Free Tropical Depression by Laurence Shames

loyalty. It'd be a mitzvah."
    "Fuck's a mitzvah?"
    'Ya know, a good deed that ya do just because ya wanna do it. Look, you helped me catch a fish. I don't like to see a guy get screwed."
    "I'm gonna get screwed anyway," said Tommy.
    "Why ya gettin' all negative on me?"
    The Indian didn't answer that. He leaned back on his milk crate, blew some air out past his pouted lips. Then he rose, slowly, deliberately, and started lifting the hinged sides of his cart of seashells.
    'Tommy, hey," said Murray, "I'm bothering you, I'll leave. You don't have to close up the business."
    "You're not bothering me," said the Indian. "In fact I want you to come home with me, have a beer."
    The Bra King, nothing if not sociable, said, "Hey, that's great, I'd love to have a beer."
    Tommy climbed aboard his clunker of a bike. "You see Toxic Triangle," he said, "maybe you'll figure out why I got this lousy attitude."

11
    They pedaled along Whitehead Street, past Hemingway's house and bailbondsmen's offices, then turned up Fleming and crossed the rude clutter of Duval into the residential precincts of Old Town. Ancient pine and cypress planks bellied out along the sides of pampered dwellings; buttery allamanda crested over the tops of picket fences; gingerbread trim hung from eaves and porches. Matched palms swayed on tiny, perfect plots; pastel shutters shaded windows otherwise naked to the passing world.
    Another zig and zag took them across William Street to Caroline, then past the chandlery and bookstore and the restaurants that catered to the yachting crowd.
    But one block farther on, the avenue grew strangely desolate, not sinister but forsaken or maybe simply overlooked. On the land side of the street, a mostly empty parking lot sprawled behind a bent-up chain link fence. On the water side, a weedy vacant lot coughed limestone dust on every breeze. Ahead loomed the electric company, with its red-and-white striped smokestacks, its clustered pylons and crisscrossed wires carrying juice away.
    Tommy hung a left in front of it, onto an unpaved little road with big gray stones that rattled Murray's teeth. In the scrub along this byway, lizards slunk and a rooster strutted. A cat sat in an abandoned refrigerator without a door; a dog peeked out from under the rusted chassis of a ghostly truck. The road wound around a low abandoned building with long jagged tears in its corrugated roof, and ended at a narrow dock of warped and cracking timbers.
    Tommy climbed off his bike. Murray looked out at the green water blazing in the midday sun, and at the bizarre armada of Toxic Triangle. Homemade houseboats were tied up here and there, they looked like grown-up versions of the rafts kids made with popsicle sticks. Old dismasted sailboats with laundry hanging from their lifelines bobbed next to retired fishing craft whose cockpits were shaded with tarpaulins or thatch.
    "Mine's at the end," said Tommy. "Corner lot. Walk your bike, the dock gets pretty dicey."
    They went single file down the narrow pier and Tommy stopped in front of something that used to be a shrimp boat before it was half-sunk. Now its broad stern was partly underwater and its bow thrust upward at a jaunty angle, like an airplane taking off. Plastic lawn furniture was bolted to the splintery planking of its tilted deck, and its small square pilothouse was raised on shims so it was almost, but not quite, plumb. The odd dwelling was linked to land by three frayed ropes and a two-board gangplank.
    "So whadda ya think?" asked Tommy.
    It was a test, and Murray knew it was a test, and without hesitation he said, "I think it's fabulous."
    The Indian scanned his face for some sign of the facetious. "Fabulous?"
    "Fabulous!" the Bra King said again. He gestured at the harbor, the sky, the gulls and frigate birds wheeling. "Look at this view! I pay through the fucking nose for waterfront, and I gotta look at a road, a sidewalk, a hot dog vendor, before I see a drop a water. This is waterfront."
    The