Apparent Wind

by Dallas Murphy

  The squat stucco building housed Moultrie’s Western Auto on the ground floor, white sidewalls piled in a pyramid twenty feet high at the point. A Jack LaLanne Health Spa, a dangerous-looking sports bar called the Dugout, Rose o’ Sharon’s Salon de Beauté, Dixie Drugs, and the Tamarind Financial Group shared the second floor, its balcony fronted by a wrought-iron railing decorated with snowy egrets, now bent and rusted into abstractions. The hot asphalt parking lot stuck to his shoes as Doom rolled his bike around back to the stairs.

  A clean-cut young man in a sweaty seersucker suit hurried down them. He could barely keep pace with his pumping knees. Doom stepped aside for him. He carried a heavy cardboard box in his arms. He didn’t even glance at Doom as he blew past and loaded the box into the rear of a parked van already stuffed to overflowing with boxes. “Tamarind Financial” was scrawled on each box in magic marker. Then the clean-cut young man bolted back up the stairs two at a time and disappeared into an office. Doom decided to observe this activity unseen. He retreated behind the fender of a red Dodge truck, rubber objects and a faded high school graduation tassel dangling from the rearview mirror. Doom watched the clean-cut young man dash up and down twice more with boxes. This young man was clearly absquatulating.

  Just then a burly cracker with a peeking beer gut emerged, pumped and pissed, from the Jack LaLanne. He was considering stopping in at the Dugout and kicking the tar out of anybody over sixty-five. Fucking silverhairs made this state lousy, entitled to a tax break and free major med. What was he entitled to? He was entitled to jack shit. If he kicked butt for it. He froze when he got a load of Doom down there in a red cap lurking beside his truck. Fucking Yankees made this state lousy. “Hey!” he bellowed over the bent egret rail. “The fuck are you doin’ to my Ram!”

  “Your what?”

  “My truck! My four-by-four! Yer dickin’ with my personal transportation!” His countenance glowed red with rage, an open wound with facial features.

  Obviously insane, Doom recognized, wheeling his bike away from the Ram. That put Doom out in the open.

  Sputtering, spitting, the cracker charged down the steps. Doom looked around for a weapon. Slap him senseless with his flippers? Doom mounted up, ready to flee, but the crazed cracker didn’t attack, at least not yet. Instead, he made for his Ram, counted hubcaps, examined the hood and fenders for a nick or any Yankee treachery that would make homicide justifiable in the eyes of the law. A tattoo on his bicep said “I like Eich.”

  The clean-cut young man hustled down the steps with a VCR in his arms. Several tapes bounced around on top of the machine. He froze when he spotted Doom astride his bent-to-hell bike. “Holy shit!” the young man exclaimed. “You look just like him!”

  “I kung-fu your spine out, you dick with my Dodge!”

  “He was my father.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “Nothing much. A chat.”

  “Then you better be a fast pedaler.”

  “I’d like to discuss the plans for Perfection Park.”

  “Oh, swell, come back tomorrow and we’ll have a nice long chat over brunch.”

  “But you seem to be moving today.”

  The clean-cut young man didn’t answer. He loaded the VCR into the back of the van and braced it in place.

  “Is the scam about to blow in your face?” Doom asked. This guy was perfect sucker bait, with his choirboy complexion and seersucker suit. He’d make the saps feel secure in the promise of affluence and a beautiful future, even as he picked them clean as last week’s road kill. “My father’s schemes often blew in his face.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  “Is Perfection Park real or is it sucker bait?”

  “For all I know, somebody greased your old man. On the other hand, maybe he ain’t muerto, maybe it’s all a put-up job. Maybe he’s just supposed to seem dead for reasons nobody bothered to tell me. Maybe this crazy cracker over there with love in his eyes is another part of the show, just like maybe you’re part of the show. Swell bike, though.”

  Doom could see his point. It was hard really to know a thing, particularly one of his father’s things.

  “Yankee faggot!”

  Then the bomb detonated.

  The blast was contained largely within the four walls of the Tamarind Financial Group, but a part of its force vented through the open door and the plate-glass window. Both, shredded, flew out over the parking lot. Several iron egrets blew clean over Ye Olde English Fish and Chips Pub, a quarter mile away. The sultry air filled with debris, spinning and jinking and fluttering in the stark sunlight. The concussion blew the clean-cut young man right off his feet. Doom, too, found himself supine, though he didn’t recognize it until he tried to run.

  Instantaneously, the Tamarind Financial Group had become a gaping black obscenity in the Snowy Egret’s side. Doom rolled under the van when flying pieces of the Group began to clatter down on him and to stick fast in the molten asphalt. From there, Doom watched the clean-cut young man crawl in babbling circles, stuff bouncing off his back.

  The young man visualized gory parts of his person pirouetting in the air, then dropping back to earth, where in no time the sun would bake them crusty.

  “Hey, Daddy, what’s that on the windshield?”

  “Gee, son, I don’t know…Jumping Jesus, it’s a nose!”

  He crawled into the van and started the engine. He began to babble in a pinched whine. As soon as he found a forward gear he’d drive to Sweden, New Zealand, somewhere they didn’t do this kind of shit. Doom rolled out from under the van. Before it lurched away, he lifted the VCR and the tapes from the back.

  Discord and hysteria reigned. Shoppers and merchants alike poured out onto the balcony, gathered in groups on the parking lot, shoes sinking, jabbering and whimpering, trying to find some sense in the smoke of chaos.

  A passing EMS unit pulled into the parking lot with lights flashing. Here seemed to be authority. They’d make sense of this, tell people what they should do. A hush fell over the crowd. The white-uniformed driver, a stethoscope draped around his neck, swung down from the driver’s seat without taking his eyes off the site of the blast. “Jesus,” he said. “Rocket attack. I’ve seen incoming before. Up near the Imperial City. Tet. How many dead?”

  The fat cracker clutched his face and sobbed at all the shit still raining down on his freshly painted Ram.

  No one noticed Doom wobble off with the tapes in his bicycle basket, the VCR under his arm.

  PERFECTION PARK

  Doom found Marvis Puller sitting on the concrete seawall at Bird Cut throwing a plug into the flood tide, which was squeezing tons of seawater through the narrow inlet at nearly ten knots.

  Marvis Puller loved to fish and wouldn’t have minded if, when his time came, he dropped dead with his rig in hand. Marvis was a CPA who had given thirty-five years to his one-man firm in a Harlem storefront. He had contributed to the community by helping his neighbors muddle through the white man’s economy, and he was proud of that. Marvis had been reasonably honest in those days.

  He and his wife Matilde, from Martinique, had raised two sons, neither of whom went to jail or played in the NBA. That lovingly done, Marvis and Matilde culled their belongings, piled them aboard a U-Haul, and headed for the Sunshine State, where you could fish till the cows came home. But Matilde, loading aluminum lawn chairs into the trunk, dropped dead on the sun-soft asphalt parking lot at the Spoonbill Mall not two weeks after they had crossed the Georgia state line, cheering. Marvis lost all interest in fish, and honesty seemed a sucker’s game if that was the return you got, a dead wife. He had holed up in a rotten little Tequesta Key motel with forty-five-watt bulbs in the lamps, and there he waited to join Matilde until Denny Loomis, a keen eye for undervalued talent, occupied Marvis’s mind with real estate whoop-de-dos, thus reviving his will to live and to fish.

  “Check out my new rig,” he said. “Top-of-the-line Orvis Fishflex 4000. Try a cast? Big snook come cruisin’ through
the Cut. They’re tusslers, snook. Good eating too. You get crevalle jacks through here, but they ain’t great eating in my book.” Marvis arced his lure out over the rushing water and plopped it two feet from the seawall on the High Hat Key side. He was beginning to talk like Bert and the skippers. “What happened to you? You look like you been rolling around in a parking lot.”

  Two Hispanic families were food-fishing nearby, so Doom said it softly: “Somebody blew up Tamarind Financial.”

  “What!”

  “Shh. I just came from there. Do you have a VCR?”

  “Huh? A VCR?”

  “A TV would do.”

  “Bert has a VCR. Blew up?”

  Doom turned to the Hispanic families. “Would you folks like a VCR?”

  The father squinted suspiciously. “How much?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s the catch, mister?”

  Captain Bert lived alone in the Briny Breezes Trailer Park up on the Manatee Narrows, from where he could watch the boat traffic come and go. Bert had spent his life at sea. He joined the Merchant Marine on the same day he graduated from Omnium High. His first ship was torpedoed out from under him during the murderous battles of Convoys SC.122 and HX.229. He was one of four survivors from a crew of forty-two. After the war he built a Starling Burgess—designed sloop and sailed her alone through the Caribbean and two hundred miles up the Orinoco River before she was stolen by pirates. Beached, Bert signed on aboard a banana boat bound for Curaçao, but it sunk en route from general lack of seaworthiness. Returning to Florida, he worked as a rigger, a mast builder, a commercial sword-fisherman, and stone crabber before he assumed command of the Amberjack, which he sank in Bird Cut.

  “I told you!” he said. “I told you Big Al would stop at nothing! Blew it the hell up!”

  “We don’t want to leap to a lot of conclusions,” said Doom.

  Bert’s Apache Airstream Double-wide felt like a boat inside, except for the vinyl Barcalounger, the deep shag wall-to-wall, and the imitation cut-glass chandelier Doom had to duck under. Bert pulled the breakfast nook stools in front of the TV. “Here, Marvis, you can have the Barcalounger.” Marvis loved the Barcalounger.

  What was he doing there, Doom asked himself, if he didn’t mean to get involved? He should have been studying his scuba diving text for tomorrow’s first lesson or practicing his tacking and jibing and splicing the main brace. He’d already had his timbers shivered, in town barely thirty-six hours. Bert, Marvis, and Doom gathered around the TV:

  A slavering fellow with a vacant look in his eye and a dong as long as an Orvis Fishflex 4000 advanced limbo-style on a naked butt of undetermined sex—

  “That’s not exactly what I was hoping for,” said Doom.

  “I saw this one,” said Bert. “Pretty good.”

  “Let’s see the next one.”

  A German shepherd ate kibble in a kitchen as a naked woman in purple mules entered, began to stroke the dog’s flanks, and moan. Is that all he had for his trouble, a fuck-film library? Or was this Perfection Park? Bert was interested in the purple mules.

  “Come on, Skipper.”

  Skipper. Bert’s eyes lit up. He ejected the dog fancier and inserted the last selection—

  Jimmy Buffett sang “Tequila Sunrise.” An aerial view of Omnium Key and Small Hope Bay swelled to fill the screen, followed by some artsy split-screen video foolishness before the credits rolled. One Bernard Renfrew was cited as producer/director. Then a voice-over said, “Come with us now to a place not quite of this world, in short, a perfect place.”

  Doom recognized that voice. He had heard it on the telephone every Christmas and birthday, even those he spent in prison. And there was the man himself onscreen, standing on Omnium Beach, smiling charmingly at the camera. After a few bars of paradise music, the title appeared:

  Perfection Park

  Denny Loomis wore a blue blazer, gray pants with a white belt, and a snappy red ascot. Hands in pants pockets, he strolled barefooted and said chattily, “Experience Florida as Ponce de León experienced it, but without the wilderness inconveniences.” Denny chuckled amiably, a man you could put your trust in, a regular guy who looked you right in the eye as he lied. “While we can’t guarantee the Fountain of Youth, we can offer the next best thing—a self-contained, climate-controlled, insect-free, ergodynamically designed total environment where the harried executive can unwind as he and his family reforge that lost bond with the natural world. That, then, is the concept of Perfection Park. Let’s turn now to the specifics of execution and actualization.”

  A schematic drawing of Small Hope Bay and Omnium Key appeared, features labeled. In voice-over Denny Loomis said, “In order to live up to its name, Perfection Park will require certain alterations to the in situ geography.” While Doom watched incredulously, his dead father explained that Small Hope Bay would have to be drained before it could be perfected.

  “The northern entrance at the Manatee Narrows will be plugged and a spillway inserted to control the water flow into what will then be renamed Perfection Bay. Bird Cut will be blocked by a seawall and sand filled in behind to preserve the integrity of the beach. Those two engineering feats accomplished, the natural, if torpid, southern flow will drain the bay in about ten days.” Computer graphics showed this happening, then Denny Loomis with a straight face said, “Why spend investor capital for a job nature will do for free?” This narrator was a good fellow, you could tell, he would treat your capital investments as though they were his own. A kind of footnote flashed on and off almost before it could be read: “Environmental Impact Study to Come.”

  Once the bay drained itself, the southern terminus would be plugged to prohibit back flow and to adjust outflow during rainy seasons. “Now actualization may commence,” intoned Denny Loomis.

  More schematic drawings appeared. They showed an artistic scattering of sweet little islets built on poured-concrete foundations, each islet to be named after an indigenous water bird, which would be flown in from Brazil. For privacy to commune with nature, there would be only one bungalow per islet. Once the islets were complete, landscaped with genuine tropical vegetation, and once the bungalows were built, Perfection Bay would be refilled to a controlled depth simply by opening the spillway at Manatee Narrows, “thus letting,” said Denny Loomis, “nature take its course.”

  Launches festooned with garlands, fresh daily, would ferry unwinding executives and their families to and from the beach and the main dining, recreational, and entertainment facilities, which would be located on the current site of Omnium Settlement.

  “Before we go,” said Doom’s father, affecting a JFK persona, strolling the beach, “we have a confession to make. The concept for Perfection Park is not entirely original with us. In fact, ours is a time-honored concept. Back in 1927, the pioneering Florida developer and visionary, Colonel A.C. Broadnax, undertook a similar project. However, his dream faltered with his premature death in 1930. We intend, therefore, to name the main dining and recreational facility the Colonel Broadnax Hall of Flowers. Who says we can’t learn from history?” Big toothy smile and a wave. “So long now, from paradise in the making.”

  Captain Bert, Marvis Puller, and Doom Loomis sat in silence. Doom excused himself and went to the head to wash the tears from his eyes. When he returned, he recognized that Bert and Marvis had also been crying, but presumably for different reasons. They hadn’t had Denny Loomis for a father. “Who is this Bernard Renfrew?” Doom asked when he had his voice under control.

  “He worked at Tamarind Financial,” said Marvis.

  “What does he look like? A Young Republican?”

  “Yeah, a real white guy.”

  “Denny sure looked great, didn’t he?” asked Bert quietly.

  “He sure did,” Marvis agreed.

  BIG AL BROADNAX

  Big Al, Colonel A.C. Broadnax’s aged and infirm only son, felt like shit today. His lackey, Lucas, had wheeled him into the central courtyard of his Greco-Moorish man
sion and parked him in his favorite thinking spot beneath the leafy hydrangea. It, like the poincianas, sapodillas, guavas, cattleya orchids, viburnums, pyracanthas, saw palmettos, mangoes, pomegranates, and air plants, was artificial. But none was made of plastic—only hicks would have plastic plants. These were made of silk by Italian master craftsmen. It took a doctor of botany to tell the difference. Real plants were pains in the ass; they attracted deer flies, dog flies, yellow flies, sand flies, and mosquitoes. Silk plants needed only occasional dusting by lackeys. Big Al sat weary, constipated, and sad. The ghost of a breeze riffled the leaves overhead.

  There was, however, one bright spot on Big Al’s horizon. Perfection Park. Big Al loved Perfection Park. Goddamn right his old man thought of it first, the grand artificer thwarted by nature and Negroes. So Big Al had no intention of letting those Tamarind hicks make crucial conceptual decisions while he remained obscure, a silent partner. Perfection Park made his loins tingle with forgotten ardor. Only thing he wasn’t wild about was that name. It wanted subtlety. Only hicks liked things blatant. He’d give that name some thought.

  There was something nagging at Big Al’s mind, and that was that crooked bastard Denny Loomis’s son lurking around town, the funeral now three days old. Denny Loomis had been up to something sneaky, and now his jailbird son was picking up the standard. Sheriff Plotner had offered to run the punk on a technicality, but Big Al preferred to take a wait-and-see stance. He hadn’t dredged his family’s ruined fortune up from the muck by being impetuous. First he’d find out what this Loomis punk was up to, and then he’d crush his ass like an armadillo on the interstate.

  “Lucas!” Big Al called.

  Lucas Hogaboom weighed in at 285 stark naked, which must have been a fearful sight. He was an ex-biker-doper-sex-offender who had served Big Al ever since Sheriff Plotner caught him red-handed exposing himself to Catholic-school girls down on Tequesta Key and offered him a choice: be subservient or be castrated.