Now I sat at the white, chipped enamel table with the sun umbrella with Dave talking about the sun and pretty women joggers. Dave was drinking water. I was working on a cheeseburger and a chocolate-cherry Blizzard, my copy of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune folded on the table in front of me.
The ultraviolet index, which I could never understand, was close to ten, which meant that if you stepped out into it you’d probably die of skin cancer faster than you would of exposure in the middle of winter at the North Pole. I pulled my Chicago Cubs baseball cap down about an inch.
Earlier that morning I had biked the five blocks to the downtown YMCA, locked up my bike, showed my card, got my things out of my locker, and worked out. Pounding the step machine, fighting the leg weights, pumping, running, stretching muscles, straining arms and legs, pushing. I needed it. Not because I treasured my body but because I could lose myself in the burn, the edge of physical pain, the satisfaction of starting at A and completing stages that took me through to Z, if I decided to go that far. At the end I could feel what I had accomplished or had done to myself. It was finite. It was satisfying. When I was finished working out, I always showered slowly, the water as hot as I could take it, letting it beat into my head and body drowning out voices, light, the world. It never fully exhausted me, though. That would have been an additional benefit. One of the many blessings or curses of Lewis Fonesca was that nothing exhausted me for very long: not working out, not working, not too little sleep or too much sleep.
I had pedaled back past the Hollywood 20 theater, the city and county buildings on Washington, past the small shops and to where I sat now, early burger and Blizzard in hand, newspaper in front of me.
I sat quietly digesting my burger and Dave’s observation. Dave drank his water and accidentally spilled a few drops on his white apron.
“My kids are coming Saturday for their annual two weeks,” he said. “My ex is going to Guam to study brown tree snakes. What do you do with an eight and ten year old? I’ll take them to Busch, Universal, Disney. Saturday I’ll take them to First Watch for breakfast. They love it. Another year or two and they’ll outgrow it. Maybe.”
“Maybe,” I said, finishing the burger and giving my full attention to the Blizzard, working at the chocolate that stuck to the side of the cup, careful not to break the red plastic spoon.
“ Das es shicksall giveren,” he said. “It’s fate.”
Dave spoke five languages, all picked up when he traveled in Europe for five years when he got out of high school over twenty years ago. Dave was a quick study with not much ambition. I didn’t know what “fate” or whose he was talking about.
“You know Christopher Lee speaks Russian and Greek?” he asked.
“No,” I said, finishing my drink.
I checked my watch. I had an appointment I wanted to skip but knew I wouldn’t.
“And Kobe Bryant speaks French?” Dave said.
I didn’t answer.
“Kobe Bryant, the kid on the Lakers. I talked to him once on a plane. In French. Kid had a great accent. Never finished high school.”
Dave was like one of the radio voices that had accompanied me when I drove, only Dave sometimes required an answer and deserved attention, which I tried to give.
“You Fonesca?” a deep voice behind me said.
Dave squinted up over my shoulder. I adjusted my baseball cap and turned around.
I recognized him.
“I’m Fonesca,” I said.
“Went to your office,” the man said, nodding toward the open space on the bench between Dave and me. “Man up there pointed you out.”
I looked up at the second-floor landing just outside my office. Digger, a homeless man who used the building’s rest room as a frequent refuge, waved down at me. I waved back.
I invited the man to sit. After all, he was a distinguished local figure, a minister, a leader of the local civil rights movement, a high-ranking official in the Florida ACLU, and a member of the County Commission, the only African-American in the city or county government.
The Reverend Fernando Wilkens was in the newspaper and on the local television news almost every day. I almost never watched the news but I did read the Herald-Tribune. Well, that’s not exactly the truth. I looked at the headlines, checked to see how Sammy Sosa was hitting, and examined the obituaries year-round to see who had died and left a small or large hole in the world.
I knew almost nothing about local politics, but Reverend Wilkens was a hard man to miss.
Wilkens was big man, running toward the chunky side, in tan slacks and a white pullover short-sleeve shirt with a little green alligator on the pocket. He was about fifty, had good teeth, smooth brown skin, an even smoother bass voice, and a winning public smile, which he was not sporting at the moment.
“Can I speak to you privately?” Wilkens said, sitting down without looking at Dave.
“Customer at the window,” Dave said, getting up. “Want a Dilly Bar or something?”
“No, thank you,” Wilkens said, folding his hands on the table.”
Dave shrugged and moved toward the door at the back of the DQ. A young, frazzled-looking woman lugging a heavy baby was at the window. The baby was trying to squirm out of her arms.
“You know who I am?”
“Yes,” I said, tapping at the Local section in front of me, which featured an article on the mysterious death of more manatees. Manatees seemed to be constantly dying mysteriously just as red tide seemed to roll in once a season and linger in the warm water and hot sun over the Gulf of Mexico. It gave the Local-section reporters surefire story material and once in a while made the front page.
The doings of both the City Council and the County Board of Commissioners, on the other hand, made the front pages only when there was a controversy so major that at least fifty citizens protested with marches and placards and complaints before the open hearings of the council or board. Few people went to these meetings with any real hope of convincing the council or board of anything. Few people when addressing the council for their allotted three or four minutes even expected their elected officials to listen to them. In the middle of an impassioned speech by an ancient resident, members of the council or board would pass notes on the latest Florida State or University of Florida football or baseball scores, hand-carried to them by a Manatee Community College intern.
Most of these meetings were on television for those who chose to watch, which was few. I sometimes tuned in and found myself dozing unless there was a new issue and lots of complaints such as whether to build another high-rise hotel like the Ritz-Carlton to block out more of the sun and the view of the Gulf.
“There’s a commission meeting Friday night,” Reverend Wilkens said, soft and deep, as I pushed away my empty plastic cup and glanced up at a couple of shirtless boys with lean bodies and a desire to be killed by the sun. I heard them order large Oreo-cookie Blizzards.
“A commission meeting,” I repeated.
Reverend Wilkens nodded.
“There’s going to be an open hearing about six items,” he said. “The last one is whether to open Midnight Pass.”
I nodded, not knowing where this was going.
Midnight Pass was a hot issue every few years in Sarasota County. Cars with bumper stickers reading “Open Midnight Pass” had been common when I first came to town. There were fewer now, but the Pass had become an issue again.
“What do you know about the Midnight Pass controversy?” he asked.
I told him what I thought I knew, which wasn’t much and was probably half wrong. There had once been a narrow waterway separating Siesta Key and Casey Key, two of the highpriced islands off the Sarasota coast. The Pass was closed now, creating one long island and cutting off access to the mainland unless a boater went down to the end of the Casey Key and came up the inlet. People on the mainland coast, realtors and land developers, wanted the Pass open so mainland property prices would go up because pleasure and fishing boats could have direct access to the Gulf. People who owned property on the Gulf side of the island wanted it left closed so their property would be worth more because there would be less shoreline with direct access to the Gulf. Then there were two additional groups of people who fought over what would be best ecologically, no Pass or an open Pass. From what I could tell, however, about ninety-nine percent of the population of Sarasota County didn’t care either
