Authors: R.J. Ellory
Such was human nature; such was the way of the world.
An hour later, maybe less. Middle-aged man – greying hair, white shirt, woven silk tie, features made of character and muscular tension – stands in front of a desk. Replaces the phone in its cradle. Looks away towards the window of the room, a window that overlooks the street from where the sound of traffic, making its way from wherever to someplace else, is like staggered breathing.
Middle-aged man turns and looks across the desk at a younger woman – dark hair, beautiful yes, no doubt about it, but a ghost within her features that speaks of some internal disquiet.
‘They shot Edward,’ the man says. His voice is matter-of-fact and businesslike, almost as if such news has been expected.
Sharp intake of breath. ‘Who? Who shot him? Is he okay?’ The woman, name of Cathy Hollander, starts to rise from her chair.
The man raises his hand and she pauses. ‘We don’t know anything,’ he says. ‘Maybe something direct, maybe simple bad luck. Go get Charlie Beck and Joe Koenig. I have to make some calls. I have to get someone here—’
‘Someone?’ the woman asks.
‘I have to get his son from Miami—’
She frowns, shakes her head. ‘His son? What the fuck are you talking about? Edward has a son?’
The man, goes by the name of Walt Freiberg, nods his head slowly and closes his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he says, his voice almost a whisper, ‘he has a son.’
‘I didn’t know—’ Cathy starts.
Freiberg lifts the receiver and dials a number. ‘You didn’t know he had a son? I wouldn’t feel left out sweetheart . . . neither did the rest of the world.’
The phone connects at the other end of the line.
Walt Freiberg smiles. ‘Evelyn? It’s Walter . . . long time, no see. Calling because I need you to do something for me.’
So this – amongst so many other things – was the real deal, the hard-bitten truth: when he was drunk he believed in God.
But these days John Harper didn’t drink so often, and thus his moments of faith were few and far between. Harper was one of the very fortunate who’d experienced the moment of special revelation: sleep off the drunk and the debt was still owed; the girlfriend still pregnant; the wife knew you’d walked out on her for a twenty-two-year-old Thai girl with universal joints for hips. The fan was still spinning, the crap still airborne six ways to Christmas. Life turns a corner, and all of a sudden your soundtrack plays in a minor key.
And so John Harper stopped drinking, and therefore stopped believing in God.
But before that: raw-faced and noisy; thundering migraines surrendering to nothing but a combination of Jack Daniels and Darvon Complex; fits of anger, more often than not directed towards himself; a frustrated man; a man of words bound within the limits of a stunted imagination. Ate too little – corn-dogs and cinnamon cake and sometimes a cheeseburger from Wendy’s or Sambo’s; late-night shuffles through the kitchen searching out Ring-Dings and handfuls of dry Froot Loops, making inhuman sounds, hands shaking, wondering when the muse would come back.
Because John Harper wrote a book one time; called it
Depth of Fingerprints
; sold it for twelve thousand dollars up-front to a smalltime publishing house in Miami. Optioned for film; film was never made. Helluva story, even posted a squib in the
Herald Tribune
which told him he had a future if he kept his narrative dry and his prose succinct. That had been eight years before. Started a dozen things since; finished nothing.
Lived in Miami now. Had headed south from New York in the
hope of inspiration and wound up staying, and like someone once said: Miami was a noise, a perpetual thundering noise trapped against the coast of Florida between Biscayne Bay and Hialeah; beneath it Coral Gables, above it Fort Lauderdale; everywhere the smell of the Everglades – rank, swollen and fetid in summer, cracked and featureless and unforgiving in winter.
Miami was a promise and an automatic betrayal; a catastrophe by the sea; perched there upon a finger of land that pointed accusingly at something that was altogether not to blame. And never had been. And never would be.
Miami was a punctuation mark of dirt on a peninsula of misfortune; an appendage.
But home is where the heart is.
John Harper’s heart was taken in Miami, and to date – as far as he knew – it had never been returned.
Pushed his pen nevertheless; wrote inches for the
Herald
, and sometimes those inches were pressed out once more for the
Key West Citizen
,
The Keynoter
,
Island Life
and
The Navigator
. John Harper wrote human interest squibs about poisonwood and pigeon plum and strangler fig and gumbo limbo in Lignumvitae Key State Botanical; about shark sightings and shark tournaments; about the homes of Tennessee Williams and Papa Hemingway on Key West; about all manner of minutiae that swallowed the attention for a heartbeat and was just as soon forgotten.
Greyhound Bus made eight stops between Miami and Key West. Down through Islamorada, Key Largo, Marathon and Grassy Key; two routes – one from the Florida Turnpike which wound up in Homestead, the other along 1-95 which became US 1 at the southern end of Miami. Both roads hit the Overseas Highway. Both roads he had travelled. And there was something about the islands – all thirty-one punctuations of limestone and the eight hundred uninhabited islands that surrounded them – that forever gripped his imagination. Here, on this awkward peninsula of hope, he believed himself a million miles from the disappointment of New York. South and east was the Atlantic, west was the Gulf of Mexico; forty-two bridges, dozens of causeways; New England and Caribbean architecture – gingerbread verandas, widow’s walks, wrought-iron balconies, population of twenty-five thousand, a million tourists a year.
John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park with its starfish and lobsters, its sponges and sea cucumbers, its stingrays, barracuda, crabs and angel fish. And then there was Key Largo Dry Rocks, the Bronze Christ of the Deep Statue, shoals of blackfin tuna, the waves of frigate birds overhead that would tell you when the fish were running. And the smell, the once-in-a-lifetime smell of salt, seaweed, fish and marsh, mangrove swamps and rocks; the memory of pirates and Ponce de Leon, the Dry Tortugas, the footprints of turtles, the reefs, the clear water, the citrus, the coconut.
All these things a hundred and fifty miles from where he sat in his small backroom office in the
Miami Herald
complex.
John Harper: journalist, one-time novelist, one-time New Yorker; thirty-six years old, muddy-blond hair, good jawline, clear grey eyes. Single now, single and without options; small address book, maybe a dozen girls in all, but each one – right to the last – had been ousted from the Harper camp by the necessity to do something more with their lives than wait for the bitter and sardonic humor to lighten up. Last got laid a handful of weeks before. Sweet girl, olive complexion, emerald eyes. Called him ‘Johnnie’ which irritated him, but not for long. Lasted a couple of months; she found someone else – boat captain called Gil Gibson running tourist trips out of Bayside around HMS
Bounty
. She took another little piece of that heart, the one that belonged to Miami, and she stole it away silently, walking on eggshells, for she knew John Harper was a man of too many words, and some of those words could be hurled with a raised voice and clenched fists. He let her go; she would have gone anyway; told her it was better for both of them if she walked out into life and found what she really wanted. To her, to himself, he had lied, but he had lied like a professional.
And Harper believed,
had
to believe, that one day the muse would come home, and then he would find his dry narrative and his succinct prose, and he would pen a prizewinner that would give him enough money to leave Miami and head south along Overseas until he reached the end. And he’d walk out to the beach come nightfall and know that Hemingway and Williams, John Hersey, James Merrill, Tom McGuane and Phil Caputo . . . know that all of them had once stood right where he would be standing, and they too had looked out towards the Keys of Fish
Hawk, Sugarloaf, Halfmoon and Little Truman. He would stand in the footprints of giants, and there – at the southernmost point of the continental United States – John Michael Harper, he of the dry and bitter humor, he of the lost loves and lonely nights, he of clenched fists and silent typewriter, of burgeoning promise and unfulfilled potential, would know that he had come home.
Home, perhaps, is not where the heart is, but where – at last – you found it.
But that was all so much of so many different things. That sort of thing was dreams and wishes and other stuff related.
Reality was less complex.
Simple job. Showed up Monday morning.
‘John?’
Standing in the doorway was Harry. Harry made most doorways look too small. Harry – a.k.a. Harry Ivens, Assistant Editor-In-Chief,
Miami Herald
– smiled like he’d just got the joke, a joke pretty much everyone else had gotten three-quarters of an hour before.
‘Harry . . . good morning,’ John Harper replied.
Harry nodded. ‘Shark tournament, Blackwater Sound into Florida Bay, all the way out and round Sandy, come home southwest into Marathon . . . you know the routine, you love it, you know you do . . . get your shit together.’ Harry smiled again.
‘Today?’
‘Today.’
‘Thought it was next Monday.’
Harry tilted his head to one side as if considering the significance of Harper’s comment. He looked at Harper again. ‘It’s December, John, same trip every year, same time. We’ll soon have Christmas, if you didn’t know. Get a diary, write this stuff down. Hell, get a computer, a laptop maybe . . . you could be better organized. We’re not asking you to cover Watergate. Time for coffee now, little more than that, and you better be away or the boats will be sailing without you aboard. Camera, remember? Pictures are good . . . get some pictures and we can put your piece in all the Keys papers three times over.’ Harry nodded. ‘I’ve got to go now, but I envy you. Sun and fun and fish, right?’
‘Right, Harry.’
Harper watched him leave the room and head through the maze of partitions to his office in the far corner, then he turned
his chair until his back was to the door. He made-believe he was looking out through a window. Behind him, there on the wall, he’d hung a calendar, a calendar with pictures of Molasses Reef, Mallory Pier, Fort Zachary Taylor and the gulls at Higgs Beach. Made-believe he was looking out through a window at these things and, sometimes when he did this, he would close his eyes and imagine the tradewind breeze through his hair, would find the smell, would hear the shrill echoes of birds and the sound of the surf against the shore.
Minutes would dissolve away silently, and then someone would say, ‘Where the fuck is Harper?’ and Harper would turn and wait for the someone to come through the door, and hear them say, ‘John, I need four and a half inches split three ways. Pages six, nine, eleven. Any old crap will do. Need it within the hour, okay?’
And John Harper would nod and smile, and spend twenty-five minutes writing four and a half inches of any old crap, and they would use it like mortar between the bricks, fill in the gaps between one real story and the next, and even as he was doing it he would smell the tradewind breeze, would hear the gulls, feel a sense of warmth on the back of his neck.
And that – fundamentally – was what he did. Rented a comfortable, simple apartment on N.W. Twelfth between Gibson Park and the North-South Expressway, not so far from his workplace; couple of bars he frequented, not because he needed to drink but because he liked the sound of real people with real enough lives, and bars were where he would find them when evening came and Miami slowed down; five days a week in a small office writing fill-ins and bylines, more than not without credit, and the only reason he got the job in the first place was because of
Depth of Fingerprints
, which – all in all – wasn’t so much a bad book as a good start that never went anyplace.
John Harper was a man without a purpose, and he knew – above all else – that a man without a purpose was destined for unhappiness whichever way he walked.
What he
told
himself he wanted was the tradewind and the blackfin tuna, the pigeon plum and the poisonwood, the eight hundred punctuations of limestone and the smell that haunted the spaces in between. The truth was perhaps different. What he
wanted was something to drive him forward, much the way he’d been driven to write
Depth of Fingerprints
.
But that December Monday morning – late December, but still so warm you felt punch-drunk before reaching the car – he left his office and the complex and headed home. Mid-morning he was packed and prepped for a two-day jaunt out of Blackwater Sound; a flotilla of boats captained by seasoned and veteran drunks, men with faces like storm-hammered rocks, hands like dried-up leather gloves, their passengers business types – from Miami and Hialeah, Coral Gables and Kendall; men who split their time between the office, the Key Biscayne Golf Course, the mistress, and three times a year this wild two-day fishing jag after barracuda and shark, staggering close to blind near the edge of the deck, loaded to the gunnels with cold beer and warm sun. This was as real as life got for guys like this, and John Harper was there to see it all, to tell the tales, to take the pictures, to write another byline or fill-in that would grace the pages of
The Key West Citizen
or
Island Life
.
Took him an hour to get down there, all the way to Key Largo, and already he sensed, perhaps with something preternatural and intuitive, that these couple of days ahead would see a storm out of the Gulf of Mexico. He parked his car, a Pontiac 6.6 that had seen so many better days, off of the highway between Newport and Rock Harbor, and then he hitched a ride back towards the mouth of the Sound with one of the many pickups that were headed that way.
All jeans and tee-shirts, lumberjack checks with the sleeves torn off, unshaven since Friday morning in preparation for this; belts with hunting knives in hand-tooled leather sheaths, strong boots with sealed soles, weatherproofs and all-in-ones packed in holdalls; men shouting, laughing, already drinking, not even discreet despite the hour of the day, and thumping shoulders and real-life honest-to-God man-hugs, and
Shit, you old fuck . . . you look like you gained forty fucking pounds since a year ago! And You hear about Marv? Hell, if his missus didn’t catch him bangin’ some Filipino chick. Took him for half his fucking company, poor son-of-a-bitch
.