Chapter 6: The Chyron

At 1:52 the last breach in Florida closed, and the bakery's TV showed it happening to an airboat dock.

The dock sat on the Tamiami Trail, forty miles west of us, in the Everglades.

A news helicopter filmed a black tear folding up over a ring of gray salt.

An airboat was still tied to the pilings, with nobody on it.

Thirty people stood in our front room to watch.

They had come in off Palm Avenue for coffee and stayed.

The bakery was the only place on the block with a TV, a generator and a woman who would feed them.

The anchor said it was over.

In the cooler the Judge was still on the mat, under a clean tablecloth.

Hialeah Police had stopped by at noon, apologized, and said the medical examiner had fourteen names on a list and no trucks.

The officer had asked if the cooler was in service.

My aunt had said, with her mouth tight, that it was a bakery cooler, and a bakery cooler could be a lot of things today.

We had thrown out eleven hundred dollars of flan to make room for him.

The three other domino men sat on milk crates outside the cooler door with the tiles laid out, and they played a hand for four.

They did not talk much, and when they did they argued about whose turn it was.

Around one, I would later learn, a man on a Miami AM station had said the name.

He was a host who sold reverse mortgages and had been on the air since six, taking calls from people with rifles.

"Folks, I'm calling it," he said. "We have got to call it something. This is Gun Day. Say it with me."

Within minutes the callers were saying it.

Soon the TV was saying it, and by four it would be on a banner over the Publix deli.

Nobody voted on it, and nobody had to.

The Judge's widow came in the middle of the afternoon in a black dress she had put on in a hurry.

She went into the cooler, and she was in there for a long time.

When she came out she sat on the empty milk crate and took his place in the hand.

I gave her the tile that had been in his fist, which I had carried in my apron pocket all day.

She laid the double six on the table face up, and nobody said a word about the rules.

I went upstairs and opened my phone for the first time since five that morning.

It had 340 notifications, and I had not posted anything.

My cousin's stream was on it, saved as a clip.

Yosi had cut a minute from the morning and posted it.

The caption read, "LALO HAS A POWERPOINT FOR THE END OF THE WORLD."

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