by Tim Dorsey
The WC-130 Hercules made a loud, continuous hum as it flew southeast above the Atlantic. According to coordinates from the National Hurricane Center in Miami, the storm that had just ripped through Cape Verde would break the horizon in less than a half hour.
Baxter silently double- and triple-checked his weather charts with drafting tools. Pepe Miguelito’s lip quivered as he read another Dear John letter.
“I got a baaaaaaad feeling about this mission,” said Milton “Bananas” Foster. Then he began crying. “We’re all gonna die!”
Marilyn Sebastian shook Foster by the collar. “Be a man!” She slapped him, then kissed him hard.
Back in the cargo hold, Honeycutt skipped rope in his boxing trunks.
At zero seven hundred hours, the edge of Hurricane Rolando-berto began to rise out of the sea, larger and larger.
“Oh my God!” yelled Foster.
“Easy now,” said Montana. He adjusted the rudder to bring the course around east.
Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes glanced up from his latest copy of Skank. “You can’t fly for shit!”
As the plane reached the outer bands of the storm system, the wings began to shake. Montana ’s heart rate remained level as he deftly banked the plane left to minimize crosswinds. They entered clouds and the cockpit went blind. All instruments from here on. The drone from the engines and vibrations from the storm became deafening.
“Baxter?” Montana said into the microphone of his intercom headset.
“Go!” Baxter said into his own headset.
“Sebastian?”
“Go!”
“Barnes?”
“Fuck yourself.”
“Honeycutt?”
“Go!”
“Miguelito?”
“Go!”
“Foster?”
Whimpering.
Barnes turned around and smacked Foster with his rolled-up stroke magazine.
“Go!” said Foster.
Montana wrapped a scarf around his neck and adjusted his goggles. “Okay. This is it. Hold on.”
The plane banked back right and shook savagely. A forgotten coffee cup slid off a shelf and broke. The blind view out the cockpit darkened. The glass cover on the altimeter cracked. There was a spark, then flames from the weather console, but Baxter hit it quickly with a Class C fire extinguisher.
Montana raised his chin and spoke solemnly into the headset. “It has been a privilege flying with all of you.”
Then nobody spoke. The violent shaking of the fuselage seemed to go on forever.
When they had almost given up hope, there was a bright flash and the Hercules punched through the interior wall of the hurricane and into the calm, clear eye of Rolando-berto. A cheer went up in the cockpit. Baxter hugged a tearful Miguelito; Barnes hugged Foster. Sebastian unexpectedly found herself in Honeycutt’s arms. They looked deep into each other’s eyes, remembering that weekend in Baton Rouge. Marilyn’s eyebrows raised up in poignancy and she opened her mouth, but Honeycutt shook his head. “No, don’t say anything.” They let go and went back to their stations.
Montana radioed Miami with news of their success.
8
Way up north in the Gulf of Mexico, the very tip of Florida ’s panhandle meets the Alabama border on a remote barrier island named Perdido Key. In the middle of the island, right at the state line, is a ramshackle roadhouse built in 1962 called The Flora-Bama Lounge. It is an outpost of sorts-a peculiar, isolated place standing in relief against the bright, flat landscape of shore and ocean. It takes persistent driving and a good map to get to, and the people who make it there are not in a hurry to get anywhere else. An old peach windsock flaps over the roof to aid customers who arrive by parachute and seaplane.
On an uneventful day late in the year, at exactly noon, a burly old man with white hair and beard sat on the last barstool at the Gulf end of The Flora-Bama. He looked out the back door at the waves and laughing gulls. His name was Jethro Maddox, and he was on his eighth Bud.
Jethro’s tired eyes scanned the Redneck Riviera. “This is like Paris in the twenties,” he told the bartender, who was distracted by a TV tracking map showing a newly formed hurricane.
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated!” Jethro lifted his beer and drained it all at once and then looked at the can. “I have drunk you, beer, and I thank you. We are now one…”
Jethro smacked the empty can on the bar and burped with abandon. “There is no shame in a belch if it is the truth…” And he promptly toppled backward off his stool and disappeared from sight.
The bartender heard muttering from the direction of the floor-“Ouch! Galanos! I will kill you!”-and he leaned over the bar looking for Jethro. “Are you okay?”
Jethro stood and whisked off his sweater and fit his fishing cap back on his head. “I am fine,” he said and remounted the stool. “A man will hurt, but he must forget his hurt. The great DiMaggio played with hurt, and there was a grace when he struck out that others do not possess when they connect hard… We will drink to DiMaggio. Another cold one…”
As the bartender popped the top on another can, he heard a deep drone high above and stepped over to the window and looked up. “Must be a hurricane plane returning to Keesler.”
“Ah, brave aviators. They are a noble crew filled with the vigor of their youth,” said Jethro, “and they will never feel more alive and proud than when they face the knowledge of death.”
W e’re all gonna die!” screamed Bananas Foster in the cockpit of the WC-130 Hercules ten thousand feet over The Flora-Bama Lounge.
Nobody paid any attention. They were all reading books, writing letters or doing tedious chores on the boring return flight over the Gulf of Mexico. Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes scraped diligently with a quarter on an ancient scratch-and-sniff foldout in one of his magazines, but instead of an arousing bouquet from the southern female glands, all he got was a musty attic.
Sebastian and Honeycutt stared together out the lower windows in the cargo hold, tracing the shoreline with their eyes. They tried to identify the features of the Florida panhandle. Santa Rosa Island, Pensacola Bay, the Naval Air Station, Perdido Key. There was a scattering of cotton-puff clouds far below, throwing shadows on the ground, and they could make out the white wake of a shrimp boat in the Gulf. They could even see teeny-tiny cars driving along the coast, and they wondered where those people’s lives were headed.
A red Alfa Romeo convertible sped east along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico on Route 292, Free’s “All Right Now” blasting from the stereo. Two tall, athletic, college-age women looked up at the plane in the sky and wondered what was going on in those lives.
They were the kind of women who were sexy at a range of a quarter mile, and their loose hair blew and snapped in the wind with a wild coquettishness. They wore big T-shirts over bikinis, and their sunglasses were cheap and cool. They gave off wanton vibrations. The scene could have been from a devil-may-care, coming-of-age independent flick that takes the jury award at Cannes, or maybe a tragedy-strikes-good-kids-in-a-small-town made-for-TV movie that opens with Meredith Baxter Birney staring through drizzling rain on a windowpane, popping pills and wondering when it all started to go so horribly wrong.
The driver was Ingrid Praline, a twenty-one-year-old blonde from Alabama with Scandinavian blood, and in the passenger seat was LaToya Olsen, a military brat from the Bronx.
Ingrid’s hair and cheekbones recalled Ursula Andress in Dr. No. She often braided her hair into pigtails and wore denim bib overalls, and the giant Lolita package gave men hemorrhagic fever. LaToya favored a young Lena Horne; she had the face of an angel, especially the eyes, and she often kept her hair pulled back in a bun, but now it was down.
The two had most recently worked at a Piggly Wiggly in Tuscaloosa, where their boss was a spitting-mean little bumper car of a woman. She hated Ingrid and LaToya on sight because they had potential, and she gave them all of the most undesirable chores. The pair first met on rubber-glove d
uty corralling an errant bowel movement in the men’s room.
They immediately became inseparable. LaToya was the talkative one and Ingrid was the mental sponge. Ingrid was far from dumb, but she had grown up in a crippling parochial environment. Her mother was Olga Svjörlvladablatt, a hardworking third-generation Swedish immigrant, but her father was Jebediah “Jeb” (“Bo”) Praline, fifth-generation Jim Beam, and global knowledge was viewed in their home as a new strain of syphilis that the line of Praline men had yet to build up a natural resistance against.
In contrast, LaToya had seen it all. She had been everywhere as a Navy kid. Subic Bay in the Philippines; Rota, Spain; and Naples, Italy, before spending her teen years at an intelligence station near London, where she picked up her British accent. She talked a streak about the outside world, and Ingrid could never get enough.
That’s how the nicknames started. After a month, they stopped using their given names altogether. Instead, Ingrid always called LaToya “City,” and LaToya always called Ingrid “Country.”
“ Pensacola is actually older than St. Augustine, but it wasn’t a continuous settlement, so St. Augustine gets all the attention,” said City. “There’s a bar over on the mainland called Trader Jon’s. It’s a freakin’ aviation museum, but Trader is getting on in years and they may have to close it down. The customers are trying to save it…”
They passed a pile of shells outside an oyster shack and a man at the shoulder of the road using a tire iron to take out his frustration on a broken-down Pontiac Firebird. City called attention to the sea oats and boardwalks and dunes of sugar-white sand. “The sand is so white because it’s finely ground quartz.” They passed a “Welcome to Florida ” sign.
City pointed at the beach side of the road. “That’s The Flora-Bama Lounge, home of the Interstate Mullet Toss…”
A young man beat on his Firebird with a tire iron as a red Alfa Romeo blew by. He dropped the iron and began marching east along the beach highway on Perdido Key in a mixture of anger, confusion and fear.
It was the worst day of Art Tweed’s life.
Art had begun the day in Montgomery, Alabama, where he worked as an accountant for the state. His full name was Aristotle “Art” Tweed. He was from a rural family, and his parents had named him Aristotle in the hopes that it would imbue intelligence in the manner that “Biff” would not. His parents raised him good-natured, gullible and tragic, and he felt obligations to the community that were almost quaint in their rarity. He had grown tall and skinny with lots of freckles and a short mop of red hair that was a shocking orange shade more often found on puppets than people.
Art Tweed’s problems started that morning when the phone rang.
“Oncology Department, Montgomery Memorial Hospital. Is this Art Tweed?”
“Yep.”
“Just need to go over some lab results,” said a woman’s voice. “As a follow-up to your physician’s consultation, we received a second confirmation from the lab today that the neoplasm is indeed malignant and inoperable. Do you have any questions?”
Art stopped eating his Cap’n Crunch. “Neoplasm?”
“Tumor, pancreatic.”
“What?”
“This is Art Tweed, twenty-eight years old, correct?”
“Yeah, but-?”
“The Art Tweed who recently had tests at Montgomery Memorial?”
“That was just a routine physical for the state insurance pool.”
“You don’t know you have a tumor?”
“Tumor?”
“Oh my. The chart shows an initial consultation. You never discussed this in person with a doctor?”
“Nope.”
“Whoops,” said the woman. “I think I’ve just made a terrible mistake. It’s my first week on the job. I wasn’t supposed to say anything before you met for counseling with a physician.”
Art fell apart. He began yelling.
“Please calm down,” said the woman. “You’re making this very hard on me.”
“How long do I have?”
“Sir, if you’re not going to-”
“I’m the one with the tumor!”
“Well! Aren’t you the self-centered one! Everything is me, me, me.”
“How much time?”
The woman harrumphed. “Four weeks! I hope you choke on ’em!” And she hung up.
Art had been driving in the Pontiac ever since. No particular route or direction, just a three-hour anxiety meltdown behind the wheel watching his life before his eyes, wiggling at the end of a stick. He ended up at the Gulf of Mexico and made a left. He was finding it increasingly difficult to stay within his lane and freak out at the same time, and he was just about to pull over when the Firebird threw a rod on the Alabama side of Perdido Key.
He crossed the Florida state line on foot and saw a pay phone outside a tavern. He felt in his pocket but only came across paper money.
The tavern was a wooden building that appeared to be falling down and going up at the same time. Old and rickety, but with newer additions built on hodgepodge over the years, and the result looked like it was hammered together by enemies of the owner. Rip Van Winkle walked out the front door and climbed on a Harley. Art caught the door before it closed and went inside The Flora-Bama Lounge.
He spotted the bartender at the far end of the place and headed for him as he pulled ones from his wallet. Early Aerosmith-the good stuff-was on the juke-“Take me back to south Tallahassee…down cross the bridge to my sweet sassa-frassy…” Art told the bartender his car was history and he needed quarters for the phone.
The bartender was making change when Art noticed the only other person in the bar, a burly old man with white hair and beard, wearing a sweater and fishing cap. Art turned away to avoid conversation, but it was too late.
“You appear to be on a journey. I am on a journey, too. Sit and appreciate some alcohol with me and we will journey together.”
“What the hell’s he talking about?” Art asked the bartender.
The bartender shrugged and handed Art his change and a Bud. “It’s on him.”
The man slid his stool over to Art and held out a hand. “Name’s Jethro Maddox. A name is what a man makes of it, not what others may make of him. I sometimes write my name in my shorts-”
“Right, right,” Art said impatiently, and quickly shook the hand. He snatched his change off the bar and took a fast sip of beer. He put the can down and turned toward the door. Something made him hesitate. He decided he’d better have another sip for the road, and he reached back for the can. He took a second sip, paused, and started gulping.
“You remind me of my greener days, when I, too, had unquenchable appetites, or was that Gertrude Stein? It doesn’t matter. It was Paris in the spring and the wine made me burn with desire, and then I beat a mime with the bottle-”
“Please stop talking,” said Art.
Art then experienced an unusual rumble of emotion moving up his chest, and the next thing he knew, he was facedown on the bar sobbing like a baby.
“Cowards and men do not cry the same, and a man can cry with dignity and not confuse the two. But when women get going, they can sometimes throw ashtrays with the velocity of Sandy Koufax, and it is best to leave the house.”
“Will you shut up!”
“It is a woman that is causing you this pain, is it not? I was married to four, which is also the number of wisdom teeth I was separated from, and they caused me much less distress in the end.”
“Shut up! Just shut up!”
But Jethro Maddox did not shut up and Art did not stop crying until the fourth round of beer. Art didn’t want to say anything, but it just blurted out-about how he was dying and the engine blowing on his car, and then more sobbing.
“We are all dying,” replied Jethro. “I do not say that without compassion, for death is in a hurry with you. Find something worth living for and grip it by the neck with both hands… I have found something, and it has changed me forever.”
“Don’t tell me-Hemingway.”
“Of course, Hemingway. Touched my soul. Once I started reading, I could not stop until I finished it all.”
“I had to read it in school,” said Art. “The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea.”
“What?”
“His masterpieces.”
“No, no!” said Jethro, waving Art off as if he were talking foolishness. “I haven’t read a word of that stuff. I’m talking about the Hemingway biographies. I’ve read all twenty-three.”
“But if you never read him, how come you talk like-”
Jethro cut him off, reaching in his pants and producing a Berlitz pocket reference book: English-Hemingway/Hemingway-English.
“The Papa mystique made me question my existence,” said Jethro. “That is why I joined the Look-Alikes. They are my whole life now.”
“Look-Alikes?”
“We gather in Key West every year for the look-alike contest at the Hemingway Festival. There are something around three hundred of us, with a permanent colony living in trailers down on the island. A British entertainment consortium discovered us and signed us up. We tour five months a year.”
Jethro pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it to Art. “Jethro Maddox, assistant regional manager, Hemingways Unlimited Ltd… Live appearances, historic anniversaries, ground-breakings, movie extras, children’s birthdays.”
“That’s an old card. We don’t do the birthdays anymore since last time when a couple of the guys threw up in the kiddie pool and on the bunnies.”
Something on the television caught the bartender’s attention and he turned up the volume. A newsman appeared on the screen, talking dramatically into a weatherproof microphone as he walked along a beach.
“…This is Florida Cable News correspondent Blaine Crease reporting to you from the Cape Verde Islands, where the latest hurricane spawned during this treacherous season has dealt a devastating blow to the simple people who inhabit this remote atoll…”