Sunset on a Jet Ski? Slamming my kidneys and wrenching my spine, when the same time and money could be spent on a Puligny-Montrachet? I didn't think so. "Another day," I told the dock guy, and hung up.
And sat there wondering why Kenny Lukens, having fled to the Bahamas and apparently escaped his very messy past, would keep a number for a Key West Jet Ski outfit in his yellow nylon duffel.
11
If a bike is mainly how you get around, you find yourself passing through the Key West cemetery nearly every day.
The cemetery, maybe five blocks square, is about the only open space in Old Town, the only respite from the grid, the closest thing we have to Central Park. It's a shortcut, a picnic ground, a lovers' lane. And, of course, a tourist attraction. Tourists find dead locals quaint. They love the color photos that the Cubans plaster into headstones; the plastic flowers left behind in plastic vases; the wry epitaphs that flip the bird at Death. Uncluttered palms grow taller in the graveyard; cypresses like candle flames flicker in its breezes.
The only problem with the Key West cemetery is that you can't actually bury anyone there. Beneath a thin layer of dubious topsoil, the ground is solid coral. You need a jackhammer to break it up, and if you do, an ooze of milky, salty water almost instantly seeps through the fissures.
So corpses are either cemented into toe- stubbing bunkers right at ground level or stacked in family mausoleums resembling vast card catalogs. In my thousands of aimless circuits through the graveyard, I'd casually observed a number of funerals, but I'd never really thought about the logistics of these aboveground rites until the day they "buried" Lefty Ortega.
This was not a funeral I should have gone to. I'd been in some degree a party to the old bully's death. If I hadn't actually shoved him into the abyss, I'd certainly poked and prodded him toward the brink. Why show up now and take a chance on being recognized as the last visitor to his hospice room?
Closure, I guess would be the fashionable answer. But I have a deep distrust of fashionable words like that. They blur specifics, flatten the wiggy details of real life. Frankly, I don't know why I went. After my ... my what? Not an argument, not a tiff, not even a misunderstanding. After my moment of doubt with Maggie, I'd had a troubled evening and a bad night's sleep, and found myself in that frame of mind where one loses confidence in the hard clear edges of notions like free will and conscious choice. It soothes our pride to imagine that we decide. But sometimes it just doesn't work that way. I showered and found myself dressing for a funeral.
The real Conchs, having their roots in New England solemnity and Spanish decorum, are on special occasions a surprisingly formal people, even stuffy in a subtropical kind of way. Not wanting to stand out, I pulled on long pants and a clean white shirt. Real shoes, with socks. Shoes feel very hard when you haven't worn them for a while. Biking in long pants feels funny too, the way they flap against your calves. I rode down to the cemetery, locked my bicycle a decent distance off, and walked toward the assembled crowd before the Ortega mausoleum—a five-story concrete condo, maybe sixty units in all, with one crypt winking open on the penthouse floor.
There were a hundred or a hundred-twenty mourners—a big turnout for Key West, where people pride themselves on seldom showing up. The older men wore suits; the women all wore stockings. It was blisteringly hot. Killer sun is a constant feature of Key West funerals, as drizzle can be counted on up north. You stand there and your neck burns and you sweat. In cases of real grief, emotion opens pores and you sweat even more. The priest sweats in his robes; the workers sweat in their canvas shirts. There is a grim, unspoken worry over putrefaction that tends to keep the ceremonies brief.
I edged closer and heard part of a speech. The guy giving it looked vaguely familiar; I think he was on the city council. He praised Lefty as a pillar of the community—businessman, family man—the standard kind of speech. I looked around. Not that I knew what I was looking for. Men in snorkels? Guys with blood on their suits? What I saw was a family—variations on a somber Spanish face. The men tended toward the craggy, with bent noses overhanging twitchy lips. The women had very deep-set eyes and the yellowish skin that was a class thing back in Cuba; it seemed to be the chin that determined who would cross the line into a sullen kind of beauty, and who would merely look severe. At the front of the throng I was pretty sure I saw the daughter. Her hair was pulled up, though little wisps had broken free and by now were plastered against her damp and reddening neck.
The politician finished and the priest took over. I looked around some more, concentrating now on the faces that didn't fit the family mold. A few big fellows who kept plucking at their jackets— cops, maybe, uncomfortable out of uniform. Some men I took to be business associates, who comprised a pretty good sampling of South Florida hustler types—dudes with ponytails and earrings, pseudo-yacht club guys in blazers, a fat man sweating grease like a goose and daintily fanning himself like a Japanese lady. The associates seemed not sorrowful but bothered that they had to be here, just like they'd been bothered that they'd had to send showy and expensive flowers to the hospital. If lack of eye contact was any indication, a lot of these people didn't know one another; Lefty Ortega, trusting no one, had apparently kept the various aspects of his business as neatly separate as the mausoleum slots.