“Are you L.J.?” said a nurse whose voice I recognized as Gina’s. I told her that yes, I was. “He left this for you,” she said. She handed me an envelope, then left me alone in the room.
I sat down on the bed and turned the letter over in my hands. The trunks of palm trees wound upward past the windows. A skywriting plane began to write something, but quit after a few letters and flew off.
Finally, I opened the envelope. Inside were my sister’s earrings, and a note written on a piece of hospital stationery:
It’s been over a year since I left Florida. I live up in the cold, blue Northwest now, in a small town with rivers on both sides. All I’ll say is that I work in a store that sells antique maps and globes, from when the world was not so sharply in focus. There are chimes made of tiny glass guitars over the door. I go by a new name now, the whole thing just two syllables, so quick you might miss it. My favorite things in the store are the copies of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century globes, which are guides to the hopes and fears of people back then more than they are actual globes. Huge blue-and-white tigers stalk the icy regions to the north; sea serpents slink through the oceans; the eastern shore of a misshapen North America is marked by a freckled ear of corn.
Most of these globes don’t show Florida at all, but a few do, usually as a long, squiggly tube, like a deflated party balloon. On one such globe there’s an oval of sunshine painted over Florida and the Gulf below, a faint golden spotlight. When I think of Gay, I like to picture him under just such a spotlight, sitting in his chair with Edward nearby, talking to an audience. In my mind he’s speaking mostly to old people, but also to people recovering from disaster and misjudgment and heartbreak. He smiles at all of them out of the good side of his face as he talks. His eye is so sensitive now—I picture him wearing sunglasses if the floors are waxed too well and have a high sheen. Sometimes I imagine him wearing a wig with sideburns that never stay completely stuck to his temples; other times not.
What Gay is always talking about, when I think of him, are the moments right before his ordeals. Sometimes he talks about ordeal number one, the fire; other times number three, at the Shores; but mostly he talks about ordeal number two. He sets the scene: he says, “There was a click as the glider was released, as the bigger plane towing us let go. But there wasn’t any drop or jolt. Our glider just hung there, suspended at the center of this wide ring of clouds. Then the glider dipped a bit—it nosed down the way they can—and all of a sudden the whole green mass of the Arkansas marsh rose into view. My girlfriend at the time, Julie, was seated just in front of me. She was the daughter of a nurse at the clinic I went to for my skin grafts. At one point she looked at me over her shoulder and pointed down at this one patch of marsh that was bubbling and fizzing like crazy. Boiling almost. ‘Frogs,’ Julie mouthed to me. It was frogs breathing at the bottom of the swamp. I remember her mouthing it to me like that, ‘Frogs,’ even though it was quiet inside the plane.”
Right here is when he smiles biggest, despite the torn nerves, the damage; he smiles and everyone listening smiles too, because they think he’s remembering that last, fragile instant up there in the plane before the crash. They never guess that he’s smiling because of what he’s going to say next.
I MADE A MISTAKE, IS HOW IT ALL STARTED. IT WAS A SIMPLE MISTAKE, the kind anyone could have made. It was dark out, and it was hard to see. But the city of Glens Creek did not think the mistake was so simple, and so, to make up for it, the city decided that I should be given a job. I was thrilled. A job! I couldn’t wait to see what it would be. I left my schedule wide open, open enough for anything.
All summer I waited to hear about my new job. June came and went. Then July. I tried calling the courthouse, but they always told me the same thing: Be patient. Be patient. So I tried to do just that.
I was living with a cousin of mine named Ronald at the time. His house was on the northern outskirts of Glens Creek, out where the suburbs gave way to farmland. There wasn’t much to do around there, and so the waiting was painful. Ronald suggested I get a job in the meanwhile, but I didn’t want to complicate things. I was being responsible, for once.
August came and the levee dried up and then the summer was over. Fall arrived, but everything stayed very warm. In fact, they said on the news that autumn was turning out to be the region’s warmest since 1956. It was amazing to be a part of. Like living in a child’s drawing of autumn: the sun was everywhere at once. A giant, shattered wagon wheel of light. The streets were painted with fallen leaves. Wherever you walked, plump acorns fell from the branches and hit the sidewalks with a joyous sound, a noise like people clapping in church.
I went for walks in town. I took long drives around the countryside. I became reacquainted with Ronald. He was poor, but, I learned, serious about golf. He coached at a nearby golf resort and each of his clubs had its own little suede hat the wintery green of a crisp dollar bill. Though he was only twenty-five, a few years younger than me, Ronald was quite a wonder at coaching. People called the house all day and sometimes late at night to schedule appointments with him. One of his clients, an old Pakistani gentleman, was so grateful to Ronald for his instruction that he gave Ronald a horse, the offspring of an actual prize Thoroughbred. Ronald’s horse was named Captain Marvel, and though he’d been born with a leg injury that would keep him from ever racing, he was a glorious animal, gray with a blindfold of black spots across his eyes.
Ronald grazed Captain Marvel in his own modest backyard. There wasn’t much room, certainly not enough for a proper barn, but Ronald was industrious and built a small wooden shelter for Captain Marvel at the yard’s far end, a shelter not unlike a giant doghouse. Ronald painted the walls of Captain Marvel’s house bright red, with a little golden lightning bolt over the arched entrance.
Ronald made all kinds of efforts to care for that horse. He ordered bunches of sweet green hay from a nearby farm. Once a day he offered Captain Marvel milk from a child’s plastic bucket, milk with electrolytes in it, which I imagined as tiny electrical charges that I could almost see firing along Captain Marvel’s ribs, popping and sparking up and down the carved muscles of his legs. But for all the power coursing through that horse, he had little opportunity to run, to really bolt. Ronald had purchased a cheap horse trailer, not much more than an aluminum crate on wheels, and once in a while, whenever he had time and could get permission, he’d drive Captain Marvel to the local high school after classes were finished and ride him back and forth across the soccer field. Captain Marvel’s hooves pounded the earth so hard I could feel the thuds all the way from where I stood on the sidelines. But as I said, Ronald was a wanted man at the golf course and could rarely go galloping like that. So Captain Marvel spent most of his days in the yard, waiting inside his little red house for his chance to explode through the world. Which is how I felt too, living with Ronald, waiting to be given my job.
Just when I began to worry that the city had forgotten about me altogether, the call came.
“Miles ‘Nunce’ Fergus,” I said into the phone. Nunce was my horn name. It’s what people used to call me on trumpet.
During this phone call, I was told by a man named Sergeant Eugene Brill that my job would be to help out at About Face Juvenile Boot Camp, five miles up Route 17 from my cousin’s house. He said to drop by the office sometime that week, whenever I was free, to be oriented. I drove up the next morning at dawn.
Before I left I took precautions to make sure I made a good impression. I showered and shaved; I even used some of Ronald’s gel, slicking my hair back from my face. By the time I started up the car, my heart was beating hard. I sat for a moment and stared at Ronald’s long, winding driveway. My new job awaited me just a few miles away. Mist was evaporating all along the driveway, being burned off by the rising sun, and as I watched, I couldn’t help but feel a great hope rising in me. I turned the key and headed down to the road.
The ride to the About Face Juvenile Boot Camp was quick. As I drove, I wondered what they’d have me do. I knew about places like About Face. There was a juvenile boot camp near Roaring Green, New York, where I’d grown up, a retreat for kids who’d gone bad. It was called Rooden and my mother had always made me hold my breath when we drove by.
