the Golden Orange (1990)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

"A little, Your Honor." Winnie suddenly went damp all over. He'd sprung a leak from last night's vodka binge, and a gremlin golfer was taking divots from his brain.

  "Do you know I enjoy putting deuces in jail?"

  "Your Honor, I wasn't driving a car. Why, I'd never drive when ..."

  "You happened to be at the wheel of a ferryboat, but you've no doubt driven a car lots of times when you were drunk. All alcoholics do."

  "Your Honor, I assure you I haven't. And I don't know where you get the idea that I'm an ..."

  "Alcoholic."

  "I don't think I'm an ..."

  "What kind of car do you drive?"

  "A five-year-old VW, Your Honor."

  "How often do you drive it with a B. A. reading of point-two-oh, or higher?"

  "Your Honor, I don't..."

  "Do you have any memory whatsoever of making a citizen, in effect, walk the plank and nearly drown in that cold black water?"

  "It's the newspapers, Your Honor!" And now Winnie was sweating buckets. "Walk the plank? What plank? Your Honor knows there's no plank on the ferry!"

  "You told the passenger you were going to shoot him."

  "My old service revolver was at home, Judge! I didn't have a gun on that boat!"

  "But he believed you. And he jumped into that cold black water."

  "He panicked, Your Honor!"

  "People were screaming for help. Other people were threatening to jump into the cold black water rather than ride it out with an alcoholic at the wheel of the boat. A dangerous drunk who really doesn't remember what happened that night. Do you have blackouts?"

  "Blackouts?"

  "Never mind. Of course you do. You're an alcoholic. I read the probation report."

  "That guy from the probation department jumped to conclusions, Your Honor!"

  Then Judge Singleton said casually, "I'd decided to send you to jail. For six months."

  Winnie went as silent as a barnacle on a keel. His skull was on fire. The Evian looked like a tall cool sweating vodka in the meaty paw of Judge Singleton.

  Winnie could hear the ice cubes clinking against the judge's teeth. Winnie's own mouth seemed full of beach sand. The judge's stare was a prison searchlight.

  "I wouldn't be helped in jail, Your Honor," he finally croaked.

  "Helped? Do you think I'm interested in helping the people I send to jail? Boy, I'm a warehouse specialist! I put lawbreakers on the shelf so the people of this county can have a break for a while. And I'm also here to provide a little revenge and retribution. Oh yes! People need revenge. Just ask the family of someone killed by a drunk driver. Just ask the family sometime."

  "Judge, please! I'm not a . .."

  "How long did you serve with the Newport Beach Police Department? Fourteen years?"

  "Fifteen years."

  "Fifteen years. And then what?"

  "I'd still be there except some disks blew when a burglar kicked me down the companionway of a boat. My back locks up on me maybe three days a week. Can't hardly sit. Can't ever lie on my stomach. I paid for the boat parade damage, Judge!"

  Winnie Farlowe was drowning in vodka ferment. He couldn't think. He tried to recall some of the commendations he'd been awarded as a cop, but strangely, all he could think of was his late father. Winnie was a little boy again, facing this terror not at The Drinker's Hour, but in broad daylight. And he wanted a father to save him. He felt like weeping.

  "I was in law enforcement myself," said Judge Singleton.

  Prepared to grovel "I know, Your Honor!"

  "Sheriff's Department. I worked at the county jail when you were a baby."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I know what can happen to ex-cops when they do jail time. Do you know what can happen to ex-cops in jail? When the inmates get hold of him?"

  A gulp. "I got a pretty good idea, Judge."

  "I remember once when I was a young deputy. We had this policeman in jail awaiting trial. Lived in Orange, I think it was. Maybe Tustin. Anyway, he shot his wife in a drunken rage one night. We isolated him, of course, but somebody screwed up on the graveyard shift. He was taken in for a morning shower with the other court transfers. The inmates knew the guy was a cop and they got to him in the showers. Know what they did to him before anyone could stop them?"

  "I got a pretty good idea," Winnie repeated, wishing the judge would stop

  "Well, I guess I never forgot how he looked on that shower room floor. Bleeding like a pig and crying like a woman."

  Winnie's instincts told him to keep his mouth shut and let this man have his say. He thought he saw a glimmer of mercy in those ferocious black eyes.

  "I'm going to give you five days and suspend it. You'll pay a fine of close to a thousand bucks and be placed on probation. That means you better not operate a boat if you've even walked past a saloon. And you better not appear in public in a drunken condition." He took a sip of Evian and said, "Don't thank me. I don't like to be thanked."

  Another croak. "No, sir!"

  "Lucky you're white. If you were black I'd catch hell for giving you a break, wouldn't I? You treated Christmas like a seagoing Scrooge, didn't you? With contempt."

  "I guess so, Your Honor."

  "If you get picked up for anything, anything at all related to drunkenness, you'll do time. Do you understand me, boy?"

  "Yes, Your Honor."

  "Okay, get outta here and tell your lawyer to can that boring speech."

  "Yes, Your Honor," Winnie said, walking shakily to the door.

  "One more thing," said the judge, stopping Winnie in his tracks.

  "Sir?"

  The judge grinned. A chilling grin. Chocolate ice. "Do you know what they say in county jail when somebody farts and the other prisoners hear it?"

  "No, Your Honor."

  "They say, 'Still a virgin, huh?' So every time you're tempted to booze it up you think about how nice it is to hear yourself fart. Do you understand me, boy?"

  "Yes, Your Honor."

  Winnie's sweaty fingers slipped right off the brass doorknob on the first try. A hairy shudder sidled up his spine like a tarantula. Still a virgin, huh?

  Chapter 4 _ Dream Vision

  It was still warm and balmy at five o'clock in the afternoon. That's when Winnie got to his apartment on the Balboa peninsula, wanting a drink more than he'd ever wanted one in his life. Wanting it all the more when he pictured Judge Singleton with his James Earl Jones Voice of God, and eyes like a defendant's bad dream.

  Winnie's brand-new pinpoint Oxford shirt looked like a bar rag from Spoon's Landing. He stripped it off and tossed it on the floor with the rest of the week's laundry. He put on his old baggy Hang Tens, opened two beers, drank the first without stopping and took the other with him out on the porch, where he sniffed the brisk salt air over the peninsula. He gulped down the second beer, shivering when he thought about psychopathic inmates and soundless farts.

  Winnie shook it off, trotted down the steps to the alley behind the apartment house, then jogged barefoot across Balboa Boulevard to the beach, one block away. That block saved him about $300 a month in rent for a cramped "studio" with a daybed.

  He sprinted across the warm white sand and hit the surf without much of a shock. He figured he was greenhousing: Sheer terror followed by utter relief equals one hot body. The ocean felt like Hawaii water to him, not the cold surf of Southern California.

  Winnie plunged through the breakers, enjoying the sting as they slapped against his chest like a wooden mallet smacking fresh squid into tender steaks.

  He knew it was risky to swim out. He'd lived near the beach all his life and understood riptides and undertow, yet he was swimming right toward trouble. Daring the rip? Some surfers two hundred yards down the beach yelled "Dumb shit!" at him, but he swam past the rip and beyond. He swam out perhaps five hundred yards before the juices started draining.

  The undertow was much stronger than he'd thought, and the sun was dropping fast. Winnie treaded water and looked toward the sunset, know
ing that before he swam much farther against this tide, the fireball would melt into the sea.

  He began stroking desperately. As a young lifeguard, he had patrolled this beach, notching his jeep with esoteric little rabbits to record the heads (tails actually) of all the surf bunnies he'd collected. But this was no time for surf bunnies. Winnie Farlowe was in trouble!

  Too macho to call for help from the teenage surfers who straddled their boards less than a hundred yards away, he continued to stroke. He couldn't bring himself to do it, not an ex-lifeguard/ marine/policeman. But at last he hollered: "Here!"

  Here? The surfers knew he was here. There, actually. There in the surf, churning back and forth in the undertow.

  Winnie finally screamed: "HELP ME!"

  The kid who paddled toward him, and towed him from the skeg of his board, was wearing a wet suit with a yellow stripe. The kid was blond, of course, about sixteen years old. He bitched about missing some rad tubes and said that old dorks shouldn't be anywhere near a rip, even a baby rip. That was the gist of the conversation, as much as Winnie could understand, in that he was gagging on the last rad tube that whacked him in the back of the skull while the kid's powerful strokes dragged him through the foam.

  When Winnie's feet touched sand and he turned to thank the surfer, the kid was already submarining through the nearest breaker, heading back toward the school of others lying still on the blue-black ocean, awaiting nirvana. The Perfect Wave.

  A violent coughing fit struck Winnie when he reached the back stairs leading up to his apartment. By the time he got inside, he was shivering and queasy, tasting brine from his mouth to his belly. A cold beer made him feel better. A shot of Polish vodka helped even more. Another beer and Winnie was half-convinced he could've managed just fine without that little son of a bitch. He might even go for a swim tomorrow, rips or no rips, just to prove a thing or two. After all, a former lifeguard never really loses it.

  By eight o'clock, Winnie had devoured a pot of clams at Digger's Hot Pbt, where he "dined" four nights a week. By 8:10 he'd entered Spoon's Landing ready to tell everybody how he'd toughed it out in court. How the hanging judge just had to watch helplessly as Winnie slid out of his clutches, like an eel through a gill net.

  He found Spoon glaring at Bilge O'Toole, who was racing his turtle, Irma, across the bar against one owned by a commercial fisherman they called Carlos Tuna, a turtle wrangler who amazed Gold Coast millionaires with the outrageous story that his turtle, Regis, was one hundred years old.

  Bilge O'Toole was already weepy drunk, which was as predictable as investment swindles around these parts, and Spoon was telling him he should take his Irma and go on home. Five young off-duty cops were shooting snooker in the adjoining room, and bitching about the yesteryear music on the jukebox.

  At the other end of the bar, Guppy Stover was sighing mournfully, but everyone ignored her. They knew that to say "What's the matter?" would get them gaffed for half an hour, during which they'd hear about the U. S. Navy boatswain's mate who wooed her but left her on the beach when he found a Waikiki grass widow on a refueling stop during his last cruise. Which was in 1945, but seemed like yesterday to Guppy, who still wore her mass of gray hair in the W. W. II, Andrews Sisters shoulder-length style.

  There were about four or five others at the bar, three of them strangers to Winnie, everybody looking exceedingly miserable, which was normal on Tuesday nights for some reason. Winnie walked to the bar and nodded at Spoon, who poured him a draft and a double shot of Polish vodka.

  Spoon's navy cap dipped twice, which was Spoon's way of asking, "Well, what happened?"

  "This place is about as cheery as the Gaza Strip," Winnie said, sipping the vodka and chasing it with two big gulps of draft.

  Spoon's navy cap-according to a has-been movie star who left it in the bar during those days when John Wayne was The Golden Orange's greatest living celebrity-was the cap James Cagney wore in Mister Roberts. Even though it perfectly fit Spoon, who had a head like a beer keg, twice the size of Cagney's.

  It was almost impossible to exaggerate the impact of John Wayne. Everyone knew he didn't really win The Big War and settle The West, and yet . . . And yet as far as Orange County was concerned, the Duke could replace Kennedy and Roosevelt on U. S. coins any old day. But why stop there? Why not the Duke on a fifty-dollar bill? In an era when heroes were routinely demolished, his icon hung everywhere. He was clearly the patron saint of The Golden Orange.

  There's an annual softb&ll event in a Southland beach city wherein dozens of teams enter a three-day elimination event, mainly just to drink and party. Entrants are encouraged to pick imaginative names for the teams, and crassness is not discouraged. For example, one team composed of police detectives called itself "The Swinging Dicks." And yet, the only caveat insofar as picking a team name is that no entrant can, in any way, denigrate the United States of America, or John Wayne. That is how profanity gets defined in these parts.

  Spoon had acquired his sobriquet back in The Big War because of his incredible ability to rap out the beat of any popular song with a pair of inverted tablespoons. He still won lots of bets by playing identifiable melodies with the rat-a-tat-tat on the hopelessly battered bartop.

  "We gonna have to visit you every other Saturday or what?" Spoon finally asked. His voice was a drone, usually. Everyone said Spoon could put you to sleep yelling "Fire!"

  "Probation," said Winnie. "They didn't wanna go and persecute a guy that's served his country and his community as many years as I did."

  Guppy Stover said, "I figured that big spade'd put you on ice, Winnie."

  Which won her a nod from Winnie to Spoon. She chose an Alabama slammer since Winnie was buying. Straight up.

  There wasn't much more to talk about. By 9:30 p. M. Bilge O'Toole's patchy gray hair was standing up in sweaty tufts. He obsessively twisted and pulled it when he was loaded, and the booze had raised his temperature till the veins were popping, not just on his blood-bucket nose but on his chin and dumpling cheeks as well. Another six fingers of Spoon's bar whiskey and they could grow orchids in the clumps protruding from his ears. He had a plaster cast on his wrist, but few even questioned it. The answer was obvious: Drunks fall down.

  Bilge was getting weepy, very weepy. Winnie hoped that he wouldn't sing "Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra," but when there wasn't a single sporting event on the big screen TV, anything could happen.

  Suddenly Bilge looked at Winnie and said, "I'm getting away from the ocean. I'm moving inland.

  Maybe out to Riverside or San Bernardino. I'm sick a tasting salt every time I lick my lips."

  "That's from the tequila," Guppy offered, amazing everyone because she wasn't comatose yet. "You always got tequila salt stuck to your chin. That's what the problem is."

  Bilge said to Winnie, "I knew I'd been around the ocean too long when I saw one a Spoon's cockroaches hanging sixteen on a swizzle stick."

  "I think I'll go home," Winnie said. "This place is too zany and full a fun. Like an East German embassy."

  "I used to have a home," Guppy offered, tucking half a bale of gray under her red velvet hair ribbon, "before Franklin dumped me for that hog in Honolulu back in forty-five."

  Winnie found a quarter and walked to the old Wurlitzer jukebox in self-defense. He had to choose between Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Mel Torme, Peggy Lee or Bobby Darin. Spoon considered them to be the great saloon singers of our time and was convinced that any song written after the fifties was bad for business. Spoon liked old songs with ocean water in them, like "Red Sails in the Sunset." Winnie punched Peggy Lee's "Fever."

  When he got back to the bar there was a blonde in an ivory cardigan, with navy blue and ivory striped pants, sitting at the bar. She wore a funnel-necked navy pullover under the cardigan. The outfit looked nautical without any of those corny little anchors.

  Winnie tried not to stare. Her boyfriend or husband might be in the john. Another wealthy couple out slumming, probably. He figured her for the old yacht club. She w
as understated but elegant. Tiny ear studs and a platinum wristwatch with art deco dials, that was it for the jewelry. Not even rings on those long elegant pampered fingers. Not even a wedding ring!

  Winnie sipped his brew and looked toward the door to the mens room. One of the painters from the boatyard got up from the bar and staggered in. A minute later he staggered out. Still no boyfriend or husband! She wore those round, no bullshit, yuppie eyeglasses. Winnie loved glasses on classy women like this one.

  Her hair was the color of melted butterscotch, streaked with golden highlights, like that last halo before sunrise he used to see from his boat when he was bobbing level with the horizon. Before that bitch Tammy took his sloop and anything else with a salvage value.

  The woman at the bar might as well have been wrapped in razor wire, she looked so unapproachable. She smoked, and sipped something that looked like an Americano. Winnie knew he was blasted when he heard himself blurt, "I used to have a twenty-nine-foot sloop. She was Danish, a double-ender with a canoe stern. A production boat, glass, but sweet. Once I was sitting in her cockpit at four a. M. And ... Do you know that water boils at a higher temperature at sea level?"

  "I only know about water in my kitchen," she said. Smiling!

  "Anyways," Winnie continued, "the coffee was very hot. The sun was beyond the curvature of the earth but getting ready to rise at the stern. I put my coffee down and watched this light start at the horizon. And there were these cottonball clouds so heavy you couldn't star-sight. The clouds were so full in that breeze, well, the fan spread and it sorta backlit the clouds. That's the way it must a looked before there were continents. The light, it was something like ... it was like the color a your hair. Well, I jist wanted to tell you that."

  She was really smiling now, not the way a beautiful woman usually smiles at a drunk. He had lots of experience in such matters. She smiled like she meant it, with those wide vermilion lips of hers!

  "My name's Tess Binder." She held out her hand and he took it. She was strong.

  "I'm a sucker for women that shake hands like a man," he said.

  She chuckled. Like wind chimes! She said, "That's flattering. I guess."