by Tim Dorsey
C ity and Country could feel they were getting close.
They were eastbound, driving through the backroads of Florida without streetlights. The night wind was too cold and they had the convertible top up. They hadn’t seen another car in miles; Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska tape was in the stereo on low. State Road 16 was narrow and empty, and they rode high beams as they crossed girders over the St. Johns River at five A.M. Twelve miles later, they saw something bright and green in the distance that said they were out of the woods. The on-ramp sign for Interstate 95. They caught the highway below Jacksonville and headed south.
They soon passed the last St. Augustine exit. The stars were gone and the black sky was replaced with dark blue. By Palm Coast, daybreak was definitely on the way, and they crossed over to the seaside A1A highway. At a stoplight, the pair threw the latches; Country turned around and stood in her seat as she pushed the convertible top back. They were in twilight, and they couldn’t distinguish where ocean left off and sky began. They kept glancing left, and a thin red line soon defined the horizon.
When they hit Daytona, they drove right out on the sand. The early-bird beer-funnelers whistled and catcalled, and City and Country waved back. After the novelty of driving on sand wore off, City drove up Main Street. They parked across from the cemetery at Boot Hill Saloon. A hard-core biker hangout. They walked in and all heads turned. But the girls knew the score-places like this were harmless as long as nobody smelled fear, and the two strolled with reckless attitude to a pair of barstools. They ordered whiskey. It was seven A.M.
“Shit,” muttered an impressed biker three stools down, and turned back to a conversation with a hit man. City studied a photograph over the bar. Three smiling bikers with their arms over each other’s shoulders. Underneath was a plaque: “In memoriam. Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm. Killed by yuppies.”
The door opened and a flabby insurance type with an untucked polo shirt stood frozen in the doorway with a Tipper Gore wife. Both looked like deer in headlights-one of the moments where someone knows they’re in the wrong place, but they don’t know which is worse, running or sticking it out. They took hesitant steps forward, their feet crunching the peanut shells covering the floor, the only sound in the room. They stopped under the unlaundered bras and panties hanging from the ceiling. Fear stunk up the joint. Several bikers got off their stools. The couple changed their minds and ran.
But there was a difference between fearless and dumb…take the Georgia Tech theology student in a Hog’s Breath T-shirt and the English major from the University of Tennessee, who finished off an all-night drink fest by falling from their hotel balcony. However, their room was on the first floor, and they simply rolled on the lawn, got up, and walked to Boot Hill Saloon. The Georgia sophomore was Sammy Pedantic. The English major in the Volunteers letterman jacket was Joe Varsity, and he was telling Sammy about his thesis comparing the Styron-Mailer literary schism to the East-West rap feud.
“Mailer might do a drive-by?”
“He’s got the temperament.”
“But he can’t do this,” said Sammy, and he stuck a full longneck beer in his mouth and raised it in the air without hands and drained it. Then he opened his mouth, and the empty bottle fell and bounced off the bar.
Three Latin men in sharp suits came in the door, and the bikers picked up their beers and cleared out of the way. The three sat down next to Joe and Sammy, who were trying to balance small stacks of quarters on their noses.
City and Country were getting a little blitzed. They ordered more whiskey and smoked cigarettes like amateurs.
Soon the Latin men left the bar, and Joe and Sammy looked around the place and spotted the two women.
“Oh, no!” said City. “They’re coming over here!”
“Hi, girls! Mind if we join you?”
“Yes.”
Joe and Sammy sat down.
The guys talked nonstop for twenty minutes while the girls faked yawns and tapped their watches. “So that’s the deal,” said Joe. “These three Latin guys are paying us to drive their Lexus across the state, and they’re even throwing in a couple of motel rooms on the beach. We just need someone to drive our car. What d’ya say?”
City talked real slow and annoyed, like she was dealing with the simple. “Why don’t one of you drive the Lexus and the other drive your car?”
“Cuz then we can’t drink beer and party on the way over,” Sammy said like it was obvious. “It wouldn’t be a roadtrip.”
“Who were these guys with the Lexus?”
“Great guys!…” said Sammy. “What were their names?”
City looked out the side window at their Alfa Romeo. A police cruiser drove by slowly, then stopped and backed up.
“Please, you gotta come with us,” said Sammy.
The officer got out and started walking around the Alfa.
“On second thought, it’s not such a bad idea,” said City. “Where’s your car?”
“Right across the street.” Sammy pointed. “When can you leave?”
“How ’bout right now?”
13
The Diaz Boys had a big shipment of cocaine headed for Tampa Bay, and they decided to try one last time to make a drop at a rented home.
They sat down their newest mole couple, Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez, and told them about all the other couples they had placed in rented homes, only to screw up. The Diaz Boys let them know in no uncertain terms exactly what the score was.
“What’s the score?” said Mr. Ramirez.
“We just told you!”
Ramirez wasn’t really their name and they weren’t really married. They were Miguel Cruz and Maria Vasquez from Colombia, both in their late fifties, who had recently immigrated to the United States with green cards arranged by the Diaz Boys with hefty bribes. They posed as a married couple. To make the arrangement more credible and unassuming, they were accompanied by a sweet great-grandmother, who was actually Margarita de Cortez, the vicious Mata Hari of Venezuelan politics from the 1940s, who was rumored to have been making love to the finance minister when she stabbed him in the heart with the spike of a German kaiser helmet that he had begged her to wear to bed. But now she was just another harmless old lady in her eighties on Florida ’s Gulf Coast -Mrs. Edna Ploomfield, the live-in mother-in-law.
The Diaz Boys repeated what the penalty would be if there were any more mistakes-just in case there was any confusion. The Ramirezes nodded eagerly that they understood and that everything would be fine. Thank you for the opportunity-you won’t regret it. They shook hands and made pleasantries until they noticed Margarita de Cortez sitting silently off to the side. Everyone stopped talking and looked over at her.
“I need a smoke,” she said. “And a drink. And a man.”
M r. and Mrs. Ramirez moved into Calusa Pointe Tower Arms, unit 1193. They couldn’t have been more thrilled about living in the United States. They wanted to be part of the American Dream. They signed up for citizenship classes.
But above all else, Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez remembered what the Diaz Boys had said, and they kept to themselves and were gracious in all social situations. It came naturally. Their enthusiasm for being in the land of the free bubbled over, and they were exceedingly pleasant to all their neighbors, who reacted with surliness and sweeping expostulations. The Ramirezes couldn’t understand how people who had so much could be so bitter. But they figured it was just another facet of American culture they did not yet understand but would soon come to appreciate.
After a few months, the Ramirezes got the odd feeling that things had changed. Their neighbors’ normally crappy outlook had become one of suspicion and standoffishness. One day the Ramirezes were walking back to the unit with grocery sacks when they saw Mrs. Ploomfield standing in her nightgown just outside the door of unit 1193, pointing down the hall at one of their neighbors. “Yeah, you! I’m talking to you, motherfucker!…”
Mrs. Ramirez screamed and dropped her brown bag of vegetables. She leaped over
the zucchini squash and ran up the walkway.
Edna Ploomfield was still yelling down the hall at the neighbor as Mrs. Ramirez hustled her inside: “You’re dead! You hear me? Dead!”
Mr. Ramirez brought up the rear and bolted the door. The couple quivered and stared at Edna in disbelief.
“What are you doing?” yelled Mr. Ramirez. “Do you want to die?”
Mrs. Ploomfield spit on the floor with disdain and shuffled toward the kitchenette.
Everyone in Calusa Pointe knew Mrs. Ploomfield and they avoided her. Just the opposite in the bar next door at Hammerhead Ranch, where she made lots of friends. One of her drinking buddies was Guy Rockney, the weatherman for FCN, who owned a penthouse at Calusa Pointe.
Rockney told Ploomfield he had a problem. He had come up with this great idea at the station for Toto the Weather Dog. The station gave him a raise but also made him take care of the pooch, which was running and peeing all over the penthouse and chewing up his shoes. He tried everything. Books, videos, obedience school. No matter what he did, he just couldn’t get the dog to behave. Could Toto live with her? He’d pay.
“Of course,” she said. “I love animals.”
Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez returned to Calusa Pointe from the drugstore and found a small Chihuahua wearing a Florida Gators cheerleading outfit, pompoms tied to its paws, sitting quietly in the corner.
“Stay!” Mrs. Ploomfield commanded, and the dog stayed.
T he mayor of Beverly Shores was shrinking.
This much was confirmed when he was fingerprinted and photographed for attempted murder with a lawn dart, which was dropped to simple assault. The news vans converged on Calusa Pointe again. Malcolm Kefauver had lost at least an inch since the last news story. He was now only five foot two, and his clothes had become so baggy they were in style.
The judge told Malcolm he expected more from a mayor, even if it was just the smallest incorporation in three counties. In addition to the lecture, Malcolm got probation and a hundred hours of picking up litter on the beach, which he accomplished by attaching a lawn dart to the end of his cane.
Malcolm Kefauver was up for reelection. The city’s vote total each year averaged one eighty-eight. Elections at Beverly Shores were wonderful occasions. Rows of folding plastic chairs filled the community rooms of the condominiums, and red-white-and-blue banners covered the walls and the podiums like the cabooses of whistle-stop trains. There was always a strapping turnout at candidate forums because of the likelihood they would degrade into talk-show donnybrooks.
Kefauver approached the podium. He was running for mayor as a Republican. The mayor and the city council did little more than argue over trash pickup, pool hours and the weight limit of pets. This didn’t stop Kefauver from issuing a tirade against the intangibles tax, foreign aid and the cultural elite in Hollywood that was conducting a systematic campaign to undermine the God-fearing values that built the condominiums of Beverly Shores. The crowd applauded politely.
As the clapping died down, someone in back yelled, “What about your arrest, Manson!”
Someone else: “Yeah, Dillinger, will your criminal enterprise be part of your administration?”
Laughter and hooting.
“Lies!” retorted Kefauver. “The distortions of commies and fags!”
“What are you talking about? You hit Mr. Goldfarb in the butt with a lawn dart. He’s a retired Army major with ten grandkids!”
“That’s right!” another woman yelled. “And why did you try to evict my dog, Muffins?”
“Oh shut up!” replied another heckler. “Your dog’s a mangy bitch!”
“She is not!” the woman responded. “But your wife has four martinis with lunch, not including the flask in her purse.”
“What are you saying!”
“She’s a lush…and she swims out to troop ships!”
“Why you…!” The man started climbing over rows of folding chairs until others restrained him, and someone gaveled an emergency adjournment. Everyone decided definitely not to miss the next meeting.
Normally, Kefauver’s arrest would have ensured the election would be his personal Waterloo. However, the Democratic candidate was a woman named Gladys Hochenburger. At the next meeting, Kefauver attacked the Black Caucus in Congress and the U.S. military policy of not using its bombs more. Then Gladys took the podium. She shuffled papers and adjusted her reading glasses. She pointed at Kefauver and said, “This man’s an impostor! The real Malcolm Kefauver died in the middle of last term and has been replaced by a man from New York named Danny DeVito. That’s why his clothes don’t fit and he looks like he’s shrinking!”
The crowd started buzzing.
“Danny DeVito the actor?” someone yelled out.
“Who?” asked Gladys.
“The actor.”
“No,” said Gladys. “Danny DeVito the replicant. I heard about him during The X-Files. Agents broke in on a special frequency that only I could hear.”
Kefauver was back in the race.
But it would still be close. Despite Gladys’s interesting bearings, she immediately inherited the built-in Jesse Ventura constituency in every precinct as the yahoo/sabotage candidate.
Until now, reporters never considered covering the Beverly Shores campaign. With Malcolm and Gladys in the race, every network had a mobile transmitting van outside the polling station at the Calusa Pointe condominiums.
On election night, Gladys took the lead on early returns, and Florida Cable News broke in from coverage of the governor’s race. But as the absentee snowbird votes were tabulated, Malcolm pulled off a narrow, four-vote victory. When the TV camera lights went on, Malcolm pledged conciliation. “I will reach across the aisle in my administration for bipartisan cooperation to work for the common good of the people of this great city.”
After the speech, Malcolm Kefauver set about identifying exactly who among his neighbors had voted against him and how he would prepare his cold dish of revenge.
T he next morning at Calusa Pointe Tower Arms began with a hard knock on the front door of unit 1193.
A second firm knock. “I know you’re in there!”
Mrs. Ramirez opened the door and smiled. “It’s Mayor Kefauver, from 2193, right above us. How nice to see you, Mr. Kefauver! Congratulations on the election!”
“Knock off the bullshit. I know you voted against me. How dare you!”
“But…but…how do you know how we voted?” asked Mrs. Ramirez. “It’s supposed to be secret. The sanctity of the ballot box.”
“Sanctity, shmanctity,” said the mayor, stepping into the living room, uninvited. “Guess what? We peeked! We have to do things like that because you immigrants are sneaky. You think you can just fall off the banana boat and start voting in secret?”
“But that’s what they taught us in citizenship class. We would be regular Americans. We could vote and have constitutional rights and everything. We just couldn’t be president.”
“But we could be in the cabinet,” added Mr. Ramirez, “like the great Mr. Kissinger.”
“Save it for the next load of greaseballs!” interrupted the mayor. “You’re all a bunch of friggin’ wetbacks as far as I’m concerned, and we don’t want your kind here! I’m going to make your life a living hell until you…”
Mrs. Ramirez felt someone grab her from behind and shove her out of the way, and Edna Ploomfield stepped up to the mayor.
“Wetbacks? Greaseballs? You don’t even know your racist geography. Your slurs missed by a whole goddamn continent both times, you ignorant fuck!”
She gave him a fast, two-handed shove in the middle of his chest and he stumbled backward. Ploomfield advanced and stood up to his chest again.
“You wanna dance with someone, cocksucker?” She gave him another hard shove and he stumbled back again, too surprised to know what to do.
She shoved him again, and he stumbled again. On a bookshelf she saw the rocks glass of scotch she’d been drinking, and she grabbed it.
When the police arrived, Kefauver was sitting up holding his forehead and screaming about the psychotic old lady who attacked him. He reeked from the booze splashed on his face and shirt.
Edna Ploomfield hobbled to the door and a young policeman helped her by the arm. “Oh, my, my. Thank heavens you’re here, you nice officers,” she said in a delicate, creaking voice. “That terrible man threatened us. Ohhhh, I’m just a sweet little ol’ lady, and he was mean to me. He fell and hit his own head because he was so crazy and drunk…”
“You’re putting on an act, you old bag!”
“…just like that,” Ploomfield said, and pointed.
“We’ve heard enough,” said the sergeant in charge, and they handcuffed the mayor and took him away in a patrol car, but not before the TV crews arrived and pointed cameras in the back window and yelled in unison, “Why’d ya do it?”
T he Diaz Boys held an emergency meeting right after watching the mayor of Beverly Shores being driven off in a squad car on the nightly news. Tommy Diaz told Rafael and Pedro to take the shotguns, and he gave them a map to Calusa Pointe, unit 1193.
“How do you want it handled?” asked Rafael.
“Just knock on the door.”
“Then what?”
“Shoot whoever answers.”
14
Three weeks into December, the meteorologic tragicomedy known as El Niño produced two markedly abnormal conditions in the Lesser Antilles. The trade winds exceeded the annual average by five miles per hour, and the water temperature rose two degrees. The changes were imperceptible to the islanders living in the region. But they made the critical difference when the remnants of a barely organized and forgotten storm system limped into the area. Overnight, Rolando-berto roared back to life and came ashore on one of the Leeward Islands, where the residents did not possess a prescient dog, but instead relied upon a goat wearing an Ohio State sweater bestowed as a peace offering in 1977 by a shipwrecked alumnus who mistook the natives for cannibals.