by Dorsey, Tim
“Arriba! Arriba!” they yelled.
Sid slid his chair over to their table. “What’s the celebration, fellas?”
“We’re richer than King Tut,” said the closest one, his pupils dilated different sizes and his mouth and tongue out of synch. “We just found five million big ones!”
“Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh!” said the second, his head rolling around in its neck socket. “That’s a seeeeecret! We can’t let anybody know it’s out in the car!…Ooops!” And he covered his mouth with his hands as if they were faster than the speed of sound.
“But I’m your friend,” said Sid.
“Yesh, he’sh our friend!” slurred the third one.
Late the next morning, the first of the car thieves awoke in bright sunlight on the wooden floor of their Ybor City warehouse apartment, where they’d passed out just before daybreak.
He looked around, groggy. What happened? Snatches of memory filtered back. He remembered some guy back at The Wharf Rat helping them into a cab and paying the driver, then the ride back to the warehouse and the inebriated struggle up the steps, the three of them leaning against each other, an unstable tripod holding itself up. They must have made it into the apartment and lost consciousness on the floor because that’s all he could remember. He couldn’t remember anything at all about…the money! Where was the money? That bastard in the bar must have stolen it!
The car thief tried to spring up from the floor but couldn’t move. He looked down and saw his entire body spooled tightly head to toe with hundred-pound-test fishing line, his arms pinned by his sides and his legs bound together. He looked over at his two comrades on the floor next to him wrapped in the nylon line.
“Hey, you guys! Wake up! There’s trouble!”
The other two came around slowly at first, but then awoke all at once when they realized their situation. They thrashed around in panic.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said an unfamiliar voice. “That line will slice you to ribbons.”
A stranger walked into the room from the kitchen and sat on the couch. He was wiry and casual, sitting there with a leg crossed, reading a Tampa Tribune. On the front of the newspaper the thieves saw a big headline, “Keys Killer Sought,” and a large photo that matched the man holding the paper.
“Who are you?” said the first thief. Then he stopped and studied the stranger. Something familiar. “Hey—you’re that guy we jumped last night coming out of the warehouse.”
Serge set the paper down. He leaned forward on the edge of the sofa cushion and spoke softly. “Where’s my money?”
“What money?”
Serge reached around the side of the couch and slid a toolbox into view. He opened it and removed a pneumatic staple gun.
“Oh, that money. We don’t have it anymore. Some guy took it.”
Serge’s voice was understated: “Where’s my money?”
“I told you, we don’t know where it is.”
Serge didn’t say a word. He got down on the floor and sat cross-legged next to the men.
“What are you going to do to us?”
Serge raised a single finger to his lips for them to be quiet. Slowly and with deliberate theatrics, he removed items from the toolbox and set them on the floor. The men lifted their heads the best they could to get a better look. A roll of metal wire, tubes of commercial solvents and epoxies, arsenical soap, gauze, highly elastic putty, steel wool and quick-dissolve surgical suture. The three faces went white. One of the thieves fainted, and his head hit the wooden floor with the clack of a billiard break.
Serge went into the kitchen and came back with two buckets and a large plastic mat, which he unrolled on the floor. He turned on a small electric air compressor.
Serge went to work with diligence, industry and master craftsmanship. Before the hour had passed, Serge had been told every single detail the thieves could remember about the money, and a few more they made up. Serge knew they weren’t holding back. But it was too late; nothing could stop him once he was into one of his hobbies.
“Ever been to Ocklawaha?” Serge asked as he turned off the compressor.
Wide stares in response.
“You haven’t? You don’t know what you’re missing—gotta go sometime. It’s just up the road a ways between Orlando and Ocala. Famous four-hour shootout. That’s where Hoover’s G-men finally tracked down the notorious Ma Barker Gang. They raided their empty hideout in Chicago and found a map of Florida with Lake Weir circled. On January sixteenth, 1935, they surrounded the house. A two-story antique wooden place with a traditional cracker porch. It was a crime in itself that they put three thousand bullets in it. Afterward, they found Fred Barker and Machine Gun Kate dead, and the locals later sold postcards showing their bodies at the morgue.”
The car thieves continued staring in blank terror as Serge put down a tube of epoxy and picked up the staple gun. “What?” said Serge. “None of this registers? And you call yourselves criminals?”
Serge sighed in disappointment as he made a deft cross-stitch with the suture. “What about Giuseppe Zangara? Ring any bells?”
Still nothing.
Serge threw up his arms. “If we can’t remember our own history, what kind of state will we have to live in?”
He began rubbing with the arsenical soap. “Okay, but I’m only going to go through this once, so listen up. It was 1933, the place: Miami. Zangara was an unemployed bricklayer who had a chronic stomachache that he blamed on capitalism. To me, it sounds like he had some other problems, if you get my drift. Anyway, on Monday, February thirteenth, Giuseppe buys a pistol in a pawnshop. He’s just about to leave for Washington to shoot Hoover when he hears FDR is planning to visit Florida, so he decides to save gas money. President-elect Roosevelt is giving a speech in Miami’s Bayfront Park. Giuseppe is only five feet tall, and he gets a chair to stand on. Suddenly he yells, ‘Too many people are starving to death,’ and opens fire. But he picked a crappy chair to stand on, and it wobbled. He missed Roosevelt and hit five other people, mortally wounding Chicago mayor Anton Cermak….”
Serge made a final suture stitch and sat back to admire. “There!” he said, and smiled proudly at the three men, seeking approval.
Four hours later, the trio lay on the floor, quiet, still alive for a little while longer. Three disbelieving mouths frozen open.
One of the thieves had a late resurgence of survival instinct, and he began to twitch on the floor.
“See, now you’re wiggling around! Ruining all my work!” Serge let out a frustrated sigh and picked up the staple gun again.
7
On July 27, 1943, in a small tavern in Bryan, Texas, a group of English and American pilots sat around the tables knocking back drafts in tall, cold mugs and talking about the approaching hurricane. Someone suggested evacuating the AT-6 Texan trainers because the planes were so delicate. A few of the pilots had flown heavier planes in combat—Spitfires, Corsairs, Helldivers—and the discussion turned into a trashing of the little Texan.
Many of them had a good laugh, but not Major Joe Duckworth. The Texan was his plane, and he said the AT-6 was good enough to fly right through the middle of the hurricane.
He had just walked into the ambush of the barroom dare.
As the storm approached, the only navigator on the airbase was Ralph O’Hair, and he soon found himself sitting behind Duckworth in the tiny single-propeller plane as they took off from southeast Texas and into the Gulf of Mexico. They rose to five thousand feet. Just off the coast the sky darkened, and the lashing rain drummed the metal fuselage like they were in a kettle. The plane rocked and vibrated, and there was less and less light outside the cockpit until it was completely black. The men became quiet. The worst was the unknown—they were in uncharted territory. Nobody knew what happened to an aircraft as it neared the churning core of a hurricane. The plane’s body oscillated like both wings were about to snap. Then, an explosion of bright light all around. They were in a large, clear circle of sky,
and the wall of the storm ran all the way around. They were in the eye. Duckworth and O’Hair had just made aviation history. The Hurricane Hunters were born.
Fifty-four years later, Major Larry “Montana” Fletcher of the 403rd Air Wing piloted his plane across the twenty-fifth parallel, heading over the Atlantic toward the Cape Verde Islands. The aircraft was the pride of the Hurricane Hunters’ fleet, a magnificent silver Lockheed-Martin WC-130 Hercules, and Montana was their best pilot.
They were three hours out of Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, and the sky was bright and cloudless.
The crew of seven from the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron was a tight-knit but sundry lot. Major Fletcher was from the beaches of Southern California—the steady, all-American leader type with blond hair, a close shave and a square, dependable jaw. The copilot was ex-Lieutenant Colonel Lee “Southpaw” Barnes, a crusty and foul-mouthed veteran with hangover stubble and a footlocker of vintage Playboys who had been demoted for moral turpitude so unsettling that the Air Force conveniently lost all records. His job was to repeatedly tell Montana he “couldn’t fly for shit.” The flight engineer was Milton “Bananas” Foster, the highly excitable yet gifted mechanical wizard. Marilyn Sebastian was the plucky aerial reconnaissance officer, as tough as any man, but every bit a woman. The navigator was Pepe Miguelito, the forlorn youth with a pencil mustache and unending girl troubles. The weather officer was “Tiny” Baxter, the massive country boy from Oklahoma with simple but strong values. The instrument operator was William “The Truth” Honeycutt, a former all-services bantamweight champion.
The WC-130 Hercules made a loud, continuous hum as it flew southeast above the Atlantic. According to coordinates from the National Hurricane Center in Miami, the storm that had just ripped through Cape Verde would break the horizon in less than a half hour.
Baxter silently double- and triple-checked his weather charts with drafting tools. Pepe Miguelito’s lip quivered as he read another Dear John letter.
“I got a baaaaaaad feeling about this mission,” said Milton “Bananas” Foster. Then he began crying. “We’re all gonna die!”
Marilyn Sebastian shook Foster by the collar. “Be a man!” She slapped him, then kissed him hard.
Back in the cargo hold, Honeycutt skipped rope in his boxing trunks.
At zero seven hundred hours, the edge of Hurricane Rolando-berto began to rise out of the sea, larger and larger.
“Oh my God!” yelled Foster.
“Easy now,” said Montana. He adjusted the rudder to bring the course around east.
Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes glanced up from his latest copy of Skank. “You can’t fly for shit!”
As the plane reached the outer bands of the storm system, the wings began to shake. Montana’s heart rate remained level as he deftly banked the plane left to minimize crosswinds. They entered clouds and the cockpit went blind. All instruments from here on. The drone from the engines and vibrations from the storm became deafening.
“Baxter?” Montana said into the microphone of his intercom headset.
“Go!” Baxter said into his own headset.
“Sebastian?”
“Go!”
“Barnes?”
“Fuck yourself.”
“Honeycutt?”
“Go!”
“Miguelito?”
“Go!”
“Foster?”
Whimpering.
Barnes turned around and smacked Foster with his rolled-up stroke magazine.
“Go!” said Foster.
Montana wrapped a scarf around his neck and adjusted his goggles. “Okay. This is it. Hold on.”
The plane banked back right and shook savagely. A forgotten coffee cup slid off a shelf and broke. The blind view out the cockpit darkened. The glass cover on the altimeter cracked. There was a spark, then flames from the weather console, but Baxter hit it quickly with a Class C fire extinguisher.
Montana raised his chin and spoke solemnly into the headset. “It has been a privilege flying with all of you.”
Then nobody spoke. The violent shaking of the fuselage seemed to go on forever.
When they had almost given up hope, there was a bright flash and the Hercules punched through the interior wall of the hurricane and into the calm, clear eye of Rolando-berto. A cheer went up in the cockpit. Baxter hugged a tearful Miguelito; Barnes hugged Foster. Sebastian unexpectedly found herself in Honeycutt’s arms. They looked deep into each other’s eyes, remembering that weekend in Baton Rouge. Marilyn’s eyebrows raised up in poignancy and she opened her mouth, but Honeycutt shook his head. “No, don’t say anything.” They let go and went back to their stations.
Montana radioed Miami with news of their success.
8
Way up north in the Gulf of Mexico, the very tip of Florida’s panhandle meets the Alabama border on a remote barrier island named Perdido Key. In the middle of the island, right at the state line, is a ramshackle roadhouse built in 1962 called The Flora-Bama Lounge. It is an outpost of sorts—a peculiar, isolated place standing in relief against the bright, flat landscape of shore and ocean. It takes persistent driving and a good map to get to, and the people who make it there are not in a hurry to get anywhere else. An old peach windsock flaps over the roof to aid customers who arrive by parachute and seaplane.
On an uneventful day late in the year, at exactly noon, a burly old man with white hair and beard sat on the last barstool at the Gulf end of The Flora-Bama. He looked out the back door at the waves and laughing gulls. His name was Jethro Maddox, and he was on his eighth Bud.
Jethro’s tired eyes scanned the Redneck Riviera. “This is like Paris in the twenties,” he told the bartender, who was distracted by a TV tracking map showing a newly formed hurricane.
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated!” Jethro lifted his beer and drained it all at once and then looked at the can. “I have drunk you, beer, and I thank you. We are now one….”
Jethro smacked the empty can on the bar and burped with abandon. “There is no shame in a belch if it is the truth….” And he promptly toppled backward off his stool and disappeared from sight.
The bartender heard muttering from the direction of the floor—“Ouch! Galanos! I will kill you!”—and he leaned over the bar looking for Jethro. “Are you okay?”
Jethro stood and whisked off his sweater and fit his fishing cap back on his head. “I am fine,” he said and remounted the stool. “A man will hurt, but he must forget his hurt. The great DiMaggio played with hurt, and there was a grace when he struck out that others do not possess when they connect hard…. We will drink to DiMaggio. Another cold one….”
As the bartender popped the top on another can, he heard a deep drone high above and stepped over to the window and looked up. “Must be a hurricane plane returning to Keesler.”
“Ah, brave aviators. They are a noble crew filled with the vigor of their youth,” said Jethro, “and they will never feel more alive and proud than when they face the knowledge of death.”
We’re all gonna die!” screamed Bananas Foster in the cockpit of the WC-130 Hercules ten thousand feet over The Flora-Bama Lounge.
Nobody paid any attention. They were all reading books, writing letters or doing tedious chores on the boring return flight over the Gulf of Mexico. Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes scraped diligently with a quarter on an ancient scratch-and-sniff foldout in one of his magazines, but instead of an arousing bouquet from the southern female glands, all he got was a musty attic.
Sebastian and Honeycutt stared together out the lower windows in the cargo hold, tracing the shoreline with their eyes. They tried to identify the features of the Florida panhandle. Santa Rosa Island, Pensacola Bay, the Naval Air Station, Perdido Key. There was a scattering of cotton-puff clouds far below, throwing shadows on the ground, and they could make out the white wake of a shrimp boat in the Gulf. They could even see teeny-tiny cars driving along the coast, and they wondered where those people’
s lives were headed.
A red Alfa Romeo convertible sped east along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico on Route 292, Free’s “All Right Now” blasting from the stereo. Two tall, athletic, college-age women looked up at the plane in the sky and wondered what was going on in those lives.
They were the kind of women who were sexy at a range of a quarter mile, and their loose hair blew and snapped in the wind with a wild coquettishness. They wore big T-shirts over bikinis, and their sunglasses were cheap and cool. They gave off wanton vibrations. The scene could have been from a devil-may-care, coming-of-age independent flick that takes the jury award at Cannes, or maybe a tragedy-strikes-good-kids-in-a-small-town made-for-TV movie that opens with Meredith Baxter Birney staring through drizzling rain on a windowpane, popping pills and wondering when it all started to go so horribly wrong.
The driver was Ingrid Praline, a twenty-one-year-old blonde from Alabama with Scandinavian blood, and in the passenger seat was LaToya Olsen, a military brat from the Bronx.
Ingrid’s hair and cheekbones recalled Ursula Andress in Dr. No. She often braided her hair into pigtails and wore denim bib overalls, and the giant Lolita package gave men hemorrhagic fever. LaToya favored a young Lena Horne; she had the face of an angel, especially the eyes, and she often kept her hair pulled back in a bun, but now it was down.
The two had most recently worked at a Piggly Wiggly in Tuscaloosa, where their boss was a spitting-mean little bumper car of a woman. She hated Ingrid and LaToya on sight because they had potential, and she gave them all of the most undesirable chores. The pair first met on rubber-glove duty corralling an errant bowel movement in the men’s room.
They immediately became inseparable. LaToya was the talkative one and Ingrid was the mental sponge. Ingrid was far from dumb, but she had grown up in a crippling parochial environment. Her mother was Olga Svjörlvladablatt, a hardworking third-generation Swedish immigrant, but her father was Jebediah “Jeb” (“Bo”) Praline, fifth-generation Jim Beam, and global knowledge was viewed in their home as a new strain of syphilis that the line of Praline men had yet to build up a natural resistance against.