THE LOGJAM STARTED at Mile Marker 27 on Ramrod Key, feeding on itself for an hour. New arrivals flying down the Keys in convertibles and motorcycles and pickups pulling boats, getting closer to Key West, anticipation busting out of the cage, coming upon stalled traffic way too fast.
It quickly backed up over the Seven-Mile Bridge. People with to-go cups of warm draft stood in front of the Overseas Lounge and watched a Chevy Avalanche sail into a Cutlass, knocking the next six cars together like billiards, a half dozen airbags banging open like a string of firecrackers. Three minutes later, the audience outside the Brass Monkey saw a Silverado plow into a Mazda, the twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler on the pickup’s trailer catapulting over the cab.
Sirens reached the Sandbar, a rustic stilt-top lounge poking out of the mangroves on Little Torch Key. Customers ran to the cross-breeze windows overlooking South Pine Channel and the bottled-up ambulances unable to cross the bridge. The gang at Boondocks heard a
The Mercury with the raised hood had since caught fire, and the tiki bar crowd at the Looe Key Reef Resort appreciated the uncomplicated entertainment value when it reached the gas tank. A fishing guide with sun-cracked skin set his Miller on the bar. “This is worse than general. I have to make Boca Chica this afternoon.”
“Why don’t you call Foley?” asked the bartender. “See if it’s reached.”
A cell phone rang inside the bar at Sugarloaf Lodge.
“Foley here. Hold a sec, let me stick my head out…. No, road’s clear here. Traffic’s fine—” Crash. “Check that. A dope boat just rolled… because I can see the bricks in the street… Yeah, people are grabbing them and running away….”
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The customers wandered out the screen door and up the road, where a helicopter hovered over the bridge. Loudspeakers cleared the fishermen below, and the aircraft set down, scattering bait pails.
The rotors stopped. One of the pilots in a green jumpsuit got out and took off her helmet.
A bar patron approached. “What’s going on?”
“Car fire caught the brush on Summerland and jumped the road. Need a place to rest the engines.”
Three more patrons leaned against the bridge’s railing. The oldest was a well-read biker from north Florida named Sop Choppy who had relocated to the Keys under hazy circumstances. Bob was the middle in age. He operated a very seasonal accounting firm on the island and closed in the summer to run a customerless tour service with his personal pleasure craft for tax reasons. The youngest was also named Bob, a shirtless construction worker who hammered roof trusses by day and had dreams but no workable plan to become a dragster mechanic for Don Garlits. Two regulars named Bob made things complex, so the other customers called him “Shirtless Bob.” He had to wear a shirt in the bar.
The trio didn’t possess a single common reference point but were welded into a fragile axis of daily bar chatter by the necessities of tourist hegemony. They gazed across the water at the Spanish Harbor viaduct, where a frozen line of cars stretched down the highway as far as they could see. A tiny driver stood on his roof for vantage.
Their heads suddenly jerked back as a fireball went up in the direction of Ramrod. They sipped drinks as a mushroom of black smoke dissipated in the wind.
“Ever watch
“Why?”
“Because it’s
Barely audible in the distance:
“They’ve got to do something about that highway,” said Bob the accountant. “Too vulnerable. Least little thing and it all craps out.”
Sop Choppy looked down in his empty drink, then up at the road. “Wonder how it started this time.”
THE WORLD LOOKED weird to Coleman. It was curved in a fisheye through the peephole of room 133 at the Royal Glades Motel. A single raindrop on the outside of the small glass bubble distorted the crime lights on Krome Avenue. This was up on the mainland, south of Miami, across the agricultural flats with pesticide musk and giant industrial sprinklers that were still at this hour. Coleman toked the roach beginning to heat his fingertips and kept an eye to the door. Downtown Homestead. Not a soul.
