Muse

   

He called her his muse. But only later, only after she’d asked why he was spending so much time around Monroe Station that day. He appeared the moment she’d opened that first time—she had just flipped the sign and unlocked the door when the knob turned and the dining room filled with the light and sound of squealing hinges. He touched his hat—a ball cap—and said, “Coffee, please?” and then he seemed to shudder for a moment, with something like relief. She had thought it had to do with a deep need for coffee, but later she would rethink it, imagine herself in his moment of epiphany. What must it feel like to sense the draw of your muse, that call coming deep from the Everglades cypresses, to put down your art, whatever it was, to drive however long toward the pull you felt, and then come to face to face with it? How frightening and joyful—how necessary a reflective pause, a cup of coffee.

May didn’t know anything about being anybody’s muse in that moment or any before it, so she gave him an it-figures grunt and said, “It’s brewing.”

It was high season, and having only one person waiting for coffee was a blessing. In the next few minutes she spread the potatoes and onions out on the skillet, glanced at the clock, turned the corner into the prep kitchen for the eggs, came back to stand at the counter beating them in a bowl, flipped the potatoes and the onions now popping and sizzling. She could hear the motors outside, the pickup trucks rumbling in, the gate clanking, the tired sound of a massive swamp buggy waking from its summer slumber. RehrehRAH, RehrehRAH. Somebody cussing and the clank of a wrench being hurled against a wheel well. She used her bare hands to scoop peanuts into the little paper bags, to set them up in rows in the roasting incubator with its pink glow. Outside, the cypresses stood draped with their Spanish moss and the breezes twisted and the water crept stealthily at the base of the sawgrasses.

Where in the hell was her husband Joe Lord? Probably one of the swamp buggy lot tenants was chewing off his ear with a tale of beer or deer or the law. The renters paid Joe and May to keep their buggies here all year—monster crafts with wheels as tall as her shoulder, built for moving over the chunky limestone and through the boggy mud the Everglades would serve up. At one time it had been magical to her, these unique men and their creations, their stories and her being at this outpost to hear them, Joe Lord’s own buggy that would take her out to his camp an hour’s ride from this depot.

But these days May, even as she whipped at eggs with her fork or phoned in an order for more toilet paper from Miami, mumbled to herself that all they had going here was a “glorified parking lot” and spare on the glory at that. The renters, who were often late with their payments, who sometimes left their buggies to rust away in their weedy spaces without ever returning, who disregarded the rules about where and how you could dispose of your beer cans, they thought they had come into some fresh frontier where no laws applied, they probably thought of May and Joe as shoddy backdrop to a bigger vision of adventure and freedom that no one on this Earth could really claim. She and Joe rarely had the pleasure of a ride out to his camp anymore (the swaying pines, the holy quiet) because they had to keep Monroe Station going, and with all the cooking, and worrying about money, and no regular help to speak of, and no one but May to unclog the toilet when needed, the demands had sapped her senses.

At some point she looked up and saw the man sitting there in the corner, the stapled business cards running up the walls in their crooked streams around him, the light coming through the mud-splattered window, muted and yellow like it always was. Except that light didn’t usually fall on a face like that, something aglow about the long eyes, the slant of the smooth cheekbones, the hands loosely clasped but full of tension all the same, like they held a precious chalice, like the chalice held a magical potion, or maybe the chalice itself was the magical thing. But none of this about chalices was what she immediately thought, it was what she thought later when she thought back, after he’d suggested the power she held over him. No, what she thought in the moment that morning was something more like: Unusual guy. Coffee. She turned and poured, she brought the cup to him.

  

Joe had never called her his muse, that was for sure. He came from the school of: Man with a vision needs a support system, a.k.a. strong, no-nonsense woman. He told her his plan that day more than 20 years ago, just weeks after they’d met at the biker bar. He drove her to Monroe Station and they stood looking at the clapboard building as he talked. They would rent the county property right here on Tamiami Trail, in the midst of nothing but squatty cypress trees and yellow grasses, the Micosukkee Indian reservation neighboring to the north. They would sell gas to the recreationists coming through from Naples to Miami or the reverse, to the squatters who had camps out there on government land. They would work hard all season and then have the summers mostly off. He would get her an AC.

A lonely life is what it mainly seemed like to her, but she had had something like too hectic a time leading up to this, her mom in Hialeah a drunk who’d relied on May to raise the younger siblings, her dropping out of high school, her juggling multiple jobs at a time for the decade leading up to when she met Joe Lord at that seedy tavern.

But also she saw something beautiful in it, its haunted landscape. And that was even before he’d helped her up onto the seat of his swamp buggy and had taken her on the moaning, growling ride, deep into the prairie, and then into the sprawling thicket of cypresses, the thicker stand of palms and pines, the ground rolling slowly below the buggy wheels, the wheels brushing against the sides of pines, mounting and dismounting one cypress stump after another, leaving the knobby, rust-colored knees unscathed. Finally the brush opened up to his little shack hidden in this secret place where there would be no one for miles and miles and the air was finer and cleaner than anything she’d known, the sky a powdery blue. Even before she’d seen the sky at night, seen the Milky Way like a silk scarf thrown off by a swooning goddess. Even before she’d gone deep in, she could see it was a special place. 

And she said that day that they stood in front of Monroe Station and talked of buying it, “I can live here, Joe, but no kids. No way I’m raising kids here.” She was almost 30 by then anyway and he was a decade older.

He scratched his chin, he looked east and west up that long straight road, fringed by the greys and tans of the cypress trees and Spanish moss, domed by the dusty blue sky. He rubbed his hand over his rounded belly and said he could live with that.

That was all so long ago.

In those long seconds looking at him she felt something, like the pop of cork from a bottle, an opening and a sigh at the same time, and then an expansion, and all around them seemed to glow.

Closing time was nine and that first day he’d appeared had a particularly busy last hour. Someone had come back in from the swamp with their foot hurt and bleeding and May had needed to search around for a first-aid kit, then call the clinic in Everglades City to see if it made more sense for them to go there or drive all the way to Miami. Joe had gotten into an altercation with a band of buggy people, something about how they left the air pump lines in a mess on the gravel, and said he had to get out of there for a drink, probably up the way on Loop Road with the Perry brothers and all those whooping misfits.

She had almost forgotten about him by the time she was back in the dining room, running a not-so-clean rag over the tabletops, straightening the chairs. She saw him there in his ball cap and said, “Well, we close soon, so you might want to think about your game plan.”

He smiled a gentle, relaxed smile and said, “I know exactly what I’ll be doing.” He had a scar on his chin, but otherwise he was smooth and unlined, like he’d neither laughed nor cried much in life, not that he was very old. She figured 30s to her mid-50s.

She stopped in front of his booth now, nested his water glass into his coffee cup, swiped the rag over the table, bumping his elbow.

“You’re my muse,” he said.

She stood up straight with the cups to her chest.

“Sorry?” she said.

“They told me this is where I should come, and I’m glad I did,” he said. “Just been drinking you up.”

She shifted her weight. A shadow of Joe Lord floated in and out of her mind, probably because the words sounded sexual.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I’m not sure a muse has to know or understand what she’s giving off,” he said. “But I want to say thank you.”

“Who’s they? Who told you to come here?”

He tapped his head. “They’re not voices,” he said. “They’re sensory impulses, like electrical charges.”

He grabbed his backpack that looked as empty as a rabbit skin and pulled into the straps. He slid over on the bench and rose from the booth. He was tall, and he was close to her. She glanced up, saw the curve of his lip, the plane of his cheekbone. Then she chided herself for being intimidated by magical talk and raised her head with purpose, looked him full in the eye.

“Or maybe you’re just casing the joint,” she said. “Getting to know the rhythms.”

He laughed and then his face settled into that clean-slate calmness.

In those long seconds looking at him she felt something, like the pop of cork from a bottle, an opening and a sigh at the same time, and then an expansion, and all around them seemed to glow.

He was the one to break it, saying, “I’ll come back, but not too soon.”

 

The muse—sometimes she called herself that—could imagine a few versions of the art he pursued. She started imagining right away. And whenever her imaginings started to wane, he would show up again and a fresh cycle would begin. She dreamed that when he wasn’t here in the corner booth, soaking in whatever muse magic she provided, that he made his art in New York City—she had been there once in her teens, she read the newspaper too, and so she could imagine he might have his home and studio somewhere close to the pond she remembered in Central Park, although that would probably be expensive. Still, you couldn’t exactly be poor and make a journey to see your muse every year. Or maybe, she thought, he was in Chicago, and had the lake to admire, in its endlessness, like the prairie could look here, only instead of the usual mild breezes of the prairie he’d have the whipping winter winds of the Midwest. In Chicago he was a composer, his piano a black-lacquered baby grand, or sometimes red-lacquered, his surroundings otherwise cluttered in the way of creative people, but the piano a shining pristine jewel.

 

Being someone’s muse is not the kind of thing you keep to yourself for long, but she sat on it for three visits before she decided to tell her one friend. So, it was a three-year secret, because he only ever came once at the beginning of the season. After three times it felt real, even in its strangeness. It was no longer a fluke. Hachi was a Miccosukee woman May loved, who she’d tried to employ so many times over the years, never with any kind of staying power. Hachi went with one man or the other and that was always her focus. She drank too much and talked about the man endlessly, his cruel words, his bullish resistance to some point of logic. Sometimes May and Hachi would get on the buggy and ride out that long and rough hour over swamp and water and rock—the air and expanse of prairie worth the tougher going into the dense cypresses sheltering Joe Lord’s camp. The two women would sit in the scrappy wilderness, among the pines and palms on this high, dry knoll, and let the soft air blow over them, talking by the fire even in the daylight, the ashes and smoke twisting and turning at their feet. May had had no plans to say anything that time after his third visit, but the quietness of the woods had soaked into her, so different from the Tamiami Trail just five miles and that long buggy ride away. Here she was inspired. Here she felt more free.

“What do you call a person who says you’re his muse?’

“What do you mean?” Hachi said. 

“Guy’s been coming in, a long time, every year or so, says I’m his muse,” May said.

“Oh, right?” Hachi laughed. Her hair was long and black and shocked through with gray. Her smile was wide and radiant, stretching far over the bottom of her face and looking like it had more elastic to spare.

“He in love with you?” Hachi said. She leaned back in her lawn chair, her eyes squinting up at the puffy clouds.

“I don’t think so,” May said. May never thought about her looks anymore, knowing she’d worked so hard for so many years in rough conditions. She wasn’t anyone pampered.

“It makes sense though,” Hachi said, sucking on her cigarette with a gasp like it caused her pain.

“It does?”

“It’s a thing: if you want a muse then you gotta go into the deep wilderness, do like a vision quest, fight to get there, don’t stay too long, don’t take too much, so then yeah, it’s better if she’s far, far away.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Not so usual for white women, right? I think they usually want her exotic.”

It made sense, though, May was realizing. She liked that it could be confirmed as realistic.

“Yeah, you live far away, but you’re not so hard to get to, right on the damn road! He was lazy picking you,” Hachi laughed.

“I don’t do anything, I just get my work done, you know, getting the lunch, feeding the bums who come in to eat, cleaning and going out to the lot to get a payment from a renter. And coming back in and there he is, still in the corner, just looking at me like he’s taking it all in.”

“But he told you what you are to him?”

“He did that first day. He didn’t say much those next two times.”

“What kind of art?”

“I don’t know,” May said, glancing at Hachi. “I didn’t ask.” She knew there was something superstitious about her not asking, but Hachi didn’t react.

“What’s he look like?”

“Maybe a little Seminole in him. So you’re right, he might not be coming from a land far away or anything. Late 30s. Wears a ballcap with the Lee jeans logo.”

“Hm, Lee. Okay, I can keep an eye out.”

Unlike May, Hachi moved around the reservation plenty, and there were always pockets of people she ran into, always characters she talked about who May had never heard of.

“And as for what to call him, I don’t know,” Hachi said. “But he better call you His Museness.” Hachi cackled and tipped sideways in the flimsy lawn chair.

She had wanted so much to be a muse for something beautiful. She was about to lose everything and now she couldn’t even have this.

Now it had been six years—in this passage Joe Lord had his first heart attack, which forced May to close the restaurant for three days and stay with him at the Naples hospital. The Park Service bought the land from the county soon after that and outlawed the sale of gas, which meant they could now barely turn a profit. There was a fire that burned the prairie for seven weeks which meant that no one came to the station. She had nothing to listen to but Joe ranting that the Park Service had let the whole disaster come to pass. May was left with a cough she had come to believe was permanent.

Those next three annual visits had happened as the years before them. Each time he appeared there was that moment when she was lifted like on a wave, then gently set back down.  It was just a moment. But it reminded her of the way she’d felt when she’d first laid eyes on the rippling prairie, first seen the true infinity of stars. With all the changes that had happened, this was a moment she could love. It was okay if everything was falling to pieces. She was someone’s muse.

Then one time Hachi caught her outside, where May was picking up beer cans and Skol tins from around the buggy wheels, cross-treads so deep she could fit a forearm there. “Remember your guy with the Lee cap?” Hachi asked. She wended her way over the rutted path, its jutting limestone rocks large but smoothed like the bones of ancient beasts, the low places full with grey water from the last rain. It was sunny and bright but Hachi looked drunk, her lids heavy, her gait unsteady.

“Yes, of course,” May said. “He was just here.” May was surprised Hachi remembered. It had been three years since May had told her about him.

“He’s a thief,” Hachi said. “He robbed my friend of all his guns. Not that anyone is taking it to the tribal council, but that’s the word on him.”

Hachi dug around in the front pocket of her jeans for a pack of cigarettes. She had trouble connecting the flame to the end of the smoke. “Shit,” she muttered, her lips clamped down.

May turned the full paper bag over the oil drum that held the trash. It made a horrible clatter.

 

The next year he didn’t come and she figured it was over, she could go back to being nobody’s muse. But then the eighth year he showed, a few minutes after opening. Hachi was there this time, drinking coffee next to the glow of the peanut heater, these days more orange than pink, oily shadows having spread over the glass.

The bells on the door tinkled, the screen slamming shut. And there he stood.

“You’re back,” she said, hearing the edge in her own voice.

He sauntered to his seat in the corner. May poured Hachi a warm-up, then jerked her head in his direction, mouthed the words “Lee cap” and pointed to her forehead. He was watching her, but she didn’t care. Her nerves were rubbed raw.

Hachi turned and looked at him, raising her eyebrows. She sat back in her seat and took a long sip of coffee, nodding her head.

In these two years of his absence, it had gotten so bad Joe and May were about to close up the station. Without the gas sales—and with Joe’s health problems—there was no way to make it work anymore. The buggy renters and plates of eggs weren’t enough. 

She called over to him, “I guess you want coffee.”

“Yes, I do,” he said.

She brought it to him. She felt Hachi over at the bar behind her. It brought her a kind of boldness. “You didn’t come last year,” she said. “What happened?”

He sipped his coffee but kept his eyes raised to hers. He set the cup down without so much as a blink. “I was incarcerated,” he said.

“For what?” she asked.

“Theft. Firearms,” he said.

So Hachi hadn’t had the whole story. They did press charges.

“So that’s your art?” May said.

He shrugged.

She hissed, a long tuneless whistle. “How dare you put that on me,” she said.

“It was a thing of beauty,” he said.

“What was?” May demanded.

“The whole operation,” he said.

“How dare you,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” he said, and something was different in that face, something pained and broken when it had always been calm.

“How dare you involve me,” she said.

He grabbed her wrist and her whole body tensed in response. She heard the squeak of Hachi’s barstool swiveling behind her.

She had wanted so much to be a muse for something beautiful. She was about to lose everything and now she couldn’t even have this.

“A muse doesn’t get to say what she’s there for,” he whispered.

He let her wrist go.

It came then, that washed-over feeling of peace and calm and beauty, that moment when it seemed like the air around her swelled and filled and became melodic. She couldn’t explain it, but the feeling stopped her from being angry. Now his face was tranquil again and she took a deep breath. She turned and went back to the counter, to the frying potatoes. She glanced at Hachi, whose eyebrows were raised: What next?

May shook her head. She didn’t know the answer.

 

Joe Lord died 60 days later. May didn’t ask the county to renew the lease on Monroe Station and she had to move out. She took a ratty apartment in Everglades City, with roaches as big as her thumb and screaming babies down the hall, their parents screaming even louder. She found a buyer for Joe’s camp and swamp buggy and now she had that money, at least. She would figure out a way to live, was still deciding if she could leave this place.

Even in Everglades City she could still sometimes be reminded of the magic she’d first sensed here. There were places she could take her car and park, Spanish moss and cypress trees all around her, where she could watch the sawgrass riffle in the breeze, the egrets flying low.

Thank you, Joe Lord, she would say, silently. I’m sorry for all the days I forgot to love it.

In the time that passed this way, she also thought of Lee cap, how he’d told her she was the means, not the end. Over time she came to see he was right. Or at least it must be that his belief matched one she must have been holding, the belief that what anyone inspired was none of their business. Why else, in all those years, hadn’t she asked him about his art? And so, she held nothing against him.

On the week when he would usually come, she drove the 30 minutes to Monroe Station. It was boarded up. No takers on such a failing business. And not even the Park Service willing to open the depot for customers. The buggy lot was self-serve now. The buggy renters turned into the lot, their pickup trucks with their four-wheelers up on trailers. She watched with interest as one after the other of them, over the course of that morning, would stop the vehicle, country music blaring out the window, then shut the engine, take a key to the gated chain link that shone new and clinical in the sun. Joe had never needed a lock on their old gate because he and May had always been around somewhere. Now the renter would unlock the new gate and throw it open wide, drive the truck and trailer through. No need for anything more than absenteeism in this type of landlord arrangement. She figured the Park Service had arranged all that.

She watched, the fall air coming in, cutting the sting of the hot sun. She fell asleep. She didn’t wait past noon. He’d always come in the morning and stayed all day. She went home, she made spaghetti and watched TV. May repeated all of this two more days. The third day she was exhausted. She had been up all night, plagued by fitful dreams of Joe and that frantic look he’d had in his eyes after they’d put the ventilator on him. Poor Joe, he’d always been so tough but of course something would inevitably come for him. Maybe they should have had children. Why had she insisted on everything being so spare?

She pulled into the lot early morning, read the sign that no one had bothered to dismantle: “Come on in and try Sweet May’s cookin’.” “Marriages performed here,” the sign read, though May only remembered Joe doing that once.

She opened the window, cut the engine. She reclined the seat and fell asleep right away.

Something was tapping, soon after. She opened her eyes and there he was, that calm face, that half smile.

“We don’t run it anymore,” she said. “No one does.”

He made a face, like, that’s a shame.

 “Should we drive around?” she asked him.

He smiled and said, “Okay.”

He got in the car. It would be the last time she’d spend around him.

She spoke as soon as he was sitting. “I was angry at you but then I asked myself what right I had,” she said. “If I have some kind of art that’s more acceptable, then maybe I should make it myself.”

She started to drive, thinking about how she’d once been so inspired by the Everglades, and how she’d let it become mostly unremarkable to her. “Do you think it’s true that with a muse you can only take so much at a time?” she asked. “That you need to only take what you need? Is that why you kept your promise to come back, but not too soon?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course. You only dip in. Any more and it’s ruined.”

The windows were open and the air and light rushed around them. She knew that the expansive feeling was coming from this place, not from him.

“For a bit there it felt like the tables were turned,” she said. “Like you were my muse.”

He laughed. “Nah—it doesn’t work that way,” he said. 

The cypress trees whipped past them on the right all along the swampy canal. The prairie stretched out wide and golden on the left, like it would always be there. It was the prairie she had loved in her deepest self, but she could only glance. She knew not to take too much.