Read Online Key West Connection by Randy Wayne White - Free Book Online

inside this old carcass of mine. Things starting to go bad. Eyes giving out—and I used to have fine eyes. Almost as fine as my father’s. Legs going, heart going. And I feel trapped in here, too.” He tapped himself on the forehead. “Nothing worse than that sort of trapped.”
    Slowly, Papa stuck his hand inside the cage to the big cat. It struck me that I should have jerked him away—but I could never have done that. Not to him. The indignity would have been worse than losing a hand. The cat stopped, yellow eyes glowing, sniffed the hand, and then moved away, strangely uninterested.
    Papa laughed. “He knows, old-timer. Only people like him and me—and you; you, too—will ever truly appreciate the horror of that kind of trapped.”
    He seemed strange that night; distant. Before we parted, he downed his seventh or eighth beer, looked steadily at me, his eyes seeming to glow as the cat’s eyes had glowed.
    â€œI want you to do some things for me, old-timer.”
    â€œSure!” I was on about my fourth beer and feeling fine. I would have done anything for him.
    â€œFirst of all, I want you to stay out of the writing business. Damn rough stuff. Does things to you.”
    â€œNo problem there.”
    â€œAnd I want you to think about becoming a fighter. You’d be one of the greatest of this century—and I’ve seen ’em all. You’re like a big cat on that trap—too fast and too strong to be believed. And what are you? Seventeen, eighteen?”
    â€œAlmost twenty,” I lied. I wasn’t quite sixteen yet.
    He chuckled. “Sure, old-timer, sure. And I want you to do one other thing, okay?”
    â€œName it.”
    â€œIf you can, come back to Key West. Take care of it. Too many jerks here now since they built that highway. This place is going to need some taking care of.”
    I had looked out across the black water, beyond Kingfish Shoals, toward the Tortugas. “I will, Papa. I mean it. I really will.”
    Two or three years later I read that Papa had finally escaped; left his disintegrating cage in his own private way.
    So that’s what I was thinking about when I heard the explosion. A sharp crack and rumble that made the island vibrate. The dopeheads loved it.
    Far out!
    It’s the Japs, man, the Japs.
    Almost eight-thirty p.m. by my Rolex. There was an odd roaring in my ears. And then I was running; running with a strange alien sob escaping from my lips. Because I knew. I knew without knowing. I ran for my life; the life they had just extinguished.
    Sirens. Pulsing blue lights. I saw the remains of our old Chevy; blue splinters and twisted metal. And then Rigaberto was in front of me, trying to hold me back. He was crying; bawling like a child. And then everyone was trying to hold me back. But I had to save them. Had to help them. I was the invincible one, the unbeatable one, and only I could bring them back.
    I broke through. And then wished I hadn’t.
    â€œThey’re gone, Dusky . . . Janet, the boys, gone . . . ” It was Rigaberto, crying, still trying to turn me away.
    â€œNo . . . ”
    â€œI had a hunch . . . was going to watch myself tonight . . . too late, too goddam late . . . waved goodbye at me before she started the car. . . . ”
    â€œNo. . . . ”
    A flower-scented evening in the tropics, and I stared on as if from above; as if soaring among the cold, cold stars and the dark chaos of mindless universe: my loves lay scattered like broken toys. . . .

VI

    The cocaine boat lay anchored off Middle Sambo Reef, ghostly in the pale August moonlight. I waited for the pickup vessel to arrive, and watched, too, for any form of law-enforcement surveillance.
    There was none.
    I had left Key West at midnight in the stocky little Boston Whaler: just over thirteen feet of rugged, take-any-sea boat, powered with a fifty-horsepower Johnson. In a pinch, she’d do forty. I had powered five miles