Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  “How was I supposed to know it was a sewer? I thought it was a little river,” said Serge. “It was supposed to be very symbolic. Obviously it didn’t work out that way, but at least I tried. These are the kind of people who cling. It’s not healthy.”

  The judge’s face was in his hands.

  He finally looked up. “Mr. Storms, this doesn’t give me any pleasure, but you leave me no choice but to commit you to the state hospital at Chattahoochee for a period of observation not less than three months.”

  They dragged Serge from the courtroom, kicking and yelling.

  The judge banged his gavel. “You’re out of order, Mr. Storms!”

  “I’m out of order? You’re out of order! And he’s out of order! They’re out of order! This trial’s out of order! The whole courtroom’s out of order!…”

  The bailiffs pulled Serge into the hall, and the double doors swung closed.

  11

  In the fall of 1960, five very special little girls entered the fourth grade in five different schools across Florida.

  A nine-year-old girl in Fort Lauderdale named Samantha told her father she wanted a baseball glove.

  “You mean a softball glove.”

  “What’s that?”

  He was a kind father, and the next day he brought home a nice pink Spalding softball glove and a ball the size of a grapefruit.

  “It’s pink,” said Samantha. She knew baseball gloves weren’t pink.

  “I know,” said her father, smiling fondly. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  Samantha could see her dad’s happiness, and she didn’t make a fuss about the color and hugged him.

  “Thanks, Daddy.”

  She stuck her little hand inside.

  “I can’t move the fingers.”

  “That’s because you have to break it in first.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “You oil it up good and put a softball in the palm and wrap twine around it and set it aside overnight. Then you have to play lots and lots of catch so the leather takes on the shape of your own hand, and pretty soon it fits like a glove.”

  “But I don’t want to wait that long. I want to play right now.”

  Her father laughed. “Life’s not like that.”

  After dinner they oiled and wrapped the glove, and when her father came home from work the next evening, Samantha and her glove were waiting on the front porch to play catch.

  “Okay, let me set my things down first.”

  That was the beginning of a lot of catch. Samantha got pretty good. Soon she could even move the fingers. One afternoon, she ran outside with her glove and down the street to the park, where the boys wouldn’t let a girl play ball, pink glove or not. They were practicing for the big Little League tryouts that weekend. They all wanted to be on the Yankees.

  When Samantha’s father came home that night, she told him she wanted to try out for Little League.

  Her father laughed and crouched down and rubbed her yellow hair. “Honey, girls don’t play Little League.”

  “But I want to.”

  “Life’s not like that.”

  That Saturday, her parents thought Samantha was down at the playground, but she had taken her bike and ridden to the Little League park, where she lined up with the boys waiting to take the field and catch grounders, pink ribbon in her hair and pink glove on her hand. The boys weren’t happy.

  “Get out of here! You’re a girl!”

  “Yeah, get out of here!”

  Samantha dug in and snarled.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “Yeah, girl. You don’t even know how to play baseball.”

  “That’s not even a baseball glove!”

  “Is so!” said Samantha.

  “Is not!”

  The coaches on the infield heard a commotion by the dugout. “Is that a girl?”

  They came over. The boys were playing keep-away with the pink glove.

  “Gimme my glove!” Samantha ran back and forth.

  “Missy,” said one of the coaches, “where are your parents?”

  “At home…. I said, gimme my glove!”

  “What’s your name?…”

  “Samantha.” Running back and forth after the glove. Why wouldn’t the grown-ups help her?

  “Samantha what?”

  “Samantha Bridges…. Give it!”

  The coaches didn’t help retrieve her glove because the boys were within rights, provoked as they were by Samantha’s presence, which threatened to cheapen their whole ritual.

  Samantha finally caught up with her glove. The coach’s son had it and they were tugging. The boy shoved her to the ground.

  “All right, that’s quite enough, Missy,” said the coach. “You’ve caused your share of trouble today.”

  No she hadn’t. She got up from the dirt and punched the boy in the nose, drawing tears.

  The public shame of his son crying at the hands of a girl was too much, and before the coach knew it, he had grabbed Samantha by the arm and slapped her face hard enough to make any of the boys cry.

  Samantha didn’t.

  She kicked him in the shin.

  “Ow! Shit!”

  Samantha struggled for the coach to let go of her arm, and the other men had to help restrain the thrashing child. Everything else stopped. A crowd gathered. They looked up her parents’ phone number, and her father arrived in minutes.

  “What are you doing to my daughter?” her dad yelled, jumping out of his car.

  “She disrupted the whole tryout!”

  “She’s just a little girl!” he said, walking quickly toward the group. “Let go of her right now!”

  “Only if she promises not to kick me again.”

  The father turned his angry glare toward Samantha. “Did you kick him?”

  “After he slapped me.”

  “You slapped her?” asked her father.

  “She hit my boy. She was out of control—”

  The tooth-loosening right cross sent the coach to the ground. Her father took Samantha by the hand, and they walked away.

  The police showed up in Samantha’s driveway after they got home, and there was a big stink. But the cops talked everyone out of pressing charges and suggested Samantha stay away from the ballfield.

  Dinner was pork chops and mashed potatoes and beets. Samantha asked for the beets in a separate bowl because the beet juice ran into the potatoes and made them pink.

  “I just don’t understand these people,” Samantha’s father told her mother across the table. “What’s the big deal?”

  “You know what you always say? Life’s not—”

  “I know, but this is so petty. Why can’t they just let girls play? It’s stupid.”

  Samantha wasn’t saying a word and wasn’t eating, just following the conversation back and forth with her eyes.

  “You know what I should do? I should file a lawsuit!”

  “Oh honey, please don’t,” said her mother, reaching across and putting a hand on her father’s arm. “Isn’t it bad enough that everyone already calls her Sam?”

  There was a successful court challenge, and girls were allowed to play Little League. But the challenge didn’t come from Samantha’s father and not for another ten years, until Samantha was in college.

  Samantha had a growth spurt when she was thirteen, and she would always be among the tallest in her class, either sex. By high school she found an outlet in girls’ basketball. She became what’s known as an “enforcer,” delivering retribution for rough play against her smaller teammates, fouling out of every game.

  “You elbowed me on purpose! That’s not fair!”

  “Life’s not like that.”

  In Daytona Beach, another nine-year-old girl, this one named Teresa, sat in her classroom drawing airplanes. It was the first day of the new school year.

  “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “Fireman.” “Football player.” “Nurse.” “Mommy.”
<
br />   “Teresa, what do you want to be?”

  Teresa looked up from her planes. “A pilot.”

  “You mean a stewardess.”

  “I don’t want to be no stewardess.”

  “I don’t want to be a stewardess,” said the teacher.

  “Me neither,” said Teresa.

  “No, I mean you used a double negative.”

  “I’ll be a stewardess,” said a boy named Billy, whom the teachers were already concerned about.

  “Boys can’t be stewardesses, and girls can’t be pilots.”

  “I’m going to be one,” said Teresa, coloring in the airplane and nodding with conviction.

  “But you can’t, dear.”

  It came out of the blue. Teresa threw all her crayons on the floor and ripped up her picture and knocked over her desk. The teacher tried to calm her, but Teresa spit at her. She was still stomping and crying when they led her to the principal’s office.

  Compared with Teresa, Samantha was living a fairy tale. Teresa’s mother and stepfather were called in for a conference, and they decided to put her in a special school. Nobody could understand it. Teresa had been such a marvelous child the previous school year, before the incest had started that summer.

  “Do you have any idea what might be causing this?”

  “Not a clue,” said her stepdad.

  They tested for dyslexia, tried some autism drugs, sent her to camp, where a counselor fondled her. Funny, but she was only getting worse.

  Teresa began smoking when she was twelve and drinking at thirteen. Her stepfather was out of the picture now, and her mother blamed Teresa for the breakup. He left them with a pile of bills and without warning. Teresa’s mom took up a minimum-wage job and sudden fits of hysterical crying. Teresa became fat.

  She stayed away from the house as much as possible, becoming what you’d call a loner, hanging out next to the airport and watching the planes land, cutting herself with razor blades.

  Nobody saw the warning signs because her grades had rocketed to straight A’s. Everything had to be exactly right, and once it was, it wasn’t good enough for Teresa, who worked some more.

  Teresa didn’t become promiscuous, but she wasn’t frugal either. She was more or less desensitized, losing her virginity at fifteen to a boy who was also a virgin, behind a movie house, in a defining moment that was memorable for its clumsiness.

  “Is this it?” Teresa asked herself, although the boy seemed to be having an out-of-body experience: “I can’t feel my legs!”

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “No!”

  Meanwhile, an undersized child named Paige was growing up in Okeechobee, near the lake. She didn’t speak much.

  Paige kept bringing home stray and injured animals.

  Her mother had died from postdelivery infections that would mean a seven-figure malpractice verdict today. Her father was killed by a drunk driver when she was two. She lived with her grandparents. They were nice, but man, were they old. They took lots of naps and didn’t have any idea what Paige was talking about half the time. But Paige rarely spoke as it was, and nobody seemed bothered by the arrangement.

  Her grandparents were understanding enough with the little birds and frogs, which she kept in boxes on the porch, but a dog or cat was out of the question, because they had heard something on Paul Harvey about germs. Paige loved her grandparents, who weren’t permissive as much as just plain tired. By the time she was nine, they were going to bed before she was, and Paige stayed up late watching Laugh-In and Carson.

  Children are natural explorers, and they’re influenced by the media material they discover around the house. Paige grew up in a museum. What were these records? Guy Lombardo and Mario Lanza? There was also about nine hundred pounds of old Reader’s Digests and a few stacks of Life that her grandparents wouldn’t throw out. They never threw anything out. It had something to do with the Depression.

  They left Paige to the orphaned and wounded animals in her room, which was crowded with fish tanks and terrariums and plastic turtle ponds and hamster wheels and a maze of interconnecting gerbil tubes that ran all over the place like berserk plumbing.

  When Paige was fifteen, her grandparents died within a month of each other, and Paige was passed around the family, attending four different high schools in four years, and she started talking even less. There are many roles in a high school: star quarterback, prom queen, class clown, brain, stoner. Paige was an extra.

  Maria’s parents would have loved Paige.

  Maria learned to talk early, and she never stopped.

  “What’s this?” “What’s that?” “Why is that?” “Can I have one of those? What is it?” “You know what I think?…”

  It accounted for her parents’ permanent expression of having teeth cleaned.

  Maria demonstrated at age four her talent for mismatching clothes. “Can I dress myself?” “I want to dress myself.” “I’m going to dress myself now.” She ran into her bedroom and came out in a raincoat and bikini bottom. “I’m ready to go to school now.”

  Maria had lots and lots of accidents, big scary-looking tumbles, skinned knees, twisted ankles—her parents awakened every other night by a loud thump, Maria falling out of bed in her sleep again, then yelling down the hall, “I’m okay!”

  They thought she might need glasses, but the tests came back twenty-twenty. The spills seemed to bother Maria less than her parents, who would jump out of their chairs on the porch and grab their hearts before Maria dusted herself off and guaranteed nothing was broken. It finally dawned on them that Maria never cried, no matter what, going over the handlebars of her bike, popping right up, “I’m okay!” Jumping back on the bike and taking off again into the side of a parked van. “I’m okay again!”

  Maria seemed to have a high threshold for pain, and she could definitely take a punch, which were administered by boys everywhere. Ooomph, the wind leaving her. “I’m okay!”

  Maria’s true passion lay in the arts. Maria was a frustrated painter, a frustrated musician and a hopeless romantic. She tried oils, pencils, watercolors, all to no avail. That hemisphere just wasn’t firing. Same problem with music, made that much more glaring by her fondness for the tuba. She was an open book, all things to all people, wanting to be liked and trying to become whatever you wanted, except quiet. She dated a lot, but was saving herself for marriage. Trying to at least. But boys will be boys, and there were lots of struggles in backseats of cars outside dances and burger joints, a car door finally popping open and the other students seeing Maria tumble out of the car with a broken bra strap. “I’m okay!”

  You couldn’t help but like her. And hate her. She was the kind of gentle person who made you feel horribly guilty every time you lost patience with her. She made the other members of the pep club suicidal. Then there was the cheerleading squad, where her natural zest won her the top position on the human pyramid—each game the parents pointing in alarm, “Jesus, did you see the fall that girl just took?”

  “I sure hope she’s okay.”

  “She said she was.”

  Rebecca had talent coming out her ears. Her first teachers couldn’t believe it. They quickly took her off finger paints and gave her oils and acrylics. Everything was a photograph. Same with music. She skipped reading sheets and mastered the scales by ear—piano, flute, guitar.

  Rebecca was one of the most well adjusted children you’d ever meet, which meant she was weird. Her parents were semiprofessional folk musicians, playing in bars and coffeehouses in the Tampa Bay area, taking Rebecca along since she was five.

  The nightclub experience made her a bit precocious, and life in the sandbox was never quite as exciting after that. She spoke a different language from the other children, refusing to play dodge ball because it was “too much like Vietnam.” But she was able to duck the menu of neuroses that afflicted her peers, mainly because her parents were so well adjusted and weird, too.

  Her friends’ bedrooms were covered with t
he usual teeny-bopper pinups, but they didn’t recognize any of the posters on Rebecca’s walls: Dylan, the Mamas and the Papas, Donovan, Joan Baez. “Who are all those old people?”

  It was a stress-free life, and Rebecca was content to just lie in a field and watch the clouds. That was Rebecca all over, ephemeral and surreal, like some kind of unicorn.

  Not quite of this world, catch it while you can because it won’t be here for long, and it definitely can’t be possessed.

  “Daddy, how come poor people are poor?”

  “I don’t know, dear.”

  “But that’s not fair.”

  “Life’s not fair.”

  “It should be.”

  “I know, dear.”

  Her parents were remarkably youthful and good-looking, and you could tell that she was going to be beautiful, too. Rebecca was one of the few individuals who actually deserved to be pretty, because it wasn’t going to make her full of shit. She took after her parents that way.

  People generally hated the whole family.

  12

  A de Havilland twin-engine turboprop banked at four thousand feet over the turquoise water of Florida Bay and lined up its approach. Samantha Bridges pressed her face to the window and looked down at the A1A traffic, moving only slightly slower than the plane.

  Samantha felt a Bogart sensation of intrigue as her plane landed on the single, short runway with faded markings, bleached and hot, carved into the salt flats and coconut palms. The terminal was smaller than some houses in her neighborhood and needed paint.