Coleman was at the threshold of forty-something and crouched against the bong-hit ceiling of eighth-grade maturity. His honeydew head was too big for his body. Coleman was never up before dawn, except now. Because he needed to make the Great Escape.
Cash was low, and Coleman had slept — make that remained unconscious — through checkout the previous day. The front desk had been phoning ever since. “Coming up in a minute to pay.” “Be right there.” “Eating dinner now, but immediately after that.” Then knocks at the door. “No clothes on — be over in a sec.” The night manager finally opened up with a passkey. Coleman lay snoring in his BVDs, empty beer cans randomly strewn around the room like spent artillery shells in a busy howitzer battery. The manager decided his salary didn’t cover social work. He closed the door and left a note in the office for the morning person.
Most recently, Coleman had been living on the couch of a party buddy’s apartment in Port Charlotte. Then, cultural differences. His friend had a job. And the evenings of brainless bingeing curiously began to seem like evenings of brainless bingeing. Coleman was asked to move on, enticed by some free pot for the road. His host considered it a high-yield investment.
The Royal Glades Motel was halfway back to Coleman’s rusty trailer with rotten floorboards on Ramrod Key. He’d headed south on I-75 and soon reached the edge of the Everglades at the bottom of the state’s west coast.
People with a few dollars in turnpike money preferred to cross the swamp on Alligator Alley, a safe, divided, four-lane interstate with fences on both sides to keep wildlife out of traffic. Those who couldn’t scrape up tollbooth change were forced to drive farther south and take the Tamiami Trail, a harrowing two-laner with no shoulders next to deep canals. Depth perception in the Everglades was always tricky. Stupidity even trickier. People were always trying to pass, and there were many spectacular head-ons.
It was worse at night.
But there was little traffic at four A.M. when Coleman entered the Glades. No light or sound either, just stars and the cool air coming in his open windows. Coleman hadn’t seen anything but black marsh for fifteen miles, when he passed the silhouette of a Miccosukee Chickee hut and a peeling billboard of a falsely cheerful Indian giving airboat rides to Eurocentrics. Then nothing again for a half hour until an auburn first-quarter moon on the horizon toward Miami. His headlights bounced off a panther-crossing sign. There was a small glow to the south: something burning down one of the gravel roads to a water-filled quarry. Coleman was driving a gold ’71 Buick Riviera that dripped oil. The maintenance money had been spent on the car’s furry steering wheel cover and Playboy shift knob. This was Coleman’s version of the economy.
The Buick passed a closed restaurant that served frog’s legs, then the locks of a dam where they had diked for this road way back. Coleman was lighting a joint and trying to get something on the radio when another set of headlights made him look up. “What’s that guy doing in my lane? Wait, what am I doing in
He couldn’t have been more right.
BACK UP THE Tamiami Trail, a light grew brighter, the one Coleman had seen down the gravel road. The fire was really involved now. An Oldsmobile with a body inside.
A brown Plymouth Duster with Ohio plates sat nearby. The trunk lid went up. Hands in leather gloves placed a metal gas tank inside and slammed the hood.
