Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  The men looked at Kluzinski, the most experienced one left. Their eyes asked the question. American rifle?

  “I just don’t know!”

  If the rounds weren’t American, they’d better get moving. No, they had to go back for Tex. While they were arguing, Jackson silently cut through the trees and overtook them. “Let’s go,” he said on the run, and they raced after him.

  They gave the roads and towns a wide berth, looping through the countryside. Tex wanted to head back to Suva Prizka. Another American unit was supposed to follow a day behind them, and maybe they could hook up.

  The route took extra hours, but no more casualties. They reached the outskirts at nightfall. There was smoke on the horizon, and flickers of flame through the windows of a tiny stone building. They found the well where they had drunk the green vodka. In the road was the body of the old man in rags, the stick of the little American flag jammed into his left eye socket.

  “Jesus Christ!” yelled Washington. Fulbright and Bordeaux cried like children. Tex looked at Kluzinski, who was in a rage. Marlon stood in shock.

  “Can’t stop now,” said Tex, and he led the way sprinting through a pasture.

  THE folks in Tallahassee had gone seismic. Calls flooded the Pentagon from the governor’s office, state legislators and the Florida congressional delegation in Washington—all the same sentiment: “What the hell do you mean you don’t know where he is?”

  Threats were made against the defense budget. The ball rolled downhill until it crashed into a general’s office in Albania. His staff pored over intelligence reports and satellite photos. Nothing on Marlon for three days.

  On the fourth, the evening newscasts back in the States were dominated by the surprise Serb offensive and sketchy reports of American casualties. A private communiqué from the general’s staff in Montenegro was transmitted to Governor Birch’s office. A unit from Florida was reported in an area of the shelling at Suva Prizka—that’s all they had.

  Birch picked up the phone and called Montenegro. “Put the general on!”

  “He’s not available. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “I’m going to take a giant dump on the general’s career if he isn’t the next voice on this line!”

  He heard the phone covered up in Montenegro and some muffled talking, a long pause and a new voice.

  “Nimitz here. How can I help you, Governor?”

  “I want Conrad out of there!”

  “Sir, we still really don’t know what’s going on. We can’t just drop everything for one—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Nimitz! I’ve got two U.S. senators who owe me, and they’ll tourniquet all new weapons funding until the joint chiefs bust you down to scrubbing latrines at Fort Benning, you little shit-boring parasite!” The screaming was so loud the general had to hold the phone away from his ear, and his whole staff heard the torrent. “Go in there with everything you got and pray you can find him!”

  Birch hung up.

  Within fifteen minutes, bases in Macedonia and Albania had scrambled six Apache helicopters and an air-sea rescue team used to extract downed pilots. They were followed by a four-engine Lockheed gunship with water-cooled .50-caliber cannons under the wings that could cut a hundred-yard swath and put a minimum of three rounds in every square foot. Accurate too—it could paint one side of a street and leave the other untouched. The plane was classified top secret, first sent to Panama to support the Contras during the Sandinista thing. It officially didn’t exist.

  JACKSON’S platoon spent the night by a small stream outside Suva Prizka and awoke at daybreak. They came upon the edge of town before noon. The Serbs must have gone east. They spaced out and walked opposite sides of the street. Tex looked around a corner and jumped back and flattened against the building. The others saw his reaction and ran to his side of the street and pressed themselves against the same wall.

  “What is it?” whispered Lech.

  Tex pointed to an open doorway behind them, and they slipped inside. They went to an upstairs window, where they wouldn’t be as easily detected, and looked out. Parked at the other end of the street, in front of the last house, were three Mad Max jeeps. The front door of the house flew open, and there was yelling. A handful of people were shoved outside, and they cowered in the road: two women, two children and an old man. They were followed by a half-dozen young men with guns drawn. There was angry screaming from the women. One of the armed men climbed on the back of a jeep and stood behind the machine-gun mount.

  There was the sound of firecrackers, and five bodies crumpled. The men walked to the next door and kicked it in.

  Tex stepped back from the window. He took a small envelope from his breast pocket. A religious medal and a family picture inside. He looked at the photo, eyes glassy.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Lech.

  Jackson didn’t answer. He put the medal and picture back in his pocket, picked up his rifle and ran down the stairs.

  “Goddamn him!” said Lech, and he ran after Tex. Marlon and the others hesitated, then followed, more out of fear of being left behind than anything else.

  It was a major firefight in less than a minute. The Americans were outmanned and outgunned, and their ammo was almost gone. But Tex and Lech had the Serb cops in an L-shaped ambush as they came out the next doorway. Two civilians and two thugs died in the initial encounter, and the others dove for cover. The jeeps were useless in the tight city street, but one of the thugs had a grenade launcher and he fired it into the stairwell where Lech was positioned. Lech dove at the last second, but he lost his gun and had to crawl from the rubble. The thugs slipped out Lech’s end of the ambush and headed for an alley.

  Marlon, Hank, François and Roosevelt ran out of the same alley, right into the thugs. Hank was first on the draw, killing a Serb with his sidearm. After that, both groups fled for opposite sides of the street, exchanging wild gunfire as they went. It was happening in seconds. The Serbs made it around the corner of a building; the Americans dove behind the abandoned stands of an outdoor vegetable market, but Marlon wrenched his ankle and fell short of cover.

  Roosevelt ran back to get Marlon and threw him over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He was almost back to safety when three bullets slammed into his back. In a last effort that came from nowhere, Roosevelt threw Marlon over the side of a vegetable stand before falling dead outside.

  The remaining three were pinned down and taking heavy fire. The wood was no protection. A round splintered through and hit Hank in his shooting hand.

  From Lech’s position in a doorway up the street, he saw the thug with the grenade launcher across the road, aiming for the vegetable stands. Lech looked around quickly—still no sign of his gun. He jumped up and sprinted. The Serb saw him at the last moment and turned, but Lech tackled him and they went down with the launcher, blowing them both up.

  At the other end of the street, the thugs who had made it around the corner of the building were preparing a second launcher. Tex was upstairs over a bombed-out bakery. From a window, he saw the grenade launcher at the corner. Across the road, the three Americans were still pinned behind the vegetable stands. Jackson padded down the stairs and ran across the street to the thugs’ blind side.

  Through a slat in a vegetable stand, Marlon could see it coming together. To their left, the barrel of the grenade launcher poking around the corner. To their right, Tex running full gait, quietly gliding tightly against the front of the buildings. Five strides away, Tex pulled the pin on a hand grenade. He ran right up to the corner.

  The thugs were ready to fire the launcher when Tex’s hand appeared at the edge of the building, just below the barrel of the launcher, dropping the grenade at their feet. One of the thugs jumped into the open and got off a quick carbine burst at the fleeing Jackson before the grenade blew off his legs and killed the other two.

  Up the street, Tex fell.

  IT was quiet. Eight bodies in the road. All over in five minutes. Marl
on ignored his bad ankle and limped to Tex. Jackson was conscious, but he’d already bled a small pond. He labored for breath. “Go see my family—” He wanted to say something else, but died quickly.

  Marlon sagged and closed his eyes and began crying softly.

  Suddenly, the door of the building in front of Marlon burst open. Screaming people of all sizes spilled out. Marlon stood up. A family surrounded him and clung to his uniform, begging. Three old women, an old man and two children. All the men of fighting age had been taken off and executed months ago.

  Walking out of the building behind the family were seven smiling Serb police officers with rifles. The one with the biggest smile had a tiny cigar in his mouth and a potbelly, and he’d been waiting for this day his whole life. He had spent twelve petty years on the police force bullying his neighbors, and now that he was operating under the wink of the Serb army, had graduated to torturing and murdering them with relish.

  When the Serbs stepped out of the doorway and into the street, the family cowered behind Marlon. The children clung to his legs. An old woman in a shawl wept and cursed the cops.

  The cops lowered the rifles to their sides and began laughing. The one with the potbelly mocked the old woman.

  Marlon felt one of the children on his leg quivering. He looked over to where Tex lay. He slowly turned back to face the Serbs, straightening his spine and lifting his chin. He took his .45 pistol out of its hip holster and raised it at Potbelly with a fully extended right arm that was shaking.

  A Swiss photographer for Reuters was hiding in a church steeple down the street and took a sequence of motor-drive zoom shots with a six-hundred-millimeter lens.

  Potbelly pointed at Marlon and laughed and said with an accent, “John Wayne!”

  The others broke up, too. But eventually they tired of laughing, and Marlon saw their eyes become vacant. They began raising the rifles.

  There was this sound. The cops looked around. A deep drone rolling in from the hills. The swooping Lockheed suddenly appeared just above the building tops, and there was no place to hide. The .50-caliber cannons cut them to pieces where they stood. The strike was surgical—barely any dust kicked up on Marlon or the family.

  When the rescue team landed the helicopter ten minutes later, Marlon was sitting in the middle of the road, holding Tex’s hand.

  13

  RED-WHITE-AND-BLUE streamers filled the terminal at Tallahassee Municipal Airport. Out on the runway, banks of TV cameras stood three deep atop a temporary stage. A red carpet led across the tarmac to an empty podium decorated with yellow ribbons.

  “There it is!” someone yelled and pointed, and everyone looked skyward.

  First it was a dot. Then General Nimitz’s plane grew larger until it made the approach and landed on runway nine.

  Marlon was coming home a national hero. The Reuters photographs had appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek, Marlon aiming his pistol with his right hand, his left arm swept back behind him protecting the family, facing down seven armed Serbs. And the perfect tearjerker detail: the smudge-faced three-year-old girl peeking out from behind Marlon’s leg.

  “That kid alone’s worth five elections,” Governor Birch had said privately.

  There was even talk of the presidency. Birch would soon begin hearing rumors that he would be pushed aside for Marlon to make an early run, and it would worry Birch right up until he crashed into the Yukon in a Learjet full of hookers and moose guns.

  But on this sunny day in the panhandle, all was right with the world. When the hatch opened, General Nimitz appeared and waved for an inappropriate duration until his aides nudged him down the steps. Then came what the crowd had been waiting for. Marlon appeared first, then Bordeaux and Fulbright, whose arm was in a sling. They walked down the stairs as the tuba section of a local high school band played “War, What Is It Good For?” and orange-spandex nymphs threw batons high in the air.

  The three returning soldiers were led toward the podium in front of a row of folding VIP chairs. General Nimitz was seated in the first chair, and a nymph’s errant baton throw came down above his right eye, requiring a fuss and butterfly closures.

  Conrad, Fulbright and Bordeaux waved again when they got to the microphone. The applause seemed to go on forever.

  Governor Birch approached Escrow. He canted his head toward Fulbright and Bordeaux. “Get them out of here!”

  As the applause petered off, Escrow grabbed the two by the arms and led them over to a pair of chairs hidden behind a giant wreath that read, “Welcome home, Marlon.” He handed them single-serving bags of Ruffles.

  Marlon looked out across the panorama of admiring faces. He had been here before—the night he won the lieutenant governor’s race, balloons dropping from the ballroom ceiling. He smiled sheepishly and waited for the last few people to stop clapping.

  “I…”

  Marlon stopped. He looked around for Fulbright and Bordeaux and spotted them behind the wreath. He paused, then faced the crowd again.

  “I want to thank…” He turned and gestured toward the VIP seats, where Governor Birch and his father were seated. He stopped again.

  Marlon took a deep breath. “I want to talk today about a man I met. He was a sergeant…”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Dempsey Conrad whispered out the corner of his mouth to Birch. “Here we go.”

  Marlon stopped again. He scanned the faces in the crowd. Each pause was growing more uncomfortable. Marlon lowered his head and bit his lower lip. The crowd began to murmur.

  “We love you, Marlon!” yelled a woman in back, which produced sprinkled applause and a blast from a hockey arena air horn. Marlon’s eyes stayed lowered.

  Governor Birch rushed to the podium and put a buddy arm around Marlon’s shoulders. He leaned to the microphone. “We’re so proud to have you home, Marlon!” Birch stepped back and began clapping, and the crowd came to its feet for a standing ovation.

  They got Marlon in the limo quickly. Birch slipped Escrow a hundred. “Take him out and get him drunk.”

  The crowd broke through the police line and chased Marlon’s limo down the runway.

  THE next morning, Escrow appeared with his clipboard in the doorway of the lieutenant governor’s office.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What’s it look like I’m doing?” said Marlon, tucking a cell phone in a stuffed gym bag, looking around to see if there was anything else he might want.

  “I hope you’re not packing for a trip.”

  Silence.

  “You can’t go anywhere! You have a month of appointments stacked up!”

  Marlon zipped the gym bag—“Please move”—and squeezed past Escrow in the doorway.

  Escrow scampered alongside him through the rotunda. “At least tell me where you’re going.”

  Marlon kept walking.

  “Okay, if you won’t tell me, I must insist that I come with you. You’ve been under a lot of pressure lately.”

  They left the Capitol for a limo waiting at the curb. As they pulled away, Escrow reached into Marlon’s gym bag on the backseat between them and pulled out the cell phone.

  “I have to call your dad and the governor. This is highly irregular.”

  Marlon’s voice was tired. “Don’t mess with me today.”

  Escrow stopped mid-dial and looked at Marlon. He quietly put the phone back in the bag and started tapping his fingers on his knees. A minute passed. “Okay, I put the phone away. Now, will you tell me where we’re going?”

  “Clewiston.”

  “Clewiston! That’s eight hours!”

  “Nine.”

  For nine hours they drove. Marlon leaned forward and stared out the window the whole time, not saying a word. Escrow fidgeted.

  They pulled off Interstate 75 south of Sarasota, and Marlon went into a convenience store. Escrow watched from the limo, then he grabbed the cell phone and quickly dialed.

  “Clewiston!” yelled Birch. “Bring him back! Now!”
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br />   “I’m afraid of him—he’s not right.”

  “Of course he’s not right! Something happened to him over there!”

  “Can’t you send people?”

  “Messy. It’ll get press. You have to bring him in alone. You’re his chief of staff!”

  “I think he’s in search of something.”

  “Great! The future governor is trying to find himself. Sets a dangerous precedent for the citizens.”

  “But maybe it would be good for him to—”

  “No buts! We don’t want people to find themselves! We like ’em just the way they are! Bring him back or you’re through in this town!”

  The line went dead. Escrow saw Marlon coming out of the food mart with snacks, and he stuffed the cell phone back in the bag.

  They headed inland, taking Route 74 at Punta Gorda. Marlon ripped open a foil pouch and offered it to Escrow.

  “Bugle?”

  Escrow shook his head. Marlon shrugged and looked back out the window and ate salty conical corn snacks.

  They picked up US 27 and were soon deep in sugarcane country. Belle Glade, Moore Haven, Harlem and, later, Clewiston, “America’s Sweetest Town.” Raised causeways of packed dirt ran next to deep canals, cane fields sprawled in grids, and twisting trails of refinery smoke dotted the horizon. A sign thanked a doctor for returning to practice in the town.

  “Pull over here,” Marlon told the driver.

  The limo eased off the road south of Palmdale, at the Cypress Knee Museum. Marlon had hoped to get a burger, but the place was deserted. A new Florida institution—the ghost roadside attraction. Marlon read a faded wooden info sign about cypress knees, the knotted roots that stick out of the swamp so the trees can breathe. He walked through the covered outdoor exhibit and contemplated. There was a yellow photo from the fifties, when the place was hopping, and another of the late owner, who collected pieces of cypress that had grown to resemble stuff. Marlon wiped dust off the display glass and saw dolphins, FDR, Stalin, Madonna and one knee with a Salvador Dalí title, Lady Hippopotamus Wearing a Carmen Miranda Hat. He learned that the museum’s founder, Tom Gaskins, Sr., displayed knees in the Florida Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.