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that direction.
    There were a lot of directions he’d quit looking in.
    Somewhere, not too far to the east, a bottle rocket screeched. Already? Sun not even fully up over the pines and already the revelers were getting going, probably unpacking their long-hoarded stockpiles of illegal fireworks, lining up the empty beer bottles and filling them with bottle rockets and Roman candles, throwing cherry bombs and M-80s into the woods. Frank knew the drill. Fourth of July in Utina. If they were setting off fireworks at dawn, they’d be drinking by noon. Which meant they’d be half-polluted by this afternoon. By the time they got to Uncle Henry’s.
    He climbed into the truck and headed for town. And for coffee. Whatever was going on at Arla’s house was just going to have to wait until he’d gotten some caffeine into his system.
    The town of Utina, perched on the eastern bank of an uncharacteristically straight stretch of the Intracoastal, was an old man, testy and gray, with little patience for fashion and a stalwart commitment to function over form. The town was broken into distinct halves—South Utina, a rambling journeyman’s neighborhood of small lots and uninspired Victorian homes that had never been much of anything to begin with and were even less today; and North Utina, where Frank’s and Arla’s houses both sat and where the homes were fewer, the land was largely unchecked scrub, and the residents were more Florida Cracker than American citizen.
    Whereas North Utina was where Frank’s great-grandfather Alger Bravo and his fellow moonshiners had lived, back in the day, South Utina was where the market had thrived, with poor whites and blacks living side by side for decades more through pure economic necessity than any idealistic racial harmony. Didn’t nobody have money in Utina, people said, no matter what color you were. You had money, you went to St. Augustine or Jacksonville, pure and simple.
    North and South Utina were separated by the town’s main road, Seminary Street, which was once a dusty one-track trail leading out of the woods to a humble Spanish mission at the water’s edge. The name evolved years after the mission had disintegrated, when the structure was clumsily mis-remembered by Utinians, who neither knew about nor cared for subtle points of distinction between a mission and a seminary. Now, Seminary Street was a quarter-mile stretch of potholes that began at Sterling’s Drugstore and ran due west down a gentle slope into a concrete boat launch at the Intracoastal, which meant a man who’d been bending his elbow for a while at the Cue & Brew, a block back from the boat ramp, could drive straight into the drink without expending much effort at all. And some had.
    Perhaps it was their birthright, Frank thought. After all, Utina, inauspiciously named for the chief of a tribe of doomed Timucuan Indians, had been known historically for two things: palms and booze. The palms, at least, were an honorable venture, destined for Palm Sunday services across the country. The orders came in the fall and early winter, and the enterprising and godly residents of Utina (and there were a few, back then) got to work. They cut palm leaves by the thousands, bound them, bundled them, and loaded them up on the East Coast Railroad at nearby Durbin Station. It was a booming and profitable venture, with the added benefit of a beneficent and sacred purpose. It was God’s work, after all.
    But even God can appreciate a bargain. So when the palms of Utina fell victim one year to an unseasonably late frost just a few weeks before Lent, church buyers around the country turned their attention to a new palm outfit in Tampa, and there was nothing for Utina to do but sit back and give up the ghost, at least as far as the palms were concerned. This was back in 1929, and when the pious lit out for more civilized territory, Alger Bravo, newly arrived from St. Augustine, led a handful of felonious stalwarts in turning to the