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  “It’s not so bad,” Carlotta said when she first saw the place. She rolled up the sleeves of her old gray sweatshirt, adjusted the crown of red and purple passion fruit flowers that she’d made from the vines, and carried her suitcase up the walk. She never expected the house to still be here. She really thought that all she’d find was a gate and an old ticket booth.

  But here it was: Grandma Lettie’s. The moment felt like Christmas was supposed to feel—magical and kind. The house felt like a gift. Its bleached silver driftwood shone. The shaded porch was hairy with algae, but the front door was open and she took it as a good sign.

  “All this needs is a little bleach.”

  Luckily, there was still a bottle under the kitchen sink.

  Chapter 22

  Early the next morning a crowd of patients came to see the man who was known as “Bee-Jesus.” They lined up outside of Leon’s door in wheelchairs, some with IVs hanging from poles. Some were on oxygen; hoses lay across their bellies like snakes sunning themselves.

  Bill, the security guard, was called in for crowd control.

  “Good thing you called me,” he told Nurse Becker who was still recovering from the bee stings; looked plucked like a fat goose. “You never know when a mob can turn.”

  “They’re in wheelchairs,” she told him. “Some of them can’t even walk.”

  He gave a grave look, pulled up his pants.

  “Just keep them out of the room until I finish my morning coffee,” she said.

  After the bee incident, Nurse Becker had refused to go home. The hospital was critically understaffed during the holiday season. They needed her and she liked to be needed.

  “Can I bring you back coffee?” she asked Bill.

  “Just take care of yourself,” he said gently.

  “If you can get them back into their rooms, that would be good.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “You always do.”

  The thought that Nurse Becker saw him as a competent man inspired Bill. As soon as she entered the break room, he pulled out his gun.

  “All right, everybody, listen up.”

  His voice rattled the breakfast trays that lined the hallway waiting for sunrise. “This is a restricted area.”

  And then he told the story of how he saved Bee-Jesus from the swarm of killer bees. He didn’t really mean to tell the story that way, leaving out Nurse Becker’s heroic act, but since he had everyone’s attention, and that didn’t happen often, and he did have a gun in his hand, as all good heroes often do, the story just came out that way.

  “They were African bees,” Bill said sagely, his voice was nearly a whisper. “Killers.”

  He said this with such conviction that even he believed it. And, as he wove the stunning story of his heroism, total fabrication that it was, the truth became so fluid, so embellished with such courageous flourish, that even those who saw the mountainous Nurse Becker with honey in hand save the day nearly believed him.

  “I kept a cool head,” he said, and then aimed his Smith and Wesson at an imaginary swarm of oncoming bees. At that moment, he looked a lot like a tiny John Wayne impersonator at the shooting gallery of the Florida State Fair. “BAM! BAM! BAM!” Bill said over and over again. Quarter after quarter. No stuffed flamingos.

  And when every last imaginary bee had been blown away Bill said ominously, “I tell you this story because I can’t guarantee the bees aren’t still around. They could be lurking in the shadows just waiting to finish this poor slob off.

  “These are wily bees.”

  Then Bill “buzzed.”

  He buzzed, long, loud, and hard. He buzzed as if he himself were a hive of killer African bees. It was an odd, thin, unerringly unnerving sound. His cheeks turned fat as goldfish. His face went red. At one point he even closed his eyes, enraptured. Bill wanted to give the crowd a sense of the danger that he had faced, a sense of urgency, and a true understanding of his newly imagined bravery.

  However, he just ended up spitting on most of them until they wheeled away.

  When Nurse Becker came back from her coffee break, she was impressed that the corridor was empty. “I’ll take it from here,” she said.

  “I don’t think they’ll be coming back.” Bill patted his Smith and Wesson and gave her a “John Wayne” nod. “When I disperse a mob, they stay dispersed.”

  Nurse Becker didn’t laugh. She never laughed at Bill. They were both odd-sized people who knew what it was like to dream odd-sized dreams. “Thanks,” she said kindly, and meant it. “I’m sure they won’t be back.”

  “They won’t.”

  Bill was wrong. Once breakfast was served, one by one, they came back. They lined their wheelchairs up outside of Leon’s door. They wanted to see him. Wanted to pat his head for luck. Wanted to believe in Bee-Jesus.

  Leon, however, wanted to sleep.

  “I don’t understand why they’re out there,” he whined to Nurse Becker. “I know Jesus and I’m not him.”

  “Glad to hear it,” she said. “I know him, too, and accept him as my personal savior.”

  “Has he ever taken you for a ride in his dang cool RV?”

  She added a bit more Valium to Leon’s IV drip. “Sweet dreams,” she said.

  Ever since the fever left, it’s been this way. Leon would remember something about his life, and Nurse Becker would tell him that the doctors don’t want him to strain his brain too much.

  “Darling, you’ve had quite a shock.”

  “But I’m a Round-Up Cowboy,” he said. “Bob the Round-Up Cowboy. I rope them in.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Nurse Becker often made very long notes on Leon’s chart.

  For example, after Leon’s postbreakfast nap it became clear to him that he was an heir to the throne of some small country. So he buzzed her.

  “It just makes sense,” he explained. “I can’t stop dreaming of kings and queens.”

  “They’ll be plenty of time to figure that out later, sugar,” she said, and added a tiny bit more Valium to his IV. “You have to rest your brain for now. Just sleep.”

  Sleep is good, Leon thought. The drugs made him sleep in the most amazing way. It was a deep gentle sleep with vivid dreams in which he invents ways to fly without airplanes, or makes friends with tall brown bears who wear sunglasses and have a striking resemblance to Elvis in his pre–Las Vegas years.

  Dang cool.

  After a while, it became clear to Leon that whoever he was before his brain got shook, he’s pretty sure that he was the kind of man who needs plenty of sleep. The kind who needs to dream dreams big enough for an entire nation—hopefully one in a tropical climate.

  But people kept sneaking in.

  “Hey! Wake up, Miracle Guy!” said Sam. He was the first one who made it past Nurse Becker. There was a bedpan incident in Room 201, lots of screaming and chaos, so Sam made a break for it. Rolled right in while nobody was looking.

  Sam was twenty years old, a bleached-blond mountain of a boy. Also known as “Gator Boy.” This is not because of his school affiliation, although he’d been a freshman at the University of Florida for over three years, but because when he was sixteen years old he sucker punched a gator who tried to make him lunch. The gator was fifteen feet long and hiding under Sam’s foster parents’ pickup—which was inconvenient because Sam was trying to steal it at the time.

  The gator lurched at the punch. Sam lost an ear, but KO’d the reptile. A tabloid reporter picked up the story and renamed him “Gator Boy.” And it stuck. He used to be known as “Bubba.”

  Sam was a young man ardently confident in his own abilities. He had a likeness of his own face tattooed on his arm with the phrase “In $am We Trust” underneath it—which is a lot snappier than “In Gator Boy We Trust.” He also pointed out to Leon that the “S” in his name had been replaced by a dollar sign. “Cool, huh? That’s because I’m worth my weight in gold. Coach said.”

  Leon, floating on a tranquilized cloud, waved down at S
am and smiled like the deposed prince he knew he was. Said nothing.

  Sam is what Nurse Becker calls a hard case. Had a football scholarship from Gainesville, and a high-powered sports agent, until, drunk in Miami, he lost his leg in a motorcycle accident on Thanksgiving Day. It happened right after the bowl game. He killed the girl he was riding with.

  “She was just a fan,” Sam told the press.

  A month later, all his fans are gone and his agent won’t return his calls. But Sam keeps thinking he’s going to play again, even though the doctors haven’t even fit him with a leg that he can successfully walk with, let alone run. He’s just so big he’s nearly impossible to fit. They will have to have a prosthesis specially made, but Sam has no insurance, and no donor is willing to step forward. His family abandoned him long ago. The comment about the girl did not endear him to the public. So hospital administration is trying to find someone willing to donate a wheelchair so Sam can be released. After that, he’s on his own.

  “I’m star potential,” he told Leon when they first met. “Always been a star. It’s only natural that I’d be the first NFL player in history with only one leg. The draft is coming up in a couple of months. If I’m in, I’ll see that you’re taken care of. I’ll be rich. You’ll be rich, too.”

  Nurse Becker arrived before Leon could answer.

  “Sam, we got to get you back,” she said and started to wheel the boy away.

  “Wait!” Sam panicked, grabbed Leon’s hand. “Look, man,” he said, “if you could just get my agent to call me back.” Then he placed his football letter jacket at the foot of Leon’s bed. “Kind of a down payment.” When he said this, he sounded a little less cocky. “If you fix it for me, that jacket will be worth something someday. I’ll be the first one-legged player in the NFL. When I win the Super Bowl you can sell it on eBay and retire.”

  Nurse Becker picked up the jacket and put it back on the young man’s lap. She knew it wouldn’t help Sam to tell him that there was no miracle. This Bee-Jesus is just another crazy fella in a sheet. Another whack job.

  “Sugar,” she said gently. “While Jesus appreciates the gesture, being who he is he could not possibly wear a Florida Gators jacket. Would that be fair to all those good Christian boys and girls at Florida State University? Or Miami International?”

  Sam thought about the logic of this. “Oh,” he said. “Makes sense.”

  She knew it would. That’s why Nurse Becker is Nurse Becker.

  When she rolled Sam out into the hallway she told the crowd, “You all should just go back to your rooms. There’s not much to see.” And she sounded sad. She hoped, at least a little, that this Jesus was different from all the rest. It was Christmas, after all.

  During that first day, Bee-Jesus spent a lot of time sleeping. Every now and then, he’d cry out as if speaking in tongues. “The river card! Fourth street! Alligator blood! All in! Go all in!”

  He seemed to be troubled in a way Nurse Becker had never seen before. Before she went home, she kissed the sleeping Leon on his forehead. “Good night, sweet prince,” she said. She couldn’t help herself. He seemed like a little boy lost in his imagination. “I hope your kingdom is warm and always sunny.”

  “Dang cool,” he mumbled and fell into a flying dream.

  About 2 A.M. Sam came back. “Hey, Miracle Guy,” he said and shook Leon by the arm until he was awake.

  Leon opened his eyes. Sam looked tired. “Can I at least rub your head for luck?” he asked.

  There was something about the lumbering boy that reminded Leon of a real alligator—the sad look in his eyes, a knowing—but Leon couldn’t imagine where he’d gotten that idea. He was pretty sure he’d never met a real alligator, especially one this large. They don’t seem to be that social a creature, he thought, too many teeth. But for some strange reason Leon felt affection for Gator Boy, although he had a disturbing urge to put a straw hat on him and ask him to say “Howdy.”

  “I’ll be bigger than William the Refrigerator Perry,” Sam told Leon. “You just got to get my agent to call me back.”

  Leon, his eyes as wide as hamburgers, just nodded.

  The next morning, the believers came again. It was Bill’s day off, so crowd control was difficult. Outside his room, Leon could hear Nurse Becker tell the story of the bees.

  “They had begun the waggle dance,” she’d say with such authority that those who have never been a Camp Fire girl knew the phrase meant something, something miraculous. Since the hospital was so understaffed, Nurse Becker was often called away. And so, one by one, the faithful wheeled themselves into Leon’s room, told their story, asked for a miracle.

  Every time this happened, Leon learned one more thing that he really didn’t want to know.

  “Do you know how long a man can live without a liver?”

  Leon did know, and so he was planning to tell Nurse Becker that this couldn’t go on any longer. He was tired of being Bee-Jesus: the Miracle Guy.

  But then the miracle happened.

  An old Mexican nun saw it first. Sister Inez Alverez came to the hospital for gallbladder surgery. “Four slits in your belly, and we’ll yank that sucker out,” the doctor told her. He was speaking loudly, because he assumed the old nun knew very little English. “Have you back in ‘Ave Maria Land’ in no time flat. Zip. Zip.” Then he grinned at her with his perfectly veneered teeth.

  “Zip. Zip?” she asked, incredulous.

  “Zip. Zip,” he shouted.

  Had Sister Inez Alverez not taken an oath of humility, at that very moment she would have told the doctor that before she became a nun she was a medical exchange student and did her residency at Johns Hopkins.

  Probably the year you were born, Gringo.

  She knew Americans liked the word gringo because they used it in all their westerns.

  Still, that would have been wrong to say. Spiteful. Prideful. Fun, but wrong.

  So she said, “Bless you, Me-stir Doc-ter!” And she spoke loudly, smiled that “I-Got-Me-A-Burro-So-I-Am-Happy” kind of smile that she’d seen in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, a movie that long ago she had decided not to hold against director John Huston because she liked African Queen so very much.

  Then she said a prayer for the doctor. And two for herself.

  Still, it was true. Zip. Zip. A laser, a hose, a digital camera in her belly—and ten minutes later, she was a new woman. Medical science had come a long way since her days as a resident. The surgery was quite simple. The painkillers, divine. And while she wasn’t exactly feeling all that well—sliced up and sans gallbladder—since Jesus was around, Sister Inez Alverez, operating under a delicious Vicodin cloud, thought it was just professional courtesy to pay her respects. Especially since she was still feeling a little guilty about the doctor incident, and the fact that while under sedation she fantasized about grinding his store-bought tan body into taco meat and feeding it to a pack of wild miniature Chihuahuas.

  “How’s that for a stereotype?” she kept on screaming. “We don’t need no stinking badges!”

  She had to scream to be heard over the mariachi band.

  Anger issues—just one of the many reasons Sister Inez Alverez had joined the Carmelites.

  “Holy Mother of God!” she screamed when she entered Leon’s room.

  An overactive imagination was the other.

  Nurse Becker ran down the hall, threw the door open, half-expecting more bees. But there, in the fading light of day, was the Virgin Mary’s image on Leon’s window. It was the very same window through which the swarm of bees had entered. It was just a trick of the light, the sun setting through streaky glass. But the Virgin was smiling and waving a “Hey there!” kind of wave. So it was all rather convincing.

  “Dude!” Sam the Gator said.

  Leon could see it, too. It nearly scared the Bee-Jesus out of him.

  And so the wire services picked up the story. And Sam the Gator called Harlan Oakley, the tabloid reporter who first called him “Gator Boy.”

&
nbsp; Sam might not know enough to ever become a junior at Florida State University, but he knows a reporter who will pay for a somewhat accurate eyewitness account when he sees one. And, if this guy really is a Miracle Guy, Sam thinks, even better.

  Chapter 23

  The ghost house has risen, Trot thinks as he walks through the gigantic gator grin and opens the gate that after all these years still nearly shuts tight. He’s never seen anything like this house before. Bleached to the bone, it sits in what seems to be a crater. The Gulf of Mexico rolls around the sides of it and back again.

  It’s low tide, he thinks. Winter. Could be only a matter of months before the entire house will be pulled into the ocean. But of course, it took forty years to whittle away the sinkhole, so you never know. Could take forty more. Or a good storm. Or, maybe not.

  He knocks on the door. The smell of bleach is overwhelming.

  “It’s open!”

  It’s Carlotta’s voice, but she sounds all business. Doesn’t remind him of crushed velvet, or prom night. Just sounds like somebody who is in the middle of something and doesn’t want to be bothered.

  “Miss Carlotta?”

  He opens the door and it’s 1960 all over again. The television is nearly as big as a porch swing but has a tiny round screen. There’s a set of TV tables rusted in a stand by the window and a cocktail table in the shape of a kidney. The small couch has plastic covers to protect its cushions. Reminds Trot of his mother’s couch. “You going to put the couch in the freezer, Ma?” he always says to her when he visits. Teases her about living a Ziploc life.

  Now he will never tease her again. The wooden frame of the couch is rotted in most places, but the cushions look nearly new.