by Tim Dorsey
Serge shook with goose bumps. “Did you know they secretly trained for that mission in Florida’s panhandle at a base near Destin? . . . And decades later, it blew my mind that I got to see many of the survivors in the flesh in this city. The reunions are over now with the math of years. But there was a time not long ago when those gatherings just a couple of miles west of here were among the proudest moments in Sarasota’s history.”
“You sure know your stuff for such a young guy,” said Buster.
“And you lived it!” said Serge. “I have the uncontrollable impulse to march around the restaurant singing the national anthem in your honor, but as you can see, I’m redirecting all my energy to sitting on my hands.”
Mildred looked out the front window. “We need to make sure we don’t miss our shuttle bus. It’s getting close to leaving.”
“Shuttle bus!” Serge’s hands shot out from under his butt. “I won’t hear of it! Any recipient of the Silver Star deserves a private driver! Your chariot awaits! Where do you live?”
“Boca Vista Lago Isle Shores, but we just call it Boca Shores.”
“Coleman, let’s give them a hand toward the door.”
Minutes later, a 1970 Ford Falcon sped east toward the interstate. Serge glanced up in the rearview at the backseat. “How are you two nutty kids doing back there?”
“Fine,” said Mildred. “You really didn’t have to do this. We always take the shuttle.”
“Nonsense,” said Serge. “Consider me your peace dividend.”
Buster leaned forward and tapped Serge’s shoulder. “What exactly is your friend doing?”
“Eating a pineapple.”
“And setting fire to the top?” asked Mildred.
“New health craze. Eliminates free radicals.”
In southern Sarasota County, Serge took one of the Venice exits and crossed over to the east side of the interstate. They approached the entrance of the Boca Shores retirement park with rows of coconut palms on each side and a small guard shack in the middle with a small TV and an Earl inside. Normally, Earl remained seated and waved people through without taking his eyes off the game shows. But none of the residents drove muscle cars. He stood and hiked his guard-uniform pants up to the stomach overlap.
“How can I help you fellas?”
“. . . Wheel . . . of . . . Fortune! . . .”
“You can’t,” said Serge. “I have everything under control.”
“Is that a pineapple?”
“Yes, next question.”
“Why is smoke coming out of it?”
“The Q-and-A portion of our program has just ended. Thank you for playing,” said Serge. “Please raise that wooden arm blocking our way. We have precious cargo.”
“. . . I’d like to buy a vowel . . .”
Buster leaned and waved out the window. “It’s okay, Earl. They’re giving us a ride.”
“Oh, Mr. Hornsby. I didn’t see you in there.” He turned back toward his booth. “I’ll open the gate.”
“. . . Is there an X in the puzzle? . . .”
“. . . Ooooooo, sorry . . .”
Straight ahead, a fountain weakly sprayed water into a square man-made lake. Boca Shores. Eight miles inland. A flock of bored swans listlessly circled the fountain. Serge’s gaze turned toward the rows of aluminum trailers disguised as houses. “I already love this place!”
“They have a clubhouse and everything,” said Mildred.
The wooden guard arm raised, and the Falcon drove through.
“. . . Chico, your spin . . .”
Chapter 4
1957
Far down below, the planet Earth was big and blue and radiant with life. White, cottony wisps streaked all the way from California wine country to the Mexican Baja. The world continued to turn.
Up here, which would be 140 miles above sea level, the electromagnetic spectrum was doing all kinds of magical stuff. Some of it could be seen with the naked eye, which is why it was called “visible light.” But the vast majority could only be detected through scientific instruments. X-rays, infrared, ultraviolet, radio waves.
They named this part of the upper atmosphere the ionosphere. That’s because it had become mildly charged with radiation from the sun, which took eight minutes to get here. Among other things, the ionosphere does this: Some of the invisible radio waves coming up from Earth are bounced back down, where they skip back up, only to ricochet down again and so forth, covering great distances across the surface of the planet.
Slide back up the magnetic spectrum, and you returned to the visible world, where the distant view below toward Hawaii was turquoise and emerald. Clouds near Fiji began to swirl in the birth of a Pacific cyclone.
Suddenly, at close range, a shiny silver ball flew by at eighteen thousand miles an hour, perfectly round, three times the diameter of a basketball. It was beeping, like a softball used to play with the blind. The metallic orb, with four spider-like legs trailing behind it, continued zooming eastward across the sky for fifteen minutes until it sailed over a subtropical peninsula called Florida.
Straight down below, a thirty-two-year-old man named Theodore Pruitt had just finished cutting his lawn in West Palm Beach. It was a Saturday. Now it was time for iced lemonade in his den. The reward for perspiration. His right hand twisted a tuning dial on an elaborate radio. As he did, the radio waves outside hopping up and down off the ionosphere reached his shortwave set with what he usually listened to: official government broadcasts from Cairo, Buenos Aires, Prague, Bangkok. But this time he kept tuning past the medley of foreign languages until he reached the vicinity of twenty megahertz. His hand stopped as the radio picked up something new, and it wasn’t an atmospheric skip. Today it was a direct downlink.
Beep, beep, beep, beep . . .
Sitting next to him in a child-size chair was a child, little five-year-old Teddy Pruitt. His father was from Hartford and worked for Pratt & Whitney, an aviation company with a giant new manufacturing plant in Florida on the edge of the Glades. There was growth ahead from government contracts in the postwar boom. Pruitt was a stand-up guy, always putting his wife and family first, his only vice an occasional Grabow pipe popular among the slide-rule types.
There were many awe-inspiring perks to being raised by an engineer. Teddy sat next to his dad’s knee, looking up with circular eyes needing approval.
Beep, beep, beep, beep . . .
“Hear that, son?”
The boy nodded with vigor, though not exactly sure why. It wasn’t like those other things he heard from the radio. Strange tongues. Calm, screaming, monotone, but always an imagination-voyage to a faraway land. This time, just:
Beep, beep, beep, beep . . .
“What’s that, Papa?”
“It’s what they call Sputnik.” He turned the volume up. “The Soviet Union launched it in October.”
“Where is it?”
“Look up, son.”
The child saw the ceiling.
“More than a hundred miles above us in outer space, circling the Earth every ninety minutes. Something new called a satellite. The Soviets put it on top of a big rocket.”
Beep, beep, beep, beep . . .
“Do we have big rockets?”
“Yes,” said the elder Theodore. “The Soviets beat us into space, but we’re catching up. We’re going to launch our own satellite in January called Explorer. It will try to detect radiation belts surrounding the Earth.”
“Are the Soviets our friends?”
“Not anymore,” his father said gently. “We used to be allies during World War Two, but then there were disagreements, and now we’re in something called a Cold War.”
“What’s that?”
“Nobody’s shooting right now, but we’re not getting along,” said his father. “You know those drills you do in school where you get under your desk for protection?”
The child eagerly nodded.
“That’s in case the Soviets do something bad.”
; “Will I be okay?”
“As long as you stay under your desk, you’ll be fine,” his father lied.
“But what kind of weapons can reach my school?”
Beep, beep, beep, beep . . .
“They’re known as nuclear weapons. The United States used to have the only ones, but some people called spies stole our secrets and gave them to the Soviets.”
“Who were these people?”
“Other Americans.”
“I don’t understand,” said the boy. “Why would Americans give our secrets away?”
“I don’t understand, either, son. You have to love your country.”
“I do.”
The beeps faded from the radio.
His father smiled and reached under his desk for an unseen shopping bag. “I have a surprise.” He handed it to Teddy, who pulled out a box with an illustration on the cover.
“Wow! A model rocket!”
“A new company called Estes is just starting, and I got an early sample. Their models really fly. A parachute pops out and everything.”
“Can we build it?”
They got to work, cutting balsa wood, gluing cardboard tubes, taping strings to the plastic parachute. After letting it all dry a few hours, they went to a nearby high school football field.
The rocket was on the miniature pad that came with the kit. Theodore put his arm around his son’s shoulders as they said the countdown together. “. . . Three, two, one, blastoff!”
The child pressed the control button, and the rocket whooshed skyward far higher than little Teddy had thought possible. He shielded his eyes and watched a tiny orange chute deploy at three hundred feet. Then the child took off running as the rocket safely drifted down and landed in the end zone.
That evening, little Teddy was in his bedroom, carefully inserting the folded parachute back into the rocket and refitting the nose cone. His father appeared in the doorway. “Son, do you want to see Sputnik?”
“Isn’t it in outer space?”
“Yes,” said his dad. “Except it’s visible if you know when to look. It has to be just before sunrise or after sunset, when the sky is dark but the sun is still close enough over the horizon to reflect off the satellite.”
“I want to see Sputnik!”
His father led Teddy back into the den. He tuned his shortwave to the same frequency as before. But there was no sound. “When we start hearing the beeps again, we go outside.”
They waited quietly and stared at the equally quiet shortwave receiver set precisely at 20.0005 megahertz. Then:
Beep, beep, beep, beep . . .
They ran outside. His father pointed straight up. “There it is!”
“I see it! I see it!”
They watched together as the tiny dot of light streaked across the darkness at incredible velocity, and his father put his arm around the boy’s shoulders again.
Little Teddy thought: This is the best day of my whole life!
The Present
A 1970 Ford Falcon pulled up to a green-and-white manufactured home near Sarasota. A row of azaleas ran along the front of the trailer, and another row of little white concrete domes ran along the edge of the grass at the street so people wouldn’t drive on the lawn or else. An American flag on a stick hung from a brass bracket by the front door.
Serge looked up at a shiny steel tube rising high from the middle of the yard. “What’s with the big flagpole?”
“Used to have a big flag,” said Buster. “Now I have to settle for— . . . that one on the stick.”
Serge stepped back. “What in heaven’s name happened?”
“Young guy from the park office came around. Told me the flag violated some kind of governing rules that I don’t remember signing. ‘Out of proportion with the visual aesthetic,’ or so he said. I had to take it down unless I wanted to pay fines each day.”
“Motherfu—” Serge quickly covered his mouth. “Uh, not good.”
“He had a point in a way,” said Buster. “If my flag flew, they would have to let others fly any crazy flag: Red China, Russia, swastikas, Kentucky Fried Chicken. I finally agreed, partly because he had worn me down, and I had to get to the doctor for my leg thing.”
“I wouldn’t have been nearly as calm,” said Serge.
“Neither was Mildred,” said Buster. “After the doctor took a look at my veins, she was right on the phone to the TV stations. One of them sent out a truck with a big dish on top, and I was interviewed by a woman who looked like a swimsuit model.”
“She was that attractive?”
“She was wearing a swimsuit,” said Buster.
“Of course,” said Serge. “The networks go belly-up anytime a condo committee or homeowners association tells a veteran to take down the Stars and Stripes because it’s an eyesore. They probably have miles of stock video they can just splice in.”
“They did,” said Buster. “They aired their interview of me, but added footage of a different guy’s house and another flag. That was three months ago.”
“So how is the flagpole still up?”
“Some lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union saw the story on TV and said he’d represent me for free. He filed for an injunction to keep the flag up under my freedom of expression, and filed another injunction to take it down for infringing on the park’s right not to express. The judge convinced the ACLU to strike a compromise with itself to remove the flag but leave the pole.”
Serge shook his head vigorously to clear his mental Etch A Sketch. “I know some other lawyers—”
“Life’s too short.” Buster flicked his wrist. “I still got my stick flag.”
“Would you like to come inside?” asked Mildred. “I have coffee and Little Debbies.”
“Come inside?” Serge took another step back. “Your cathedral of semi-wind-resistant construction? Say no more! . . . Coleman! We’re golden! . . . I was trying to work up my best pickup line to view the inside of an actual senior-citizen terrarium, but she beat me to it!”
Mildred led the way, followed by Buster, limping with the aid of his tactical cane tested by the special forces.
The layout of all the trailers in the park seemed quite unorthodox and perplexing at first, then brilliant in its retirement function. The front door of each trailer was a sliding glass door. And in front of it was a screened-in porch that faced the street, just like all the old front porches up north, where people sat outside on balmy evenings and waved to their neighbors prior to the onset of the suburbs and pricks. But because it was Florida, these porches needed screens to keep out bugs, and metal roofs to keep out sun. So, if you arrived at one of the trailers from the street, you walked up the driveway, climbed two steps to a screen door, then another few steps past all-weather furniture to a glass door before entering the forgotten world of wall-to-wall carpeting.
Serge walked into an aroma-funk of baked apples and ointments. “Whoa!” He spun slowly in place, appraising a trailer that appeared to have been decorated by the Consumer Channel. “You’ve beaten back the concept of minimalism with a tree trunk!”
There were knickknacks and figurines and crystal crap, several ottomans, a chandelier that was out of scale for the space, a dusty set of encyclopedias, and an embroidered pillow that said Who Farted? Inside a glass bell jar was a clock with all the moving parts visible, powered by a ring of three shiny balls that spun one way and back the other. A row of matching flowerpots in descending order of size sat on a mantel below a painting of dogs playing poker.
Rrrrrring . . .
“I’ll get it,” said Mildred. She picked up a cordless phone from a base featuring a bronze eagle coming in for the kill. “Hello? . . . I’m sorry, we’re having company right now . . .”
Coleman tripped over a knee-high ceramic frog. “Where am I supposed to walk?”
“This way,” said Mildred, navigating a winding path to an embroidered sofa covered in plastic. “I’ll get the Little Debbies. Are red velvet cakes okay?”
> Ding-dong! . . .
“I’ll get it.” Mildred answered the door. “I’m sorry, we’re having company right now.”
Buster eased himself down into a large padded chair and grabbed its remote control that made him recline. Serge took a seat on the plastic-covered couch and stared at a marble coffee table supporting stacks of magazines representing fifteen successful magazine salesmen.
“So, Buster,” said Serge. “How did you end up in Korea?”
“Enlisted.” He finished adjusting his chair until his pale legs were out perfectly straight in his favorite position. He placed the chair’s remote control with all the other remotes, stored in a special fabric organizer that hung from the armrest. He stared at a TV set showing bundled-up people straining to walk in a snowstorm. “Enlisting is what you were supposed to do back then. Most of my family was military. So was most of the neighborhood.”
Serge pointed at the television. “What are you watching?”
“What’s the point of retiring to Florida if you don’t follow the weather back home?” Buster reached in the armrest organizer for a portable phone and dialed. “Roland, it’s me, Buster. How’s the shoveling coming?” He hung up and giggled.
Mildred emerged from the kitchen with a wicker tray of dessert cakes that she set on the magazines. She clasped her hands. “Would anyone like some coffee?”
“Uh-oh,” said Coleman.
“Ooo! Ooo!” Serge waved a hand.
“Coming right up.”
Rrrrrring . . .
“Don’t answer it,” said Buster.
“What if it’s the children?” asked Mildred.
“It’s not.”
She pressed a button on the phone. “Hello? . . . No, we’re having company right now . . .”
“Buster,” said Serge. “If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?”
“Ninety-four. Mildred’s two years younger.”
A lace doily, saucer and cup were placed on a 1996 Reader’s Digest. “I forgot to ask what you like in it.”
“Black’s fine,” said Serge. “Sometimes ice cubes so I can chug.”