Tim Dorsey Collection #1
Page 50
Coleman was another story. He was the fuckup in the operation, no doubt about it. He had a chubby head that was a little too big for his body, and sunken, small eyes. In his resting state, ignorantly content. He was studying his hands, slowly turning them over and back.
Yelling came from the water. “Get off the coral!”
Others looked. A man was standing up to his waist in the water, exposing a bleached upper body. He was oblivious, adjusting his mask and destroying the reef.
Four other divers joined the yelling, almost in unison. “Get off the coral!” And next, everyone, including the dive operators and Serge: “Get off the coral!”
He continued to stand there, all fat and happy, not paying attention.
“He’s from France!” someone in the water yelled. “He doesn’t understand English!”
“Really? I speak French,” said Serge. “Get off the fucking coral!” He pulled the Smith & Wesson from the gym bag and shot the water around the diver.
The tourist looked up, saw he was taking the gunfire he’d been expecting ever since landing at Miami International, and dove in the water.
“Eurocentric bastard!” said Serge.
The dive operators were staggered with fright, but most of the people in the water began clapping.
Serge smiled and waved at them with the hand that still held the gun. He tossed the.38 into the gym bag.
Serge walked over to the dive operators and said quietly, “That was pretty dramatic, but there was really no harm. And when we get back to the dock, we’re going to get in our car and drive out of your lives. Or you can try to call the authorities on that radio or maybe make a stink back at the pier. In which case I will make sure our lives are entwined forever.”
The two sprinted out of the dive shop. Coleman was hallucinating carnivorous sea horses, and Serge pulled him by the arm to keep him on track. The shooting on the reef was justifiable, of course. That Frenchman had been stepping all over the coral. But he knew the French were a powerful people, and they would try to make an example of him.
The Corvette was on the far side of the lot, so they ditched it and jumped in a running panel truck delivering rolls to the convenience store next door.
Coleman thought Key Largo was ten miles of hell and sobbed. But Serge was getting excited, picking up the cues of building anticipation for the hundred-mile drive out to sea. Poincianas lined the median, and there was that squarish concrete tower on the right, whatever it was.
Plantation Key was more of the same, but by Islamorada the views began to open up, and Coleman settled down. One drawbridge spanned varying depths laid out in gradations of indigo and turquoise. Cocount palms angled out over the waves and charter boats lined up at a dock. Scales by the highway hung a swordfish, sea bass and bull shark.
Serge pulled over at a coral sculpture of a blowing palm, a monument for the victims of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. Coleman had gone into himself, entranced. Serge showed him Cheeca Lodge and the tiny Pioneer Cemetery that sat in the middle of the beach. A small square plot of nineteenth-century headstones and a cherub with a broken wing, surrounded by sunbathers.
They ditched the bakery truck in the Cheeca parking lot and switched to a restored red LeMans. Coleman told him the upholstery in the LeMans was alive with fire-tipped flagella. Serge pushed him in anyway and sped off.
Serge downshifted to climb the steep and high Channel Five Bridge. Coleman darted his eyes around, paranoid, preparing to light a joint. As they hit the crest of the bridge, Coleman deemed it safe and lit up. The drag was deep and calming.
Coleman blew the joint out of his mouth and yelled and crawled down to the floor to hide. Two Blackhawk military helicopters flew by slowly at window level on each side of the car, ported machine gun barrels glistening in the sun.
“Oh,” said Serge. “George Bush must be down here bonefishing. They’re just sweeping the area for terrorists.”
Coleman didn’t blink for five minutes.
Serge named the islands as they drove over them: Long Key, the Conch Keys, Duck, Grassy, Fat Deer, Crawl. They started out with brief glimpses of sea between long islands, and then it reversed, and they were touching down on brief islands between long, high bridges.
They were halfway out to Key West, approaching the Seven Mile Bridge. Serge told Coleman it was the longest bridge in the world. Just before the span, Serge looked over at one of his favorite restaurants but didn’t stop. He saw the fifties-style sign over the lunch counter that was open to the highway. The Seven Mile Grill, one of those pieces of roadside Americana that the rest of the country lost when they put in the interstates. It was so popular he didn’t wonder about the black limousine in the parking lot. Three men in white suits sat on stools, backs to the highway, eating the fish platter. Fried grouper with hush puppies and french fries on wax paper in plastic mesh baskets, coleslaw in paper cups. They had napkins tucked in their collars, and three machine guns rested on the counter; nobody in the place was moving. They tipped well and got sodas to go in souvenir can coolers depicting Pigeon Key.
Coleman told Serge the sky was convex, like a big blue punch bowl. He said the clouds were making sounds like a Wurlitzer organ. It dawned on him that their car had many, many moving parts.
At the beginning of the Seven Mile Bridge, Coleman was trying to get in the glove compartment. By the end he was tearing up the inside of the car like a cat on the way to the vet.
“Let’s get you off the highway,” said Serge.
He turned off US 1 and drove up Big Pine Key until they were back in the woods, and he kept driving. They approached the bridge across Bogie Channel, and Serge pulled over on the left. There were two other cars and a building partially obstructed in the trees. Coleman couldn’t see any signs as he got out of the car and followed Serge through a flimsy screen door.
“The hallucinations are back,” said Coleman. “There’s money everywhere. We’re rich!”
He saw thousands of scribbled-on one-dollar bills that covered the walls and ceiling of the No Name Pub. As remote and hidden as it was, the bar remained in another decade. Back when Zane Grey visited fish camps and ferries carried Studebakers across gaps in the Overseas Highway. Serge grabbed Coleman’s hands, which had torn down some of the money. The bills read, “Billy and Sally’s honeymoon,” “Green Bay Packers rule!” and “Support mental health or I’ll kill you!”
Serge apologized to the bartender and handed her the bills. It was a tiny place, the size of a living room, wrapped in an L around the bar. Children had taken over the single pool table.
“Look at this menu,” he told Coleman. “Beer food from around the world. Pizza, chili, tacos, Philly cheese steak, calzones, smoked fish, barbecue…”
Coleman was looking up at the large animal head over the bar. A sign said “Largest Key Deer on Record, Shot at No Name Pub.”
“It’s a joke,” said Serge. “That’s the head of a regular deer. Real key deer are these miniature things. They’re endangered, only a few hundred left. On this island we’re on, Big Pine, they’re like sacred cows in India. There’s nothing these people wouldn’t do to protect them. A little ways up, death threats are spray-painted in the road for anyone who messes with ’em.”
Serge told Coleman about the times he’d come out to the No Name Pub years ago, how there used to be an antique mechanical baseball game that used steel balls, and an old stuffed deer that stood over the bar wearing a bow tie. He’d watched a Super Bowl here, when everyone wore 3-D glasses to watch the Coke commercials….
Coleman interrupted, still staring up at the head. He whispered that the deer was telling him “to do bad things.”
Serge suggested they leave and paid the tab. They drove farther, over the Bogie Channel Bridge onto No Name Key. It was a dead end, unsettled island with no utilities and a few dirt roads leading to places that didn’t want visitors. This was body-dumping country, plenty of elbow room to deal with Coleman.
They got out of the car, and
Serge sat on the hood. Coleman became mollified by a series of objects. A rock, a twig, a land crab. Coleman said wavy lines were coming off the end of the road, and Serge said that was real. A miniature deer came out of the woods and stood in the road facing them. It had long since become tame through food handouts. It smelled a smorgasbord on Coleman and walked toward him.
Coleman screamed. Before Serge could do anything, Coleman had grabbed the.38 out of the car and shot the deer until the air was full of fur.
It was Serge’s turn to scream. He thought of the townfolks’ reaction and imagined Coleman and him as the “after” photo of the Mussolinis.
He pushed Coleman into the car and hit the gas.
Mo Grenadine thought it was the first time he’d seen a brick fireplace next to a bright window view of tropical plants. A sailfish hung over the mantel and a cat rubbed his leg. He threw the cat a piece of jerky, but it was rejected.
The homing device sat on the table; a bright dot slowly approached from the east.
Grenadine fiddled with the remains of the steamed shrimp and ordered another beer. The restaurant sat back in the banana trees and he hadn’t noticed it on the side of US 1 until it was too late and he had to backtrack. The Jamaican paint scheme had caught his attention, vibrant green and yellow, and a funky sign on the roof: Mangrove Mama’s.
The dot on the homer was accelerating. Grenadine chugged the beer as the dot passed through the middle of the screen—his position—and kept going west. He left a twenty on the table and ran to his car.
The dot became stationary and Grenadine shook the homing device. But there it stayed. He slowed as he crossed Sugarloaf Key. He recognized the lodge, to his right. That old dolphin Sugar, who had lived in the pool out back for years, had died and it had made every paper south of Orlando. Grenadine was getting close to the dot, and he slowed and turned in the dirt road next to the lodge.
He approached an isolated an isolated airstrip—where they had filmed part of a movie when they needed a place with smuggler atmosphere. Over the tops of nuisance pine trees he saw the bat tower. It was a louvered gothic structure from the 1930s. Another developer’s folly, but a creative one, put up in a vain attempt to colonize bats that would dine on mosquitoes.
Grenadine pulled around a bend in the road. He parked the car and walked quietly on the gravel with his binoculars. First he saw the parked red LeMans, and then the full bat tower came into view. At its base, a slightly plump man had his arms and legs wrapped around one of the pylons, hanging on for life only a foot above the ground, and a taller, thinner man was trying to pry him off.
“Is it just a matter of time?” asked Sean. “Are we safe in this state, or have we just been beating the odds?”
“You’re paranoid,” said David, at the wheel, crossing Tavernier Creek. “I saw an article in the newspaper. It said Floridians are overly fearful of crime. There was this study that found residents fear violent attack about fifteen times greater than the rest of the country, when the actual threat is only ten times greater.”
“That’s comforting,” said Sean. “Last year Karen and I were coming out of a video store just after dark. She was eight months’ pregnant. Looked like she was about to pop, she walked like a freakin’ penguin. These two guys followed us out. I didn’t think anything of it ’cause I can’t fathom the mind that would prey on someone that obviously pregnant.”
“What happened?”
“I put Karen in the mini-van and was about to walk around to my side when I realized the guys had disappeared. I looked around and I finally bent down and looked under the car. There were two pair of feet on the other side. They were crouched down waiting for me to walk around. I got Karen back out of the car and we went back in the store as fast as we could. I can’t tell you how frightened I was until we were back inside. But you know, once we were there, I started to get this feeling like I’ve never had before. I was so angry I wanted to kill those guys with my bare hands.”
“I woulda helped,” said David. “You found the traveler’s checks yet?”
“No!”
“Just asking.”
“I told you I hid them and I can’t remember where. It’ll come to me.”
“Okay, okay.”
The conversation stopped in a truce, and a minute later David asked Sean if he’d get the guidebooks back out. It was the division of labor; whoever wasn’t driving would read from history and travel books, looking up facts and legends about whatever place they were driving through. They were traversing the causeway between Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys.
“Okay, up ahead on the left,” Sean said, looking down at a map and then out the window. “That should be Indian Key. That used to be the seat of Dade County. Back in 1840, the guy who developed the place, Jacob Houseman, offered to kill Indians for the government for two hundred dollars each.
“For some reason the Indians got upset. They came out there and massacred a bunch of people.”
“And you’re worried about muggers at a video store,” said David.
“Shut up,” said Sean. “Here’s the wild part. There was a famous botanist, a Dr. Henry Perrine. He was hiding with his family. The Indians killing people all over the island. And the Indians are moving toward his house. So Perrine lowers his wife and three kids into the basement through a trapdoor. They expect him to come with them, but he figures the Indians are sure to discover the trapdoor and kill his family. So he closes them in and piles bags of seeds and junk over the door to conceal it. Then he waits up in the house and the Indians come in and butcher him. They never found the trapdoor—his family survived.”
“Man, read something lighter,” said David.
As soon as they arrived in Key West, Sean and David settled in at the Expatriate Café on Duval Street and watched the news. The Conch Train, an open-air sightseeing tram, clanged its bell as it went by, and a tourist took a picture of Sean and David.
On the side street, in the doorway shadows of a closed bric-a-brac shop, a man watched David and Sean.
Did they really want to go to Sloppy Joe’s, David asked. Sean was ambivalent too, but it was a weeknight, he said, when Joe’s was a functional bar instead of a souvenir mall.
David and Sean had been looking out at the traffic on Duval as they talked, not looking at the man approaching the table from David’s blind side. In the last few yards the man lunged. David’s Canon camera with zoom lens was in the middle of the table, next to the lamp. While still looking at Duval, David’s left hand shot out and landed atop the camera, a split second before the man’s hand landed on top of David’s.
David looked up at him. He said calmly, “You have a decision to make.”
The man snarled, “I want the camera. Now!”
“Wrong decision.”
David curled his right arm just behind the man’s calves and slammed his shoulder into both his knees. The man went over backward like a tree. David was on him, and gave one quick rabbit punch below and behind his ear, knocking him out.
“How’d you know?” asked Sean as they walked down Duval. “I didn’t even see him coming, and he was almost behind you.”
“It’s Florida,” David shrugged. “It’s like you’re a small fish on the reef. You have to stay aware of your surroundings.”
Up ahead, at Sloppy Joe’s, Sean and David stuck their heads in the door from the sidewalk. They decided not to go in.
The bar was packed more than usual for that early, and especially a weekday. There was something odd about the crowd. They were all older men on the paunchy side. Gray or white hair with beards. Rosy, full faces, some sunburned, others with lots of capillaries near the surface. Most of them in white turtleneck sweaters.
“I think they’re all supposed to be Hemingway,” said Sean.
Since the early sixties, looking like Hemingway had been a growing cottage industry in Key West. So much so that by the time the annual Hemingway festival was unexpectedly canceled, it spelled a crisis of confidence for the swelling num
bers of look-alikes who vacationed or had permanently relocated on the island.
The colony even had a name, The Look-Alikes. In 1997, Hemingway’s heirs decided to cancel the festival. They said they didn’t like the rowdy image of Key West’s yearly festival, which disgraced Ernest’s memory by not giving them a big enough cut of the profits.
They moved the festival to Sanibel and announced there would be no drunken revelry; Hemingway would be honored with more appropriate activities, like golf.
The look-alikes moped around Key West for weeks, some became surly, a few ended up on the public dole. They had started meeting lately, trying to figure something out. They hadn’t made any progress against the Hemingway heirs or the city of Sanibel, but interest and hope were building. Each Monday they held a meeting at Sloppy Joe’s, but before they could stratify a legal or economic approach, the gatherings inevitably unraveled into loud misadventure.
The forums grew each week. It started with the previous year’s eighty-three entrants in the look-alike contest, and grew to one-fifty the next week, and two hundred the week after that. Soon the weekly meetings generated so much sympathy that they were pulling in the cross-over look-alikes—those of Burl Ives, Orson Welles and Dom DeLuise, who, in a pinch, could do Hemingway in a crowd, if they were in the back rows.
This Monday, the meeting had ballooned to a record three hundred and forty. TV crews from Japan, England and Spain were on hand. But the meeting was well on the way to making no sense. One of the Hemingways tumbled onto the sidewalk and spilled a draft on Sean’s shoes.
Sean and David agreed that no good could come of going inside, and they proceeded to Captain Tony’s.
The chubby, belly-landing amphibious plane dropped its wheels and rolled onto the short Key West runway. A young man and woman in Bermudas directed taxiing planes around with lazy gestures. The woman chewed gum.