two hours of contemplating Orville’s beard, David himself appeared almost obscenely clean-shaven. He was handsome, with smooth, regular features; I imagined he would be extremely photogenic. He greeted me in a black baseball cap, Hawaiian-style shirt with carp swimming on it, a pair of hip, high-tech sweatpants, and with a laidback ease and thoughtfulness that spoke of professionalism, success, and intelligence. He gave me a glass of water and we went out to talk on his deck.
‘We just got home from an overnight bus trip to Key Largo,’ he said. ‘It was great. You sleep all night, wake up and you’re there, then you dive all day and come home. I’d do it again anytime.’
‘I was just in Florida too,’ I said lamely, then came to an abrupt stop because I had completely forgotten the names of everyone I’d seen there and the places I’d been. Instead I told him about my hunt for Ray Hicks, and my meeting with Orville. He knew them both well, and later gave me a photocopy of a map drawn by Ray’s wife, Rosa, that showed the way out to their holler.*
‘It’s best to write ahead of time and ask for an audience,’ he said. ‘Ray and Rosa are the nicest people in the world, but they don’t have a lot of money. I like to bring them groceries – you know, canned goods, maybe a ham or a chicken, rice, that kind of thing. Ask what they need. Then you’ll have to fight Rosa to get her to stop cooking it all up to serve you. They’d both give you the shirts off their backs, even if that was all they had. And they don’t have much more.’
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