Broke Down Wet

by W.C. Levy

Now

Shafts of dawning sunlight struck Owen like cloudless lighting as he departed the Everglades, something dazing and dangerous that came from and returned to a implacable nothing. Or, perhaps, like releasing a long-held breath after driving by a cemetery. As the wetland receded behind him, he flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror. Smoke ascended from the green-brown dampness, congealing blood somehow blooming from a dying vein, thick and slow and directionless. He drove north, into life and out of memory.

Then

Coils of smoke reached up toward the clouds hanging above the deep marsh. The fumes rolled into the stratus and stained the lower atmosphere with bands of black scars boiling further and wider out across the sky. The smoke cast a shadow down onto a dog track several miles east of the burning sawgrass and pine. Owen looked up from the bleachers as the shade spread over the dirt track that had been tilled to crumbs by the paws of greyhounds leaning into corners and screaming down straightaways. He was sitting next to Avery, and they were drinking pale beer from plastic cups. Avery held a ticket in his free hand. Pressed between his thumb and index finger was the amount he had bet: one-hundred-and-fifty dollars. The man kept rubbing his thumb across the number over and over, wearing the ink thinner and impressing into his skin the residue of a small fortune squandered, a river run dry in a drought of debauchery and hard lessons. Owen could see the payout ratio of his friend’s bet at the bottom of the ticket: thirty-five-to-one.

Avery sipped his beer and scratched the ear of his old greyhound, Matilda, resting by his feet. He’d explained to Owen that he’d rescued the dog from her former owner after she’d suffered a broken hock – a death sentence for a racing dog. Owen didn’t know anything about a hock, but Matilda’s slight gimp in her rear right leg told him clear enough that her best days had been run out. He watched the dog’s tongue slack out of her jaw as she panted in the heat searing off the metal seats. Her gray coat looked to Owen like the underbellies of the catfish he and Avery used to catch as kids fishing the shallows of the Everglades. It had taken Owen several attempts at unhooking a catfish before he got the hang of it without catching a dorsal barb in his palm, a stinging wound that pulsed up through his forearm and atrophied his fingers into little rigid pillars for the better part of an hour. Avery, the son of a fishing guide and the grandson of a leather-skinned ecologist, remained impervious. When Avery was seeing straight, he had needle-nose pliers for fingers. And, when he wasn’t seeing straight, he had nickel-thick calluses insulating his palms.

A horn sounded, and the dogs tore down the straightaway. Avery leaned forward. The big man rubbed Matilda’s head in a careful, clockwise motion, practiced and deliberate and desperate, as he tracked the greyhound sporting the number six jacket. Avery’s pick was stuck in the heart of the pack, a jumble of hounds bearing down on the lure, an amalgam-beast of flaring teeth and ears and paws. Ahead of the pack was number three, the favorite, who maintained a lead throughout the race and outpaced the rest of the pack so completely that Avery couldn’t bother watching till the end. Instead, he pounded down the rest of his beer, tossed the cup down onto the lower bleachers, and stared up at the drifting smoke trails.

The portly man stood up, stretched his arms out over his head with a pained groan and turned to Owen. “What say we go down to Belly Up?”

“That place still open?”

“‘Bout the only place you’ll recognize, I figure.”

Avery took a couple steps down the bleachers toward the exit and whistled for Matilda to follow. She trotted down after him as Owen finished his beer, found a trash can near the top of the bleachers and hustled down after Avery, on the heels of Matilda.

Belly Up was a tin-roofed and plank-walled dive bar that straddled the outer vestiges of the town and the threshold of the Everglades, a sinking outpost planted at the boundary of infrastructure beyond which lay miles of muck-mired sheet flow. The bar was at the end of a dirt road and housed a gravel lot. The rear of the building rested on a series of stilts which suspended it above a slight ridge spilling down toward the water. Avery and Matilda led Owen along a walkway to the bar’s otherwise empty back porch.

“Usually quiet till ‘round sundown,” said Avery as he dropped down into a folding chair near a table. Owen did the same. Matilda rested near Avery’s feet, closing her eyes and leaning her head against the top of Avery’s boot. A server stepped out onto the porch. Upon seeing Avery, she disappeared back into the bar. Avery didn’t seem to notice, but Owen thought it strange; he’d seen a look of recognition upon her face before deciding to turn back around.

She even put her notepad back in her pocket.

Owen looked out over the water and remembered more – fishing, beer, nights of humid dark and adolescent intrigue; smoke and cane liquor and young women amidst moonlight and warm wind. He’d forgotten the names of lean girlfriends in cutoffs and broad bumpkin fellows with whom he’d passed around a tin of spearmint dip. Dead recollections within Owen’s mind were resurrected by the sensory assault of methane discharge and choral mosquito clouds droning and humming about the marshes, activating a dormant frequency long silenced by the future become present.

He felt heat flash across his face. He turned to what he understood, what had ultimately called him back to these wilds: appraisal. He observed the bar, then the patch of land upon which the bar stood. He estimated that it was around a half-acre lot, and one could install a small dock down at the edge of a narrow clearing of brush with little difficulty.

The land would probably fetch one-fifty. Couldn’t cost that much to install a dock, either. Add a dock, push the lot up closer to one-eighty, minimum.

A look through a window revealed a familiar sight: a Select-O-Matic jukebox. The front glass displaying the CD’s was obscured by fused grease and dust, baked into the glass by years of sunsets gazing through the western-facing windows. The wood panels had lightened and chipped, and the neon tubes which once glowed creamsicle orange had been reduced to a shallow, cantaloupe shade.

“That old jukebox still work?” asked Owen, nodding toward the window.

Avery looked through the window. “See a dance partner?”

“No. Just don’t want them to forget about us sitting out here.”

Avery stood up and led Matilda inside, holding the door open for Owen. Once inside, Owen walked over to the Select-O-Matic while Avery sat down at a high-top. He wiped a bit of smudge off the glass with his thumb, revealing a metal record carrier housing black discs. The buttons on the front panel were lettered A through K and numbered zero through nine, stenciled in a shade of once-cherry-red now smudged away into a fading blush. He searched the track selections and was welcomed back by the zeitgeist of the eighties pop scene.

He ran his finger over the coin slot, then approached the bartender. She was a wilted branch of a woman, dry and ill-fitting skin stretched out upon bone. Owen recognized her – what remained of her. A lifetime spent toiling away in the Everglades had fossilized and oxidized the woman into this petrified relic some couple decades ago, and so she had remained.

Owen pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and produced a dollar bill.

“Can I get some quarters from you?” he asked.

The bartender looked at the dollar, then the jukebox, then Owen.

“Ole thing ain’t worth nothin’ no more.”

Owen went to put the dollar back in his wallet, but instead pulled out a few more dollars and ordered two beers. The bartender took his money and socked it into the register without offering change.

“Sandra,” she called, “two stouts.”

The bartender went over to a stool behind the bar, sat down and pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her breast pocket. Sandra, the server who’d left them out on the back porch, appeared from behind the door leading into the galley kitchen. She blew a thin stream of smoke out of the corner of her mouth and waved the smoke away toward the ceiling. She went behind the bar, reached into the cooler and pulled out two bottles of stout. The bartender watched Sandra with glazed eyes behind a blooming cloud, one arm laid across her stomach and the other hanging down toward the floor, cigarette burning away.

Owen watched Sandra pop the caps off the bottles and toss them into the trash. She slid the bottles to him, and he observed her hands: unpainted nails, wide palms, faint calluses, a cursive tattoo on her wrist.

She’s local, but new to the job.

He walked back over to Avery, wondering how long it would take for Belly Up to wear her down. He passed one of the bottles to his friend, and they drank. Avery took a gulp to every one of Owen’s sips. Owen sat on a stool facing toward the bar, and he watched the old woman stare at the back of Avery’s shaved head. She sat there, smoke clouding about her face. Owen looked down at his beer, drank a bit more, then asked Avery about the property he was looking to sell.

“Hell, you already know everything about the place,” said Avery. “Shacked up out there plenty.”

“But it’s been a while since I’ve seen the structure. I don’t have any idea about the lot’s worth until I really appraise the land. It’ll take at least a few days, like I told you before.”

“‘Structure’,” repeated Avery, eyebrow raised. “‘Appraise’… brother, it’s a fishin’ camp.”

“I need to know the appropriate listing price for your lot. Like I said, I know commercial metro prices, not Everglades prices.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s why you called me, right?”

“Called you to get me as much money as you can get me. You ain’t but the one person I know who got anything to do with sellin’ land.”

The phone call from Avery a few weeks ago had struck Owen with a blinding force. He’d been in his office in Winter Park when his desk phone rang. He answered it, and his secretary connected him to, as she put it, “some guy with an accent – says he knows you.”

From the moment Owen was connected to the call, Avery had flooded his ear with rushed pleasantries, profane tirades about his various debt collectors – some legitimate and others disreputable, apparently – and a long-winded plea for Owen to return to his speck of a hometown so that he could help an old friend out of a jam by selling off his fishing camp, which had doubled as Avery’s home all his life.

“Reckon I can make enough on the camp to pay some people back and get me on down to Islamorada,” Avery had said.

“Islamorada?”

“Gonna buy me a RV, hitch my skiff to it and take people fishin’ out in them flats.”

The more Owen listened to Avery speak over the phone, the more he’d become aware of Avery’s rolling drawl and how it pressed his own extinct inflections into blatant relief. He couldn’t be quite sure when his accent had fully disappeared, though he knew it had to have been sometime between when he’d graduated college in Tallahassee and began selling office spaces to biotechnology companies in the Central Business District. His pronunciation and dialect had been scrubbed clean of backwoods twang and euphemisms, wholesale replaced by commercial vernacular and professional rhythm.

“How’d you get my number, Avery?” he’d asked.

“Ole Taylor Myers told me you helped your momma sell y’all’s old place after your daddy passed and got her moved up your way. Weren’t all that hard to track you down.”

I suppose if you can catch a gator in pitch dark, you can figure out the internet.

“Actually, all I did was put my mom in touch with a realtor from Weston. How are your folks doing, by the way?”

“They been gone for six, seven years, thereabouts. Cancer took Momma, and Daddy just plain died. So, just me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I certainly hope it wasn’t too rough on either of them.”

Avery had laughed into the phone, a tone caught between surprise and melancholy, first loud and then stifled down into his throat.

“Yeah, well.”

As Owen sat beside Avery and drank his beer inside Belly Up, he could see that his old friend believed that all Owen had to do was snap his fingers and he’d sell the camp for a good price.

“All in,” began Owen, “how much money do you owe right now?”

Avery sucked his teeth. Owen saw the bartender lean forward on her stool. The bar silenced; the boards ceased their creaking; even the clouds of mosquitos halted their droning.

Avery looked up at Owen, then rotated the bottom of his bottle on the table. He shrugged, and asked, “S’pose we just get the camp sold, huh?”

Understanding, Owen nodded as they both finished their beers. Avery collected both of their bottles, walked up to the bar, pulled a few dollars out of his wallet, and asked for another round. Sandra looked at the bartender, who shrugged and lit another cigarette. Avery returned to the table, handed a bottle to Owen and sat back down. Matilda returned her head to his boot and closed her eyes.

“So, first thing you need to do is go over to the camp and get a feel for it?” asked Avery.

Owen rubbed his forehead. “Look, you’re better off with this realtor in Weston. You say I’m the only person you know who could help you out, but I may not be the right person to do this.”

“Hell, why’d you come if all you’re gonna do is tell me to go ask somebody else for help?”

It was a fair question; it had been one that Owen had considered as he’d driven down Route 441 yesterday. It had been a question that his wife had asked him as he packed a small suitcase and booked a hotel room on his laptop. There were no hotels in his hometown, so he’d had to select a place further east, toward the coast.

“Just tell him to call that other guy,” she’d told him.

He’d considered calling Avery back and telling him that he was unable to step away from work, even for only a few days. He’d even thought about simply not going and not telling Avery anything – letting it go and hoping the issue disappeared like a distant memory mistaken for a dream.

He’s gotten on this far in life. He can figure it out.

But here he was, having a beer at Belly Up and talking about selling that old camp. Against his head and heart, he was here.

“Let’s see what I can do.”

They finished their beers and drove in hot silence along the edge of the wetland. Owen looked out the window at the smoke trailing up from the fire deeper in the swamp. He knew it was a controlled burn, like one of the many his dad had overseen during his decades as a fire manager. The fires were used to burn away dry, dead, and overgrown brush, depriving a true wildfire of potential fuel. As Owen watched the smoke twist and dissipate, he recalled some of his dad’s ramblings as he’d driven them from their old house to the ranger station on summer days when his mom had to work her desk job at a bank in Weston.

When we burn away the brush, we’re restoring the pines. When we do that, sunlight gets down to the rockland floor and helps them smaller plants grow. Like we’re plantin’ things ourselves. Like gardeners.

He continued to watch the fire burn away the stretch of wilted wetland, wondering how close the blaze would come to Avery’s camp. He wondered if it would be in Avery’s interest if his camp were to catch fire and burn down to a skeleton remainder of roasted planks.

Save both of us some trouble.

The years between Owen’s last visit to the camp and his return to his hometown had bleached his mind of the camps’ particularities. What remained within his memories were fragments of interactions with friends-turned-strangers, long-dead locals, and obscure figures. Owen lacked the ability to piece their faces back together through the residue of adolescent drunkenness. He remembered a dock, falling off the outermost plank while dancing with a girl who had been leaning against him and sucking his neck as bluegrass music leaked out of the camp’s radio. It had been just the pair of them out there. They had spun around and stepped off the planks and slapped down into the water. There was no memory after that – no visual memory. His head was filled with the scents of soaked undergrowth, methane, ethanol – putrid sensations staining his time within this place of water and grass and gaseous rot.

As Avery drove them closer to the camp, Owen’s heart pumped with alarm as he drew no recollection from any tree, divot, or bent signpost. His stomach deadened in despair.

I couldn’t have been so drunk that I can’t remember anything. I remembered Belly Up, the bartender. This can’t be the road to the camp.

“I’ve never been down this road.”

“Main road got flooded over two years ago. Under about a foot of standing water right now. Hurricanes. Took ‘em six months to fix up this road. Took their time ‘cause they figured ain’t but one person who needed that road.” Avery smirked, then said, in a low voice, “Good thing I had my skiff.”

They reached the end of the gravel road, which had narrowed to the point where the truck’s mirrors brushed against the leaves and fronds flanking either side of the road, brushing the growth back like curtains. They came upon the camp: a squatty-framed structure with warped planks for walls and mossy shingles upon its roof. A pair of windows looked out from the rear of the house toward the dock and the channel leading further out into the wetland. Avery’s skiff was secured to a cleat at the end of the dock. Even from a distance, Owen was able to discern green and brown striations all along the boat’s fiberglass hull.

Avery parked in front of the camp and got out of the truck, Matilda leaping out after him and trotting up to the screen door. Slowly exiting the truck, Owen looked around the property with a stunned daze, as though roused from a dream and still on unsteady ground in the waking world. It immediately struck Owen as impossible to advertise the property as anything but fit for what was already in place. He’d be selling the dead end of a marsh grave, offloading not only his own crumbling recollections of this place, but whatever amounted to the remnant of Avery’s life.

No growth. Just overgrowth. Algae bones.

In an instant, he felt an agitating isolation that demanded climate control and pressed sheets.

“Avery,” he called out. His old friend turned back to him, his hand on the knob of the screen door. “I get the picture. I need you to drive me back to my hotel, please.”

Avery had attempted business talk and small talk on their drive to the hotel, but Owen quietly busied himself, solidifying his exit with steady eyes offset by a heart beating against his eardrums.

Email the guy in Weston and be done. You don’t know this place anymore.

Way Back When

The boys sat on the dock and hacked up globules of black bile in between rolling bouts of laughter. They were wreathed in the orange glow of a fire dying at the water’s edge, and their feet hung down near the surface of the still channel. One passed a bag of chew to the other, who plugged a pinch into his lip and continued to regale the other with a story about a handjob in a skiff gone awry. The laughter slowly faded, and each of the boys grabbed a beer from the cooler sitting between them. As one of them sipped, he closed his eyes and pictured his long walk home.

I’ll be damned if I can find that sumbitch.

 

Born in Tennessee, raised in Florida and blood-bound to Louisiana, W.C. Levy is a Literature Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Florida. His scholarly interests include Southern Gothic literature, American Gothic theory and class-based otherness in the American South. His creative works frequently feature aspects of local color, haunted characters and unsteady reconciliations.