Key West Tales Read online

  JOHN HERSEY

  Key West Tales

  John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge universities, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. He had published sixteen books of fiction and nine books of reportage and essays. During the last years of his life, Mr. Hersey and his wife, Barbara, divided their time between Key West, Florida, and Martha’s Vineyard. He died in 1993.

  BOOKS BY, JOHN HERSEY

  Key West Tales (1993)

  Antonietta (1991)

  Fling and Other Stories (1990)

  Life Sketches (1989)

  Blues (1987)

  The Call (1985)

  The Walnut Door (1977)

  The President (1975)

  My Petition for More Space (1974)

  The Writers Craft (1974)

  The Conspiracy (1972)

  Letter to the Alumni (1970)

  The Algiers Motel Incident (1968)

  Under the Eye of the Storm (1967)

  Too Far to Walk (1966)

  White Lotus (1965)

  Here to Stay (1963)

  The Child Buyer (1960)

  The War Lover (1959)

  A Single Pebble (1956)

  The Marmot Drive (1953)

  The Wall (1950)

  Hiroshima (1946; new edition, 1985)

  A Bell for Adano (1944)

  Into the Valley (1943)

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 1996

  Copyright © 1993 by The Estate of John Hersey

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1993.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Hersey, John 1914–1993

  Key West tales / by John Hersey.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-679-42992-1

  1. Key West (Fla.)-Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3515.E7715K48 1994

  813′.52—dc20

  93-11094

  CIP

  Vintage ISBN 9780679772637

  Ebook ISBN 9780593080757

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

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  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by, John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  God’s Hint

  Get Up, Sweet Slug-a-bed

  Did You Ever Have Such Sport?

  The Two Lives of Consuela Castanon

  They’re Signaling!

  A Game of Anagrams

  Cuba Libre!

  Fantasy Fest

  Just Like You and Me

  Page Two

  Amends

  Piped Over the Side

  To End the American Dream

  The Wedding Dress

  A Little Paperwork

  God’s Hint

  The preacher on this Sabbath morning is Brother Eagan. A big bear of a man, he has a chestnut beard and sideburns like huge ficus bushes sticking out on either side of his face. He is a Methodist, with embers for eyes and a whip for a tongue. Just now it is the Methodists nine o’clock turn to hold their service in the great hall of the county courthouse in Jackson Square, which all Key West denominations use, in round-robin hours, for worship on Sundays.

  Squire Eagan, as most people call the Methodist parson, is feared more than he is loved, and envied more than he is feared. He has a deadly aim, and the bull’s-eye he consistently hits is his listeners rather weak sense of having done the wrong thing. The sun shines bright and hot on Key West; this is a climate that is kind to bright-blooming greenery and to joys of the flesh—frisky trysts, rum, and rumpled bedsheets—and so it is that many of the citizens are well acquainted with mischief but at a cost. For once a week, at Sabbath meeting, when the hot tongue of Squire Eagan is levied at them, they suffer remorse. The remorse is not extreme, and it is short-lived, but while it lasts it is most annoying, like the bite of the fire ant.

  Squire Eagan is envied because he is rich. He is rich because on weekdays, instead of visiting the sick and comforting the poor, he plies the trade of an expert wrecker. He owns a swift and sea-kindly schooner, the Godspeed. The trade that goes by the name of wrecking has brought great prosperity to our little town, which, being the most southerly place in the United States, is a port of landfall for bottoms from all over the world, laden with spirits, silks, finished articles, works of art, silverware, lace, fine furniture, and other goods and artifacts, to say nothing of bulk cargoes of lumber, sugar, fruits, and the precious bird droppings known as guano.

  Wreckers are salvors. That enormous living creature the coral barrier reef along the Keys lies in wait in all weathers for unwary ships. There is not a single lighthouse along the one hundred twenty miles of this monster from Carysfort Reef to Key West, and indeed, the influential wreckers of our town have vociferously opposed the setting out of any government lights. Some slanderers from the mainland have invented a story that Key West wreckers have actually set out a light at a place where there is no channel at all; the wreckers say to cynics who point toward a shining speck out there at night, No, no, that is just a star very low over the horizon.

  At any rate, the moment the great coral beast clamps its southernmost jaws on a stray vessel, or, at the latest, at dawn the next morning, the wreck is spied from a whole series of high lookouts on the waterfront of Key West. A cry goes up, passed through all the Old Town: “Wreck ashore! Wreck ashore!” and within minutes the streets become racecourses for crowds of men, running for the harbor. Soon scores of vessels there bend on their canvas, slip the pennants of their moorings, and crowd all sail for a race, be it in doldrums or gale winds, out to the reef What regattas those are! The captain of the first vessel to reach the vicinity of the derelict becomes the Wrecking Master, who can then lay claim to whatever he salvages. He lays claim, too, to mean and dangerous work, which often involves skin-diving in the foulest of weather. Squire Eagan’s Godspeed, whether with divine assistance or not, has had a way of getting there first again and again, and Eagan’s house on Front Street, a three-story clapboard mansion with a widow’s walk atop it, has in it, among many other treasures, a Ming dynasty coromandel screen, a silver tea service said to have been made by Paul Revere, a cloisonné tea caddy from Bombay, and a dazzling collection of South American butterflies mounted as if on the wing in a glass case lined with crimson velvet.

  Squire Eagan stands now in the raised rostrum from which, when court is in session in this room, the judge presides. On Sundays, this is the pulpit. Magisterially intimidating, this rostrum stands a full six feet higher than the floor of the hall, where the Methodists are seated. The walls of the chamber on either side have tall and wide windows, so that the eye of God has a good look at the brightly lit faces of His flock—and by the same token, the eye of God’s messenger, up in the rostrum, has a fine clear view of the expanse of ocean out to the south.

  The text for the sermon today is I Corinthians, chapter nine, verse twenty-four. “Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain.” Squire Eagan winds into his theme: The great rac
e, which every one of these poor sinners in Key West must run, is for eternal salvation. Who will win the prize? His hot eyes roam along the rows of faces of those he knows to be strong in ardor and weak in will—lotus eaters, hankerers, those with red noses and lubricious lips, sensualists whom he has reason to suspect as trespassers in the meadows of wedlock. Squire Eagan looks you, too, dear reader, in the eye, and you, too, tremble, thinking of the wrong that you, too, have done. Do you feel the fire ant’s bite?

  Now, it happens that some twenty minutes into the dominie’s harangue, his eyes dart for a moment out the window to his right. And what does he see? He sees a handsome brigantine, tacking into a strong sou’wester, staying well inside the contrary current of the Gulf Stream and therefore close aboard the terrible stretch of the reef known as the Sambos. And look! She is trying to come about—a miscalculation. She loses steerage way—she is in irons!—she drifts! There! She is fast on the reef!

  The automatic cry “Wreck ashore!” almost rises in Squire Eagan’s throat. But he chokes it back. God has vouchsafed him a timely thought. If he gives the lookout shout from up here in the rostrum, nine tenths of the men in the congregation will be out the door at the other end of the hall and racing for their vessels before he can climb down from this height and chase them.

  His furious gaze swivels back onto the faces of the more or less rueful transgressors. His voice rising to new thumps of thunder, he makes his way down the steps of the judicial bench to the floor level, and ambling as he roars, he eases into the center aisle. What he is doing is most necessary. He has reached the stage in his sermon when he needs must face each parishioner close at hand—lean into the end of each row on either side, stare down both male and female sinners one by one, and drive the message home.

  And so he goes down the center aisle, shouting, “Prepare! Prepare for the great race—for salvation!”

  Having reached the very last row, three paces from the open door to the town, he roars, “Wreck ashore! Now we will run a race and see who receiveth the prize. Run, that ye may obtain!”

  His church is emptied as fast as if he had smelled smoke and shouted, “Eire! Fire!” Virtually all the men in his flock are in full chase behind him—Methodists are keen wreckers. But he has a goodly lead. Some of the men of his crew have been rendered sufficiently uneasy by his sermon to run extra fast, as if the Devil himself were chasing them, and so they catch up with him at the docks. They scramble aboard Godspeed on the parsons coattails.

  What a beautiful parade of sails on a Sunday morning! Godspeed gets the jump on the Hester Ann, the Splendid, the Orion, the Olive Branch, the Fair American, the Whale, the Brilliant—and all the many other craft that heel smartly out of the harbor on a tight close reach.

  It goes without saying that the Godspeed reaches the wrecked brig first. Once again, as has so often happened, Squire Eagan is the Wrecking Master. The prize of this race, at any rate, thanks to the merciful hint that God gave him up there on the rostrum, is his.

  Get Up, Sweet Slug-a-bed

  Billy’s hibiscus blooms every day, summer and winter. That shrub can almost talk. Nothing else in Paul’s garden acts the way it does. Paul impartially waters all five of the hybrids in his garden twice a week, feeds them all on the first Sunday of each month with a special hibiscus formula they sell at Strunk’s, tosses snail bait equally around under all of them, mulches them all—but only Billy’s blooms every single day, the year round. It’s a hybrid called Tamara, bearing a six-inch pale-yellow bloom with the most extraordinary deep grayish-lavender mouth at the center, which sends whispers of its color, like mischievous rumors, out onto the petals.

  Those were the last colors Billy ever saw. The plant was in a pot in the window nearest his bed. Paul told me that the day after Billy died, the amazing Hospice people came in to “de-hospitalize” the room—arranging to return the crankable bed, the IV tree, the trapeze for Billy to help lift himself onto bedpans, and all the other rented gear back to Cobo’s—and Mary Conover, the most equal among the several equal angels of Hospice, said to Paul, “Of course you’ll want to plant Billy’s hibiscus outdoors.” She understood what Paul didn’t yet understand.

  Paul needed a lot of care from all of us after Billy died. It might have been easier if Paul and Billy had been lovers, for then Paul would have grieved normally. They were best friends. They lived in turbulent amity a couple of blocks from each other, Paul in a guesthouse on Simonton called Swann’s Way, and Billy in a small apartment on William Street. Paul told me that one night, a couple of years ago, when they were sitting around, both quite tight, Paul asked Billy whether he thought they might have been lovers if they’d met when they were younger—when Billy, say, was twenty-one and Paul still in his mid-thirties. “Not a chance,” Billy said, and then gave out that hoarse laugh of his, which, Paul thought at the time, put a puzzling and maybe not too nice edge on his answer. Paul tends to vibrate when he doesn’t understand exactly what you mean.

  Paul’s rooms are on the ground floor of the guesthouse, and it has its own garden. He planted Billy’s hibiscus on the side of his plot nearest Simonton. All five shrubs get plenty of light. Paul told me a few days ago that he’d been struck almost blind, that afternoon, by the sight of Billy’s bush, which was prospering as usual, holding up for the pleasure of the sun’s rays a dozen big dishes of those wizard colors. They made Paul dizzy, at first, with a perverse happiness, as he thought of Billy’s energy, his zest, which came through in weak flickers even in his most vegetative state toward the end. His wit, always with a little price tag on it. His thick and merciless laughter. His anger, tumbling out through his utter helplessness in those last days. Remembering those things filled Paul with an enigmatic joy. “But then,” he said to me, “I picked a bloom to take inside, and I felt a horrible stab of guilt, as if I were killing the whole plant plucking off that one flower.”

  * * *

  —

  Paul still lives a life of self-blame. Pain mostly, I guess, about having turned Billy over to Drew. He’d had to hire Drew. He’d really had to. Billy was alone. Billy had booted little Vanya Bronin out a month before he tested positive. He’d waited too long, years too long, to be tested, and on top of that he was destined to have a galloping case. He had full-blown symptoms within weeks, and since Bronin was no longer around, the entire care, when the bad signs set in, and for a long time after that, fell on Paul, who gave up his lunchtimes to fix Billy something to eat (or not eat) and used to sit by the hour, after he came home from work in the evenings, with what the rest of us considered an immaculate purity of friendship, reading to Billy, listening to CDs with him, holding his hands, massaging his feet, giving him back rubs, rolling him around to remake his bed with him in it, settling him for the night. Paul finally began to fall apart, just at a time when he thought he was taking another kind of fall—into love. He decided he had to get away from Key West for a few days, away from caring for and about Billy, to see whether what was happening with his new friend, Stanley, was for real. That was when he asked around and found Drew.

  “I’ve combed the town,” he said to Billy, announcing the change with what he later thought might have been a little too much sales talk. “This Drew person is a classic. Wait till you see him, Billy, with his nurse’s cap. He’s a howl. But everyone says he’s the tops, really dedicated. Gourmet cook—you’ll start eating again. I checked a hatful of references. They all say he’s wonderfully sweet, oozes TLC. But also very strong—he could hoist you out of bed like a baby and put you on the potty. You know what a mess I am, helping you to move.”

  “You S.O.B.,” Billy said. “You’re running out on me.”

  People didn’t run out on Billy. It always happened the other way round. Billy didn’t know the meaning of the word loyalty. His idea of love was a romp. He was the best fun in the world, and you couldn’t help wanting to be with him, but you’d better be careful.

  Little Vanichka
Bronin dropped in on Paul at the worst possible time, when Billy was beginning to fade fast. Vanya said to Paul that he wanted to warn him. Didn’t want Paul to get burned the way he had been. Vanya is a short, butchy street kid—could pass for a featherweight boxer. He has a swaggering cockiness that I’d guess encodes a mess of self-doubt close under a thin skin. His unlikely line of work was as a taxidermist, mostly stuffing big fish for flabby-armed one-day charter-boat anglers—instant Hemingways—to take home as trophies. Occasionally he did up exotic birds, and once he claimed to be really pissed off at having to stuff a Key deer that had been illegally killed by a bow-and-arrow hunter.

  Vanya said to Paul that he had done everything for Billy: kept house, gone shopping, cooked, done the dishes—and given him any pleasure that his whim might choose at any moment of any hour of the day or night. “The guy used me,” Vanichka said, his face splotched with puddles of his outrage. “I was just a servicer. Some kind of, like, fuck machine. He had no more feeling for me than he did for his right hand when he jacked off—less.” Toward the end of his tirade, Vanya said, “Son of a bitch tried to accuse me of having infected him.” That ugly claim of Vanya’s Paul knew wasn’t true, because Billy threw Vanya out a full month before he even tested positive, and he never saw or spoke to him again.

  “Not to worry,” Paul said when Vanya finally ran out of steam. “I’m not in love with the guy.”

  Vanya couldn’t believe that. I do. Because when Billy said, “Not a chance,” that time, I think he spoke for both of them, whether Paul knew it or not. They were made to be just friends.

  * * *

  —

  I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on Drew Patterson. I dropped over one afternoon to see Billy, as I often did. I didn’t know Paul had hired a nurse. I was one of half a dozen friends of Billy’s—our little support group—to whom Paul had given keys to Billy’s apartment, so that we could let ourselves in at hours when Billy was apt to be alone. So in I went, and there, leaning over the bed, gradually and it seemed endlessly straightening up at the sound of my entrance, was this six-foot-three-inch androgyne dressed in a white T-shirt and nothing else, it appeared, besides a white wrap-all-the-way-around apron that looked like a sheath skirt, and God knows what—pistil? stamen?—was hidden under it. His long, slightly curly, and very bleached hair was pulled back in a ponytail that hung nearly to his waist; on top of his head stood a lacy and frilly nurse’s cap interwoven with a purple ribbon—the only color, aside from his green eyes, in the whole apparition. For some reason, perhaps the way the long torso sagged, with its weight on one hip, I had a sudden thought of a Saint Sebastian—was it Piero della Francesca’s?—for there was something about this drooped figure that suggested multiple wounds.