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His and Roark’s plan had been to depart for Florida the afternoon of their college graduation. They had everything packed and ready, their only chore before hitting the road being to return the caps and gowns in which they’d marched to “Pomp and Circumstance” and received their degrees.
They planned to caravan in their respective automobiles and had agreed to stop just before their arrival and toss a coin to determine which of them got to lead the way to Duval Street.
But fate intervened. Their well-laid plans were changed for them. A family obligation prevented Todd from leaving that day. Roark offered to postpone leaving, too, but after a rushed consultation, they agreed that he should go ahead and start looking for housing.
“I’ll be the scout. By the time you get there, I’ll have camp set up,” Roark had said as they exchanged their dejected good-byes. Roark’s Toyota was packed to the gills. Every square inch of interior space had been utilized to transport all that he owned in the world from the fraternity house where he had lived for the past three years to the next phase of his life.
“This sucks,” Todd muttered.
“Big time. But hey, it’s only a minor setback.”
“Easy for you to say. It’s not your setback. While I’m languishing, you’ll be down there writing your ass off.”
“Hardly, man. I’ll be busy scoping out things, finding us a place to live. Getting the telephone hooked up. That kinda shit. I won’t get any serious writing done.”
Todd knew that wasn’t true. Roark always wrote—drunk or sober, tired or wired, sick or well. He wrote when he was happy and when he was sad. He wrote just as much when he was in a good mood as he did when he was pissed over something. He wrote when it was flowing easily and when the phrases simply would not come. He wrote no matter what. Any which way you looked at it, despite all his arguments to the contrary, this was giving him a head start, and Todd resented it like hell.
As Roark wedged himself into the driver’s seat of his packed Toyota, he tried again to lift Todd’s spirits. “I know this seems like a big deal now, but one day we’ll barely remember it. You’ll see.”
As agreed, he had called Todd immediately upon his arrival in Key West. A few days later he phoned again to report that he had rented them an apartment. Todd barraged him with questions about it, but his answers were evasive, his descriptions vague. After hanging up, Todd realized that all he really knew about their new place of residence was that it fit into their budget.
It was six weeks before Todd was able to set out for his relocation to the tip of the continent. The morning of his departure, as he left his childhood home for what would be the last time, he wasted no time on sentiment and never looked back. Instead, he equated it to a release from prison.
He drove almost twenty hours that first day and crossed the state line into Florida before pulling off at a roadside park and napping in the driver’s seat of his car. He arrived in Key West at midafternoon the second day. Although not all his expectations were met upon his arrival, some were.
The air, for instance. It was warm and balmy. No more running to an early class on a bitterly cold and windy morning ever again, thank you very much. The sun was hot. Palms and banana trees grew in abundance. Jimmy Buffett music was pervasive, as though it were secreted through the pores of the city.
As he navigated the tourist-clogged streets, following the rudimentary directions Roark had given him, his initial disappointment began to recede and was replaced by flurries of excitement. His mood was buoyed by the sights and sounds and smells.
But this flicker of encouragement didn’t last. It was snuffed out when he located his newly leased domicile. Dismayed, he checked the address twice, hoping to God he’d made a wrong turn.
Surely this was one of Roark’s practical jokes.
Tall oleander bushes formed a unkempt hedge between the street and the shallow, weedy lawn in front of the building. He expected Roark to leap from between the blooming shrubs, grinning like a jackass and braying, “Man you oughta see your expression. Looks like you’ve been hit in the face with a sack of buzzard shit.”
They would have a good laugh, then Roark would guide him to their actual address. Later they’d go out for a beer and relive the moment, and that would be the first of a thousand times they would retell the story, as they retold all their good stories when they wanted or needed a laugh.
Except the one about the incident with Professor Hadley. That was one story that neither retold. They never talked about it at all.
Todd parked his car at the crumbling curb and got out. He was re
luctant even to step between the oleanders—which looked like shrubs on steroids—and follow the cracked sidewalk up to the door of the three-story building. The cinder-block exterior had been painted a flaming flamingo pink, as though the lurid hue would conceal the low-grade building material. Instead, the color accented the lack of quality.
A crack as wide as Todd’s index finger ran through the wall of blocks from eaves to foundation. A wild fern was growing out of it at one spot. Hurricane shutters, the color of pea soup, were missing slats and seemed to be clinging to the building only out of fear of falling into the stagnant water that had collected around the foundation. As wide as a moat, it was a flourishing mosquito hatchery.
The frame of the aluminum screen door probably had once been rectangular, but it had been dented and bent so many times that it was grossly misshapen. A large part of the mesh had been peeled away, making it totally ineffectual against flying insects—or chameleons, Todd discovered when he opened the door and stepped into a dank vestibule with a concrete floor. Two of the green lizards were lounging on the interior wall. One scampered away when Todd entered. The other puffed out his red throat as though in protest of the intrusion.
Six mailboxes, which would usually be found on the outside of a building, had been secured to the wall. Once his eyes had adjusted to the dimness, Todd read, to his distress, his and Roark’s name on one of the boxes.
There were six apartments in all, two on each floor. Theirs was on the third. Stepping over a puddle of unidentifiable fluid, he started upstairs. When he reached the second-floor landing, he could hear The Price Is Right coming from a TV within one of the apartments. Otherwise the building was quiet.
By the time he reached the third floor, he was sweating. He cursed the same balminess he’d been extolling only minutes before as he’d driven through the streets with the car windows rolled down, ogling the bare-shouldered, bare-legged girls strolling the sidewalks.
Surely the individual apartments were air-conditioned, he thought as he tried the door knob on 3A. It was locked. He knocked—three times in all before Roark answered. His suntanned face broke into a wide grin. “Hey, you made it! An hour early.”
“No air-conditioning? Are you fucking kidding me?”
The heat inside the apartment was, if anything, more stifling than the unventilated vestibule and staircase. And that was only one of the many amenities the apartment lacked. As Todd surveyed it, his misgivings were realized. And then some.
