by N. M. Kelby
“I don’t understand, son,” he says.
A bolt of lightning strikes nearby. For a moment, Jesus is illuminated—his crown-of-thorn scars, the haunted sad eyes. He seems more vulnerable, smaller than Jimmy Ray imagines him to be, but there is blood splattered everywhere—across his face, his bare chest, the shirt wrapped around his waist, and the machete.
“Let’s take a ride,” Jesus says. “Don’t forget to bring your harmonica.”
Behind Lucky’s RV Round-Up, the beached body of Sam the Gator, former University of Florida football star, rocks back and forth in the waves. Trot’s cell phone lies next to it, ringing.
As does Trot. His blood mixes with rain, saltwater.
Chapter 33
The biggest problem with the Nancy Drew “Girl Sleuth” books is that the legions of little girls who read them grew up to be responsible intelligent women who somehow, in the face of unexpected peril, believe that all you need is pluck.
Luckily, at the age of sixteen, Dagmar discovered Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
So she’s at The Dream Café looking for Uncle Joe’s gun. She always keeps it in her top drawer, just in case she needs it. It’s a Jimmy Cagney tough guy snub-nosed Colt Classic .38.
“It’s a short man’s gun,” Uncle Joe used to say. “Looks like it means business, even if you don’t.”
But she can’t find it. It was in her desk two days ago. It’s always in her desk. She remembers seeing it last when Jimmy Ray and Jesus came for Happy Hour. She showed it to them as part of the tour. “My bodyguard,” she called it.
“You still got that thing?” Jimmy Ray said.
“Stylish,” said Jesus.
That’s the very last time she saw it.
Shit, she thinks.
Just then Bernie knocks on the office door and opens it without waiting for an answer. “Thought you’d like to know we’re sold out,” she says. It’s half an hour before the first show. Bernie is dressed like a peacock, with a huge plume of feathers and an iridescent G-string. Her red hair is piled on top of her head. She is Las Vegas beautiful.
This year’s New Year’s Eve theme is Moulin Rouge—big and glitzy. One hundred dollars per couple for the early bird show. A hundred fifty after 9 P.M. Sold out means about $5,000 net for the first show alone.
Dagmar should be ecstatic, but isn’t. She’s too worried. “Great,” she says, but doesn’t look up. She’s got to find that gun. She pulls out the top file drawer, shakes it. Papers and files fall into a heap. The office is a mess.
“Anything I can do?” Bernie asks.
“Jimmy Ray call?”
Bernie shakes her head. Her peacock feathers catch the light. Seem to throw tiny rainbows. “Haven’t heard from him since the wake.
“It’s nice your ex isn’t dead, don’t you think?”
Dagmar gives Bernie a look that reminds her of a chow she once had to have put down. “Sorry,” Bernie says and closes the door gently behind her.
Dagmar picks up the phone and calls Jimmy Ray again. Still no answer. It’s the fourth time in an hour. This isn’t good. She starts to call Trot when Bernie opens the door again. Looks sheepish.
“Can I ask a favor?”
“Hurry up,” Dagmar says. From the tone of her voice the answer feels like no—no matter what the favor is. So Bernie takes a deep breath, straightens the peacock feathers over her breasts. “Well, here’s the deal,” she says and then pauses. She’s trying to find the right words.
Dagmar taps her watch. “Half an hour to showtime.”
“Right. Well, I know how you don’t like boyfriends hanging around, but since the bouncer quit—”
“The bouncer quit?”
“Yesterday. Got a better offer in Miami.”
“Why doesn’t anybody tell me?”
“I left a note just in case you noticed he wasn’t here. I figured you’d notice, though. I mean he is like a four-hundred-pound Samoan—”
“Is there a point to this?” Dagmar is hands-on-hips angry, mostly with herself.
“Well, my boyfriend would like to be the bouncer for tonight—”
“No.”
“But.”
“You know the rules about boyfriends.”
“But—”
The door opens wider. Preacher, the trucker from Christmas, the one who traded the Vietnamese prayer for his breakfast, stands next to Bernie.
Bernie is blushing. Shrugs.
Dagmar is certainly surprised. She did not expect this at all.
Preacher is dressed in a tuxedo. He’s an odd combination of handsome and menacing. In his large manicured hands he’s holding a florist’s box with an old-fashioned orchid corsage inside. The tag reads “To: Bernadette.”
Jeez, Dagmar thinks.
“I’m sorry to barge in Mrs.,” he says. “I don’t want to break any rules. If you want me to pay for both shows, I will.”
Not dating guests is another rule, Dagmar wants to say, but Bernie has a lot of loyal fans. Doesn’t want to lose her.
Still, she thinks, rules are rules.
“Bernie,” Dagmar says in that strained way she has, but before she can say anything else, the blushing woman dressed in peacock feathers pulls her aside.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she whispers quickly, “but the rest of the girls don’t know Preacher was a guest. And he’s got a good heart—and a good heart is hard to find.”
She’s nearly pleading. She’s in love, Dagmar thinks.
Amazingly, Preacher seems to be blushing, too. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to cause any problems,” he says. Sounds sheepish, looks hulking—it’s all very incongruous.
“Jeez,” Dagmar says, giving in. “All right. Preacher, we don’t get a lot of trouble here. Mostly we get couples, especially on New Year’s Eve. So just fit in. Don’t let anybody touch the girls—that’s your main concern.”
“Yes’m.”
“We’ll work out the money later.”
“I don’t need—”
“Well, you’ll take it, just in case something happens. I want you to fill out an application form, too. You need to be on staff and covered by insurance—even if it’s just for one night.”
“Yes’m.”
“Bernie, you make sure Preacher gets what he needs.”
Then Dagmar turns back to her desk. Picks up the phone again.
“Mrs.?” Preacher interrupts. “Can I just ask you one thing?”
Dagmar taps her watch again. “Twenty-five minutes before showtime.”
“Sorry,” he says. “It’s just . . . could you call me Carl? That’s my given name. ‘Preacher’ is just something the guys call me.”
That Buddha heart, Dagmar thinks, there it is again. Jeez. Well, at least somebody has one.
“Carl’s a nice name,” she says.
“It was my father’s.”
“Glad to hear it. That’s nice. Now, Carl get out of here. Take Bernie with you.”
He takes Bernie’s hand and they’re both goofy, beaming.
Lovesick, Dagmar thinks. “Back to work,” she says. “Or I’ll fire both your asses.”
When the door closes behind them, Dagmar dials Jimmy Ray again. With Jesus missing, she didn’t want to leave him alone, but he insisted. “I’m just old, not helpless,” he told her. Still, she made him lock the doors. But now the phone rings without answer. Shit.
She slams down the receiver just as Bernie runs back into the office and kisses her on the cheek. “Thanks,” Bernie whispers.
“Get to work,” Dagmar says, as gruff as she can muster. Love, she thinks, what a waste of time. Then she calls Trot’s cell. He doesn’t answer either.
“Where in the name of hell are you guys?”
It’s clear she’s going to have to find them, even without a gun.
Just call me Nancy Drew, she thinks—and doesn’t like the sound of that at all.
Chapter 34
“Do you know any polkas?” Jesus asks. This is not exactly the q
uestion Jimmy Ray expects. “I make it a point as a professional to know a little bit of everything,” he says. “But I’m no Frankie Yankovic.”
The two men are driving the American Dream down the narrow dirt road that leads to what was once Pettit’s Alligator farm, although Jesus doesn’t know that. He just knows it’s the main road in town, and it leads out toward the peninsula he saw earlier—and it’s deserted. Deserted is a good quality in a road.
“I love Yankovic,” Jesus says, as if they’re just out for a drive. “A lot of people don’t know that he isn’t Polish at all.”
This is more than Jimmy Ray ever wanted or expected to know about America’s Polka King.
“Can you sing me a little?” Jesus asks.
Jimmy Ray gives him an incredulous look. “Sing you a little polka? You brought me out here in this storm to sing polka songs?”
“Well, no. But I think it would make the experience a little more pleasant for us both.”
“You’re fixing to kill me, but first you want a musical interlude?”
Jesus turns to Jimmy Ray, looks sheepish. “Well, you didn’t have to bring your harmonica, just because I told you to.”
“You had a machete.”
“I was just holding it,” Jesus shrugs. “Wasn’t trying to scare you.”
When he says this he no longer looks menacing, just tired and dirty. Looks like Jimmy Ray’s friend again—just a little bit more lost, and a little less harmless. Jimmy Ray softens.
That’s some kind of crazy you got going on, he thinks and can’t imagine the struggle inside the man’s head.
“Well,” Jimmy Ray says, “no musician can resist a willing audience.”
Jesus smiles. Jimmy Ray takes the harmonica and riffs a classic blues-based two-step beat. “Roll out the barrel,” he growls. “You gots to roll out that little barrel baby ’cause I’m your handyman.”
Unfortunately, the polka loses a lot in translation.
When they finally arrive at the end of the road, Jesus guns the engine. What little gas the Dream has left in it propels it through the passion fruit flower archway. Then it stalls.
In the clearing sits the ghost house.
“Shoot,” Jimmy Ray says, amazed.
The electrical storm is raging around them. White-capped waves surround the small house. The gigantic gator grin, an entrance like no other, rocks in the high wind.
“What’s this?” Jesus asks.
“A miracle,” Jimmy Ray says.
At that moment, on the dirt road that connects Whale Harbor to the interstate and the rest of the world, Dagmar is officially going twice the posted speed limit. The rain is sheeting down, makes the road fluid around her. The Mercedes is well designed, able to go 100 mph on the Autobahn.
This, however, is not the Autobahn.
Going 50 mph she hydroplanes but has the presence of mind to take her foot off the gas and downshift. The small convertible spins like a bottle in the center of the road. The car is heavy so it doesn’t flip.
Lucky, she thinks right before her head hits the steering wheel.
Leon is also feeling lucky, but not entirely happy about it. He’s sitting alone in the parking lot of the Round-Up in his mandarin orange 1975 El Dorado looking at himself in the rearview mirror. “Rancid Creamsicle. That’s what I look like. A big friggin’ rancid Creamsicle.” The shrink-wrapped money is in the trunk. Bob the Round-Up Cowboy is wantonly tossing his lasso in the blinding rain.
Life is good. Leon knows he should be happy. He has every reason to be happy. If he leaves right now, he can be in Miami in three hours. He can rent a room at one of those pink hotels and drink imported beer. Maybe even watch wrestling on the pay-per-view channel. With a big bag of shrink-wrapped cash, you can even eat the macadamia nuts from the tiny locked refrigerator. Life, at the moment, is filled with possibilities. There really is nothing to keep Leon in Whale Harbor anymore. No women. No family. He can sell Grammy Lettie’s house—since there really is a house to sell now. Sell Lucky’s. Start a new life. And he knows he can, and should, do this because as soon as Trot discovers that there was a big bag of money taped to the bottom of the Posture-Perfect, he’s going to be pissed—and that’s never good.
So Leon knows what he really needs to do is put the car in reverse, back out of Lucky’s parking lot, and never look back. He turns the key in the ignition. The windshield wipers slap on. The headlights waver in the rain. He checks the rearview mirror again.
“I still look like a friggin’ rancid Creamsicle.” Then he throws it in reverse. But instead of pulling away, he idles. The engine rumbles, bucks.
That kid is missing.
And so is Dr. Ricky Jesus.
And the money has to belong to that Levi couple. They owned the Dream. They have to be dead.
These are not my problems, he tells himself, and the engine whines.
Then, unfortunately, he thinks about all the people who came to him when he was Bee-Jesus. They all wanted him to save them, but he couldn’t. Never could save anybody, he thinks. Not Miss Pearl, the Amazing One-Ton Wonder. Not Grandma Lettie. Not even my own boy, Cal.
When he thinks of his son, Leon remembers that awful look of panic on Cal’s sweet face as the water pulled him down. The memory feels so real, Leon can’t catch his breath; feels as if he’s drowning in it.
Not even myself, he thinks. I can’t even save myself. And he feels beyond sorrow, all tapped out. So Leon pullsÊout of the parking lot and starts down the long dirt road that used to be paved, used to have a sign that welcomed visitors to Whale Harbor. He heads in the blinding rain toward the interstate and the world beyond. No reason to stay, every reason to leave. Time to start over. Get a new life.
But then, about a mile down the road, he sees Dagmar, bruised and bleeding, waving him down in the sheeting rain. Her tiny sea green convertible blocks the road. He has to stop. So he does. He opens the car door to let her in. He plans to explain that he’s leaving, starting over. There’s nothing left for me here anymore, he wants to say.
But the dome light makes her face seem even more beautiful. Soft as magnolias.
“That Jesus guy got Jimmy Ray,” she says.
She’s dripping all over the mandarin orange leather of the Pimp Daddy Caddy. “I’m pretty sure of it. I think he’s going to kill him.”
That’s when Leon notices it. He can’t believe he never noticed it before. In the soft moon of the dome light, Dagmar’s eyes—they’re Cal’s eyes with those tiny specks of green and gold.
Our son, he thinks. Then leans over and kisses her hard.
Dagmar’s stunned. So is Leon.
“Let’s go kick some psycho butt,” he says and throws the Pimp Daddy Caddy into reverse.
For once in her life, Dagmar is speechless.
Chapter 35
Bleeding to death is not an unpleasant experience, except for that moment of sheer panic when you realize it’s going to happen, and you’re helpless to stop it, and you don’t want to die so your heart races, beats against the bone of your chest, and you’d like to scream but you can’t.
Other than that, it’s really quite a lovely way to go.
Of course, as the blood leaves your hands and feet the cold becomes difficult. But then, luckily, when the blood slips away from the brain you lose consciousness. Then die.
Except for the mess, it’s all rather pleasant.
“You’re not giving up this easy, Trot Jeeter.”
The sweet voice pulls him back into life. He opens his eyes.
“That’s good,” Carlotta says. “You look at me. You stay awake.”
She’s elevated Trot’s head and applied pressure so that the bleeding has slowed. “They trained all the dealers at the casino in first aid,” she says. “I know what I’m doing. Just do what I tell you. Just look at me. Nowhere else.”
Even if I die, this is my lucky day, he thinks.
“Can you hear me? Can you wink at me?”
Definitely lucky.
The rain is coming down horizontal. Hard. Stings the skin. The smell of dead fish is overwhelming. The waves crash over them. Carlotta holds Trot close. She has to keep him awake and his head above water. Has to keep him focused, alert. Has to make sure they both don’t drown.
She’s trying hard not to panic, but it’s difficult. Sam’s lifeless body is rocking back and forth next to her. It’s half on shore, half still afloat. Every now and then, a wave carries the dead boy’s hand and it brushes up against her back. Or her leg. Or arm.
It’s so cold, lifeless. She wants to scream, but can’t. Can’t upset Trot. Can’t risk it. Can’t move him either. His skin is already clammy. Blood seems to be everywhere. Pressure must be maintained—she knows that.
When the dead boy’s hand comes to rest on her thigh, his dull fat fingers, she takes a sharp breath. Feels the acid in her stomach rise. Focuses on Trot.
“You’ll be fine,” she says in that voice that’s an odd mix of steel and silk. “I called for backup on your cell. They’ll be here soon.”
With each wave, Sam’s fingers seem to move back and forth over her thigh. Caress it. It’s difficult not to scream.
“You got to hold on,” she says to Trot. “Hold on tight.”
He wants to smile, but can’t manage it. Things are murky. He’s not sure what happened. All he remembers is that Jesus had the boy. He doesn’t remember drawing his gun. Doesn’t remember Jesus saying, “You believe in salvation?” Doesn’t remember the machete, or Carlotta finding him.
A wave crashes over them both and makes her cough so hard she nearly loses her grip on him. “You’re lucky I like the beach,” she says.
“You make me want cotton candy,” Trot whispers.
Or at least thinks he does.
Chapter 36
Jesus never could resist a good miracle “Miracle house? That should be interesting,” he says, as if he’s just another tourist planning his day. “I’ll clean up and we’ll take a quick look. It’ll be fun.”
Jimmy Ray says nothing. He stares out the window into the night and can see the whitecaps of high waves illuminated by lightning as they overwhelm the small house. He picks up the harmonica and plays an old Underground Railroad song. “Wade in the Water”—“God is gonna trouble the water.”