It might have been an interstate with a 70 rather than a 55 mph speed limit, but otherwise Alligator Alley is much the same as Highway 41: a two-lane freeway with a big scrubbed verge in the middle. Fewer signs of hurricane damage are in evidence along the almost deserted road. Fences on both sides keep back dense vegetation, as desperate to engulf the concrete as a mob of teenage girls are a pop star. Lennox barely allows the Volkswagen to dip under 90 mph. Ginger wouldn’t be hanging about and now he really needs to get back to Trudi.
The passing trees become a blur, her eyes blinking as they flash by. Then Tianna can see him, Tiger Clemson, standing in the doorway of her room. Looking down at her in bed. Your momma’s fast asleep, he’s saying, in his soft, gloating tones. She squirms in the hot leather seat of the car, feels the heat on the back of her neck, hears the sounds of the engine ticking over, so loud, like Chet’s boat. But part of her is in the bed and Clemson is telling her that he’s gonna do her real good this time, show her some ol tricks she’ll never forget, but it isn’t Clemson, it’s somebody else and she screams…
Lennox is so shocked he almost loses control of the car. — Jesus, fuck! What’s wrong? He slows down and pulls over on to the hard shoulder. Her screaming abates as she leans into him, forcing him to comfort her.
— I keep seein a face. A man’s face. She looks up him, her features tight and crinkled.
— It’s okay, he says, stiff and awkward as he pats her back, — it’s just a flashback, like a bad dream when you’re awake.
She buries her head in his chest. — Do they ever stop? her muffled voice asks.
— Course they do, he says, his hands now on her shoulders, making her sit up and look at him. — Who did you see? Was it this Clemson guy?
— No… and she straightens and pulls away, wiping a snottered nose on her sheep bag, looking apologetically at him until he dismisses her concern. — I thought it was, but it ain’t.
— Okay. Whoever it was, they won’t hurt you.
— Promise?
— Aye, he smiles, and she tries to return it but fear has frozen her face muscles. He starts up the engine.
They maintain an edgy silence as they eat the miles, content to let sounds coming from afar fill the vehicle. Call-in voices blast out, citizens as proud to demonstrate their intellect in radio’s anonymity as they are to display their stupidity in front of TV cameras. Then Lennox turns the dial and a throbbing hip-hop bass rattles through the Volkswagen, building so steadily that it seems to be propelling the accelerating vehicle. Soon a road sign announces the impending presence of Exit 49.
They step giddily from the car, taking a few seconds to adjust to the abrupt curtailment of velocity, and are walled by the hot, muggy air. The murky darkness is diluting the everyday miracle of the brown and green light that bounces off the great expanse of sawgrass and water. There’s no sign of Ginger and Dolores. The old gas station, a rusted corrugated shack with three pumps, has a moribund neon Coca-Cola sign that pulses sickly in the window. It betrays no sign of life: most likely it kept irregular hours. The stillness is eerie; a pervasive silence, with no songbirds in the trees or cars on the highway. Tianna moves over towards a broken area of fencing that borders the mangrove swamp.
— Don’t go too far from the car, Lennox warns. Four Rivers comes into his mind, probably because the turning for the reservation is nearby.
She moves over and leans on the bodywork of the car, fingering the solitary card. Catching him watching her, she looks up, brushing the hair from her face and says, — I found this card I figured I’d lost. It was on the boat. Hank Aaron. He was from Mobile too, y’know. But I cain’t remember losin it there. I had it when I was last on the boat, and I
The surrounding silence is crumpled by a rustling from the mangrove bushes, followed by the brief, snuffed-out shriek of some animal and a raucous bellow of triumph. Lennox looks nervously to the swamp, then back at her, as if to dismiss it. It heralds a brief cacophony of bird sounds from the dense growth, which settles back into silence. — What do you mean? Like you were on the boat and seasick? he asks, smelling the saltiness in the gathering breeze.
— Like it was on the boat, and it was a dream… but it kinda wasn’t, she says in a dizzying moment of realisation.
Lennox’s pulse quickens and he swallows down more nothingness in his throat. — It was probably just a bad dream.
Tianna is far too eager to agree. Sensing she needs mental space, Lennox falls silent, allowing her to ask him, — Do you ever get bad dreams, Ray? I mean dreams so really, really bad that you just cain’t talk to anybody about em?
Now Lennox is stunned. He looks above. Expects to see dark stone instead of mottled blue. Seconds pass. — Yes, he finally says, his voice wavering and weak. — Yes, I do.
— Would you tell me them?
— Maybe later, pal.
She sweeps her hair from her face again. In the shaft of pale moonlight that filters through the trees behind the fence, she carries the gravity of a spectral prophet. — Y’all promise?
— Aye… Lennox hears his voice hover between a whisper and a gasp. Anxious for a diversion, he gestures to her to pass the baseball card and he reads:
HANK AARON
(b: February 5, 1934, Mobile, Alabama)
755 home runs in 23 seasons. A record in Major League baseball, he surpassed the legendary Babe Ruth.
Hank Aaron was Mobile’s favorite son. His parents moved south from Selma to work in the shipyards. Originally playing in the Negro Leagues, Aaron remembered how the restaurant staff would break the plates that he and his colleagues had eaten from. His Major League career spanned over two glorious decades, split between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Atlanta Braves.
Lennox recalls the name. Vaguely remembers reading about some steroid juggernaut’s joyless pursuit of Aaron’s record. — He seems some man. Sort of guy who’d never let anything hold him back. The arseholes who smashed these plates, who told him he was nothing, where are they now? Who cares what they think? He pauses, hands back the card. — You know what I’m saying?
She meets his gaze with a fixed stare of her own. — I guess so.
— Remember that. Always remember that.
He leans into the car to start the engine and fire up the car radio. They listen to Big 105.9 Miami’s classic rock station; Duran Duran’s ‘Is There Something I Should Know’ plays. Then they go on to the bouncy mayhem of a Spanish dance-music channel; fast, intoxicating fun that makes him want a tequila or mojito.
They are both glad of the distraction, but then a sad ballad commences and Tianna speaks again. — Nobody will ever marry me, she says in a tentative sorrow, her brows rising. — Supposin, just supposin, I was older and you was younger, would you marry me, Ray?
Lennox smiles tightly. — You can’t ask me that. You don’t know what I was like when I was younger, and for some reason he has an image of himself in a pair of Falmer jeans, a hooded top, and a long, floppy fringe. And that moustache. That daft, stupid thing they’d all slagged him off for,
He’d joined the force a few years after working as an apprentice joiner with a house-panel building firm at Livingston. The vectors of educational opportunity and youthful excitement crossed over on the Police Graduate programme, and he was sent to Heriot-Watt University, sponsored for a BSc in Information Technology. His boyhood mate Les Brodie, along with his plumbing apprenticeship, had taken up with the Hearts casuals as his outlet for the testosterone bubbling up inside him. But the police was a means rather than an end. Lennox had a mission; a buried, ill-defined quest that was pulled into sharper focus in the last few months than ever before.
