Send Down the Rain(20)

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 Jake 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.