Lobster Boy

by Fred Rosen

  “By then, he [Joe] had already fought with four or five other people. Mary and Butch, ‘The Snake Queen’ and sword swallower, he’d already beaten up on their kid a couple of times.”

  Grady, meanwhile, decided that it was time to act.

  “I’ve had enough of this shit with you, Joe,” Grady said. “I don’t need you. Take the gorilla show and get the hell out of here. Take Donna with you. You guys do whatever the hell you want. Just go. I just don’t need the problems anymore.”

  Nervous about going out on their own, Donna and Joe hesitated. And then, so did Grady. He remembered that Joe was the only one in their group with a trucker’s license.

  “Grady, it’s nothing for me to go down and get my license. I’ll drive the truck,” said Merman.

  That cinched it. He told Joe and Donna to get lost. Joe and Donna were ready to leave when Teresa went over and tried to talk them into staying. After a few hours, things had seemed to calm down.

  “Before we left that spot, everything kind of chilled over and gelled. And he [Joe] was back in good graces.”

  Grady wanted him to drive the truck again instead of Merman. Later, though, Merman remembers there was another problem when Joe discovered that someone had cut the truck’s brake lines, the truck that Merman was going to drive.

  Joe wasn’t the only one who, according to Merman, was jealous of his position in the carnival hierarchy.

  “Glenn got pissed off at me one day because they were late getting there and we’d already set the show up and I had one stage left to put together. It was an awkward stage and just easier for one person to do it.”

  “I don’t need your help. Let me do this,” Merman told Glenn.

  Glenn got pissed off at Merman, and ran over and told Grady, “You need to fire him. He’s an asshole. You need to get rid of him.”

  “Leave him alone,” Grady replied. “You just need to relax and let him do his job.”

  “Glenn then got so pissed off at Grady that he went over and punched a tree, and broke half the bones in his wrist,” Merman remembers.

  “Man, I am extremely, extremely sorry. I’ve never seen a season like this. I can’t afford to go into these big spots and have these people doin’ what they’re doin’ cause they’ll never let me back in,” Grady told Merman.

  “These guys were his family and they would work the ticket box and steal money from him. That was part of my job, to keep an eye on the box. See, these people thought, ‘He’s just some magician, he’s never been in the business.’ But I’d sit there and watch them. I’d count the people and count the box when they walked away from it.

  “Teresa’d steal money out of the box every chance [she] got. Somebody’d come up with a fifty or a hundred, and she’d double-count the money and shortchange the guy twenty bucks. Then she’d brag about it and then tell us not to do that shit.”

  Such shenanigans might account for how Teresa was able to save up the $1,500 she later paid to have Grady killed.

  “She’d walk out of the trailer, slam the door, and walk down the midway and talk [out loud], ‘Oh this sucks. That fuckin’ bastard. I could kill him.’

  “It would be because he didn’t want to go to town or something. Stupid shit. I honestly believe they [the family] were trying their damnedest to make everything fail,” Merman says.

  But several members of the family were doing much more than that. They were plotting murder.

  While they were on the road in July, Teresa and Cathy had their first conversation about killing Grady.

  “I want him dead,” said Teresa.

  Cathy agreed.

  Marco Eno knew Grady well. He had worked for him at numerous carnival sites around the country for the past five years. He knew that Grady had a temper when he drank, that he would get verbally abusive, but he had never seen him get physical with his family. The proposal, therefore, was out of the blue.

  “Marco, would you kill Grady for me?” Teresa asked.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  “No, I couldn’t do it,” he answered.

  What a stupid question! What did she think he was, some kind of hired killer? She was watching too many movies.

  “Could you get someone else?” Teresa continued.

  This had to be a joke, Marco reasoned. That was it. A joke. A stupid joke.

  The summer wore on. Every weekend it rained. The crowds stayed away. The wetter it got, the more the money dried up.

  “Get rid of the sword swallower, get rid of Satina the Snake Queen,” Merman advised Grady. “All the time they’re cryin’ and whinin’. We’ll find somebody else. We’ll start anew, make some money and save this season.”

  “I can’t do that,” Grady answered.

  “Why the hell can’t ya? You own the show.”

  “Look, I took them in and I gave ’em my word that I’d let ’em work the summer. I can’t go back on that. When this season is over, fine, we’ll get rid of ’em, we’ll get whoever you want. Besides, and if I do get rid of them, where the hell they gonna go? Who’s gonna take care of them?”

  “Grady, that’s not your problem. I understand you gave your word, but do something. Tell ’em I’m in charge and the shit’s gotta be done this way or it ain’t gonna be done.”

  “Well, you’re not in charge, I’m in charge!”

  “Yeah, but you know what I mean.”

  “Look, just deal with them. We’ll get out of this thing and make it work. Let’s just go with it.”

  “All right. You’re just the boss.”

  Grady thought for a moment.

  “Look, Merman, I know it’s been a lousy season. I want to make this up to you. Next season, we’re not bringing any of the family.”

  And then Grady outlined his plans for the future.

  “In the wintertime, I want you to come down here, work for me at some of these spots in Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. I’ll pay you seven hundred fifty bucks a week. While we’re here, that’s when we’ll pick up our crew for next year. You can interview these people, you can get whoever you want and we’ll take ’em with us. We’ll get rid of everybody and the hell with them. We’ll go out and make some money, I promise you that.”

  Merman had no reason to doubt the claw-handed man. He had come to admire and respect Grady. “He was an old carny guy who wanted things done his way. No bullshit. He treated me well. There were a lot of little things he did that a lot of people had never done.

  “For instance, couple of spots we played were super dead. We couldn’t even pay the rent. Like I said, I didn’t get paid until the rent was paid and then I got ten percent.”

  “Look, I need you to take me somewhere. Take a break for a minute,” Grady would tell Merman.

  Merman wheeled Grady away from the show, away from the prying eyes of his family.

  “Look, you know you’ve been busting your ass out here for me, and I know I got these shitty people working for me. My family, everyone’s trying to screw me, you’re the only one who’s not trying to screw me.”

  And he’d slide Merman a fifty or a hundred to get through the next week.

  At the end of the summer, Grady told Merman to call him the last week in November to set things up for next season.

  “They [the family] knew he was gonna get rid of them. When you live and work day in and day out with the same group of people like we did, there are no secrets.”

  Except one.

  Twelve

  The strip mall had been erected on the south side of Federal Highway 301 in River-view, Florida. There was space enough to house three businesses. One of them was Your Place Game Room, a combination billiard parlor/video-game room that catered to the teenagers in the surrounding area.

  “Put me behind a counter and I’ll rob you,” says Chuck Sanders, smiling. The proprietor of Your Place, he was reminiscing about his days in the carny, when he ran the games on the midway.

  “You can put me in a game with five people,” Chuck continues, “and when I get
done, they leave happy and smiling,” even though they lost their money at one of the carny games like Screw, Razzle, or Swinger.

  “I’m an agent,” Chuck says proudly, agent being carny vernacular for “a guy that can rip you off.”

  Unlike the unlucky residents of Gibtown, Chuck got out of the carny hustle and gives free games for students who run A’s and B’s in their classes.

  Chuck Sanders doesn’t remember seeing Harry Glenn Newman, Jr., waiting outside his billiard parlor that day in early November 1992.

  Glenn had positioned himself outside Your Place a few yards away from the strip mall’s second store, Paws and Claws—Pet Grooming. As instructed, he was there, waiting at the appointed hour.

  When his friend didn’t show at the appointed time, Glenn called him on his beeper, and left a message.

  Soon, the phone rang. It was his friend Chris Wyant, who lived just down the block from him at 11104 Inglewood Drive.

  “Meet me at the park. Right down the road from the arcade.”

  Glenn got back in his car. With the sun setting and dusk fast approaching, he drove quickly, and took a left down a side street. Within a block, he had come to Riverview Community Park.

  It was the kind of park you’d find in any residential community with a decent appropriations budget: well kept, approximately two square blocks in size, with an elementary school on the far end, a playing field leading into a children’s playground on the other.

  He drove over near the equipment shed, parked his car, and waited.

  Dennis Cowell had a birthday coming up. On November 26, he would be nineteen years old. But that was a few weeks off. What was more important to him that night was not his upcoming birthday but helping out his friend Chris Wyant.

  Dennis and Chris were good buddies. In fact, Wyant was as close a friend as he had. And when his good buddy asked him for transportation over to the park in Riverview, he was glad to oblige.

  Dennis borrowed his girlfriend Lynne Browne’s blue-gray Ford Ranger pickup, got Chris, and drove over to Riverview. It took less than ten minutes to get there, but those ten minutes spelled a great difference.

  Once in Riverview, the depressing pall of poverty and hopelessness that encompassed Gibsonton was gone.

  Riverview has fast-food restaurants; Gibsonton doesn’t. Riverview has many gas stations dispensing well-known national brands; Gibsonton doesn’t. And Riverview has neat, one-family homes, which are common; Gibsonton, with its itinerant, poor carny population, doesn’t.

  In short, Riverview is more like your typical American community. It is not a place where murder is common, and its residents do not think about it with any sort of regularity. Yet it is a place where a murder was conceived and, at that, in one of the more innocent places.

  Dennis Cowell tooled his girlfriend’s truck to Riverview Park. Spying Glenn’s car, he pulled over and parked beside it.

  As the sun set and another quiet Florida night approached, Chris got out of the truck and nonchalantly walked over. He had blond hair and blue-green eyes. He was five feet nine inches and weighed 135 pounds soaking wet, the type of kid you wouldn’t give a second look to on the street.

  Already at the ripe old age of seventeen, Chris had a full juvenile record, and while juvenile records are sealed, he bragged to friends and acquaintances that he’d killed people in drive-by shootings. But booking sheets are one-dimensional objects; cold recitations of fact are no substitute for direct observation.

  Maybe it was a portent of things to come, or maybe it was just that he was raised to be polite when someone else was doing business; whatever it was, Dennis hung back, barely in earshot.

  Glenn got to the point immediately.

  “My mom’s having a lot of problems with my father, and I need somehow to help her out, make it better for her. So, what can you do about it?” Glenn asked urgently.

  They haggled about the price for a couple of minutes. Then Chris said confidently, “Give me three hundred dollars and I’ll do it.”

  Glenn would later recant this part of his statement, saying that it was actually the price of $1,500 that they’d agreed on. Regardless, it was precious little for a human life.

  Overhearing snatches of conversation, Dennis Cowell thought the two were talking in code, that some sort of drug transaction was going down. That must be it, Dennis thought. Chris had a history of dealing drugs, so it was likely this was just another drug transaction in the making.

  Time would prove him wrong, however. They made a bond drenched in blood.

  Chris Wyant was nothing if not a good and loyal friend. If someone did a service for him, he had to repay it.

  “Come on, Dennis, let’s go shopping,” Chris said gleefully after his meeting was over. He planned to reward his friend.

  Chris bought Dennis a pair of tennis shoes, a pair of pants, a shirt, and an Oakland Raiders baseball cap with some of the money he’d received from Glenn. Dennis was very happy with his gifts, so happy that he accompanied Chris on another trek, this time to Apollo Beach.

  Apollo Beach is five miles south of Gibsonton on Highway 41. It was built on the green shores of Hillsborough Bay, just another lazy town on Florida’s west coast that most tourists pass through without even stopping. Barry Allen, a family friend, lived in Apollo Beach, and Chris and Dennis headed to his house. It was there that Barry’s wife, Sally, sold Chris a .32-caliber Colt Automatic for $150.

  Chris was nothing if not clever. He convinced his good buddy Dennis Cowell to sign the paperwork necessary to purchase the weapon. Since it had been a cash transaction, unless someone talked, which wasn’t likely given Chris’s reputation, there was no way anyone could trace the gun back to him.

  It would be Dennis who’d take the fall.

  The mourning, plaintive sound of the train whistle played through the palm trees of the still Florida night. You could hear that sound every night in Gibsonton, and during the day, too.

  The town was bisected by rail lines. Anytime you made a turn and went east across Highway 41, you had to be careful you didn’t run into some hundred-car freight. If you did, the lights would flash, the warning gate would come down, and you’d sit there, stalled, unable to move for an interminable period of time, until the train had passed.

  Mary Teresa Stiles lived in fear of those trains.

  The trains were always in the back of her mind when she left Inglewood Drive and drove the few miles into town to go shopping.

  At Twin Oaks Plaza, Teresa was momentarily distracted by a display in the window of a store next to the supermarket. There was a momentary pull to go in, to give in to her urge to browse, but then, the fear kicked in like some addictive drug.

  No, I can’t. I got to call Grady, she thought anxiously.

  Then she went into the supermarket and bought a twelve-pack of Pepsi and a pack of Almond Joy candy bars for the boys, and whatever staples they needed.

  After loading the packages into the car, Teresa pulled out and went south a few blocks until she got to Showtown USA where she picked him up a pint. Then she made the turn toward the railroad tracks.

  She caught a train and was forced to stop. Stalled, waiting for the freight to pass, she kept looking at her watch, willing the second hand to slow down, looking up, willing the slow freight to go faster, and all the while her heart pounding in her chest with fear.

  After an eternity of waiting, which was actually mere minutes, the last car finally cleared. She gunned the car across the tracks and raced home to Grady.

  Parking the car in the driveway, she raced across the hearty Florida grass, stiff and green no matter what season it was, through the front gate, and into the brown trailer.

  Wordlessly, in a drill born from long repetition, Teresa took the soda pop and the candy bars out of the bag and put them in the pantry. Then she took the rest of the groceries into the house.

  Sitting in his armchair, Grady had a stoned look, which wasn’t surprising.

  Grady Stiles was a creature of habi
t. Every day, weekday or weekend, he awoke between eleven and twelve. He would crawl out of bed and have a glass of tea in his bedroom. After a while, he’d crawl out of the bedroom on his claws and sit on the chair in the living room in front of the old 1970s-style console TV set. Maybe an hour and a half to two hours later, he started drinking.

  He would begin his imbibing with a glass of Seagram’s 7 and a glass of tea. Maybe a couple of more glasses, and then he’d leave. He would either get someone to drive him or push himself in his wheelchair down to the local bar, where he would continue drinking, returning in the afternoon to drink more at home, not stopping until he went to sleep in the empty hours after midnight.

  “Well, what took you so fucking long? You were longer than what you said you were going to be.” His voice sounded harsh.

  “I had a train,” Teresa answered meekly.

  “Don’t give me that shit!” Grady shouted. “I know better than that. What were you doing? Where did you go?”

  “Just shopping.”

  “Yeah,” he said dubiously, “well, you didn’t buy too much, did you?”

  Teresa thought of the pop and candy she’d left in the pantry. He always complained that Little Grady and Glenn drank too much soda. She wasn’t allowed to buy more than a twelve-pack every three weeks. And just a pack of Almond Joy bars. They ate too much, he said. If she bought more than her assigned quota and Grady found out about it …

  “No, I didn’t buy too much. Grady, your drinking—”

  “What about my drinking?” he screamed, making little slurred gestures with his claws. “I’m not in a prison, this is my home, I’ll do what I want to do.”

  In some ways, it was a prison. Grady couldn’t see very well and no longer drove. He had to rely on his family and friends to chauffeur him around.

  “You won’t let me buy a car because you don’t want me drinking,” Grady continued screaming at Teresa. She just stood there and took it. “I’m allowed to drink, I’m old enough to do what I want to do,” he screamed like some petulant schoolboy.