Fletch's Moxie

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “Look at the children,” Stella said.

  Some men were passing demonstration signs down from the trucks. The signs were passed along from hand to hand. The signs said KEEP AMERICA WHITE, HOLLYWOOD SELLS U.S. SOUL, NO RACIAL MIX. One sign, carefully handprinted, read NO MONGURILIZATION! And these signs came to be held by the men in white hooded robes, and by the women, and by the children.

  “I guess they mean me,” Gerry Littleford said.

  “No,” Stella Littleford said. “They mean me.”

  To the left, the thirty Neo-Nazis were trying to appear military. A man with a red band around his hat was yelling at them as they were lining up. They all had beer bellies they were sucking in while tucking their chins in to show they all had dewlaps.

  Moxie was standing beside Fletch and she put her hand on his on the railing.

  “These people must have driven all night,” Fletch said.

  “These aren’t people,” Moxie said.

  In the street someone said, There’s Moxie Mooney, and Cunt!, Whore! were shouted in both men’s and women’s voices and a voice said, Isn’t that ol’ Gerry Littleford up there? and a rock bounced off the wall of the house behind where they were standing and fell to the floor near their feet.

  From one of the trucks, My country ‘tis of thee began to blare.

  Fletch said to Moxie, “You don’t think people care about such things anymore? You think there came a moment in history when everyone wised up and love and understanding pervaded the world? Well, it hasn’t happened yet, babe. Maybe on television, but not in real life.”

  Moxie said, “The sick, the stupid, and the scared.”

  With two rows of uniformed plodgies standing behind him, the man distinguished by a red band around his hat began to shout a speech over the sound of music: “We all know what this is about! We all know what is happening! We all know what is happening to the world! Who runs Hollywood which makes the movies? The Jews! Who runs the newspapers which sell the movies? The Jews! Who owns the movie theaters which show the movies? The Jews! Who owns the television networks which push the movies into our homes, spoiling the minds of our children? The Jews! And who pays the Jews? The Communists! The Jewish people do not mix. Oh, no—they do not marry outside their race! They marry outside their race and their families say they’re dead! The Russians do not marry outside their race! Oh, no—they send the Jews out of their country…

  Moxie giggled. “This is getting confusing.”

  Along Duval Street, from the houses, guest houses, and coffee shops, and from the side streets ordinary citizens began to appear. They stood apart from these others, their eyes wide, their mouths open. They spoke to each other in disbelief. A large number of them were gathering. A woman shrieked: Be Nice! The fishermen began to appear in the crowd, the real fishermen and the sport fishermen and even the other kind of fishermen who always came back to Key West with a full cargo of shrimp they had bought with their other, more valuable cargo. Fletch recognized two or three people who had been at Durty Harry’s the night before, listening to Frederick Mooney.

  A Cuban-American boy, a Conch, about eight or ten years old, sat cross-legged on the ground behind a man in a white robe. Fletch watched the boy take a cigarette lighter from the pocket of his shorts. It took him five or six tries to get flame from the lighter. Then he set fire to the hem of the man’s robe.

  … land of liberty…

  The man jumped, beat his burning robe with his arm, and kicked the kid, hard, rolling him over in the gutter. He kicked the kid again, in the head. By then, the robe was burning well. A woman was trying to grab the robe off him. He kept kicking the kid.

  The crowd rushed the people who had driven all night. Rocks went through the air in all directions. Sticks appeared from nowhere. Here and there, on bare skin and on the white robes red blood began to appear. Women were screaming, in Cuban and English. The man distinguished by the red band around his hat ordered his uniformed plodgies to drive a wedge through all these screaming, hitting, kicking, yelling people and the uniformed plodgies went into the fray. They were beaten nicely.

  From the center of Key West finally there came the sounds of sirens.

  Fletch took Moxie’s elbow. “Let’s go.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Sailing,” Fletch said. “It’s a nice day for sailing.”

  Edith Howell in her dressing gown was carrying a cup of coffee up the main stairs of The Blue House. “Something I’ve never understood,” she said to Moxie and Fletch, “is how one can be a Jew and a Communist at the same time. A tree and a stone cannot be the same thing. Either one is one thing, or one is another…”

  “Sick people,” Moxie answered.

  Lopez was waiting in the front hall. He wore a clean white jacket. He said, “Mister Fletcher, Mister Sills is on the phone. He says if I don’t put you on the phone, he fires me.”

  Sy Koller came out of the dining room with his cup of coffee. He said to Moxie, “We’re a part of an international conspiracy?”

  “Throw ’em a script, Sy,” Moxie answered. “Let ’em see how bad it is.”

  Koller said, “I’d suspect Peterman’s hand behind this foolishness—you know, for publicity—if he weren’t dead.”

  Fletch said to Lopez, “Did you tell Sills what’s going on outside?”

  Outside were the sounds of sirens and hysterical screaming.

  “No,” said Lopez.

  Fletch went down the corridor and through the billiard room to the study.

  He lifted the telephone receiver from the desk.

  “Good morning, Ted,” Fletch said into the phone. “Nice day. We’re just going sailing.”

  “Why am I hearing sirens?”

  “Sirens?”

  Ted Sills said, “I’m hearing sirens over the phone. While I’ve been waiting. Was someone singing My country ’tis of thee… ?”

  “I wasn’t. Not this morning.”

  “I heard people screaming. I’m still hearing people screaming.”

  “Must be a bad connection.”

  “What’s going on there, Fletch?”

  “Just settling down for breakfast. Maybe you heard Edith Howell practicing on the scales.”

  Somewhere in the house another pane of glass smashed.

  “What was that?” Ted Sills asked over the phone.

  “What was what?”

  “Sharp noise. Sounded like glass breaking.”

  “Must have been at your end, Ted.”

  “Sounds like a riot’s going on.”

  “Must be your telephone cord, Ted. Give it a tug and see if it clears up.”

  “Fletcher, I have told you and your little playmates to get out of that house.”

  “Yes, you did, Ted.”

  “You’re still there.”

  “Having a few days of peace and quiet.”

  “I heard on the morning news you’re still there. In The Blue House.”

  “That reminds me, Ted. When does the rubbish get picked up? Want to make sure Lopez puts it out.”

  “I want you to get out of the goddamned house!” Ted Sills shouted.

  “Now, now, Ted. No wonder your phone is broken.”

  “All right, Fletcher, I’m coming down there. With a shotgun. And if you’re not out of that house by the time I get there—”

  “You’ll hardly be noticed. By the way, Ted, you never told me Moxie Mooney is half-owner of Five Aces Farm.”

  There was silence from Ted Sill’s end of the line. From Fletch’s there were three sounds which could have been light-caliber gunshots.

  “I happened to find out just this morning,” Fletch said. “I didn’t know you two knew each other.”

  Ted Sills said, “Ms Mooney has a financial interest in this farm. What’s that to you?”

  “Nothing. Just think it odd that here you have two such nice financial partners, Moxie and me, staying in your resort house, and you want us out.”

  “Fletcher…” Ted Sills sighed.
“You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve turned that house into a circus.”

  “Not me, Ted.”

  Moxie appeared in the doorway of the study. Her eyes were huge. “Stella Littleford’s been hurt,” she said.

  “Sorry, Ted,” Fletch said into the phone. “Gotta go.”

  “What did I just hear?” Sills shouted. “Who’s been hurt?”

  “The three-minute eggs,” said Fletch. “Their feelings are hurt. I’m not there eating ’em.”

  He hung up and followed Moxie into the front of the house.

  Stella Littleford was sitting like a dropped doll on the floor of the front hall. Her hands were over her forehead. Blood was seaping through her fingers.

  Sy Koller was kneeling beside her. “Definite need for stiches,” he said to Fletch. The front door was open.

  A low haze of riot gas drifted over the street. Police had set up saw horse barricades in a U in the street at the front of The Blue House. Two were knocked over. There were a few discarded white robes on the road. There was also one of the uniformed plodgies sitting on the road in a position nearly identical to Stella Littleford’s, another dropped doll, also holding his head.

  To the right, down Duval Street, away from the riot gas, hand-to-hand fighting and mouth-to-mouth shouting was continuing.

  Directly across the street, a sinewy armed fisherman was puncturing the tires of the school buses and trucks with his fishing knife.

  Gerry Littleford ran into the yard followed by two young men with a stretcher. His eyes were red and runny from the gas.

  “Shit forever,” he said to Fletch. He pointed to a broken rum bottle on the front porch. “Someone pegged Stella with that. Cut her head.”

  Clearly there had still been rum in the bottle when it broke. The shattered glass was in a puddle.

  An ambulance was backing down the street, over one of the fallen saw horses, to the front door of The Blue House.

  In the front hall, Mrs Lopez was handing wet cloths to Moxie who was handing them to Sy Koller who was applying them to Stella Littleford’s forehead. The young men who brought the stretcher stopped all that. They put a pile of dry gauze against the cut and taped it lightly.

  They helped Stella onto the stretcher.

  “Want me to go to the hospital with you?” Fletch asked Gerry.

  “I do not.”

  “Want Sy to go?”

  Gerry said, “I do not.”

  “Okay,” Fletch said. “I’ll see you later.”

  Gerry followed the stretcher-bearers through the front door.

  Fletch stood on the front porch watching them put Stella into the back of the ambulance.

  When Moxie joined him, he said. “Watch your feet. Broken glass.”

  The riot gas was dissipating. A swinging, kicking crowd came back down Duval Street from the right, knocking over another barricade. Fletch supposed the demonstrators were trying to get back to their buses and trucks. Their signs were broken and trampled around the trucks as were record player and the amplifiers. The trucks, the buses, and some of the cars had flat tires. But by then there were too many personal angers and personal scores to settle and the pushing and the punching continued.

  From above their heads, from the upper front balcony of The Blue House boomed the world’s best trained, most voluminous voice: “Four score and seven years ago…”

  “Oh, God,” said Moxie.

  In fact, the people in the street did look up. That’s Frederick Mooney! And they did stop fighting.

  “… our forefathers brought forth on this continent…” “Good ol’ Freddy,” said Fletch. “Let’s go sailing.”

  “… a new nation…”

  Fletch and Moxie walked through the house to the back. Even in the backyard they could hear Mooney’s Gettysburg Address. All other noises had ceased.

  “Think of that volume of sound,” Moxie said, “coming out of a head that must hurt as much as his does!”

  26

  After they sailed awhile, Moxie said, “I suppose I should ask you, seeing it wasn’t so long ago you put me on an airplane ostensibly for dinner and landed me far enough away from the scene of the crime to make me a fugitive from justice, if now you have me in a sailboat, do you mean to flee the country with me?”

  “Damn,” said Fletch at the tiller. “You caught me. You penetrated my purposeful plot.”

  Moxie’s eyes were full of the sunlight reflected from the sea. “I’ve always heard Cuba is a gorgeous country.”

  Up to that point, they had said little to each other.

  They had walked to a Cuban-American restaurant and had a quiet breakfast. Some of the people there had recognized Moxie and smiled at her in a friendly way and kept their dignity by otherwise leaving her alone. During breakfast, Moxie wondered aloud if Stella Littleford would have a scar on her forehead forever and Fletch said he thought Stella had suffered a concussion as well because there had been quite a lot of rum in the bottle that had hit her. The senora of that restaurant made a picnic lunch for them and put it in a cardboard box. Fletch also bought a six-pack of cold soft drinks.

  They walked the long way around, along the water, until they came to a beach where Fletch rented a catamaran. He put the food and the drinks aboard. Boys on the beach helped them push the catamaran into the surf. Fletch boosted Moxie aboard and then climbed aboard himself.

  The process of launching put enough water in the bottom of the boat to soak the cardboard picnic box. Moxie showed Fletch the soggy box as he was finding the wind and beginning to sail on it and they laughed. She rescued the sandwiches and the fruit and rolled the box into a ball and dropped it into the bottom of the boat.

  Moxie was wearing her bikini and she removed the top but she kept herself more or less in the shade of the sail. She said, “Talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “Something nice, please.”

  “Edith Howell says if you’re not talking you’re dead, or something.”

  “If Edith Howell ever stopped talking everyone else would die. Of shock.”

  “She has her eyes on your father’s millions.”

  Moxie snorted. “Millions of empty cognac bottles. She’s welcome to ’em.” She put herself on her side and trailed her fingers in the water. “Talk to me about something nice. Like how come you’re so rich.”

  “You’re asking me if I’m rich?”

  “Well, you’re not working. You have that nice place in Italy.”

  “That’s sort of a rude question, from a girl I just met.”

  “I know. Answer me anyway.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got all day.”

  “It’s sort of an impossible story to tell. In detail.”

  “Did you do something wrong, Fletch? Are you a crook?”

  “Who, me? No. I don’t think so.”

  “What happened?”

  “Not much. One night I found myself alone in a room with a lot of cash. The cash was there because I had been hired to do a bad thing. I had not done the bad thing. But the bad thing had happened anyway. Coincidentally.”

  “Boy, why don’t you spare me a few details?”

  “I told you it’s a long story.”

  “So you took the money…”

  “I had to. Leaving it there would have embarrassed people. It would have raised questions.”

  “Robbery as an act of kindness?”

  “I thought so at the time.”

  “What did you do with the money?”

  “I didn’t know what to do with it. I had never been very good with money.”

  “No foolin’. I remember the time…”

  “What time?”

  “Forget it. I’m still mad.”

  “There should never be money between friends.”

  “That’s it,” said Moxie. “There wasn’t any. Unfortunately, you had invited me to one of Los Angeles’ most posh eateries.”

  “Oh. That time.”

 
“That time.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting my watch back sometime. The one the restaurant took.”

  “A Piaget, wasn’t it?”

  “With little diamonds.”

  Fletch asked, “What time is it?”

  She put herself on her stomach. “Who cares?”

  Fletch said: “Exactly.”

  Moxie inhaled slowly and exhaled with a great sigh. “Oh, Fletch. Oh, Fletch—you never change.”

  He smiled at her, showing her all his front teeth. “I just get better.”

  “Worse. So what did you do with all this money you stole?”

  “I didn’t steal it.”

  “It just fell into your lap.”

  “Something like that. Long story. The money was on its way to South America, see, so I went with it. I’m very big on seeing actions completed. Essential to my psyche.”

  “Then how come you haven’t finished writing the biography of Edgar Arthur Tharp?”

  “I’m working on it. I was in South America. I didn’t know what to do with the money. Maybe I felt a little badly about having it. Maybe I was trying to get rid of it. So I bought gold with it.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I did.”

  “And the price of gold shot up?”

  “Someone mentioned that to me. In a bar. So I felt worse. I got rid of the gold. Quick. Yuck. I hated the oil companies, thought they were given’ the world a royal screwin’, they were bound to get their comeuppance—”

  “So you put your money into oil companies?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “And their value shot up?”

  “So I heard. That made me feel worse.”

  “I can believe.”

  “I got rid of that yucky stuff as quick as I could. I’ve done terribly.”

  “And where’s the money now?”

  “Well, I decided my investment policy wasn’t very sound. Very responsible. You know what I mean? I had been buying things I didn’t like.”

  “So you decided to buy things you did like?”