by Dorsey, Tim
The Diaz Boys were enjoying the parade immensely, especially the Gloria Estefan Revue, which featured a prerecorded tape of Gloria regretting that she couldn’t appear at the festival in person and then cuing her latest album while bitter members of the Miami Sound Machine danced and played backup.
Then came the next float, carrying a realistic replica of a Cuban refugee raft. Standing in the middle of the raft and waving to the crowd was C. C. Flag, wearing a gold satin sash that read “Mr. Latin Heritage—Tampa Bay.”
Juan and Rafael Diaz suddenly recognized the man on the float going by, and they exchanged worried glances.
“Whoops,” said Juan.
He started up the van to get the hell out of there. He was about to pull out of the parking space when a black Jeep Eagle sped by and skidded up to Seventh Avenue. Three members of the Posse Comatose jumped out of the Jeep, charged through the spectators and climbed up the grand marshal’s float. They began whaling on Flag.
Because of concerns of violence surrounding the upcoming vote on Proposition 213, the parade was attended by a contingent from the militant Hyphenated-Americans Defense League. For security reasons, the members attended the parade in disguise. And when C. C. Flag came under attack, the brass section of the Miami Sound Machine jumped down from its float and charged the Posse Comatose. It was a near-riot. Flag fell off the back of the float and was scooped up and pulled to safety by unlicensed gypsy nacho vendors working the skirt of the crowd.
28
The day that City and Country left Alabama for Florida, they didn’t know they were going until they were already driving.
Friday, nine A.M., City began her shift at Piggly Wiggly on register eighteen, ringing up an economy box of candy corn, off-brand hair spray and ninety-nine-cent false eyelashes. Back at the apartment, Country put on her uniform and nametag and walked out the front door. On Monday, Country’s Pinto had blown a gasket, whatever that meant. The mechanic had put the Pinto on the lift, wiped his brow with a greasy rag and undertaken the highly technical diagnostic procedure of trying to guess the maximum amount Country would agree to pay. The figure was way off, and the Pinto had sat ever since in a sea of disabled, gutted cars and free-range dogs behind Big A1’s Garage and Beverage at the county line on State Road 67. When their boss, Mrs. Frigola, learned that Country depended on City for transportation, she staggered their shifts an hour, and Country was forced to buy a fifteen-dollar banana bike with a loose chain at Crimson Tide Pawn. For the third day, Country climbed on the high-handlebar child’s bike and pedaled off for work four miles away. The first two days, Country arrived at the supermarket sticky, tired and late. Frigola said if it happened again, she was fired.
Ten A.M., City rang up a sack of pork rinds and checked her watch, then the front door. No Country. She looked over at Frigola, who was watching the door with a blend of rage and delight.
Ten-forty A.M., City saw Country through the front window of the Piggly Wiggly, drenched, walking a banana bike dragging a broken chain, forty minutes late. Country leaned the bike against the shopping carts and walked through the automatic door. Frigola waited until she was well inside and loudly fired her in front of everyone.
City bit her lip. She prayed: Country, don’t say anything. Don’t hit her, and definitely don’t cry.
Country didn’t. She just turned and walked out. City stopped ringing up items mid-customer and ran after her.
Frigola yelled, “You leave and you’re fired, too!” but City never looked back.
Ten P.M., City and Country were peeling the labels off their fourth beers at The Hole in the Wall, a dive on the far side of town from campus favored for the eighty-five-cent longnecks. City’s Torino was two hundred yards down the road from the bar, where it also had broken down. All in all, not a good week for the girls. As the house band mangled “Brown Sugar,” City and Country resigned themselves to the most constructive course of action. Unwind, maybe get a little wild, and put the day’s events behind them. Get a good night’s sleep and start checking the classifieds.
The bar was bare bones. Every surface was wood and had been gouged and regouged with large knives. There weren’t any windows, just thick wire mesh and roll-down shutters. In the men’s room, the urinal was a long trough along one wall filled with ice and disinfectant cakes, and the sink was a large rounded trough on the other wall. There was a sign above it: “This is a sink!”
It was a loud crowd and City and Country had to shout to talk. The crowd was almost all locals, but there was a table against the side wall with two frat boys and a sorority chick who’d decided to go slumming. From the trio’s plurality of affections, it was clear neither of the guys was the woman’s steady, but both wanted in her pants. It was also clear that Sorority Sister was a damn fine juggler, holding both their interest without committal. City nudged Country and pointed. One of the guys was looking their way, then both were looking. Soon they were waving City and Country over.
The guys didn’t look too shabby, kinda young and adorable—Andrew McCarthy types—and City winked at Country and they stood up.
City and Country counted ten empty longnecks and the dregs of five pink poodle drinks as they arrived at the table. The frat brothers stood and held out chairs as City and Country sat down, but Sorority Sister’s body language said the fur was standing up on her back.
The sister was an eye-catching Marilyn Monroe blonde with a name straight from the heart of Dixie—Billie Joe Bob (“Bo”). She was five-six with a string of add-a-beads, a cute little Valerie Bertinelli nose, big tits showcased in a tight pink sweater. But in the end, she was a peroxide-and-pancake makeup beauty, whereas City and Country were the Real McCoys, and everyone at the table knew it.
Five minutes into the conversation. “So you girls work at Piggly Wiggly…” said Billie Joe, and she let a snicker escape. “That’s just lovely. How bucolic.”
The men were overcome with beer-chuckles and grinned at Billie Joe.
City smiled, too, as she noticed the three triangles of the Delta Delta Delta sorority on the woman’s sweater.
“I heard a good joke,” said City. “If you can’t get a date, tri-Delta.”
The guys broke up laughing even harder this time and turned to the unamused Billie Joe, and the guys’ expressions retreated to serious.
The band rolled into “Born on the Bayou,” and the guy on the left shouted, “I love this song!” He started to ask City to dance, but Billie Joe clamped onto him and nuzzled into his neck. Before she knew it, the other guy had taken Country’s hand and headed for the dance floor. One of the juggling balls had just fallen.
When that guy got back from the dance floor and sat down, Billie Joe put a hand on his thigh under the table—and the other guy popped up and asked City to dance. It went on this way for hours; Billie Joe could keep a grip on either one she wanted, but not both. A game of sexual brinksmanship, the old bird-in-the-hand dilemma, and the longer it went on, the more Billie Joe knew she risked losing both.
The alcohol kept coming—more longnecks and poodle drinks—everyone getting seriously bent. Billie Joe leaned over the table to Country. “Want a taste of this? It’s really good.” As she leaned, she whispered “bitch” and dumped the whole pink drink square in Country’s chest.
Everyone was on their feet, suddenly awake. “I’m such a klutz,” said Billie Joe. The guys were grabbing napkins from nearby tables. Billie Joe smirked at Country.
Then things took an unexpected turn. In the chaos, both frat boys were soon leading City and Country to the dance floor as the band began “Long Cool Woman” by the Hollies. Billie Joe was aghast—all the juggling balls had hit the floor.
“…Saturday night I was downtown, working for the FBI…”
Both couples had their arms around each other’s neck. Back at the table, Billie Joe found an unfinished beer and drained it, grabbed her purse and got up.
On the dance floor, Country broke off from her date. Under the influence, she closed her e
yes and did a sexy grind in the middle of the floor. She threw her hips in synch with the music and ran her hands slowly down the outside of her legs.
“…Suddenly we heard a siren, and everybody starting to run—jumpin’ up across the table when I heard somebody shootin’ a gun…”
Space cleared around Country and everyone else’s dancing slowed. The floor was in dim red light, and Country now started running her hands up the inside of her thighs. Her hips gyrated in a slow circle to the song’s chorus. Her eyes were still closed but her full lips had opened wide and hungry. One of the Andrew McCarthys took a step back and said, “God damn!” Even the band was distracted.
Then, just as her hands reached the tops of her thighs—in perfect time with the tempo change in the last verse—Country’s arms shot up over her head, and she began shaking her shoulders and hips like a go-go dancer.
With that signal, everyone else joined in and danced their heads off.
“…I told her don’t get scared cause you’re gonna be spared—I’d rather be forgivin’ if I wanna spend a livin’ with a long cool woman in a black dress…”
At the end of the number, everyone on the floor cheered and clapped for themselves. City and Country pecked the men on the cheeks and excused themselves for the ladies’ room, giggling along the way like schoolgirls.
Inside, they examined themselves in the mirror to see how hammered they looked. Everything was checking out fine when they heard a weird noise coming from one of the stalls.
City and Country looked at each other puzzled and then back at the stall. Some kind of chaos inside, bumping around, then cursing. A leather bag hit the floor and the contents of a woman’s purse scattered under the stall door and onto the tiles of the restroom: lipstick, hairbrush, dispenser of contraceptive foam, car keys, cocaine vial.
More cursing.
The stall door opened and Billie Joe started to reach down for her belongings. When she saw City and Country, she stopped and stood up straight. She held a small lacquer tray and a steak knife she had gotten from the short-order kitchen, to chop at a Peruvian pebble. Her jeans were around her ankles and panties at her knees. Powder all over her nose and smeared on her left cheek. She was wreckage.
City and Country were stunned silent, but Billie Joe looked at them and yelled, “Youuuuu!”—accusation, verdict and sentence all in one syllable. She pointed the steak knife at them and charged, except her clothes were still around her legs and she was only able to manage a ridiculous waddle. City and Country had to hold each other up they were laughing so hard. Then Billie Joe ran out of steam and toppled forward on her face.
City and Country fell into hysterics. They resisted looking back at Billie Joe because it would only bust them up again; their sides were aching and they were having trouble getting air.
City finally looked back and her face changed. “Wait! What the hell is this!” A deep purple pool was spreading out from under Billie Joe. Country leaned forward and saw the tip of the steak knife sticking out the back of Billie Joe’s neck.
“Jesus!”
She flipped Billie Joe over, pulled the bloody knife out of her throat and flung it aside. When the blade came out, the severed jugular squirted all over Country, and she grabbed the woman’s neck trying to stop the bleeding. The more life leaked out of Billie Joe, the harder Country squeezed.
It was no use; blood was still getting out, and it was over in seconds.
Country stood and saw blood on her hands and wiped them on her jeans.
City was jumping up and down. “Oh my God! We’re dead!”
“What are you talking about?” shouted Country.
The pair did a quick once-around the restroom. Knife with bloody fingerprints under a toilet, more bloody fingerprints on the bruises on Billie Joe’s neck, and blood all over Country.
She began to shake. “We didn’t do anything!”
“Listen to me!” said City. “This is Alabama—I know about separate justice. She’s some rich bitch and we’re poor trash.”
“We didn’t do anything!”
City looked at the door and pointed. “Lock it!”
Country ran for the dead bolt and turned it fast, and City started scooping the contents back into Billie Joe’s purse.
“What are you doing?” asked Country.
“We gotta get outta the state. There’s some money here.”
“Neither of us has a car.”
“She does,” said City, holding up the set of keys with an Alfa Romeo fob. “There can’t be more than one Spider outside in the lot. Let’s just hope the guys didn’t drive.”
There was a pounding on the door, a woman’s voice. “I gotta pee!”
City opened the door fast and both of them knocked over the waiting woman as they ran out. They turned down a side hallway, away from the dance floor, and burst out the plywood back door and into the parking lot.
29
The mood at Hammerhead Ranch had gone sour.
The heat wave continued. The excitement of just arriving at the island motel had turned to the bitter drudgery of washing clothes at the island Laundromat.
There was a stifling funk that hung heavy like ozone. The place was getting listless yet jumpy. There was the feeling of the end game.
The wind had almost completely stopped. People languished in The Florida Room, drinking more, talking less. There was little movement except the tapping of fingers on tables. The bartender was getting divorced and stopped wiping glasses. People held their drinks up to the light, looking at water spots. Serge was at a table with a jeweler’s magnifying glass stuck in his eye, trying to sell a plain rock for ten thousand dollars to two members of the Olympic Committee.
C. C. Flag staggered into the bar with half his clothes torn off, welts up and down his torso, and a shredded gold sash hanging off his shoulder.
“What the hell happened to you?!” asked Zargoza.
“Tampa Bay is a primitive place,” Flag said and wobbled to the bar.
A hesitant private investigator from Alabama named Paul checked into the motel and started snooping around, showing a picture of Art to people in the bar. Everyone dummied up. They grabbed his private eye badge and threw it on the roof.
Five Navy SEALs paddled ashore in a black raft and sprinted silently between the beach blankets and sand castles up to room four, hoping to surprise a band of arms dealers. The SEALs lobbed concussion grenades through the window, knocked down the door with a fiberglass truncheon, ran inside and neutralized the occupants in three point two seconds with the Vulcan nerve pinch. Except the arms dealers were in the next room, and the SEALs had subdued a vacationing family from Akron. A TV camera crew from Florida Cable News’s Cops and Robbers—Live! charged into the room after the SEALs to incriminate the Ohio residents in their underwear before millions of viewers.
Nobody in the bar gave a damn.
Vacation had turned into a grind. The sexual tension was gone. Exciting, mysterious strangers became tired, irritable neighbors with uninteresting secrets. Even City and Country were starting to look rough. They had taken to sitting at their regular corner table and openly smoking dope the whole day. They stared puzzled and angry at their joints. “What’s wrong with this shit? It doesn’t work anymore!”
Lenny wandered into the bar.
“Hey, asshole,” the bartender yelled at him. “You wanna get your two friends out of my bar and into some kind of twelve-step program?”
“What’s the matter?” asked Lenny.
“What’s the matter?! You’ve turned them into pot gnats!”
“Marijuana is nature’s medicine.”
“You got to get ’em out of here. They keep bugging me to hook ’em up with a better connection. They say your stuff’s no good. Quote: ‘It’s a bunch of shitty brown Mexican shake that doesn’t even get you high—and there’s too much lumber.’ Where did they learn to talk like that?”
“I don’t know why it doesn’t get them high.”
“Becau
se they smoke it round the clock! They’re burnt out! It’s like the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers over there!”
“Have you asked them to cool it out?”
“They’re your monsters—you drive ’em back into the sea!”
The Florida Cable News weather report came on the television over the bar.
“Hey, that’s not Toto!” said someone at the bar.
He was right. There was a new dog on the set. Looked a lot like Toto, but the audience was too familiar with the real thing to be duped. The new weather dog was called Toto II, with no mention of what happened to Roman numeral one.
Toto II danced on a large storm-tracking map on the floor of the studio. Hurricane Rolando-berto had crossed the Caribbean Sea. It was supposed to hit the Yucatán but unexpectedly curved up into the Gulf of Mexico. Revised projections had it heading north and passing Tampa Bay in twenty-four hours, missing it by a hundred miles to the left and making landfall somewhere between Pensacola and New Orleans.
“Where’s that storm going now?” asked weatherman Guy Rockney. Toto II danced on the map in a little pirate outfit as a ceiling camera filmed the dog from overhead.
“Looks like it’s still heading north,” said Rockney, “so you can breathe easy, Tampa Bay.”
Up the coast of Florida and around the horn to Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, a pre-hurricane custom was under way. Journalists flocked to the beach communities, facing out to sea, moving laterally along the coast like fiddler crabs as landfall predictions changed by the hour—trying not to be the guy who missed by two hundred miles last year and now served mashed potatoes with an ice cream scoop in the Action News 9 cafeteria. They stood on seawalls and piers and jetties and beaches, in bright raincoats, in even brighter sunshine, from Biloxi to Panama City.
A reporter in a hazard-orange raincoat stood on a wharf in Pascagoula. Her image filled the screen of the TV set anchored high on the wall of the crew lounge at MacDill Air Force Base on the south end of the Tampa peninsula. The crew of The Rapacious Reno had been deployed to Tampa for public relations duty, and they lay around the lounge drinking coffee, smoking and eating out of vending machines. They drew doodles and worked crosswords.