Dust

44

A train whistle makes a mournful sound, dissonance in a minor key, somewhere to the west of me.

It’s a different train I hear on a distant rail line, not the candy-apple-red circus train with gold lettering that bakes brightly in a wintry Florida sun on a switch of railroad tracks flanking parking lots that as recently as last night were crowded with people eager to be thrilled and entertained by aerialists, acrobats, clowns, animal trainers, and of course the lions, tigers, camels, and most of all the elephants, smaller than African ones but big, gray, and sad.

A homeless man named Jake who parks himself behind the arena most days tells Lucy and me the reason elephants sway from side to side is they’re trying to touch each other because they’re lonely and when granted wide-open spaces they bark, growl, rumble, and trumpet as they bump and nudge each other playfully like children. They are good to their mothers and take care of one another and can signal members of their pack from great distances with vibrations and odors that humans can’t hear or smell. Elephants are very intelligent and sensitive and he’s seen them cry.

If we allowed them to live freely the way Jake lives freely, our new friend says, we could utilize them to find water in the desert and detect sinkholes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and all sorts of danger, including evil people, and by following the example of the elephant we’d do better dealing with death. I’ve commented that it would be a very good thing if humans were more respectful of death and less afraid of it but I haven’t mentioned to Jake what I do for a living or that I have good reason to know what I’m talking about.

I have yet to hint that my niece and I are loitering behind the arena near the circus train because we’re waiting for a detective friend and my FBI profiler husband to clear a rather ghastly scene, a killer’s lair, which like the elephant’s is a train car only elephants don’t hurt anyone. Jake hasn’t a clue that his two new snowbird acquaintances aren’t in Miami simply to spend the holidays with family but are involved in the very homicide investigation that relates to the very circus he’s had his eye on since he was born, according to him. I’ve said nothing and I won’t.

I’d rather chat about elephants and he considers himself the keeper of them, claiming he’s studied them when the circus is in town for as long as he’s been disabled, which was 1985, when his charter boat was hit by a tanker in the middle of the night, breaking almost every bone in his body and requiring countless surgeries. The arena wasn’t here in 1985 so I don’t know if the story is true or if any of his stories are. But I believe what he says about elephants and the cold-blooded young man who performed acrobatic tricks on the backs of them until just yesterday when he was led away in handcuffs, escorted from the bright red train by a plainclothes posse that included Benton and Marino, whose pictures were in The Boston Globe and all over television this morning.

Quite small, almost as small as a child, and you’d think Daniel Mersa was one from the back until he turns around and you see his hard, narrow face and cruel gray eyes, as Jake has described the demented spectacle killer whose name he didn’t know until Lucy showed him the Globe story that she displayed on her phone. Gavin Connors was honorable and didn’t run his big scoop until Mersa was arrested and it’s a stunning story, I have to say, and it’s “everywhere on the planet,” to quote Bryce, who has decided his reporter pal will “win a Pulitzer” and Santa will bring Ed Granby “an orange jumpsuit for Christmas” and Daniel Mersa “will be extradited to Virginia so he can get the needle.”

“Never did like him,” Jake has continued to mutter with a shake of his head since we first started talking this morning. “So that’s his name, Mersa, like the staph infection. How’d they find him?”

“Computer software,” Lucy replies as if she had nothing to do with it while she hands out café con leches with extra shots. “They have programs that can recognize people by their facial features. For example, if there’s a photo in a college yearbook and the same person has recent ones out there because he’s a performer with a circus. And then of course you can confirm with DNA and other evidence.”

“I don’t use a computer. Never have.”

“It doesn’t look like you need one.”

“I’m telling you I hated the little bastard the first time I laid eyes on him.” Jake says what he’s said at least half a dozen times, sitting on the seawall where his old bicycle is parked. “I’d see him out there with the elephant hook grabbing a back leg just right to get the tendon so it hurts like hell. And for no reason he’d slap them like this.” He slaps the air with a leathery hand. “And squirt them right in the face with the hose, making the pressure really hard, and laughing.” He imitates that, too, spraying an imaginary hose.

“I wish I’d seen it,” Lucy says.

“I’d want to go right over the damn fence,” he points at the fenced-in area beyond us at the edge of the water, “and go after him with the hook and see how he liked being gaffed in the back of the leg.”

“I would have helped you but I would have used more than the hook,” Lucy says and Jake is very pleased with her. And if it’s possible to keep in touch with a man whose home is his bicycle and all that he carries on it, I suspect she will.

My niece and I need to be here right now for a lot of reasons, and as I wait for Benton this is the view I’m most comfortable with, shiny red train cars stretching for a mile between parking lots and the white pavement of Northeast 6th Street as it curves from the mainland and over the water to Watson Island and beyond. The red train I’ve seen so many times some fifteen hundred miles north of here in Cambridge is quiet for now with wide, sturdy metal ramps extended from open doors as workers finish loading up the Cirque d’Orleans.

All of its people and exotic creatures are headed out of Miami to the next stop in Orlando, then Atlanta, making their way back north again as if nothing has happened, as if there’s nothing unusual about an FBI profiler and a Cambridge detective helping local law enforcement collect evidence inside the eighth train car from the end and from the big black SUV on a flatbed, which is how a lot of circus performers and staff haul their vehicles around from city to city, living on the rails.

Daniel Mersa’s arrest was without his usual drama and that seemed poetic justice for a spectacle killer who most recently starred in a horror show in the Massachusetts countryside, slashing the throats of three people, including his biological father Dominic Lombardi. There was no need for the FBI agents from the Miami field office, no need for the Dade County cops in tactical gear who surrounded Daniel Mersa’s train car. Benton and Marino would have been fine on their own.

I didn’t see it happen. I heard the details later when Benton called me from the Federal Detention Center at the corner of Northeast 4th Street and North Miami Avenue just a few blocks from here. He said that Mersa was dazed and disoriented, rambling that he didn’t want to be kidnapped by aliens before the Apocalypse. He wished to be left in peace to make his pilgrimage to the Pyrenean village of Bugarach in southern France, known for its upside-down mountain and wooden tools and hats. His father had died suddenly several days before the world would end, bled to death by these same aliens who can’t survive on earth if they don’t steal blood, and Daniel had plenty of money to take anybody to Bugarach who wanted to go before it was too late.

And Marino, mixing up the Mayan end of the world with the Christian Rapture, said to him, “Guess what, you fucking little piece of shit, it’s already too late. December twenty-first was three days ago and you’ve been left behind.” He said he was turning Daniel over to these same aliens, who were waiting for him, hovering over Miami and ready to steal his blood and do even worse things to him, or words to that effect.

Benton cautioned Marino about making such statements to someone delusional — at least this was what Benton reported to me over the phone while Lucy and I dealt with my mother and my sister Dorothy in Coral Gables, where we stayed last night. Benton and I talked on and off while I did what I’ve always done in the land of my birth. I cooked and cleaned, decorated for the holidays, and made sure everyone was all right, and I slept alone in the second bedroom while Lucy took the couch. I will see Benton soon enough. All of us will be together and we’ll work our way through the awful things that have happened, all of them beginning with Connecticut and ending here, as much as anything ends.

Lucy and I wait by the seawall behind the arena, what’s been called the American Airlines Arena for as long as I can recall. But it wasn’t here when I was growing up and the Cirque d’Orleans would pitch a huge tent in the same spot near the switch of tracks where the long red train would park.

Behind us is the Bongos Cuban Café, with its glass dome on top that’s shaped like a pineapple, and at close to three p.m. we’ve just now feasted on stuffed green plantains, roasted pork, and vegetarian rice while Jake was happy with a grilled fish sandwich. To our left the variegated blue water of the Biscayne Bay surrounds the Miami port, where cruise ships are lined up like small white cities, and directly in front of us on the other side of a fence is the circus’s tent city, which really isn’t a tent city but that’s what it’s called because it was called that in the old days when there really was a tent.

I calculate it’s about ten acres of grass and coconut palms, and white trailers and trucks are arranged like a city of sorts whenever the circus sets up camp here for a few days and then moves on. There is a penned-in area for the elephants to be “let out,” Jake has explained, but I can’t see them now and I find myself looking even though I know I won’t see them anymore.

When we first got here early this morning we watched police close off Biscayne Boulevard in front of the arena, completely blocking off traffic between Northeast 6th and 8th Streets, so the elephants could walk their methodical walk, tail to trunk, from the fenced-in area through an empty parking lot and onto NE 6th, where they were slowly herded toward the train tracks and one by one up ramps and into awaiting cars.

Lucy and I were transfixed by the great pachyderms on a public promenade that they may have been indifferent to or not minded or hated. No one really knows because any signals they might have sent to one another we couldn’t hear or smell. In awed silence we stood off to one side of the small cheering crowd and for some reason the sight of the huge lumbering land animals brought tears to my eyes that I discreetly dabbed away and blamed on the glare of the subtropical sun low over the bay.

I found myself having to blink often and breathe deeply as I watched them move heavily past until I couldn’t see them anymore, and then I wandered back to the seawall where Lucy and I sit with Jake, who I find a pleasant comfort as we chat in the breeze off the water, the sun warm on my hair and the thin long-sleeved shirt and pants I wear. We’ve been happily resurrecting a past both of us remember well since we’re close to the same age. And while I’ve not lived outdoors most of my adult life, we have much in common, both of us children in Miami once, both of us feeling a bit like elephants in an overbuilt world that doesn’t understand much.

When I was growing up here and the circus came to town, the elephants would make a longer, more drawn out parade on the boulevard for the benefit of a massive crowd, and the entire world would stop, or so I thought. I’ve described things like this to Lucy because I want her to hear more about the past she’s from even if she didn’t live it. Before my father was too sick he took me to watch the elephants, I’ve explained, and I can still see their measured gait as they slowly plodded along, these massive gray creatures with patchy brown hair and crinkly small eyes and round, drooping ears carried on pillar-like feet, each elephant curling its trunk around the tail of the one in front as if they were holding hands to cross the street.

Today there was but a small straggle of spectators along the short segment of the boulevard closed to traffic, a few police cars and traffic cops in vests, and I doubt anyone had any idea at all why a young athletic-looking woman and with an older, less athletic-looking one were standing silently alone in poignant wonder. Then we retreated without a word to the seawall where the homeless man we hadn’t met yet was stripping palm fronds into wire thin ribbons that by now he’s fashioned into a lizard, a fish, a grasshopper, and a bird. I gave him twenty dollars for the grasshopper and that’s when I found out his name is Jake — not the grasshopper but the man who created it.

He has trash bags filled with his belongings in the baskets of his dented blue bicycle leaning against the railing of the seawall and just now he points out a dolphin charging after a fish, a streak of silvery gray underwater that ripples on top, and then I see the gray rolling curves before the bottlenose breaks the surface and it seems he’s laughing at his good fortune of having the small fish he holds in his mouth, throwing it back as if he’s going to toss it like a ball, and I smile at such a happy mammal.

Jake has watched the dolphins and the elephants for many years, as many years as he’s lived outdoors in a Florida sun that has weathered his skin to the texture of old brown leather, his graying blond hair tied back in a ponytail, scars and tattoos all over his sinewy arms. His eyes are almost the same blue as the shallow water in the bay, a light greenish blue that turns a deeper aqua when he turns philosophical and digs into his memories and offers his opinions.

“What are you doing for Christmas?” I ask him as I look at the latest photographs Benton has texted me, those of Daniel Mersa’s train car, where he’s lived for his past eight years on the road with the circus.

“I don’t do much.” Jake reaches for a bundle of coconut palm strips upright in a basket of his bicycle. “Every day’s the same. It’s all about the weather.”

“Why don’t you eat with us?”

“I could make an angel because that’s what both of you are,” Jake says. “But I think they’re boring.”

“I’m not an angel,” Lucy says and truer words were never spoken.

“What about a hibiscus flower?”

“My aunt’s a pretty good cook,” Lucy says.

“Pretty good?” I don’t look up from my phone, cupping my hand over it so the sun doesn’t white out the display.