Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  The Key West International Airport doesn’t allow jets, because of noise rules, and the old prop planes lend romance. Much of the modest terminal is taken up by the Conch Flyer Lounge, which, in a display of priorities, sticks out onto the runway.

  The door flopped down into a staircase from the green-and-white plane, and Charles Saffron trotted out, yelling into a cell phone. He marched to the terminal with the purpose of a man moving toward someone he wants to punch.

  “You dumb sonuvabitch! Where’s my money!”

  “I’m real close, Mr. Saffron. Got ’em on the run,” said the phone. “Just a little more time.”

  Grenadine, who had had a hundred miles of sea and sky to crunch the numbers, was no longer on the New England Life team, but it was no time to tell Saffron.

  “Grenadine! Where are you! I want to see you right now!”

  “Your signal’s breaking up, Mr. Saffron,” said Mo, holding the phone at arm’s length. “I’m losing you. I can’t hear…” and he hung up.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” Saffron yelled next to a luggage cart. He bit the cell phone, breaking off the 6, 8 and 9 buttons.

  Saffron entered the airport through the bar and punched a hole in a wicker butterfly chair. He ran out to the curb and hailed a cab the color of Pepto-Bismol.

  The driver of the school bus had been crying off and on since they’d left Miami southbound on US 1. He turned around and looked at the men sitting behind him. “I love you guys.” And started blubbering again.

  Sixty middle-aged, overly happy men hugged each other often and sang, “Put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the water…” They passed around pictures of their families and hugged and wept some more.

  “Sorry you changed your mind,” the desk clerk at the Purple Pelican said in the phone, jotting down the cancellation.

  Sean, at a pay phone outside Captain Tony’s, said he was sorry, too. Maybe next time.

  The clerk was short, fiftyish, effeminate and well tanned. He had a white tank top, short blond hair, and an engaging personality. When he was finished writing, he looked up and saw two men approach.

  “Welcome to the Purple Pelican,” he said.

  Serge’s arms held a brown sack full of papaya, guavas, passion fruits, kumquats, pomegranates, limes, dates and coco plums. An hour earlier he had announced to Coleman that from now on his life was all about fruit. He decreed that he would drink only beverages that contained a tincture of banana.

  “Any vacancy?” Serge asked.

  “Usually we’re booked solid,” said the clerk, “but you’re in luck. We just had a cancellation.”

  The clerk asked if they wanted to know where his favorite restaurant was and was told no.

  “Blue Heaven,” he said anyway. “Used to be a brothel. Roosters run around your table while you eat.”

  Serge looked down at a souvenir pelican trivet and took a bite of papaya while the clerk wrote down the make and model of their car. Serge went in the gift store and came back with a stack of postcards and a pair of souvenir Hemingway beards.

  “The room I have for you is European bath facilities. That okay?” the clerk asked.

  “European?” said Serge. “Wow, you make less service actually sound classier. We have to pay extra for that?”

  The clerk dropped the smile. He handed over the key and said tersely, “Room three, upstairs.”

  In the room, Coleman became erratic, his skin clammy. He jerked his head around, looking.

  Coleman stuck his head under one of the beds, and Serge finally said, “What!”

  “Where’s the TV?”

  “There isn’t one. A lot of guesthouses in Key West don’t have ’em.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Where’s the TV?”

  The hotel tucked itself between a used bookstore and a moped rental on Fleming Street, just around the corner from Duval Street and a block from La Cubaria. The lobby was flush against the sidewalk. A tiny spotlight illuminated a sign with a purple pelican in a Hawaiian shirt.

  “I’ll be out in the lobby,” said Coleman, “by the TV.”

  Serge looked down from the window into the courtyard with a pair of royal palms. Ceramic tiles at the bottom of the pool formed yet another pelican. Serge installed the tension rod in the bathroom doorway. He put on his antigravity boots and hung upside down, working his abs.

  Coleman ran back into the room. “We’re on TV!”

  They ran to the lobby but only caught the last seconds, the “armed and dangerous” part. Serge wondered how long the two giant pictures of them had been on the screen, Serge looking dangerous in his mug shot, Coleman smiling like a loon in his.

  Serge looked over at the desk, but the clerk wasn’t paying attention, working with a pencil and calculator.

  They returned to the room and bolted the door. They waited an hour, until Florida Cable News looped back to the segment on Serge and Coleman. They went back downstairs to the lobby.

  When they got there, however, the lobby was full of Belgian students on a youth hostel tour. They had switched the TV to the Home Usher Movie Channel, watching Wayne’s World. Serge couldn’t believe what he saw, the entire room swaying back and forth and singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

  “No, no, no!” yelled Serge, standing in front of the TV set and waving both arms at them. “That song is illegal in this country. You must now go to your rooms and await instruction.”

  “Weirdo,” said one of the Belgians as they walked out onto the sidewalk. “Dork,” said another, but Serge had already changed channels.

  He and Coleman were right up to the set, blocking the view from anyone else, and the volume was low.

  They saw crime scene tape outside the Orbit Motel. They saw the Lotus outside the World Series and a sheet in the road on No Name Key.

  “What do they mean, ‘serial killers’!” said Serge. “Veale, okay. But Sharon was self-defense and the scalper—I mean, that was the World Series! You can call me a murderer, fair is fair, but as soon as you put ‘serial’ in front of it, everyone automatically thinks you’re crazy.”

  “I only killed a deer,” said Coleman, “and a turtle.”

  “We have to lay low and try to figure something out,” said Serge.

  “Yeah, but…”

  “But what?”

  “I wanted to go out and party.”

  The men in the school bus sang, “I am woman, hear me roar,” as they crossed the Seven Mile Bridge, but the driver didn’t know the words and asked that they switch back to “Put your hand in the hand.”

  He blew his nose and dabbed his eyes with Kleenex and broke down again. They crested the Niles Channel Bridge and headed onto Summerland Key.

  Dar-Dar hunched over the wheel, radio blaring. The sun had been down for two hours when the Yugo sputtered across the Saddlebunch Keys. He couldn’t believe his luck. To his right: a red LeMans parked at the shoulder of the road, two shadows on the bridge with fishing poles.

  He made a U-turn and parked on the opposite side of US 1. Waiting for a break in the traffic.

  “Way too late in the year for tarpon,” Serge told Coleman. Both were in their Hemingway beards. “Bonefish are out of the question too with this bait. Maybe get lucky with a trout.”

  Coleman reeled in his line and found something had chewed the shrimp off the hook. He hoisted the bait bucket out of the water and with clumsy effort retrieved another shrimp. He held it and the hook out to Serge.

  “Okay,” said Serge, “one more time. You can hook him through the face or under the tail or sideways through the carapace, but make sure you don’t hit that black round thing inside. That’s an important organ. He’ll die right away; you’ll get no action out of that bait. You can also twist that little fan thing off the end of the tail. It’ll improve the cast and put more scent in the water, but you’ll be doing way too many big things wrong for those little advantages to count.”

  With a rebaited hook, Coleman th
ought hard and flipped the bail on his spinning rod. Serge nodded so-far-so-good. Coleman stiffly whipped the rod and the line back over his shoulder, ready to cast.

  A voice behind them yelled, “Watch it! You could put someone’s eye out!”

  Serge and Coleman turned. Dar-Dar held a sharp-looking scimitar. Without the baseball T-shirt and cap, and the scar on his forehead now showing, Dar-Dar didn’t look like the fan from the World Series. He wore an all-black outfit and ankle-length black trench coat. Cloven hooves were painted on his sneakers.

  Serge studied the get-up and the inverted cross. “Who the hell are you supposed to be, Beelzeboob?”

  “I am Dar-Dar!” he said.

  “Tartar?” asked Coleman. “Like fish sauce?”

  “No! Dar-Dar! Lord of ultimate evil, pain and hopelessness!”

  “Oh,” said Serge. “That Dar-Dar.”

  Dar-Dar placed the point of the sword into the road and genuflected to one knee. He closed his eyes and prayed softly. Serge looked at Coleman and spun a finger at the side of his head, indicating insanity.

  Dar-Dar continued his contrition. “I am not worthy, oh dark one. But thank you, great Satan, for the chance to offer you this humble blood sacrifice in the name of all that is unholy and shitty….”

  With long black hair and black clothes, kneeling at night on an unlighted bridge, Dar-Dar was invisible. There was faint singing in the night, “Put your hand in the hand of the man who calmed the sea…”

  It grew louder, but Dar-Dar continued talking to the devil.

  “…hand in the hand of the man from Galilee…”

  Dar-Dar looked up over the high headlights and saw a man behind the wheel with eyes streaming tears of joy. A banner hung across the top of the windshield.

  Dar-Dar read the banner and said, “Goddammit!” and was crushed to death by a Promise Keeper bus.

  Twenty-three

  With Dar-Dar all over the road and Promise Keepers running everywhere, Serge decided they should leave before the authorities arrived.

  An hour later they were ambling down Duval Street. Coleman wore a newly purchased T-shirt that said, “Mean people suck…. Nice people swallow.”

  “Maybe later we can go to the cockfights,” said Serge. “They have them around here somewhere. I just have to get hooked up. We’ll ask a cabdriver. They know where all the action’s at.”

  They ate conch fritters with Key limes, sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the front of the Southern Cross Hotel. A debutante from Jupiter Island mistook the bearded pair for vagrants and said, “Homeless and hungry, blah, blah, blah.”

  Serge spotted one of the half-bike/half-rickshaws in the loading zone. The driver said his name was Aubrey, from New Zealand. Twenty-two and not a bit wiser. He looked at their Hemingway beards.

  “Hey! ZZ Top!” he said.

  “ZZ Top wants the big tour,” said Serge, climbing in back with Coleman.

  “You got it.”

  After directing Aubrey through a series of stops, Serge and Coleman had sacks of take-out Cuban food, beer and Jack Daniel’s in back with them.

  “Have a beer,” Serge told Aubrey.

  “Not while working. I’ll get fired.”

  Serge had him stop at a drugstore and bought a bicyclist’s water bottle. He filled it with two cans of Miller and handed it over Aubrey’s shoulder.

  “Hey! Thanks!”

  Over the next three hours, Serge and Coleman would make Aubrey a legend in his field, setting the Key West rickshaw record with a two-hundred-dollar fare. They saw Truman’s southern white house, and they stopped to take pictures of the ten-ton concrete thimble at the ersatz Southernmost Point. In between were constant stops for rest rooms and tropical trinkets.

  They rode down Olivia to Whitehead Street. At the corner of the Hemingway House they were beset by three competing crack dealers on mopeds, who appeared from behind bushes like motorcycle cops at a speed trap. “Psst, hey, I got what you want!”

  Serge stood in the back of the rickshaw and pulled up his shirt to display the pistol in his waistband. The mopeds scattered.

  Aubrey pedaled north on Duval.

  Susan Tchoupitoulas walked south on the sidewalk, carrying flyers, darting in and out of stores where Serge and Coleman had been spotted.

  She showed faxed photos of them in a kite factory, a body shampoo parlor and an art importer. The importers remembered the two all right, high breakage risks. Serge had handled and photographed everything. Coleman had bumped his marlin hat into a giant copper wind chime depicting a school of Spanish mackerel, and the staff had to get ladders to untangle him.

  Susan walked in Southernmost Bong and Hookah, where Coleman had bought a ceramic toucan water pipe. The clerk yelled to another clerk, “Yo, Five-O! Five-O!”

  “Bennie! It’s me, Susan,” Tchoupitoulas yelled as Bennie ran out the back door. “We went to high school together!”

  Serge kept a steady flow of beer going to Aubrey, who lost inhibition and started taking pulls straight from the Jack Daniel’s bottle in traffic in front of the Bull.

  “You guys are the greatest,” Aubrey declared.

  “It’s all relative,” said Serge. “Turn around and watch the road.”

  When they got to Turtle Kraals, Aubrey was having trouble keeping the rickshaw on all three wheels. Leading to the Land’s End Marina, in the darkness, was a winding downhill road. Aubrey took his feet off the pedals and let the bike freewheel. The pedals spun like fans, and Aubrey turned to an ashen Serge and Coleman. “Extreme, man!”

  Somehow they found themselves going about thirty out on the wooden pier, vibrating like they were going down railroad tracks. They sailed off the end into the black water of Key West Bight.

  A crack team of barflies ran down the pier and fished them out.

  The rubber bands holding their beards had slipped down around their necks, and someone yelled, “It’s those guys from TV, the deer killers!” Serge and Coleman fled sopping wet and ran out in front of a pink taxi driving by on Front Street. The driver hit the brakes and the two hopped in.

  The taxi had a thick plastic body-fluid liner over everything in the backseat, and the driver ignored their wetness.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “To the cockfights!” said Coleman.

  “Ignore him,” said Serge. “Start driving and I’ll tell you when to turn.”

  They went west on Greene Street. Serge looked out the back window and saw a small mob running down the street chasing the cab. The cabbie studied them in the rearview mirror.

  “Hey! You’re the guys from TV! The murderers!” The hack hit the brakes, and Serge and Coleman bailed out and sprinted up Greene Street. The vigilantes ran by the cab in pursuit.

  The mob was closing, about fifty yards behind Serge and Coleman, as they came to the intersection with Duval.

  There was a lot of activity ahead in the road. On the left-hand corner was Sloppy Joe’s, and out on the sidewalk, spilling onto Duval, were the look-alikes. A few hundred, massing in the intersection.

  They were in a tight knot in the street, mostly staggering, moving slow, or completely stopped, not appearing to be going anywhere soon, like cows when they’re chewing. Blocking Serge and Coleman’s escape. The mob right on them.

  Serge reached the Hemingways, stopped and spun. Looking for an exit. He saw the mob a few feet away, about to pin them against the look-alikes. “Put your beard back on!” he told Coleman, and they pulled the rubber bands up behind their heads. Then they both turned their backs to the mob and pried their way into the Hemingways like they were climbing into a dense jungle.

  The mob stopped at the edge of the Hemingways. They stood on their tiptoes and stretched their necks, trying to pick out Serge and Coleman. The pair burrowed deeper into the look-alikes.

  One of the pursuers pointed and yelled, “There they are!” Serge saw the vigilantes start climbing in after them, and he pulled a pistol. He fired a fusillade in the air. The mob pulled
back, tentative, and they dispersed when Serge fired two more shots.

  Meanwhile, the Hemingways started moving slowly in the opposite direction, down Duval. In their dulled state, there was a calm confusion and general sluggishness of response. But as a few started moving, so did others. Slow at first, but soon all were under way, and the movement took on its own life.

  The undulating, protoplasmic mass of Hemingways broke into a trot, then a run. In the middle, Serge and Coleman kept pace. By the time it got to Fleming Street it was a full-scale stampede. A clomping, reeling, wobbling herd of flatulence engines thundering across the island. A woman shrieked and a stranger darted into the street and pulled a small child from the path of the Hemingways. A moped slid out from under someone, and a man wearing a sandwich board that said “Repent” was trampled, footprints up and down his signs.

  People ran hollering in the opposite direction; others dove for doorways or climbed on top of cars. Spooked cats came out of nowhere, running for their lives, adding to the panic. A tabby jumped onto one of the Hemingways’ back and dug in its claws. The Hemingway twirled, yelling and flapping his arms behind him, trying to swat the cat just out of reach, and he ran up on the sidewalk and crashed through the front window of Margaritaville. A group of college thrill-seekers waited behind a fritter wagon, timing the herd. When it was alongside, the young men ran out into the Hemingways and down the street with them, dodging the men and their beer steins, trying not to get gored. Serge and Coleman worked their way to the eastern edge of the stampede and dove into a sunset cruise ticket booth at Angela Street.

  The leading Hemingways ended up falling in the sea at the foot of Duval and others turned onto South Street until the matter petered out under its own specific gravity. The Japanese, English and Spanish television crews took news of the melee global. The following week, the look-alikes would be approached by a consortium from London, who would sign them to a lucrative deal to participate next year in the first annual Running of the Hemingways.