Wrecker

“You call yourself Wrecker, even though you’re not one—and tonight you find a boat crashed on a reef, just like in the olden times.”

Suzanne points out the irony that someone who is not a wreck salvager—but who wishes he were—actually happened upon a wreck. Her belief that this is funny does not take into account the fact that Wrecker is much more like his distant salvager forbears than his present-day family. Suzanne’s comment foreshadows later events, when Wrecker will actually dive several times to salvage materials from wrecks and hide materials within a wreck.

“Before the COVID lockdown, three or four of the ocean liners would arrive every day, unloading thousands and thousands of tourists. They stalked through Old Town like an army of loudly dressed zombies, loading up on rum drinks and cheap T-shirts.”

The hyperbolic phrase “thousands and thousands” stresses the overwhelming number of people arriving on the cruise ships; the simile comparing them to “loudly dressed zombies” conveys how out of place they seem—they are visually jarring in their loud clothing and move like a herd of monsters eager to devour. The aggressive connotation of the verb “stalk” portray the tourists as an invading force whose objective is not to appreciate the culture of the area but to “[load] up on rum drinks and cheap T-shirts.” Their approach is the opposite of What It Means to Belong to a Place as they do not care about the negative impacts they are having on Key West’s Old Town.