by Carl Hiaasen
Afterward all the performers gathered arm-in-arm under a vast neon marquee and, to no one’s surprise, sang “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Then the floodlights in the stadium dimmed and the slate rainclouds overhead formed an Elysian backdrop for the emotional climax, a holographic tribute to the late Ethel Merman.
The audience had scarcely recovered from this boggling spectacle of electronic magic—scenes from Gypsy projected in three dimensions at a height of thirty stories—when the lights winked on and John Davidson strode to midfield.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, with a smile bright enough to bleach rock, “if I may direct your attention to the east zone, it’s my great pleasure to introduce this year’s Orange Bowl queen, the beautiful Kara Lynn Shivers!”
In the stands, Brian Keyes went cold. In his obsession with the parade he had forgotten about the game, and the traditional halftime introduction of the queen and her court. It was a brief ceremony—a few of the prize-winning floats circling once in front of the stands before exiting the east end zone. As Kara Lynn’s father had griped, it was hardly worth getting your hair done for, eleven crummy minutes of airtime.
But eleven minutes was plenty long enough. An eternity, Keyes thought. A horrible certainty possessed him and he jumped to his feet. Where were the cops—where were the goddamn cops?
The mermaid float entered first, still trumpeting sperm-whale music; then came floats from Cooley Motors, the Nordic Steamship Lines, and the Palm Beach Lawn Polo Society. The procession was supposed to end with a modest contingent of motorcycle Shriners from Illinois, who had been awarded a halftime slot following the untimely cancellation of the entry from Bogotá.
However, something foreign trailed the betasseled Shriners into the stadium: a strange unnamed float. Curious fans who thumbed through their Official Orange Bowl Souvenir Programs found no mention of this peculiar diorama. In their reserved box seats along the forty-yard line, members of the Orange Bowl Committee trained binoculars on the interloper and exchanged fretful whispers. Since the NBC cameras already had discovered the mystery float, intervention was out of the question, image-wise; besides, there was no reason to suspect anything but a harmless fraternity prank.
Though its craftsmanship was amateurish (forgivable, considering its humble warehouse origins), the float actually made a quaint impression. It was an Everglades tableau, almost childlike in simplicity. At one end stood an authentic thatched chickee, the traditional Seminole shelter; nearby lay a dugout canoe, half-carved from a bald cypress; steam rose from a black kettle hung over a mock fire. Grazing in a thicket, presumably unseen, was a stuffed white-tailed deer; a similarly preserved raccoon peered down from the lineated trunk of a synthetic palm. The centerpiece was a genuine Indian, very much alive and dressed in the nineteenth-century garb of trading-post Seminoles: a round, brimless straw hat, baggy pants, gingham shirt, a knotted red kerchief, and a tan cowskin vest. Somewhat anachronistically, the nineteenth-century Indian was perched at the helm of a modern airboat, gliding through the River of Grass. A long unpolished dagger was looped in the Seminole’s snakeskin belt and a toy Winchester rifle lay across his lap. His smooth youthful face seemed the portrait of civility.
Brian Keyes sprang for the aisle the moment he saw the Indian. Frantically he tried to make his way down from the stands, but the Nebraska card-flashers (Irish Suck!) were embroiled in a heated cross-stadium skirmish with the Notre Dame card section (Huskers Die!). Keyes pushed and shoved and elbowed his way along the row but it was slow going, too slow, and some of the well-fed Cornhusker faithful decided to teach this rude young fellow some manners. They simply refused to move. Not for a semicolon, they said; set your butt down.
As the floats trundled past the stands, wind-whipped rains lashed the riders and sent the ersatz Broadway actors scurrying off the field for cover. Kara Lynn was drenched and miserable, but she continued to wave valiantly and smile. Through a pair of field glasses (and from the dry safety of a VIP box) Reed Shivers assayed his daughter’s bedraggled visage and noted that her makeup was running badly, inky rivulets marring impeccable cheeks—she looked like something from a Warhol movie. Reed Shivers anxiously wondered if it was time to buy the lady from the Eileen Ford Agency another drink.
Reed Shivers and almost everyone else in the Orange Bowl did not yet realize that the Nights of December were alive and well. Nor did they know with what ease Skip Wiley’s troops had carried out the assault on the Nordic Princess, the ditching of the stolen Huey, and the staging of their own deaths: the gang had simply performed flawlessly (minus Jesus Bernal, who’d vanished before Wiley had revealed the scheme’s final refinement, and who’d gone to his death haplessly believing that the helicopter crash was an accident).
Tommy Tigertail had played a heroic role as captain of the clandestine rescue boat, a twenty-one-foot Mako powered by a two-hundred-horsepower Evinrude. Posing as a mackerel fisherman, he had plowed rough seas for an hour, staying close to the ocean liner but attracting no notice. His night vision had proved crucial when they had all bailed out—the pilot, Skip Wiley, and Viceroy Wilson. The ocean had been a turbid and treacherous soup, littered with sinking or half-sunk chopper wreckage, but within minutes the Indian had found all his comrades and pulled them safely into the speedboat.
The daring helicopter pilot had been rewarded with twenty thousand dollars of bingo skim, a phony passport, and a first-class plane ticket to Barbados. The Nights of December had dried off, checked into a Coconut Grove hotel, and gone back to work.
The news of Jesús Bernal’s violent fate had darkened Skip Wiley’s mood, but he’d refused to let it drag him down. Bernal’s passing had not similarly moved Viceroy Wilson, who merely remarked how inconsiderate it was for Hay-Zoos to have ripped off his private shotgun, and how supremely stupid to have used it on a cop. Tommy Tigertail had had absolutely nothing to say about the neurotic Cuban’s death; he had understood Jesus even less than Jesus had understood him.
In truth, Bernal’s death had changed nothing. Las Noches had gone ahead with the mission, working with a vigor and esprit that had warmed Wiley’s heart. At the vortex of the plan was a rejuvenated, rock-hard, and recently drug-free Viceroy Wilson, much more than a shadow of his former self.
Viceroy had had no trouble choosing Notre Dame’s uniform over the apple-red jersey of the University of Nebraska.
The reasons were simple. First, Nebraska’s agri-business hegemony represented a vile anathema to Wilson, whose radical sympathies were more logically drawn to the Irish Republican Army, and thus Notre Dame.
Second, and most important, Notre Dame was the only one of the teams with a number thirty-one on its roster.
In reconstructing Viceroy Wilson’s movements about the stadium that night, it was determined that several fans saw him emerge from the broom closet at 9:40 P.M. Ten minutes later he was observed, in uniform, ordering a jumbo orange juice at the concession stand in Section W.
Four minutes after that, he was seen eating a raisin bagel in a box seat at the Notre Dame twenty-yard line. When the rightful occupant returned from the souvenir shop and requested that Viceroy move elsewhere, Wilson inconsiderately mutilated the man’s shamrock umbrella and popped him in the face. No one in the stands called the police; it seemed more properly a matter for the NCAA.
An eight-minute period elapsed during which no one reported seeing number thirty-one—then half the households of America did, courtesy of NBC.
While the other football players clustered in the southwest tunnel, Viceroy Wilson broke onto the field in a casual but self-assured trot. Many Notre Dame fans applauded, thinking the halftime show was finally over but wondering why the rest of the green-and-gold did not follow. They wondered, too, why a second-rate fumbler like David Lee would be given the honor of leading the Fighting Irish into battle.
They were stunned by what happened next.
Number thirty-one ran a perfect beeline down the center of the football field, each great stride splas
hing in the soggy turf. For Miami Dolphin fanatics, it was an unmistakable if ghostly reprise—the familiar numeral on the jersey; the right shoulder, drooping ever so slightly, as if bracing for a high tackle; the thick arms pumping like watchgears, the black hands locked in fists; and of course that triangular wedge of muscle from the shoulders to the hips. All that was missing was a football.
By the time Viceroy Wilson crossed the fifty-yard line, he was in full gait and no $3.50-an-hour security guard on the face of the earth could have caught him. Viceroy’s mad dash seemed to freeze the authorities, who did not wish to shoot, maim, or otherwise embarrass any Notre Dame player. Maybe the kid was psyching himself for the game, or maybe just showing off for South Bend. After all, there were TV cameras everywhere.
In the midst of Viceroy Wilson’s virtuoso run, two other disturbances erupted in the stadium.
First, the Seminole float rumbled and began to shudder at the tail of the procession—it appeared as if it was about to blow apart. The Shriners slowed their motorcycles and wheeled around, believing that the dim-witted Indian had accidentally started up the airboat.
At the same instant John Davidson was accosted at midfield by a bald, barefoot, russet-bearded man who was dressed as the King of Siam. It was, of course, Skip Wiley.
Unintelligible bits of their argument went out over the stadium sound system and then a struggle began. The two men tumbled out of the spotlight.
Seconds later the King of Siam appeared alone, holding Davidson’s cordless microphone.
The crowd seemed greatly confused about whether this was part of the official program; half of them clapped and half murmured.
Skip Wiley beamed up at the stands and said, “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.”
Brian Keyes had extricated himself from the card-flashers and was bounding down the stadium, four steps at a time, when he heard it.
Skip Wiley shouted to the heavens: “Been around for long, long years. Stolen many a man’s soul and faith.”
Swell, Keyes said to himself, he’s doing the Stones.
From the crest of the queen’s float, Kara Lynn Shivers stopped waving at the crippled Cub Scouts in Section Q and turned to see what was going on. She did not recall “Sympathy for the Devil” being listed in the Orange Bowl music program. Nor did she recognize the bald performer in the gold Oriental waistcoat.
“Pleased to meet you,” Wiley sang, “hope you guess my name....”
In the NBC trailer the assistant producer barked into his mike: “Keep two cameras on that asshole!” Which was the prevailing sentiment among his forty-one million viewers.
Skip Wiley’s performance was queer enough to draw almost everyone’s attention away from Viceroy Wilson—everyone except the Shriners. Reacting swiftly, Burt and James led the motorcycle squadron across the east zone to intercept the hulking ex-fullback. It was the ultimate test of Viceroy’s reborn skill, zigging and juking through the stolid heart of the Evanston Shrine; stiff-arming fenders where necessary; using his All-Pro shoulder to knock the cyclists off balance; an elbow to the fez, a fist to the throat (in the old days, fifteen yards and loss of down). With each collision Viceroy Wilson gave a contented growl. Thirty-one Z-right. This was the only part he’d ever missed, the purity of contact. Galvanized by adrenaline, he rejoiced in the shining justice of his run—the abused black hero outwitting, outflanking, outmuscling the whitest of the white establishment, impotent against his inevitable assault on precious honky womanhood. In Wilson’s wake the bruised Shriners squirmed in the slop, pinned beneath their spangled Harleys; defeated, Viceroy mused, by their own gaudy materialism. And all this played out with splendid irony in the theater of his past heroics.
With the pursuers in chaos, all that stood between Viceroy Wilson and the Orange Bowl queen was the United States Marine Corps Honor Guard, whose members had no intention of breaking formation or soiling their dress blues. Wilson threaded them effortlessly and bounded onto the mermaid float.
“Oh shit,” said Kara Lynn Shivers.
“Come on, girl,” Viceroy Wilson said, catching his wind.
“Where we going?” Kara Lynn asked.
“Into history.”
The tuna-blue mermaids shrieked as Wilson slung the queen over his shoulder and sprinted back upfield.
At that second the Seminole airboat shot off the Everglades float, splintering plywood, disemboweling the stuffed deer, leveling the chickee; the aviation engine expelling a suffocating contrail of rain and kerosene fumes over the stands. The airboat’s aluminum hull pancaked on the slick football turf and hydroplaned; it was perfect, the Indian thought, gaining speed—you couldn’t ask for a better surface.
Brian Keyes had finally reached the ground level and was vaulting the fence when he found the cops he’d been looking for. Five of Miami’s finest. Dogs, nightsticks, the works. Keyes protested at the top of his lungs but they pinned him to the fence anyway, and there, stuck like a moth, he watched the whole terrible scene unfold—the airboat wheeling circles; Viceroy running with Kara Lynn slung over his shoulder; Skip crooning at the microphone.
On the field Burt and James had righted their bikes and resumed the chase. The key element now was speed, not agility: dodging a Harley Davidson was one thing, outrunning it was impossible. Viceroy Wilson had no illusion about this: he was counting heavily on the Indian.
Tommy Tigertail was a wizard with the airboat. He cut the field in half and slid the howling craft between Wilson and the frowning white riders in purple hats. The Indian spun the boat on a dime, throwing a sheet of rain and loose sod into the teeth of the Shriners. James lost control and went down in a deep skid, chewing a trench from the Notre Dame forty-yard line to the Nebraska thirty-five. He did not get up. Burt alertly veered from the airboat’s backwash and, to avoid the flying muck, crouched behind his customized Plexiglas windshield.
The airboat bounded up alongside Viceroy Wilson and coasted to a stop. Wilson heaved Kara Lynn Shivers onto the deck as if she were a sandbag. By now the stadium crowd had figured out that this was not part of the show and started to scream witlessly. The Orange Bowl chairman was on his feet, yelling for the cops, while Sparky Harper’s Chamber of Commerce successor frantically tried to sabotage the cables on one of NBC’s portable Minicams. Meanwhile some of the real Notre Dame football players ambled onto the field to watch the commotion; Tommy Tigertail feared that they might soon get chivalrous notions.
“Hurry,” he said to Viceroy Wilson.
Wilson had one foot in the airboat when Burt’s Harley buzzed him like a fat chrome bee. Viceroy looked down to discover that his right leg—his bad leg—was stuck fast in a Shriner death hug. With his other leg Wilson kicked and bucked like a buted-up racehorse. The motorcycle fell from under Viceroy’s attacker but somehow Burt kept his balance and his grip, and wound up on his feet. Wilson thought: This guy would have made a helluva nose tackle.
“Let the girl go!” Burt commanded.
“Get in,” Tommy Tigertail said to Wilson.
“I can’t shake loose!”
The pain in Viceroy’s knee—famously mangled, prematurely arthritic, now barely held together with pins and screws—was insufferable, worse than anything he remembered from the old days.
“Hurry!” said the Indian. He jiggled the stick and the airboat jerked into gear. They were on a drier patch of the field so the boat moved forward in balky fits. Tommy was aching to throttle up to top speed; through the cutting rain he had spotted a phalanx of helmeted police advancing from the north sidelines. In the bow Kara Lynn sat up, shivering in the deluge.
“Let her go!” Burt bellowed, tugging and twisting Wilson’s leg until number thirty-one clung to the hull by only the tips of his fingers. A deep-bone pain began to rake Viceroy’s mind and seep his resolve. He suddenly felt old and tired, and realized he’d spent all his stamina on that glorious run.
The Indian decided it was time to go—the police were trotting now, yellow-f
anged K-9 dogs at their heels. Tommy hopped off the driver’s platform, grabbed Viceroy Wilson by the wrists, and yanked with all his strength. Burt lost his grip and fell backward, the purple fez tumbling off. Wilson landed in the boat with a grunt.
Kara Lynn tried to scrabble out, but the airboat was already moving too fast. She huddled with her legs to her chest, hands pressed to her ears; the thundering yowl of the engine was a new source of pain.
She saw the sturdy Shriner running alongside the airboat, his sequined vest flapping. He kept shouting for Tommy to stop.
He had a small brown pistol in one hand.
Viceroy Wilson rose to the prow, breadloaf arms swaying at his sides, keeping steady but favoring his right leg. He tore off the Notre Dame helmet and hurled it vainly at the dogged Shriner.
Viceroy’s bare mahogany head glistened in the rain; the stadium lights twinkled in the ebony panes of his sunglasses. He scowled imperiously at Burt and raised his right fist in a salute that was at least traditional, if not trite.
“Down!” the Indian shouted. The airboat was hurtling straight for one of the goalposts—Tommy would have to make an amazing turn. “Viceroy, get down!”
Kara Lynn saw a rosy flash at the muzzle of Burt’s pistol, but heard no shot.
When she turned, Viceroy Wilson was gone.
With a grimace Tommy Tigertail spun the airboat in a perilous fishtailing arc. It slid sideways against the padded goalpost and bounced off. The Marching Cornhusker majorettes dropped their batons and broke rank, leaving Tommy a clear path to escape. With Kara Lynn crouched fearfully in the bow, the airboat skimmed out of the stadium through the east gate. A getaway tractor-trailer rig had been parked on Seventh Street but the Indian knew he wouldn’t need it; the swales were ankle-deep in rainwater and the airboat glided on mirrors all the way to the Miami River.
Viceroy Wilson lay dead in the east end zone. From the Goodyear blimp it appeared that he was splayed directly over the F in “Fighting Irish,” which had been painted in tall gold letters across the turf.
