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“What’s that?”
“Cops who can’t quite bring themselves to pull the pin,” Zane said. “But Pelley’s good police, got a lot of experience, and he’s fishing buddies with one of the local judges. I bet he could get a Writ of Exigent Circumstances, or whatever it’s called.”
“So I wouldn’t have to actually go inside the house—”
“Nope, nope, you can’t,” Zane said. “That’ll be Pelley’s job, if he agrees to do it. But thanks for calling it in. And for keeping the fucking buzzards off her. They messed her up, but it could have been a lot worse. Sorry your morning walk got ruined.”
“Shit happens. I think Confucius said that.”
Canavan looked puzzled, but Zane laughed. “Ask Mr. Ito if he knows anything about Mrs. Bell’s relatives when you see him.”
“I will.”
I watched them get into their cruiser and waved as they went around the next bend. Then I walked back home. I thought about Donna. I thought about Tad, our lost boy, who would now—if not for a plugged needle valve—be in his forties and starting to go gray. I thought about Allie Bell, who made good oatmeal cookies and who said I know they aren’t there. And yet sometimes they are.
I thought about the double pram parked in the dark garage, next to the Chevy Cruze with its no-nonsense blackwall tires. I thought about saying be good boys… even though the pram was empty.
It wasn’t fair. True of the Bell twins, true of my son, true of my twice-married wife. The world is full of rattlesnakes. Sometimes you step on them and they don’t bite. Sometimes you step over them and they bite anyway.
By the time I got back to the house, I was hungry. No, ravenous. I scrambled up four eggs and toasted another English muffin. Donna would have said my hunger was healthy, life-affirming, a spit in the eye of death, but maybe I was just hungry. Finding a dead woman at the head of her driveway and waving away the buzzards who wanted to eat her must have burned a lot of calories. I couldn’t get her ruined face out of my mind, but I ate everything on my plate anyway, and this time held it down.
Because the day was pleasant instead of oppressively hot (“Hotter than dog-snot” was how Mr. Ito liked to put it), I decided to walk after all… but not down to the swing gate, which would mean passing the spot where I’d found Allie. I took Greg’s boardwalk to the beach instead. The first part of it was hemmed in by palmettos and junk palms, which turned it into a green tunnel. The raccoons seemed to like that part, and I was careful to avoid the little clumps of their scat. There was a gazebo at the end of the boardwalk. After that the trees fell away to a wide sweep of beach grass and dune reeds. The sound of the waves was mild and soothing. Gulls and terns circled, loafing on the Gulf breeze. There were other birds, too—big ’uns and little ’uns. Greg was an amateur ornithologist and would have known them all. I did not.
I looked south where there were great tangles of underbrush. A few palms poked above them, but they looked tattered and unhealthy, probably because the trash growth was sucking up most of the nutrient-rich groundwater. It was there that Jake and Joe must have come to grief. I could see the Bell boardwalk, and if they had only taken that instead of trying to play jungle explorers they would also be in their forties, maybe pushing their own youngsters in that old stroller. If onlies are also rattlesnakes, I think. They are full of poison.
I left the gazebo behind and headed north along the beach, which was wide and wet and shining in the sun. There would be a lot less beach that afternoon, and almost none by evening, when the tide was high. Mr. Ito said it didn’t used to be that way; he said it was global warming, and by the time Eddie was his age, the beach would be gone.
It was a pleasant walk with the Gulf on my left and the dunes on my right. Greg Ackerman’s was the last house on the Key; north of his property, county land took over and the tangled undergrowth reappeared, growing so close to the beach that I occasionally had to brush away palmetto branches and step over big clumps of beach naupaka. Then the foliage ended and the beach widened into a lopsided triangle deep in shells. Here and there I spotted shark’s teeth, some as big as my index finger. I picked a few up and put them in my pocket, thinking I’d give them to Donna. Then I remembered, oh snap, that my wife was dead.
Bitten again, I thought.
The triangle was lopsided because Daylight Pass had cut off the beach. Water ran against the tide from Calypso Bay, first fighting the mild Gulf waves and swirling in a whirlpool before joining them. It was a hurricane that opened Daylight, which had been closed ninety years before. So I’d read in A Pictorial History of the South Keys, which had been on Greg’s coffee table when I took up residence. Across the way was a floating patch of greenery, all that remained of Duma Key, which had been inundated in the same hurricane that opened the pass.
I lost interest in picking up shark’s teeth—remembering your wife is dead will do that, I guess—so just put my hands in my pockets and looked at the shell beach where Rattlesnake Key ended. It was to this dead end that the hunting party had driven the infestation of snakes. A group of lawyers is an eloquence; a group of rattlesnakes is a rhumba. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did. The mind isn’t just a venomous reptile that sometimes bites itself; it’s also an enthusiastic garbage picker. Freddy Cannon released his 45s on the Swan label, which bore the message DON’T DROP OUT. James Garfield’s middle name was Abram. Those are also things I know but don’t know how I know.
I stood there with the breeze rippling my shirt and the birds circling overhead and the green mop of foliage that marks what’s left of Duma Key rising and falling with the waves, as if it were breathing. How had they driven the snakes here? That was a thing I didn’t know. And once they got them here, how had they killed those that didn’t try to escape by swimming away? I didn’t know that, either.
I heard a squeak from behind me. Then another. The sweat on the nape of my neck turned cold. I didn’t want to turn my head because I was sure I’d see that double stroller with the dead twins inside it, swollen from snakebites. But because I had nowhere to go (like the rattlers), and didn’t believe in ghosts, I did. There were a couple of gulls standing there—white heads, black bodies, beady eyes asking what the hell I was doing trespassing on their spot.
Because I was scared, I threw a couple of shark’s teeth at them. They weren’t as big as the shells I’d thrown at the buzzards, but they did the job. The gulls flew off, squawking indignantly.
Squawking.
What I’d heard behind me had been squeaking—like the wheel that needs some grease. I told myself that was bullshit and could almost believe it. The breeze brought the smell of something that might have been kerosene or gasoline. It didn’t surprise me; Florida politicians, from the governor right down to the city and town councils, are more interested in business than they are in preserving the Gulf Coast’s fragile ecosystem. They abuse it and eventually they will lose it.
I looked for the telltale rainbow of gas or oil on the surface, or turning at the edges of that constant whirlpool, and saw nothing. Breathed deep and smelled nothing. Went back home… which was how I was now thinking of Greg Ackerman’s house.
I don’t know if remarriages work, as a rule. If there are statistics, I haven’t seen them. Ours did. Was it because of the long gap? Those years when we didn’t see each other, then fell out of touch completely? The shock of reconnection? That might have been part of it. Or was it because the terrible wound of our son’s death had had time to heal? Maybe, but I wonder if couples ever get over a thing like that.
Speaking just for myself, I thought of Tad less often, but when I did, the hurt was nearly as strong as ever. One day at the office I remembered how I used to read him the Monster Words before bedtime—a catechism that was intended to banish his fear of the dark—and had to sit down on a toilet in the office bathroom and cry. That wasn’t a year or two or even ten after it happened; that was when I was in my fifties. Now I’m in my seventies, and I still don’t look at pictures of him, although there was a time when I stored many on my phone. Donna said she did, but only on what would have been his birthday—a kind of ritual. But she was always stronger than I was. She was a soldier.
I think most first marriages are about romance. I’m sure there are exceptions, people who marry for money or to improve their station in life some other way, but the majority are powered by the giddy, gliding feeling pop songs are written about. “The Wind Beneath My Wings” is a good example, both because of the feeling it evokes and because of the corollary the song doesn’t go into: eventually the wind dies. Then you have to flap those wings if you don’t want to crash land. Some couples find a tougher love that endures after the romance thins away. Some couples discover that tougher love just isn’t in their repertoire. Instead of discussing money, they argue about it. Suspicion replaces trust. Secrets blossom in the shadows.
And some marriages break up because a child dies. Allie Bell’s didn’t, but might have if her husband hadn’t died not long after. No coronary for me, only panic attacks. I kept a paper bag in my briefcase and huffed into it when they came on. Eventually they stopped.
When Donna and I remarried there was an older love, kinder and more reserved. There were none of the money arguments that bedevil many young couples who are just starting out; I had done well in the ad biz, and Donna was the superintendent of one of the biggest school districts in southern Maine. On the evening I saw her in that bar, she was in Providence for a New England conference of school administrators. Her yearly salary wasn’t as big as mine, but it was generous. We both had 401k’s. Our financial needs were met.
The sex was satisfactory, although without a lot of fireworks (except maybe for that first time after our long—ha-ha—layoff). She had her house, I had mine, and that was how we lived. The commute wasn’t a big problem. It turned out that we’d been living just seventy miles apart for all those in-between years. We weren’t together all the time, and that was okay. We didn’t need to be. When we were, it was like being with a good friend that you just happened to sleep with. We worked at the relationship in a way that couples just starting out don’t need to do, because they have that wind beneath their wings. Older couples, especially those with a terrible darkness in their past that they need to avoid, have to flap. That’s what we did.
