by Dorsey, Tim
“What?” she yelled. “They’re taking Florida away from Gore? They can’t do that!”
She jumped out of bed and turned up the volume with the remote.
“What is it?” asked Johnny.
“Shhhhh!”
So when Johnny met Bianca on the beach behind the Orbit Motel, he had just one question.
“Do you read newspapers?”
“Read what?”
They headed for the golf course across A1A from the motel, where Johnny said he was the club pro. That impressed her; she said she had always wanted to learn golf.
On the third hole, the ball was three feet from the cup. Johnny interlaced his fingers on the putter’s leather grip. Then he handed her the club. “Now you try.”
She pretended to be all thumbs. “I just can’t do it. Could you show me again?”
Johnny stepped up from behind and wrapped his taut arms around her, repositioning Bianca’s hands on the shaft. She turned toward his biceps. “Wow, you’re pretty strong. I’ll bet you have lots of girlfriends.”
“Just stroke through the ball,” said Johnny. “One fluid motion.”
Bianca tapped the ball with the putter.
“Darn! It hit the windmill again. I just can’t play this game.”
“Let’s try the dinosaur hole,” said Johnny. “That’s an easy one.”
“It’s not golf,” said Bianca, pooching out her bottom lip, then staring off.
“What is it?”
“I have this problem…. It’s medical.”
Just my luck, thought Johnny. Probably a week to live. On the other hand, a week’s a week.
“What kind of problem?”
“It’s embarrassing. My boyfriend dumped me because of it…. Autagonistophilia.”
“Is that like a bunion?”
“It means I can only become sexually aroused if I’m doing it in a public place near people.”
“You do it in public?”
“Not actually in public, but where I can see lots of people close by, and there’s a high risk of being discovered, possibly arrested…. You okay? You look pale.”
Johnny braced himself on the side of the windmill.
“Wait, there’s more,” she said. “I’ve also got chrematistophilia—that’s getting excited if you’re blackmailed into sex. And hybristophilia, sex with convicted criminals, and symphorphilia, sex during natural disasters, and formicophilia, wanting to have sex on cheap countertops.” She held out her left arm. “See? I have a medical alert bracelet.”
Two men walked by them on the cart path, sipping coconuts and reading their Cocoa Beach travel guide. They strolled past the waterfall, the pink elephant and the airplane crashed into the side of a plastic mountain on the thirteenth hole. They crossed the Japanese footbridge over the lagoon that separated “Goony Golf” from the driving range. The lagoon was actually a retention pond, and the pair looked over the bridge’s railing at the bubbles in the water and the submerged scuba diver with a sack of golf balls.
Sleigh bells jingled as Paul and Jethro opened the door to the driving range office. The man behind the counter scooped balls into wire baskets and plopped them on the counter.
Paul pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket.
“We don’t take hundreds.”
“I’m sorry,” said Paul. “What if I let you keep the change?”
“Then we have a new policy.” The man plucked the bill from Paul’s hand, stuck it in his back pocket and pushed two baskets of balls across the counter. Paul and Jethro went to select clubs from a large oak barrel of bent irons and woods.
“We close in a half hour,” said the man. “You can still play, but you’ll be in the dark.”
“Ah, such is the challenge of life itself,” said Jethro.
“No problem,” added Paul. “Anything you say.”
“And replace your divots,” said the man. “This ain’t a sod farm.”
Actually, it was a sod farm, at least on documents at the zoning office. The state was under drought restrictions, which meant only sod farms could water, and the driving range wanted to keep its sprinklers going.
“Right. Replace divots,” said Paul. “Sure thing.”
“I remember it well,” said Jethro. “Grand traditions of Scotland, the noble but curious land of plaid…”
“And stop talking like that. Both of you. It’s getting on my nerves.”
“You got it,” said Paul. “No problem-o.”
The pair left the office and headed to the last tee, number twenty-two.
Jethro spilled his bucket on the ground and used the head of a four iron to rake a few red-banded balls over to his feet. “DiMaggio would have been a formidable golfer. You could see it in his dark Italian eyes, etched with the scars of life.” Jethro swung hard and hit the ball with the toe of his club, slicing right, scampering through traffic on A1A and ricocheting off the manager’s door at the Orbit Motel. An old Honduran opened the door, looked around, closed it.
Paul lined up his own shot. He looked out at the range signs, marking distance in fifty-yard increments. In between were small greens with flagsticks.
“What’s the objective here?” asked Paul. “Hit it as far as you can or get it close to the flags?”
“Neither, my worthy companion. It is but to hit the range cart.”
“The what?”
“You do not understand now, but you will in time.”
Paul and Jethro swung through their ration of balls, which took off at random adventures in geometry. They were accompanied by a score of other golfers whose graceful swings resembled the chopping of firewood, and a spray of balls curved, sliced, bounced and whizzed across the range, some hooking high over the safety netting and into the retention pond, where a scuba diver trespassed with a mesh gunnysack full of balls in one hand and a twelve-gauge bang-stick for alligators in the other.
One of the golfers noticed something. Out near the left hundred-yard marker, a small tractor started moving across the range. The driver’s seat was enclosed in a protective wire cage, the tractor pulling a wide scooping device that sucked up balls and squirted them into the collection bin.
The golfer on tee number three sounded the alarm.
“Range cart!”
The customers began hitting balls as fast as they could, a rapid series of twenty-one-gun salutes. Most were wildly off target, but through sheer volume the range cart began taking heavy fire. The driver was used to it by now, a community college student reading Crime and Punishment and drinking a Foster’s as the fusillade of Titleists and Dunlops pinged off the vehicle. A lucky shot smashed one of the red plastic light covers. A small voice in the distance: “I got the taillight! I got the taillight!” A two-wood clanged off the outside of the cage protecting the driver, who was inside a depressing nineteenth-century Russian apartment. He turned the page. Balls flew by.
Paul topped another drive fifty yards. “How does anybody play this game?”
Jethro addressed his ball with a three wood. “Think of it as bullfighting and you will see the truth in it.” He knocked a TopFlite into the Checkers drive-through.
Bianca and Johnny held hands as they crossed the footbridge over the retention lagoon next to the driving range. She giggled and squeezed his arm. “I’m getting wet just thinking about it.”
Johnny choked on some saliva and grabbed the railing for balance.
“You all right?”
He nodded. They continued walking, coming to a fence and meeting a third party in the dark. Johnny paid the man in twenties. The couple began wiggling into position behind a control panel.
“Look! I can see people over there!” said Bianca. “Oh, my God!” She ripped off her bra and plunged her tongue down Johnny’s throat. Her hands went for his zipper.
“Are you ready?” she whispered.
Was Johnny ready? He had the kind of erection SWAT teams could use to knock down doors on crack houses. He fumbled to operate the control panel like he�
�d been shown.
The man waved goodbye as Johnny and Bianca departed. “Have a safe trip.”
Bianca gave Johnny a hickey as she slid off her panties. She looked over her shoulder at the little people in the distance and her stomach fluttered. She bit Johnny again. “You’re going to remember this the rest of your life….”
The couple had just gotten the rest of their clothes off when they heard a tiny voice in the distance.
“Range cart!”
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
Bianca jumped off Johnny in alarm. “What the fuck was that?”
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
A shower of dimpled balls pelted the range cart with the two naked people.
“They’re trying to kill us!” yelled Bianca.
“No, they’re not,” said Johnny. “It’ll just make it better. Come on, baby.”
Bianca lost it, clawing at the inside of the protective cage like a drowning cat. “I have to get out of here!”
“Don’t open that door!”
She opened it, took a Maxfli in the forehead and fell back unconscious in Johnny’s lap.
4
Rush-hour traffic lurched along The Palmetto Expressway through hardworking Hialeah, past the horse track and industrial park. In the third warehouse off Exit 7, men in back braces pushed handcarts of brown boxes marked THE STINGRAY SHUFFLE through beams of exhaust-filtered sun, loading trucks and vans, which pulled out of the shipping bay toward the highway ramp.
In a windowless room next to the dispatcher’s office, a young man scrolled down his computer screen. He stopped, hit print and waited for a sheet of paper to come off the inkjet.
The supervisor’s office had windows, but they overlooked the loading dock and the men hoisting cases of bestsellers at one of the biggest book wholesalers in the Miami–Fort Lauderdale statistical hub. The young man stood in the doorway.
“What is it?” asked the boss, staring at his own computer screen, squeezing a stress ball advertising a new stress-free-diet book.
“I’m getting some strange sales figures on this one title.”
“Down?”
“Way up.”
The young man handed his printout to the supervisor, who grabbed his reading glasses.
“That is strange. You sure these are right?”
“Triple-checked.”
“Must be an explanation. Maybe a publisher’s promotion. Contest or something.”
“Nope. Already called them.”
“What about the author? Is he touring? Speak at a local college?”
“Hasn’t been seen in years. Could be dead for all we know.”
“Anything on Oprah?”
The young man shook his head.
“Maybe it’s one of these local book clubs. Look—see how the sales are all just at this one bookstore in Miami Beach, The Palm Reader?” He took off his glasses and set the page down. “That has to be it. Must be someone’s selection-of-the-month, and they’re all buying at this store.”
“Three months in a row? The numbers are bigger than any ten book groups could account for. Besides, The Palm Reader is a dump. No self-respecting club would set foot inside with all the classier places nearby.”
The supervisor scratched his head. “Then there’s simply a strong word-of-mouth pocket. The book’s taking off on its own.”
“Sir, The Stingray Shuffle has been out eleven years.”
“This is a crazy business. I’ve seen stuff out twenty years with nothing to show, then someone makes a movie and bang!”
“There’s no movie.”
“The point I’m making is you can’t account for consumer behavior. These things sprout at their own pace, the gestation of the pyramid progression, a classic equation of the hundredth monkey. Revenues are cruising horizontally along the X axis, then suddenly demand reaches critical mass and sales make the all-important vertical swing up the Y axis.”
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Making some money,” he said, picking up the phone. “Let’s call the other bookstores, see if we can’t help this thing along. And beat the other wholesalers while we’re at it.”
The supervisor got the entire staff in on the act, and they canvassed the bottom half of the state, pushing the title, then working their way north. The stores were receptive. They could always send the books back if they didn’t sell. “Sure, we’ll take a few cases.” The title started moving in several markets. Not like at the first store, but respectably, and multiplied by hundreds of outlets, it began adding up to real numbers.
An overcast summer morning in New York. A Friday. Midtown Manhattan, the nerve ganglion of the global publishing industry, and by noon everyone was consumed with the same crisis: how to beat weekend traffic heading out of town to the Hamptons after lunch.
On West Fifty-third Street, at a sidewalk restaurant of obscure nationality and no prices, a man and a woman sat across from each other in identical business suits. A waiter in a red turban set a plate in front of each of them. They had ordered the same, pan-seared sponge on a bed of pollen.
“Pepper?” asked the waiter.
They nodded. The waiter twisted a metal tube over their plates.
“Sir,” said the woman. “We have a sleeper on our hands. Just got the sales report yesterday. Red-hot—might even crack the Times bestseller list.”
“Whose book? Allister? Byron? Sir Dennis?”
She shook her head. “Ralph.”
“Ralph!”
The waiter held a pump bottle. “Moisture?”
They nodded.
“I didn’t know Ralph was even still alive.”
“We’re trying to confirm that.”
“When did we publish a new title?”
“We didn’t. This is his last one.”
The waiter put on safety goggles. “Blowtorch?”
They nodded.
“But his last book was ten years ago.”
“Eleven.”
The man shook his head. “This is a crazy business.”
“No crazier than any other.”
A troupe of midgets surrounded the table, Cossack dancing.
“I just can’t get over it. I mean, Ralph! How did this start?”
“A sales fluke out of Miami Beach. A bookstore called The Palm Reader, then it snowballed.”
“The Palm Reader?”
“One of those new crime and mystery specialty shops. A local wholesaler got wind of it and spread the word…”
The waiter clapped his hands twice, and the midgets dispersed. “Dessert?”
They nodded.
“Okay, throw some money at promotions,” said the man, jabbing his sponge with a fork. “And find Ralph. We need to get him back on tour. Talk to his agent.”
“He isn’t represented anymore, not that we know of.”
“Try the last one.”
The dessert hovercraft arrived.
5
The day Paul and Jethro found the five million dollars and took off across the state had started out pleasant enough. No rain in the forecast, the mercury hovering under eighty at the Lakeland airport, halfway between Tampa and Orlando. Two long lines of cars sat stationary in the eastbound lanes of Interstate 4, hundreds of traffic-jammed vehicles stretching endlessly over the gentle central Florida hills, all the way to the horizon.
In the middle of the right lane was a blue ’74 Malibu. Jethro was driving, Paul in the passenger seat with an open briefcase in his lap, counting wads.
“How much farther to the cruise ships?” asked Paul.
“Eighty miles,” said Jethro. “How much money?”
“Three million. A lot left. Hope there’s a ship leaving today.”
“We can always put up in a motel. Nobody’s going to find us that fast. It’ll be weeks before they even realize anyone has found the money, and longer, if ever, before they connect it to us.”
Five miles behi
nd the Malibu, a pink Cadillac Eldorado was stuck in the same lane.
“What’s the global-positioning tracker say?” asked Lenny.
Serge looked down at the beeping box on the seat beside him. “The briefcase is stuck in traffic, too. About five miles ahead.”
The Cadillac held four people, two men in front, two women in back. Airbrushing down the side of the convertible: LENNY LIPPOWICZ—THE DON JOHNSON EXPERIENCE. One bumper sticker: REHAB IS FOR QUITTERS.
“What’s the delay?” said Serge, grabbing the top of the windshield and standing up on the driver’s seat to see as far as he could. He plopped back down and punched the steering wheel.
“Maybe a wreck?” said Lenny in the passenger seat, wearing a pastel T-shirt and white Versace jacket.
“Should have known better,” said Serge. “Never take I-4 when you have to get anywhere.”
A female voice from the backseat: “Can we have another joint?”
“No!” snapped Serge. “No more dope for you!”
Lenny passed a joint back.
Serge threw up his hands. “I just told them they couldn’t have any more.”
“Doper etiquette,” said Lenny. “Mellow out.”
“You know my personality type,” said Serge. “I can’t take boredom. And I especially can’t take some kind of huge holdup where you don’t know what’s going on!”
One of the women offered the lit joint over Serge’s shoulder. He pushed it away. “Just give me a ballpark of how long the wait is! I don’t care if it’s four hours—I need something I can mentally whittle on, compartmentalize, break down and digest. Or give the reason. Let me know what the hell’s going on! This out-of-the-loop, can’t-seethe-front-of-the-line shit is making me crazy!” He punched the steering wheel again.
“Look,” said Lenny. “I think they’re starting to move up there.”
They both leaned forward and watched closely. They sat back again.
“Sorry. Just an illusion,” said Lenny. “Heat waves from the road.”
The backseat: “Ahem…can we have, like, another joint? It’ll be the last one. Promise.”
“See what you started?” said Serge. “They’re hooked.”