Lunatics

by Dave Barry

  Next, the truck made a sharp left-hand turn into the jungle. This was because the driver had bailed out, along with Nunez, Ramon and the other Cubans, who were interested in not getting shot.

  Next, I pushed Horkman off me, and the gun finally stopped shooting, and Horkman fell out of the truck, still screaming.

  So I was alone in a driverless truck, smashing through all kinds of trees and branches, and suddenly it burst into a clearing and OH GOD right ahead I saw a canyon. There was no time for me to bail; the truck went right over the edge. I could see down into the canyon. There was a shallow river on the bottom, but mostly big rocks. I knew I was going to die. You know how they say that when you’re about to die, your whole life flashes before your eyes? Well, they’re full of shit. Because I was in that exact situation, and all I thought was, This is totally Horkman’s fault.

  That’s when Spider-Man showed up.

  He wasn’t the actual Spider-Man, of course. He didn’t have the gay spandex costume; he was wearing dark clothes and a dark wool cap, and his face was painted black. But he definitely had Spider-Man skills. He dove off the side of the canyon, grabbed me in mid-fucking-air out of the truck with one hand, and yelled “Hold on!” Then he yanked something on his backpack with his other hand, and suddenly there was a parachute wing over us, and we’re swooping down to the river. The truck hit first; it landed on some rocks and exploded, just like in the movies. I could feel the heat from the fire when we went over it. We landed in water that was maybe two feet deep, both of us going under for a second. The guy yanked me to my feet, shoved me and yelled, “MOVE!” I stumbled down the river to a break in the canyon wall. The guy shoved me in there.

  “Stay here,” he said. “And keep quiet.” He had a knife strapped to his leg that looked like it could decapitate a mastodon. I kept quiet.

  A few seconds later, the end of a rope slapped the ground next to me. The spider-guy grabbed it and quickly tied it around me in some kind of harness.

  “Hang on,” he said, and next thing I know, I was being hauled up the canyon wall. When I got to the top, I saw who was hauling me up: more spider-guys. There were five of them, including the guy who rescued me, who climbed the rope after they got me up.

  We were now in some bushes on the far side of the canyon from where the truck went off. Peering through the bushes, I could see a bunch of Cubans on the other side, including Ramon and Nunez, looking down at the burning truck. I could also see Horkman with them.

  I looked around at the spider-guys and said, “Who are you guys?”

  “We’ll ask the questions,” answered my rescuer. He definitely had an American accent. Suddenly it hit me who these guys had to be.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Are you Navy SEAL Team 6?”

  One of them snorted. “We call Navy SEAL Team 6 the Campfire Girls,” he said.

  “So who are you?” I said.

  He took a step closer and said, “Did you ever hear of the U.S. Coast Guard Salamander Unit 9?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Because we don’t exist.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Philip

  By now you know I am not a negative man. And that I have never used the misfortunes of others as a salve for my own shortcomings. No, I was brought up to believe happiness can best be attained when a person makes an honest self-evaluation, sets realistic goals, then works his butt off to make them come to pass. So in the end, a man’s contentment is his own responsibility, unaffected by the fates of those around him.

  That said, I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that when I saw that driverless truck go over that cliff with Peckerman inside and then burst into flames after crashing to the bottom of that ravine, my gut reaction was a profound regret that a driverless truck with Peckerman inside didn’t crash and burst into flames on his way to that AYSO championship soccer game so I would never have met him after I called his daughter offside (which she was, by the way) and become a wanted international criminal enmeshed in a foreign war. So I confess I was not altogether heartbroken as I stood at the edge of the ravine, staring down at the burning truck.

  Next to me, Ramon and Nunez spoke a few hurried words to each other. With my limited Spanish, I was able to gather that they thought that we’d been attacked by enemy snipers; apparently they weren’t aware that it was Peckerman’s gun that had done the shooting. Concerned about being targets, they turned and trotted back into the safety of the trees.

  Alone now, I lingered a moment longer, looking down at the flaming wreckage, thinking about the horrible fate that had fallen Peckerman.

  Then I saw something even more horrifying.

  Peckerman was still alive.

  Somehow, impossibly, he had escaped the crash and was now standing with some other men on the far side of the ravine. I glanced behind me; no sign of Nunez or Ramon. I climbed down into the ravine and, with some effort, made my way up the other side, where Peckerman and I had a joyful reunion. If you think I am being sarcastic, I am, because what he said to me was, “Thanks a lot, asshole.”

  “For what?” I said.

  “Shooting my gun, dickwad. I’d be a dead man if Spider-Man here hadn’t saved me.” He pointed at one of the half-dozen tough-looking uniformed men standing nearby, observing us.

  I was going to point out that it wasn’t my finger that had pulled the trigger, but I was more curious about the men. “Who are they?” I asked.

  “They’re Salamanders,” he said.

  “They’re what?”

  “Salamanders.”

  “No offense”—I nodded politely at the tough-looking men—“but I never heard of them.”

  “That’s because they don’t exist,” said Peckerman. “At least that’s what they tell me. Seems to me they have to exist, because there they are.”

  “Peckerman, you idiot, it’s a figure of speech. They must be such a secret unit that no one knows about them.”

  “But now we do,” he said.

  “And if you tell anyone, we’ll have to kill you,” said one of the Salamanders, apparently the leader. I got the distinct impression that he was dead serious, but Peckerman, imbecile that he is, laughed. A hardy, derisive laugh. With his ridiculous head pitching this way and that—as if he’d somehow left his neck muscles back at Ramon, Ramona, and Ramon Jr.’s house.

  “You think that’s funny?” asked the lead Salamander.

  “Not at all,” Peckerman answered. “‘If you tell anyone, we’ll have to kill you,’” he said, mimicking. “Jesus, you couldn’t come up with anything more original than that? You’ve been watching too many movies.”

  Another derisive laugh or two later, after the laws of physics were kind enough to make his bobbing head eventually slow to a halt, Peckerman swiveled it in my direction.

  “What crawled up your ass and ate your vocabulary?” he asked.

  With the Salamanders now surrounding us, I chose each of the following words like they were vials of plutonium. As though they had the incendiary power to explode and launch chunks of me and Peckerman skyward, before they ultimately rained back down and hung like ornaments from the nearby foliage once they returned from their missions high above the Earth’s surface.

  “First of all, Peckerman, they just saved your life, so I’m thinking something that even resembles a ‘thank you’ may be in order. Secondly, unless I’m misreading the angles of the guns these gentlemen are pointing at us, the phrase ‘we’ll have to kill you’ is not a figure of speech the way ‘we don’t exist’ was a figure of speech.” I then turned to the Salamanders and said, “I’m helping him bone up on his figures of speech.”

  Apparently the Salamanders couldn’t care less what kind of linguistic lesson I was conducting. They stared at me in unified non-acknowledgment for about ten frightening seconds before retreating dee
per into the jungle, where they began having an animated conversation.

  Peckerman then leaned toward me, cupped his hand to his mouth and began speaking in hushed tones, which made absolutely no sense to me.

  “I don’t want them to overhear us,” he explained.

  “But they’re thirty yards away and they’re not whispering and we don’t hear them.”

  “Point taken,” he said, and then lowered his cupped hand but continued to whisper. “Look, I’ve already figured out that they’re Americans.”

  “Me too.”

  “From their accents, right?”

  “That and the American flag patches on their sleeves,” I said, nodding.

  Peckerman looked over at the six Salamanders and, apparently for the first time, noticed the patches.

  “Fine,” he said. “So anyway, if they’re really a secret operative, it means our country is helping overthrow the Cuban government, the way we do in a lot of countries.”

  I agreed with him. It seemed obvious that was the objective. In recent years, democracy had come to so many other suppressed nations around the world and it made sense that it was now Cuba’s turn. But I was also affected by Peckerman’s referring to the United States as “our country.” Was it still? As far as I was concerned it was. I’d always been a devoted American who voted every November and watched football every Sunday and had a flag proudly waving on my lawn every national holiday. But now that I was considered to be a threat to the way of life of the country I loved, I was a man without a home.

  From there my thoughts took me to my kids, and I wondered if they were worried sick about me. Or if they were actually happy about the absence of a reviled father who’d let them down. And branded them forever. Like Osama bin Laden Jr. would’ve been branded if Osama bin Laden had a son and named him Osama bin Laden Jr. Or if Lee Harvey Oswald had a son and named him Osama bin Laden Jr.

  As for Daisy. Well, a part of me wondered if she’d find a new man. We were high school sweethearts. The first and only lovers each of us had. But now? Like all marriages over the course of a long run, ours had a fair amount of peaks and valleys—but I couldn’t help feel that this current valley was one we might never emerge from.

  Then again, did I even want us to? What about Maria? Where was she? I wondered. The last time I saw her was the night before. After the rally outside Ramon’s house. After he and Nunez shoved me and Peckerman into that truck. And after Sharisse and those duffel bags filled with money and those breasts filled with enough rubber to erase the Empire State Building entered the back of that other truck with those Cuban rebels. I saw Maria voluntarily take a seat in a jeep that was driven by what I could’ve sworn was a priest, and speed away in the opposite direction.

  “You know,” said Peckerman, “I wonder if this revolution can help you and me in the long run.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Well, everyone thinks we’re enemies of democracy, right? But if we help bring freedom here to Cuba, wouldn’t it show the world that we’re not terrorists? And that what happened was just one huge misunderstanding?”

  Peckerman had caught me off guard. So much so, all I could do was stare at him in silence for a few seconds.

  “Make sense?” he asked.

  “Yes, it makes a lot of sense,” I finally uttered. And it did. What didn’t make sense was that this imbecile thought of it.

  What occurred next happened rather quickly and without further discussion: Our grabbing clumps of mud and streaking them onto our faces. Our tearing off a sleeve from our shirts and tying them on as headbands. Picking up rifles and raising them aloft. And our running out of the jungle with Peckerman shouting across the ravine to a stunned Ramon and Nunez, “Venga! We have a dictator to kick the shit out of!”

  CHAPTER 34

  Jeffrey

  You know those Rambo movies? Where Sylvester Stallone runs around some dirtbag communist country with no shirt on and shoots down a helicopter with a slingshot and kills 237 communist soldiers with his bare hands?

  Those movies are unrealistic. Here’s what reality is like: Horkman and I are on one side of the ravine, holding our guns over our heads. The Cubans are on the other side, going nuts, shouting “YI-YI-YI!” ready to go kick some ass. In a movie, the next scene, we’re all charging into battle.

  But what actually happened was, first, Horkman and I had to climb down our side of the ravine, which was hard because those guns are a lot heavier than they look, plus it was really steep. We both kept dropping the guns and falling down, so we ended up mostly sliding on our butts, which took a while. The Cubans tried to keep cheering, but after a while they realized they’d better pace themselves. Like every twenty seconds or so, one of them would go, “YI-YI-YI!” But you could tell they were losing the mood.

  Plus—I’m just going to come right out and say this—I had to take a shit. I mean, bad. Which is something that never happens in the movies. You never see Rambo take a shit. You never see whatshisname, the guy in those Bourne movies, Matt Damon, when he and his co-star hot babe are fleeing through some foreign city and he’s killing enemy agents with kung fu, speaking nine languages, hot-wiring a car and driving like a stuntman, etc., you never hear him say to the babe, “Geez, I’m sorry, but even though those enemy agents are, like, twenty yards behind us shooting at us, I need to make a pit stop, because if I don’t get to a toilet right now I’m going to turn this car into a septic tank.”

  That’s the way I felt, when Horkman and I got to the bottom of the ravine. I had a cramp in my gut like I was about to give birth to a walrus. I had no choice but to drop my pants right then and there.

  “What are you doing?” Horkman said.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” I said.

  “You can’t at least go behind something?” he said.

  “Go behind what, asshole?” I said, because (a) there was nothing to go behind, and (b) Horkman is an asshole.

  “I don’t believe this,” said Horkman. He walked about ten yards and sat down on a rock, facing away. Thanks a lot, douchenozzle.

  So there I was, squatting, and I don’t want to get too specific here, but it was a severe firehose situation. I was splattering the gravel big-time, plus there was a certain amount of gas noise, plus you had the natural echo in the ravine. I don’t think this was what the Cubans were expecting in the way of military leadership. I could hear them up there talking about me, and then one of them went “YI-YI-YI!” definitely sarcastically, and then they were all laughing. Assholes. Like they never had diarrhea in a ravine.

  I firehosed for I would say a good three minutes, off and on. When I was finally done, I realized I had nothing to wipe with, and of course Horkman was no help, because he’s an asshole. I looked up at the Cubans, but I didn’t see Ramon or Nunez, just a bunch of morons who didn’t speak English. I yelled, “TENGO TOILET-O PAPER-O?” I don’t know the Spanish word for “toilet paper,” not that it would have made any difference, because they probably haven’t had toilet paper in Cuba since 1964. So of course the idiot Cubans didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. I pointed at my ass and made a wiping motion, which they thought was very funny, ha-ha, YI-YI-YI! Jerkoffs. But finally they got the point and threw down some kind of big jungle leaves. I wasn’t too happy about that, because I remembered a situation at the 1983 Northeastern New Jersey Boy Scout Council Camporee when this kid in my troop, Lenny Vitali, wiped his ass with leaves that turned out to be poison sumac, and by the time they got him to the hospital, according to his brother Victor, his butt was the size of a truck tire.

  But I figured I had no choice. I wiped myself as best I could, and then Horkman and I started up the other side of the ravine. It took us even longer than going down did, but we finally made it to the top. Nunez was waiting for us.

  “I must ask you,” he said, “how did you survive th
e attack? I confess that when I saw the truck explode, I feared the worst.”

  Horkman gave me a nudge. I looked at him and he shook his head, indicating Don’t say anything about the Salamanders. I gave him the finger, indicating Fuck you. Then I looked back at Nunez and said, “You ever hear of Bourne?”

  “Who?” he said.

  “Bourne,” I said. “Like The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Extremity, etc.?”

  “No,” he said.

  “It’s a special kind of agent training,” I said. “Bourne Training. We train for this situation.”

  “You train for going off a cliff in a truck?” he said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Impressive,” he said.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  Ramon came out of the jungle and said, “We must go. We have lost time.”

  We got into a different truck, Ramon and Nunez in the front seat, Horkman and me behind them. The convoy started up and we were bouncing down the road again, if you can call it a road, going maybe two miles an hour. Horkman leaned over to me and, keeping his voice low, said, “While you were making the River of Poop, I did some thinking.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  “Listen to me, Peckerman. This is important. Why do you think the Salamanders let us go?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we’re supposed to be wanted terrorists, right? Wanted by the United States?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, they’re United States military. Why didn’t they kill us? Or capture us? Why’d they save you, and give both of us guns, and send us back to the rebels?”

  “We already discussed this, Horkman. They’re secret whaddycallits, operators. They’re helping the rebels overthrow the government.”

  “That makes no sense,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Salamanders saw us up close. They know we’re not military threats. I think they know we’re just a couple of schlubs from New Jersey.”