by Dorsey, Tim
“Those were keyboard-dominated bands,” said Tommy. “BTO was wall-of-sound guitar.”
“Excuse me?” Sammy interrupted. “Is this a Latin thing?”
Everyone glowered at him, including Joe Varsity.
“Sorry,” said Sammy. He grinned nervously, then made a straight face.
Tommy turned back to Juan. “What are you talking about? You’re one of us! Your name’s Diaz, too! We’re the Diaz Boys!”
“Yeah, but it could be the Diaz Brothers. Like in Scarface! I know that’s what you’ve really always wanted. Like the Garcia Brothers and the Rodriguez Brothers. You only let me in the group because you felt sorry for me and you promised my mom.”
“Where do you get these ideas?” said Tommy. “You’re family!”
Tommy gave Juan a big hug and kissed him on both cheeks. “I don’t want to hear any more of this foolishness. Now get going before the wedding shop closes.”
Juan wiped a tear and smiled and rushed out the door.
As soon as he was gone, Rafael Diaz said, “Let’s get rid of that guy. Then we can finally be the Diaz Brothers.”
“I can’t,” said Tommy. “I feel sorry for the guy and I promised his mom. Besides, he runs all the errands.”
“Can we at least change the s to a z?” asked Rafael. “We could be the Diaz Boyz.”
Tommy Diaz looked at Rafael like he had an extra nose. “Okay, follow me carefully. We smuggle cocaine. We don’t sing fuckin’ doo-wop.”
Juan Diaz returned from the wedding shop in thirty minutes with a giant box of deflated balloons and a floor-standing tank of helium. Everyone drank heavily watching the hockey game. They untied Joe’s and Sammy’s hands so they could eat roast beef sandwiches and drink beer. There weren’t enough chairs so Juan had to sit on the cooler because he was the cousin, and he complained about having to get up every time someone wanted a beer.
“It’s because I’m the cousin, isn’t it?”
“Nonsense!”
They all cheered when the Lightning scored the go-ahead goal in the third period. After the game, Florida Cable News’ Blaine Crease appeared on TV at the top of the Sunshine Skyway bridge.
“…And this is where the bloody trail of the Keys Killer came to an end, where he jumped to certain death and was swept out to sea in the powerful currents at the mouth of Tampa Bay….”
Crease stopped to pull a folded piece of paper from his pocket.
“…Just before he decided to take his own life, the notorious murderer wrote an exclusive letter to me, Blaine Crease….”
Crease put on reading glasses, held up the letter and began reading:
“‘Dear Mr. Crease, You report too many depressing stories. More happy news, please. Warmly, Serge A. Storms.’”
Crease dramatically whipped off his reading glasses. “Obviously the rantings of a seriously deranged mind!…”
Tommy Diaz and the others started filling balloons with helium, tying them off and letting them float up to the low ceiling.
The men took turns inhaling helium and talking funny.
“I didn’t know drug smugglers were so much fun,” said Sammy, hair disheveled and head bobbing from the injection. “I thought you’d be mad at us.”
“No, we’re not mad,” Tommy said and took a hit of helium.
“So, you’re not going to kill us?”
“Oh no,” Tommy said like Donald Duck, “we’re still going to kill you.”
One of the men went outside and got two beach loungers from the patio next to the pool. They tied and taped Joe and Sammy into the loungers and attached a hundred balloons to each.
“Hey, what are you guys doing?” asked Joe Varsity.
Nobody answered. They kept tying on more balloons and taping Joe and Sammy more securely to the beach loungers.
“Okay, this is starting to not be funny anymore,” said Joe.
More balloons.
“Are you trying to make us blimps?” asked Joe. “It’ll never work. You can’t lift a person up with regular party balloons.”
Just then, Sammy floated away from his handlers. His hands were tied to the sides of the lounger, and his nose mashed up against a hanging lamp.
“Stop clowning around,” snapped Tommy. “Get him down from there.”
Sammy wasn’t coming out of the drug as quickly as Joe, and he giggled as they retrieved him.
“I heard about this before,” Sammy told Joe. “Some guy up in Georgia was laid off at a factory. So he got loaded at his daughter’s wedding and tied a bunch of balloons to a cot and grabbed a leftover bottle of champagne and took off. He brought a frog gigger with him to pop balloons one at a time when he wanted to come down.” Sammy turned to the Diaz Boys. “You’re gonna give us giggers, right?”
“No giggers,” said Tommy, not looking up, tying off another balloon.
“What’ll happen to us?” Joe asked from the outskirts of panic.
Sammy answered. “We’ll go up real high and black out from lack of oxygen and then die. Or the balloons will explode from the low atmospheric pressure and we’ll crash and die. Even odds which will happen first.”
Joe started crying.
“I hear Tampa Bay is beautiful from the air at night,” said Sammy.
Tommy Diaz cracked the front door to the room, stuck his head out and looked both ways. “Coast is clear.”
Joe sobbed and Sammy giggled as the men jockeyed with the loungers like Macy’s parade ground crews. They bumped into each other in the close quarters of the motel room and Sammy got wedged in the doorway. Rafael Diaz shoved from the rear and a few balloons popped as Sammy came free and shot up into the night air faster than they had expected. “Wheeeeeeeeee.”
Then it was Joe’s turn, but he went up screaming and crying.
Some people in the bar heard the commotion and looked out the window, but didn’t see anything. Two doors down, City and Country thought they heard something and stepped out of their rooms onto the sidewalk. City checked her watch and shook it. “Where can those guys be?”
Sammy drifted out over the Gulf, but Joe caught a thermal crosswind and blew back across the bay toward Tampa, over the big green glass dome of the Florida Aquarium.
15
Lenny had been staying with Serge the last two days in room one of Hammerhead Ranch. From the moment they jumped in Lenny’s Cadillac on the Sunshine Skyway fishing pier, there was instant hypergolic chemistry.
Serge upon arriving in the room: “First we establish a bivouac. I’ll deploy my gear over here by the TV and check the escape routes; you fill the tub with ice…. If we do it right, the room should look exactly like we’re on a stakeout.”
“This is so great!” said Lenny.
Serge cleared the wicker writing table with the round glass top and laid out precision tools, electrical meter, soldering iron and snacks. He began taking apart the homing signal receiver, trying to figure out why it wasn’t picking up the briefcase. Soon he had the guts all over the table, frayed wiring sticking out everywhere, looking like it would never work again. Serge talked to himself. “It’s gotta be something simple, like a bad rheostat…. Hmmm.” He stuck his tongue out the corner of his mouth in concentration. He plucked a semiconductor off the chassis with needle-nose pliers like a kid playing the old Milton Bradley game Operation. In the background, Lenny was a one-man bucket brigade, making repeated trips from the ice machine to the tub with the motel’s tiny plastic ice pail.
“These things don’t hold shit,” said Lenny, dumping his twentieth bucket of cubes.
“That’s so inconsiderate guests don’t hog all the ice.”
“Some people spoil it for everyone.”
Lenny dumped another bucket, and the ice finally crested the top of the tub.
Serge finished reassembling the homing receiver, extended the telescopic antenna and turned it on. Nothing. “Piss.” Serge turned it off and tossed it on the near bed. “Supply run!”
“Check!” said Lenny, and they spr
inted out the door.
They had been tooling around the barrier islands ever since in bursts of aimless but urgent activity.
On the third day, Serge slouched in the passenger seat at an open drawbridge on the Pinellas Bayway. His arm was over the side of the car, slapping the “Don” in “The Don Johnson Experience” in time with the music. He looked up to the sky and made a scrunched face.
“My spider senses are tingling…. First time I felt like this I was three, just before Betsy hit.”
“Betsy?”
“One of the craziest hurricanes on record. Labor Day weekend 1965. It was first spotted by a Tiros weather satellite, and it curled up near the Bahamas. Then it continued tracking northeast, out to sea, and Florida breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone got out their barbecues and went swimming. But Betsy stalled out there. Everyone gulped hard and kept watching the TV reports in disbelief as it did a complete U-turn. Nobody had seen anything like it. Betsy headed right back at south Florida with hundred-and-forty-mile-per-hour winds….” Serge swirled his arms.
“What happened?”
“Raked the bottom of the state. My family huddled in the hallway of our house. Everything got real dark and quiet. I was a little kid so I thought it was fun, but I remember it was the first time I had seen the grown-ups afraid. A small palm tree came through our living-room window, and my mother screamed. We rode it out, but seventy-four others weren’t so lucky.”
“Wow,” Lenny said softly.
The drawbridge closed and they began moving again. Serge fished in the glove compartment and found a Phil Collins tape, and he stuck it in the stereo. They passed the Pelican Diner.
“…I can feel it comin’ in the air tonight—hold on…”
“This is too cool,” said Lenny. “It’s like we’re on the exact same page. I need another joint.”
Lenny grabbed a doobie paper-clipped behind the visor and tried to light it but couldn’t. “Same thing on the pier. I need a new lighter.” He pulled into a convenience store.
Back on the road, he lit the joint on the first try with a small, windproof acetylene torch on a keychain, $9.99.
“You shouldn’t waste your money on crap like that,” said Serge, playing with the laser pointer on his own keychain.
“In the long run, paraphernalia pays for itself,” said Lenny.
“I used to know someone like you,” said Serge.
“What’s he like?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh,” said Lenny. They stopped behind a Rolls-Royce at a red light, waiting to turn onto Gulf Boulevard.
“Why were you trying to fake a suicide the other night?” asked Lenny. “Need to ditch some business partners? Meet your wife in the Bahamas to split the life insurance? Jump bail?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Serge.
“It’s obvious. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s brilliant, too. Not like the guys who dive from short bridges and leave stupid notes or torch their boat in the Gulf at night and row ashore in rafts and they’re suspected right away and turn up two weeks later in Cancún. But nobody can survive a fall from the Skyway, so you have to be dead. Your prints are all over the car you left up there. And best of all, they got your fatal jump on videotape on the bridge surveillance cameras. Except the part about what was inside Santa’s belly. Where’d you get a black parachute, anyway?”
“Pez Easter egg coloring.”
Lenny nodded.
“Wonder why this light’s taking so long,” said Serge. He stretched his neck to look forward in traffic.
Their lane had the green arrow, but the Rolls-Royce ahead of them didn’t move. Then the arrow was red again.
“Goddammit!” said Serge. “Now the light has to cycle again. What’s going on in that car?”
Serge grabbed the top of the convertible’s windshield and stood up. He grumbled and sat back down and fidgeted. The driver of the Rolls was talking on a cell phone while simultaneously trimming nose hair with tiny scissors. Serge could see the driver stop to inspect his nostrils in the lighted mirror on the back of the sun visor, then resume trimming.
“Try to hang on,” Serge whispered to himself, twisting nervously in his seat. Then he noticed the Rolls’ two bumper stickers: “God is my copilot” and “Get a job!”
“You know, that’s pretty unsafe, putting a sharp object in your nose at a red light,” said Serge. “You never know when someone might rear-end you.”
Serge reached over with his left leg and tapped Lenny’s gas pedal, and the Cadillac lurched forward and popped the bumper of the Rolls. The windows of the Rolls were up, but everyone near the intersection could hear the terrible screaming anyway.
“You might want to pull around him,” Serge told Lenny. “I think there’s some kind of problem in that car.”
They crossed the bridge at Johns Pass as a casino boat headed out to the edge of territorial waters.
“I love how we’re holed up in the room,” said Lenny. “I do it as often as I can. What about you?”
“Only when I have to.”
“I mean for fun,” said Lenny. “You know, you want to break the routine, so you drive across town and check into a seedy motel and pretend you’re on the run. Act mysterious, arouse people’s suspicions, maybe rock star the room. There’s a lot of style you can put into being a fugitive. It’s a damn American art form!”
“Turn here, David Janssen.”
“Where?”
“Here!”
Lenny checked his watch as Serge sprinted in and out of the video store and vaulted back into the passenger seat without opening the door. “Two minutes, eight seconds,” said Lenny.
“Gotta get it down under a deuce,” said Serge.
They skidded into the parking lot of a thrift store, and Serge raced in. Two minutes later, he hurdled back into the car and threw a T-shirt in Lenny’s face. Lenny held the shirt out and read the front. “Treasure Island Police Athletic League.” Serge had an identical one, and he had already stripped off his other shirt and was wiggling his arms through the holes of the new one.
“Put that on,” said Serge. “Whenever I’m fleeing and eluding, I hit the thrifts for local law enforcement T-shirts. Makes traffic stops go much smoother.”
Back in the motel room, Lenny shoved more bottles and cans down into the ice-filled tub. Coke, Sprite, orange and grapefruit juice, Bloody Mary mix, Budweiser, Heineken, Absolut, Finlandia. Serge arranged a row of Florida keepsakes along the back of the writing desk. Above them he taped an autographed black-and-white photo of a scuba diver to the wall.
“Who’s that?” said Lenny, shotgunning a beer on the way out of the bathroom.
“Lloyd Bridges,” said Serge. “The immortal Mike Nelson from Sea Hunt. Originally, Nelson operated out of Marineland in California. But later he went freelance, and they shot several episodes in the Florida Keys, which made him technically eligible for inclusion in my shrine.”
Lenny reached into the shrine and started to pick up a Flipper thermos, but Serge slapped his hand.
“It’s burned into my mind,” Serge continued. “The end credits of every episode, Bridges sailing off in his boat, the Argonaut, and then the trademark emblem of Ziv Productions.”
“You have a good memory.”
“That’s because I don’t smoke that shit you do. I wouldn’t want to be abnormal.”
Lenny looked again at Bridges’s smiling face in the yellowed photo and the inscription, “To my pal, Serge.”
“This is all very interesting, but why put his picture up?”
“Inspiration. It’s important to build on the shoulders of the giants.”
Lenny poured vodka, lit a joint and took some speed.
Serge duct-taped the edges of the curtains to the wall, taped over the message light on the phone and the battery indicator on the smoke detector.
“What are you doing?” asked Lenny.
“Establishing theater conditions. I hate it when people wat
ch a great movie at home with a bunch of lights on. Wrecks the whole medium. If there’s any other light source in the room except the film, it completely ruins it for me.”
Serge unplugged the pine-scented nightlight in the bathroom and taped over the blinking “12:00” on the VCR. Lenny took a small brush out of a nail polish jar and painted his joint with a brownish liquid.
“What are you doing?” asked Serge.
“Putting hash oil on this doobie,” said Lenny. “I’ve been refining the technique. The speed counteracts the dovetail-drowsiness of the weed and the depressant effect of the alcohol. The booze files down the rough edges of paranoia from the pot and hyperagitation from the amphetamine. And the marijuana heightens self-awareness to prevent you from pulling something stupid that the liquor and pills are trying to talk you into.”
“What if you, like, didn’t do any of that stuff, then you wouldn’t have to worry about neutralizing all the bad effects?”
Lenny looked at him blankly. “What are you talking about?”
Serge popped Goldfinger in the VCR, and Lenny got ready for another pill.
“Look! Look!” said Serge, pointing out the scene where Bond meets Goldfinger in the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. Serge’s yelling startled Lenny, and he inhaled the pill and began choking. He staggered, clutching his throat with one hand and bracing himself against the TV with the other.
Serge hit pause on the remote, stood up without urgency and gave Lenny a roundhouse kung fu kick in the solar plexus. The pill flew out and plinked off the TV screen.
“Now the movie’s ruined,” said Serge. He went over to the writing table and immersed himself in the tedium of taking apart and reassembling the homing signal receiver for the fifth time since they got to the motel.
“What are ya doin’?” Lenny asked.
No answer. Serge wore safety goggles, and the soldering iron gave off a tentacle of smoke when he touched it to a capacitor.
Lenny reached under the bed and pulled out a sturdy nylon travel bag with zippers, pockets, compression bands, D-rings and Velcro.
He suddenly had Serge’s attention by the short hairs. “What’s that?” Serge asked, unplugging the soldering iron and coming over to the bed.