The Big Blast

by Lister, Michael

  “The queer joint?” Ernie asked.

  I nodded.

  “Where’s that?” Orson asked.

  “In that shack on the dock out over Masalina Bayou.”

  “Oh. And it’s queer?”

  “Jimmy,” Ernie said, “I don’t think you realize how much you’ve changed since we knew you.”

  “Must not,” I said. “’Cause it doesn’t seem like I have to me.”

  “Really? Negro partner. Jap secretary. Living with a woman outside of wedlock. Fraternizing with fags.”

  “Fraternizing with friends.”

  “Why?”

  “I genuinely like Tommy and his place. It’s also one of the few places I can go with my Negro partner and Jap secretary and—”

  “The woman you’re living in sin with,” Orca said without looking up from the pile of clothes he was sorting through. He said it to be helpful. There was nothing sarcastic or malicious in his remark.

  “And her. My wife out of wedlock.”

  “Better count us out of this one, partner,” Ernie said.

  His reasons were ugly and unbecoming but I understood where they came from. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t have to.

  “It could’ve been a lot worse,” David Howell was saying.

  We were in the empty USO building—me and Lauren, Clip and Miki, Ernie and Orca, and now Howell.

  Ernie looked like he was about to go out for a night on the town, but Orca looked to be popping out of kids’ clothes—had in fact ripped the seams of the largest coat and pants he could find just to get them on.

  “Looks like all we lost was one victory ship, one train car, and two men,” he said.

  “And one brave, generous, kind girl,” Lauren added.

  “Yes. Sorry. Didn’t mean . . . And what you guys did here . . . Can you imagine if it had gone off inside here with a full house?”

  “The place was packed,” Lauren said.

  “Y’all saved a couple of hundred lives at least,” he said. “Most of them servicemen.”

  “Orson’s the real hero,” I said.

  “Yes he is,” Ernie added.

  “He certainly is,” Lauren said. “Took that bomb away from me as if it were nothing at all.”

  This last caused him to blush.

  “With the two y’all got—”

  “Not y’all,” I said. “Clip.”

  “I just meant . . . Sorry. With the two Clip got, the two we got, and the one who died in the train car explosion, I’d say there are between one and four still out there—including Demetri.”

  “Good,” Ernie said. “’Cause we’re hoping to find him before anyone else does.”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Lauren and I were in our bed, our naked bodies warm beneath several blankets.

  Tommy Dorsey’s “In the Blue of Evening” was playing almost desultorily.

  Like the night, the room was dark, lit only occasionally by the flickering fingers of distant night lightning.

  “I wasn’t sure we were ever gonna be like this again,” Lauren said. “Really didn’t see a way out of that one.”

  I didn’t say anything, just concentrated on not thinking about the alternate outcomes of tonight’s predicament.

  “Wonder if Ernie and Joan will ever get to do what we’re doing right now?” she said.

  “He disapproves of . . . well, of me,” I said. “Of the way I live, of the places I go and who I associate with.”

  “Surely you know most everyone does, darling,” she said. “Disapprove of you and me not being married. Of your relationship with Clip. Miki. Tommy. Mama Cora. Just for starters.”

  “Different when it’s a close friend,” I said. “At least one who used to be close. He’s supposed to . . .”

  “Accept you?”

  “Sure, but not just,” I said. “He’s supposed to trust me, to reevaluate his conditioned responses because it involves his friend.”

  She let out a little laugh.

  “What? Is that so much to ask?”

  “I’m afraid so, sweetheart. But I adore you for thinking it shouldn’t be.”

  “Makes me sad,” I said.

  “You’ve lost your friends in a way,” she said.

  She was right. I had. And it made me more sad than I could say, but the loss was nothing at all compared to what had been gained—genuine friendship with authentic, honorable people and a love the likes of which poetry can’t contain or even explain.

  In my dream, Ernie, Orson, and I were playing sandlot baseball after school on a seemingly endless North Florida spring day.

  Ernie was pitching. I was on second. Orca was at bat.

  Then something dissonant, something wrong, pushed its way into my unconscious.

  I woke to the sounds of Lauren whimpering.

  The covers were off and I was cold.

  “You having a bad dream?” I asked, reaching for her.

  She was out from beneath the covers too.

  And someone was on top of her.

  “Turn on light,” the disembodied voice in the darkness said.

  The voice belonged to a German male.

  I rolled the other way, reached over, and turned on the lamp.

  Blinking in the blinding light, it took me a moment to be able to see. When the blurry shapes finally came into focus, I saw something I wish I never had.

  Demetri, as naked as we were, on top of Lauren, his pistol pressed into her mouth.

  “You will watch while I make fuck on your girl,” he said. “Try anything and I blow back of her head off.”

  Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  I had never felt as vulnerable or as weak or as naked in my life.

  “Look at me,” I said to her.

  Unable to move her head because of the gun, she cut her eyes over toward me.

  “I love you. It’s going to be okay. Just keep looking at me.”

  I tried to think of what to say and do. There was no way I was going to lie here and let him rape Lauren beside me, even if it meant we would both die—and not just because he’d kill us anyway when he was done.

  His left hand was holding the gun pressed into Lauren’s mouth. His right was rubbing his flaccid penis, attempting to coax the uninspired organ into becoming the weapon he wanted it to be.

  I thought about what might disarm him the most, what my best chance against him might be.

  “Just keep looking at me,” I said. “Think of me while he does what he does to you. Okay? Just think of me.”

  Was that enough to make him think I wasn’t going to put up a fight? Was I a weak, one-armed, passive coward?

  He continued rubbing his limp genitals, leering at her bare breasts as he did.

  “You burn your woman or someone else do it for you?” he said.

  Like before he didn’t look at me, just continued to stare at the beautiful body of my beloved—the last thing he was ever going to see in this life.

  Certain he wasn’t looking, I gave Lauren a small nod and a look that said I was about to make my move.

  “Just keep looking at me, baby,” I said. “Don’t buck or thrust, just lie there and take it. It’s going to be okay. He’s got a little dick and he’s not going to be able to get it up anyway.”

  That got his attention.

  In the split second he turned his attention toward me, starting to pull the gun out of Lauren’s mouth presumably to shoot me, she bucked up and I rolled. Rolling into him and on top of her, the momentum carried us both off Lauren and crashing to the floor, the gun firing as we did.

  Lauren remained on the bed behind us and I couldn’t see if she had been shot or not.

  Had I gotten her killed? Was all this for nothing? Was everything?

  He still had possession of the pistol.

  With my one hand, I grabbed for it.

  We were two naked men wrestling for a gun on the floor, but I couldn’t afford to feel awkward or inhibited in any way.

  I had hold of the
gun, but so did he, and I couldn’t do anything with it, couldn’t gain any advantage.

  Then he brought his right hand up and grabbed with it too.

  My one arm was no match for his two.

  He began turning the pistol toward me, lifting it as he did.

  I tried with all my might, but it was no good.

  He was lifting the gun to shoot me in the face and I couldn’t stop it.

  God damn I hated being so fuckin’ weak and useless.

  I was going to die and then what was he going to do to Lauren—whether she was still alive or dead herself?

  I couldn’t bear the thought of that.

  Pulling my leg back, I kneed him in the nuts as hard as I could.

  He let out a wicked yelp but didn’t stop bringing the pistol up toward my face.

  Think. Try something else. Anything. Come on.

  It was no good. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  His finger was on the trigger now and the gun was nearly pointed at me.

  He squeezed off a round that just barely missed my neck. It shattered one of Lauren’s perfume bottles and ricocheted off the record player.

  The pistol kept turning despite my best efforts.

  The next round would rattle around my brainpan and unspringing my mortal coil.

  “I love you Lauren,” I said, not sure if she was conscious to hear me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the blue-black barrel of my revolver coming past me and down toward Demetri.

  Lauren was there, leaning against me, reaching down with the weapon.

  When she had the barrel in position, she pulled the trigger and shot Demetri in the face. Twice.

  “I love you too,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Samuel Wineberger and his wife Vivian lived in a plush, palatial home on the bay in the Cove.

  Before they grew old, retired, and returned to this place where he had grown up, they had been one of Hollywood’s most celebrated couples toward the end of the silent film era. Transitioning from stage to screen, he directed and she starred in hit after hit, but they had been unable to successfully make the transition into talking pictures.

  We were seated in their glassed-in Florida room overlooking their backyard and its fifty-yard drop-off into the bay.

  It was a sunny, clear morning, and the bay was brilliant in its brightness and beauty, calm and expansive. Though it was cold out, you couldn’t tell it from in this hothouse-like room.

  I was sleepy, having spent much of the night dealing with Demetri, and the sun and warmth weren’t helping. Following the cops and the cleanup, Lauren and I had checked into our old room at the Cove Hotel, where she was fast asleep right now.

  Sam, in silk pajamas and robe, was in a high-back wooden wheelchair with a wicker back, a blue blanket across his lap.

  Vivian floated around the room in a flowing white gown making us tea and seeing to her husband’s needs. Her hair and makeup were immaculate, her every move a performance.

  Ray and I had found their niece and some of Vivian’s jewelry she had taken a few years back and I had stayed in touch with them ever since.

  “Such a shame about Ray,” Sam said.

  “Such an awful shame,” Vivian echoed as she served me my tea in fine china.

  As if she had become what she had pretended to be for so long, all of Vivian’s expressions were greatly exaggerated—conveying enough emotion for the last row of the theater to see what her character was supposed to be feeling.

  “Now there was an interesting man who cut a classic figure,” Sam said. “I could’ve cast him in a crime picture and made it a hit and him a star.”

  I nodded.

  Having finished serving the tea, Vivian had floated over to the chair next to Sam’s wheelchair and glided into it, leaning forward and crossing her legs in the most dramatic way possible, and had her hand beneath her chin as she gazed with intensity at whoever was talking, her head bobbing back and forth between the two of us as if she were watching the slowest, but most interesting tennis match in history.

  “Lots of crime pictures bein’ made these days,” he said. “Cheap B pictures, but they got somethin’. Style. They got style for days.”

  “It’s pictures that bring me by to see you today,” I said.

  “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Missing girl I’m looking for told a friend she had been discovered by a location scout and a casting director who were here in town working on a new picture. You know anything about that?”

  “Here?”

  “Here?” Vivian said. “In Panama City?”

  She had a deep, throaty smoker’s voice with a good bit of Southern twang, as if your manly old aunt maid had burned her vocal chords with lots of hard booze and too many cigarettes. Like the guys said to have a face for radio, she definitely had a voice for silent pictures.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Could be,” Sam said. “Two likely scenarios. Lots of war pictures being made. Not full movies. Training. Propaganda. News reels. Could be something like that.”

  I nodded.

  “The other thing it could be . . . Since the war, a lot of European directors have come over and started working here. Some of them very experimental—with varying degrees of success—”

  “Very varying degrees of success,” Vivian said.

  “Some of them film on location as much as possible,” he said. “Avoid the studio sound stages any chance they get. Jean Renoir shot Swamp Water just a few hours from here in Georgia a couple of years back.”

  “With Walter Brennan and Dana Andrews,” Vivian said. “I just adore Dana. Adore him.”

  “That’s the picture she told her friend they had worked on,” I said.

  “Then it’s probably legit,” he said. “Unless they knew enough to lie to her. It’s easy enough to find out. Bring me the phone, Viv.”

  Made in 1941, Swamp Water was director Jean Renoir’s first American film. Starring Walter Brennan and Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, and Dana Andrews, it was produced at 20th Century Fox. Shot on location in the Okefenokee Swamp near Waycross, Georgia, the film, based on the Vereen Bell novel, is about a local boy, Ben (Dana Andrews), who encounters a fugitive Tom Keefer (Walter Brennan) from a murder charge while hunting in the Okefenokee Swamp. The two form a partnership in which Ben sells the animals hunted and trapped by both until townsfolk become suspicious.

  When Sam hung up the phone, the expression beneath his raised eyebrows was one of surprised amusement.

  “It’s legit,” he said. “They’re keeping it quiet, which is why I didn’t know about it yet, but they want to do a war picture here, using Tyndall Field, the naval section base, Wainwright Shipyard, and Camp Gordon Johnston near Carrabelle. I’ve set up a meeting for you with them this afternoon.”

  Chapter Forty

  When I got back to the office I found Miki distraught.

  She ran to me the moment I reached the top of the stairs.

  “They take Clip,” she said between sobs.

  “Who?”

  “Cop. Say he rape white woman last night. Say he gonna get what comin’ to him.”

  “Which cop?” I said. “Did he give his name?”

  “Clip say tell Jimmy that Dixon have him.”

  Freddie Dixon was a cop who rightly or wrongly believed Clip had had an affair with his wife a while back and had it in for him. At one point when I was still part of PCPD, Dixon along with his crooked cop buddy Gerald Whitfield thought they finally had Clip for stolen merchandise, which was just an excuse to get their hands on him. Their plan had been to get him into custody where some very bad things would befall him—after which he’d get shot trying to escape. I had stopped them and Clip and I had become fast friends.

  “Shit. How long ago was it?”

  “Half the hour so.”

  “Call Folsom. Tell him what’s going on. If you can’t get him, try Howell. Let them know I’m on my way over th
ere. I doubt Dixon took him to the station, but that’s where I’ll start.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Miki, look at me. It’s going to be okay. I’ll get him back. I need you to simmer down and make the calls, okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Calm down and concentrate on what we need to do to get him back. I need your help to do it.”

  “Miki better,” she said. “You go. Everything okay Jakey.”

  “Call Lauren after you talk to Folsom. She’s at the Cove Hotel. Let her know what’s going on. Ask her to help you calm down. When Ernie and Orson get here, fill them in and tell them to wait here for me.”

  To my surprise, Freddie Dixon had actually brought Clip to police headquarters and booked him.

  “It ain’t personal,” he was saying. “Not anymore.”

  The four of us were in Folsom’s office—Howell, Dixon, Folsom, and me.

  “I got him this time fair and square. I knew I would eventually. It was just a matter of givin’ him enough rope and lettin’ him do the rest. This is legit. I ain’t playin’ no angles or nothin’. Strictly by the book.”

  “When was this alleged to have happened?” I asked.

  Dixon looked at Folsom. “Do I have to answer the questions of some low-rent, one-armed peeper?”

  “When did she say it happened?” Folsom asked. “Unless you mind answering my questions too?”

  “Last night,” he said.

  “What time?” I asked.

  He ignored me.

  “What time?” Folsom asked.

  “No matter what time I say, he’s gonna say the nigger was with him at that time,” he said.

  “Actually,” Howell said, “Clip was with me part of the night. And helping to disarm a bomb at the USO the other part. We were dealing with some major attempted sabotage last night, or didn’t you hear?”

  “Yeah, I heard. I was out there helping like all the rest.”

  “What time?”

  “Around eleven.”

  “He was with me and a handful of other people, at least two of them war heroes, at the USO at that time,” Howell said.