Tropical Depression Read Online Free Page B

few seconds later I wheeled across and headed for home.
    My home that year was about halfway across the island, across the street from a small canal that emptied into the marsh above Houseboat Row. The house was a small, squat cinderblock cottage built in the 1960s. The yard was overgrown when I moved in and hadn’t gotten any better.
    Inside the low coral rock wall around the lot there were enormously tall patches of weeds sharing space with the blotches of hardscrabble dirt where nothing could ever grow. A huge key lime tree leaned over the back door and dropped fruit on the cat who lived in the crawl space under the house.
    The house had once been painted Florida pink, a strange bastard color halfway between tan and the hot blush of a Puerto Rican whore’s toreador stretch pants. The paint was fading now. Chunks of it had flaked off to show a pastel green undercoat. I dropped my bike on the poured-cement front step and kicked the front door open.
    The house had two small bedrooms, a living-dining room, a bathroom about the size of a coat closet, and the kitchen. At the moment the house was dim, and hot enough to melt plastic. I switched on the big Friedrich window unit and a throaty roar of arctic air pushed me towards the kitchen.
    The kitchen had a pass-through about five feet wide with one louvred shutter on the left side. The other shutter, for the right side, had been gone when I moved in. I stood in the kitchen doorway, with the pass-through on my left, and looked at the refrigerator. It was older than me and streaked with rust.
    I thought about Roscoe and what he had said. I thought about getting out one of the bottles of St. Pauli Girl beer. Then I thought maybe I should take a shower first. I couldn’t decide and felt my shoulder muscles getting tighter as I just stood there, unable to make a simple decision.
    What I should do, I knew, was just grab a beer. It was right there, ten feet away. Just step over, open the door, grab a beer. But then—I couldn’t really take a beer into the shower. Maybe I should take a shower first. Get clean, sit down, then have the beer. Except then the beer wouldn’t taste as good. So have the beer first. Except—
    It was too much. Both decisions suddenly seemed to have enormous consequences. I just had to choose, one way or the other, and I couldn’t. I could feel the tension in my shoulders spreading, the muscles starting to knot, and before I knew it I was shaking from the strain. It was all coming back to me. Roscoe’s visit had brought it all back.

Chapter Three
    March 18. It was not a date I was likely to forget. The day had started badly. The freeways were full of mean drunks and Type A personalities with too much engine in their car and not enough sense of their own mortality.
    The air that day was a solid yellow-brown, a poisonous, barely breathable ooze unlike anything I’ve ever seen anywhere else. Sure, other cities have pollution. New York has a dark brown cloud cover that can rip out your throat when the wind is right; Mexico City has a vicious fog so thick you can feel the weight of it and watch it peel the paint off your car. But L.A. has something special. It clings to your clothes, drifts gently into your pores in that dry desert air, and gives you blinding pains in your throat and head that make you want to drive up onto the Santa Monica Freeway and look for somebody to run off the road. The pollution in L.A. is special. After you’ve lived there awhile you realize that the gauzy, yellow-brown air really stands for the whole city in a unique way. Like everything else about L.A., the smog is often pretty to look at, completely intangible, and ultimately poisonous. But hey—it sure makes for great sunsets, huh?
    Great sunsets and lousy mornings. On my way in to roll call that yellow morning it was already over ninety and the smog was pounding its way in and making my temples throb. My eyes were stinging, there was a sharp rasp in my chest, and jolts of