“He said he is going to call you El Gato.”
“What’s it mean?”
He smiled. “The cat.”
Manuel helped me to my feet while Catalina and Gabby brushed me off. I tried to apologize, but so few of my listeners spoke English that I felt like I was making matters worse, so I quit. I sat on the tailgate, finished my sketch of the old woman. I thought about giving it to her, but when I realized she couldn’t see it, I just set it on the table nearby, where the kids gazed at it and whispered. Quietly I ate my dinner, watching the good-natured Javier replay the events with a smile and good humor.
After three plates of what might have been the best Mexican dinner I’ve ever eaten in my life, I sat back and loosened my belt. A stuffed tick had more room than me. That’s when I noticed the women dropping something in the hot oil. The sound of something frying had my full attention, as did the smell. A few minutes later, they sifted golden brown handfuls of goodness out of the oil, drizzled them in honey, and served me six on a plate. “Sopapilla,” a woman said softly.
Evidently, word of my participation in Catalina’s departure from Juan Pedro had spread, and despite my near decapitation of Javier, a steady line of folks were smiling at me and patting me on the back. Most everyone in the park came through to shake my hand and say, “Gracias, mi amigo.” Several chuckled, patted me on the arm, glanced at Javier, made a fist, and said, “El Gato!”
I felt bad for Javier. A golf ball–sized bump had risen on his head and his left eye had swollen. Almost shut.
Mexican doughnuts are not what a diabetic needs to eat, but not wanting to be rude, I ate twelve. The combination of fat and sugar hung on my eyelids, pulling them down.
As the moon rose, an older man brought out a nylon string guitar and sang in the most beautiful voice I’d heard in a long time. When he finished some forty-five minutes later, Gabby was asleep in my lap, Diego was asleep on Rosco’s stomach, and both fires had been reduced to warm red coals. I stood and patted my pocket, looking for my truck keys, but Manuel waved his finger like a windshield wiper at me. “Señor, you stay here. My guest. Please.”
The thought of not driving sounded good. I carried Gabby inside his trailer while he carried Diego, and we placed them on bunk beds. He then led me to his room, where Catalina had just changed the sheets. He pointed. “Please.”
“Manuel, this is your room. I can’t—”
Catalina spoke from behind him. “Mr. Jo-Jo, it would honor my brother if you’d say yes. He is very happy to have you and wants to thank you for what you’ve done. He doesn’t have anything else to offer you.”
Rosco stood looking up at me. The look on his face said Old man, let’s take the bed.
I thanked Manuel, pulled off my shoes, lay down, put one hand on Rosco, and closed my eyes. Behind my eyelids I watched the replay of the video, now some forty years old—the man with the machete. I was nineteen at the time. I could still hear the words and how he spoke them so fast.
Sometime during the night, I woke drenched in sweat. The sheets I had been sleeping on lay in a pile on the floor. Catalina stood in the doorway, holding a lit candle and looking at me. Somebody had placed a cold, wet hand towel on my forehead. Rosco had laid his head near mine. His paws were tucked up under my arm.
AT DAYLIGHT THE PARK again came alive. Fires were lit. The smell of breakfast. Within twenty minutes everyone was bathed, fed, dressed, and lined up for the bus. I walked out of the trailer and noticed that somewhere between last night and this morning, someone had washed my truck and wiped something shiny on the tires.
Manuel appeared with a small backpack over his shoulder, machete and hat in hand. He thanked me again and then joined the mass of men heading off for the bus. I sat on the tailgate and listened to multiple cries of “El Gato!” as the men waved, laughed, and patted Javier on the back. Javier’s eye was black and swollen, but it seemed to have little effect on his smile.
The men squeezed into the bus and within minutes only the exhaust remained, leaving me alone with Catalina and a few of the older women, who were cleaning up breakfast. Catalina had not spoken much to me this morning. I pointed to the trailer where the kids slept. “You going to be all right?”
Catalina nodded. “My brother is moving tomorrow. Texas or Louisiana. We will go with him. It’s a larger community. There’s a school. The homes are cement block.”
I pulled the cash out of my pocket, several hundred dollars, and offered it to her. She waved her hand. “No.”
I looked around. “You might need it.”
She leaned forward and hugged me but would not take the money.
I grabbed a pen and the receipt from our Walmart shopping trip, flipped it over, and wrote my cell number on the back. “If you need anything . . . Rosco usually answers by the third ring.”
Gabby and Diego appeared at the trailer door, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. Catalina said, “Wait . . . please.”
I didn’t like good-byes. Would have preferred to slip out while they slept. Catalina lifted Gabby onto her hip, and the two stood staring at me.
Gabby reached around the side of my face. “How’s your head?”
I didn’t know my head hurt. “Okay, I guess.”
She touched the side where the blood had dried and caked to my hair. I had no memory of that. The side of my head was puffy and tender.
“You fell out of your bed last night.”
“I do that sometimes.”
“Did it hurt?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her. “No.”
“You could get a seat belt.”
I laughed. “For my bed?”
“Yeah, and a helmet.”
“You have good ideas.”
She whispered. Just between us. “Juan Pedro told me I was stupid.”
I pushed her hair out of her eyes. “He’s an idiot.”
Diego shook my hand, the knife on his belt speaking loudly against the backdrop of the silence of his mouth. Catalina approached me and didn’t shake my hand so much as hang hers inside mine. For several seconds she just stood there. “Thank you, Mr. Jo-Jo.”
Rosco whined behind me. I handed her the index card. I’d sketched her from the side with her hair falling down across gently sloped shoulders. She was looking away.
I climbed into the truck and cranked the engine, laughing. “It’s just Jo-Jo.”
11
I dusted myself off, turned north, hit I-75, and soon felt the tug of my childhood pulling me eastward. It’d been awhile since I’d driven those coastal back roads. I had time. I hugged the coastline on Highway 19. A two-lane in need of some tax dollars. I was in no hurry. The highway ambled northwest and then west as it followed the coastline and 19 turned into 319 and finally 30A. Occasionally the Gulf of Mexico would appear on my left. Miles up the coastline, a black plume of smoke spiraled miles into the air. Evidence of a hot and still-burning fire. I’d seen large explosions do the same thing.
When 30A turned hard right, or north, I continued straight, or due west, onto Cape San Blas Road. Cape San Blas is a seventeen-mile spit of barrier sand that juts off the skin of the state of Florida into the Gulf of Mexico like a hangnail. Before me, a plume of black smoke rose like Jack’s beanstalk and disappeared into the stratosphere. Two state troopers stood guard by a cordoned-off road. Staring at the smoke, I felt the old pain return. I stretched my left arm and popped a few antacids.
I rolled down the window and spoke to a trooper who was looking at me through dark chrome glasses and holding his hand up like a stop sign. “Looks like something not real good going on,” I said.
“Just a bit.”
“What happened?”
“Old boy drove a hundred-mile-an-hour tanker filled with fuel into the rocks at the turn. Been two days. Core of the fire still burning.”
“Know who it was?”
“You live here?”
I shook my head. “Grew up here.”
“Local news said his name was Ja
ke Gibson.”
I knew the name. “Road to the Cape closed?”
“No, but fire is still so hot you can’t walk within a hundred yards. One-lane road going around through the marsh at the site.” He eyed my truck. “Little soggy but you could probably make it.”
“Thanks.”
TALL PINE TREES LINED the road, along with power lines and signs advertising homes for rent. Homes on stilts appeared through the trees on either side, with large wraparound porches, docks, and waterfront views. I passed through the quiet military observation installation where they’ve been “observing” for years, but nobody really knows what they’re looking at or why.
At its widest, Cape San Blas is only about a half mile across. Where it narrows, and the marsh of the bay on the right had crept within two hundred yards of the ocean on the left, a man-made wall of enormous rocks had been constructed by the highway department to protect the road from tide encroachment and washout. This road was the only way onto or off the island, so the state had determined long ago to try to protect it. Some of the rocks were as big as cars. Some bigger.
Unlike Jake Gibson, I made the turn successfully.
I followed the road, slowed, and turned right in a wide northerly arc. Another trooper routed me through the marsh. The middle of my turn gave me a good view of what remained of Jake’s semi. It perched grotesquely mangled in its final resting place atop the charred multi-ton rocks. The cab and its enormous, exploded gas tank rested among the rocks like a beached whale, still spewing black smoke.
Seven fire trucks surrounded the site; three were sucking and pumping saltwater onto the core. I rolled up my window. The heat was still intense.
A few miles north I got a room at the local motel, stashed my stuff, and headed out to the Blue Tornado. It had been a long time, and I wasn’t sure how she’d respond, but I knew I needed to check on Allie.
12
The Blue Tornado was the product of an unlikely union between a Detroit-based, cold-calling vacuum salesman with an entrepreneurial bent and a homespun west Florida girl working the checkout counter at Tops Hardware. While Mr. Tops wasn’t too interested in Billy Pine’s Blue Tornado vacuum or his research-backed promises that it would suck the carpet off the floor, his daughter, Eleanor Dane Tops, found the new and updated Tornado II a fascinating modern marvel; she sat pleasantly through the forty-five-minute presentation and ordered seven for the main store and four for the annex two counties over. Billy, six weeks on the job without having actually sold a single vacuum cleaner, and having now made his quota for the next four and a half months, invited Eleanor Dane to dinner, which she gladly accepted. The two shared a burger and a milk shake and then took in the latest double feature. The first was a John Wayne movie entitled Rio Grande. The second was an animated Disney film, Cinderella. During the movie, Billy bought Eleanor Dane a popcorn and soda and acted the total gentleman. Following the movie and a quick ice cream, he returned her home three minutes before her ten p.m. curfew.
Three weeks later, when Billy delivered the eleven shiny new vacuum cleaners to Mr. Tops, he quickly learned that Eleanor Dane did not have the authority to order eleven vacuum cleaners. In fact, she couldn’t order a stick of bubble gum without the old man’s signature. Stuck with a trunk full of inventory he might never sell, Billy Pine sat in his borrowed car and stared from his gas gauge to a map. He didn’t have the money to get out of Florida. His destination was clear. All roads led to unemployment.
A bit of an optimist, he straightened his tie, walked back into Mr. Tops’s office, and said, “Sir, I’d like to apply for a job.”
This bravado seemed to both surprise and impress Eleanor’s father, though he tried not to let on. He raised an eyebrow. “Other than not sell vacuum cleaners, what can you do?”
Billy adjusted his tie. “Sir, if you teach me, I can do most anything.”
Thus began Billy Pine’s employment at Tops Hardware. In two months he was managing the annex. In four months he and Eleanor were engaged. With Mr. Tops’s permission, he set up a Blue Tornado display at the front of the hardware store. By the time of their wedding, Billy had sold ten vacuum cleaners. The eleventh he gave to Eleanor as a wedding gift.
The couple were married in 1950 under a setting sun and honeymooned on Cape San Blas, where they walked the beach and promised each other they would return and purchase property. When Mr. Tops died just a few weeks after their wedding, leaving Eleanor a few thousand dollars in inheritance, the newlyweds did just that. They bought a home, a car, a dishwasher, and an oceanfront piece of property on a sliver of land most found worthless.
Ever the entrepreneur, Billy pointed to the sunset falling over the Gulf. “With that view, good food will bring people from most everywhere.”
And he was right.
What started small grew into two stories, beachfront tables, seating for over a hundred, live music, romantic lights strung across the outdoor porches, a waiting list on weekends that eventually spread across the week, a venue for weddings, and even a few small bungalows or weekend cabin rentals. In honor of their first meeting, Billy and Eleanor named the restaurant the Blue Tornado. And because patrons loved knowing the history of what birthed so unique a restaurant, Billy retired the actual vacuum cleaner and installed it in a glass case just inside the front door. Above it, Eleanor posted a handwritten sign: How my husband stole my heart.
Love had come to Cape San Blas.
In 1955, five years into marital bliss, Eleanor gave Billy a blue-eyed, towheaded wonder they named Allie.
The Blue Tornado became a cash cow and put Cape San Blas on the map. The heyday lasted about five years; then Eden gave way to the secret Billy had kept hidden from his wife.
Billy loved a challenge. Sales. Eleanor. The hardware store. Marriage. The Blue Tornado. But when those measured risks paid off and prosperity came, Billy learned he wasn’t in love with money. He was in love with the challenge of getting it. The chase.
The lure of gambling was strong. Cards led to dice, and dice led Billy to the realization that he was a terrible gambler. Pretty soon the jewel of Cape San Blas, the resort he and Eleanor had built with their own two hands, only earned enough to service the interest on his debt.
None of which Eleanor knew about.
The combination of insurmountable debt and an unwillingness to share his secret with his wife led Billy to find comfort in the bottle. And while it did little to comfort, it did cause him to forget—temporarily.
Billy was both a terrible gambler and a belligerent drunk.
He managed to lay off the bottle Monday through Wednesday, but come Thursday he’d start tipping it back and by Friday morning he would erupt into a full-blown binger that would last through Monday morning, when he’d start the cycle over again. For Eleanor, the Blue Tornado became a safe haven away from the storm at home.
A FEW MILES AWAY, my father returned home to my mom in 1955 from service in the Korean War and promptly gave her me as a homecoming present. I only had a few years to get to know my dad, nine to be exact, but during those few short years he was a hard, silent man. What tenderness I knew, I learned from my mother.
In 1963, when I was eight, my dad gave my mom an ocean-view house for their anniversary. It wasn’t waterfront, but you could see the water from their second-story bedroom window.
The home behind us belonged to a family that owned a restaurant called the Blue Tornado. Judging from the sound of the screaming that erupted from those windows, they were living with another one.
Given the remote location of the island and the cost of connecting to the main line, indoor plumbing had made it to the restaurants and businesses, but most homes still used outhouses. One night I got up to go to the bathroom around three a.m. and found the daughter, eight-year-old Allie, sitting on her back porch. Legs bouncing. Eyes and ears focused on the outhouse.
I whispered across the backyard, “You okay?”
A single shake of her head.
I walked closer.
“Something bothering you?”
She pointed at the closed outhouse door.
“You scared?”
A nod.
“Of what?”
“Whatever’s in there.”
We hadn’t been living there long, but we’d already overhead a couple of her father’s outbursts. I looked over my shoulder. “Where’s your dad?”
She thumbed behind her.
“He been drinking?”
No response.
I held out my hand, she took it, and I led her to the outhouse where I found the door unlocked and three curious raccoons rummaging around inside. I turned on the light, shooed them outside, and was walking to my house when I heard Allie’s voice speak to me from behind the door. “Jo . . . um . . . Jo?”
“Joseph.”
Her voice cracked. “Jo-Jo?”
I seldom tell people that the origin of my nickname rose up and out of an outhouse. “Yes.”
“Will you walk me back?” A pause. “Please.” The tremor told me she was scared of more than raccoons. I walked her to her house and waited until she waved at me from her bedroom window. We did that a lot.
As her father’s drinking worsened, so did the destruction he caused. Many a night I stood in the backyard listening to what sounded like a bull wrecking a china shop. The sound would start on the first floor and then travel up the stairs. As the sound of the havoc grew closer to Allie’s room, her window would slide open and Mrs. Eleanor would pass Allie down to me from the second story. Both would climb down the lattice attached to the side of the house, and me and Momma would sit with them at the kitchen table while Mr. Billy deconstructed their house and Allie shook like a leaf in the chair scooted up next to mine.
Given that the beach was our backyard, and the fact that she didn’t like being home with her dad, we spent most of our daylight hours outside. And most of those we spent combing the beach. Shells, driftwood, pieces or parts of boats with foreign writing. Every new discovery excited us because it was proof of a world beyond ours. Our favorite was finding sharks’ teeth after sundown. When the sun dropped below the horizon, the receding tide rinsed the shells, and the teeth shone like black diamonds. We found thousands. Allie’s father favored a brand of bourbon sold in blue Mason jars, and we put the empties to good use. We lined a shelf in her bedroom with jars filled with various sorts and sizes of shells and teeth.