by Dorsey, Tim
Ivan and Igor carried plastic convenience store bags to their room. The dogs took off down the street after a banana bike.
“I don’t know why you’re in such a grouchy mood,” said Igor.
Ivan stopped walking. “Did your mother, like, fall down several flights of stairs when she was pregnant?”
“No.”
“Get kicked by a horse?”
“No.”
“Handle a lot of plutonium?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
Ivan resumed walking to the room. He unlocked the door, and they dumped their stuff on the dresser.
“Go get him out of the trunk,” said Ivan. “You think you can handle that?”
Five minutes later, Ivan stood in his socks in front of the TV, looking for something with the remote and shaking a bag of sunflower seeds into his mouth. Then he remembered Igor was taking a long time.
Ivan opened the door and stuck his head out. “Igor?…Igor?…”
Igor hadn’t blinked for five minutes. His hands were bound, mouth taped.
Serge snipped away with heavy-gauge metal shears.
“It’s important to have the right tool for the job.” Snip, snip. “They’re Sears, you know. Lifetime guarantee.” Snip, snip. “Aren’t you just fascinated by the place we’re at?”
Igor didn’t blink.
“Me, too,” said Serge. “Cape Canaveral, from the Spanish for ‘cape of canes’ because of all the reeds the sailors saw. Say the name today, and people think modern, futuristic, space travel. Yet it also has one of the oldest histories of any place in the country.” Snip, snip.
Serge stepped back to inspect his work, then nodded to himself and began snipping again. “The cape jutted out so much, it became Florida’s most prominent navigational feature for early explorers. That’s why there are so many shipwrecks around here. Hence, the Treasure Coast.”
Serge switched to bolt cutters. Snap, snap.
“The area was mapped as early as 1502. The Spanish tried to establish their first settlement here, but the Indians were too savage, so they moved a bit farther north to a little place called St. Augustine. Isn’t that a fun fact? Did you know they had to bulldoze historic Indian grounds when they were building some of the launch pads? Talk about your symbolism overload.”
Igor finally figured out Serge’s plan and started screaming under the mouth tape.
“You’re right,” said Serge. “It was a tragedy. All kinds of archaeological opportunities lost.”
Serge snipped a few last times and stood up straight. “There!”
He reached down next to Igor’s leg and turned a key. A quiet electric motor came to life. “You realize you kidnapped my best friend. I saw you with that cage of scorpions. You weren’t exactly planning a Hallmark moment.”
Serge produced a pistol with a silencer, took aim, and shot out four floodlights in the distance. He picked up a concrete block and placed it in front of Igor’s feet, on a pedal. The electric motor grew louder, and Igor slowly pulled away from Serge.
“Don’t forget to write.”
Ten p.m. A homicide detective and the county medical examiner stood on a Japanese footbridge, interviewing witnesses. EMTs were down on the bank of the retention pond, zipping up Pavel’s body in a black plastic bag.
The detective took notes on a spiral pad. “And you say you were scuba diving in the pond for golf balls.” The detective looked up. “Is that actually a job?”
The diver nodded.
“And the deceased just came out of nowhere and jumped on the end of your bang stick?”
The diver nodded again.
“Hey!” the complex’s owner yelled over to the detective. “Can I open the driving range now? I’m losing a lot of money!”
The detective said it was okay.
“Go ahead!” yelled the owner. Twenty golfers began swinging.
They loaded Pavel’s body into the back of the coroner’s van.
“Range cart!”
The golfers dumped out the rest of their buckets and began swinging as fast as they could, dozens of balls clanging off the side of the cart. But other shots, which appeared to have found their mark, didn’t make much noise at all. With the floodlights shot out, the golfers couldn’t see that the driver’s protective metal cage had been cut away.
The police and medical examiner had to drop Pavel’s body off at the morgue and head right back to the driving range.
The detective wasn’t happy when he met the owner in front of the windmill. He pointed at the range. “They’re still hitting golf balls!”
“I have to make a buck.”
“This is a crime scene!”
“They’re not aiming at the cart anymore.”
“Tell them to stop!”
The owner stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled toward the driving tees. “Hey! The police say you have to stop!” Most of them did, although some tried getting in a few last balls.
“Stop hitting!” yelled the detective. “What are you, children?”
The detective and coroner walked out to the two-hundred-yard marker and peeked in the range cart at Igor. The detective cringed. The coroner threw up.
The detective offered him a handkerchief and tapped the corner of his own mouth. “You got vomit.”
The coroner dabbed it.
“Other side.”
The EMTs carefully extracted Igor from the range cart.
The detective stared off in thought and shook his head. “What the hell kind of Goony Golf are they running here?”
A golf ball whizzed by.
Ivan sat in his motel bathroom with a cell phone.
“Calm down, Mr. Grande…. Please calm down…. Nobody feels worse about this than I do…. No, someone else has the briefcase now…. We’re still trying to find that out…. Look, I know this is a bad time to bring this up, but I need some more men…. I ran out…. What do you mean, what happened to the ones I had? They’re all dead…. Stop shouting…. Please stop shouting…. I’d like to point out that they died trying to recover your five million dollars…. Yes, that’s right, the five million I still don’t have…. If you can just send some more guys, I think we can wrap this up pretty quickly…. Okay, I’ll meet them at the airport….”
The next morning Ivan headed west on the Beeline Expressway, listening to books on tape. He took the exit for Orlando International and parked in short-term, then got on a moving sidewalk for the new airside. He found a seat and folded his hands in his lap.
A wide-body pulled up to the terminal. Ivan stood and walked over to the gate. Passengers poured off the plane. Couples embraced, children cried, others ran for the smoking area. Ivan got on tiptoe in the middle of the human stream, craning his neck for a better view, holding a white sign in front of him with both hands: MIERDA CARTEL.
Four men in tropical shirts walked up and introduced themselves. Dmitri, Alexi, Vladimir and Chuck.
“We’re on a tight schedule,” said Ivan. “We have to head to an address right now. Then drinks on me.”
Jethro was back in his room at the Orbit Motel, sitting on the foot of the bed. He had decided to end it like a man. There was no other choice. The money was gone and so was his little buddy. He had already read the grisly details in the paper. Jethro blamed himself. He drank straight from a bottle of George Dickel and muttered as he loaded the shotgun he had purchased at Space Shuttle Pawn for twenty-five dollars.
“If only I had not run like a coward, possibly I could have prevailed in the struggle and offered protection and comfort. Instead, I abandoned my faithful traveling companion. Men do not do such things. Not even dogs do such things….” He took another swig. “I am not even a dog. Where was my grace under pressure? There is no honor in this anymore. Just the burning sting of truth like a morning urination in Madrid. Galanos!”
He braced the butt of the shotgun on the floor and placed the other end in his mouth. He kicked off his right sandal and stuck his big toe in the trigger guard.
He pressed down with his toe.
Nothing.
He pressed again. Still nothing. The damn thing wouldn’t budge. He took the barrel out of his mouth and looked down. The safety was still on. He reached for it but the gun was too long, and he couldn’t get to it with his toe still in the trigger. He tried to pull the toe out, but it had swollen and was stuck.
Jethro sulked on the end of the bed, hanging his head pitifully, his big toe turning purple. He grabbed the bottle of Dickel again. “Exquisite,” he sighed. “Even in suicide I have become a buffoon.”
The motel room door crashed open. Five tropical shirts stood in the doorway.
“Where’s our briefcase!”
Jethro screamed. He jumped up and ran for the bathroom.
“Get him!” yelled Ivan.
It was difficult for Jethro to run, dragging the shotgun. The sixteen-gauge swung out and hit the bottom of the dresser, knocking off the safety.
Jethro took another step for the bathroom.
Bang.
Another step.
Bang.
Jethro hobbled as fast as he could, the shotgun firing with each step, spraying a tight pattern of lead pellets at everything within six inches of the floor.
The homicide detective was conducting follow-up interviews at the driving range. His beeper went off.
The detective parked behind the Orbit Motel and trotted quickly toward an upstairs room but slowed when he noticed five sets of bloody footprints coming down the steps.
A paramedic was inside, trying to get Jethro’s toe out of the shotgun with Vaseline.
“Ah, yes, you drive the ambulance,” said Jethro. “Like the courageous young men of the Parisian countryside during the Great War…”
“Jethro, straighten your leg out some more,” said the paramedic. “I can’t get leverage.”
“Did you check to see if it was still loaded?” asked the detective.
“Of course.”
Bang.
“Jethro?…Jethro?…”
The detective pulled out his notebook. “This is going in your file.”
20
Spider came back to the Sapphire Room after storming out that night. He always came back.
Preston promised not to do the one-armed gag anymore. He always lied.
The Sapphire Room was the Devil’s Island of lounge acts. The gang wanted out. They all had the same agent, and they complained every chance. On a Saturday night in September, they got the phone call. Their agent had come through with an ambitious schedule of engagements cutting clear across the country from the desert southwest to the northeast industrial corridor. The itinerary came over the fax at the Gold Dust Motel.
“These places look worse than the Sapphire Room!” said Spider. They called their agent.
He advised patience. This was résumé-building time. They needed to get some polish from the road, put together recommendations and audition tapes. And if all went well…the agent told them what he had in mind next.
“Shit,” said Preston. “What are we waiting for?”
They hit the highway in Spider’s brown DeVille with bad suspension, pulling a U-Haul, dragging the trailer chain and making sparks. It was tight quarters. Spider, Andy, Saul, Preston, Frankie and Bad Company, shoulder to shoulder in blue tuxedos. They were surprised to discover they actually liked the road. It got in their blood: the gas stations and the greasy spoons and the greasier motels with The Paper Strip of Total Confidence across the toilet seat. They worked the circuit of small hotel bars in second-shelf cities bypassed by the big acts. No interstate travel. Just two lanes across America. The big, open sky and rolling plateaus and tumbleweeds across Arizona and New Mexico, putting in a lot of car time. Preston kept them going with hypnosis stories.
“There was this guy in Switzerland back in the eighteen hundreds who used to hypnotize his wife into becoming completely rigid. And he would set up two chairs and lay her on her back, head on one chair, feet on the other, nothing underneath…”
“I’ve seen that one,” said Andy.
“It gets better,” said Preston. “This guy put concrete blocks on her stomach and invited people from the audience to smash them with sledgehammers.”
“I know what’s coming,” said Spider. “She came out of the trance at the crucial moment?”
“Worse,” said Preston. “One of the volunteers from the audience—he misses the block completely. Kills her.”
“That’s fucked up,” said Spider, lighting a cigarette.
“Still a fun story,” said Preston.
More miles. Texaco road maps, flat tires, bad coffee, farts. But things were looking up, moods improving. They were seeing their country. And they were getting better. Acts began to sharpen during the night-in-night-out lounge march east, Tempe, Tucson, Tombstone. “Any cliff dwellers in the audience tonight? I got a joke for you…” Albuquerque, Carlsbad, Roswell, Lubbock, Abilene, the landscape slowly transforming, cattle ranches and oil derricks replacing the mesas and buttes and UFO people. San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, the Alamo Room, the Lone Star Supper Club, the downtown Galveston Skate-O-Rama, which they would be discussing with their agent.
“Here’s a good one,” said Preston. “This is what got me interested in hypnosis in the first place, and it’s definitely true, completely documented. All the scholars know the details. In the late 1800s, another hypnotist in Europe had regularly been hypnotizing an assistant for stage demonstrations. He usually instructed her mind to leave her body and enter another hypnotized subject, in order to cure ailments. Then she’d leave that person’s body and take the ailment with her.”
“Did it work?”
“The medical part is hocus-pocus, but the power of suggestion is very real. One night, the guy got sloppy or something and instead of telling her mind to leave her body, he told her soul to leave.”
“What happened?”
“Heart attack. Died.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“Bullshit!”
“We only find it amazing because we’re cynical Americans. We’ve never really accepted hypnosis over here,” said Preston. “The French know all about this.”
“The French?”
“If it can be used for sex, the French are all over it. A hundred years ago, stage hypnotists were screwing everything that moved in Paris. It got out of control. Everybody knew what was going on. The subject dominated French publishing. De Maupassant wrote about it. So did Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers. Then, in 1894, the same year that assistant got killed onstage, George du Maurier kicked the door wide open with his international best-selling novel Trilby, featuring the cowardly-cruel villain Svengali, who exploits his subjects.”
“A hypnotist who exploits his subject?” said Spider. “What a shock.”
Onward, turning north, heavier coats, autumn leaves changing. Knoxville, Lexington, Akron, Wilkes-Barre, Schenectady. The regional accents and politics morphing, but not the clubs, which even had the same names, repeating over and over in a neon Möbius strip: the Flamingo, the Satin Club, the Stardust Room, the Horseshoe Lounge, Fast Eddie’s, the Sands, the Surf, the Algiers, the Copa, the Aladdin, the Riviera, the Flamingo…These were the good times, barnstorming Vegas Nation, laughter again filling their lives, even if it was at someone’s expense from another hypnosis prank. None of them would admit it, but they genuinely began enjoying hanging out together, encouraging each other, going to movies at old Main Street theaters. They went to see Saving Private Ryan in Bridgeport and Preston said asparagus, and Frankie Chan went up to the screen and made shadow puppets during the beach landing, and they all got chased down the street.
With such a heavy schedule, it was bound to happen. Casualties. In Poughkeepsie, they lost Saul Horowitz and his vaudeville tribute to varicose veins, replacing him with Dee Dee Lowenstein “as Carmen Miranda.” Then, in the Tango Room in Scranton, Bad Company was served a footlocker of lawsuits for trademark infr
ingement.
But they were professionals now, no looking back, pressing forward, toward the final prize. The odometer turned over. Spider dialed their agent in New York. “When do we get the replacement musical act for Bad Company?…But they were our anchor on the marquee…. You said to be patient last time….”
The DeVille pulled into their Thursday-night engagement.
Dee Dee Lowenstein finished her Carmen Miranda set. She returned to the corner booth in the restaurant and set her fruit hat on the table.
Spider lit her cigarette. “How’d it go?”
She exhaled. “Fuckin’ morgue.”
Frankie reached for her hat. “Can I have a banana?”
“No, you can’t have a banana! What are you, fuckin’ simple?”
“But you got a whole bunch.”
She pointed at his hand. “Move it or lose it!”
A stranger approached the table wearing a tuxedo and carrying a small musical case. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and read something.
“Can we help you?” asked Andy.
“I’m supposed to meet some people. I’m not sure I have the right place.” He reread the piece of paper.
Andy reached. “Let me see that.”
Spider finished his juggling set and came back to the table.
“How’d it go?”
“Fuckin’ granite. Gimme a cigarette.”
Andy handed the paper back to the new guy. “Yep, you’re in the right place. What’s your name?”
“Bob. Bob Kowolski.”
Andy motioned back and forth. “Bob—the gang…. The gang—Bob.”
“What’s your act, Bob?”
Bob told them.
Frankie lit a cigarette. “Better than nothing.”
The emcee came up to the table and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “What’s going on here? We got an empty stage.”
Spider pointed at the new guy. “Looks like you’re up, Bob. Cherry-poppin’ time. Break a leg.”