Suitcase City. Sterling Watson

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       ONE

       1978, Cedar Key, Florida

      Jimmy Teach left professional football at the age of twenty-four, and his life went into a fast fall. He squandered money on bad friends and foolish business deals and the drink and drugs that went with them. He lived hard and the months passed and it became a slow suicide. He woke up one morning in a car he didn’t own in the driveway of a fashionable house in Atlanta with a policeman at his window. Teach had no idea who owned the house or why he had come to it. He had passed out with the engine running. A half-open window and an empty fuel tank had probably saved him from a blue-lipped death.

      Teach went home broke to Cedar Key, Florida. To start over in the old place. To remember who he had been, build a man again. One he could stand to be. People in the little towns were used to their sons and daughters coming home. The little places sent out a strong call to their own. The call was, Come back. Come back and be small again. And many did.

      Teach looked for jobs in the local fishery, but the crabbing, oystering, and gillnetting had fallen on hard times. He worked in kitchens, then as a bartender. At first it was hard because people asked questions. As simple as: what are you doing back here? As difficult as: what happened to all that football money? But it wasn’t long before Teach was one of them again. Before he was nothing special.

      One night, Teach was serving a party of sun bunnies who had arrived on a big motor sailer. He was dropping the paper umbrella into a banana daiquiri when a black man said, “Hey, what you doing back here?” The question was old, the man was vaguely familiar.

      The man looked over at the people he was with. They were the easy, pretty people who stopped in at the Cedar Key docks and ate in the restaurants and then sailed on to the next piña colada or planter’s punch. Teach called them the Whatever People. Whatever was an attitude, a place where people had enough time and money to let things happen to them, things that felt good. Teach said, “Do I know you?”

      “Hey, Jimmy, come on.” The man’s accent was local, the black version of it anyway, but the attitude was from Whatever. Teach still couldn’t place him. The guy laughed, leaned close, and said, “Delia B., man. Remember?”

      It all came back. The Delia B. was a trawler Teach had piloted when he was fifteen years old. An accomplished kid with a boat, he had coasted the Delia B. into a secluded canal bank where she would meet a rented truck. When her cargo was off-loaded, he would take her back out again, jump into a skiff tied to her stern, and wave goodbye to his friends who would clean her out and run her back around through Key Largo and up to Homestead. The black man’s name was Bloodworth Naylor. Nine years ago they had been business associates.

      “Naylor,” Teach said, “how you doing, man? It’s been a long time.”

      Teach remembered it all now, the nights he’d brought the boat in, the fat envelopes of cash, the things he’d bought for his widowed mother, the secrets. Bloodworth Naylor glanced over at the Whatever People, lowered his voice. “Ah, you know. I get along one way and another. Right now I’m babysitting tourists for ten bucks an hour.”

      After Teach closed up that night, he let Naylor in the back door and they sat in the dark bar. Naylor was crewing on the motor sailer, running tourists up and down the coast for a couple of New Age gurus who had them meditating in string bikinis and Speedos and contemplating the Tao. “Bunch of mantra-mumbling fools,” Naylor said over his third rum and lime. He stared at Teach. “You probably think it’s a coincidence us running into each other like this.”

      Teach raised his Wild Turkey and sipped. He was supposed to smile, say yeah, he thought it was a coincidence. He glanced around the bar. A table of waitresses over in the corner counting tips and telling evil-tourist stories. The cleanup crew coming on with mops and buckets. This was Teach’s life after football. Apparently, the man he had come home to build was a bartender. Bartenders know the past always comes looking for you.

      Teach said, “You’re doing it again, Naylor. You’re back in the import business.”

      Blood Naylor smiled. “Not yet, but I’m thinking about it. Now that you’re back in town.”

      * * *

      The trawlers didn’t come from Homestead anymore, and they didn’t cross to Freeport for the product. Teach and Bloodworth Naylor were subcontractors for a consortium of Guatemalan importers. The Guatemalans owned a mother ship designed to transport yachts across the world. Its huge bow doors opened, boats were floated aboard and secured, then the seawater was pumped out. They brought the mother ship up the Florida coast at night, floated an eighty-ton shrimper named the Santa Maria out of her bow, and three Guatemalans named Julio, Carlos, and Esteban piloted the shrimper inside the twenty-mile limit. The shrimper’s steel booms had been removed to give her a smaller radar signature and more deck space. The Santa Maria was loaded to the gunwales with bales of marijuana, the Guatemalans were armed to the teeth, and the night skies were full of cops.

      Teach did the job he had done as kid. He ran out in a twenty-one-foot Boston Whaler, met the Santa Maria and the three surly Latino gangsters, brought the shrimper in, weaving her through a maze of mangrove canals to the place in the Steinhatchee game preserve where Naylor met them with a rented truck. Teach and Naylor off-loaded the bales while the three pistoleros stood around smoking caporal cigarettes and stroking their mustaches. Once, Teach said to the ranking Guatemalan, “Hey, Esteban, why don’t you guys help us with the heavy work here? We get this done sooner, you get out quicker. It’s better for everybody.” Teach looked up at the sky, reminding Esteban of the DEA aircraft that patrolled this coast.

      Esteban looked at Teach the way he would at a guy who’d just asked for spare change. “Soy soldado. No soy peón.”

      Teach knew enough Spanish to get the drift. A soldier, not a laborer. “Yeah, well, we get caught here you’ll be somebody’s pom-pom girl up at Raiford. They like the little brown ones up there.” Teach squared himself, wiped the sweat from his eyes with his shirt sleeve, waited to see what Esteban would do. Maybe he had gone too far this time. He didn’t like the guy, didn’t care for any of the Guatemalans. They were Indians who had worn gaudy suits only long enough to learn how to sneer. Their eyes said they would kill without remorse, and their hands always hovered near the weapons they carried in shoulder rigs or in their waistbands.

      Esteban opened his coat and showed Teach the gleaming stainless steel nine-millimeter automatic СКАЧАТЬ