Florida Blues / part 2
"The story you're about to read is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent" (to slightly paraphrase George Fenneman). It is from a collection of short stories entitled, The Little River Outlaws and Other Stories of Adventure.
“I gotta drain the radiator. I’m about to spring a leak,” the inebriated would-be smoothie announced. Then, suddenly he veered the vehicle into a gas station and brought it to a screeching halt. He threw the car door open and jumped out of his seat and walked briskly toward the rest rooms. When the boozy driver got back in the car several minutes later, he said, “I was just thinkin’… Actually, I’m kinda in the mood for a road trip. Tell you what, you buy me a tank of gas and I’ll give you a ride to Key West...Deal?”
The fact that the driver was driving under the influence, as it were, plus the fact that Roy would be giving a total stranger, in effect, a substantial amount of his limited immediate funds to transport him approximately a hundred and fifty miles were concerns clearly worth considering. He wondered if it was worth the risk. He thought it over, but only for a second. “Okay… I can do that.”
So they filled up the gas tank, and cruised down the highway toward the abode of pirates.
Apparently, the driver was embarrassed about the clutter in the car and felt the need to explain the reason for the mess. He said that it was because he was moving to a new apartment. He mentioned that he was a cook in the Navy and that he was married but had recently separated. Then, all of a sudden, he burst into a harangue about how his wife had become addicted to heroin, unbeknownst to him. When he found out that she was a smack addict, she had already “split the scene”. He ranted on about how he suspected that she was “shacking up somewhere in Miami with one of her associates” and even though he claimed that he loved her, he said that he would “put her in the ground” if he ever located where it was that she was staying. To make his point more fully understood, he reached under the seat and pulled out a chrome-plated 45-caliber handgun and began to wave it around.
How the woman’s heroin addiction could have escaped the detection of the angry man, to begin with, was never questioned. Roy wasn’t about to go there. But throughout the sordid story, the driver continued to wave the gun around menacingly. Fortunately, for Roy’s sake, the mad man eventually calmed his nerves and put the gun away.
The scenery along the highway to Key West was like a souvenir post card, cobalt blue sky and huge billowy clouds that were scattered across the horizon. It was plain to see why pirates were fond of the Florida Keys. If a buccaneer needed a place to cool his heels for a while, it could easily be done hiding out among the many islands of the Florida Straits, where a captured ship could be stripped of anything of value, while enjoying the balmy sea breeze that blew across the Keys. Included among the larger Keys were countless smaller ones, many of them so small that one could not sit down without dangling one’s feet in the water. For the variety of sea birds in the Florida Straits, however, those miniature islands provided safe havens to rest on. Linking the numerous Keys were the numerous bridges, some of them several miles long, from which hundreds of fishermen tried their luck. Occasionally, a large oblong shape in the turquoise water just beyond the bridge would attract Roy’s attention. “Are those dark torpedo shaped objects down there what I think they are?”
“Yep…probably
sharks. They’re just waitin’ around for someone or something to fall into the
sea.”
Roy laughed slightly uneasily and looked down at the clear water for another shark and wondered. He reasoned that, if they were sharks, they were obviously there because they were either attracted to the fishermen’s bait or perhaps to the fish that were being attracted to the bait, itself.
(...to be continued)
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