Heart of Palm by Laura Lee Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

him then, enjoying the pleasing rhyme with donkey and the added connotation of “dookie” the nickname brought with it. When the Bravo boys, bored and looking for entertainment, wandered south of Utina into the Oldest City’s jurisdiction, they generally guaranteed themselves a tangle with Do-Key, which was, Frank admitted, probably the real reason they went there in the first place. St. Augustine. It was a righteous old place, by God, proud and pristine, but that didn’t mean it didn’t need its cage rattled now and again.
    The first time they met him, they’d come down to St. Augustine from Utina through a thunderstorm: the three Bravo brothers, Frank and Carson still in high school, Will in junior high. They’d been driving around downtown with a box of bottle rockets, waiting for the rain to stop, past the Fountain of Youth and the antique shops and the hallowed grounds of the Catholic mission. When the rain eased up they opened the windows to throw jeers at the costumed conquistadors at the city gates and whistle at the coeds at Flagler College. They cruised the plaza and circled back through the narrow lanes behind the Spanish Quarter, growing hotter and more restless by the minute. Finally the clouds cleared and they ended up, panting and damp with sweat, in the parking lot of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium, where the wet asphalt steamed. And then, after a while, Officer Donald Keith showed up, evidently to represent the interests of those neighbors who objected to bottle rockets being launched from Ripley’s up to the bastions of the Castillo de San Marcos.
    “Move on, kiddos,” Keith had said condescendingly. “Take your little games elsewhere.”
    “Okay, Do-Key,” Carson said, looking at the cop’s name tag.
    Keith’s face had darkened, and he looked from Frank to Carson and Will and then back to Frank again.
    “You get your asses out of here, boy,” Keith said.
    “I’ll try, sir,” Carson said, twisting his back and looking over his shoulder in a comic effort to regard his own backside. “But I tell you, I’ve only got the one.”
    Do-Key won that round. He kicked the unlit rockets into a puddle and hustled them out of the parking lot. Oh, but how many little dances had the Bravos shared with Keith after that? Do-Key chasing them down after Utina High beat St. Augustine at homecoming and the Bravo boys had celebrated with four boxes of Tide poured into the Fountain of Youth; Frank and Carson decorating the back of Do-Key’s cruiser with Care Bear stickers; Do-Key once getting the upper hand by catching them in the act of stealing a six-pack from the Winn-Dixie and slapping them with a fat list of charges, from breaking and entering to disorderly conduct, but then the Bravos regaining their advantage when the judge threw the case out on the technicality that Do-Key had forgotten to sign the arrest report. Each skirmish was a brilliant battle in an epic war.
    The score had been approaching even in the spring of 1984, the night before Easter, when it was already hot as hell and only April, still the long scorching summer licking like flames before them. Frank, Carson, Will, and their buddy Mac had been fishing, just fishing, for Christ’s sake, in a beautiful little estuary behind the Nombre de Dios mission in St. Augustine, where the shadow of a two-hundred-foot bronze cross fell across the reeds and spared them, blessedly, from the sizzling rays of the evening sun. The fishing was glorious there, always. The Holy Hole, they called it, where every time they cast a line they pulled back a fat, wriggling crappie or bass, no more than a minute’s wait every single time. They caught so many fish they couldn’t even keep them all. It was perfect. Then along had come Do-Key, ready to put the kibosh on everything.
    “You can’t fish here,” he’d said. His uniform was taut across his belly, and he bent his knees a fraction to adjust his crotch as he stood in front of them.
    “Why