Tony Donuts Junior didn’t do running. He walked rapidly to the spot where his Jeep had been parked only moments before, planted himself in the empty parking space, and began turning in a slow clockwise circle. He was sure the girl he was looking for would appear.
It didn’t turn out well for him.
The first pedestrian he saw was another geezer—no, a coot—this one solidly built, heavily tanned, balding on top, and possessed of a splendid round grey-and-white beard.
Tony’s gaze continued moving clockwise, and five degrees later encountered another stocky coot with a tan and a Kris Kringle beard.
A little to the right of him, a third sanguine Santa in khaki shorts and sandals was gesturing with his pipe at a fourth bronzed Geppetto in a Hawaiian shirt. Tony’s gaze slowed but kept moving.
A few people to the right of them, a pair of Japanese tourists were excitedly photographing yet another florid white-bearded senior, this one in slacks and a jacket with lots of pockets and epaulets.
Tony and his gaze stopped rotating, and his pulse climbed. Almost nothing frightened him, and hardly anything made him uneasy—but he had heard terrified drunks in bars read aloud from the Post or the Enquirer on this very subject more than once, and had seen numerous movies about it, all nearly identical (ironically), and all of them creepy.
Jesus, he thought, they’re all the same fuckin guy—they’re whaddyacallit, clunes!
He tried to recall what it was about clunes that was so creepy—were they from space?—but could remember for sure only that there were scientists involved. Tony regarded scientists the same way Conan the Barbarian did wizards. Even strength and balls were no use against them.
Still, these clunes were doing nothing overtly threatening, and nobody else on the street seemed alarmed by them, plus which anyway how much trouble could even half a dozen Xerox copies of an overweight Obi-Wan Kenobi be for a guy like Tony?
The word “copies” reminded him of his other science project. Miracle Girl. Who, come to think of it, had been using photocopies to taunt him—was this more of her work? Tony really hated it when people were subtle. More determined than ever to wring the secret of youth from her, so he could then wring her neck in good conscience, he was just about to resume his clockwise scan when something belatedly registered on him. He backed up dubiously, but no shit. There between Geppetto and Santa, holding Geppetto’s hand in fact, was a woman his eye had subtracted the first time because she was the wrong age, race and shape to be Miracle Girl, an Asian in her thirties (he estimated) with no hips and a pleasant smile. Tony was well aware that standards in Key West differed greatly from those of Brooklyn, particularly at the beaches, but he was sure this was the first woman he had seen stark naked on Duval Street in broad daylight.
No, not naked—she was wearing paint. Some talented artist had painted fishnet stockings, a frilly white garter belt, a lacy white cupless bra and tiny white crotchless panties on her tanned skin. And the high heels had to be real.
By now a certain sense of unreality was beginning to grow upon Tony. He’d seen at once on arrival that nearly everyone in Key West was fucked up somehow, but this was getting excessive. Since he didn’t read, tuned out most of what people said to him, and changed the channel if he didn’t hear at least small arms fire, there was no way he could have heard of Key West’s legendary weeklong Fantasy Fest—Mardi Gras without the ugly parts, Carnavale without the dark side—which was about to start that evening, and probably no hope of his understanding that in another few hours, and for the next few nights, the woman he was staring at might seem overdressed for the party. No more could he be expected to have heard of Ernest Hemingway, fathomed the Hemingway Lookalike Contest held in Key West every April, or appreciated that he was looking at several of that year’s finalists, gathered together informally to boggle the Fantasy Fest tourists and promote their own festival. Tony’s policy when faced with the weird was to think about something else, so he was just about to return his attention, again, to the search for Miracle Girl when a car horn went off a couple of feet from his ear.
It was not, oddly, the first time in his adult life that someone had honked at Tony Donuts Junior, but he was the only living person who knew that. Doesn’t matter how tough you are, a car honks right next to you, you’re gonna flinch, and Tony hated flinching. Plus which he was busy now. He turned to confront the offending vehicle, a van with a heavily tinted windshield that had pulled halfway into the parking space and clearly wanted him to move so it could finish the job. Tony glared at the unseen driver and gave him the finger. The horn sounded again, longer this time. Tony swelled himself until his clothes threatened to split like Bruce Banner’s when he turned into the Incredible Hulk (“Eat me!”), and tried to recall just where you punched a van of that particular make to kill it.
The engine shut down, doors opened, and four people got out. Tony swelled another increment…then slowly began to deflate. (“Drink me!”)
He had been in Key West long enough to know it was the mecca for East Coast drag queens, the place where people from Provincetown and Fire Island went to see something really exotic. Tony had never had a problem with queers in his life, any more than with muggers. He even grasped that drag queens weren’t necessarily queers, having raped some of both. But these four were striking. For a start, they were gorgeous, even by the standards of Key West. In face, body, dress, carriage, makeup and style, they would have passed in daylight not just for women, but bombshells.
If they had not each been very close to Tony’s size.
He had seen guys almost his size before—admittedly, not often—and was confident he could take all four at once if it came to it. He’d taken guys bigger than him; viciousness was what counted in the end and viciousness was his best thing. He also knew that dropping these clowns could take a good half-hour of hard work in the hot Florida sun, and that to have that long, here on the main drag, he’d have to put down at least one or two cops too. And none of this would help him find Miracle Girl. Without a word he turned his back on the quartet and stepped back up onto the sidewalk, deleting clunes and clowns alike from his universe.
Only as the driver was pulling the van into the parking space did it occur to Tony that an outside observer might have misunderstood, and believed that he’d been made to back down. By broads…and not even real broads. Miracle Girl had probably observed it, and was laughing at him right now. His shirt split in the back, not vertically but the hard way. He heard the van door slam behind him as the driver got out to rejoin his sisters, and when the inevitable tittering began, he turned around again. Of course they weren’t looking anywhere near him, and could not stop murmuring and giggling.
The van was parked sloppily, angled in and nearly a yard (Tony believed the only use for the metric system was to confuse juries as to how much drugs you’d been caught holding) from the sidewalk. He walked to the front of the van, studied it, and put his fist through the windshield at its lower right corner. This let him get a good grip on the window post. His right arm swelled, his shirt split all the way from cuff to shoulder under his suit, the van’s tires all made sounds like a moron imitating a motorboat, and the van moved a couple of feet deeper into the parking space and a foot closer to the curb. The drag queens all hit the mute button. Duval Street itself became comparatively quiet for a main, uh, drag.
Tony studied his work and frowned. The van was closer to the curb, but its angle was even worse now. He walked to the rear quarter, transvestites scattering out of his way, and saw that to get as good a grip at this end he would have to punch through the wall of the van. He frowned up at the sun, sighed…walked around behind the van, and put it flush against the curb with a single kick. A complexly layered sound issued from inside it, mostly treble but with some bottom as well. “All my goddam makeup!” wailed the stricken driver. One of his friends put a hand over his mouth and all three led him hastily away. Aside from his dwindling sobs the only sound to be heard on that part of Duval Street wa
s the clashing music from the nearest dozen establishments, the composite murmur of a dozen air conditioners, and an elderly nun half a block away, swearing colorfully as she tried to pry a crumpled bumper away from the rear wheels of a Jeep with a short tire iron.
Satisfaction carried Tony for several seconds, before it dawned on him that by now his chances of spotting Miracle Girl had plummeted to lower than the neckline on the van’s driver. Prioritizing had always been a problem of Tony’s; it was why he liked shotguns. There just never seemed to be enough hours in the day to terrorize all the pains in the ass who had it coming; someone was bound to slip through the cracks, and it always seemed to be the biggest pain in the ass.
But Tony Donuts Junior was not the sort of man who gave up on something just because he knew it wasn’t going to work. He doggedly resumed his by-now-hopeless clockwise scanning rotation, and got a whole two seconds’ look right at her before he felt a sharp tug at his nipple, the right one this time, and realized she had blown past him on a bicycle again.
He’d failed to recognize her for those two seconds because he’d been looking for a seventeen-year-old. Today she was no more than thirteen, tops, boobs like apples, hair short like a boy.
Since he had worked out in some detail exactly what he would do if this ever happened again, and reminded himself to remember not to forget, it only took him five or six seconds to work out what to do. No time to hot-wire the van, no point jacking other wheels with traffic at a standstill, too hot to run, the key to eternal power and wealth was disappearing down Duval Street as he watched. Briefly he pictured himself in a bicycle race with a kid…and that finally brought his train of thought back to Shining Time Station. He located the nearest moped—he thought of it as a baby motorcycle—and by the time he reached it nobody was driving it any more. Now watch, Witch Bitch, thought Tony (noticing nothing about the sentence), and he bestrode the moped, and while he was figuring out how to make it go, both tires quit. There was no bang, they simply farted themselves dead in harmony.
There was no time for rage; Miracle Girl’s lead was increasing with every second. Tony spotted a slightly bigger moped, presumably stronger, driven by an obvious rich guy who proved his superior intelligence by bringing it to Tony without being told, as soon as he saw Tony’s gaze lock on it. As the rich guy handed it over he gave a very quick little pantomime lesson in moped driving and stepped back. Tony sat cautiously, lifted both feet from the ground. The tires accepted the load, and he kept his balance, but he looked profoundly ridiculous, his knees sticking out to the sides like the booms of a swordfish boat. No matter. Tony would not learn to mind being laughed at until someone tried it. Several bystanders struggled with that very impulse, seeing him now, but they all mastered it. He stared up Duval Street, acquired his target—that was definitely a thirteen-year-old ass, tops—hunched forward over the handlebars of his moped as he’d seen bikers do before laying rubber, and twisted the accelerator grip like a knife, as far as it would rotate. The moped whined like a neurotic chain saw, and in under five seconds went from zero to ten, where it topped out.
Even the fear of death and the love of life itself could not prevent giggles from breaking out on Duval Street then. One oblivious child frankly whooped, and every third adult seemed to be coughing, rubbing his upper lip, or smoking an imaginary cigarette. Tony glowered down at the moped, already learning to mind this, and decided to treat the accelerator like a neck—if you can’t twist it any further, twist hard. The result was exactly the same: it snapped, spun freely, and the patient stopped screaming, coughed and died.
Everyone lost it now. Even a monster like Tony couldn’t kill everybody. The Hemingway clunes tried hard to laugh loudest, but one of the drag queens topped them.
Tony climbed off the body—it was already leaking and starting to cool—flung it through the windshield of the van, and considered his options. Miracle Girl was still visible in the middle distance, but only just; heavy pedestrian traffic had her stopped, but not for long. Under this remarkable confluence of pressures, serial traumas, provocations and incompossible yearnings, Tony Donuts Junior accomplished something painful and for him almost unprecedented. He reasoned.
Miss Thirteen was heading west on Duval. If she kept going straight for too much longer, she would pedal off a dock into the Gulf of Mexico. If she hung a left at any point, she could go one whole block to Whitehead, where traffic was almost as slow, and then pedal off a dock into the Florida Strait. Those little side streets south of Duval were the heart of Tony’s new manor, the barnyard of his victim-farm. If she did go that way, he would find her spoor easily.
But if she hung a right, she could go anywhere in Old Town, over fifty square blocks, pass all the nicest houses and scenery, and encounter far fewer moving cars—or keep going past Old Town to anywhere in Key West—or leave the rock altogether and start pedaling for America, a hundred gorgeous miles north.
Tony shrugged off the ruins of his suit jacket—double-breasted, yes; double-backed, no—and shirt, and he started running west after her as fast as he could; the first chance he got, he hung a right. Behind him, the laughter faltered for a moment, then resumed. Yeah, he definitely minded being laughed at, now that he’d tried it.
Among the other pedestrians Tony pushed out of his way as he ran were two spacemen, a Chinese Tarzan, Lady Godiva riding on a pig, and a Bahamian butterfly with really gorgeous wings—more Fantasy Fest people jumping the gun, trying out or drying out their costumes in advance. He ignored them, except as impediments in the obstacle course he was running, but they contributed to his growing sense of unreality.
He decided to turn left one block north, onto Simonton. It paralleled Duval for its entire length, and had vastly less traffic, pedestrian or auto; he would be able to run at nearly full speed without hurting anybody. No matter where Miracle Girl made her own right off Duval, Tony would see her cross Simonton from left to right, and adjust his own course. He was fairly confident he could run down a little girl on a bike who didn’t know she was being chased.
Despite his concentration, weird pedestrians he passed kept threatening to distract him as he ran—a topless nun, a six-foot white rabbit writing something on a business card with a pen, a midget witch, a little girl who gave him the finger as she rode by on a blue moped, a famous movie star whose name he could almost remember, some idiot walking a live kangaroo on a leash—but hey, that was just life in Key West, and Tony was focused now, concentrating, eye on the prize, so determined to not miss his quarry crossing the street up ahead that it took him a good half a block to think, A little girl who gave me the finger as she rode by? He slammed to a halt in a spray of sidewalk-chips and spun around in time to see the tail end of a blue moped that had just turned right.
It ain’t her, he thought. No way. She just couldn’ta got back here that fast, not even on a fuckin Moped. Forget about it—it would take a miracle for that girl there to be—
—Miracle Girl…
He began to run again, back the way he had just come.
Halfway back to Duval, he saw a blue moped chained to a parking meter in front of one of the rare shops with a closed door. The place had no windows, no Muzak, and apparently no name, unless ADULT XXXXX 21+ ONLY was a name. The air above the moped’s tailpipe shimmered. Tony thundered to a halt, caught his breath, planed sweat from his forehead with the edge of his hand and flung it on the sidewalk, and went inside.
It was dark in there. After having been out in the sunshine, Tony found it only slightly less dark when he remembered to take off his sunglasses. He stood with his back to the door, blocking the exit, while he waited for his eyes to adjust. It was also massively air-conditioned in there, which Tony hated, especially after exercise; already he could feel a charley horse threatening in his left calf. The more he made out of his surroundings, the bigger his pupils got, and soon he could see just fine. Tony had been involved in the distribution end of the porn business once or twice, until amateur video killed it—and some of t
he stuff offered for sale in this chilly little hole in the wall startled him, even shocked him in one or two cases. He made himself ignore it and looked around for the girl. No sign of her, and nowhere she could be hiding unless she could fit into a video box or hide behind a magazine. The whole place was about the size of a New York kitchen. There was a counter on the right, with an aging hippie behind it, but it didn’t look like he had enough room back there even to take advantage of the merchandise without barking his knuckles.
Still, there was nowhere else to go. Tony approached the counter—racks of video tape boxes slid aside to make way for him—and confronted the clerk. Long curly hair, lots of mustache, and a silly little tuft of beard hanging off his chin. He reminded Tony of Buffalo Bill—or was it General Custer he was thinking of?—only with mostly grey hair. He was dressed conservatively for a hippie, by Key West standards, but he didn’t look scared of Tony so he must be very stoned. Tony put enough menace and volume in his voice to get the guy’s attention. “I’m lookin for a blonde, about thirteen, short hair.”
“Aisle three,” said the hippie. “Second row from the top.”
Tony closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and began counting to ten. At five, he forgot he was counting and said, “Not in a movie. For real.”
The hippie shook his head. “We don’t do live,” he said. “Take a left on Duval, go about five blocks—but you better have a lot of money, and be prepared to settle for a pretty good fake.”
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