Sirens reached the Sandbar, a rustic stilt-top lounge poking out of the mangroves on Little Torch Key. Customers ran to the cross-breeze windows overlooking South Pine Channel and the bottled-up ambulances unable to cross the bridge. The gang at Boondocks heard a whap-whap-whap-whap and looked up at the runners of a sheriff’s helicopter called in by the stranded emergency vehicles.
The Mercury with the raised hood had since caught fire, and the tiki bar crowd at the Looe Key Reef Resort appreciated the uncomplicated entertainment value when it reached the gas tank. A fishing guide with sun-cracked skin set his Miller on the bar. “This is worse than general. I have to make Boca Chica this afternoon.”
“Why don’t you call Foley?” asked the bartender. “See if it’s reached.”
A cell phone rang inside the bar at Sugarloaf Lodge.
“Foley here. Hold a sec, let me stick my head out…. No, road’s clear here. Traffic’s fine—” Crash. “Check that. A dope boat just rolled… because I can see the bricks in the street… Yeah, people are grabbing them and running away….”
More whap-whap-whap. Another chopper cleared the roof of the No Name Pub, a 1935 roadhouse hidden in the banana trees on Bogie Channel.
The customers wandered out the screen door and up the road, where a helicopter hovered over the bridge. Loudspeakers cleared the fishermen below, and the aircraft set down, scattering bait pails.
The rotors stopped. One of the pilots in a green jumpsuit got out and took off her helmet.
A bar patron approached. “What’s going on?”
“Car fire caught the brush on Summerland and jumped the road. Need a place to rest the engines.”
Three more patrons leaned against the bridge’s railing. The oldest was a well-read biker from north Florida named Sop Choppy who had relocated to the Keys under hazy circumstances. Bob was the middle in age. He operated a very seasonal accounting firm on the island and closed in the summer to run a customerless tour service with his personal pleasure craft for tax reasons. The youngest was also named Bob, a shirtless construction worker who hammered roof trusses by day and had dreams but no workable plan to become a dragster mechanic for Don Garlits. Two regulars named Bob made things complex, so the other customers called him “Shirtless Bob.” He had to wear a shirt in the bar.
The trio didn’t possess a single common reference point but were welded into a fragile axis of daily bar chatter by the necessities of tourist hegemony. They gazed across the water at the Spanish Harbor viaduct, where a frozen line of cars stretched down the highway as far as they could see. A tiny driver stood on his roof for vantage.
Their heads suddenly jerked back as a fireball went up in the direction of Ramrod. They sipped drinks as a mushroom of black smoke dissipated in the wind.
“Ever watch Monster Garage on the Discovery Channel?” asked Shirtless Bob. “Last week they converted a PT Cruiser into a wood chipper. You jam logs through the open back window and twin sprays of chips go flying up from two secret hatches in the roof.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s Monster Garage.”
Barely audible in the distance: Bang. Bang. Followed by: pop-pop-pop-pop-pop, a small under-the-armpit smuggler’s machine gun.
“They’ve got to do something about that highway,” said Bob the accountant. “Too vulnerable. Least little thing and it all craps out.”
Sop Choppy looked down in his empty drink, then up at the road. “Wonder how it started this time.”
How it started: before dawn
THE WORLD LOOKED weird to Coleman. It was curved in a fisheye through the peephole of room 133 at the Royal Glades Motel. A single raindrop on the outside of the small glass bubble distorted the crime lights on Krome Avenue. This was up on the mainland, south of Miami, across the agricultural flats with pesticide musk and giant industrial sprinklers that were still at this hour. Coleman toked the roach beginning to heat his fingertips and kept an eye to the door. Downtown Homestead. Not a soul.
Coleman was at the threshold of forty-something and crouched against the bong-hit ceiling of eighth-grade maturity. His honeydew head was too big for his body. Coleman was never up before dawn, except now. Because he needed to make the Great Escape.
Cash was low, and Coleman had slept — make that remained unconscious — through checkout the previous day. The front desk had been phoning ever since. “Coming up in a minute to pay.” “Be right there.” “Eating dinner now, but immediately after that.” Then knocks at the door. “No clothes on — be over in a sec.” The night manager finally opened up with a passkey. Coleman lay snoring in his BVDs, empty beer cans randomly strewn around the room like spent artillery shells in a busy howitzer battery. The manager decided his salary didn’t cover social work. He closed the door and left a note in the office for the morning person.
Most recently, Coleman had been living on the couch of a party buddy’s apartment in Port Charlotte. Then, cultural differences. His friend had a job. And the evenings of brainless bingeing curiously began to seem like evenings of brainless bingeing. Coleman was asked to move on, enticed by some free pot for the road. His host considered it a high-yield investment.
The Royal Glades Motel was halfway back to Coleman’s rusty trailer with rotten floorboards on Ramrod Key. He’d headed south on I-75 and soon reached the edge of the Everglades at the bottom of the state’s west coast.
People with a few dollars in turnpike money preferred to cross the swamp on Alligator Alley, a safe, divided, four-lane interstate with fences on both sides to keep wildlife out of traffic. Those who couldn’t scrape up tollbooth change were forced to drive farther south and take the Tamiami Trail, a harrowing two-laner with no shoulders next to deep canals. Depth perception in the Everglades was always tricky. Stupidity even trickier. People were always trying to pass, and there were many spectacular head-ons.
It was worse at night.
But there was little traffic at four A.M. when Coleman entered the Glades. No light or sound either, just stars and the cool air coming in his open windows. Coleman hadn’t seen anything but black marsh for fifteen miles, when he passed the silhouette of a Miccosukee Chickee hut and a peeling billboard of a falsely cheerful Indian giving airboat rides to Eurocentrics. Then nothing again for a half hour until an auburn first-quarter moon on the horizon toward Miami. His headlights bounced off a panther-crossing sign. There was a small glow to the south: something burning down one of the gravel roads to a water-filled quarry. Coleman was driving a gold ’71 Buick Riviera that dripped oil. The maintenance money had been spent on the car’s furry steering wheel cover and Playboy shift knob. This was Coleman’s version of the economy.
The Buick passed a closed restaurant that served frog’s legs, then the locks of a dam where they had diked for this road way back. Coleman was lighting a joint and trying to get something on the radio when another set of headlights made him look up. “What’s that guy doing in my lane? Wait, what am I doing in this lane?” Ahead: A Datsun had come to a complete stop, its passenger compartment and the driver’s open mouth filled with Coleman’s high beams. Brakes squealed. At the last second, Coleman veered around the other car. He glanced back over his shoulder at the Datsun, then turned around to find a twelve-foot gator in the mist of his headlights. He stiff-armed the steering wheel and slammed the brakes again. Thump. The squish-grease made the tires lose traction, and the Buick slowly rotated sideways down both lanes until it completed a perfect three-sixty. Coleman came out of the spin back in his own lane, still speeding east. “This road is way too dangerous. I need a beer.” He reached under the seat. On its own, the radio picked up a weak station fading in and out. Steely Dan. Something about a weekend at a college that went awry. Coleman imagined a wooden shack and a lone radio tower with a blinking red beacon, personally transmitting to him from an island in the middle of the swamp. He slouched and settled in for the rest of the drive. Fate. It was meant to be. God was watching out for him, Coleman thought, or he never would have made it to this age.