantic with a worry that quickly transformed into fury as he began to understand the nature of her absence.

“Tit for tit,” she said.

“Tat,” he corrected her.

She looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

Bodie was sick with jealousy. He harangued Mary Lou into telling him the name of her lover, then he set out into the streets of Naples in search of her suitor, Biaggio DiMaria. He found DiMaria in the very same bar where Bodie had tangoed with his Italian tart and started the whole mess in the first place. The bartender, following Bodie’s inquiry, pointed to the end of the bar, where a man sat alone, regarding his drink.