Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  The officer told Veale’s wife that he was sorry. But since George refused to cooperate, or even come out from behind the stump, all he could do was tell the men to leave. He tipped his hat.

  Veale’s wife and daughter took matters into their own hands and went shopping in Hyde Park.

  After the women left, Serge and Coleman circled back to the house and walked through the unlocked door. George, in the living room, took off running.

  Serge tackled him again on the Mexican tiles.

  “George, we’re not going to cut off any more fingers. We just want to show you something.”

  Serge pushed a videocassette into the VCR, and George watched himself with a fishbowl on his head.

  “Now let’s go for a ride, George,” said Serge.

  But George made himself back into a ball. So Serge and Coleman put him in a large laundry basket and carried him out to the Barracuda.

  As Serge drove, he talked to Veale in the passenger seat. “Why haven’t you paid us? You know it’s the right thing. I can’t believe you were intentionally trying to avoid us.

  “Tell you what I’m going to do, George. I’m a motivational kind of guy. I deeply believe in inspiring the people around me, giving them a clear reason to do things.”

  Serge pulled out several sheets of paper stapled together. “We took the liberty of going through your mail. As a free service, of course, no charge. This was from your caterer, your daughter’s final wedding guest list. About a hundred and fifty names, addresses too.”

  Serge pulled out ten rectangular boxes wrapped in brown paper, the size of videocassettes.

  “These are the fishbowl chronicles,” said Serge. “I’ve addressed them to the first ten people on the wedding list. Every day you don’t pay, I address another ten tapes.”

  Serge pulled the Barracuda over to the curb, stepped out and dropped the ten tapes into a mailbox. George screamed, jumped out of the car and jammed his arm into the mailbox up to his neck, scraping off wads of skin, and got stuck for a half hour.

  With the three bikers on the sailboat and out of the way, the unveiling of Puerto Lago Boca Vista Isles, Phase V, went off without a snag. McJagger thought it wise to keep the Ohio visitors in their buses, preventing contact with the park’s residents. A phalanx of yard workers cleared one intersection of a blockade of electric scooters.

  The mood at the park returned to interminable funk. Minimum closed the pool again and ordered the breakage of forty water heaters.

  On October 14, just after noon, Minimum stood in the driveway of Trailer #864, the Aloha model, browbeating an eighty-year-old woman to tears over the maintenance fee. A crowd gathered and heckled him.

  In Trailer #865, a widower in a walker went to the closet and put on his Eighth Air Force bomber’s jacket with a small flak tear under the arm. He reached behind a pile of newspapers and military yearbooks and grabbed a lever-action Winchester.

  A few onlookers noticed the gun barrel through a screen on Trailer #865. They whispered and the crowd slunk out of the line of fire. Minimum, concentrating on his intimidation, was the only one without a clue.

  The doctor said the shot couldn’t have hit Minimum’s kneecap more directly or done more damage, even though the veteran told police repeatedly that he was aiming for his heart.

  After at least six months of rehabilitation, Minimum would be able to get around with just a leg brace. Until then he’d have to use…

  “No, not that!” said Minimum.

  The residents hooted at Minimum as he hobbled around the complex with a walker. At the clubhouse, some tried to hook the legs of his device with their canes.

  As for the veteran, that was something McJagger wanted to talk to Minimum about. McJagger, at his desk, harrumphed with impatience as Minimum moved like an escargot with the walker. He struggled to get into a chair.

  “You comfy?” asked McJagger.

  Minimum nodded.

  “Good.” He threw several newspapers hard across the desk and Minimum put up both hands to stop them from hitting his face.

  “Look at those goddamn headlines. ‘Shooting trial opens: Aging vet’s last mission.’ ‘Retirement parks—hell on earth?’ ‘Gray Panthers blast Vista Isles.’ They’re making this guy out to be a hero. CNN even named a new syndrome after him. It’s a goddamn nightmare. I got a twenty-million-dollar new phase about to go in the tank because of you. You’re fired!”

  “But what about all I’ve done for you?” said Minimum, on the business end of fear for the first time in his life.

  “What about how you’ve treated all those old people!”

  “But you wanted me to. I made you rich!”

  “Oh! Blame others! That’s the high road, you groveling little shit. You’re weak; you can’t even walk right anymore. You’re yesterday’s news,” said McJagger. “How do you put it? You’re out on the streets!”

  Minimum sobbed without regard.

  “Jesus Christ,” said McJagger. “Be a man!”

  Minimum fell to the floor and crawled around the desk. He grabbed McJagger by the leg and wouldn’t let go, weeping on his socks.

  “For the love of God!” yelled McJagger, trying to shake free. “Okay, okay, you’re not fired. But you’ve got to disappear for a while, at least until the trial’s over. The best thing we can do is make sure this guy doesn’t get convicted. Get this off the front page.”

  “But he tried to kill me!”

  “Don’t cry to me. I’m on his side. Did you see the man’s war record? Purple Heart, Flying Cross, thirty-six bombing runs over Germany, shot down twice, prisoner of war, tortured. I read the paper—couldn’t believe how much money you swindled him out of. You’re a sick man!”

  “I gave the money to you!”

  “That man is a real American hero! Cripes, you’re just a little worm. Your kind has no values.”

  “But he shot me!”

  “I would have shot you. I will shoot you if you don’t shut up,” and McJagger pulled the .45 from under his desk.

  “Maybe you can sign some kind of affidavit,” McJagger thought out loud. “Say you shot yourself cleaning your gun. It was a lovers’ quarrel. A gang-related drive-by. Jealous husband. You were trying to buy drugs. Claim you’re mentally unbalanced, mildly retarded. A transvestite…”

  McJagger opened his desk drawer again and pulled out a zippered bank bag and threw it at Minimum.

  “That’s five grand and the keys to my Hatteras in Cape Coral, sleeps six. Take it and get lost,” said McJagger. “Jesus, I’m running out of boats here.”

  Minimum rubbed his forehead where the bank bag had hit him.

  “And if you see those bikers, tell ’em I want my sailboat back!”

  Sean Breen and David Klein drove north from Tampa on Interstate 75. It was a warm Sunday morning and they were in Sean’s Chrysler. David bought the gas when they stopped at a Cracker Barrel for biscuits.

  They had open country driving through the Withlacoochee State Forest, slightly rolling, which is a mountain chain in Florida. Lots of pastures and hardwoods connected by strings of billboards for topless truck stops a hundred miles away.

  It was a vintage 1985 New Yorker with a maroon interior, factory stereo. Eight hundred dollars of recent work on the air-conditioning. Mileage: unknown. David gave Sean relentless grief about trading it in. To hear Sean tell it, the car was good for another two hundred thousand, as long as he changed the oil on time.

  The car began making a ker-chunk noise and puffs of smoke shot out the edges of the hood, but Sean continued driving.

  “Don’t you think you should pull over?” asked David.

  Sean reached forward and turned off the air conditioner and the problem stopped. He rolled down his window.

  “Why do you keep this car?” asked David. “How many miles has it got?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sean. “The odometer’s broken.”

  “So it’s got a million miles and you have to have the air conditioner fixed every
year, and a few months ago it failed the emission test. What was that? Another five hundred dollars?”

  “Nine.”

  “Nine hundred!” David said and whistled.

  “I just can’t bring myself to get rid of it,” said Sean. “I feel comfortable in it. It’s like an old baseball glove.”

  “The rearview mirror is out of alignment in your baseball glove,” said David. He reached up and turned the mirror slightly and it popped off the windshield in his hand.

  “Whoops.”

  David tossed the mirror over his shoulder into the backseat. He turned and grinned with guilt at Sean, who glared back.

  “They make a special glue,” said David. “Sticks right to the glass.”

  “And you’ll be finding where they sell it.”

  They took Exit 63 at Bushnell in south Sumter County and hooked back under the overpass. Sean drove briefly through the rural countryside until he saw large American flags. Florida National Cemetery.

  They drove through tight grids of tombstones that formed different patterns depending on your angle. They only gave way to more fields of tombstones.

  “It’s over there,” David said, pointing.

  They parked on the road and began walking. Only one other person was in sight. An elderly woman knelt at a grave in the adjacent field, holding a rosary. Sean and David were in the newest section. They could tell because the tombstones ended in a ragged, nongeometric edge, and the land beyond was being backhoed and prepared for the advancing wave of white tablets.

  In military cemeteries, plots aren’t purchased in advance and spread out willy-nilly. They are dug in strict chronological order.

  David and Sean walked through time as they checked the inscribed dates of death. 1988. 1989. 1990. The pair slowed when they got to 1991. Up until then, the dates of birth had been mostly in the early part of the century as World War II and Korean vets died off. But now they began seeing a growing frequency of birth dates in the early 1970s mixed with the 1920s. The Gulf War. “A lot more than I thought,” said Sean.

  Most of the tombstones had crosses carved at the top. A distant second were six-pointed stars. There were rare Eastern Orthodox symbols. Following a series of eleven consecutive crosses was a Star of David and the name Reuben Klein.

  David stopped and looked down and was quiet. Sean was glad he’d come, but he was uncomfortable because David’s nature had been to aggressively avoid talking about his parents.

  David started talking. “When he had his stroke, it looked like he would make it. I went with the whole family. Spent as little time as I could. Then my sister called and said I should see him. What she meant was if we had anything to say, there wouldn’t be another chance. She knew why we didn’t get along. It was because of the way he treated her. He didn’t mistreat her. He just didn’t treat her right. He was the colonel, very military, he was always cold and hard and never any affection or emotion. I could take it, but he treated Sarah like she was a buck private too. We always fought over it and when I was sixteen I took a swing at him and he decked me. After I left for college, I never said more than two words together to him, and that was only when I visited Mom. Seemed fine with him; he never called or wrote.”

  Sean had never heard David talk remotely like this. David stared down at the tombstone the whole time he was talking.

  “Sarah begged me to go back to the hospital and fix things. What do you fix? There was never anything there. I went early one Monday, but he was sleeping, tubes in his nose and mouth and arms. Machines tracking everything. He was helpless as a baby, and he slept like one. I sat there. Before I knew it I had been there two hours, and I left.

  “I went to an artist I knew through a friend and told him I needed something quick—I’d pay extra. That Friday I went back to his room and this time he was awake. But no expression except maybe wondering what the heck I had wrapped in the brown paper. I held it up at the foot of the bed and took the paper off.”

  It was a painting of a beautiful P-38 Lightning flying over the Pacific Ocean. Tendrils of clouds seemed to zip by the plane, below the right wing and under its trademark twin nacelles. The sea was deliberately fuzzed up because David had rushed the artist and told him to cut corners on the background—he had to have the painting by the weekend. But the out-of-focus sea actually created a nice depth-of-field effect. On the horizon were traces of an island chain. The archipelago was anonymous in the painting, but the plane was not. Its numbers and markings were those of Klein’s plane, and the pilot, though tiny, had Reuben’s black hair and determined face. It was a clear sunny morning just after his twentieth birthday, and Reuben Klein had life by the tail as he roared through the wide-open sky.

  Reuben Klein would have recognized the plane without the markings. The image in the painting was the same as in a sepia-toned black-and-white photo taken in 1945. Exactly the same. Every brushstroke precisely captured the details branded in his mind. The photo had been taken by another pilot that morning, looking back and to the right at Reuben’s plane. For some reason it was the only photo Reuben had of himself flying during the war. In fact it was the only picture of him during the war, period. The other guys took snapshots of themselves all the time, but Reuben thought they were being childish. Years later, he regretted it. He kept the photo at home in a special cherry-wood box on his desk. Reuben Klein was not a materialistic man, except for that box. It also contained his pilot’s wings, a couple of medals and the colonel insignias he would receive toward the end of his career. But that picture was the most special to him. If there was any emotion in Reuben Klein, it was when he opened the box once or twice a week and stared at it. His young heart was a lion in that cockpit and the world awaited. He didn’t know at the time that it was his peak, but now he did.

  David always wanted to be like his father, and, like his father, he stared at the photo of the P-38 for hours, committing every minute detail to memory. Then he’d put it back in the box and carefully set it on his father’s desk and sneak out of the room before his dad came home and caught him. David got more than one spanking for messing around with that box.

  One night Reuben Klein was reading the newspaper when six-year-old David came up to give him something. He told his father he’d made it himself. It was a paper plate. Around the edge of the paper plate was a circle of hearts drawn with a red crayon. Glued into the middle of the plate with library paste was an airplane. David had cut it out of the black-and-white photo with his safety scissors and stuck it on the plate. He colored it with purple and yellow crayons and he put more paste on top of it and sprinkled silver and gold glitter.

  “How do you like it?” David had said, beaming.

  He got the worst spanking of his little life.

  David stopped as he recounted all this for Sean in the cemetery, and Sean couldn’t believe the always composed, private person transforming before him. David gathered himself and continued.

  “I stood there at the foot of my father’s hospital bed with the painting for what seemed like the longest time, and I said, ‘How do you like it?’ My dad’s left eye looked up at me. The stroke had paralyzed the right side of his face and it was like stone, like that half was already dead. But his left eye started crying and the tears rolled off the side of his face onto the pillow. He desperately wanted to say something, but he had these tubes in his mouth, and the left half of his mouth tried to work the tubes out. I rubbed his arm and told him it was all right, but he kept trying to spit out the tubes like he had to say the most important thing in the world. The nurses came in, and they made me leave. I set the painting upright in a chair facing him. Late that night, actually closer to dawn, he went. By Monday he was here.”

  David turned his back to Sean, and Sean could see he was dabbing his eyes with the heel of his right hand. Sean looked away and wiped his own face. A few minutes passed without anyone talking. “Thanks for coming with me,” he said, and they walked back to the car.

  George Veale bonded out of the Hill
sborough County Jail on Orient Road the morning after shooting his dog’s leg off. He had shared a cell with a man who wore an aluminum-foil skullcap to keep out the gamma rays. He had eaten a dinner of food squares with the taste and texture of particle board. Sharing his table was a man who was somehow missing his nose and kept asking Veale, “What are you looking at, motherfucker!”

  The only outdoor area in Cell Pod D was a tiny basketball court with four sheer, eighteen-foot-high concrete walls and a chain-link grating across the top. A basketball sat idle under the basket and Veale picked it up and started dribbling spastically like he was eight years old.

  Two sinewy men sat in the corner of the court, and the taller one yelled, “Hey, Grampa, did we say you could touch that basketball?” He looked up at them and immediately put the basketball down.

  “Did we say to put the ball down?” They came over and picked up the basketball and made Veale play dodge ball with them, Veale permanently on defense.

  All in all, a rough twenty-four hours for George. After freeing his arm from the mailbox, Veale had camped at his wet bar for two hours and driven to the strip club, where he blabbed everything to Sharon and began wailing so loudly that he was thrown out of the Red Snapper for the first time.

  Back at the homestead, Veale went into a paranoid fandango as he walked Van Damme in the front yard. He held the drink and cigar in his right hand, the good one, and in his left, with only a thumb and forefinger, he simultaneously gripped the end of the leash and a nickel-plated .45 automatic, the sight of which prompted seven neighbors to call the police.

  Coleman and Serge made a slow left turn in the Barracuda from Obispo onto San Clemente, Veale’s street. From the corner they could see Veale five houses up on the right, unraveling, marching back and forth with the dog, waving the gun and yelling at the sky.

  As they approached Veale’s house, Coleman glanced in the rearview mirror and nudged Serge, who turned his eyes to the mirror without moving his head. A Tampa police cruiser had fallen in behind the Barracuda.