by Dorsey, Tim
Rufus was covering the guests with his shotgun when he noticed the Liberty Bell shuffling sideways along the wall toward him.
“What the fuck?”
Lance slid up next to Rufus.
“Psssst!” said Lance. “It’s me!”
“Who?”
“Your landlord.”
“So?”
“So this is great!”
“What are you, high?”
“Yes…When I asked you to annoy the neighbors, I never expected this.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Rufus. “Anything else you might like us to do?”
“Tell them to take off their clothes.”
Rufus just stared at Lance.
“Once they’ve all seen each other naked, there’s no way they can still live on the same street together. Can you imagine how uncomfortable it will be? They’ll have to move out!”
Rufus broke up laughing. “You’re one sick motherfucker! I like you!” He turned back to the guests in the living room. “Listen up! We have a request from one of your local landlords…”
“Shhhh! Don’t tell them it’s me!”
“…Everyone take off your pants!”
Nobody moved.
“Now!” Rufus shouted, smacking Amelia Earhart with his gun barrel.
Everyone took off their pants.
“Psssssst!” whispered Lance.
“What is it now?”
“Why just their pants?”
“Because it’s funnier!”
Lance looked around the room at the history of the United States naked from the waste down.
“I see what you mean.” Lance got out his nitro capsule and did another toot.
“Any more requests?” Rufus asked sarcastically.
“Make ’em play Twister.”
THOMAS JEFFERSON, JOHN Adams and Andrew Jackson were tangled and bent in unnatural directions.
Rufus spun the game wheel. “Left hand, blue!”
“I can’t reach it,” said Jefferson.
Rufus picked up his shotgun. Jefferson reached it.
“I found him!” said Sly McGraw. He shoved Jim Davenport into the room. “He was out back flipping burgers.”
“Jim!” yelled Martha, running to him.
“So this is the shit-sucker who killed our brother,” said Rufus. He walked up and stuck the shotgun in Jim stomach. “Say good-bye, shit-sucker.”
“Someone’s here!” said Willie McGraw, peeking out the window. “They’re coming up the steps!”
Rufus pointed the shotgun around the room. “Nobody make a sound. Just act like everything’s normal.” He turned to his brothers. “Quick! Hide behind the door!”
They heard voices outside as the late-arriving guests came up the steps.
“We should have gotten in the costumes first,” said Coleman. “Everyone else will already be dressed. I hate to stick out.”
“We’re late as it is,” said Serge. He nodded down toward the costume box he was carrying. “We’ll put it on in the bathroom right after we go through our proper social graces with the hosts.”
“But Ambrose got to put his on already,” said Coleman, pointing at J. Paul Getty.
The McGraws bunched together behind the Davenports’ front door. Everyone was silent. They heard steps on the porch. Then a knock. Rufus motioned for Jim to answer.
“Door’s open. Come in.”
“Sorry we’re late—” Serge stopped and looked around the room. “Have you all lost your fucking minds!”
“Man!” said Coleman. “And I thought I partied.”
The front door slowly creaked closed behind them, and Serge turned around.
“Who are you?” said Serge.
“Shut up!” yelled Rufus, pointing with his shotgun. “What’s in the box?”
“My costume. Want to see?”
“No!”
“It’s pretty cool.”
Rufus motioned with his gun. “Over there with the others. And take off your pants.”
Serge began unzipping his trousers. “Of course you know, this means war.”
Rufus sat back down in the chair by the door and picked up a bottle of sour mash he’d taken from Jim’s liquor cabinet. “I’m gonna really enjoy this!…Hey! Did I say you could stop playing Twister?”
Serge walked over to the wall. Sly McGraw, the Gentleman Bandit, covered him with a Mauser.
“Good evening,” said Sly.
“Evening,” said Serge.
“How do you like this neighborhood?” asked Sly.
“It’s great. Nice park, good schools nearby, roads in decent shape, but mainly it’s the neighbors.”
“That’s important,” said Sly. “I might come back here and settle down.”
“Good choice,” said Serge. “Nowadays you gotta be real careful where you live. Florida’s getting pretty scummy. We’re cursed by good fortune. Great weather, beautiful beaches, booming growth. But it’s a completely transient culture. Pick any street; almost nobody grew up there, and most will be gone in a few years. They appear to be neighborhoods, but they’re just collections of houses”—Serge put his hands together and interlaced his fingers—“There’s no fabric.”
“I respectfully disagree,” said Sly. “Florida doesn’t have any copyright on this problem. It’s going on all over the country. I’ve seen the same thing across the Midwest all the way into New England. Parents aren’t doing their job anymore. That’s where the problem is. They let the entertainment industry raise their kids. Don’t even get me started on that.”
“You’re right about the parents, but that doesn’t change the truth about Florida,” said Serge. “We have a special confluence of economic and social factors that are killing the roots of the communities.”
“Towns are falling apart everywhere,” said Sly. “It’s the New Selfishness. There’s no shame anymore. It’s not any worse here.”
“Again, I must dissent,” said Serge. “What I’m talking about is purely a function of demographic trends. It’s getting really strange out there.”
“Okay, if we’re limiting it to a kind of tropical diaspora, then I have to give you that. What I’m saying is the pathologies exist everywhere. Florida has no monopoly on truly bizarre and freakish crimes. That’s anecdotal, not empirical.”
“What? Like forcing people to play half-naked Twister at gunpoint?”
“I knew you were going to use that.”
“Will you two shut up over there!” yelled Rufus. “This ain’t a coffee klatch!”
Coleman walked over and turned on the TV.
“What are you doing?” asked Rufus.
Coleman pointed at the set. “Watching some tube.”
“Do you see what I have in my hands here?”
Coleman nodded.
“Turn it off!”
Coleman reached for the set again, then stopped. “Hey! It’s Ambrose!”
Everyone looked. The face on the TV belonged to the guest dressed as J. Paul Getty. The picture was almost twenty years old, but it was unmistakable. The image on TV switched to Blaine Crease, standing in front of the biggest house on Bayshore Boulevard. Crease dramatically explained the abduction, spinning a tale of mind-bending wealth and corporate intrigue involving Ambrose Tarrington III, whose net worth Crease randomly fabricated at sixty million dollars.
“Sixty million!” said Rufus.
“Sixty million!” said Ambrose.
On television, Crease walked down the mansion’s driveway talking to the camera.
“While Ambrose had been a regular on the chamber of commerce luncheon circuit back in the seventies, little is known about him in recent years, except that he lived out a bizarre and reclusive Howard Hughes existence behind the walls of this Bayshore mansion…”
The butler came out the front door and yelled for Crease to get off the property.
“…But even this opulence couldn’t protect him from ruthless kidnappers…Stay tuned for Florida’s Most Wanted…Back to you, Ja
cqueline.”
Rufus looked at his brothers. “Screw this caper. We’re grabbing the old dude here. He’s worth a fortune!”
Sly pointed at the TV. “Rufus! Look! We’re on television!”
Florida’s Most Wanted opened with a compelling segment about a trio of southbound desperados. Mug shots of Rufus, Willie and Sly McGraw appeared over the gang’s new nickname, “Three Dog Night.”
“How’d we get a nickname!” said Sly. “That’s so not fair!”
The crimes of the McGraw brothers were depicted by a trio of actors, two of whom were improvisational players from an L.A. troupe, and the third an original member of Three Dog Night trying to break into theater.
47
TELEPHONE TECHNICIANS HAD just finished wiring ten additional temporary lines in the studios of Florida Cable News. Agent Mahoney sat poised with a support crew of local detectives and police officers ready to handle the anticipated flood of phone calls.
The TV show began. Mahoney stood at a wall map with a box of pushpins.
Florida’s Most Wanted was on the air no more than a minute when all lines lit up. Nine callers placed the gang in a south Tampa neighborhood. The tenth said that he was saddened his favorite band had turned to crime and that “One Is the Loneliest Number” had always made him cry.
The police officers manning the phones called out locations as the tips came in; Mahoney inserted pushpins for each address. He stood back from the map. “That’s enough. We’ve got a fix.” Mahoney grabbed his hat and ran out the door.
He raced south without his siren or lights. His police radio came on.
“Mahoney, you son of a bitch!” said Lieutenant Ingersol. “You wait for backup!”
“No time.”
“I’ll have your badge!”
Mahoney turned off the radio and cut his headlights. He eased around the corner at the dark end of Triggerfish Lane. Cars were parked all over the road outside the Davenport place. Mahoney pulled over four doors down. He reached in his jacket for his shoulder holster and crept along a hedge.
“Rufus,” said Sly. “Someone’s creeping around outside…Now he’s coming up the steps.”
Rufus swung his shotgun around the room. “Everyone act natural!”
The McGraws hid behind the door again.
Mahoney crept silently across the porch with his gun drawn. He tried the doorknob. Unlocked. He turned it slowly, then pushed it open with a light creak.
In the middle of the room were three nineteenth-century American presidents playing Twister without pants.
“Not again,” said Mahoney.
He stepped into the house, then felt a gun barrel in his back.
“Drop it,” said Rufus.
Mahoney dropped it.
“Get over there with the others. Take off your pants.”
“You’ll never get away with this,” said Mahoney. “Cops are going to be swarming all over this place.”
Rufus laughed.
Mahoney took his place against the wall with the other hostages. The person next to him looked familiar.
“Serge?”
“Mahoney?”
“Last time I saw you, we were in a horse suit and you had a gun on me.”
“Nothing personal.”
“It’ll be nothing personal when I put you away for good. Don’t think I’m going to go easy on you because we’re experiencing this common adversity together.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“So, got any ideas how to get out of this?”
“Matter of fact I do. All we need is one little opportunity. A single moment when they’re distracted. Then this is what we do…”Serge leaned and whispered.
“You two! Stop talking!” said Rufus. “Doesn’t anybody see I have a gun?” He walked into the middle of the room and addressed the group as a whole. “Okay, here’s the deal. We’re taking Ambrose with us. Anyone calls the police in the first half hour—we know where you live and we’ll be back…But before we go, there’s a little matter that I have to settle with an old friend.”
Rufus walked up to Jim Davenport. He popped open the cylinder of his revolver and dumped all the bullets in his other hand. He put one bullet back in the chamber and slammed it closed. Rufus spun the cylinder and pointed the pistol between Jim’s eyes. He pulled the trigger.
Click.
Rufus laughed and spun the cylinder again.
THE COLLEGE STUDENTS had waited patiently for sundown. Now they carefully lifted their Saturn V replica onto a dolly and wheeled it out the front door.
“On three!” said Bernie, gripping one of the fins. “One, two, three!”
The students heaved together and lifted the rocket off the dolly and set it down on the front porch/launch pad.
“This is going to be so great!” said Waste-oid. He knelt next to the fuse and flicked a Bic. The fuse began to sparkle.
“Run!”
They all ran except Siddhartha the solipsistic student, who remained next to the rocket, watching it curiously.
The other students dove over a hedge and stuck their heads back up.
“Sid! Watch out!” yelled Bernie.
Siddhartha didn’t move. “Don’t worry. It can’t hurt me.”
The fuse was almost down to the solid-fuel booster. The rocket the students had assembled was quite impressive. And heavy. Too heavy, in fact, for the first stage, and one of the cardboard fins slowly began to buckle.
“What’s happening?” Bernie yelled to Siddhartha.
“I think it’s tipping over.”
“Do something!” Bernie yelled.
“No, I won’t interfere. It doesn’t matter anyway.”
The fuse burned into the rocket fuel a split second before it fell over completely, and it took off like a Sidewinder missile.
“I DON’T LIKE these odds,” said Rufus. He put all the bullets back in the gun and pointed the pistol at Jim again. “This is for Skag. Nice knowin’ ya.”
He cocked the hammer back with his thumb.
There was a tremendous whoosh outside the house.
Rufus turned. “What the—”
The front window crashed, spraying glass, and everyone shielded their eyes. When they looked again, a Saturn V rocket was lodged in a human Liberty Bell, shooting sparks. The papier-mâché caught on fire and Lance began screaming.
“I’m really starting to get pissed off!” said Rufus.
The second stage ignited with massive thrust, pushing Lance across the room. Rufus opened the door at the last second, and the Liberty Bell ran out onto the front lawn.
A gash opened in the side of the papier-mâché, and the rocket shifted inside the bell, sending thrust off at an angle and spinning Lance across the lawn like a top. Everyone ran to the windows.
The third stage ignited, and the extra thrust caused the Liberty Bell to pitch up on its side. It began rolling and took off down the street at high speed, the rotation creating a Doppler effect in Lance’s screaming.
At the intersection, the third stage burned down to its core pyrotechnic charge, and Lance exploded in a flaring six-point starburst of blue, green and magenta. Seconds later, all that was left of him were twinkling little tracers fluttering to the ground.
The college students looked at each other.
“Hide!”
They ran inside and got in a closet.
“Un-fucking-believable!” said Rufus. He turned back around. “Show’s over. Everyone get away from the windows…Hey! This isn’t everyone. Who’s missing?”
Rufus looked at Willie and Sly.
“We were watching the fireworks.”
“Dammit!” said Rufus. “Search the house!”
“WHAT’S GOING ON?” asked Serge.
“I can’t see,” said Mahoney. “Hold on a second. Let me adjust this thing. There we go. We need to come up a little on our right.”
“What’s our range?”
“Fifteen feet and closing. Get ready. On my mark…”
Jim Davenport stepped into the middle of the room. “I’d like you to leave now.”
Rufus almost didn’t notice, Jim was so quiet-spoken. “Huh? Did you say something?”
“I would like you to leave my house now.”
Rufus began laughing. “Oh, you would?”
Jim nodded. “Please leave.”
Martha whispered urgently behind him: “Jim! What are you doing?”
“Hey guys!” Rufus yelled to Willie and Sly. “The wimp’s throwing us out of his house!”
“My husband’s not a wimp!” yelled Martha.
Rufus leered. “You got some fire. I’m gonna enjoy that later, right after I settle the score for my brother.”
“Last chance,” said Jim. “Leave or else.”
Rufus broke up laughing again. “So tell me, why do you want us to leave?”
“Because you’re scumbags, and this is where my family lives.”
Rufus’s amusement tapered off.
Time was slowing down for Jim. It was like he was outside his body watching it all from the ceiling. He heard the words coming out of his own mouth like a tape recorder on dying batteries. It was as if a part of his brain that had always stayed behind a locked door was now in control. Jim saw himself begin to walk toward Rufus.
“My patience has run out,” said Jim. “I can handle you being a loser and stupid and rude, but not all three at the same time.”
Rufus stopped laughing and raised his gun. “You’re in a serious rush to die, you little worm!”
“No!” Martha screamed.
Sly pointed across the room.
“I don’t remember that costume.”
“You’re right,” said Willie. “There wasn’t any buffalo at the party.”
The buffalo began to charge.
“Rufus! Watch out!”
“What—”
Too late. Mahoney and Serge nailed Rufus in the back. He tumbled over a coffee table, and his gun went flying. Rufus came up on the other side of the table mad as hell, yelling to his brothers. “Shoot the buffalo! Shoot the buffalo!”
Jim Davenport was approaching the speed of light. Time slowed, mass expanded, sound went dead. He saw Willie and Sly turn in slow motion and level pistols at the buffalo. He looked down and saw Rufus’s loose gun skittering across the wood floor, taking forever. He dove for it.