Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

“A rain barrel shower is something you’ll never forget if you’re a city kid,” I said to Luz, who had gathered her own bag and followed me up.

“I remember,” she said, looking up at the contraption, which was little more than a short length of hose leading from a gasketed hole in the bottom of the barrel. Only one of the four roof gutters fed water into the open top, but it was always enough.

It’s a crude device, and rare. But when I looked at Luz Carmen to explain her comment about recollecting such a thing, she turned without offering more. I didn’t probe. I reminded myself that I knew very little of this woman and her life, both past and present. If she was going to open up, she’d do it on her time.

When I pushed the door open and stepped into my shack, I was met by the odor of must and mildew, inescapable in this environment. I dropped the bags and immediately went to the windows, opening the sashes one at a time for air flow and pushing open the Bahama shutters to let in the remaining light outside. Then I lit the kerosene lantern and placed it in the middle of the big, door-size table that dominated the middle of the room. The light spread a coppery glow throughout the place.

Luz was still standing just inside the door, her bag in her hand.

I nodded toward the bunk beds against the opposite wall.

“If you don’t mind, I like the lower one,” I said. When Sherry had come out, we put both mattresses together on the floor and dealt with the gap in the middle. That was obviously not in the plan this time.

Saying nothing, Luz deftly swung her bag in an arc up onto the top bunk. Again, I was surprised by her athleticism. Then she did a sweep of the place: the two mismatched pine armoires where my clothing and books were stored; the row of cupboards; the butcher block countertop; a pre-electric ice box at one end, and slop sink at the other; and the walled-off corner where the chemical toilet would be kept. I didn’t have to explain that it wasn’t much.

“It was originally built by a visiting industrialist from the northeast who used it for hunting and fishing trips,” I said, feeling a need to say something in the cabin’s defense. “Then in the 1950s, it was used by scientists who were studying the Everglades, mapping the moving water and doing marine population surveys.”

Luz nodded her head as if it made perfect sense.

“Billy either bought it or accepted it in payment from some client. I rent it from him.”

Again, she barely acknowledged me. I was starting to feel like a babbling idiot. I went back out and brought up the rest of the supplies.

When everything was put away, I rekindled the fire in the potbellied stove, scooped out coffee from a three-pound can into my old metal pot, and waited for the boil. Luz had taken a seat in one of two straight-backed chairs that flanked the table and was seemingly watching the flame of the kerosene lantern that I’d set in front of her. The shadows played on her face, creating an even deeper sense of sadness, if that were possible after losing a brother and blaming yourself for his death.

I sat down on the opposite side of the table and determined that I would not say “so how are you holding up” or some other inane comment.

Outside the night buzz had begun, with myriad insects, lizards, and bats doing the whole nocturnal dance of “eat and be eaten.” When I first moved out here from Philadelphia, I thought the sounds would drive me crazy. My urban ear was in tune, or able to tune out, the constant sound of cars and horns, yelps and sirens, late-night television through an open window and predawn garbage trucks in nearby alleys. I thought I could sleep through anything. But the sound of nature in its nighttime chaos was so unsettling it took me months to rejigger my brain.

“You get used to it,” I said, making a passing comment on what I was listening to without thought of what Luz was tragically carrying in her own head. She cut her eyes up into mine. And if she’d said “fuck you” to my face, she would have been justified. “The night sounds, I mean,” I said quickly, trying to cover.

Her face relaxed, but only a bit.

“I have heard it before, when I was a girl. We would visit with my aunt in Rurrenabaque, where the jungles are thick and the animal life is abundant.”

“In Bolivia?”

“Yes. My parents lived just outside La Paz. But my mother’s people came from the area to the north on the Rio Beni, which is very junglelike.”

“And that’s where you learned to use a canoe paddle?” I said, grateful that she was even speaking.

“Yes, in dugouts. My many cousins taught me. It was the way they traveled to most places. And they fished at night, spearing the ranas , uh, frogs.”

“Ahh, frogs’ legs,” I said with an honest appreciation of the delicacy I had out in the Glades with my old friend Nate Brown after a night of spotting them with bright lights, and then spearing them with barbed spears. Maybe Luz saw my own slight smile; a pleasant twitch played at the corner of her mouth, remembering.

“Yes. We would cook them over the open fire in the night with the sparks flying up into the stars.” She was staring into the flame now, seeing her past.

“And gator tail?” I said, trying to string some conversation together.

“No. No alligator,” she said. “I saw your alligator on the way in, a small one, up on the bank.”

She had a sharp eye. I had missed seeing any of the many gators that live along the river.

“We have caimans in Rurrenabaque-dark and nasty. We were always afraid of them as children. They were much too ugly and dangerous, or so we thought. But we have freshwater dolphins there. When they are young, they have very pink skin-very pretty, prettier than your gray ones.”

She was reaching for more pleasant memories, a good sign, I thought.

“Did you and your brother see them together? The pink dolphins, I mean?”

“A few times, when he was young; then our parents moved closer to the city and worked all the time. But the neighborhoods in La Paz are not that different from parts of Miami. I went to school and Andres went to the streets, to his friends and their street ways. It was after I came here and had a job that I brought him to live in America.”

To save him, I thought, but didn’t go there.

“So is your family still in Bolivia?” I said instead, thinking family connection in a time of grief.

“Some distant relatives-but our parents are gone.”

Nice try, Max. I pushed away from the table and went to my so-called kitchen.

“Are you hungry? I can heat something up. Soup, maybe?”

“No thank you,” Luz said.

I busied myself, finding a saucepan and going through my cupboard. It may be ironic in this place of water and so close to the sea, but my favorite soup is still the canned Bookbinder’s lobster bisque from Philadelphia, which I buy a case at a time in a market in Fort Lauderdale and leave here. Billy would disown me if I asked for it at his place. Sherry only wrinkles her nose at any mention of the stuff; when I’m here, I indulge. You have to thicken the bisque by adding milk, so I always like to eat it the first day I come out, when I’ve just brought fresh milk for the cooler.

I pushed a few more pieces of dry pine into the stove to get the heat up and then opened the can, mixed it in the pan, and set it to simmer. Fortunately, the shack is built in the style of Old Florida dwellings. The inside ceiling is no ceiling at all. The roof slants up in four planes like a pyramid, the triangles coming together twenty feet above and meeting at a cupola that’s vented at the top. The heat inside the cabin rises to the top and vents, thus creating a vacuum. And because the entire structure is raised above the water on stilts, the cool shaded air beneath is drawn up-natural air-conditioning. I have never felt overwhelmed by heat out here.