Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#15)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Horse Balls didn’t want anything to do with it. A Caesarean section done by a high school student? Even, he admitted, a very bright and talented high school student who knew his anatomy as well as he knew his Socrates? On a poor woman not even quite dead? Not that he didn’t know the procedure, but he was sure it was different in real life from in the manuals. People weren’t line drawings, they bled and screamed and died. Of that much he was sure; he’d seen it last night. So it took all the persuasion Louise had to make him do it. By this time Porcelain was barely breathing. She coughed out great clots of blood. Horace was certain she had broken ribs that had punctured her lungs, and there was nothing he could do about that. He came to a decision.
    “I need a sharp blade, preferably a razor.” He looked into the eyes of the people around him, and they gathered what he required of them, water and soap and bandages. Grown men and women, black and white, all commanded by a high school boy.
    He turned back to Porcelain and then looked at Louise, who still held her. She had stopped breathing. Louise was sobbing quietly on her face, arms gathering the slack body to her. Horace thought for one second how beautiful this young woman was, very pregnant and now apparently dead. “I can’t do this,” he said, shaking his head, and Louise snapped her face up to his in an instant. “You have to. You’re the only one here who can. Do something! It’s dying.” She put a hand to where the baby was now visibly kicking.
    A month ago Horace Ball would have done anything she asked simply because it was her asking. Now, he did what he thought he had to do, because it was necessary. And because Louise was correct, there was no one else who could do it, right here, right now, and it had to be done. Right here and right now.

When Jim came walking through the wreckage to Louise’s house, he stopped out on the sidewalk, his jaw hanging. His putative father-in-law, who was quite a racist Georgia man, had at least twenty black folks in his home. Most were wailing like banshees at the top of their lungs, and the sound carried out the open doors and windows. He’d already heard it from down the street. Out by the corner of the empty lot at the end of the block, there was an attractive dark-haired woman, a weird little guy who appeared to be wearing dungarees over a girl’s sundress, and a man who might have been Ernest Hemingway. Hell, he didn’t know. But James Donald Owens was an observant man, and he did not miss much. Now there, by the open jalousie front door, was the tall skinny kid who’d been such a stand-up last night. He had blood on his silly-ass brown suit. There was also a young man in a dirty white undershirt sporting a horrid sunburn, sobbing his life out on his knees in the front yard. He had blood on him, too. Jim had seen that before, he knew what it looked like. When he thought he could hardly be more astonished, his lovely, shining girl with her flaming hair stepped out that front door holding a newborn baby in her arms, and she had blood on her, too.

Sure and certain, cousin LC was mighty tore up about what happened to Miss Porcelain, and I can’t say I was much less tore up myself, what with her being killed and cut open and all, it had us all in tears. But it was the right thing for that kid to do, and I have to say it took one hell of a lot of balls. When I said that to the red-haired girl, she laughed in my face and I really thought she was going to cry. I have no faintest idea what the hell she thought was so funny. But Lester Clayton had that tiny baby girl, and she was about the prettiest little child I had ever seen, and he named her Porcelain on the spot – at least, when he could stop crying, I mean. I don’t think I stopped even then.
    Blackie sold our cargo of what would come to be called Key West Pinks for about ten times what we would ever have gotten if damn near every other fishing boat in the entire fleet hadn’t been sunk. It was a bitter victory, what they call Pyrrhic in the history books, the kind that costs you so much you wish you never came to the field at all. Lester was never the same, but almost in a good way. He lost that nervousness, that fear I had seen chasing him around like a ghost in a nightmare. The worst had already happened to him. It couldn’t get no worse. But he came with us, and we sailed the Horny B. for eight more years, and we made a hell of a lot of money in those years. Blackie and Miss Lottie sure enough got married, and it took a while but the babies did start to come. And when she was too big with a baby to go with him, she stayed on the beach and watched little Porcelain play in the sand. And when she was carrying Delia she watched Porcelain and little Walter Samuel play, and that’s how it went for a good while. I know Miss Porcelain would have liked that a lot.

Ruby Louise Dedge was incensed. Outraged. The American Red Cross had come in and said they would loan the fishermen, the ones who had survived, anyway, the money they needed to rebuild their boats, but they would have to pay it back within three years, with interest. How did they think they could pay it back that soon, and with 3% added to it? It was a scandal. Why did we donate to the Red Cross anyway? Had they made our boys pay back for all those bandages during the war?
    About a week after the hurricane, she marched past the bougainvilleas blooming on the hospital wall, plotting a course for Thompson’s Island like an avenging angel. She had no idea why, but her mama had told her that Mr. Thompson, of all people, would know what to do.
    Later that morning, Mr. Thompson walked across the wooden bridge to the Bank of Key West and told the people who ran the bank for him that they would give the fishermen whatever loans they needed to repair their boats or to buy new boats, and there would be no interest, and that they could repay the loans whenever they were able, if ever.

[Epilog]

This is a work of fiction. Many of the people in it lived, and some live today. Many of the events depicted happened, and many did not.

James Donald Owens married Ruby Louise Dedge and turned down the Navy’s offer to rise to command rank in the post-war world. He went to work for Union Carbide, and was one of six supervisors of the construction of the first nuclear plant in the world at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where my older brother, Red, was born. Then, having designed a system of pipes and pumps three stories tall to carry hot Uranium slurry, which no one else knew how to run or maintain, he was sent to install it at the top-secret weapons plant in Waverly, Ohio, where I was born. But actually I was born in Chilicothe, because there was no hospital in Waverly in 1955. Because I had asthma and the kerosene heaters common at the time seemed bound to kill me, my father decided to move his family back to Florida, where he had met his sweetheart Louise in 1945. He went to work for Boeing and spent the next 35 years at Cape Kennedy shooting men into space. He often told me that when he came to Florida he thought he had found the Promised Land. Every word in this paragraph is true.

Ruby Louise Dedge Owens, my mother, participated in all the above, obviously. She has told me stories about the hurricane since I was about seven, which would have been in 1962, when she was about 34 years old and hardly senile. If you want to tell her she is wrong you can call her in Melbourne, Florida and tell her yourself. Don’t cry to me if you get your ear bitten off. You have been warned. Louise joined the Harbor City Volunteer Ambulance Squad in 1971, and over a 35-year career she not only saved countless lives but would serve as President and Squad Commander more times than any other volunteer ever. I have often wondered whether her friend Horace Ball had not inspired her to the medical field. When our son was waiting to be born, the word went out that Louise Owens’s daughter-in-law was having a baby, and my wife’s hospital room overflowed with eager young folks, all medically inclined and every one determined to see the crowning glory. At this writing, she just fell down at a Squad Reunion party (the Harbor City Volunteers, for whom I am honored to have been a minor dispatcher in 1972 and 1973, and who are now long defunct) and broke her humerus near the shoulder, so if you want to make that phone call you had better get a move on. Every word in this paragraph is also true.

Lester Clayton Tottenmann, whose last name means Dead Man in German, has haunted my dreams for many a lifetime and I have no idea from what subterranean hell he arose. At least 20 years ago, the scene came to me like a bolt from the blue in which he and Porcelain were driving down the west coast of Florida on the run from racism, hatred, and death because of their love for one another. I had not the slightest idea where they had come from or where they were going; all I could see was his hand on that milky green steering wheel. The idea of telling the story of the Key West hurricane came to me in 2014, and suddenly I knew where they were going for the first time. Lester raises his daughter Porcelain, and she has a daughter named Porcelain (great name isn’t it?), who will be killed in a later story by a man named Byron Clayton Tottenmann, her cousin. Lester Clayton, as must be clear by now, has other children and they have other lives.

Winchell Sanford Wainwright and Lottie Jane Miller Wainwright had five children and lived in Key West for the remainder of their days. They bought the house my grandparents had lived in from 1943 until 1967, and used the money they made from the Honoria B. to build three solid concrete tenement houses, two on the Atlantic beach lots across from the empty lot with the old fuel tank where my brothers and I played as kids in the stony marl and weeds, and finally one on that empty lot itself. They rented them out to the worst kind of Bahamians, Cubanos, Hatiens, and Mexicanos, at ridiculously low prices, and they let their children and Porcelain, their god-daughter, play with the children of those undesirable immigrants until they had children of their own, and then those children played together too. Lester Clayton Tottenmann stayed in close touch and finally took his daughter Porcelain to live with him in Miami. Captain Niko continued to live next door, on the other side, in his concrete block house, with his white rocks and palm trees, and he maintained until his death that Ernest Hemingway was an asshole.

Lola, Amon William, and (Ruby) Louise Dedge, June 1944

Louise Dedge and James Owens, December 1945

James’s Navy bracelet

Louise on a parade float (second from right), July 4, 1945

Louise on the parade float (middle, from another angle)

Louise’s USO certificate, circa 1946

Horace Ball, Miami, 1953

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[Editor’s Note: The novella of which this installment is a part can be ordered from Amazon.]

Copyright © 2018 by Roger Owens