The Coke Twins

Fran walked out the curved road leading from the passenger terminal area where for a mile a fleet of cruise ships stretched the length of Dodge Island. Behind him, his ship, the small liner SS Far Seas was snug at the quay in a web of braided hawsers to keep it from moving on the changing tide. He started up the drawbridge incline connecting the port to downtown Miami. This was home territory to him. He stared for a moment of fond yearning over at the sailboats in the city marina, where he once lived on an old sloop. As if it remembered him, a brown pelican lifted from a piling. It flew slowly. Strong, great wing strokes flapped it to the drawbridge as if it needed to inspect the curious walking Pisces striding along.

Always with an eye on the alert for seabirds, Fran watched the pelican’s slow graceful flight toward him. When the magnificent bird swooped overhead, he called out: "Let the gang know I’m back!" The brown pelican wheeled above in the trade wind updraft against the bridge. The secondary feathers on the wide wings flattened and stopped the bird in flight. Beneath the bridge, the bay water was dirty brown from propellers of a dozen ships churning the narrow channel bottom as they ran into port. The great bird’s all seeing; fiery yellow eye spied a silvery outline of a mullet near the surface. It collapsed feathers, wings to its sides. Instantly the wings resembled coat hangers. The natural but ungainly aerodynamics of the bird’s heavy body heeled it over for a rock like, water slamming collision. Compared with a sea eagle’s steep swooping glide, sharp talons spread wide to delicately pluck a fish from the sea, the pelicans long bill, neck, were a stretched, bent spear. But, the pelican’s leathery pouch was ready to inflate, purse seine underwater, trap the fish. The great bird crashed into the water. It bobbed instantly up on the surface in a floating ‘sit’. The bird shook its head to each side as if to say, "What happened? Where am I?"

Once, watching a similar scene, Fran joked with tourists from Chicago, telling them, "A pelican rammed the fish with its head, then scooped the stunned fish into the pouch.

It could be true sometimes? Only pelicans really knew, he said to himself.

"The reason the bird shook its head," he confided to the tourists, "Was to get the tiny walnut sized brain back in its slot!" Nonetheless, Fran never saw a fish jump from a pelican’s pouch. He leaned over the bridge to look at the bird below. The pelican streamed water from the leathery bowl of the distended pouch. A fish tail stuck out next to the thin black upper bill. The mullet didn’t move. When the water was streamed off, the pelican flipped the mullet in the air, caught and swallowed it head first, in gullet gulps.

"Life vs. Death on simplest terms," Fran observed.

"One second you are a happy, bulgy eyed mullet! In the next instant, you’re on the way to becoming fish pâté!" The wonder, the drama disturbed him. Was he a catalyst in the fish’s death, unplugging? What then was life, a respite between energy cycles? Here he was, newly turned forty. Half his statistical life was over. He wore the hat of a Purser, one rank below chief, on top of the hat of a poet, biologist, atop seven other functional hats.

"How many stripes do you need to be a simple sergeant in this world?" his ethical voice shouted.

Hell bent for the seaport’s cargo line five huge Auto-Car semi’s hauling shipping containers roared onto the opposite end of the drawbridge. A trembler shook the structure. An incredible din shattered the peacefulness of the scene. Fran instinctively moved to the safety rail at the edge of the walkway.

"Meeerde!" his wailing voice cried. "A freak tire blowout! The big truck would jump the curb, splatter him on the walkway!" What happened when you were hit by a Diesel tractor-trailer burning it up hill at seventy?

The voice howled, "You jumped!" Impaled yourself on a submerged, barnacle encrusted old piling!"

A huge, wind pressure bubble pushed by the lead truck hit Fran with concussive force. He was stopped, his arm looped around the metal safety rail. The whole steel and concrete bridge shook beneath him. A line from one of his poems played sweetly in his mind.

"How fragile the human body,

Though the mind deludes you into thinking it strong!

You get in the way of a Click,

And, ‘Oops’ – a finger comes off."

Today, the poem continued on, "A foot. An arm! You get chopped, smeared in half!" The trucks thundered past.

"We are just soft putty bodies functionally muscled to give us pleasure, strength, and, if in top shape, able to wear tailored clothes. The proof was the fish a moment ago," he said.

In a few minutes another line of trucks would be headed toward him. Fran tightened his gluets-thigh muscles, strode quickly in a tiger walk down the curve of the bridge toward the warehouse district, the garage where he kept his van. Impatience triggered a need to be driving south, away from the port. The last minute frenzy of clearing the ship was still ahead. The land, its sickness, its satanic pulse began to take hold of him.