Epitaph

TWO

It was already mid-afternoon when he finally eased himself into his car, an off-white Mustang which had seen better days, and took off. Of course the Mustang had also seen better drivers. Much better drivers. Compared to him-Indianapolis Speedway caliber drivers.

Ten years had made him rusty. Let's see: left turns, turn wheel left, right turns, turn wheel right. And the brake is the one on the…? The problem, once he got the basics squared away, was that he overreacted. He turned too hard at corners and nearly ran into the curbs; he braked too hard at traffic lights and nearly propelled himself into the dashboard. The heat didn't help matters either; it didn't take him long to discover his air-conditioning was bro- ken-the only thing coming through the vents was hot air. He opened both windows and loosened his shirt, which ten minutes of driving had turned dishrag limp.

Follow the list, William.

His first stop was 1320 Magnolia Drive-a Mr. Samuels-and to get there he had to ride through old Miami Beach. It had, William thought, the look of a tinsel town that had somehow lost its tinsel. Though, here and there, it was trying to get it back, scaffolded porticoes and plastic-covered bamboo roofs being restored to their original levels of tackiness.

Traffic had reached a standstill. It seemed a bus had somehow collided with a Porsche-at least that was the story being passed from car to car. The only people made happy by this turn of events wore Stamp Out M.S. T-shirts; they flitted from one passenger window to another like hungry pigeons in search of crumbs, which they collected in boxes that began to sound like maracas as they jiggled up and down across the avenue.

"Can you spare something for a worthwhile cause?" A girl in tight white shorts had placed her box directly at eye level; William could just about smell her youth. Ahhh.

He pushed a dollar bill into the box.

"God bless you," she said.

"I hope so," he answered, but she'd run off to the car behind him and didn't hear him.

The blocks groaned by. He'd reached a section where fast-food joints had weaseled in between the crumbling hotels. Texas Wacos, Wendys, and Big Jakes separated by red stucco, kneeling palms, and cracked neon. Limp white towels hung from serrated balconies like washed-out coats of arms. Cuban bellboys grabbed smokes outside empty lobbies.

The natives, mostly old, moved in time to the crippled traffic, clip-clopping along in white mules, their floppy hats casting huge shadows on the pavement. There was a purposefulness to their motion that seemed completely misplaced, as if, bent and beaten, they were merely following some timeworn route, some caravan track in the sand.

Fred's Fritos, the Crab Corner, the Dunes. The Beachcomber, Wiggles, and FleshDancers-featuring Wendy Whoppers and Ms. Nude Daytona. The traffic thinned out, his pace picked up a little. Soon Miami Beach itself was gone. Referring back to the map, he turned into a street darkened by huge grugru palms, a street saturated with the sickly sweet smell of plantain.

Now, evidently in the residential district, one block followed another with little change. They'd built their homes in the Spanish style here; only the color of the stucco varied-from red to brown to every combination of pastel. Each house had its small flat lawn, its thick spiral- ing palm, and filigreed iron gate. But it was the overall flatness he noted, as if the heavy Florida air, swollen with moisture from the sea, had pressed everything into a pancake.

It was quiet too. Except for the occasional bark of an unseen dog, silence permeated the very air, like the humidity, oppressive and inescapable. He flicked on the radio in an effort to pierce it, but the tinny country sounds that bled one into the other as he turned the dial this way and that seemed almost sacrilegious here-think laughter at a funeral-so he turned it back off.

Now the neighborhood began to change. There was no sharp demarcation, no single street separating the haves from the have-nots, but rather a gradual and insidious progression of ruination. The filigreed iron gates went first, then the grugru palms, as the lawns themselves turned scraggly and spotty. It was, William thought, like driving toward ground zero, bearing witness to the general and increasing denuding of the land, inching closer and closer to that terrible point of impact.

Which, in this case, was Magnolia Drive. No doubt about it. There was nothing further but swampland, acres of gold and green shaded by thick rippling swarms of badass insects. Magnolia Drive was several blocks long, was devoid of even a single magnolia tree, and looked very much like a repository for trash, of both the inanimate and animate kind. The houses were dilapidated things, slapped together like collages: design thrown out the window, crap piled up the walls. Old hubcaps, ragged pieces of knapsack, sheets of cardboard, all shape and manner of wood, chunks of scorched brick, and even what appeared to be swamp hay had been used in their construction. Their dirt yards were littered with the odds and ends of modern life: broken dolls, cracked china, yellowed newspapers, rusted rolls of chicken wire, crushed fenders, smashed TVs, ripped-open furniture, and half-eaten food. Nervous chickens ran amok from yard to yard pecking fiercely at the ground.

Mr. Samuels, William thought, had apparently fallen on hard times. His lack of a phone listing, then, was probably due to lack of a phone. In this neck of the woods, having a phone would be pretty far down on the list, right below, he guessed, room fresheners.

William pulled the car up to the first house, if you could call it that. He stopped too sharply-his head nearly hit the dashboard and he banged his knee on the steering wheel. He got out limping. It was worse than hot here; the air actually hurt. No kidding-it scalded. In addition, it was filled with all sorts of flying insects that got into his eyes and stung him. And the entire area had taken on the scent of the swamp, not to mention its purpose. Magnolia Drive was all about decay.

He saw his first inhabitant then. An old black man, white curls covering his cheeks like frost, hobbled out of the first house and stared at him.

"Excuse me," William said. "Could you tell me where 1320 Magnolia Drive is?"

The black man continued to do what he'd been doing; he stared. Then, almost imperceptibly, he shrugged-just that, and no more.

William's presence had brought others out-two barefoot black girls in dirty shifts, holding hands as if on a date. A white man with one leg, who scratched his head and looked down at the ground. A black woman who waddled out of the second house toting a baby in her arms.

"Anyone?" William asked. "Can anyone tell me where 1320 Magnolia Drive is?"

But Anyone couldn't.

It wasn't, as William first thought, because they didn't like him, and it wasn't, as he then thought, because they didn't understand him, and it wasn't even, as he finally thought, because they didn't want to.

It took him twenty minutes or so of skirting nervous chickens and nervous stares, of peeking through open doorways and broken windows, to understand that the reason they couldn't tell him where 1320 Magnolia Drive was, was because there wasn't a 1320 Magnolia Drive. It wasn't there. And, since the map clearly showed that there wasn't another Magnolia Drive in the greater Miami area, that meant it didn't exist. And neither, at least according to what little he could get out of the local inhabitants, did Mr. Samuels. They'd never heard of him.

So, William thought. What does that mean? He didn't know. He didn't know, of course, a lot of things. What he didn't know, in fact, far outweighed what he did know, which was next to nothing.

Follow the list-Samuels to Shankin to Timinsky-but what if the list is bogus?

He was stuck in a swamp, literally and figuratively that's where he was stuck, the way out just as muddy as the way in. Already, he was sinking.

Yet for all he didn't know, he did know one thing with absolute certainty. For in walking back to the car, the old black man had joined him, sidled up to him as if to talk about the weather or the Dolphins or the price of oil.

But he wanted to talk about something else.

"You know his bruddar?" the black man said.

"Brother? What brother?"

"Mista Samuels. Mista Samuels's brudda was here lookin' for him too. You know him?"

"Yes," William said. "I think I do."

Okay, so he did know one thing then, didn't he?

That Jean had been there first.