by Tim Dorsey
Inside, they examined themselves in the mirror to see how hammered they looked. Everything was checking out fine when they heard a weird noise coming from one of the stalls.
City and Country looked at each other puzzled and then back at the stall. Some kind of chaos inside, bumping around, then cursing. A leather bag hit the floor and the contents of a woman’s purse scattered under the stall door and onto the tiles of the restroom: lipstick, hairbrush, dispenser of contraceptive foam, car keys, cocaine vial.
More cursing.
The stall door opened and Billie Joe started to reach down for her belongings. When she saw City and Country, she stopped and stood up straight. She held a small lacquer tray and a steak knife she had gotten from the short-order kitchen, to chop at a Peruvian pebble. Her jeans were around her ankles and panties at her knees. Powder all over her nose and smeared on her left cheek. She was wreckage.
City and Country were stunned silent, but Billie Joe looked at them and yelled, “Youuuuu!”-accusation, verdict and sentence all in one syllable. She pointed the steak knife at them and charged, except her clothes were still around her legs and she was only able to manage a ridiculous waddle. City and Country had to hold each other up they were laughing so hard. Then Billie Joe ran out of steam and toppled forward on her face.
City and Country fell into hysterics. They resisted looking back at Billie Joe because it would only bust them up again; their sides were aching and they were having trouble getting air.
City finally looked back and her face changed. “Wait! What the hell is this!” A deep purple pool was spreading out from under Billie Joe. Country leaned forward and saw the tip of the steak knife sticking out the back of Billie Joe’s neck.
“Jesus!”
She flipped Billie Joe over, pulled the bloody knife out of her throat and flung it aside. When the blade came out, the severed jugular squirted all over Country, and she grabbed the woman’s neck trying to stop the bleeding. The more life leaked out of Billie Joe, the harder Country squeezed.
It was no use; blood was still getting out, and it was over in seconds.
Country stood and saw blood on her hands and wiped them on her jeans.
City was jumping up and down. “Oh my God! We’re dead!”
“What are you talking about?” shouted Country.
The pair did a quick once-around the restroom. Knife with bloody fingerprints under a toilet, more bloody fingerprints on the bruises on Billie Joe’s neck, and blood all over Country.
She began to shake. “We didn’t do anything!”
“Listen to me!” said City. “This is Alabama -I know about separate justice. She’s some rich bitch and we’re poor trash.”
“We didn’t do anything!”
City looked at the door and pointed. “Lock it!”
Country ran for the dead bolt and turned it fast, and City started scooping the contents back into Billie Joe’s purse.
“What are you doing?” asked Country.
“We gotta get outta the state. There’s some money here.”
“Neither of us has a car.”
“She does,” said City, holding up the set of keys with an Alfa Romeo fob. “There can’t be more than one Spider outside in the lot. Let’s just hope the guys didn’t drive.”
There was a pounding on the door, a woman’s voice. “I gotta pee!”
City opened the door fast and both of them knocked over the waiting woman as they ran out. They turned down a side hallway, away from the dance floor, and burst out the plywood back door and into the parking lot.
29
The mood at Hammerhead Ranch had gone sour.
The heat wave continued. The excitement of just arriving at the island motel had turned to the bitter drudgery of washing clothes at the island Laundromat.
There was a stifling funk that hung heavy like ozone. The place was getting listless yet jumpy. There was the feeling of the end game.
The wind had almost completely stopped. People languished in The Florida Room, drinking more, talking less. There was little movement except the tapping of fingers on tables. The bartender was getting divorced and stopped wiping glasses. People held their drinks up to the light, looking at water spots. Serge was at a table with a jeweler’s magnifying glass stuck in his eye, trying to sell a plain rock for ten thousand dollars to two members of the Olympic Committee.
C. C. Flag staggered into the bar with half his clothes torn off, welts up and down his torso, and a shredded gold sash hanging off his shoulder.
“What the hell happened to you?!” asked Zargoza.
“ Tampa Bay is a primitive place,” Flag said and wobbled to the bar.
A hesitant private investigator from Alabama named Paul checked into the motel and started snooping around, showing a picture of Art to people in the bar. Everyone dummied up. They grabbed his private eye badge and threw it on the roof.
Five Navy SEALs paddled ashore in a black raft and sprinted silently between the beach blankets and sand castles up to room four, hoping to surprise a band of arms dealers. The SEALs lobbed concussion grenades through the window, knocked down the door with a fiberglass truncheon, ran inside and neutralized the occupants in three point two seconds with the Vulcan nerve pinch. Except the arms dealers were in the next room, and the SEALs had subdued a vacationing family from Akron. A TV camera crew from Florida Cable News’s Cops and Robbers-Live! charged into the room after the SEALs to incriminate the Ohio residents in their underwear before millions of viewers.
Nobody in the bar gave a damn.
Vacation had turned into a grind. The sexual tension was gone. Exciting, mysterious strangers became tired, irritable neighbors with uninteresting secrets. Even City and Country were starting to look rough. They had taken to sitting at their regular corner table and openly smoking dope the whole day. They stared puzzled and angry at their joints. “What’s wrong with this shit? It doesn’t work anymore!”
Lenny wandered into the bar.
“Hey, asshole,” the bartender yelled at him. “You wanna get your two friends out of my bar and into some kind of twelve-step program?”
“What’s the matter?” asked Lenny.
“What’s the matter?! You’ve turned them into pot gnats!”
“Marijuana is nature’s medicine.”
“You got to get ’em out of here. They keep bugging me to hook ’em up with a better connection. They say your stuff’s no good. Quote: ‘It’s a bunch of shitty brown Mexican shake that doesn’t even get you high-and there’s too much lumber.’ Where did they learn to talk like that?”
“I don’t know why it doesn’t get them high.”
“Because they smoke it round the clock! They’re burnt out! It’s like the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers over there!”
“Have you asked them to cool it out?”
“They’re your monsters-you drive ’em back into the sea!”
The Florida Cable News weather report came on the television over the bar.
“Hey, that’s not Toto!” said someone at the bar.
He was right. There was a new dog on the set. Looked a lot like Toto, but the audience was too familiar with the real thing to be duped. The new weather dog was called Toto II, with no mention of what happened to Roman numeral one.
Toto II danced on a large storm-tracking map on the floor of the studio. Hurricane Rolando-berto had crossed the Caribbean Sea. It was supposed to hit the Yucatán but unexpectedly curved up into the Gulf of Mexico. Revised projections had it heading north and passing Tampa Bay in twenty-four hours, missing it by a hundred miles to the left and making landfall somewhere between Pensacola and New Orleans.
“Where’s that storm going now?” asked weatherman Guy Rockney. Toto II danced on the map in a little pirate outfit as a ceiling camera filmed the dog from overhead.
“Looks like it’s still heading north,” said Rockney, “so you can breathe easy, Tampa Bay.”
U p the coast of Florida and around the horn to Alabama,
Mississippi and Louisiana, a pre-hurricane custom was under way. Journalists flocked to the beach communities, facing out to sea, moving laterally along the coast like fiddler crabs as landfall predictions changed by the hour-trying not to be the guy who missed by two hundred miles last year and now served mashed potatoes with an ice cream scoop in the Action News 9 cafeteria. They stood on seawalls and piers and jetties and beaches, in bright raincoats, in even brighter sunshine, from Biloxi to Panama City.
A reporter in a hazard-orange raincoat stood on a wharf in Pascagoula. Her image filled the screen of the TV set anchored high on the wall of the crew lounge at MacDill Air Force Base on the south end of the Tampa peninsula. The crew of The Rapacious Reno had been deployed to Tampa for public relations duty, and they lay around the lounge drinking coffee, smoking and eating out of vending machines. They drew doodles and worked crosswords.
Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Lee “Southpaw” Barnes lit a Pall Mall. Milton “Bananas” Foster kept saying, “I got a baaaaaad feeling about this mission!”
Marilyn Sebastian was turned on as William “The Truth” Honeycutt beat the crud out of a vending machine whose corkscrew didn’t drop his Jujyfruit.
“Nine-letter word beginning with G for a colorless syrup used in food preservation and skin lotions,” said weather officer “Tiny” Baxter.
“Glycerine,” said Major Larry “Montana” Fletcher, and Baxter leaned over and jotted in his newspaper.
An oscillating siren went off. The crew jumped up and ran out the door and across the runway in their flight suits.
When they got inside the plane, most were stunned to see three dozen old men with white beards sitting on a long bench in the cargo bay, wearing parachutes and drinking beer.
“Jumpin’ Jesus!” said Barnes. “I’m not believin’ my motherfuckin’ eyes!”
“Easy now. Everything will be all right,” said Montana. “This has all been officially approved by headquarters. These are the Flying Hemingways.”
“The what?”
“You’ve heard of the Flying Elvises? Same thing, only different.”
“Those were professional skydivers who dressed like Elvis. But these guys-” They all turned to see the Look-Alikes chugging beer, bumping into each other, farting and belching in graded octaves like a pipe organ.
“These orders come from the top,” said Montana. “PR duty just like when we do flyovers for air shows, holidays and funerals of large political donors. Before we do recon on the hurricane, we’re supposed to fly over the beach and drop the Hemingways as the entertainment for something called the Proposition 213 Jamboree.”
“What’s that?”
“No idea. But the mayor of a place called Beverly Shores apparently has a lot of clout. He pulled the strings.”
Twenty minutes later, they were at ten thousand feet, almost directly over the Proposition 213 stage. The back gate of the Hercules dropped open. A green light in the cargo bay came on. The Hemingways struggled to their feet and clipped their static lines to an overhead cable. They were pressed together in a tight line, with only seconds to all get out of the plane once the signal was given. Jumpmaster Jethro Maddox stood by the open doorway and gave the high sign. The line began to move. He smacked each on the butt as they ran past and dove out of the plane. “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!…”
It was not a precision team, and by the sixth jumper their legs tangled and they started going down in a chain reaction. A few at the front made it out of the plane, but the rest of the line snarled, and the Look-Alikes toppled over on the floor into a big blob like a single brainless organism, a giant polyp of Papa-plasm. Honeycutt radioed Montana what was going on, and Montana pulled the nose of the Hercules up as high as he could, pouring the rest of the Hemingways out the back of the plane like a margarita.
They left the Hercules at all angles, on top of each other, arms and legs spindling. Down at the rally, spectators watched with binoculars. It looked like the jump the night before D day, when bad weather sprayed the pre-invasion force all over the countryside, everywhere but the target. Some Hemingways landed hundreds of yards out in the Gulf, others on the boulevard and in the shopping plazas. One chute snagged on a sailboat mast. Another Hemingway came down behind the walls of a N.O.W. retreat and was beaten severely. Jethro Maddox ended up hanging from the tallest palm tree on the grounds of Hammerhead Ranch. He pedaled his legs in the air until he was exhausted. Then he began consuming the six-pack that was stored in the pack usually reserved for the emergency chute. He fell asleep in his harness.
An hour later, The Rapacious Reno was somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. “You can’t fly for shit,” Barnes told Montana. “And another thing…”
Montana held a hand up for Barnes to be silent as weather officer Baxter called the pilot over the intercom. Montana turned the plane over to Barnes and joined Baxter at the weather console. They studied the instruments with concern.
Baxter looked up. “Sir, we have a change of direction in the storm.”
“Better call Miami,” said Montana. “Give ’em the news.”
D ue to global warming, El Niña, La Niña, and a host of end-of-the-millennium volcanic eruptions, mud slides and biblical floods, the National Hurricane Center in Miami was only mildly surprised that a catastrophic hurricane had caromed ninety degrees and was about to make landfall. Officials at the center got a late jump reacting, but quickly made up time and issued the warning. Along Florida ’s west coast, every major television and radio station put out the word that a force-four hurricane was hooking right into Tampa Bay.
Except one.
At Florida Cable News, things hadn’t gone so well during Toto II’s second day on the job. The dog had been dressed in the uniform of a Tampa Bay Lightning hockey player, and the crew had worked much of the morning trying to get it to hold the miniature hockey stick. Just before airtime, a stagehand wrapped a rubber band several times around the stick and Toto II’s right front paw.
Instead of doing the weather dance, Toto spent the better part of the segment trying to chew his leg off.
“He looks like he’s in a lot of pain,” said the anchorwoman.
“No, no, no!” weatherman Guy Rockney said with a chuckle. “He wants to play hockey! He’s trying to get a better grip on the stick.”
“His paw is turning blue!” said the woman. “Help him!”
“You’re overreacting,” said Rockney. He attempted to prop the dog up and make it dance like a marionette on top of the anchor desk.
“Guy, what’s the forecast?” said the annoyed male anchor, watching the production clock.
“Oh, everything will be fine. Sunny. Lots of sun,” Rockney said without looking up from Toto II, who finally bit Rockney between the thumb and forefinger.
“Owww! Dammit!” said Rockney, and he grabbed Toto II by the hair on the back of his neck and snapped his head back. Toto growled and yelped, and Rockney said “Fuck” on the air. He struggled with the dog and fell off his chair, and they both disappeared behind the anchor desk, where there was more growling and cursing. The anchorman dropped his face into his hands; the anchorwoman froze with her mouth open. The station’s switchboard lit up.
T hree dark government sedans raced in single file across the state on Interstate 4 toward Tampa Bay. The occupants wore suits, sunglasses. Stern faces, nobody spoke.
L enny and Serge made their standard supply run to Island Grocery in the afternoon, oblivious to the hurricane fear gripping the rest of the population.
“What’s happening?” said Lenny, standing in an aisle, looking at the empty shelves. “It’s like communism!”
Canned goods, bottled water, potato chips-all gone. Lenny whimpered when he saw the empty beer section.
“We better get moving,” said Serge. They drove to the mainland and hit three grocery stores, but the story was the same. They kept driving around.
“We’re in luck!” said Serge, pointing. “The video store’s still open.”
Le
nny hit the brakes and swung into the parking lot.
The place was empty, and the pair had their pick of movies. Serge grabbed Palmetto, Strip Tease, Out of Sight, The Mean Season, Ruby in Paradise, Body Heat, Some Like It Hot and Key Largo.
“This is great!” said Serge. “All Florida, from camp to classic.”
They jumped in Lenny’s Cadillac and headed back to the island. Nobody was going in their direction-everyone was coming the other way over the bridge, the cars in a solid line, standing still. People got out of their vehicles to see the cause of the holdup. Someone’s car had stalled at the foot of the bridge. Over the driver’s protests, six people pushed the vehicle off the road and it rolled down the embankment into the water. The driver yelled. A weeping woman held a swaddled infant on the shoulder of the causeway. The car was full of clothes and personal belongings that floated up in the passenger compartment as the water line rose in the car. Then just the top of the roof showed, and a bunch of bubbles, and it went under. The traffic resumed without a skipped note, indifferent to the stranded family.
“I smell panic,” said Serge. “These are different animals now. They’re starting to winnow out the weak at the fringe of the herd. We need to hurry or this could affect our snack situation.”
“Affirmative,” said Lenny, and he accelerated. They raced around to convenience stores, grabbing whatever was left, packs of cheese and crackers, Fiddle Faddle, fortune cookies.
They tooled along the Gulf Coast, bobbing their heads to the radio, riding the now.
Serge suddenly bolted up in his seat, and tremors made high-frequency waves in his cheeks. Spitfoam bubbled at the corners of his mouth.
“What’s wrong?” Lenny asked. Serge couldn’t answer, and Lenny pulled over and made an emergency stop on top of a stray cat.
Serge looked like he might be swallowing his tongue, so Lenny grabbed his head and started jimmying his clenched jaws with the car keys. Serge’s muscles began to uncoil and the spell soon passed. Lenny released.