waited at the hotel for three days before giving up on him.
The wrecking yard I manage is down on Orange Blossom Road. There’s a neon sign in the front window of the office: a big, flashing dollar sign that goes from green to yellow to orange. CASH FOR WRECKS!!! And so on.
Wrecking is a lucrative business in our part of Florida. There are more trade-ins per year here than almost anywhere else in the country. During the week, our yard is always busy with acquisitions and parts cataloging. Still, I understand that managing a wrecking yard, even a huge one like ours—a yard that pays a real salary—wouldn’t be enough for some people. I enjoy the work, though. Putting vehicles to rest: rolling them into the lot, dismantling them piece by piece, loading the empty husks into the crusher. I’ve been at the yard in one capacity or another since I was a teenager, when I spent a summer helping the owner, Liam, with the books. By now Liam and I are close friends. He relies on me.
More than the work, though, I enjoy the yard itself. For all the business that goes on—for all the sawing and loading and jacking, for all the squealing metal and busting glass—the property is generally a quiet and restful place. The lot covers two acres; the maze of wrecks stretches back from the office almost to the interstate. You can spend hours walking its deep alleyways, getting lost, listening to the towers of flattened cars creaking in the wind.
The lot is especially beautiful when it’s stormy out. The rain drums and pings off the crumpled metal, making everything glisten for a brief moment. On rainy days I usually give my assistants, Jesus and Marco, the afternoon off and just man the shop by myself. No one seems to want to bring in a car on a rainy day—to drop off their ride and then have to wait in the bad weather for the bus or a cab to take them home. The time drags by. I read or listen to the radio, to the old country station I like. Once in a while a car will glide past on I-35 in a cloud of water. The songs keep coming through the radio: songs full of yodels and whining slide guitar and all the otherworldly sounds I love about that music. Here’s a song about a woman who murdered her husband by dipping the mouthpiece of his horn in poison. Here’s another, about a man whose wife flew away in a huge silver blimp.
And while the songs come, one after another, I’ll examine the neon dollar sign flashing in the shop window, and I’ll think of my grandfather; I’ll picture him speeding across an open landscape in his Ford Model T, alone behind the wheel.
He came back into my grandmother’s life periodically, through the years, haunting her. Out of nowhere the doorbell would ring and she’d answer it and there he’d be, standing on the porch, holding his hat by his side. He’d tell her how sorry he was, how badly he wanted to work things out. If she’d only give him another chance. He’d be selling something else by now, ladies’ shoes, or typewriters, or parlor furniture for Beaulieu and Sons. And of course my grandmother would be dating someone new, someone kind and reliable—the type of man her own daughter, my mother, would eventually marry—and even though she knew better, even though she understood exactly how things would unfold, my grandmother would come outside to meet him.
He kept hurting her, over and over. He’d come back and stay with my grandmother just long enough for her to become attached, even hopeful, and then he’d vanish. Poof. Gone.
ii.
LAURA AND I LIKE TO JOKE THAT WE MET ON THE BOTTOM OF THE ocean, that we swam up to each other—just two lonely people drifting along the dark, empty moonscape of the ocean floor—and introduced ourselves.
“Hello,” I said, which, underwater, came out more like: “Mebbo.” Bubbles tumbled from my mouth as I spoke.
“Hi,” Laura managed, her hair swaying around her face.
The truth is that Laura and I met at the aquarium, where she was doing evaluation work for its public relations department. I had gone to the aquarium to see an exhibit that had just opened, an exhibit on deep ocean life that was causing a big stir in the news.
The exhibit was called “Creatures of the Deep: Life in the Bathypelagic Zone,” and everyone I knew was talking about it. The opening had been a big event for the state of Florida. Politicians had come, and local celebrities.
The exhibit featured fish from the deepest parts of the ocean, strange, frightening fish that had never been on display before. Until this particular exhibit, no one had been able to successfully bring any bathypelagic fish up from the depths. The captured specimens had always died as a result of the massive changes in pressure that occurred as the traps were brought up toward the surface.
But in acquiring their specimens, the marine biologists at our aquarium had used a brand-new type of trap from Australia called a PrAc, which stood for pressure acclimatization. A PrAc trap gave a fish time to adjust to a low-pressure tank by reducing the atmospheric pressure inside the trap a fraction at a time, over a period of days.
Even Liam was going on about the exhibit. He called me at work to push me to go. “They have weirdos you have to see to believe,” he said.
I could hear seagulls behind his voice. Liam owned five wrecking yards around the state and was basically retired. He lived with his wife on their houseboat, which was huge, with three stories, like a penthouse bobbing on the water.
“I’m not much for aquariums,” I said. “I’ll send Jesus or Marco. They’ll report back.”
“No. I insist. Take the day off tomorrow and go see this exhibit. It’ll clear your head.”
“My head is clear,” I said.
There was a pause from Liam’s end. Just the birds, the lapping waves.
“What?” I said.
“Your head isn’t clear,” he said. “It hasn’t been clear since you broke up with what’s-her-name. Angie? Angeline?”
“Anne,” I said.
“It hasn’t been clear since her.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re taking time off,” said Liam. “Go see some fishes. Tomorrow.”
So I did. I took the day off and I went through the motions. I drove up to the aquarium, the whole time just wanting to go back to the yard. The exhibit did take my mind off things, though. It was easy to lose myself once I’d made it through the line and down the long, winding ramp leading to the exhibition’s main gallery.
The gallery was a world unto itself, a winding maze of underwater glass tunnels and exhibit halls. Behind one window was something called a gulper eel, a black, eight-foot serpent with razor-sharp teeth and a mouth that billowed open like a sack, wide enough to engulf a small child. Behind another window swam a deep-sea angler, a vicious animal with beady eyes, and oversize fangs sticking out of its mouth. From a stalk on its head hung a little lure that glowed bright white, like a bare bulb, swaying back and forth to attract victims.
Then there was a fish that seemed to be wearing all its organs in sacks hanging on the outside of its body. Across the hall was a fish with extra rows of teeth inside its throat. And whipping around in a tank by the water fountain was a slimy, worm-like animal called an Atlantic hagfish.
The hagfish thrashed about inside its tank, leaving gooey smear marks on the glass.
They were like monsters, these creatures, like things come to life from my childhood nightmares. These were what hid beneath all that beautiful ocean. These were what lurked in the darkness.
I walked over to a bench in front of the angler’s tank and sat down. I began thinking about Anne again, and how badly things had ended. How, like always, I’d changed into someone I hardly recognized, someone I hated.
“She’s really amazing, isn’t she, the angler?”
