Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#1)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

[Editor’s Note: Hurricane Irma seems to be telling us to go ahead and announce  n o w  the forthcoming publication of Roger’s novella: “With 130-M.P.H. Winds, Storm’s Eye Begins Passing Over the Florida Keys,” says a headline today in the NY Times. “The eye of the Category 4 hurricane was 15 miles southeast of Key West, the National Hurricane Center said.”]

[Prolog]

The New Year’s Day hurricane of 1947 was never recorded by the National Weather Service. The director of what was then called the National Hurricane Warning Station Miami was on vacation, since everyone knew hurricanes did not happen in January; and because he was the only person authorized to announce hurricane warnings, the National Weather Service simply did not issue any. Even then, due to the nature of the Keys, an evacuation called in error would have caused huge traffic jams, major disruptions of business, and gigantic economic losses, and the lesser lights of the Service did not wish to take such a gamble on their own. The consequences of no evacuation were the same ones. Hundreds of people were killed, most of whom were never found because they were in the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean on fishing boats at the time. And because the majority of them were Cubanos or black Bahamians, no one else seemed to care all that much. Almost every boat in the fishing fleet of Key West Florida was damaged or destroyed. As the hurricane never came ashore anywhere in the U.S. except Key West, the National Weather Service has stubbornly continued to deny its existence.

Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel

Ruby Louise Dedge was always startled by the pink and purple bougainvillea growing against the whitewashed walls around the hospital. The first thing she had seen when the bus brought her and her mother to Key West, in the summer of 1938, was that white wall on her left covered with gorgeous flowering vines. Coming all the way from Savannah, Georgia, standing most of the time, exhausted, she’d had no idea what bush it was that burst with so much color onto the drab green and marl-white landscape of the Florida Keys. She had despaired for leaving her home in Georgia, but moving was something she was becoming used to. And, like a lot of men back then, Ruby’s daddy was having a hard time finding work.
    Her earliest memories were of Valdosta, Georgia, humid and slow-moving like mist over the river on a summer night. She’d had relations in Valdosta but she couldn’t remember who they were. Once when she was very small she’d contracted pneumonia and they had all gathered at Little-Griffin Hospital because they thought for sure she was going to die. It happened all the time; children sickened and died with discouraging regularity. Why, right now it was almost 1947, and just last year had seen the worst polio outbreak in the history of Key West, or at least the history anybody knew about. Twenty young people in the prime of their lives had fallen ill, some literally falling down in the act of walking. Eleven had been left permanently paralyzed, and two had died.
    Those forgotten relatives had given up on Ruby, all that long time ago, back there in Valdosta. They had all gone home. Even her daddy had gone home. Only her mama had stayed, praying and crying over her only baby, who even the doctors said would die. Only, she did not die, and after that Ruby’s mama, Lola, began to take her churchgoing very seriously. Her daddy, Amon William Dedge, still went out drinking and gambling on Saturday nights, still got into fights now and then. He sometimes came home broke, with a black eye and scrapes on his wide, bony knuckles, smelling of Bermuda brandy and chaw tabacca. Ruby worshipped him. She could never have said in front of him the rough words she’d learned working at the PX and the Navy laundry, but the truth was, whoever’s sorry ass he saw fit to whip, she would forever believe it had needed whipping. The white “working girls” and las putanas Cubanas who worked beside the pale, naive Georgia girl were more fun than many of her friends in school, and they had taught her all the bad words in both English and harsh Cubano Spanish.
    It was a sad fact, but school was a bore. With all the moving around they’d done, at the ripe age of eighteen (which she had turned almost a month ago, on November 28th), Ruby Louise Dedge was just in her junior year at Key West High. She didn’t mind. Her studies never went all that well. It wasn’t that she couldn’t do the work, it was simply that she didn’t want to. She really didn’t feel grown up. She’d had no ambition to leave her parents’ home and make one of her own. At least, she never had until she met James Donald Owens, Chief Petty Officer in command of Fire Control on the USS Sarsfield, a destroyer stationed at the Navy base at the southern end of Roosevelt Boulevard. They’d met at a USO dance at the Driftwood Hotel in June 1945, but they both had obligations. Jim was bound to the Navy for the duration of his tour, and he wasn’t one of the run-of-the-mills they were looking to get rid of after the peace declarations either. He could calculate an artillery trajectory down to a matter of inches, he could run a work gang of rough-assed seamen, and he was the middleweight boxing champ of the Caribbean Command. He stood five feet, eight inches of solid, manly muscle, and his thick, wavy hair was so black it had purple highlights. His bright blue eyes sparkled with humor and love. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She adored him.
    Ruby hated her name. Her mother, entranced by her daughter’s bright red hair, had insisted that “Ruby” was “fitting.” But Ruby openly loathed it, for no more reason than that doing so drove her mother to distraction. That magical night at the Driftwood Hotel, when Jim had first asked her to dance, she had on a whim told him that her name was “Louise,” a deception that would last a lifetime. Just like her mother, James Donald Owens was now likewise entranced. Every single sailor boy or Army Air Corps pilot who danced with her that night, Jim was there in exactly two minutes, tapping him heavily on the shoulder. The irritated lads would turn from her beaming face to see this battleship anchor of a man grinning at them. They would flinch as if an aircraft carrier had snuck up on them in broad daylight, and suddenly remember somewhere else they had to be. After a while no more fellows asked her. Jim’s shipmates had slyly informed them of his status in the boxing ring, and her dance card had dried up on the spot. For once she didn’t care at all. She never went back. From then on she was his and his alone, and at home, at school, at the grocery store or laundry, till death did them part, she would answer only to “Louise.”
    Now she enjoyed the pink and purple blossoms rioting against the white hospital wall in the crystalline December sunshine. She walked close to the vines and put her hand out to touch the blooms before she turned to her right on her way to Thompson’s Island. She knew by now to only lightly brush the natural bouquets of the bougainvillea. Just below the shimmering surface of beautiful four-petaled flowers, shaped like little Japanese lanterns, vicious inch-long thorns awaited the unwary. She was on her way to invite the nice old gentleman who lived on the island, Mr. Thompson, to Key West High’s New Year’s Eve Ball. Mama had told her to do it, she wasn’t really sure why. She wasn’t even really sure what a New Year’s Eve Ball was, as that particular holiday was not celebrated with much extravagance where she came from. Mr. Thompson seemed like a nice enough old fool, as far as old fools went.
    From the corner behind the bougainvillea stepped Horace Ball, as gawky as it was possible for a human being to be, gazing at the flowers and paying no least mind to where he was. He wore a brown-checked suit with a tan bow tie, which not only was unheard of in Florida but also fit him like a shroud on a shriveled corpse. It was buttoned to the collar of his long-sleeved white shirt, and she wondered he didn’t fall prostrate on the marl in heat stroke. His light brown hair, which tended near whiteness in the summer, exploded in coils and springs around his wide forehead. She had to stop short to prevent his colliding with her. It was not unusual for Horace to walk into people, cars, or even the water, as distracted as he always was with his “scientific studies.” It was a tragedy that, at the age of eighteen, he had exhausted the educational opportunities on the island and lacked the means to escape to where his genius might be supported by more than fried chicken dinners from the Ladies’ Brigade. Even more unfortunate, at least for him, was that his natural nickname since he was about ten years old had been “Horse Balls.” Even his teachers called him that.
    Perhaps the most unfortunate thing in Horace Ball’s life was that he had long ago fallen desperately in love with Ruby Louise Dedge. Oddly enough for a character like Horace, he was not the only human being alive upon the Earth who did not know how utterly hopeless was his case; no one, including Horace himself, gave him a snowball’s chance in hell of so much as holding her hand.
    “Oh, Louise! You truly are a ‘vision of beauty’ today!” Horse Balls – she almost choked on a laugh – Horace, she chided herself, never tired of reminding her what her chosen name meant, in French no less. “Thank you, Horace, and how goes the research today?” No one doubted Horace was to be a great scientist one day, a botanist or naturalist or something. That conviction was as strong in the denizens of Key West as the belief that he would never see even a dropped hanky from Ruby Louise Dedge.
    “I have identified several new mollusca, I believe, but the birds...Do you know the Frigate bird we have here, the Magnificent Frigate, as it is also called, was once known as the Man-of-War bird? They were essentially the same thing, a frigate and a Man-of-War, that is....” She indulged his chatter until she went to turn to her right at the ever-present salt water that separated Key West from the next little piece of stony marl. She waved goodbye to him with a smile that lifted his heart even as he cursed himself for his usual waste of a chance to speak to her, to see her face, maybe hear her laugh. He was a fool, couldn’t talk of anything but animals and shells and birds. A fantastic fossilized snail caught his eye just then, and as she walked out of sight he dropped to his knees and stared at it like a near-sighted cow.
    Mr. Thompson owned his own little island to the east of Key West, on the Atlantic side, with a wooden footbridge to get across the water to it. There was no way to drive there, even if you had a car, and most people didn’t. The island he lived on was covered with passion vines, papaya trees, and pomegranate bushes. Green and red mangoes swung invitingly on pointy-leafed trees just out of reach. Coconuts hung in ponderous bunches from gorgeous palms, which swayed in the brisk sea breezes thirty feet overhead. Naughty children would often come and play on his island, but no matter how much noise or mischief they made, Mr. Thompson never came out to scold them. He strode briskly over the wooden bridge from his island every working day promptly at eleven, his beige Cuban summer suit loose on his pinched frame, curve-handled bamboo cane thumping hollowly on the boards. He spent long hours at one or another of the cafes on the Gulf waterfront with the Cubano expatriates and the old filibuster captains who had supplied the Revolution all those years in the past, enjoying the salty breezes, drinking the dark, vile, sugary coffee from tiny china cups, and smoking those disgusting little black cigars. His favorite was a sticky little joint called the Flamingo Café, in which, it was widely known, was an ancient neon clock with a pink flamingo on it. The clock, it was said, had one day stopped with the hands at five minutes until nine o’clock – who knew whether morning or evening? – and no one had ever bothered to repair it. So it was “always five to nine at the Flamingo Café.” Louise was like many on Key West who thought Mr. Thompson was just old and probably senile.
    On the way she passed the old railroad spur that stuck out over the water before you got to Thompson’s little bridge. A few Cuban couples sat on the old trestle, some fishing, some making out. The Cubanas would kiss their boys in broad daylight! It made her shiver to think about it. She shook herself again, thinking about doing more, much more, with Jim. She knew some of the Cubana girls did it with their boys before they got married, but that wasn’t for her. She was no bigot. It wasn’t like there weren’t white girls who did the same. Especially back in the woods where she’d come from. She just knew what she wanted, and that was to be married. To him. James Donald Owens.
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[Editor’s Note: The novella of which this installment is the opening can soon be ordered from Amazon, as either a paperback or a Kindle book.]

Copyright © 2017 by Roger Owens