The Light, The Dark

What secrets does Key Largo hold?

So here’s me, holing up in a stormy Caribbean Hotel a la Bogey in Key Largo, sweating bullets, waiting for the storm to come, falling in love with the woman you don’t want to know, all the while the homeless Seminoles who do the landscaping are pounding on the front door to let them in and, of course, the murderers are in the back room plotting your demise. Best line of action. Get a drink. A tall drink. Preferably on ice, but that’s probably a luxury you can’t afford in this heat, not with the storm coming and the power out. The electricity has gone from the wires and outlets into the clouds, charging the air, all those invisible + and – ions roaming around just waiting for a nice fat target. Like you. Everyone’s waiting on you, bubba. What you gonna do? What’s your next move? Make it too fast and bloodthirsty drugrunners got the guns to your head. Too slow and that storm’ll pound you into the sea. What’s left but to open the door to the servants and at least save their lives. But in doing so, in letting those mohawked and braided warriors in need of shelter inside you see a flash out there, close to the beach, coming from the ever-rising water’s edge. It’s moving, beautiful, flashing like a beacon, seems like a call for help. That or it’s a siren’s ruse. Ruse or not you must go. Like it”s the last thing you’ll ever do. Suddenly it’s as if your whole life has been leading up to this, as if all those shit decisions and bad choices, empty promises and broken hearts lying in the dirty wake that is your past, may have been the only way to get you to right here, to be seeing this flash that’s uncontrollably hypnotizing you down to the shore in the midst of what looks to be a queen mother of a hurricane. You know it’s risky, you know one way or another you most likely won’t live out the rest of the day. Yet with night setting on soon and the dusk egging you on into one last adventure, you wonder if you’re worth anything to anyone, and maybe, just maybe you’ve got enough left in you for this one try at something good, this last chance to prove yourself, to prove you’re worth a goddamn, before the murdering lot of them get their chance to fill your belly full of lead, before the cops come in and get it all wrong, before she can sink her hungry teeth into you, before the whiskey runs dry, before the ocean swallows you whole, for good or ill.

What do you do?

You go is what you do. You go and crouch low, walking into that monsoon gale, the rain sheeting down more like shards of glass into your skin which normally feels like old leather but now is so on edge that it’s like a baby’s rearend, your nerves so alive, taut like all those perfect breasts you’ll never see again. Shut-up, you fool and concentrate. Keep your head low and your eyes trained to the sea. Forget the horizon line, that’s how all those shipwrecks got tossed into Davey Jones’ locker, staring at that horizon line that never ends, that far off thing that just kills you like some devil woman all in heels and makeup whispering your name you can never reach, but you continue to pursue to the ends of the earth, of which there are none. Damn fool. Eyes on the prize now. Those jackals inside probably know you’re gone by now, probably on their way out to find you, to fill you full of death. Maybe the injuns slowed ‘em up though. You can always hope they’ve got enough life in them left to know what’s what, but damn that whiskey. It’s a disease. A slow dirty maggot of an affliction that’s just seductive enough to make you think it’s a…Dammit! Pay attention now! There it is, floating just a little ways out, flashing like an supernatural entity. This ain’t no damned bioluminescence, this is something…Quick! Grab it. Ouch, damn! It’s hot, almost cold it”s so hot, and bigger than it looked a second ago too. It goes way down there doesn’t it? Shit, no way to lift that. You can’t give up now you worthless piece of…you’ve got nowhere to go back to, and no one would be there even if you did. At least die with the small piece of dignity the good lord gave you before you pissed it all away on cheap women and booze. Grab at it, fer chrissakes! At least end it all acting like you were alive once. Maybe it’ll count for something somewhere. Here they come, damn! As you reach for it something whitehot enters you and you feel the heat of exploding organs beginning to melt away, but don’t let it go…Dive man DIVE!

And there you go. Down, down, into the deep, and down deeper. until the light aqua turns dark and your only light is this preternatural rock formation welling up next to you tapered at the top to make it look small, guiding you down as it fattens out like the base of a volcano. Suddenly it dawns on you you must be breaking laws of physics as you were just standing in five feet of water and now you’re diving straight down and there’s no end in sight. You haven’t taken a breath now for minutes and the trail of blood from the bullets which should have torn you apart and should be attracting a school of sharks in these infested waters no longer flows from your body at all. You realize you’re not even swimming but rather being guided. You are being taken. But willingly. Images of the past flash before your eyes. The few good times soften the razor-edged sorrows, but you don’t care. Words like Life and Death have no meaning. Women and Whiskey even more so. Love and Hate. Happy and Sad. Up and Down. All meaningless. There is only the Black and the White and they meld into one another as if a melted Reese’s left on a leather carseat in the summer sun. You are the Light. And the Light is you. But you are also Darkness. And the Darkness is you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 13:06. It is filed under Blog and tagged with All Content © Manny Santiago, Fiction, Key Largo, Noir, The Dark, The Light, Whiskey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.