“Sick world,” Twilly Spree said, in his own defense.
He was born in Key West, where his father had gone to sell commercial waterfront. Little Phil Spree was a real estate specialist. If a property wasn’t on the sea or the Gulf, Little Phil wasn’t interested. He would buy and sell beach until there was no more beach to buy or sell, then pack up the family and move to another town where, Little Phil typically would exult, “the coast is clear!” Florida has thirteen hundred miles of shoreline, and young Twilly got to savor plenty of it. His mother, who kept out of direct sunlight, wasn’t crazy about the tropics. But Little Phil was making excellent money, so Amy Spree basically stayed indoors for eighteen years, tended to her complexion and endeavored to occupy herself with hobbies. She grew bonsai trees. She started writing a romance novel. She learned to play the clarinet. She took up yoga, modern dance and strong martinis. Meanwhile Twilly ran wild, literally. Every free moment was spent outdoors. His parents couldn’t imagine what he was up to.
When Twilly was four, Little Phil briefly moved the family to Marco Island, which was famous for its white dune-fringed beaches. The sand was spangled with ornate tropical seashells, which Twilly collected and organized in shoe boxes. Usually he was accompanied by a sitter, hired by his mother to make sure he didn’t wander into the Gulf of Mexico and drown. Years later, at age fourteen, Twilly hot-wired a friend’s station wagon and drove back to Marco, in order to prowl the shore for shells. He arrived late at night in a howling downpour, and fell asleep in the car. When he awoke at dawn, he comprehended for the first time what his old man did for a living. The island had sprouted skyline; a concrete picket of towering hotels and high-rise condominiums. Waterfront, of course. Twilly fixed his eyes downward and marched the beach, his shoe box under one arm. He hoped he was seeing a mirage, a trick of the fog and clouds, but when he glanced up, the hotels and condos were still there, looming larger than before. As the sun began to rise, the buildings cast tombstone shadows across the sand. Soon Twilly found himself standing in a vast block of shade—shade, on an open beach under a bright clear sky! He sunk to his knees and punched the hard-packed sand with both fists until his knuckles were skinned.
A woman tourist came up to Twilly and told him to stop carrying on, as he was upsetting her children. The woman wore a stretch two-piece swimsuit and spoke with a New England accent. Her toenails were colored magenta and her nose was buttered with zinc oxide and in one hand she brandished an Arthur Hailey paperback. Twilly howled and resumed pummeling the beach. The woman glowered over the rims of her sunglasses. “Young man,” she said, “where is your mother?”
Whereupon Twilly whirled and chomped down on her bare foot and didn’t let go until a beefy hotel security man came and pried him off. Little Phil arrived later that day with lawyers and a checkbook. On the trip home Twilly had nothing to say to his father. At bedtime Amy Spree went to her son’s room and found him mounting a gaily painted human toenail in his seashell display. The next morning she took him to a psychologist for the first time. Twilly was given a battery of tests, none of which pointed toward violent sociopathy. Though Amy Spree was relieved, her husband remained skeptical. “The boy’s not right,” he would say. Or: “The boy’s not all there.” Or sometimes: “The boy’s playing on the wrong team.”
Eventually Twilly tried to talk to his father about Marco Island and other heartaches. He reminded him that Florida for eons had been underwater and was steadily sinking again, the sea and the Gulf rising each year to reclaim the precious shoreline that Little Phil and others were so avidly selling off. So what? Little Phil replied. That’s why people got flood insurance. Twilly said, No, Dad, you don’t understand. And Little Phil said, Yeah, well, maybe I don’t understand geology so good but I understand sales and I understand commissions. And if this goddamn place starts sinking to where I can see it with my own eyes, then me, you and your mother are packin’ up and moving to Southern California, where a man can still make a dandy living off oceanfront.