Tourist Season

by Carl Hiaasen

  Let me fill you in on what’sbeen going on the last few years: the Glades have begun to dry up and die; the fresh water supply is being poisoned with unpotable toxic scum; up near Orlando they actually tried to straighten a bloody river; in Miami the beachfront hotels are pumping raw sewage into the Gulf Stream; statewide there is a murder every seven hours; the panther is nearly extinct; grotesque three-headed nuclear trout are being caught in Biscayne Bay; and Dade County’s gone totally Republican.

  This is terrible, you say, but what can we do?

  Well, for starters, you can get out.

  And since you won’t, I will.

  It’s been pure agony to watch the violent taking of my homeland, and impossible not to act in resistance. Perhaps, in resisting, certain events happened that should not have, and for these I’m sorry. Unfortunately, extremism seldom lends itself to discipline.

  At any rate, my pals and I certainly got your attention, didn’t we?

  By the time this is published—if it’s published—I certainly won’t be where I am now, so I don’t mind revealing the location: a palm-shaded porch of an old hotel on a mountainside overlooking the sad city of Port-au-Prince. Above my head is a wooden paddle fan that hasn’t turned since the days of Papa Doc. It’s humid here, but no worse than SW Eighth Street in July, and I’m just fine. I’m sitting on a wicker chaise, sipping a polyester-colored rum drink and listening to last year’s NBA All-Star game on French radio. Upstairs in my hotel room are three counterfeit passports and $4,000 U.S. cash. I’ve got a good idea of where I’ve got to go and what I’ve got to do.

  Evidently this will be my last column, but whatever you do, please don’t phone up and cancel your subscription to the paper. The Sun is run by mostly decent and semi-talented journalists who deserve your attention. Besides, if you quit reading it now, you’ll miss the best part.

  Historically, the function of deranged radicals is to put in motion what only others can finish; to illuminate by excess; to stir the conscience and fade away in exile. To this end, the Nights of December leaves a worthy legacy.

  Welcome to the Revolution.

  For the first time in nearly half a century, the front page of the Miami Sun on New Year’s Day did not lead with a story or photograph of the Orange Bowl Parade. Instead, the paper was dominated by three uncommon pieces of journalism.

  The farewell column of Skip Wiley appeared in a vertical slot along the left-hand gutter, beneath Wiley’s signature photo. Stripped across the top of the newspaper, under the masthead, was a surprisingly self-critical article about why the Sun had failed to connect Wiley to Las Noches de Diciembre even after his involvement became known to a certain high-ranking editor. This piece was written, and written well, by Cab Mulcahy himself. Therein shocked Miami readers learned that Wiley’s cryptic “where I’ve got to go, and what I’ve got to do” referred to the planned, but unconsummated, kidnapping of the Orange Bowl queen during the previous night’s parade.

  The other key element of the front page was a dramatic but incomplete account of the killing of fugitive terrorist Jesus Bernal on a limestone spit in North Key Largo. This story carried no byline because it was produced by several reporters, one of whom had confirmed the fact that private investigator Brian Keyes had fired the fatal shots from a nine-millimeter Browning handgun, which he was duly licensed to carry. Keyes’s presence at the remote jetty was unexplained, although the newspaper noted that he recently had been hired as part of a covert Orange Bowl security force. The only other witness to the Bernal shooting, Metro-Dade Police Sergeant Alberto García, was recovering from surgery and unavailable for comment.

  When Brian Keyes woke up in the dinginess of his office, Jenna sat at the desk, reading the morning paper.

  “When are you gonna learn to lock the door?” she asked. She handed him the front page. “Take a look. The puddy tat’s out of the bag.”

  Keyes sat up and spread the newspaper across his knees. He tried to read, but his eyes refused to focus.

  “I figured you’d be decked out in black,” he said groggily.

  “I don’t believe he’s dead,” Jenna said. “I will not believe it, not till I see the body.” Case closed. She forced a smile. “Hey, Bri, seems you’re a big hero for killing that Cuban kidnapper.”

  “Yeah, I look like a big hero, don’t I?”

  He glanced at Wiley’s column. “December 28—the day before the helicopter crash. When’s the last time you heard from him?”

  “Same day. I got a telegram from Haiti.”

  “What did he say?” Keyes asked.

  “He said to spray the lawn for chinch bugs.”

  “That all?”

  She pursed her lips. “He also said if anything happens, he wants to be buried in that pine coffin he got from the swap meet. Buried with all his old newspaper clippings, of course.”

  “Very touching.”

  “I think he stole the idea from the Indian,” Jenna said. “Seminole warriors are always buried with their weapons.”

  Keyes stumbled downstairs to a vending machine and bought three cups of coffee. Jenna took one look and said she didn’t want any, so Keyes drank them all.

  It put him in a perfect mood for Skip Wiley’s farewell column, which Keyes found mawkish and disorganized and only slightly revelatory. He was more interested in Cab Mulcahy’s companion story. In it, the managing editor explained that Wiley’s key role in the Nights of December had not been exposed because of a threat that many more tourists and innocent persons would be murdered. For several days the information about Wiley was withheld while an investigator hired by the Sun searched for him; in retrospect, Mulcahy had written, this decision was ill-advised and probably unethical.

  “Poor Cab,” Keyes said, not to Jenna but himself. He felt hurt and embarrassed for his friend.

  Jenna came around from behind the desk and sat on the tattered sofa next to Keyes. “Skip really got carried away,” she said, stopping just short of remorse.

  “He carried all of us away,” Keyes said, “everyone who cared about him. You, me, Mulcahy, the whole damn newspaper. He carried all of us right into the toilet.”

  “Brian, don’t be this way.”

  Jenna wasn’t wearing any makeup; she looked like she hadn’t slept in two days. “It was a good cause,” she said defensively. “Just poor administration.”

  “What makes you think he’s not dead?”

  “Intuition.”

  “Oh really.” Keyes eyed her with annoyance, as he would a stray cat.

  He said, “I can’t imagine Skip passing up that parade. National television, half the country tuned in. It was too good to resist—if he’s not dead, he’s in a coma somewhere.”

  “He’s not dead,” Jenna said.

  “We’ll see.”

  Jenna had never heard him so snide.

  “What’s with you?” she asked.

  “Aw, nothing. Blew a guy’s head off last night and I’m still a little bushed. Wanna go for a Danish?”

  Jenna looked shaky. “Oh Brian,” she said.

  A plaintively rendered oh Brian usually would do the trick; a guaranteed melt-down. This time Keyes felt nothing but a penetrating dullness; not lust or jealousy, rage or bitterness.

  “He was supposed to meet me at Wolfie’s this morning, but he never came,” she admitted. “I’m kind of worried.” Her eyes were red. Keyes knew she was about to turn on the waterworks.

  “He can’t be dead,” she said, choking out the words.

  Keyes said, “I’m sorry, Jenna, but you did the worst possible thing: you encouraged the bastard.”

  “I suppose,” she said, starting to sob. “But some of it sounded so harmless.”

  “Skip was about as harmless as a 190-pound scorpion.”

  “For instance, dropping those snakes on the ocean liner,” she said. “Somehow it didn’t seem so terrible when he was arranging it. The way he told it, it was supposed to be kind of funny.”

  “With goddamn ratt
lesnakes, Jenna?”

  “He didn’t tell me that part. Honest.” She reached out and put her arms around him. “Hold me,” she whispered. Normally another foolproof heartbreaker. Keyes took her hand and patted it avuncularly. He didn’t know where it had gone—all his feeling for her—just that it wasn’t there now.

  “It wasn’t all Skip’s fault,” Jenna cried. “This was building up for years, poisoning him from the inside. He felt a duty, Brian, a duty to be the sentinel of outrage. Who else would speak for the land? For the wild creatures?”

  “Save your Sierra Club lecture for the first-graders, okay?”

  “Skip is not a bad man, he has a vision of right and wrong. He’s a principled person who took things too far, and maybe he paid for his mistakes. But he deserves credit for his courage, and for all his misery he deserves compassion, too.”

  “What he deserved,” Keyes said, “was twenty-five-to-life at Raiford.” Ten innocent people were dead and here was Jenna doing Portia from the Merchant of Venice. He let go of her hand and stood up, not wishing to test his fortitude by sitting too close for too long. He said, “You’d better go.”

  “I took the bus,” Jenna sniffled. “Can you give me a lift?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “But I really don’t want to be alone, Brian. I just want to lie in a hot bath and think sunny thoughts, a hot bath with kelp crystals. Maybe you could come by tonight and keep me company?”

  In the tub Jenna would be unstoppable. “Thanks anyway,” Keyes said, “but I’m going to the football game.”

  He gave her ten bucks for a cab.

  She looked at the money, then at Brian. Her little-girl-lost look, a pale version at that.

  “If he’s dead,” she said softly, “what’ll we do?”

  “I’ll varnish the coffin,” Keyes said, “you spray for chinch bugs.”

  32

  The annual Orange Bowl Football Classic began at exactly eight P.M. on January 1, when the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame kicked off to the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers before a stadium crowd of 73,411 and an estimated worldwide television audience of forty-one million people. The A. C. Nielsen Company, which rates TV shows based on sample American homes, later calculated that the Notre Dame-Nebraska football game attained a blockbuster rating of 23.5, giving it a 38 share of all households watching television that Tuesday night. These ratings were all the more remarkable considering that, for obvious reasons, the second half of the Orange Bowl game was never played.

  Midway through the first quarter the rains came; stinging needles that sent a groan through the crowd and brought out a sea of umbrellas.

  Brian Keyes huddled sullenly in the rain and wished he’d stayed home. He had decided to attend the game only because he couldn’t reach Kara Lynn, and because he’d gotten a free ticket (the Chamber of Commerce, showing its gratitude). Unfortunately, his seat was in the midst of the University of Nebraska card section, where raucous fans held up squares of bright posterboard to spell out witty messages like “Mash the Irish!” in giant letters. No sooner had Keyes settled in when some of the rooters had handed him two red cards and asked if he wouldn’t mind being their semicolon. Keyes was worse than miserable.

  On the field Nebraska was humiliating Notre Dame; no real surprise, since the no-neck Cornhuskers outweighed their opponents by an average of thirty-two pounds apiece. Many of the fans, already sopped and now bored, wondered whose brilliant idea the four-point spread was. By half-time the score was 21-3.

  The second-string running back for Notre Dame was a young man named David Lee, who stood six-feet-four and weighed a shade under two hundred pounds and was about as Irish as Sonny Liston. Though nominally listed on the team roster as a senior, David Lee was actually several dozen credits short of sophomore status—this, despite majoring in physical education and minoring in physical therapy. David Lee’s grade-point average had recently skied to 1.9, slightly enhancing his chances of graduating from college before the age of fifty—provided, of course, he was not first drafted by a professional football team.

  Which now seemed unlikely. During the first half of the Orange Bowl game, David Lee attempted to run with the football three times. The first effort resulted in a five-yard loss, the second a fumble. The third time he actually gained twelve yards and a first down. Unfortunately the only two pro football scouts in the stadium missed David Lee’s big run because they spent the entire second quarter stuck in line at the men’s room, fighting over the urinals with some Klansmen from Perrine.

  David Lee’s fortunes changed at halftime. As the two teams filed off the field and entered the tunnels leading to the lockers, a muscular Orange Bowl security guard pulled the young halfback aside and asked to speak with him privately. The guard informed David Lee that there was an emergency phone call from his parents in Bedford-Stuy, and escorted him to a stale-smelling broom closet below the stands in the southwest corner of the stadium. Once inside the room, which had no telephone, the security guard locked the door and said:

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “No, sir,” David Lee replied politely, as even mediocre Notre Dame athletes were taught to do.

  “I’m Viceroy Wilson.”And Wilson it was, not at all dead.

  “Naw!” Lee grinned. “C’m on, man!” He studied the security guard’s furrowed face and saw in it something familiar, even famous. “Shit, it’s really you!” Lee said. “I can’t believe it—the Viceroy Wilson. Man, how come you wound up with a shitty job like this?”

  The young man had obviously not been reading anything but the sports pages in Miami.

  “Having a rough time tonight?” Wilson asked.

  “You got that right,” David Lee said. “Those honky farmboys are built like garbage trucks.”

  “Field looks pretty slippery, too. Hard to make your cuts.”

  “Damn right. Hey, what about my momma and daddy?”

  “Oh, I lied about that. Lemme see your helmet, bro.”

  Lee handed it to him. “Fits you pretty good.”

  “Yeah,” Viceroy Wilson said, squeezing it down over his ears. “Lemme buy it from you.”

  “Sheeiiit!” David Lee laughed. “You really sumthin.”

  “I’m serious, man.” Viceroy Wilson pulled out a wad of cash. “A thousand bucks,” he said, “for the whole uniform, ‘cept for the cleats. I got my own fuckin’ cleats.”

  The money was Skip Wiley’s idea; Viceroy was just as amenable to punching the young man’s lights out and stripping him clean.

  David Lee fondled the crisp new bills and peered at the visage inside the gold Notre Dame helmet. He wondered if the Carrera sunglasses were some kind of gag.

  “Is it a deal or not?” Wilson asked.

  “Look, the coach is gonna freak. How about after the game?”

  “This is after the game. Believe me, son, the game is over.” Viceroy Wilson nonchalantly handed the college halfback another one thousand dollars.

  “Two grand for a football uniform!”

  “That’s right, bro.”

  “You want the jock strap, too?”

  “Fuck no!”

  When he finally made it back to the Notre Dame locker room, David Lee stood naked except for his spikes and athletic supporter. After apologizing for interrupting the team prayer, he soberly told the coach he had been robbed and molested by a gang of crazed Mariel refugees, and asked if he could sit out the rest of the game.

  The Orange Bowl Football Classic is as famous for its prodigal halftime production as for its superior brand of collegiate football. The halftime show is unfailingly more extravagant and fanciful than the Orange Bowl parade of the previous evening because the Halftime Celebration Committee adopts its own theme, hires its own professional director, recruits its own fresh-faced talent, and performs for its own television crew. The effect is that of a wearisome Vegas floor show played out across ten acres of Prescription Athletic Turf by four hundred professional “young people” who all look like they
just got scholarships at Brigham Young. In recent years the TV people realized that lipsynching by the New Christy Minstrels and clog-dancing by giant stuffed mice in tuxedos were not enough to prevent millions of football viewers from going to the toilet and missing all the important car commercials, so the halftime producers introduced fireworks and even lasers into the Orange Bowl show. This proved to be a big hit and new-car sales went up accordingly. Each year more and more spectacular effects were worked into the script, and themes were modernized with the 18-to-34-year-old consumer in mind (though a few minor Disney characters were tossed in for the children). In the minds of the Orange Bowl organizers, the ideal halftime production was conceptually “hip,” visually thrilling, morally inoffensive, and unremittingly middle-class.

  The emcee of the Orange Bowl halftime show was a television personality named John Davidson, selected chiefly because of his dimples, which could be seen from as far away as the stadium’s upper deck. Standing in an ice-blue spotlight on the fifty-yard line, John Davidson opened the festivities with a tepid medley of famous show tunes. Soon he was enveloped by a throng of prancing, dancing, capering, miming, rain-soaked Broadway characters in full costume: bewhiskered cats, Yiddish fiddlers, gorgeous chorus girls, two Little Orphan Annies, three Elephant Men, a Hamlet, a King of Siam, and even a tap-dancing Willy Loman. The theme of the twenty-two-minute extravaganza was “The World’s a Stage,” an ambitious sequel to previous Orange Bowl halftime galas such as “The World’s a Song,” “The World’s a Parade,” and more recently, “The World’s a Great Big Planet.”

  The heart of the production was the reenactment of six legendary stage scenes, each compressed to eighty-five seconds and supplemented when necessary with tasteful bilingual narration. The final vignette was a soliloquy from Hamlet, which did not play well in the downpour; fans in the upper levels of the Orange Bowl could not clearly see Poor Yorick’s skull and assumed they were applauding Señor Wences.