get to do the horizontal cha-cha-cha with her?”
Ariel closed his eyes, pursed his mouth and gyrated his hips to demonstrate.
“Can we please leave my sex life out of this discussion? Besides, Madalina…”
“You should see how your eyes light up when you say her name. So what’s her problemo? She playing hard to get or something? I can help you if you got a problem. Make you an ebo. No sweat.”
Ariel, as did many of his island ancestors, practiced Santeria, a five-hundred-year-old religion imbuing African beliefs with Catholicism. An “ebo” was a spell which, among a multitude of uses, promised to remedy any number of physical, emotional or even financial maladies.
“Lemme give you a small stick of Jamaica rosewood. Next time you speak to her, you gotta chew it up and leave it in your mouth. I’m telling you, man, you do this and the girl will be yours.”
“Appreciate the offer,” said Woody. “But no thanks. I’m afraid it’d take a whole helluva lot of magic to ever get with a girl like that.”
Traffic on US1 moved as fast as a becalmed sailboat in a sea of sludge. But then again, what with rampant construction and overpopulation, getting nowhere fast anywhere, anytime, in Miami was a sure thing.
About a mile from the club, Woody’s air-conditioning crapped out. Opening the windows provided no relief from the heat and humidity, and within a few minutes he was a sweaty mess.
Needless to say, Woody was especially grateful to finally reach the turnoff for Rickenbacker Causeway. He left the gridlock behind and sped across Biscayne Bay, relishing the cross breezes which wicked the moisture from his body. It took him two minutes to traverse Virginia Key, and in the final leg of his commute, he ascended the mountainous William Powell Bridge which deposited him onto the barrier island he had called home since the age of five.
Shortly after his mother passed away, Woody and his father, Mike Woods, moved from a sleepy northwest corner of Connecticut to Key Biscayne where they had been invited to stay with Mike’s older sister, Katherine, and her husband, Herb Arnold, until permanent housing was found.
Woody’s aunt and uncle had purchased their modest, two-bedroom ranch on West Mashta Drive with its panoramic view of Biscayne Bay for thirty-five grand in the late fifties when the population of the Key consisted of World War II vets, stoned artists, assorted Bohemian types and battalions of kamikaze mosquitoes. In those days anyone who willingly chose to reside on this island, with its cookie-cutter Mackle houses and the village’s one working pay phone, was considered nuts. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and Herb and Katherine Arnold’s hurricane-battered, cement-walled box was now worth somewhere in the vicinity of eight million bucks. As a tear-down!
Meanwhile, Mike Woods, a freelance international photo journalist, accepted every extended assignment that came his way. Woody saw his dad so infrequently, the tot began to think of Katherine and Herb as his real parents and Mike as this Star Wars–type “action figure” who landed on earth every now and again armed with tales of heroism and wielding a light saber camouflaged as a banjo. Unfortunately, the “force” was not with Mike Woods when, less than a year later, a freak accident off the coast of Cyprus cost him his life and orphaned his son.
As his sole guardians, Woody’s aunt and uncle embraced the opportunity to nurture the child they could never have on their own. Who cared that they were old enough to be his grandparents? They absolutely adored him.
Katherine taught science at a ritzy private school in Coconut Grove. Although neither she nor her husband, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Miami, were thrilled to have Woody fraternize with those “rich, spoiled brats,” the allure of superior—and free—education at Grove Prep couldn’t be ignored.
Woody’s love affair with the ocean began the day he arrived in South Florida. Thanks especially to his uncle, who was a sailing nut. Herb had joined the Trade Winds Yacht Club back in the days when a lifetime membership could be bought for peanuts; and he had moored his boat, the Lady Katherine, there. The irony was that his wife, after whom the thirty-foot sloop was named, was prone to extreme seasickness and never once went sailing. Not so with “the boys,” who were on the water at every opportunity.
It was also Herb who taught his young nephew how to work with wood (giving additional meaning to his nickname). From model ships to furniture, their crowning achievement was a fourteen-foot wooden skiff which, along with the Lady Katherine, was lost years later during Hurricane Andrew.
When it came time for college, Woody reluctantly accepted a scholarship at the University of Iowa so he could, at Katherine’s suggestion, “get a taste of middle America” while taking advantage of a top-notch writing program. But the land-locked campus made Woody claustrophobic and terribly homesick. He finished out his freshman year and then transferred to the University of Miami which, like Grove Prep, was tuition-free for the kin of tenured professors.
Upon graduation, Woody, like many Gen-Xers, moved back in with his aunt and uncle until he figured out what to do with the rest of his life. Sure, he loved the creative word, but aside from one published short story in a quirky periodical, the starving-writer route was not financially viable.
Straight journalism wasn’t exactly his bag. At least at the entry level. Besides, he’d most likely have to relocate to some obscure town to report for an obscure paper for however long it took until he broke out of, well, obscurity.
Graduate school didn’t appeal. Much to the chagrin of his erudite guardians, Woody had no interest in teaching anything other than sailing. And forget about a law degree. His aunt and uncle often compared attorneys to subhumans who performed unthinkable acts with puppies.
In the interim, Woody fell back on his old job at the Trade Winds Yacht Club where he had worked summers and holidays since the seventh grade. And when Skip Edwards offered Woody the newly vacant position of assistant dockmaster, he readily accepted the job as an in-between until something more suitable came along.
Who could have guessed, after six years, he’d still be there?
Unfortunately, that same summer after his college graduation, Herb Arnold was diagnosed with prostate cancer. While he was in the hospital, his nephew read to him from one of their favorite books—about a captain named Joshua Slocum who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, rebuilt a wooden mess of a tub named the Spray and single-handedly sailed the thirty-six-foot boat around the world. Slocum’s memoir of his travels—Sailing Alone Around the World—became a best-selling seafaring classic.
With Herb’s enthusiastic endorsement, a seed was thus planted in his nephew’s brain. The realization of which would take a lot more time, effort and money than anyone could have ever imagined. Nonetheless, fueled by the memory of his uncle, who died that same year, Woody maintained a steady course to fulfilling his dream.
From the air, Key Biscayne—originally claimed by Ponce de Leon for Spain in 1515—looks rather like a vegetative sandwich. Two state parks—Crandon on the north and Bill Baggs on the south—flank the four-mile long island, and squeezed in the middle, from the bay to the ocean side, are single-family homes and high-density condo developments. To some, this “arrangement” might be interpreted as Mother Nature’s way of containing urban sprawl. But to others, an impediment to “twenty-first century progress.”
Woody followed the island’s sole access road—lined with nothing but subtropical flora for the first two miles—into the village of Key Biscayne. Far from sleepy, this micro-mini metropolis consists of several two-story, tastefully constructed strip malls, a gas station, a smattering of restaurants, a large Winn Dixie supermarket, a community center, a village green and a snazzy new firehouse. This being high season, Crandon Boulevard swayed under the weight of the combined bank accounts of its part-time residents, many for whom English was not their first language.
But despite how much the island’s profile had changed in the twenty-three years he’d lived there, the simple home Woody shared with his now widowed aunt Katherine remained constant.
Two cars were