Acts of Nature

EIGHTEEN

Harmon was thinking about some half-baked Hollywood movie scene of the dedicated hero searching for his drunkard partner when he parked behind the beachfront just west of A1A and started up the sidewalk to the infamous Elbo Room. He knew Squires would be there. He was always there when the weather got rough. The hurricane had left a feel of some dusty Mexican town in its wake. The cyclical wind had come off the ocean in the second half of the storm and sand from the beach was drifted up against the curbs and around the doorways and sheets of it were still swirling in the streets. Later the maintenance guys for the city would be shoveling it back up over the low retaining wall but now they were too busy shoving splintered trees off the roadways and assisting emergency power crews with downed utility poles. It had been a bit of an adventure driving through his neighborhood and then making the circuitous route all the way to Las Olas Boulevard and east to the ocean. He’d been redirected by roadblocks three times and twice had to use side streets to get there. Luckily, they’d closed the bridges over the Intracoastal Waterway in the down position, not that anyone was fool enough to move their boats, though you always heard of some idiot who was racing for the dock or had been torn off his anchorage during the blow.
At the corner of A1A and Las Olas there were only a handful of people on this, one of the most historic gathering spots in South Florida. The ocean breeze was still kicking. A long piece of ripped canvas awning was flapping from its frame on the second floor somewhere. The neon that normally illuminated the bikini mannequins and beer sales posters and displays of cheap sunglasses in the storefronts had gone dark. But as Harmon rounded the corner he could hear the strains of Stevie Ray Vaughan playing “Boot Hill” on the juke and he knew finding Squires was going to be a snap.
Unlike in the movie version, he did not expect the big man to be passed out on some small table in the corner and have to pick up his head by a clutch of hair à la some Clint Eastwood spaghetti western. He was not disappointed. Squires was sitting at the bar, his back against the countertop, his feet propped up on a second stool, and a bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale in his hand. From this familiar perch Squires could see the ocean and the sidewalks. On good days he could watch the sun dollop on the surf and the girls pass by. On bad ones he could spot the hustlers and bill collectors and trouble coming. He cut his eyes immediately to the south when Harmon stepped inside. He grunted and took another sip of beer, knowing what kind of day this was going to be.
“Shit,” Squires said.
“Yeah,” Harmon said, hitching his hip up onto the empty stool beside his partner. “You got that right.”
“Nothing good brings you out on a beautiful day like this. Where the hell we goin’ now, boss, and don’t tell me out into the Gulf, man.”
“Would have called but all of the cell towers are down,” Harmon said. “And I won’t tell you the Gulf.”
“Have a beer then,” Squires said and raised two fingers to the bartender who had not made a move toward their end even though there was only one other patron in the place.
“Elma!” Squires said. “From my private stock, please.”
The bartender, an elderly mainstay of the place named Elma Mclamb, put her crossword puzzle down and reached down under the counter to open the door of a small cooler and came out with two bottles of Arrogant Bastard. The beer came from a brewery in San Diego and was only distributed in a few of the western states but Squires had acquired a taste for its dark flavors while doing some work for the Marines and now had it shipped to the Elbo Room at his expense. If Harmon hadn’t known the man better, he might have thought it was some kind of show-off status thing, but Squires was not a poseur. And he rarely shared the stuff.
The two men sipped from the bottles and looked out over the gray waters of the Atlantic to the horizon where the color of sky and ocean were so close one could hardly find the line that separated them. Harmon understood why his friend chose both this place and the view: neither changed. The Elbo Room had remained pretty much the same worn and welcoming place it had been since the 1960s when they filmed Where the Boys Are on this stretch of Fort Lauderdale beach. The two street-front walls of the tavern opened full to the sidewalks; the shutters that covered them were raised every morning at nine. Inside, the oval bar held the scars and chipped initials of three generations of teenagers emboldened with skittering hormones and the freedom of spring break. The city put a big damper on the annual craziness back in the 1990s when the yearly bacchanal got too big and rowdy for the changing times, but even the high-priced restaurants and the faux mall that sprouted up to replace the wet T-shirt bars and seaside novelty shops couldn’t destroy the tradition. College kids still came. Locals looking to show off their cars and tans and energy still moved up and down the strand. The city couldn’t change that any more than they could stop the tide from sliding up and down the beach.
Squires liked the constancy, in fact got surly when things changed.
“You ride out the storm here?” Harmon finally asked.
“Upstairs,” said Squires. “They closed the shutters down here so we went up on the balcony. Better view anyway.”
“You guys are nuts.”
“Yeah. But it was cool. The only time these days when you can look out to the east and not see any freighter or container ship lights out there waiting to get into the port,” Squires said. “And when the power went out, man, it was blackness all up and down the coast. Reminded me of jumping out the back of a C-one-thirty at twenty thousand feet over the desert. Very cool.”
“If you say so, big man,” Harmon said.
Squires took another long pull on his beer.
“So where we goin’?”
“Local job,” Harmon answered. “Boss wants us to catch a helicopter ride out over the Everglades. Says they’ve got some kind of a research facility out there that needs a storm assessment done. In his words: ‘Make sure it’s not exposed.’”
Squires gave him a questioning eye.
“Didn’t know we had a facility out in the Glades.”
“Me neither. But the man seemed pretty concerned, you know, that tick in his voice that means somebody higher up the ladder is the one asking.”
“Yeah. Everybody’s got someone up the line,” Squires said, finishing the beer. “So when we going?”
“The pilot says he’s got to get his ship back out of the hangar after they broke it down and secured it for the storm. We’re looking at tomorrow morning, earliest,” Harmon said. “It’s out at the regular site at Executive Airport. You can get out there all right?”
Squires nodded.
“We taking anything special?”
“This place is supposed to be empty. So just pack your standard inspection gear. Shouldn’t take us more than a few hours. You’ll be back for happy hour.”
“Sounds like a good day to me,” Squires said and again raised his hand. “Elma!”