Apparent Wind

by Dallas Murphy

  But Rosalind couldn’t handle sitting without toxic-waste-disposal gear. “Did your office arrest Doom Loomis?”

  “No, but that story’s been flyin’ up and down this dock all afternoon. Let me tell you something, honey. Cons just ain’t like our kind. It’s a well-known fact of penology—cons only serve time for five percent of their crimes. Now, you take a New York con like this Loomis, there’s no tellin’ the number of felonies he perpetrated. They nabbed him for another one, that’s all.”

  “They took him off in an unmarked boat. Isn’t that a tad unusual?”

  “Maybe he did a marine felony.”

  “You know what I think? I think Big Al Broadnax had him kidnapped.”

  “Whoa! Now, hold your tongue there. That’s your late husband’s daddy you’re slandering.”

  “I just want you to know I know it. We know it! And you’re his stooge—we know that too!”

  “Here now, you just keep your voice down, little lady.”

  “And you tell Big Al that if he harms Doom, I’ll find my own cops—I mean real cops!”

  Sheriff Plotner sputtered with humiliation and confusion. By now the skippers had pivoted on their stools to watch; Dawn, wiping the counter, had stopped in midswipe, and Archie stood slack-jawed. Worse, however, was the fact that he didn’t know anything about any snatch on Doom Loomis. “Take it from me, little lady, you go messin’ around with cons, it’ll break your heart.”

  But the screen door had already banged shut behind Rosalind. Sheriff Plotner hurried after her into the heat that, he knew, would one day kill him.

  WEIRDO JAMBOREE

  Unaware that a flamingo tongue was a variety of seashell, Holly visualized a blunt, black, stubby, wrinkled organ, and the thought of eating one caused her gorge to climb. Longnecker cut his way out of the Range Rover, having tied the door shut with twine after demolishing it against a toll station up near Yeehaw Junction on the Sunshine State Parkway.

  “That’s a sailboat over there,” he said. “Maybe that’s the Staggerlee.”

  Maybe Holly had been wrong. This looked to be a very classy yacht. In fact, it was kind of pretty around there, all that shiny turquoise water, the big sky and white light. She and Longnecker strolled out on the dock just as a long-legged, barefoot woman in brown shorts and a T-shirt ran past them from the Flamingo Tongue. She seemed to be weeping, and she seemed to be heading for the same sailboat as they.

  “I hope Doom ain’t alienating the ladies,” said Longnecker.

  “Psst!” hissed Holly. “Cop!”

  “Where!”

  “Coming up behind us!”

  “Don’t panic, keep walking. We’re tourists from Upper Saddle River, and we’re going fishing.”

  “But we don’t have any poles.”

  “Now you listen to me, missy, don’t be going ’round making accusations you can’t support…Hear?”

  “He’s talking to the tall chick. He didn’t even notice us!” Holly hissed.

  “Just keep walking.”

  The weeping woman climbed aboard the boat called Staggerlee, but Longnecker and Holly kept right on going to the end of the dock, where they peered into the clear water as if reconnoitering a fishing spot. In fact, fish were visible. Several ballyhoo, like miniature sailfish, circled on the surface, and a school of sergeant majors and a small sheepshead poked around the barnacle-encrusted piling. Longnecker glanced back covertly under his arm and, breathing easier, watched the fat cop climb into his black-and-white, which Longnecker had failed to spot parked behind a big green dumpster, and drive away. He felt giddy with relief, even as he reprimanded himself for lack of vigilance. Maybe it was the heat.

  Holly said, “I’ve always wanted to go snorkeling.”

  They walked back to Staggerlee, and Longnecker quietly called Doom’s name, but instead of a stand-up guy, a big-eyed motion picture camera came up the companionway. Longnecker recoiled and scurried out of range. The weeping woman emerged behind the camera person. Then Anne-on-sound climbed up, and she was followed by an ancient Indian woman with leather skin.

  “Who are you?” Rosalind asked Holly.

  “I’m Holly. That was Longnecker. We were invited by a guy named Doom Loomis. Longnecker doesn’t like to have his picture taken. It’s a religious thing with him.”

  That naturally fascinated the Annes, even if they didn’t believe it.

  Rosalind introduced herself, then the Annes. “The Annes are making a documentary about Doom. And this is my grandmother, Lisa Up-the-Grove.”

  Two Annes and an Up-the-Grove. A whole boatload of weirdos if ever Holly saw one.

  A sob overcame Rosalind.

  “Oh, honey, what’s wrong?” asked Holly.

  “He’s gone! They took him!”

  “Took him! Who took him!” demanded Longnecker.

  “Kidnapped him!”

  “Then they’re dead meat,” assured Longnecker.

  Lisa Up-the-Grove looked Longnecker up and down. Longnecker was rail thin. He wore pointy cowboy boots, tight jeans, and a Hawaiian shirt with black-beaked macaws roosting in bright green banana plants. Lisa nodded her approval. He didn’t look like a dangerous man, but there was something deep in his spirit that reflected from his eyes. He was a bad fellow, and Lisa Up-the-Grove was glad. She nodded, setting the turkey skin beneath her jaw bouncing.

  Dawn shouted “Rosalind!” from halfway up the dock. “I have a phone call for Doom—”

  Rosalind trotted up the dock to take it.

  The flush of success wasn’t a familiar flush for Professor Goode, and he felt disappointed that Doom wasn’t available to take his call and to congratulate him.

  “This is Rosalind Rock. May I take a message?”

  “Oh, Rosalind. Doom has spoken very highly of you. This is Professor Goode calling.”

  “Hello, Professor. He spoke highly of you too.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Do you have news?”

  “Actually, I do, yes. I have a chap bitten by a rattlesnake yesterday, the day in question. Apparently a large chap.” The professor was sweating profusely in his roadside phone booth. “His name is Lucas Hogaboom.”

  “Lucas!”

  “Do you know him, my dear?”

  “He’s Big Al Broadnax’s right nut!”

  “Oh yes, I see—”

  Back at the boat, Rosalind spit the name Lucas Hogaboom.

  “He’s trash,” said Lisa Up-the-Grove.

  “Big Al Broadnax killed our alligators!” said Rosalind. “And I bet you he’s the one who took Doom! Oh, Grandma, if he did that, I’ll—”

  “I know, sweetie, it’s the only way to teach ’em.”

  Alligators? What alligators? Holly wondered. She had a childhood aversion to reptiles.

  “Grandma,” said Rosalind, “I’m going to see Big Al and try to reason with him.”

  “Reason with Big Al?”

  “I’ll go with you,” Longnecker said. “I love rationality.”

  Anne held her camera languidly, dangling it by the pistol grip, but she was only pretending not to shoot. She didn’t miss an image, and Anne didn’t miss a sound.

  “Now, Longnecker,” Holly cautioned, “don’t go off half-cocked—”

  “Don’t worry, we’re just going to reason with this Big Al fuck.”

  “Do you have your mustache?”

  Longnecker patted his breast pocket.

  “What about your wig?”

  TALKIN’ TURKEY

  The air-conditioning unit had barely kicked in by the time Sheriff Plotner reached the Broadnax compound, broken Coke bottles imbedded in the outer perimeter walls, three miles south of Omnium Town on the Atlantic Ocean. Now that the opportunity for true crime-busting greatness and Yankee TV coverage had arisen, the sheriff couldn’t go suppressing any further capital felonies by an old fart who’d lost his grip on reality.

  Sheriff Plotner waved at Fidel, who guarded the elaborate wrought-iron gate. One of the good Cubans. He
roared up the raked-pebble drive through the stand of banyan trees and careened to a halt before the sprawling Greco-Moorish compound. Wing Li, the obsequious butler, tried to stay ahead of the noisome sheriff as he showed him into the stifling phony garden in the center courtyard. Fucking gooks.

  Big Al Broadnax still hadn’t had a shit, and he felt like he was sitting on a sharpened pool cue. Maybe it was time to hire himself a new sheriff, since this uppity slop bucket thought he could have audience any old time he pleased.

  “Sorry to bust in on you, Mr. Broadnax, but we have ourselves a problem here,” said the sheriff after the gook departed.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Well, sir, under the present circumstances, I can’t go around covering up no more felonies—’specially if I don’t know about them beforehand.”

  “Just what the puke are you talking about?”

  Lowering his voice to a whisper, Sheriff Plotner said: “Felonies.”

  “What felonies!”

  “Well, felonies like snatching Denny Loomis’s boy. In broad daylight. With violence.”

  “What? Are you drunk! I didn’t do that, you cobstopper! Why would I do that? If I wanted to do that, I’d have you go and arrest the punk!”

  “…You didn’t do it?”

  “No. Somebody snatched the punk?”

  “Uhh…yeah, I guess—”

  “Great, glad to hear it. Will that be all, Sheriff?”

  “Uh, well, yes—no. Can I ask you a question? It’s kind of important.”

  “What?”

  “You killed Denny Loomis, didn’t you?”

  “Denny Loomis?” Big Al’s black eyes flashed, and he stared suspiciously at Sheriff Plotner. “Denny Loomis drowned, didn’t he?”

  “Well, actually…no.”

  “No?”

  “He was strangled.”

  “No!”

  “You didn’t do, uh, do it?”

  “If I’d wanted him done in, you know what I’d do? I’d have you arrest the punk, then I’d have you shoot him trying to escape. That way there it’d be legal. Why do you think I keep you in office, Sheriff?”

  Panic in one relentless wave after another swept over the sheriff’s body. Had he covered up a capital crime for a perfect stranger? A man didn’t make it on Ted Koppel by doing that.

  KINFOLK

  Big Al built his Greco-Moorish mansion on the Atlantic, completing construction on the precise day in September marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Big Blow, fifty years from family disaster to this, the most opulent, showy, and overblown Greco-Moorish mansion south of West Palm Beach.

  “Gee, it’s been a long time, Rosalind,” said Fidel at the gate. The driver of the car wore a long black wig attached to a Mets cap, but then, it wasn’t up to him to make assumptions about Rosalind’s friends. Besides, styles change. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Me too, Fidel.” She squeezed his hand.

  “Go right on in. I’m sure he be happy to see you again.”

  The crushed coquina-stone driveway, winding around the gigantic roots of banyan trees, was lined with larger-than-life marble statues of Colonel A.C. Broadnax. In several he sat mounted atop rearing cavalry chargers; in others, of the classical motif, he wore togas and olive-branch crowns; in a contemplative mood at the top of the driveway, he stood reading from Plutarch’s Lives. Wing Li showed Rosalind and Longnecker into the silken garden after asking Longnecker if he could relieve him of his cap and curls.

  “No, thank you,” said Longnecker.

  “What in hell are you doing here?” demanded Big Al, peering sourly at Rosalind, then at Longnecker. “Who is this man?”

  Longnecker was amazed at this crazy garden. The entire house seemed to have been built around this garden. Yet all the plants were phony, not a single act of photosynthesis going down in the entire garden. He’d copped a feel of an elephant ear on the way in—it seemed to be made of cloth, satin or something. Plus it was a good 120 degrees in here. That was enough to turn a man’s brain the consistency of yogurt. Maybe that’s what happened to this Dickensian old fart, sat here in the “garden” until his brains liquefied.

  “I’d like to ask you something, Big Al,” said Rosalind.

  But Big Al didn’t wait to hear what. He aimed an accusatory finger at Rosalind. However, his digits were so arthritically gnarled that the finger pointed 90 degrees off line. He said: “You’re trying to lead Sennacherib down the garden path!”

  “What?”

  “Sennacherib! My only son!”

  “I know who Sennacherib is!”

  “Of course you do! That’s my point! You’re leading him down the garden path. Just like Claudius!”

  “Don’t you dare bring Claudius into this! Don’t you dare!”

  Longnecker wondered when the reasoning was going to begin.

  “Don’t tell me about Claudius! He was my son!”

  “Right. That was his major problem!”

  Big Al wheezed with rage and twirled his chair to confront Longnecker. “Just who are you? One of my son’s wife’s new blow jobs?”

  That didn’t upset Longnecker. Even before that he was thinking about snapping the old man’s neck like a bean pod.

  Rosalind collected herself. She said, “Big Al, did you kidnap Denny Loomis’s son?”

  “What? Ha! So it’s true. Somebody kidnapped that punk? Ha! Swell! I hope they kill him! Most do, you know. Most kidnappers kill their victims. Ha!”

  Rosalind glared, teeth clenched, a little vein in her neck throbbing. “Are you saying you don’t know anything about his disappearance?” she strained.

  “I’m saying I’m glad. Glad, I tell you! Glad! He was a punk!”

  “Did you send Lucas Hogaboom to murder my alligators?”

  “Yes!”

  “…You admit it?”

  “Yes!” Big Al shook with glee.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Why! Because you’re leading Sennacherib down the garden path! Just like Claudius!”

  “Then let me tell you something, Big Al—”

  Her voice was calm, too calm, thought Longnecker. This woman’s eyes were like twin gun muzzles. Longnecker felt right at home.

  “—Claudius didn’t die in a diving accident. He died diving, but it wasn’t an accident. He killed himself.”

  “Lying slut bitch! May you give birth to gargoyles!”

  “We talked about you all the time. You made him crazy.”

  “Hag! Crone! May God grant your cervix drops out!”

  “He killed himself because he had you for a father!”

  “Twat bitch!”

  Longnecker had always felt an odd sense of relief when reason ceased to obtain, when the limits of codified behavior were breached. It usually didn’t take long.

  “Lucas! Lucas!” bellowed Big Al, head back, tendons straining, twitching.

  Lucas Hogaboom appeared from the far end of the courtyard, beyond the palmetto thicket. He was hobbling fast on his crutches, his enormous right leg swathed in bandages.

  “Throw these punks out!”

  “You got it, sir.”

  “Take it slow, Lucas baby. No need for the rough stuff,” said Longnecker, a reasonable man. “We’re going. I mean, hell, you’re one terrifying hombre, even on the sticks. Say, what happened to you anyhow?”

  “He got bit by a rattlesnake,” said Rosalind, who began to cry with rage and guilt—she had ruined reasoning.

  Lucas Hogaboom paused to watch. It made him erect to see pretty women cry.

  “Throw them out, you shithead!”

  “Was it a big one?” Longnecker asked Lucas. “The snake.”

  “Yeh, real big.”

  “Where’d he get you?”

  Lucas Hogaboom leaned from the waist, supporting himself on the opposite crutch, and pointed to a spot on the outside of his massive shin, halfway up. “Right chere.”

  “Right there?”

  “Right chere.”

  And that w
as precisely where Longnecker kicked him with his pointy cowboy boots.

  The scream was chilling, shockingly high-pitched from so big a man. Lucas dropped on the Grecian tile floor, shimmied and twisted like a beached grouper. Screams came in terrible staccato bursts, yet even in agony Lucas struggled to extract his gun, visibly bulging in his pants pocket. So Longnecker stomped once on the back of Lucas’s skull, and he stopped shimmying.

  “Police! Call the sheriff!” Big Al howled into the air.

  Longnecker pushed his Zippo out of his tight jeans, snapped a flame, and touched it to the nearest sapodilla. It went up like a two-year-old Christmas tree. Fire leapt to the adjoining cattleya orchids, and in a flash they too were gone. Destroy the garden in order to liberate it.

  “Fire! Fire!”

  White-uniformed house staff poured into the garden. They covered their mouths and squealed at the sight of flaming philodendrons.

  “Seize him! That’s him, there in the ball-cap hair! Seize him, you cunts!” But none was that foolish, what with Longnecker standing, a bad smile on his face, over the supine mass of Lucas Hogaboom. The cooler-headed servants went at the blazing silk with aprons and dish towels. All that remained of the sapodilla, the orchids, and philodendrons were red-hot wire frames, curling into springs as they cooled.

  “Let’s go, Rosalind,” suggested Longnecker. “We’ll get no reasoning here.”

  Hot silken embers wafted on the updrafts, threatening adjoining botanicals.

  On the way out Longnecker grabbed the handles on Big Al’s chair, spun it around, and wheeled him, screeching and gesticulating, down the long marble hall. “Reason,” instructed Longnecker, “implies causality. Without cause and effect, reason don’t mean shit. If I learn you hurt my friend Doom Loomis, then that will cause me to come back and reason with you—” Longnecker rocked Big Al back onto his rear wheels and ran him into the wall. That being something he had wanted to do for years, Wing Li watched with suppressed glee.

  On the way to the car, Longnecker stiff-armed a militaristic statue of Colonel A.C. Broadnax from its pedestal. Its head broke off and rolled into the bushes. As they drove down the long driveway, Longnecker leaned out the window for a good look at the Greco-Moorish mansion, its points of maximum structural stress where the charges would be most efficacious.