The Shark-Infested Custard

by Charles Willeford

  “What happens to me if I decided to stay in Miami?”

  “Speaking for the company, Hank, nothing could make me any happier! We won’t be able to find a man half as good as you are to replace you, and as long as you’re here this is one territory that Julie and I don’t have to worry about. For the company, it would be a great thing. Fine. We could quit worrying about Miami—for about five years, anyway. But you’re a person, Hank.”

  Tom jumped down, crossed to the bed, sat beside me, and put his right arm around my shoulders. He dropped his voice a full octave.

  “Let me level with you, Hank. I like you, you horny fucking bastard! You know that, don’t you?” I nodded.

  “You like me, too, don’t you, Hank? Haven’t we had a few good times together?”

  “You know what I think of you, Tom.”

  “Right. So let me tell you a story. You’ve met Johnny Maldon, I know. He was at the last Atlanta meeting, and you’ve probably talked to him at other conventions, or seen him anyway. Has Julie ever talked to you about Johnny?”

  “No,” I lied. “Julie doesn’t talk about his other salesmen, unless they’ve come up with a good idea.”

  “Good. Johnny hasn’t come up with a good idea in ten years, but eighteen years ago he was a damned good man. He was never as good as you, but at least he got out and hustled. Awhile ago, when I told you that you were Lee’s highest paid salesman, I didn’t tell you all of it. How much did you make when you were first hired?”

  “Nine thousand, and a car.”

  “That’s what Johnny still makes now, Hank! Nine thousand a year and a car. He hasn’t had a raise in seven years, and he’ll never have another. But Johnny is really our highest paid salesman, Hank, because he’s really making nine thousand dollars an hour—the one hour, if it’s that much, he works for the company during an entire year.”

  Tom shook his head and signed.

  “So let’s say that you stay in Miami, Hank. For the next four or five years, fine. No problems. None for you, none for the company. But every year, inflation. If Johnny can’t live on nine thousand a year in Alabama today, do you think you’ll be able to survive in Miami on twenty-two thousand, five years from now? In Miami? You’ll be bitter, and you’ll be unhappy, and you won’t blame yourself—no, you’ll blame the company. And once you start blaming the company, you’ll slack off. You’ll work one day a week instead of three or four, and Miami sales will go down. Old Ned Lee won’t be around in five years to save your ass, either. Next year, if he keeps his promise, Ned will give up the presidency and confine himself to handling the gavel at monthly board meetings as Chairman of the Board. You’ll be thirty-seven years old, and you’ll be out on the street, Hank. It’s human nature. And even if you continue to do a good job, and I have a hunch that you won’t let any bitterness influence your actual working habits, it won’t help you. You aren’t that kind of man, Hank. But all the same, the other company executives will wonder about you. And why? Because it’s unAmerican to refuse a promotion, that’s why. They’ll think—right or wrong—that you haven’t got any ambition. And if they think you haven’t got any ambition, the next thing they’ll think is that no matter how good your sales are in Miami—from Key West to Palm Beach—they should be even better, much better—no matter how hard you’re actually working.”

  “Jesus, Tom,” I said, “a lot of men keep one job for life…”

  “Of course they do, Hank. But they aren’t exactly ambitious men, are they?”

  “But if they’re happy men, what the hell?”

  “Hank, if you’re still only making twenty-two grand a year five years from now, I’ll guarantee you that you’ll be one unhappy sonofabitch in Miami. Believe me. How about one more drink, and then I’ve got to run you out of here. I’ve got to get a few hours sleep before my midnight plane.”

  “I’ll pass on the drink, Tom.”

  “Okay. Don’t make your decision now. Think about it—the decision’s yours all the way, and I sure as hell don’t want to influence you any. Either way you decide is fine with me. I may be your boss, but I’m a better friend than I am a boss, and I think you know that. So either way, I’ll back you. Lee Labs is twice as big as it was ten years ago, but we still believe in the personal not the personnel approach to employee relationships. And if the company ever forgets that employees are people, I’m getting out myself and they can stick my seventy thousand dollars a year up their ass!”

  He got to his feet, and so did I. I put the glass down on the desk.

  “I’ll be at the Coronado Beach in San Juan for the next week, or maybe ten days. Gonzales is the only Catholic in the company, and he wants to hire a black man for the Leeward islands. What do you think about that, Hank?”

  “I didn’t know that Gonzales was our only Catholic.”

  “Ned Lee hates Catholics. I thought you knew that. But we had to have a linguist in the Caribbean, and Gonzales speaks Spanish, French, and even Haitian patois. Besides, Gonzales is a native Puerto Rican with a B.S. from Tufts.”

  “I like Gonzales,” I said, “I also think it’s a good idea to hire a few black detail men—especially if you keep them in the Caribbean.”

  “I agree with you, Hank. In fact, if you take the midwest district, we’re going to ask you to recruit a black detail man for Detroit. The guy we’ve got in Detroit now is afraid to drive a car into some of the sections in his territory.”

  I started for the door, and Tom grabbed my left elbow with a thumb and forefinger pincers grip.

  “So you’ve got a week, Hank. Call me collect in Puerto Rico at the Coronado Beach when you’ve decided what you want to do.”

  “I can tell you right now, Tom…”

  “I don’t want to know now! I want you to think about it, and call me later.” “Right.”

  When I got downstairs I had a double-shot of brandy in the Dobbs House lounge, and then I left the terminal. Tom had manipulated me with a heavy hand. If he hadn’t been so tired, and he had looked exhausted, he would have handled the matter much more subtly instead of beating me over the head. Nevertheless, almost half of everything he said was true. I would still get raises in Miami. If I didn’t there were other pharmaceutical companies that would hire me at a much higher salary in another year or so. So if Lee didn’t pay me what I was entitled to, I would get it elsewhere. But in seven or eight years—not five—I really would be frozen and unable to quit—like Johnny Maldon in Tuscaloosa. In ten years time, however, I hoped to own some rental property, maybe a small apartment house. All I had to do was save my money, but it is hard to save any money in Miami. I would have to work out a regular saving plan of some kind. And soon.

  Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, the sun was still shining at eight p.m. I crossed the heavy traffic to the parking garage, and rode the elevator to the top floor. I unlocked my car, glanced at the back seat, and heard, before I accepted the physical evidence, the ticking of an alarm clock. There were four red-and-white wires wrapped around three sticks of dynamite, and these wires were attached to the alarm clock.

  Without slamming the door, I turned and started running down the exit ramp, and I didn’t stop running until I reached the ground floor.

  19

  On the ground floor, panting, I leaned with both hands against a concrete post and vomited a thin stream of sour bile. My stomach convulsed a few more times, but by breathing heavily through my mouth, I managed to regain control of my body and check my desire for further flight. My shirt was soaked through, and my seersucker suit jacket was damp beneath the arms. I removed my jacket, and wiped my streaming eyes and face with my shirt sleeve.

  I had left my car key, on the ring with all of my other keys, in the car door. Cars raced noisily into the parking garage seeking, but not finding, a space on the first floor before they took the ramp on up to the second or the third or fourth. Because I could ride the elevator, I never wasted my time looking for a space on the bottom floor when I came to the airport. I drove to the to
p floor immediately, where there were almost always empty spaces. I tried to remember what the makes of the other cars up there were, but I couldn’t. I also wondered if Mr. Wright was on the top floor, lurking madly about to exult over the explosion. I also wondered what the time was on the alarm clock attached to the dynamite in my back seat.

  I looked at my watch. It was eight-twenty-two. If Wright had a sense of order, he would set the explosion for eight-thirty or nine p.m.—if he had a sense of order. A man crazy enough to put dynamite in another man’s car was unlikely to have a sense of anything. My mind wasn’t functioning too well either, or I wouldn’t have taken a chance. But I took the chance, hoping, as I rode the elevator to the top floor that I would encounter Mr. Wright. If I did, I would disarm him, feed him his pistol, and then throw the sonofabitch over the rail from the fourth floor and watch him splatter when he hit the asphalt below.

  I approached my car. The door was still hanging open. I retrieved my keys, glanced into the back seat, and noticed that the red paper on one of the sticks of dynamite was loose and flapping. I looked a little closer. The exposed end of the dynamite stick resembled a piece of sawed wood. I folded the driver’s seat down over the wheel, and gingerly fingered the tissue paper, unfolding it back a little more. It was merely red tissue paper wrapped loosely around a short length of broomstick. So were the other two “sticks.” The wires attached to the alarm clock didn’t do anything either. There was no battery, and there were no dynamite caps in the three sticks of wood. The bomb was a fake. I threw the wrapped wooden sticks and the alarm clock on the concrete floor and got into the car.

  I opened the glove compartment and discovered that my .38 pistol was missing.

  There was no way, that I could figure, for Mr. Wright to know—in advance—that I was coming to the airport, unless, of course, he had a tap on my phone. But even so—and a tap was unlikely—he still couldn’t know that I was going to park in this particular garage on the top floor. There are literally hundreds of places to park at the Miami airport, and the constant vehicle traffic is unbelievable. Somehow, though, Wright had followed me, watched me, and planted the fake explosive device after stealing my pistol. How, I wondered, did he happen to have a key that fitted my Galaxie? And why plant a phony bomb? Why not a real one?

  The man was insane, that was all. He had to be. What he was doing, as nearly as I could determine logically, was playing around with, telling me, in one curious move after another, that he would kill me any time he wanted to, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. The evil bastard was enjoying himself, and laughing at my antics.

  Somehow, he was able to follow me about the city like a damned ghost, and he was able to get into my car every time I left it. He was probably close by now, watching me, even though I couldn’t see him. I shivered. On the off chance (or on-chance) that he might have planted a real bomb under the hood this time instead of a Whiz-Bang, I checked under the hood, looked beneath the car, and rummaged around in the trunk. None of my samples was missing, nor had he ripped open any of the sealed cardboard boxes full of drugs in the trunk.

  I sat in the front seat, closed the door, turned on the engine and air-conditioning and smoked a cigarette. I was bone-tired. With two bad scares that day, and what with the additional pressure from Tom Davies, my body was running out of adrenaline.

  20

  By the time I finished the cigarette, I had a plan. A stupid plan, maybe, but I was going to try it anyway. But first I had to eat something—the hell with my diet—I needed all the strength I could muster.

  I pulled into the Pigskin Bar-B-Que on LeJeune, and ordered two pork barbecue sandwiches and a double chocolate milkshake. It was the first milkshake I had had in two years, and I had forgotten how good they were. I felt much better after eating, and although I wasn’t too optimistic about succeeding with my hastily conceived plan, the fact that I was going to do something to counter Mr. Wright instead of just waiting to see what would happen next gave me a feeling of well-being.

  Now, instead of worrying about his uncanny ability to track me through the crowded city, like some wily, city-wise Natty Bumppo, I began to worry about the possibility of losing him.

  It was dark when I left the Drive-in. I took the Airport Expressway to Miami Beach, hugging the outside lane all the way without driving any faster than forty miles per hour. I didn’t want to lose the bastard; I wanted to find him by making it as easy as I could for him to trail me.

  In Miami Beach I cruised slowly down Arthur Godfrey Road, turned in to the side street behind the Double X Adult Theater and parked in the tiny parking lot. The old guy who gave me the parking stub asked me if I was going to the Double X Theater, and when I told him I was he reminded me to have the girl at the box office stamp and validate my stub before I came back for my car.

  “Otherwise, buddy,” he said grumpily, “it’ll cost you a buck an hour to park here. This ain’t no regular lot, you know, it’s for movie patrons.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I’ve been here before.”

  There were two films playing. I had seen both of them with Larry when they played at the Kendall mini-theater a few weeks back. The features were A Hard Man’s Good to Find and Coming Attractions, and they were both one-hour length films. That gave me about two hours to see if my plan would work. I took the tire iron out of the trunk, and wrapped it in the oily pink towel I also kept in the trunk.

  I gave the Cuban woman in the box office four dollars for admission. She looked sharply at the folded pink towel, and sniffed disdainfully, but that didn’t bother me. She probably had a low opinion of all the patrons of the Double X anyway.

  I found a seat, and watched a couple of naked blondes massage each other to rock music on the screen for about ten minutes, while I smoked a cigarette and got used to the darkness. There were about thirty people scattered about in the audience. Most of them were men, but there were two white-haired old ladies sitting together, and a couple of younger women—with their dates or husbands—who giggled a lot.

  I left my seat and went to the lobby. I didn’t see Wright in the audience, but I sensed, nevertheless, that he was somewhere about, or knew that I was in the theater. A man stood at the combination candy-and-porno glass counter. In addition to candy and popcorn, there was a wide selection of porno devices and still photos in the glass case. I waited until the man bought a box of popcorn, a Mounds bar, and a French tickler and went into the auditorium before I bought a package of gum from the girl behind the counter. I chewed two sticks in the empty lobby for a minute or so, and entered the men’s room when I was sure that the counter girl was watching me.

  The window in the crummy little toilet was about four feet above the wash basin. It was three feet wide, triple-paned, and about eighteen inches high. I climbed up on the wash basin, unlatched the window and let it fall back inside against the wall. Then I unhooked the screen, and pushed it outside. The screen fell, clattering, onto the asphalt pavement of the parking lot. I could look out, but the old attendant was at the other end of the lot and he hadn’t, apparently, heard the screen fall. The drop from the window to the ground outside was about ten feet, which was a safe enough fall if a man slid his body out belly down from the window, and then dropped with his fingers from the ledge.

  I took a sheet of the brown blot-don’t-rub paper from the container by the sink, and printed “OUT OF ORDER” on it with my ballpoint pen. I had to go over the block letters several times to make it readable on the brown paper. I stuck the improvised sign on the outside of the door to the toilet with chewing gum, and then locked myself inside the cubicle. There was at least a foot and a half of space below the closed door, and beneath the side panel separating the toilet from the urinal. I stood precariously on the seat and crouched down to hide my upper body. There was a tiny screw-hole in the metal side panel, and I could see through it with one eye. I could watch a man standing at the urinal, and I would also be able to get a quick glimpse of anyone who came in through t
he door.

  It was hot in the john. The smelly latrine, unlike the rest of the smelly theater, was not airconditioned, and the slight exertion of climbing onto the wash basin and opening the window had opened my pores. Straight ahead, there was just enough space at the door hinge for me to see the mottled mirror above the wash basin, but not the basin itself. Crouching there, hot, uncomfortable, sweating, with my legs becoming increasingly cramped by the strained position I was in, I felt like a damned fool.

  I clutched the wrapped tire iron in my right hand, and resigned myself to a long wait. I would wait out the full two hours, regardless of the discomfort. Sooner or later, Wright would discover that I was missing from the audience, and he would find out that I had come into the john. Perhaps he knew already. When he came in to check, and noticed that the window was open, I would jump him. Such was my simple plan, but the longer I crouched there the dumber it seemed to be.

  A young Latin male of twenty or twenty-one came in, and combed his shaggy locks in the mirror. He ambled over to the urinal and unzipped his fly. He masturbated rapidly into the urinal as I watched him in about twenty seconds—zip, zip, zip. This was something I hadn’t expected to witness, nor did I want to see it. My face flushed with embarrassment. I could feel the heat in my cheeks. He went back to the wash basin, combed his hair again and, without washing his hands, left the john.