Tropical Depression (3 page)

I don’t know exactly how long I stood there beside the ice machine. I finally heard Art tapping on the window and I jerked my head around. He was peering through the glass, moving his mouth at me. I realized I had been standing there too long, that I didn’t look right just standing there.

I noticed my reflection. Billy Knight, living ghost. Nobody would ever call me handsome. Intriguing maybe, with my slightly lopsided face, the faint trace of a scar down the left side, eyes blue and the right eye slightly bigger, sun-bleached dark blonde hair, broad, heavy shoulders, standing just under six feet tall. I could see hollows in my cheeks and under my eyes that didn’t used to be there.

But beyond that, beyond the superficialities of how a cop might describe me on an APB, there was something wrong with the way I looked. There was some haunted thing looking out from just behind my eyes, and Roscoe had brought it out of its cave. It had been watching me for months now, slowly settling back inside, and I had been stupid enough to think it was going away forever. Now I knew better; it was just hibernating. When Roscoe pushed the right buttons, it rolled over in its sleep and said Spring is here, and poked its nose out again.

And there it was, looking out at me from inside, looking at my reflection and seeing only bones, worm food, a tiny chuckle in the great, dirty, shaggy dog story of life. That’s how it attacks; it gives you Real Perspective. It makes you realize that the only real purpose we have in this world is to provide fertilizer for plants. Everything leading up to getting dropped into a hole in the ground is just another routine step in manufacturing the world’s best self-replicating plant food.

Oh, I had Real Perspective, all right. At three A.M. on any of those hundreds of sleepless nights it kicked in and gave me a patronizing peek at how things were. It patted my shoulder with a friendly, manly touch and whispered suggestions about my gun, and the only defense I had found against it was to pretend. Just pretend everything was normal and that to continue to walk around every day served a purpose. What purpose? We’ll get to that later. For now, just pretend the purpose is there and maybe you can fool that thing behind your eyes into going back to sleep. Just act normal.

Except I didn’t even know what normal was anymore.

It was something I’d been conscious of a lot the last year, for the first time in my life. Maybe most people never think about it, and from the time I was a kid until last year I didn’t either. I always assumed that whatever I was doing, however I looked doing it, that was normal, and that was it.

Things had changed. Since that day eighteen months ago I felt like an imposter, somebody hiding in my own body. I’d been very careful not to stick out, not to act in any way that would make me look different, not to give people any reason to ask me any questions. One thing I liked about taking strangers fishing was that the talk tended to be pretty specifically about fish. It left personal things out of it. If somebody got too curious about me I could always just point to a fish.

That’s how I wanted it. It had taken a lot of work to get functional again, and I didn’t want to risk losing the careful equilibrium I had built up. I wasn’t sure I could do it again.

For the first few months I’d watched a lot of TV. I’d even managed to sit through parts of a couple of talk shows—sometimes as much as five minutes at a time. According to most of the talk shows it wasn’t good to avoid my feelings. It was healthy and natural and honest to talk things out. It was self-destructive to bottle things up. What the hell: It wasn’t quite as self-destructive as swallowing a 9-millimeter steel-jacketed slug, and that ought to count for something.

Art was knocking on the window again. I realized how worried he must be to get up off his seat and come all the way across the room.

I made myself step back into the vicious freezing cold of Art’s shack.

“The hell’s the matter, Billy? Been standing there like that for—Christ, I dunno. Hell’s the matter?”

“Nothing, Art. I was just thinking.”

He shook his massive head. Three chins crashed into each other. “Fucking cop, huh. Told you he ’uz trouble. Smelt it on him.” He put a finger the size of a kielbasa up beside his nose. “This don’t miss much. Could tell he ’uz trouble.”

“No trouble, Art.”

“Thirty-five years in this goddamn town,” he told me. “Think I can’t smell trouble?”

“There’s no trouble, for Christ’s sake, Art,” I yelled at him. The sound of my voice was too high and much too loud, so I gave him a big, loopy smile so he could see for himself there was no trouble. “I’m going home.” I turned for the door, staggering slightly as some trick of the cold locked my knee up for half a step. I shook it off and made it to the door.

“Dickhead,” I heard Art mumble behind me.

Outside, I walked to the other side of the shack, where my bicycle was chained to a piling. I undid the lock, flung the chain into the battered basket, and headed out onto the street and across US 1. I had a car, but I hadn’t started it up for six months. I wasn’t even sure it would still start.

There’s a special word for anybody who drives a car in Key West: tourist. Real Conchs have battered bicycles with large, American seats and those high handlebars that every kid in the country lusted after in 1966. With the high handlebars it’s a lot easier to stay upright under Key West conditions.

Most of the bikes have a half-smashed basket on the front, and generally a half-smashed rider holding onto the handlebars. But even if you’re sober, the way you ride a Conch bike is the same, easy enough for any drunk. You lean half-forward, drape one forearm over the handlebars, and slouch over in a kind of boneless way while your legs move on the pedals as if you were going downhill and you’re just keeping up with the spinning wheel; you’re not really pedalling at all, just letting gravity pull you along.

It works out pretty well on an island that’s completely flat and only a few miles long and a few miles across. Gas is expensive, and unless you’re hauling lumber, cars are a waste of time and money and take up too much room. Besides, nobody is really in a hurry here. Tourists are here for a break from the hectic rodent marathon. Residents generally don’t have anything too pressing; at worst, they’re keeping a tourist waiting a few minutes—which is actually one of the real pleasures of living here, so nobody minds.

I generally managed to get across US 1 without serious injury, but it always amazed me. If the road wasn’t so straight nobody would make it all the way to Duval Street. Nobody is really driving as they come through here. They’re hanging onto the wheel often enough, but they are either wrestling kids or gaping out the window. In a lot of ways people feel like they’ve come to a foreign country, so I guess they assume a red light means something else here.

I was as bad as any tourist right now. I couldn’t get that last picture of Roscoe out of my mind, as he tried that pained half-smile one last time and turned for his rental car. So I ended up partway across the street before I realized I was in traffic, going against the light. I made it back to the curb without losing a wheel or a leg, but just barely. A thoughtful guy with a blonde crewcut leaned out the window and very loudly told me what my head was full of and what he figured I liked to put in my mouth. It wasn’t very original; I barely heard him.

When the light finally changed I missed it and had to wait through another cycle. I felt trapped. Roscoe had found me and in just a half-hour stripped away all my carefully built-up defenses. He was right; I was still a cop underneath. I still cared.

A red convertible filled with college kids went by. The horn honked and a beer bottle spun from the backseat and smashed at my feet. Small pellets of glass pattered off my hat, and one stung my cheek. My left leg was wet with warm beer that smelled like the urinal at Sloppy Joe’s. It woke me up, and when the light changed a few seconds later I wheeled across and headed for home.

My home that year was about halfway across the island, across the street from a small canal that emptied into the marsh above Houseboat Row. The house was a small, squat cinderblock cottage built in the 1960s. The yard was overgrown when I moved in and hadn’t gotten any better.

Inside the low coral rock wall around the lot there were enormously tall patches of weeds sharing space with the blotches of hardscrabble dirt where nothing could ever grow. A huge key lime tree leaned over the back door and dropped fruit on the cat who lived in the crawl space under the house.

The house had once been painted Florida pink, a strange bastard color halfway between tan and the hot blush of a Puerto Rican whore’s toreador stretch pants. The paint was fading now. Chunks of it had flaked off to show a pastel green undercoat. I dropped my bike on the poured-cement front step and kicked the front door open.

The house had two small bedrooms, a living-dining room, a bathroom about the size of a coat closet, and the kitchen. At the moment the house was dim, and hot enough to melt plastic. I switched on the big Friedrich window unit and a throaty roar of arctic air pushed me towards the kitchen.

The kitchen had a pass-through about five feet wide with one louvred shutter on the left side. The other shutter, for the right side, had been gone when I moved in. I stood in the kitchen doorway, with the pass-through on my left, and looked at the refrigerator. It was older than me and streaked with rust.

I thought about Roscoe and what he had said. I thought about getting out one of the bottles of St. Pauli Girl beer. Then I thought maybe I should take a shower first. I couldn’t decide and felt my shoulder muscles getting tighter as I just stood there, unable to make a simple decision.

What I should do, I knew, was just grab a beer. It was right there, ten feet away. Just step over, open the door, grab a beer. But then—I couldn’t really take a beer into the shower. Maybe I should take a shower first. Get clean, sit down,
then
have the beer. Except then the beer wouldn’t taste as good. So have the beer first. Except—

It was too much. Both decisions suddenly seemed to have enormous consequences. I just had to choose, one way or the other, and I couldn’t. I could feel the tension in my shoulders spreading, the muscles starting to knot, and before I knew it I was shaking from the strain. It was all coming back to me. Roscoe’s visit had brought it all back.

March 18. It was not a date I was likely to forget. The day had started badly. The freeways were full of mean drunks and Type A personalities with too much engine in their car and not enough sense of their own mortality.

The air that day was a solid yellow-brown, a poisonous, barely breathable ooze unlike anything I’ve ever seen anywhere else. Sure, other cities have pollution. New York has a dark brown cloud cover that can rip out your throat when the wind is right; Mexico City has a vicious fog so thick you can feel the weight of it and watch it peel the paint off your car. But L.A. has something special. It clings to your clothes, drifts gently into your pores in that dry desert air, and gives you blinding pains in your throat and head that make you want to drive up onto the Santa Monica Freeway and look for somebody to run off the road. The pollution in L.A. is special. After you’ve lived there awhile you realize that the gauzy, yellow-brown air really stands for the whole city in a unique way. Like everything else about L.A., the smog is often pretty to look at, completely intangible, and ultimately poisonous. But hey—it sure makes for great sunsets, huh?

Great sunsets and lousy mornings. On my way in to roll call that yellow morning it was already over ninety and the smog was pounding its way in and making my temples throb. My eyes were stinging, there was a sharp rasp in my chest, and jolts of pain shot around my skull if I tried to use my head for anything except pointing my eyes.

I had plenty to think about and it all hurt. Jennifer and I had just finished another of our early-morning screaming matches. She had this nutty idea that just because she married me she ought to see me every now and then. She said I had this two-year-old daughter who thought the mailman was her daddy.

A cliché like Cops and Divorce can be a tremendous pain in the ass when you’re living through it. You can’t find much comfort in the fact that you’re falling in with the statistical norm. I was fighting it with both hands, but we were edging closer and closer to divorce. It seemed like every morning when I left for work and every night when I came home there was another yelling session. Each time we shouted we said things we shouldn’t. Each awful thing we said was a little worse than the one before, a little harder to gloss over, apologize for, rationalize. I felt like we were both passengers on some kind of wild amusement-park ride. The guy running it was drunk, the ride was spinning out of control, and nobody could do any more than ride it out and hope we all landed okay.

Except lately it was looking like we weren’t going to land at all.

We’d said some truly hurtful things this morning. Most of them centered on my shortcomings as a father and a human being. It was getting tougher to explain myself—even to me. I loved my wife and my daughter, loved them so much it hurt sometimes. But I worked long hours. I had to. I was a cop. I had been a cop for a long time before I got married, and I expected to be a cop for a long time to come. It was the only way I had been able to work things out for myself, to balance what I believed with who I was and how I lived. It worked for me.

And on the darker side, I loved the faintly queasy thrill of it, of never knowing when a bullet or a knife might be aimed at my back. I loved waiting for danger, meeting it, beating it. I loved the high-stakes crap game of putting my life on the line, gambling it to keep the rest of the world safe.

It was not just the thrill of danger, but danger that
meant
something. Resisting it mattered, helped in a small way to make things better—or at least kept things from getting much worse more quickly. I guess that’s what Roscoe meant when he said I was still a rookie in my heart. Most cops lose their idealism pretty quickly; I never did. I liked doing something that was both important and dangerous. I never felt so alive as when I was answering a call that might mean my death. That’s why I resisted promotion, fought to stay on the street. I loved seeing results, and I loved the danger.