“You take me to the nicest places, Michael,” Fiona said. The pleasant thing about being with Fiona is that you drive through a bad neighborhood with her and she doesn’t lock the doors and scream for you to find the closest Quiznos. She just takes it all in. Cereal-box gangsters and graffiti scare her about as much as a guppy scares a shark. She was looking out the window and smiling at the corner boys, periodically waving at them as we passed.
“You want to know what I did when I was a kid?” I said. “I came down here and stole cars. Half of them were already stolen or had fake plates as it was. Sometimes, Nate and I would steal a car here, drive it to the Pork ’n’ Beans Projects, steal another car there, drive it back over here and then catch the bus back home before my dad even knew we were gone.”
“And that was fun?”
“That was the best time,” I said. “Better than being home, Fiona. Better than being home.”
We wound back through 34th Street, picked up the 195 and circled back to the MacArthur Causeway, which was a longer trip, but I didn’t mind too terribly much. I’d already seen my mother five times that week-once to unclog her sink, which it turns out was backed up with a compound of cigarette ash and animal fat, which had turned into a marcite-like substance in her disposal; once to take her to see her podiatrist in order to get her troublesome ingrown toenail cut out; once to assure her that her neighbors were not using their DirecTV unit to bug her conversations; once to show her how to operate her DVD player and once to dissuade her from making me go to family therapy with her again.
It was her new thing. She wanted us to get closer to each other, to get past my anger at her having been married to my father, of her letting him treat us like leaves, something to be raked up and burnt, and to, as the last article she clipped from Oprah’s magazine said, “mend our broken home.”
Twenty years of psychological training in warfare and battle. Armed conflicts in half the world. Set up shadow governments in countries that don’t even exist anymore. No one told me I’d still be responsible for repairing my past, too.
From the MacArthur Causeway I could see what was causing all the backup on the parallel causeway-a yacht the size of Bali had crashed into a piling beneath the Venetian Causeway, which runs between the MacArthur and the Tuttle. There wasn’t any real damage to the causeway, as it looked to be a glancing blow, but the yacht seemed wedged into place. The water was filled with other boats, mostly other ostentatious yachts, as well as a series of rescue ships and Port Authority boats making their way towards the accident.
“What’s with the luxury fleet?” I said. The bay was frequently filled with gorgeous boats and dinghies alike, but there was something clearly different on this day. Yachts like you only see on the coast of Italy and in rap videos were thick on the water, some so close to each other it was hard to distinguish where one began and the other ended.
“There’s a race this week,” Fi said. “One of those playboys-with-toys events.”
“Why do you know that?”
“A business contact is coming into town for it,” she said. “Do you have any pressing needs for weapons- grade plutonium?”
“No.”
“Shame.”
“Who do you know who is handling plutonium?” I said.
“Just an old playboy.”
“Anyone I know?”
Fi tried to hide her smile, but I caught a glimpse of it. I am not a jealous person. I’m not. Normally. At all. In the least.
“He’s very complex,” she said. “Your complete opposite.” It occurred to me that Fiona was probably making up this entire scenario as she went along. “Whereas you’re cagey and apt to disappoint,” she continued, “he is perfectly acute to everyone’s feelings.”
“Which is why he’s trying to move weapons-grade plutonium.”
“Everyone has bills, Michael.”
Just as I was about to respond that it might be wise for Fiona to keep herself a safe distance from anyone handling plutonium, lest they be inexperienced with it and find themselves in a situation where they might accidentally kill everyone in a ten-mile radius, or at the very least give them all inoperable cancer, I was distracted by the explosion of the crashed yacht. One moment it was a ship; the next it was a thousand flaming splinters raining into Biscayne Bay and back onto the causeway. Within moments, the palm trees and slash pines that dot the causeway just east of the accident site burst into flames, paradise burning in mere seconds, the sky filling with ugly black smoke.
Most people live their entire lives without wit nessing an explosion firsthand. That’s because things rarely explode.
Things catch on fire.
Things burn down.
Things occasionally crash into other things and then ignite, but then stop burning after a short period of time.
In order for something to explode, two things generally need to be in place: a trigger and a person who wants to blow something up. Other than small children, you’d be surprised by how few people on this planet have a real desire to create widespread criminal destruction.
If you want to kill someone and get away with it, blowing up their yacht isn’t the best way. If a boat is going to explode on its own, there will be evidence-leaking gas line, compromised fuses, a faulty battery. Any of these things could cause a boat to explode, provided there was a perfect and rare confluence of events. The key is that the explosion would come from the bottom up, where the gas, battery and fuses are kept.
Not, as even we could see paused on the causeway, from the flying bridge, unless the people driving the yacht kept high-powered acceler ants there or were taking on mortar fire. None of which seemed the likely occurrence, even from our distant vantage point.
It wasn’t my problem. And to some degree, that felt good.
Nevertheless, cars all around us came to a halt and passengers started hopping out to look at the wreckage, which is always a bad idea, but since everyone is now a “citizen journalist” they were willing to risk their lives to shoot shaky videos and wobbly photos from their cell phones. Fi and I just kept moving. Besides, we’d both seen worse. And neither of us wanted our picture taken.
“You know how your friend was making it into Miami?” I asked.
“Boat,” Fi said.
“Big boat or small boat?”
“Big.”
I nodded. “He already in town?”
“I hope so,” she said.
“If there was weapons-grade plutonium in that,” I said and pointed out the window, though we couldn’t see the fire anymore, the MacArthur having turned south briefly, though smoke had filled the sky and sirens could be heard from all directions, “we’d already be dead. And that causeway would probably be gone, too.”
“Your point?”
“No point,” I said. “Just making a statement. Playboys don’t know much about explosives, that’s all.”
“That seem peculiar to you?” Fiona said. “That boat exploding like that, all that smoke, fire, destruction?”
“The fact that it clearly was a bomb of some kind?”
“Yes, that,” she said.
“Fi,” I said, “it’s Mother’s Day. I can only be possessed by one disaster at a time.”
“I’m not possessed by it,” Fi said, “just noting that if, at some later point, you’d like to do something like that as you go about walking the earth helping the unfortunate, that it can be done with a lot less damage and does make for an impressive display of might. Just something to keep in your little head.”
We drove on, but Fi’s point was well made, even if I didn’t listen. The other aspect of an explosion like that was if it turned out to be something truly awful or notable, eventually someone of importance would notice that Fi and I were in the vicinity, might even have access to a security photo of my car driving on the opposite causeway at
