INTERSTATE SURFER
—ANONYMOUS
Upon closer examination, Mortimer saw the length of fiberglass had indeed been expertly shaped to resemble a surfboard.
“Huh.” Mortimer sat on the front bumper of the MINI Cooper and looked at the metal surfer. The legs were axles banged and bent into submission, the arms strands of metal Mortimer couldn’t identify, but the stubby fingers were spark plugs. The torso looked like a gas tank. The skull was some engine part Mortimer could only guess at, lightbulbs in the eyes, the wide mouth a car stereo. An orange highway cone for a hat.
Something in the body language kept the sculpture from looking completely comical. It must have weighed a ton but seemed perfectly balanced.
Bill sat on the bumper next to Mortimer. “It looks like the least little thing could knock it over, massive and fragile at the same time. I wonder how long it took him to do it.”
“Beats me.” Mortimer noticed a lack of bird droppings on the sculpture. Nothing rusted. This one was relatively new.
Sheila sat on the other side. “I’d have signed my name. Doesn’t he want credit?”
They sat looking at the surfer a long time, nobody saying a word.
They ran out of fuel twenty miles north of Valdosta. They camped near the car that night, built a small fire and slept the sleep of the dead.
The next morning they sat around the campfire’s cold coals, no gasoline, no food, no ideas and no coffee. If Mortimer had been granted only one wish, it would have been for the coffee.
Sheila spotted it first, a black speck in the blue of the sky. They sat and watched the speck grow bigger all morning until it was close enough to recognize as the Blowfish.
They yelled and jumped and waved as it passed overhead. Bill broke one of the mirrors off the MINI Cooper and tilted sun flashes at the blimp. Just when it looked like it would sail right on by, it made a slow, slow, slow, awkward turn and landed about two hundred yards down the highway.
Reverend Jake seemed happy to see them. They were sure as hell happy to see him. Sheila asked if he’d come looking for them. The reverend looked slightly embarrassed, admitted that he hadn’t been searching for them. Instead, he’d been following the interstate south, intent on witnessing to the heathens in tropical Miami or Key West. He had, in fact, picked up intermittent signals on the radio that sounded vaguely like Jimmy Buffett music.
“Can you stomach some hitchhikers?” Mortimer asked.
The reverend cleared his throat. “‘As you do unto the least of my children, so have you done unto Me,’ says the Good Book.”
Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
—ADOLF HITLER
EPILOGUE
For three weeks they floated south. At first they used I-75 as a guide, but somewhere between Gainesville and Ocala, unseen snipers popped off a few shots at them. They veered east until they hit the Atlantic and followed the coast, always south.
They scavenged food, and with the onset of warmer weather, they also scavenged shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops. Bill didn’t look right, the Union officer’s cap and the six-shooters and the Bermuda shorts and the pink shirt that said MY HUSBAND WENT TO FLORIDA, AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.
Mortimer wore cutoff jeans and a white tank top that said TECATE, and Sheila switched between a glowing blue one-piece and a wispy-light sundress with spaghetti straps.
They stuck close to the beach so they could catch fish and crabs and oysters. Jimmy Buffett came in much clearer as they went south. Mortimer became obscenely fond of “One Particular Harbour,” although Bill’s favorite was “A Pirate Looks at Forty.”
They got stuck in Boca Raton for a week when the Blowfish’s little engine finally ran out of gasoline. They rigged an exercise bicycle to turn the propeller and took turns pedaling. This reminded Mortimer of the bicycle-slave uprising back on Lookout Mountain, but he quickly put it out of his mind.
He never told the others what happened.
They remembered what fear felt like as they passed Miami. The city looked just as decayed and haunted as Atlanta had, and they kept their distance.
If they’d tried to make Key West on foot or by car, they’d never have made it. Half the bridges were out, and Mortimer strongly suspected they’d been destroyed on purpose to keep away outsiders.
Too bad. Here we come.
They put down in a parking lot, several onlookers marveling at the sight of a blimp suddenly among them.
A man in his late fifties with a pierced ear, a gaudy Hawaiian shirt and a braided white beard introduced himself as the unofficial “sort of leader spokesperson guy” and asked for news of the outside world.
Mortimer said, “You don’t want to know.”
They were made welcome, and the locals showed them the ropes. They all got together about once every three months (give or take) to vote on whatever issues anyone wanted to raise, but nobody was obligated to abide by the outcome, so there wasn’t a lot of stress about it.
Mortimer was told to find any old abandoned dwelling and help himself. He found a small, three-room place forty feet from the beach and moved in. Sheila moved in with him by unspoken agreement.
Reverend Jake set up a church. People came occasionally for a little fire and brimstone, the closest thing the community had to theater.
The public library had been set up on the honor system. You signed out a book and brought it back whenever. If you kept a book too long, somebody might occasionally show up on your doorstep and say something along the lines of “Hey, man, you done with Potty Training for Dummies yet?”
It amused Mortimer to check out Milton’s Paradise Lost, but he quit reading halfway through and started checking out all the Harry Potter books instead.
They fished. They lounged in the sand and got tan. Mortimer made love to Sheila every night, often on the beach, sometimes in their lazy porch hammock. The Key West folks were easygoing, polite, helpful. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Mortimer knew that there was an ugly world out there waiting to crash down on these people. Sooner or later somebody would notice the island wasn’t getting its fair share of misery, and they’d swoop in with pain and sorrow.
But not today. Maybe never. Mortimer planned to forget, to make himself as blissfully ignorant as the rest.
Six months went by like nothing at all.
He was lounging in the shade of his porch one day when he saw a figure walking up the beach toward his little house. Sheila swung in the hammock next to him, snoring lightly. It was late afternoon and hot.
The figure took shape as he got closer. Bill. His long Buffalo Bill/George Custer hair bleached almost white, long braids on either side, as was the style on the island. He carried his boots in his hands and walked barefoot in the sand.
Mortimer waved and waited. Bill stepped onto the porch, nodded hello. Mortimer put his finger to his lips in a shhhhh gesture.
“Go ahead and talk,” Sheila said. “I’m awake.”
“I’m getting a little restless,” Bill said. “Thought I’d take off. Wanted to see if you’d come with me.”
“Sounds needlessly hazardous,” Mortimer said.
“One of the guys I know has been working on a boat at the old navy base. It’s rigged for steam. We’ve been on the shortwave radio to a lot of folks willing to trade. Thought we might get some commerce going.”
Mortimer shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t really think of anything I need.”
They had plenty of fish to eat, and mild weather, and fish, and people in Bermuda shorts who wanted to talk about how good or bad the fishing was on any particular day, and Jimmy Buffett music, and fish, and lots of swimming in the warm ocean, and fish, and plenty of goddamn fish.
“We’re heading for South America. Thought we might swing by Colombia, pick up some coffee.”
Mortimer stood, stretched lazily.
“Guess I’d better get packed.”
“Me too,” Sheila said. “Don’t leave me stuck in paradise.”
Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse: A Novel Page 25
