Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Novel Part 1

Midnight Pa.s.s.

A Lew Fonesca Novel.

Stuart M. Kaminsky.

This one is most definitely for Polly Curry.

I did not know what to say to him. I felt so awkward and blundering. I did not know how I could reach him, where I could overtake him and go on hand in hand with him once more.

It is such a secret place, the land of tears.

-ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPeRY.

The Little Prince.

Author's note: There really is a Midnight Pa.s.s. There really is a controversy over whether it should be opened. However, this is a work of fiction. The issues I have created differ from those in reality, as does the history of the controversy and some of the history of the Pa.s.s itself. The motives of those who have taken sides about whether to open the Pa.s.s are very different from and far less dramatic than the motives and people in the story I have invented.

Prologue.

THROUGH THE PARTIALLY open door in a treatment room in the E.R. of Sarasota Memorial Hospital, I look out at the cluttered counter of a nursing station.

Small colored sheets of paper are skewered on an upright thin spike. Wire baskets flow over with charts and graphs. A single thin brown folder totters at the edge of the counter, threatening to fall whenever a blue-clad nurse or aide shuffles or hurries by.

On my right in the small, darkened room, the machine next to me gives out a steady, slow series of beeps and a simultaneous series of blips, black dots of sound. The fluorescent lights in the corridor beyond the open door hum. Blips, beeps, and hums. A little night music complete with vocal accompaniment.

"Ron"-a woman's voice, calm, weary-"glucose was two-five-two."

A young man in short-sleeved whites wheels a gurney past the cubicle I'm in. Covered by a thin white blanket, an old man with eyes closed pauses just outside the room for an instant and then is pushed out of sight.

There is a low, calm chatter of voices, and then a heavy white nurse with gla.s.ses and close-cropped hair pushes a wheelchair past the door. A pretty young black woman sits in the chair, holding an infant.

"Four months old," the young mother says. "She's got asthma and something wrong with her heart."

The heavy white nurse with gla.s.ses and close-cropped hair touches the young woman gently on the shoulder, and they roll by.

The pa.s.sing parade pauses.

I look around the room. In the band of cold white light that comes through the open door, I see a gray stool and an overflowing ivory-colored trash can with the fingers of a blue rubber glove dangling out, as if someone or something is trying to escape.

There is a box on the wall, a see-through rectangular box with a plastic slot. The word "Danger" is printed in black letters on an orange square on the box and under it, also in black, "Used Needles."

There is a pink plastic tray to vomit in on the small, shining steel table next to the bed. All the discomforts of home.

A new voice, female, beyond the curtain.

"What'd I do with my pen? I've lost two today."

A man in hospital blues, dark haircut almost scalp short, clipboard in his hand, walks slowly by, talking to an older woman in blues with washed-out blond hair.

They glance at me through the parted curtain and walk on. I hear him say, "Dr. Greenspan wants him in op in ten minutes."

The woman says, "Okay."

"Sat.u.r.day morning," the man's voice comes back.

"Sat.u.r.day morning," the woman repeats.

I listen to more blips and bleeps. A man moans from somewhere; two female voices giggle. Is there going to be a third? Does Dr. Greenspan know what he is doing or looking for? Who is this Dr. Greenspan?

My back aches. I have a headache.

I wait, listening for the wheels of a gurney moving to the room I am in. I wait to look up at whoever will be pushing it. I imagine a thin-haired, short, well-muscled orderly in blue, his hairy arms, and a wide-band metal wrist.w.a.tch. I wait for him to cheerfully say, "It's time."

The road from a cold Dairy Queen Blizzard to the hospital emergency room began five days earlier.

Three people had died in those five days. There was a good chance there would be a fourth soon, a fourth who lay in a small triage room, a fourth whose odds were not looking too good.

Sally Porovsky steps into the room and looks down at me.

"How does it look, Lew?" she asks.

I don't have a good answer. I try a smile. It doesn't work. She takes my right hand in both of hers.

It had been bright and sunny and humid and definitely Florida when I got up healthy on Monday. Time generally seems to move slowly for me, but on Monday the clock began to spin.

Here's how it went.

1.

"NO AMOUNT OF SUNSCREEN will save her," Dave said, shaking his head.

I nodded and looked up at the jogger pa.s.sing in front of the DQ, headed downtown. She wore shorts and a tank top, a Walkman singing in her ear, a serious look on her pretty face, her sun-bleached blond hair bouncing against her back in a long ponytail.

She made a left turn and headed out of sight toward Towles Court, a collection of small shops and homes owned by painters, sculptors, jewelry makers...people who had once been successful in business or raising a family and now were retired and wanted to change the label they wore from no one in particular to Artist. Few of the community in Towles Court, mostly women, had illusions about breaking out and getting famous and wealthy. They enjoyed what they now were and what they were doing. They had peace, time, and ident.i.ty.

I cannot paint, sketch, sculpt, or draw, and I have no urge to try. Unlike the artists of Towles Court in their brightly painted houses, I have as little ident.i.ty as possible.

Dave owns the Dairy Queen franchise across the parking lot from where I live and work in a walk-up office building with peeling paint and crumbling corners of concrete. The building had begun life as a two-story, 1950s motel and had gradually gone downhill till it was ready for me. I'm not supposed to live in the back room of my office, but the landlord doesn't care as long as I pay my rent on time and don't complain. I don't complain.

Dave looks like a dark, deeply weathered mariner, which he is when he's not handing out Dilly Bars, Blizzards, and burgers. He owns a boat and is out in Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico whenever possible. The sun has leathered him. The boat has given him muscles and kept him trim.

Dave is about my age, early forties. I like to think that with his face and bleached-out hair he looks older than I do, but I'm dark with a rapidly receding hairline that makes me look every minute of my age.

My name is Lew Fonesca. I live in Sarasota, Florida, where I drove a little over three years ago when my wife was killed in a hit-and-run "accident." "Accident" is in quotes because the police couldn't find out who the driver was. My wife was a lawyer in the Cook County State Attorney's office, where I worked as the head of legal research. She had prosecuted a lot of people, made a lot of them and their relatives angry. Maybe it wasn't an accident, a drunken driver, a panicked kid who had just gotten his or her license, someone on a cell phone not paying attention.

When the funeral was over and I had nothing left to weep, I got in my 1989 Toyota in the cemetery parking lot and started to drive. I headed south, in the general direction of oblivion and the tip of Florida. I had no idea of what I would do when I got there. I wasn't sure where "there" was. In those four days, I listened to the voices of conservative talk-show hosts, Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, Michael Savage, and the advocates of the unknown like Art Bell and Whitley Streiber, anybody who was talking. I didn't want music. I wanted company, a voice, anyone speaking whom I didn't have to answer. I listened but I heard nothing.

My car had given out in the DQ parking lot in Sarasota. There was an "Office For Rent" sign on the office building. I sold the car for twenty-five dollars to a couple of kids eating hot dogs and drinking Blizzards and made the first month's rent on the office overlooking the DQ parking lot and heavily traveled Route 301, which was named Washington Street for the stretch through Sarasota.

Now I sat at the white, chipped enamel table with the sun umbrella with Dave talking about the sun and pretty women joggers. Dave was drinking water. I was working on a cheeseburger and a chocolate-cherry Blizzard, my copy of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune folded on the table in front of me.

The ultraviolet index, which I could never understand, was close to ten, which meant that if you stepped out into it you'd probably die of skin cancer faster than you would of exposure in the middle of winter at the North Pole. I pulled my Chicago Cubs baseball cap down about an inch.

Earlier that morning I had biked the five blocks to the downtown YMCA, locked up my bike, showed my card, got my things out of my locker, and worked out. Pounding the step machine, fighting the leg weights, pumping, running, stretching muscles, straining arms and legs, pushing. I needed it. Not because I treasured my body but because I could lose myself in the burn, the edge of physical pain, the satisfaction of starting at A and completing stages that took me through to Z, if I decided to go that far. At the end I could feel what I had accomplished or had done to myself. It was finite. It was satisfying. When I was finished working out, I always showered slowly, the water as hot as I could take it, letting it beat into my head and body drowning out voices, light, the world. It never fully exhausted me, though. That would have been an additional benefit. One of the many blessings or curses of Lewis Fonesca was that nothing exhausted me for very long: not working out, not working, not too little sleep or too much sleep.

I had pedaled back past the Hollywood 20 theater, the city and county buildings on Washington, past the small shops and to where I sat now, early burger and Blizzard in hand, newspaper in front of me.

I sat quietly digesting my burger and Dave's observation. Dave drank his water and accidentally spilled a few drops on his white ap.r.o.n.

"My kids are coming Sat.u.r.day for their annual two weeks," he said. "My ex is going to Guam to study brown tree snakes. What do you do with an eight and ten year old? I'll take them to Busch, Universal, Disney. Sat.u.r.day I'll take them to First Watch for breakfast. They love it. Another year or two and they'll outgrow it. Maybe."

"Maybe," I said, finishing the burger and giving my full attention to the Blizzard, working at the chocolate that stuck to the side of the cup, careful not to break the red plastic spoon.

"Das es shicksall giveren," he said. "It's fate."

Dave spoke five languages, all picked up when he traveled in Europe for five years when he got out of high school over twenty years ago. Dave was a quick study with not much ambition. I didn't know what "fate" or whose he was talking about.

"You know Christopher Lee speaks Russian and Greek?" he asked.

"No," I said, finishing my drink.

I checked my watch. I had an appointment I wanted to skip but knew I wouldn't.

"And Kobe Bryant speaks French?" Dave said.

I didn't answer.

"Kobe Bryant, the kid on the Lakers. I talked to him once on a plane. In French. Kid had a great accent. Never finished high school."

Dave was like one of the radio voices that had accompanied me when I drove, only Dave sometimes required an answer and deserved attention, which I tried to give.

"You Fonesca?" a deep voice behind me said.

Dave squinted up over my shoulder. I adjusted my baseball cap and turned around.

I recognized him.

"I'm Fonesca," I said.

"Went to your office," the man said, nodding toward the open s.p.a.ce on the bench between Dave and me. "Man up there pointed you out."

I looked up at the second-floor landing just outside my office. Digger, a homeless man who used the building's rest room as a frequent refuge, waved down at me. I waved back.

I invited the man to sit. After all, he was a distinguished local figure, a minister, a leader of the local civil rights movement, a high-ranking official in the Florida ACLU, and a member of the County Commission, the only African-American in the city or county government.

The Reverend Fernando Wilkens was in the newspaper and on the local television news almost every day. I almost never watched the news but I did read the Herald-Tribune. Well, that's not exactly the truth. I looked at the headlines, checked to see how Sammy Sosa was. .h.i.tting, and examined the obituaries year-round to see who had died and left a small or large hole in the world.

I knew almost nothing about local politics, but Reverend Wilkens was a hard man to miss.

Wilkens was big man, running toward the chunky side, in tan slacks and a white pullover short-sleeve shirt with a little green alligator on the pocket. He was about fifty, had good teeth, smooth brown skin, an even smoother ba.s.s voice, and a winning public smile, which he was not sporting at the moment.

"Can I speak to you privately?" Wilkens said, sitting down without looking at Dave.

"Customer at the window," Dave said, getting up. "Want a Dilly Bar or something?"

"No, thank you," Wilkens said, folding his hands on the table."

Dave shrugged and moved toward the door at the back of the DQ. A young, frazzled-looking woman lugging a heavy baby was at the window. The baby was trying to squirm out of her arms.

"You know who I am?"

"Yes," I said, tapping at the Local section in front of me, which featured an article on the mysterious death of more manatees. Manatees seemed to be constantly dying mysteriously just as red tide seemed to roll in once a season and linger in the warm water and hot sun over the Gulf of Mexico. It gave the Local-section reporters surefire story material and once in a while made the front page.

The doings of both the City Council and the County Board of Commissioners, on the other hand, made the front pages only when there was a controversy so major that at least fifty citizens protested with marches and placards and complaints before the open hearings of the council or board. Few people went to these meetings with any real hope of convincing the council or board of anything. Few people when addressing the council for their allotted three or four minutes even expected their elected officials to listen to them. In the middle of an impa.s.sioned speech by an ancient resident, members of the council or board would pa.s.s notes on the latest Florida State or University of Florida football or baseball scores, hand-carried to them by a Manatee Community College intern.

Most of these meetings were on television for those who chose to watch, which was few. I sometimes tuned in and found myself dozing unless there was a new issue and lots of complaints such as whether to build another high-rise hotel like the Ritz-Carlton to block out more of the sun and the view of the Gulf.

"There's a commission meeting Friday night," Reverend Wilkens said, soft and deep, as I pushed away my empty plastic cup and glanced up at a couple of shirtless boys with lean bodies and a desire to be killed by the sun. I heard them order large Oreo-cookie Blizzards.

"A commission meeting," I repeated.

Reverend Wilkens nodded.

"There's going to be an open hearing about six items," he said. "The last one is whether to open Midnight Pa.s.s."

I nodded, not knowing where this was going.

Midnight Pa.s.s was a hot issue every few years in Sarasota County. Cars with b.u.mper stickers reading "Open Midnight Pa.s.s" had been common when I first came to town. There were fewer now, but the Pa.s.s had become an issue again.

"What do you know about the Midnight Pa.s.s controversy?" he asked.