Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 57 - Smugglers Run

Photo by Brian Urso on Unsplash

Key West in the 1970s held a slower pace, relaxed yet still purposeful, with the purpose primarily being colorful glasses packed with shaved ice and plentiful rum, perhaps the tiniest splash of RC Cola, often from a vending machine.  On the western end of the main island, where cruise ships took occupancy before the anomaly time-shifted everything back forty years, ships and subs once docked at the same naval base.  There, Charlie Clarke would continue to visit the commissary and surrounding taverns long after he permanently relocated to the island, swapping stories both true and fabricated with men still in uniform.  These same men often regaled him with tales that made Charlie regret his retirement from service, especially after Josephine scrapped him for a younger man without even attempting to mask her indiscretion from her heartbroken husband.

In many ways, Charlie’s arrival in Key West signaled the further slow fading of the town where Ernest Hemingway once took residence, crafting drafts of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Charlie was acutely aware of how Hemingway’s shadow loomed large amongst the palm-lined streets, literally and figuratively, as his image in black and white silhouette hung in cheap wooden frames above men’s room doorways.  Charlie didn’t much care for Hemingway, nor was he intimidated by the squander and lore the writer left behind through a well-known trail of indiscretions.  Charlie was never much of a reader and had little use for a man who’d gone through four wives.

As the Naval base transitioned from a bustling port to a state-of-the-art combat fighter training facility around the same time Case Marina finally buckled to financial need and closed down in 1970, it was still a few years yet before National Airlines quit flying directly into Key West, landing their mammoth B-727 planes on runways no longer than the sign for the airport, itself.  Through these years, Charlie could feel himself pushing through the ominous sensation that everything was transforming around him in ways beyond his control.  Familiar faces would shuttle out of town, and new ones, who were less savory, would take their places.  He eagerly sought distractions, holding to the idea that there were more interesting ways to occupy his time before the island became a permanent tourist trap novelty with fake tributes to Ernest Hemingway like the counterfeit Sloppy Joes, which disgustingly turned into a franchise in the nineties.  

On some days, Charlie would amble drunkenly to the Key West Kennel Club and stupidly place bets against Ekco Elder, who, on more than one occasion, almost broke the 1963 dog racing record set by Mandarin Andy.  Like his distaste for Hemingway, Charlie didn’t care much about the races but enjoyed the quickly fleeting hope of the potential of benefiting from the insurmountable odds placed on his competitors.  But he also liked the sweaty atmosphere, the speed of the greyhounds, and the slowness of those cheering them on, awash in sweat, their eyes shaded with straw hats.  

On some evenings, he’d stroll between the lines of palm trees on Roosevelt Boulevard, laid out like a promenade, vast open fields of seagrass to his right and the endlessness of ocean fading into the sunset to his left, everything open and clean and salt on his lips. He’d wave each time the Conch train rolled down the street, often filled with military wives and their children.  When the sun eventually gave up the fight and slipped below the sea, the sky was somehow darker back then, more so than the sunsets of today - or of what was today - with the skyscrapers that abrogated the skyline, swallowing the darkness with neon marquees.     

By 1980, in just the ten short years since Charlie had taken permanent residence, the town had become a haven for homosexuals.  Drag shows and strip bars, the Island House gay sauna, all promulgated the tourist season from January through April, with adventurous singles and couples temporarily migrating to the south to fulfill appetites not yet satiated in more northern climes.  

Needing the cash, Charlie frequently looked the other way and chartered out his boat for booze cruises where twenty or more gay men would cavort to music that Charlie knew would earn him the disdain of fellow Navy infantry friends were they to see him at the helm of his boat with strangers gyrating against each other in the stern.  

Charlie knew there was money in drugs, too. And the opportunities to rendezvous with Cuban boats seeking passage for the goods sifted through from Columbia and elsewhere were too proliferous to ignore. A single smuggler’s run was equal to twenty decent fishing tours, and the money was often too good to pass up.

By the end of the eighties, Charlie was dead and gone, eaten up by cancer that had riddled his organs, an unseen demon chomping at his flesh the way other demons had swallowed other parts of him whole.  

He’d gone to the VA hospital complaining of a stomach ache, an ulcer perhaps, from too much BC Powder after too much cheap whiskey after Josephine had abandoned him.  They’d checked him in that same day, and he shared a room with a fellow retired sailor who talked so rapidly that he even mumbled in his sleep.  Charlie couldn’t sleep much at all, worry sinking deeper like oil into a concrete driveway, permanent and deep and staining and prominent, soon becoming the only thing he could see, the cancer, wrapped entirely through him and deeper still.  

He thought of the lives he’d taken during the war and another incident after that, on one of his poorly chosen expeditions to meet with the Cuban drug boats, when things didn’t go quite like he expected.  But he’d expected something, or else he wouldn’t have been traveling with a pistol pressed against the curve of his lower back, tucked into the tight elastic of his deck shorts, a loose Hawaiian shirt with a gaudily bright aqua pattern draped lightly over the gun.  

When he’d pulled the trigger that last time, he was thinking of Josephine’s lover when he did so, and when the man dropped in front of him, sending the others scattering for cover, Charlie wasn’t so sure that he was even aware of who it was that he’d shot.  

But as he’d sat in that bed, back before any of this time-traveling nonsense, before the magnets and black holes and all of Key West becoming something like a ghost town, the one clear thought that Charlie had as the cancer ate him up raw was that if there was any hope for him after the sun faded once and for all, that he needed to face the regrets he’d had through his whole blasted life.  But then there he found himself, stuck in a bed, weaker by the day. Any remaining hope faded quickly, so quickly in fact that as he had the very thought of maybe trying to do something better with this rotted old life of his, he drifted away without ever realizing it and was gone, left in pervasive blackness and nothingness until finding himself adrift in his boat again on a gorgeously blue-sky day, and soon after being presented with strangers seeking to make things different in their own ways.

But, as he had with Josephine, it didn’t take long for Charlie to chase those two strangers away, to turn his back on them like a spoiled adolescent, turning inward and solitary once more.

“Well, I’m just stupid,” Charlie mumbled to himself as he sat on the deck of his boat, staring out into yet another brand new day, inexplicably offered to him like an undeserved gift. A good five hundred yards off the coast, at least ten black holes were pulsing, so large in size that they nearly swallowed up the horizon.  

“There are better things to do than waste all this time all over again,” Charlie said. “And I’m just stupid if I stay here doing nothing.”

Photo by nikldn on Unsplash