by Tim Dorsey
The camera panned with Blaine as he moved through the village. He came upon some stilts without a hut on top. A campfire burned in front of it, and a small animal the size of a Cornish game hen turned on a makeshift rotisserie.
“…The destruction and the hardship is so severe that the residents have been reduced to cooking their own pet dogs!…”
The people sitting around the campfire behind Blaine couldn’t have looked happier.
When the report ended, Jethro Maddox stood and picked up a ratty canvas bag. “It’s time we got going. This is a moveable feast.”
But Art was still immobilized by intermittent sobbing.
“We’ll never get to Kilimanjaro with that attitude.” Jethro grabbed him under an armpit and coaxed him off the stool. He led Art to the parking lot and got him into the passenger seat of his blue Malibu, then went to the driver’s side and climbed in, and they began heading east across the panhandle on Highway 98.
They entered Okaloosa County, “ Florida ’s Finest Beaches,” and drove through Fort Walton and Destin. Recent storms had taken bites all up the coast. Some homes were still set back high and safe with wide beaches; elsewhere, waves lapped the stilts. They entered Walton County, “The Best Beaches in Florida,” and drove through the movie-set town of Seaside, featured in The Truman Show. They entered Bay County, “ Florida ’s Most Beautiful Beaches,” and came to Panama City, spring break territory. Jethro eyed the motel balconies. “Life has a cruel way of taking the youngest and the brightest.” The balconies were enclosed in bars and cages to prevent the brightest from falling on their heads.
They continued east. Fighter jets buzzed high above Tyndall Air Force Base. They hit Gulf County, no motto. The waterfront housing was spare and humble as they approached Port St. Joe. They stopped at the Indian Pass Trading Post near Cape San Blas and ate shellfish in Apalachicola, down on the elbow knot under Florida ’s panhandle.
In the restaurant, Art spoke for the first time since The Flora-Bama. “Where are we going?”
“It is not the destination but the journey.”
Art stared sadly at him.
“Okay, we’re going to Tampa. I have a gig with the Look-Alikes.”
I t had all the makings of a Girl Power roadtrip, “Daytona or Bust.”
Steppenwolf was on the stereo as City and Country headed out of Apalachicola after a seafood lunch.
“If this were the early 1800s, we’d be in the third-largest cotton port on the Gulf,” City told Country. “The bridge and half the things in town are named after Dr. John Gorrie, the first person to figure out how to make ice cubes.”
After Apalachicola, erosion had its way with the highway. There was no beach, and the waves hit the side of the road and sprayed cars. Some sections of road had collapsed in the sea and been repacked with new tar. There was no shoulder. If the wheels went out of the lane, they rolled into the water.
City drove with one hand, then the other, pulling her T-shirt off over her head and revealing a purple bikini top. She put on a tennis visor. In the passenger seat, Country slouched way down and stuck her feet up on the dash. She pushed a floppy hippie hat down over her long hair. She had a white tank top from a Jacksonville radio station and white shorts, and she watched the road over the top of raspberry-tinted Janis Joplin glasses perched at the end of her nose.
They stopped for gas and cheddar popcorn.
“I taught my Rottweiler Chinese,” the Miami man ahead of them at the cash register told his friend.
“Get outta here.”
“No lie. You know how everyone in Dade is buying vicious dogs because of crime? I read where burglars are giving the dogs commands, because everybody uses the same ones-sit, stay, heel-and houses are cleaned out while expensive pit bulls and German shepherds stand there stupid.”
“Why Chinese?”
“Can’t use Spanish. Half the burglars in Miami are bilingual.”
“How do you say sit in Chinese?”
“I’m not gonna tell you!”
Back on the road, City and Country talked bad romance.
“Remember that one guy you thought was Mr. Right because he drove up for your date in an expensive Lincoln?” asked Country. “Then he took you cruising back and forth across campus for three hours and activated those low-rider shock absorbers that bounced the front wheels two feet off the pavement until it nearly detached your retinas.”
“Very funny,” said City. “Okay, remember that guy who came to pick you up with an entirely new haircut?”
Country stopped laughing and cringed. Shaved into the side of her date’s head: “Ingrid,” with a heart and a dagger through it. He’d seemed normal enough when he asked her out-then he arrived with that crazy shit carved in his skull. “How do ya like it?” he asked. Country plotzed in the doorway.
And their date still lay ahead. A dinner so painfully uncomfortable for Country that everything tasted like packing peanuts. Then an evening at the 4-H fair. Country returned home at midnight, quickly locked the door and threw a giant stuffed animal across the apartment.
“Nice panda,” said City.
“Shut up,” said Country.
The red Alfa Romeo sailed through a yellow light in Perry and kept going east.
T he traffic light in Perry turned red, stopping a blue Malibu.
Jethro Maddox checked his roadmap, then stuck it back in the visor. “When you took vacations as a small child, did you ever play the license-plate game?”
Art didn’t respond. The light turned green and Jethro made a right onto U.S. 19.
“I now enjoy a similar game when I am on the road-Pick the Fugitive,” Jethro continued. “It works very well in Florida. Anyplace you are on the highway, there must be a hundred fugitives come through a day… You study the people in the other vehicles and try to determine who is on the lam.”
Art couldn’t help but look around at the traffic, and Jethro joined him.
Cars full of suitcases and colorful rafts, with “Heart of Dixie” license plates, Florida Gators wheel covers and Fob James for Governor bumper stickers. There was a truckload of fruit pickers riding in back with a load of cantaloupe and marijuana; a retired couple from Newark muling stolen gems; a cold-call bauxite salesman with Michigan fraud warrants, driving a station wagon eaten up by harsh winters in Saginaw. Three runaway teens from Texarkana in a hot Taurus; the deposed president of Paraguay in a Chevy with bad transmission; and an ex-KGB agent stranded in Florida during the Soviet collapse who was now a freelance troubleshooter for the Broward County Democratic Committee.
“I pick that one,” said Jethro. He pointed at a van with a faded Molly Hatchet mural.
Inside the van were two sour-smelling men-a couple of open beers and loaded pistols on the greasy upholstery between them.
“I’ll bet the discussion in that van has just drifted into speculation about how much cash liquor stores keep on hand,” said Jethro.
“…About five hundred dollars just before the night drop,” the van’s passenger told the driver.
“I have seen it with alarming frequency,” Jethro told Art. “It is a well-worn path: The Downward Spiral into Paradise. They all follow the same internal riffraff gyroscope and drag their traveling cavalcade of dumbness across the Florida state line for a final stand that only ends in crime tape and headlines…”
“…Maybe six hundred bucks on the weekend,” said the van’s driver.
Jethro grabbed a day-old newspaper off the floorboard and handed it to Art. Strong-arm robbery. Exploitation of the elderly. Church funds missing. Handicapped woman raped. Four-year-old bludgeoned to death by boyfriend while mother went to buy crack.
Art became troubled. He looked up from the paper and resumed examining the nature of the traffic around him. He realized he had spent far too much time in the small pond; he never knew the outside world was so upsetting. His small-town values and obligations to the community kicked in. The knowledge that he would soon die gave Art a chance to be selfless
and do something positive for the world before he left.
“Have you considered my advice?” asked Jethro. “Have you thought about something that moves you? Something to focus your energies?”
Art had. He became obsessed with the number of bullies he saw.
He decided to kill one of them.
9
Zargoza waited ten minutes at the glass front door with the “Sorry, we’re closed” sign. He daydreamed and gazed at the drawbridge over the viridian sailboat channel. A gold Dodge Viper rolled into the gravel parking lot of B. F. Skinner Taxidermy.
“What are you doing here so early?” the driver asked Zargoza as he got out of the car.
“I need a repair job, B. F.” He pointed to the stuffed hammerhead shark sticking out the back of his pickup truck. The end of one of the shark’s eye pods was snapped and dangling.
“Damn college kids,” said Zargoza. “One shimmied up the thing last night and lost his balance and grabbed for something on the way down. Fucked up my shark. Kid landed on his neck, went to the emergency room. Guess who he’s gonna sue.”
“It just ain’t right,” said Skinner, unlocking the door. He hit switches near the entrance and fluorescent tubes flickered on in sequence and filled the large room with unnatural light. The taxidermy shop was an open studio with a high ceiling. The walls were white, and there was a row of generous transom windows just under the ceiling. Only a blond pine desk near the door and long, neat work shelves in the back. The minimalism set off the trophy fish. Finished jobs covered the walls. The fish still curing hung by their tails from a ceiling rack running down the center of the studio.
“Damn fine work,” said Zargoza, looking at a sailfish, king tarpon and hammerhead shark hanging in the middle of the room, almost completely dry. He admired the sail-the iridescent rainbowing in the ultramarine ridges-and the silver scaling of the tarpon. Zargoza walked up and touched the shark tentatively, but it was still tacky.
“That’s a great hammerhead,” said Zargoza. “I’ll double whatever you’re getting for it.”
Skinner rummaged through a mess of yellow papers and mail on his desk. He looked up. “I don’t know who that’s for. I’ll have to check with Jeff. He must have come in over the weekend and done them.”
“Jeff sure has improved since you took him on,” said Zargoza. “This is some of the best work I’ve ever seen… And these eyes-they’re so lifelike. It’s almost like the fish knew he was doomed.”
Zargoza walked around the tarpon. “I like what he did with bodies, too, full musculature. Lumpy, but in a menacing way, like a boa constrictor after it’s swallowed something.”
Zargoza squatted down and stuck his face under the hammerhead to admire further.
Skinner was opening a bank statement and almost impaled his hand with the letter opener when Zargoza screamed. He looked up and saw Zargoza on the ground, trembling and unable to speak, pointing up at the recessed mouth of the hammerhead. Inside the shark’s mouth was another mouth, a human mouth.
T he coconut telegraph running through the Gulf Coast ’s criminal subculture came alive.
Sidney Spittle was enjoying a morning beer at The Wharf Rat when word swept through the bar about the three regulars found taxidermied alive over at B. F. Skinner’s. His hands shook, and a sweat broke out at his temples. He got up and made it to the pay phone by the pool table, where he dropped his quarter and it rolled under a jukebox. He retrieved another from his pocket and used two shaking hands to get it into the slot, and he dialed.
“Baby, I’m at The Wharf Rat. Something bad’s happened. No, not now, not here. In an hour…” Sid stopped and looked around. He turned his back to the pool room and whispered.
“…I love you. Be careful,” and he hung up. He scanned the room again and left briskly through the screen door in the back of the bar.
A customer sitting at a table next to the screen door had his nose in a 1952 Life magazine. When Spittle went by, the customer stuck the magazine under his arm and followed Sid out the door.
As the screen slammed shut, Zargoza and his traveling goon squad skidded to a stop in the parking lot out front.
The bartender got his cocaine six steps below Zargoza and the Diaz Boys, and he wanted to score points. He also wanted to avoid the unspoken penalty of later being found to have withheld information. Upon hearing about the dead car thieves ten minutes earlier, he immediately phoned in a tip to Zargoza that the three had been bragging about five million dollars the night before and tipping everyone in sight like John Gotti. They had been hanging out with another regular, and the guy was back this morning, acting peculiar-he only knew his first name, Sid.
“Where is he?” Zargoza shouted as he crashed through the front door of The Wharf Rat.
The bartender pointed at the back door. “Just left.”
They ran out the back and saw Sidney Spittle and another driver pulling onto Gulf Boulevard. They sprinted around front to Zargoza’s German sedan.
It was a slow-motion O. J. chase down the barrier islands of the Gulf Coast. Serge had retrieved the scorched Chrysler in Ybor City after dealing with the car thieves, and he drove under the speed limit in the right lane. Two cars back in the left lane was Team Zargoza. Neither was aware of the other and neither wanted to make a move on Spittle until they saw him with the briefcase.
They took a bridge to the mainland and drove across the Pinellas Peninsula. They caught the Gandy Bridge over the bay to Tampa and followed the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway downtown. Took nearly an hour, everyone stressed going so slow hanging back from Spittle.
Sid parked in front of the bus station, looked around and went inside. Zargoza parked a block away, Serge at the corner.
Spittle took a chair with his back to the wall and pretended to read a travel brochure. He peeked over the top and scoped the place. So far so good. He got up and walked around for a more thorough recon, checking out the facilities. An old scale, your weight and lucky lottery number, twenty-five cents. A vending machine dispensing artificial stimulants, artificial depressants and temporary tattoos. A schedule board, arrivals, departures. Western Union, for the broke and the shameless, to renew old friendships with the endearing three-A.M. phone prostration for five hundred dollars. Out on the loading platform, thick with diesel fumes, a bus from Richmond idled and someone in uniform was flinging sawdust on a Night Train regurgitation. Sid took a seat again in the station and decided to wait and watch. The terminal reminded him of visiting day at the state prison. The chronic inability to master life hung in the air like a toxic mist. Something about the manner of travel. Good news comes to Tampa rarely and by divine intervention, but bad news arrives every day on the bus. The luggage definition was casually regarded: gunnysacks, laundry bins, pillowcases, Glad bags and liquor cartons. Woody Guthrie made them sound like romantic troubadours over the radio, but in person the image was a bit too jarring for Sid to burst into hobo songs.
Two Tampa cops came in the front door and walked slowly down the rows of molded plastic chairs, comparing waiting passengers with mug shots of Serge A. Storms. Various fugitives began to fidget and perspire in their seats. The stress got the best of a young work-farm escapee with bushy hair and an acoustic guitar. He jumped up and was grabbed immediately. He tried to put up a fight with the instrument, but the cops easily took it away and smashed it like balsa wood to a smattering of applause. They led him off in cuffs. The clock on the wall continued ticking.
A half hour later, Sid was confident the coast was clear. He got up and walked to the lockers. He scanned the station a last time before opening number seventeen and removing a metal briefcase.
When Sid turned back around, he saw a man in a chair on the other side of the station staring at him over the top of a newspaper. The man quickly looked back down. A hot flash of dread surged through Sid and he had to focus hard to walk as if each leg weighed two hundred pounds. He made it to a chair and sat down next to a girl reading a Sixteen magazine with Leonardo on the cove
r. He set the briefcase on the floor next to his feet. He was still on the other side of the terminal, but he had a clear view of the man with the newspaper. The man looked at Sid again over the top of his paper and back down quickly. Sid then noticed there was a whole damn row of men peeking over newspapers.
Sid’s heartbeat shook his whole body. He and the men furtively watched each other for five minutes. Sid suddenly grabbed the briefcase and raced for the bus station’s exit onto Polk Street. Zargoza and his goons threw their newspapers in the air, pulled guns and ran after him.
There was a yellow Checker cab at the curb, and Sid clutched the briefcase to his chest and literally dove through the open back window.
The cabbie turned around. “Never seen that before.”
“Get me out of here!” yelled Sid.
“Sure thing.”
The cab patched out from the curb, and Sid looked out the back window at Zargoza and the goons standing in the street, shaking their fists at the cab and shouting.
Sid turned back around, slumped in the seat and let out a deep breath of relief. “Take me to the airport.”
“You got it,” said Serge, and he turned on the meter.
B ack inside the bus station, everyone was in Florida mode-here we go again!-hitting the deck when the goons pulled their guns and started hurtling through the terminal.
As the cab peeled away and the men stood yelling in the street, the waif named Patty Bodine stopped reading her magazine article about Leonardo Di Caprio. She picked up a second, identical metal briefcase at her feet and calmly strolled out the exit doors on the other side of the bus station.
S erge had Sidney Spittle’s undivided attention.
Sid was chained up around the armpits and elbows. Another chain wrapped tightly around his hips and knees. Each chain was extended loosely and fastened in opposite directions so that Sid hung like a hammock. He almost looked comfortable.
There wasn’t any challenge to the interrogation. In the first minute, Spittle was ready to confess to the Lindbergh kidnapping. He told Serge everything about the money, about making the switch at the bus station with his girlfriend, Patty, and about their planned rendezvous later that night.