FSF, July-August 2010

by Spilogale Authors

  "See you guys tomorrow,” I said, unsteadily rising.

  "No,” said Ted, surprising me. “We'll see you tonight, at the museum."

  "You're going out? After this?" I pointed at the bent gate.

  "Yes by God, I am. I said I'd make a pitch for those crippled blind kids with AIDS and I'm gonna do it. And no fucking demon's gonna stop me."

  I was impressed by that little speech. Not only by what he said, but the way he said it. This had become a guy with—as we used to say, back when I was a small Irish Cracker child growing up on the edge of the Everglades—sand in his craw. He still didn't have the F-word perfect, because he kept the g on the end, which made it sound a mite prissy. But he was headed in the right direction.

  He got up, adjusted his pants, and walked me to my car. There he became somewhat emotional, wringing my hand and muttering, “Manny, I just want to say thanks. Thanks for—for everything."

  I thought he was going to hug me. But he didn't, just gave me a blissful smile and turned back. And hey, I didn't mean to make a pun, but looks like I just made one, anyway. After all his troubles with Mr. Wrong, I really hoped that Ted had finally found Mr. Right.

  * * * *

  Yet I was worried about him leaving his fortress, especially at night. So I rang Tony Dantoni over at Crocodile and asked if, as a fourth-generation Sicilian immigrant, he happened to have a lupara lying around the house somewhere.

  He said sure. It was kind of a family heirloom.

  "Well, how about loaning it to me tonight? Dance insists on going to this goddamn ball, and the guy who's guarding him might need a weapon with real stopping power."

  He said no problem—great old piece, load it with buckshot and it would stop Godzilla. I asked him to drop it by Ted's mansion, a place he knew well, having killed Zane Cord in the patio. I did some desultory work, then went home, slept off the rest of the gin, and woke up in time to get dressed for the ball.

  By then Shelley had arrived, lugging boxes. I was curious what she'd decided we should dress up as. Turned out I was a Spanish conquistador and she was an Indian maiden. “That means I get to rape, rob, and enslave you,” I pointed out, while buckling on my armor. “That's the Florida story in a nutshell."

  "You try it, Don Manfredo,” she replied, testing the edge of her tomahawk, “and you'll be missing more than just your scalp."

  At seven o'clock I guided Sacajawea through the back door of the museum, clanking with every step I took. The costume included a cape, so I was able to keep my Beretta concealed in a holster tucked in the small of my back. Generally speaking, I don't like getting nudged in the kidneys, but that night it felt fine. In the atrium, the caterers had finished loading up tables with every fat shrimp the Gulf Stream could spare, so we sampled them, plus oysters in little toasted shells and chunks of steamship round and crudités that made me feel virtuous and healthy while eating raw broccoli with ten thousand calories of garlic-mayonnaise dip.

  We were still chewing when Jonas Whelk arrived, wearing an outfit that was supposed to make him look like Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow. The resemblance wasn't close, despite the cutlass banging at his knees and a wild bunch of fake hair on and around his sallow face. Ignoring Shelley, he told me the Governor and Dolly Lama and Art News had sent regrets, but he still hoped for Chelsea Varoom, who was more famous than all the rest put together. He bustled off to greet some new arrivals, and Shelley asked, “Is that the scumbag you work for?"

  "That's him."

  "I never realized before what you go through to get me that M.A."

  People began entering in a swarm. Their costumes formed a pretty good cross section of Florida's last 495 years as a colony, first of Madrid, then of London, and finally of New York. I noticed Spanish grandees, women in spectacular hoopskirts, planters in white linen, Indian braves, and tons of conquistadors, so I didn't have to feel lonely in my aluminum armor. Confederate officers and their adoring Scarletts recalled the state's brief, unhappy fling with secession. Modern times were represented by people dressed as orange juice cartons and a couple of dozen Mickey and Minnie Mice from DisneyWorld. Astroguys and astrogals were all over the place, making sure Cape Canaveral wasn't forgotten.

  I was watching Whelk gladhand the guests when somebody jogged my elbow. I turned and did a double take, because Jonas seemed to be in two places at the same time. Then I saw that this time the guy with the leather britches and fake beard was Bliss. A wig of long greasy-looking black ringlets covered his blond hair.

  "Howja like my getup, sir?"

  "You look a lot more like a pirate than Whelk does. And that's weird,” I mused, “because he really is a pirate, and you're not."

  Bliss was wearing Tony Dantoni's lupara as part of his costume. The shotgun had a pistol grip and its sawed-off double barrels were only two feet long. Hanging by his side in a leather sling, it made a fairly convincing pirate gun, if you didn't look too close.

  I asked, “Where's Ted?"

  Bliss grinned. “Over there in the crowd, sir. See if you can spot him.” I peered, but couldn't.

  "At first Ted was gonna wear this outfit I got on,” he explained. “But it's got bad memories, because Zane Cord picked it out for him last year when they were going to Mardi Gras. So he gave it to me and came as something else."

  I was still staring at the throng, trying to find Ted. “He must be really got up. I've known him for over twenty years, and I don't see him."

  "Took him like three hours to get dressed. It's something he said he's always wanted to do, but never had the balls before. He said when he realized he might die any day he began to figure, what the hell, it's now or never."

  "Well, keep an eye on him. I've got the whole damn building to watch, and if the action at the bars is any guide"—there were five of them, spotted around the atrium—"I'll soon have a couple hundred drunks on my hands, too."

  "Don't worry, Mr. Riordan. I been wanting to tell you, I'm resigning from Five Star at the end of the month. Ted's gonna be my meal ticket, besides everything else, so I'll watch him real good."

  "You moving in with him?"

  He nodded. “My wife won't like it, but that's tough."

  "You got a wife?"

  "And two kids. In Tallahassee. Ted's agreed I can spend a week every month with them. He says it'll give him a chance to get some work done."

  "You're a busy young man, Bliss."

  "It's a full life, sir."

  At this point a Dixieland band that Whelk had stowed on the mezzanine broke into Muskrat Ramble, or one of the three hundred other tunes that sound exactly like Muskrat Ramble. Shelley emerged from the crowd, grabbed my arm and demanded we dance. I told her maybe later but not right now.

  "This may be fun and games for you, Honey, but I'm on duty. Why don't you find Ted and dance with him? He's a helluva lot better at it than I am, anyway."

  "I can't dance with him. Not with that costume he's wearing."

  "What cost—"

  I'd gotten just that far when the screaming started.

  * * * *

  My right hand went to the grip of the Beretta, while my left was pushing Shelley behind me. Conquistadors, Scarletts, Indians, orange juice cartons, spacepersons, all began scattering like a school of mackerel before a hammerhead shark.

  As the crowd parted I saw what had just come through the bronze doors. It wasn't exactly surprising, but by God it was appalling. Wrapped in a filthy sheet and preceded by a smell that could have tarnished silver, Zane Cord stumbled into the atrium. His skin was the oil-slick color of an old bruise, his face was starting to slide off its bony framework, and he had a black hole right in the middle of his forehead that appeared to contain maggots. But his boiled-egg eyes turned two shiny metallic-looking irises from side to side as if they could still see. Jonas Whelk was standing in his gladhanding position near the doors, lower jaw at half-mast, when the thing spotted his pirate costume and went for him with hands that were mostly green flesh and white bones.

&n
bsp; Everything was happening quick, too quick—I had the Beretta out now and clanked a couple of steps forward, but Bliss got there first, pulling the lupara from its sling. It had double hammers and through the screams and the notes of Muskrat Ramble I heard the two sharp clicks as he cocked it. Jonas didn't hear anything, because Zane Cord had grabbed him by the throat and wrung his long neck like a chicken's and flung him aside with such power that his body slid across the smooth marble, dragging part of the red carpet with it.

  Then Zane turned on Bliss, the next nearest guy whose costume meant he might be Ted Dance. By now everybody else was out of the line of fire, and the lupara let off two enormous echoing booms. The buckshot punched Zane Cord in the middle and he exploded wetly, screaming once as he came apart—the damndest noise I ever heard, like the shriek of a bandsaw hitting a knot in a pine log, then snapping with the twang of an enormous banjo string.

  The echoes died away. Several people fainted, as they had every right to do. Shelley stayed upright, but leaned on my shoulder pretty hard, and since my own knees were feeling wobbly, we kind of propped each other up for a few seconds. We were still recovering when out of the crowd emerged a very tall lady of Spain—hoops, veil, silken mantilla—and circled the mess in the middle of the floor, somewhat wobbly on her clicking stiletto heels. She touched Bliss on the shoulder, raised her veil, and kissed him.

  "You know,” Shelley whispered, “I really think Ted's been wanting to dress up like that, ever since the old days at Walt Whitman."

  There was a messy aftermath to that messy night. The police were informed by the M.E. that at the time of his disintegration Zane had already been dead for quite a while. So who broke Jonas Whelk's neck? And why were a whole roomful of witnesses lying to them about what had happened?

  Blah, blah, blah. Shelley and I and Bliss and Ted got out of it by telling the inquisitors, on legal advice, exactly what we'd seen and refusing to draw any conclusions whatever. Chelsea Varoom never had to testify, because she was stuck in rehab, and the Dolly Lama and the Governor, I'm sure, felt they were well out of it all. In time so were the rest of us—the incident went on the shelf as one more cold case among many, and we stopped being grilled every day and got back to real life.

  It was maybe eighteen months later (Cinco de Mayo, I remember the date) when Shelley and I were invited over to Ted's for drinks. I presented him with Suzette the mastiff, who was getting old for guard duty and needed a good home. Of course she loved him—women always love Ted—and he scratched her ears while explaining that Bliss was away, indulging the flip side of his nature in romantic Tallahassee.

  Then us old school chums settled in comfortable chairs and started bringing ourselves up to date on what had happened since the night of the ball. We had lots to congratulate Ted on, because the buzz generated by his new novel Demon Lover pointed to a spectacular success in the making. He said Clive Barker wanted it for a movie, adding that he'd need the money because when he took on Bliss, turned out he took on the whole family as well. So far he'd paid for orthodontia for the kids and a hysterectomy for Mrs. B, to say nothing of Bliss's new wardrobe and an ‘09 Infiniti for him to commute in. When he left us to fetch munchies for dogs and people, Shelley sighed and shook her head.

  "Poor Ted. He always winds up getting exploited by those he loves."

  "On the other hand,” I pointed out, “he's rich and famous and lives exactly the way he wants to live. That's a lot more than most people can say."

  Shelley nodded. “He's surprising, isn't he? Most terribly successful people are a bunch of jerks. But he's not."

  Ted returned, carrying a tray loaded with caviar and Stolichnaya and a rawhide bone for Suzette. He explained that he'd given his staff the night off to go to the Latin festival, and anyway he always enjoyed serving his friends personally.

  That started a train of thought I wouldn't have wanted to share with my wife. While he piled crackers with pearly Beluga roe, I recalled a tutoring session back at old WW, when my thick head, confronted by Coriolanus, refused to function at all. Eventually Ted said, “You're all tensed up, Manny. I know what you need.” He did, too. Afterward, I went back to work a lot more relaxed and ready to learn. It was the kind of personal touch that made Ted a princess among men.

  I raised my Stoli to him, and the three of us clinked our glasses. “Thanks for proving,” I said in my warmest Father Flanagan voice, “that nice guys do finish first sometimes."

  Ted looked embarrassed, but also happy. He lowered his eyes and blushed and licked his lips, and I figured he was remembering, too.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Department: PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS: COUCH SURFING WITH MICKEY AND JUDY by Paul Di Filippo

  My host for the Boston portion of my self-organized book tour picked me up at South Station, on the edge of Chinatown. I climbed with gratitude into her car. Exhausted from the long overnight bus ride from Cleveland, I sagged for a moment wordlessly in my seat. But I quickly roused myself to sociability. After all, the whole point of this debilitating, humiliating roadtrip—an exigency I had been forced into by lack of publisher initiative or publicity budget—was to pitch my new novel, Black Swan Down, a thriller involving a rogue government statistician. And in order to pitch, I had to be upbeat and engaging. Besides, Judy and her husband Mickey were being good enough to put me up in their home. The least I could do was to make light conversation.

  "So, Judy,” I asked as we ascended a freeway ramp, “do you live right in the city?"

  Judy was somewhat older than I, late middle-age. She exhibited a serious mien, sensible haircut, and circumspect suburban clothing. Her voice was resonant and assured. “No, Mr. Lambeth, we live in Waltham. It's a nice town just outside Boston. Our place is very quiet and private."

  I was a little disappointed. I had expected a more urban setting for my readings, which were to take place in Judy's house. She seemed to sense my disconcerted state.

  "Oh, don't worry, Mr. Lambeth. Waltham's on the MBTA, and easily accessible. You'll get a big audience, I can guarantee. Plenty of students and their professors. Book groups and local writers. It's all in how the publicity is handled. Believe me, Mickey and I are old hands at this. We're very thorough. Posters, the internet, radio. You're not the first author we've hosted."

  I relaxed a little. “Call me Karl, please, Judy. And thanks again for agreeing to handle all the details of my reading."

  Judy smiled. “You can just relax now, Karl. You're in good hands. Why, Mickey's at home unpacking the box of your books that just arrived yesterday."

  With that good news, I allowed myself to close my eyes and drowse.

  In just a short time, I roused myself to witness Judy maneuvering the car into park at the end of a long driveway. The large Colonial house, well-maintained, stood some distance from any neighbors, who were further screened by trees and a tall fence around the property.

  "Let me help you with your bags, Karl."

  Judy took both my knapsack and my rolling suitcase.

  "Thanks. Be careful of my knapsack, please—it's got my phone and laptop inside."

  Judy and I entered a breezeway bridging the house proper on the right, and the adjacent garage. She opened the door on the left, and said, “In here, please, Karl."

  Slow-witted from fatigue, I did not think to ask why we were entering the garage. I stepped through the door, which quickly slammed behind me, and locked.

  Baffled, I looked around.

  The windowless space was outfitted like a youth hostel: bunkbeds, sink, dorm fridge, television, primitive but complete sanitary facilities. Several of the bunkbeds held other people. They smiled wanly at my appearance.

  "Mickey and Judy got another one,” said a young graceful woman.

  "I'll bet he's an economist,” said a tattooed guy. “Full of lectures on current affairs."

  "No, no, he's not quite dull-looking enough,” said a second woman with long Stevie Nicks hair. “I say he's a novelist."

  "Wh
at kind?"

  "Mainstream contemporary."

  "No, something genre—"

  "Stop!” I yelled. “Somebody please tell me what the hell is going on!"

  So they all did.

  Mickey and Judy were running a kind of permanent unlicensed Chautauqua out of their residence. A three-nights-a-week program of readings and entertainment, provided courtesy of the unpaid, indentured services rendered by visiting creative types such as myself and the others currently here—Judy, a folk singer; Raelynn, a dancer; Pete, a magician and sword-swallower; and Sam, a scientist from the Santa Fe Institute.

  "I just don't get it,” I said, massaging my aching head. “I'm already willing to talk for free. It's to my benefit. Why coerce me?"

  "Are you willing to stay in Boston for a month?” said Pete. “There are over half a million students in the greater metropolitan area, not to mention endless book clubs. How many people can see you if you do one or two readings? No, Judy and Mickey are experts at maximizing the draw and milking the audience. They've built up a huge clientele. And they charge admission! Five bucks a head. Plus money they earn on refreshments. They're clearing a couple of thousand a week!"

  "Pete—how long have you been locked up here?"

  "A month now. Why?"

  "A month! I can't stay here a month!"

  "You'll stay until you've exhausted your potential audience and aren't drawing anymore,” said Sam, the scientist. “The formula is a simple logarithm."

  "I'll refuse to perform!"

  Raelynn said, “Oh, you say that at first. We all said it. But the alternative is to remain locked up in this room. You'll go stir crazy. Besides, we all live for our art. We want an audience. You'll see."

  And so I did.

  The next morning was a Thursday, and we were roused early to rehearse.

  Mickey was tall and thin and reminded me of Basil Rathbone. He seemed sinewy and virile, and more than a match for me physically.