Pompano Beach
The waves roll in, lick Jessica’s heels, soak the butt of her jeans. Rolling out, they siphon sand through her toes. To the north, beneath a lighthouse, a sport fisher breaks from an inlet that is pointing a diagonal path in front of her toward the Bahamas. Already the boat has raised outriggers so it won’t be traveling that far, 150 miles. Jessica has never been to the islands and doesn’t precisely recall how she knows the distance and triangulation. Having grown up nearby, she must have absorbed a local nautical chart. One of the reasons she did well in the drone program is her memory for spatial data. She had been proud of this ability until it had been misused. Now she wishes she never had it.
Skittles behaves as if it’s her first time before an endless expanse of water. Jessica can believe this since Newt and Shelly were definitely not beachgoers. Their dog chases sea foam and barks at hovering gulls.
“Quiet, girl,” Jessica says, though there’s no one else around to complain about the yelps. Jessica retracts her legs and wraps her arms around her shins. She tracks the fishing boat against the haze on the horizon. It is a humid, airless morning and the sun is a disappointing smear, a wet lozenge instead of the orange fireball she had hoped to watch rise.
The familiarity of the area behind her—the flat expanse of the landscape, the wind-bent palms, the canals and quarry lakes, the low concrete houses, the midrise hotels and condo developments, even the grungy strip malls—makes her nostalgic. She shouldn’t feel so at home here in her hometown. She’s been in exile too long.
By age twelve she was long fatherless but unprepared to be completely orphaned. That was her age when her mother explained to her how lucky Jessica was to be alive, that six months before she was born, on the day her mother was scheduled for a D&C, her father convinced her to marry him. The biggest mistake of her life, her mother added cutting a lime for her second gimlet of the morning.
Only later did Jessica grasp why her mother had told her these things. Joanne wanted her to understand the inconstancy of her mothering—the disappearances, the empty refrigerator, the infrequently washed clothing. Despite this neglect, through Jessica’s unconditional love, Joanne remained a goddess. Until, to keep a boyfriend who disliked children, she abandoned Jessica at her sister’s.
Jessica’s aunt lived in central Florida and was raising as devout Christians a quartet of boys. She took in her sister’s girl to save that “lost child’s soul.” But Jessica thought her soul was fine and, not a month after she moved in, vowed that she would get away from her aunt and her aunt’s church—Martyrs of the Lamb—as soon as she could. Five long years later, after graduating from high school, it was the Air Force that saved her—at least from her family.
Cawing gulls draw Jessica’s attention down the beach, to where a lifeguard is striding toward her. With his rescue buoy he fends away Skittles’ curious approach.
“She’s friendly,” Jessica shouts, not wanting the guard to hit Skittles.
“No dogs on the beach,” he says.
“Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Read the signs.”
The guard is typical—young, tan, ripe with muscular health, hair bleached to a white-sand blond. In comparison Jessica feels like a carcass washed ashore. Especially given her weariness, the journey from California, the breakdown in the desert, the resurfacing of her pursuers and her flight from them.
After the Claytons had dropped her in San Antonio, Jessica met a night-shift trucker at the McD by the motel where’d she’d taken a room. She’d gotten worried about staying the night—the call Mr. Clayton had taken kept replaying in her head. The trucker brought her and Skittles to New Orleans, where a trio of broke coeds, or so they claimed, let her hitch to Gainesville for gas money. Jessica risked a withdrawal from an ATM and that leg of her trip took two days while the women tanned on the beach in Panama City. After this she had less luck on the road; her inked arms attracted loners whose stares demanded more for a ride than she was willing to spend. The tattoos, no doubt, also discouraged regular folks from picking her up. She was closing in on her aunt’s country—the wary Koran-burning Christian heart of Florida.
Traveling on foot, Jessica was more concerned about being detained than happy to see any police cruisers. Those that did track her must have discounted her ability to violate any criminal statutes with a dog in tow. Or maybe the authorities just didn’t want to confront Skittles, who, like Jessica, was starting to look feral. On the eastern edge of Gainesville she came upon a campground amenable to pets.
After a brushing for Skittles, a shower for herself, and a night under a lean-to, a retired couple with an RV gave the young woman and her dog a lift to Daytona. They said goodbye at a gas stop near the speedway, and at a Dunkin’ Donuts Jessica tied up Skittles in the shade. When Jessica returned with her coffee and a cup of water for Skittles, a lean, tough-looking woman was kneeling there stroking the dog.
“You from Oregon?” the woman asked.
“No.”
“Kids with tats traveling with dogs remind me of Portland. Great city,” said the woman.
Jessica didn’t balk at being called a kid. She figured she must have lost years along with her weight. “I’m from California,” Jessica told the woman. “The Inland Empire.”
“Yeah,” she said. “And where ya going?”
The woman, Nell, drove a pickup with a kennel in the bed. She was heading to Miami after her dog’s evening races. That night, after Flying Pumpkin earned only participation fees, Jessica chipped in for gas, handing over her last twenty, and they were traveling. Two hours later, near Fort Pierce, Nell pulled in at a rest area and Jessica thought, Uh-oh. But all Nell wanted was sleep. The downside was her snoring. So Jessica kept company with Skittles and Pumpkin in the pickup bed.
Before dawn they were rolling again and soon Jessica’s exit drew near. She mentioned a desire to see an ocean sunrise and Nell drove to the beach, where she wished Jessica and Skittles luck.
And now Jessica is back to where she started—this time facing an unfriendly Adonis.
“Cops see your dog out here you’ll get a fine,” says the lifeguard.
Jessica pushes herself up from the sand. “C’mon, Skittles,” she says, and they start off.
“Your pack!” the guard calls, angry as if Jessica were purposely trying to trash his beach.
Jessica walks back to get her worldly belongings.
On the path to the road there’s a shower tap. Jessica waters Skittles and checks to see if the guard is going to yell again. But he’s already forgotten them. He’s striding in the sand toward his little tower.
THE MULTISTORY BEIGE-AND-OCHRE buildings on this barrier island seem unchanged from when Jessica was last here, a dozen years ago. The structures were old then, dating from the sixties. It’s hard to believe, after a decade of foul coastal storm seasons, that so much of the past remains unmolested.
On the road to the mainland drawbridge stands a newer structure—low, slablike, windowless, a United Imperial Bank. There’s a flagpole planted there, too, but no American flag is flying from it yet. Too early. Gathering courage, Jessica locates the bank’s cash machine and feels her heart thump as she thinks about her pursuers—Daugherty and that other younger, meaner agent. Pyle. Though it’s not really them she fears. It’s their bosses who can put her away. Maybe for good. There’s no parole for souls imprisoned in psych wards. That her skinny, tattered spirit is so obviously wrecked gives them a perfect excuse to commit her, to lock away whatever secrets they fear she might reveal.
Looking into the ATM mirror, Jessica considers the hidden camera taking her picture. Some day such monitoring will be tied to a network that instantly sends ID and facial data to whatever authority might want it—much the way she once transmitted coordinates and imagery from circling drones to ground troops on missions.
But already she knows that she can’t completely hide. Without friends like Newt and Shelly, she is going to have to surface a little. She dips her bank card.
As usual, Jessica doesn’t know if it is good or bad news when out come fifteen twenties. Maybe her trackers don’t really want her that desperately, not desperately enough to lock her account. Maybe they’re not using unlimited resources to hunt her. Maybe she’s not public enemy number one. Jessica decides to go with all these maybes.
Then, as if the future of ATM surveillance has already arrived, a police cruiser pulls up. Jessica is stuffing the money in her knapsack when the officer approaches. He’s not smiling. With his mirrored sunglasses he resembles an emotionless movie cyborg.
“Morning,” he says to Jessica and passes on to the cash machine.
“Morning,” Jessica says, and then, “C’mon, Skittles.” They start walking toward the drawbridge, a block away.
Coming over it, a pack of Harleys growl and fart. The riders acknowledge Jessica with whoops as if she’s some kindred spirit, probably due to her tattoos. After the last bike passes, the drawbridge rises, stopping Jessica on the sidewalk. And the police cruiser pulls alongside her. They wait. As Jessica watches a sailboat motor by, she can feel the heat of the officer’s lenses. Then the bridge lowers and the officer drives off.
HOMECOMING NOSTALGIA, OR something opposite—that human impulse to pick a scab—guides Jessica’s steps over the sticky tarmac to her old neighborhood. It is less than a mile from the drawbridge but over twelve years back in time. When she comes to the sandstone building where Joanne and she lived, her pulse quickens. This is not because Jessica fears that she will be there, sipping her gimlet and peering through the slats of a jalousie window. Joanne, or so wrote her berating aunt two summers ago, is still unrepentantly drinking. But she has long since departed Pompano, has been migrating between West Palm Beach and Port Saint Lucie—between her two Medicare-eligible boyfriends.
The news left Jessica colder than usual. For by then she had not spoken with Joanne in six years. And before that she could count her mother’s combined visits and phone calls to her on fingers and toes. The piety of her aunt was partly to blame. She called Joanne a sinner, said it was her duty to enlist Jessica into the army of God. Thus, in the eyes of Jessica’s legal guardian, the less often Joanne phoned Jessica or came to see her, the better. And so, trying to ignore the sisters’ dispute, Jessica became numb toward the women in her family, which eventually rekindled her desire to know her father. Jessica was in the Air Force by then. No longer a child, her reality could not so easily be upended by family, or so she thought. She would be the one in charge now. That the relationship would be conducted through letters to a person who couldn’t visit didn’t hurt either.
Joanne’s old building recedes, and so do Jessica’s memories of her. What remains is Jessica’s responsibility to Don: she’s the one who started communicating with him. If she abandons him altogether, or even if she doesn’t write to him soon, won’t she be doing what her mother did to her?
“YOUR PUP LOOKS overheated,” calls out a shirtless, big-bellied man in a straw hat. He is holding a watering hose over a hibiscus hedge and Skittles, tongue hanging, pulls toward him. As the man seems more comic than dodgy Jessica also steps off the tarmac and onto the healthy lawn.
Skittles laps at the water the man is running into his cupped palm. “You’re a good girl, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” the man says to her.
In the meantime Jessica studies the property—a pink two-story apartment building. She counts maybe a half-dozen units and has already noted the FOR RENT sign in the yard.
“They allow pets here?” Jessica asks.
“We’re pretty flexible, me and the wife. Got a furnished efficiency upstairs just vacated. Wife’s cleaning it now. Care for a look?”