Apparent Wind

by Dallas Murphy

  Mario Gepetto waved his Red Man Chew cap in circles overhead. Like RAF pilots scrambling to meet the Hun, his operators leapt aboard, fired up their engines, and the humid Florida air filled to bursting with the throaty snarl of eleven D-2 Caterpillar diesels.

  “Hey, Carmine,” said the cool-headed Mario Gepetto, “maybe you oughta go talk to O’Mera first. You know, try to reason with the worm.”

  “Reason? What is this reason?”

  “Well, I mean try to tell him nice like, get them dozers off our site. Otherwise you might be liable if you don’t even try to talk things out.”

  “Yeah, liable to chop his seeds off.” But Mario had a point there, Carmine knew. If he shoved O’Mera’s dozers into the bay without a powwow first, slick lawyers could grab onto his ass like a cheap suit. Fuckin’ lawyers made this country lousy. Didn’t used to be like that back when he was coming up, back when a guy got in your way you ran over his feet with heavy equipment, because if you didn’t, then he’d run over yours. That’s why, even today, everybody wears steel-toe boots. Survival of the fittest. Now the government sticks its—“Okay, Mario. I’ll reason. You got anything white?”

  “I got a napkin in my lunch pail.”

  Waving Mario’s napkin, Carmine walked out into the open area between the lines of snarling bulldozers. Frankie O’Mera walked out to meet him. They stood in the dust facing each other like gunfighters at high noon.

  “What say, O’Mera?”

  “What say, Blunchelli?”

  “Hot.”

  “Hot? This ain’t hot. August’s hot.”

  “What are you doin’ here?”

  “Workin’. What are you doin’ here?”

  “Workin’.”

  “You mean to push down that town?”

  “Then haul it away. You?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You still fuck sheep?”

  “No, your old lady said I should only have eyes for her.”

  They peered at each other for a time, the sun pounding on their receded hairlines, then each turned and walked back to his respective squadron.

  “Did you reason with him?” asked Mario Gepetto.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Well, he can’t say you didn’t try to reason with him.”

  Frankie O’Mera’s yellow bulldozers, plows poised for maximum destruction, moved in a phalanx on the forlorn remains of Doom’s hometown. The engine noise, it was subsequently reported, could be heard as far afield as High Hat Key. From the glassless windows of Fred’s Hobby Shop, uncombed heads peeped out at the armored division heading their way with malice aforethought.

  Like Harry on the eve of Agincourt, Carmine Blunchelli exhorted his drivers, stout fellows all, to squeeze the most from their machines, to give it all they had. He scurried back and forth before his line of russet bulldozers, shouting and waving and gesticulating. When they began to move, he leapt aboard the nearest, hanging off the driver’s protective cage, calling for speed, more speed, full speed, for he sensed that the initial encounter would determine the day.

  Likewise, Frankie O’Mera exhorted his fellows. He saw what the wops were about, a flank attack. Blood up, teeth bared, he signaled for his line to wheel left, meet the wops head-on—yellow and russet closing fast, heat wavering from their hoods.

  Nothing could stop it now save orders from generals Sikes and Broadnax, but like many in the history of conflict, these generals were nowhere near the field.

  Carmine dropped from his perch, bellowing berserkers’ oaths, one of which expelled his upper plate into the sand, but he ran right over it, hurled himself toward Frankie O’Mera, who through the dust and the fumes saw Carmine Blunchelli coming and made ready. Frankie laid his shoulder onto Carmine’s shoulder, like a couple of football lummoxes on the line of scrimmage, with a crushing thud. Foreheads met.

  Frankie and Carmine were both sixty years old or better, and the impact did instant, irreparable hurt to their spinal discs. Both felt the damage as it happened, but neither gave a shit. This was war, and they were young again; they were yearling wolverines in full rut. After that impact they recoiled, did a dizzy, rubber-legged turn or two, and when their eyes refocused, when each saw his adversary still afoot, they butted heads again hard enough to fold up their ears— Then their bulldozers met plow to plow.

  Raccoons foraging for oysters on the mangrove roots at the sinking side of the battlefield froze, tuning their senses to comprehend the crash. What harm did it mean to them, this human endeavor? Green, reddish, and great blue herons, brown pelicans, snowy egrets, and scarlet ibis took wing over Small Hope Bay. Slider turtles and mangrove terrapins hunkered into the trembling mud. Having for centuries reaped the benefit of human endeavor, turkey vultures circled the battlefield on hot updrafts, waiting aloft for the inevitable.

  The center of the line met head-on with steel-buckling impact. Those machines were demolished on the spot, and the sudden stop hurled operators over their control levers onto the accordioned engines, where they too met their opposite numbers head-on.

  Events transpired differently on the right and left flanks of the line. Russet outnumbered yellow by one, so the russet right attempted a flanking maneuver against yellow’s left. Yellow countered with a parry, and their combat took jousting and shovel-fencing form, but the end result—destruction—was the same as at the center; it only took slightly longer.

  New to modern conflict, armor debuted on the Western Front in 1916. Armor met again at Tobruk, El Alamein, and, in the greatest of all tank battles, at Kursk. Twenty-eight years later new, improved tanks fought it out on the Sinai, where the resulting carnage shocked even the combatants. By that measure, the Battle of Omnium Settlement—where no shots were fired, no men actually perished—was a petty skirmish, a mere footnote to the bloody history of mechanized war.

  One bulldozer remained running. Its shovel was ripped off, bodywork and driver shorn away, treads clanking. The machine spun in an ever-diminishing gyre like a half-stomped horsefly until it dug itself into its own hole and quit forever. Frankie and Carmine lay supine, staring at the sun. Here and there, crippled drivers crawled away from their machines for fear of explosion, but there were no other stirrings on the field of battle except, as at Waterloo, that of dust, smoke, and buzzards on the wind.

  WALTER VALE II

  Walter Vale retraced his route back across Biscayne Bay on the Rickenbacker Causeway. The outbound traffic was beginning to snarl, but since it was still early morning, his side of the road was almost free of obstruction. Crossing, he watched a fleet of J-35s tacking and jibing around their starting line on a fluky southwesterly breeze. Walter Vale had always wanted to own a sailboat until he realized how slow they were. Probably owned by a bunch of snobby bastards anyway. Maybe one day he’d buy himself a forty-foot Cigarette boat, call it the Sociopath or the Fuck Yourself and cut a swath through the sailboats at fifty miles an hour. Imagine spending the day on a slow boat to nowhere with guys like R.J. Kreely and his foursome. Same buttholes, they just wore Topsiders instead of cleats.

  At the foot of the causeway, he picked up the Dixie Highway south to Le Jeune Road, which led him to Poinciana Plantation. He was getting pretty adept at navigating Miami streets, a good thing, since this seemed to be the land of plenty for the likes of Walter Vale.

  The bottoms of billowy cumulus clouds over the western part of the city had flattened and darkened as a rain squall marshaled its forces. Stark sunlight accentuated the darkening clouds and made the impending weather seem more ominous and dangerous than it would be upon arrival. Walter Vale liked south Florida rain, liked watching the fat drops fall and the fingers of steam rise from the hot asphalt like miniature battlefield fires, but he didn’t want to get his new alligator shoes wet. Only a few drops can ruin your alligator shoes for good, which seemed odd to Walter, since alligators lived in water to begin with.

  R.J. Kreely owned one of the old homes
, a Spanish-style split ranch with rows of half-round red tiles on the roof and some kind of ivy with little red flowers growing up the tan stucco walls. Another white Mercedes convertible and a green MG-TD were parked in the open-air carport. A couple of rambunctious blue jays chased each other off the manicured Bermuda-grass yard.

  This whole spread on an acre and a half lot’d be a steal at $2.5 mil. Why would a guy like that with everything to lose want to go piss people off? How much does a man need? But from experience Walter Vale knew that when a man reaches a certain financial standing, people tend not to question his actions. The stupid guys take this absence of criticism for the possession of real power, and they piss people off. The next thing they know Walter Vale is motoring up their driveway in a rented Buick.

  He knocked on the massive oaken door. A young Hispanic woman in a French maid’s uniform answered. Her big black eyes were shy and roving, never lighting directly on Walter’s.

  “Good morning, I’m Walter Vale. I’m playing golf with R.J. today.”

  “Ohhh, well, sir, he already left to play golf.”

  “Already left? Gee, did I get my signals crossed? When did he leave?”

  “Maybe two hours ago, sir.”

  Walter Vale snapped his fingers. “Doggone it. Say, are you Conchita?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Conchita, may I come in and phone the club?”

  Conchita vacillated for a moment. She really didn’t want anyone around while she cleaned, because she was embarrassed by the scanty uniform R.J. had her wear, showing her legs in black spandex and lifting and squeezing her breasts together—but how could she say no? She stepped aside and held the door open.

  “Thank you very much, Conchita.”

  It was almost cold inside. Walter Vale shivered before he adjusted to the thirty-degree plunge. The living room, about the size of a handball court, was sunken three steps, its floor covered by a spotless white shag carpet that Walter thought tacky. Just because you had money didn’t mean you had any taste. The telephone sat on a thick plate-glass coffee table surrounded on three sides by an off-white overstuffed couch. Little intricately carved jade dogs were displayed in a pack on the table, Conchita’s feather duster lying among them. Walter Vale made no move toward the telephone, didn’t even descend into the living room.

  He peered at Conchita in a way that made her nervous, so she excused herself.

  “Conchita—”

  “…Yes, sir?”

  “My old pal R.J. says you have the cutest little titties.”

  “Wha—?”

  “So I’d like you to take off your uniform.”

  The man was grinning. Maybe this was some kind of dirty but harmless joke. She wasn’t surprised to learn that Mr. Kreely said rude things about her to his friends. “Telephone’s over there,” she said, and turned down the hall.

  “Conchita—”

  When she turned back, she saw that the man had a silenced pistol in his hand. She had seen guns like that on “Miami Vice,” where only evil came of them. She began to tremble.

  “Take off your clothes, Conchita.” The man didn’t even bother to point the gun at her. “Don’t worry, Conchita, I just want to see if old R.J. was right.”

  Conchita stood staring at him as if he were a bad dream which with time would recede.

  “Conchita, I’m a busy man, fully diversified. I can’t wait all day for you to shimmy out of that sweet little suit.”

  “Please, sir—”

  “Conchita, I won’t ask you again nicely.”

  She began to cry and to cover herself as if she were already naked in front of this man. “I’m not wearing any underwear,” she blubbered.

  “Is that the way he wants you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man nodded as if he sympathized, but then he made hurry-up gestures with the gun.

  Conchita pulled off her shoes and dropped them. Then she stopped as if that would satisfy the man.

  “Conchita, I have pressing engagements.”

  A single sob escaped from her chest, then she reached behind her back to unzip the uniform. Walter Vale noticed that the white apron was not a separate piece but was attached to the black dress, if something that small qualified as a dress. She pulled it down in front, exposing her breasts, which she quickly covered with her upper arms but not quickly enough to prevent Walter Vale from affirming R.J.’s judgment about them. “Please don’t hurt me,” she pleaded as she let the dress fall about her ankles.

  Walter Vale assumed she wore tights, but she didn’t. They were stockings, and they clung to her upper thighs of their own accord. She tried to cover herself in that wonderful way stripped women always did, at least in Walter Vale’s experience—moving their hands and arms from top to bottom, trying one means, then another, realizing it was futile, and then giving up, standing with their arms at their sides, heads bowed in humiliation and fear. Walter Vale always enjoyed that process.

  “Now we’re going to go back to the bedroom—the master bedroom. Lead on.”

  Conchita whined, then turned, stepping out of her crumpled skirt, and led Walter Vale down the long hall decorated with identically framed Winslow Homer originals. He noticed that Conchita had an allover tan, and he wondered if R.J. Kreely had requested she sunbathe nude. Some men were knocked out by that; however, Walter Vale preferred sallow women. Otherwise they ended up with a lot of unsightly skin cancers. Conchita turned left at the end of the hall into an enormous bedroom. It was obviously decorated by a woman. The walls were peach, and there was a lot of chintz and lace and more jade figurines, busy, like pictures he’d seen of Victorian boudoirs. Conchita had just finished making the bed.

  Walter Vale pulled the coverlet away and dropped it on the floor. Cream-colored satin sheets, creaseless as if they’d been ironed right on the bed. “Now, Conchita, what I’d like you to do is get in the bed.”

  “Oh no, please, don’t rape me.” She sat on the bed in a ball. Christ, it was a water bed. This guy Kreely was something else. Little Conchita bobbed up and down, enhancing her helplessness. Walter Vale made a mental note not to puncture the bed and get his alligators wet.

  “Now I want you to rumple around in it.”

  “…What?”

  “You know how you make angels in the snow?”

  “I’ve never seen snow.”

  “No, never?” Patiently, Walter Vale told her how you make angels, and she did it. He told her to wriggle her ass around to make a lot of wrinkles, and she did that too.

  When it was done, she sat up with her forearms folded across her breasts, thighs clamped, and looked at the man.

  Walter Vale shot her once in the upper chest.

  He watched her body bob and roll like a Cigarette boat in a bouncy anchorage.

  And then he sat on the living-room couch to wait for R.J. Kreely. Shoving aside the pack of jade dogs, he sprawled his feet out on the coffee table. Excellent shoes, those.

  AFTERMATH

  Sunlight lent the scene an incongruously cheery air. This was vacation light, light meant to be frolicked in, beach balls tossed to toddlers, Frisbees flipped, the kind of morning light in which self-serious surfers bob on gentle swells while zinc-oxided tourists munch potato chips on the beach and brush sand out of the youngsters’ suits before it chafes their little butts raw. On Omnium Beach tourists ceased their play, packed up toys, masks, snorkels, fins, food, towels, lotions, unguents, Handi Wipes, and stood solemn-faced at the edge of the road, staring out across the smoking yellow and russet corpses. What had happened here?

  Children wept, and the elderly trembled. Some of the latter had seen it before; they knew what war meant. Down the hill, squatters emerged from their hovels into the light to watch, to ask each other why? There was simply no sense to it. Surfers in wet suits hotfooted it across the road and gathered in a semicircle at the entrance to upper Main Street.

  “Radical,” observed one.

  “Gnarly,” added a second.

&n
bsp; “I hope I never get to be an adult.”

  Emergency vehicles arrived from Tequesta Key, from townships on the mainland side of Small Hope Bay, and from points west. Their strobes pulsed, twinkled, and fluttered; their sirens whooped and cried. White-clad stretcher bearers hustled to and fro. Battle-shocked combatants murmured prayers to their Blessed Savior as they were borne from the field. Their broken limbs flopped at sickening angles. Many of the injured were in shock, babbling.

  The Volunteer Firefighters of Tequesta Key careened up in a hook and ladder, six ardent volunteers following in six elevated pickup trucks. Sweating like rubber-wear enthusiasts in their black slickers, the firemen alighted, bustled about with their gear, bellowed at obstructing gawkers, unrolled their six-inch hose—hot to trot, ready to extinguish any conflagration you could come up with. But nothing was burning.

  “Aw shit,” said a disappointed volunteer.

  “It ain’t too late. Any one of them things could blow right up.”

  TV newshounds jogged down the hill for some live closeups, while their colleagues hung out of circling helicopters for the panoramic perspective shots. A rerouted C-130 reconnaissance aircraft from Homestead roared in low over the scene, and a Coast Guard chopper hovered, trying to determine whether the destruction below was drug-related.

  Back on the ground, police contingents squabbled over who had jurisdiction. Nobody wanted it. The man who screwed this one up would find himself picking shit with the chickens. The contingents could agree only that the tourists and the surfers ought to get the fuck back on the beach and play. The cops hauled out bullhorns and told them so. And since the state troopers had a bilinguist on the scene, they had him repeat the order in Spanish, a language no one else present understood.

  Sheriff Plotner skidded to a stop, flasher and siren going, a half mile from Main Street, his path impeded by this clot of emergency vehicles. The heat sapped him upside the head as soon as he opened his door, and the trek to the scene left him gasping against an ambulance fender. Hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire.