Jamie had awakened around noon and the brothers had spent the early afternoon on the beach together, laughing and playing in the surf. Then they picked up some hamburgers and drove the final half hour to the Kennedy Space Center. Jamie had strongarmed an avid Gator booster, an aerospace executive who lived in Melbourne, for tickets to the VIP viewing area. They arrived there just before nightfall. Four miles away, the impressive shuttle launch configuration. consisting of the orbiter mounted on top of an orange external tank with two solid rocket boosters on the side, stood erect against its launching tower as the final countdown began.
No observing experience in Troy’s life would ever come close to rivaling his watching the space shuttle blast off that night. As he listened to the countdown being announced over the loudspeakers in the VIP area, he was eager and anticipant, but not yet in awe. The moment the engines ignited, however, filling the Florida night with reddish-orange flame and thick white clouds of billowing smoke, Troy’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. But it was the combination of his seeing the giant spaceship, slowly and majestically lifting itself into the heavens riding a long slender flame, and his hearing the astonishing sound, a constant roar punctuated with unexplained pops (which at only four miles away still arrived twenty or so seconds behind the sight of the engine ignition), that really caused the goose bumps to break out on his skin, the tears to come to his eyes, and the tingle to spread through his body. Troy’s intense emotional excitement lasted well over a minute. He stood beside his brother Jamie, tightly holding his hand, his back arched as he strained to follow the flame rising higher and higher and then finally disappearing in the night sky above him.
After the launch they slept again in the car. Jamie then dropped Troy at the bus station in Orlando and headed back to Gainesville for football practice. Young Troy felt that he was a new person, that he had been transformed by his experience. In the week that followed he obsessively followed the flight. Burford became his hero, his new idol. During the first two quarters of the following year, he applied himself avidly to his schoolwork. He had a goal. He was going to be an astronaut.
Little did Troy know that on a March night only seven months later he would have another experience, this one devastating and deeply disturbing, that would completely overshadow the thrill he had felt at the shuttle launch. On that later March evening, his brother Jamie would stop by his room before leaving the house around eight o’clock. “I’m going over to Maria’s, bro,” Jamie would say. “We’ll probably take in a movie.”
Maria Alvarez was eighteen and still a senior in high school. She had been Jamie’s steady girl for a couple of years. She lived in Little Havana together with her Cuban family and eight siblings.
Troy had given his brother a hug. “I’m glad you’re here, Jamie. There are so many things that I want to show you. I made you a set of headphones in school — ”
“I want to see everything.” his brother had interrupted him. “But tomorrow, first thing in the morning. Now don’t stay up too late. Astronauts need plenty of sleep so they can be alert.” Jamie had smiled and walked out of Troy’s room. It was the last thing Troy would ever hear him say.
Troy never could remember what he had heard first when he had awakened in the middle of that night. His mother’s wild wail had mixed with the screech of the nearby sirens to create an imbroglio of sound that was unforgettable and terrifying. Troy had raced to the door and into the front yard wearing only his pajama bottoms. The sound of the ambulance siren was drawing closer. His mother was at the end of the short walkway in front of the house, bending down over a dark body spread partly in the street in front of Jamie’s Chevrolet and partly in their yard. Three policemen and half a dozen curious bystanders were huddled around his distraught mother.
“Somehow,” he heard one of the policemen say as Troy, in a panic, tried to figure out what was happening, “he managed to drive home. It’s incredible after all the blood he lost. He must have been hit four times in the stomach . . .”
His mother’s cry intensified again and, at that moment, Troy put all the pieces together and recognized the body lying on its back. A chill went through him, he gasped, and then Troy fell on his knees beside his brother’s head. Jamie was struggling for breath. His eyes were open but they did not seem to be focusing on anything.
Troy cradled Jamie’s head in his hands. He looked down at his brother’s stomach. His red shirt was awash in blood that seemed to be flowing in a continuous stream from an area just above the genitals. Blood was on Jamie’s jeans, on the ground, everywhere. Troy felt himself gag, then retch involuntarily. Nothing came up. Hot tears filled his eyes.
“We think it was a gang shooting, Mrs. Jefferson,” the policeman droned on. “Probably some kind of a mistake. Everybody knows that Jamie wasn’t mixed up with that kind of crowd.” Reporters had arrived. Lights were flashing from cameras. More sirens approached.
Jamie’s eyes went blank. There was no sign of breathing. Troy pulled his brother’s head to his chest. He instinctively knew that Jamie was dead. He began to sob uncontrollably. “No,” he mumbled. “No. Not my brother. Not Jamie. He never hurt anybody.”
Someone tried to comfort him, to pat him on the shoulder Troy shrugged them off violently “Leave me alone,” he shouted between sobs. “He was my brother. He was my only brother.” After a couple of moments, Troy tenderly placed Jamie’s head back down on the ground. He then collapsed in total despair beside him.
At almost three-thirty in the morning some ten years later, in March of 1994, Troy Jefferson would be at home, alone in his duplex, awake with the memory of that terrible moment when Jamie had died. He would feel a new the heartbreak of that loss. And he would realize again, very clearly, that most of his adolescent dreams had died with his brother, that he had forsaken his dreams of college and being an astronaut because they were inextricably coupled with his memory of Jamie.
Somehow he had stumbled through high school in the three years that had followed Jamie’s death. But it had taken the combined efforts of his mother and the school and the city authorities to keep Troy from abandoning school altogether. Then, as soon as he had graduated, he had left Miami. Or rather, ran away. Away from what had happened and what might have been. For over two years he then wandered in a desultory manner throughout North America, a young, solitary black man, bereft of love and friendship, looking for something to overcome the feeling of emptiness that was his constant companion.
So I finally came to Key West, Troy would think, years later, as he settled back in his bed in the middle of the morning for a couple more hours of sleep. And for some reason made myself a home. Maybe it was just time. Or maybe I had learned enough to know that life goes on. But somehow, although the wound has never healed, I got past Jamie. And found the lost Troy. Or so I hope.
The dream that had been interrupted by the siren suddenly came back into his mind. Angie was beautiful in the moonlight in her white bathing suit. And now for some unfinished business, Troy laughed to himself, concentrating on the image of Angie as he returned to sleep.
2
“GOOD morning, angel,” Troy said with a grand smile as Carol approached the Florida Queen. “Ready to do some fishing?” He hopped out of the boat and shouted at Nick, who was around at the back on the other side of the canopy. “She’s here, Professor,” he hollered “I’m going out to the parking lot to get her stuff.” Carol gave Troy the keys to her car and he took off in the direction of the marina office.
Carol paced for a few moments on the jetty before Nick emerged from behind the canopy. “Come on down on the boat,” he said, scowling a little as he wiped some heavy dredging chain with a dark cloth. Nick felt terrible. He had a nasty hangover. And he was still bothered by the events of the night before Carol didn’t say anything at first. Nick stopped cleaning the chain and waited for her to speak.
“I don’t know exactly how to say this,” she began in a firm but pleasant voice, “but it’s important to me that I say it before I get on the boat.” Carol cleared her throat. “Nick,” she said deliberately, “I don’t want to dive with you today. I want to dive with Troy.”