now. Had headed south from New York in the hope of inspiration and wound up staying, and like someone once said: Miami was a noise, a perpetual thundering noise trapped against the coast of Florida between Biscayne Bay and Hialeah; beneath it Coral Gables, above it Fort Lauderdale; everywhere the smell of the Everglades – rank, swollen and fetid in summer, cracked and featureless and unforgiving in winter.
Miami was a promise and an automatic betrayal; a catastrophe by the sea; perched there upon a finger of land that pointed accusingly at something that was altogether not to blame. And never had been. And never would be.
Miami was a punctuation mark of dirt on a peninsula of misfortune; an appendage.
But home is where the heart is.
John Harper’s heart was taken in Miami, and to date – as far as he knew – it had never been returned.
Pushed his pen nevertheless; wrote inches for the Herald, and sometimes those inches were pressed out once more for the Key West Citizen, The Keynoter, Island Life and The Navigator. John Harper wrote human interest squibs about poisonwood and pigeon plum and strangler fig and gumbo limbo in Lignumvitae Key State Botanical; about shark sightings and shark tournaments; about the homes of Tennessee Williams and Papa Hemingway on Key West; about all manner of minutiae that swallowed the attention for a heartbeat and was just as soon forgotten.
Greyhound Bus made eight stops between Miami and Key West. Down through Islamorada, Key Largo, Marathon and Grassy Key; two routes – one from the Florida Turnpike which wound up in Homestead, the other along 1-95 which became US 1 at the southern end of Miami. Both roads hit the Overseas Highway. Both roads he had travelled. And there was something about the islands – all thirty-one punctuations of limestone and the eight hundred uninhabited islands that surrounded them – that forever gripped his imagination. Here, on this awkward peninsula of hope, he believed himself a million miles from the disappointment of New York. South and east was the Atlantic, west was the Gulf of Mexico; forty-two bridges, dozens of causeways; New England and Caribbean architecture – gingerbread verandas, widow’s walks, wrought-iron balconies, population of twenty-five thousand, a million tourists a year. John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park with its starfish and lobsters, its sponges and sea cucumbers, its stingrays, barracuda, crabs and angel fish. And then there was Key Largo Dry Rocks, the Bronze Christ of the Deep Statue, shoals of blackfin tuna, the waves of frigate birds overhead that would tell you when the fish were running. And the smell, the once-in-a-lifetime smell of salt, seaweed, fish and marsh, mangrove swamps and rocks; the memory of pirates and Ponce de Leon, the Dry Tortugas, the footprints of turtles, the reefs, the clear water, the citrus, the coconut.
All these things a hundred and fifty miles from where he sat in his small backroom office in the Miami Herald complex.
John Harper: journalist, one-time novelist, one-time New Yorker; thirty-six years old, muddy-blond hair, good jawline, clear grey eyes. Single now, single and without options; small address book, maybe a dozen girls in all, but each one – right to the last – had been ousted from the Harper camp by the necessity to do something more with their lives than wait for the bitter and sardonic humor to lighten up. Last got laid a handful of weeks before. Sweet girl, olive complexion, emerald eyes. Called him ‘Johnnie’ which irritated him, but not for long. Lasted a couple of months; she found someone else – boat captain called Gil Gibson running tourist trips out of Bayside around HMS Bounty. She took another little piece of that heart, the one that belonged to Miami, and she stole it away silently, walking on eggshells, for she knew John Harper was a man of too many words, and some of those words could be hurled with a raised voice and clenched fists. He let her go; she would have gone anyway; told her it was better for both of them if she walked out into life and found what she really wanted. To her, to himself, he had lied, but he had lied like a professional.
And Harper believed, had to believe, that one day the muse would come home, and then he would find his dry narrative and his succinct prose, and he would pen a prizewinner that would give him enough money to leave Miami and head south along Overseas until he