by Dorsey, Tim
Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Lee “Southpaw” Barnes lit a Pall Mall. Milton “Bananas” Foster kept saying, “I got a baaaaaad feeling about this mission!”
Marilyn Sebastian was turned on as William “The Truth” Honeycutt beat the crud out of a vending machine whose corkscrew didn’t drop his Jujyfruit.
“Nine-letter word beginning with G for a colorless syrup used in food preservation and skin lotions,” said weather officer “Tiny” Baxter.
“Glycerine,” said Major Larry “Montana” Fletcher, and Baxter leaned over and jotted in his newspaper.
An oscillating siren went off. The crew jumped up and ran out the door and across the runway in their flight suits.
When they got inside the plane, most were stunned to see three dozen old men with white beards sitting on a long bench in the cargo bay, wearing parachutes and drinking beer.
“Jumpin’ Jesus!” said Barnes. “I’m not believin’ my motherfuckin’ eyes!”
“Easy now. Everything will be all right,” said Montana. “This has all been officially approved by headquarters. These are the Flying Hemingways.”
“The what?”
“You’ve heard of the Flying Elvises? Same thing, only different.”
“Those were professional skydivers who dressed like Elvis. But these guys—” They all turned to see the Look-Alikes chugging beer, bumping into each other, farting and belching in graded octaves like a pipe organ.
“These orders come from the top,” said Montana. “PR duty just like when we do flyovers for air shows, holidays and funerals of large political donors. Before we do recon on the hurricane, we’re supposed to fly over the beach and drop the Hemingways as the entertainment for something called the Proposition 213 Jamboree.”
“What’s that?”
“No idea. But the mayor of a place called Beverly Shores apparently has a lot of clout. He pulled the strings.”
Twenty minutes later, they were at ten thousand feet, almost directly over the Proposition 213 stage. The back gate of the Hercules dropped open. A green light in the cargo bay came on. The Hemingways struggled to their feet and clipped their static lines to an overhead cable. They were pressed together in a tight line, with only seconds to all get out of the plane once the signal was given. Jumpmaster Jethro Maddox stood by the open doorway and gave the high sign. The line began to move. He smacked each on the butt as they ran past and dove out of the plane. “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!…”
It was not a precision team, and by the sixth jumper their legs tangled and they started going down in a chain reaction. A few at the front made it out of the plane, but the rest of the line snarled, and the Look-Alikes toppled over on the floor into a big blob like a single brainless organism, a giant polyp of Papa-plasm. Honeycutt radioed Montana what was going on, and Montana pulled the nose of the Hercules up as high as he could, pouring the rest of the Hemingways out the back of the plane like a margarita.
They left the Hercules at all angles, on top of each other, arms and legs spindling. Down at the rally, spectators watched with binoculars. It looked like the jump the night before D day, when bad weather sprayed the pre-invasion force all over the countryside, everywhere but the target. Some Hemingways landed hundreds of yards out in the Gulf, others on the boulevard and in the shopping plazas. One chute snagged on a sailboat mast. Another Hemingway came down behind the walls of a N.O.W. retreat and was beaten severely. Jethro Maddox ended up hanging from the tallest palm tree on the grounds of Hammerhead Ranch. He pedaled his legs in the air until he was exhausted. Then he began consuming the six-pack that was stored in the pack usually reserved for the emergency chute. He fell asleep in his harness.
An hour later, The Rapacious Reno was somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. “You can’t fly for shit,” Barnes told Montana. “And another thing…”
Montana held a hand up for Barnes to be silent as weather officer Baxter called the pilot over the intercom. Montana turned the plane over to Barnes and joined Baxter at the weather console. They studied the instruments with concern.
Baxter looked up. “Sir, we have a change of direction in the storm.”
“Better call Miami,” said Montana. “Give ’em the news.”
Due to global warming, El Niña, La Niña, and a host of end-of-the-millennium volcanic eruptions, mud slides and biblical floods, the National Hurricane Center in Miami was only mildly surprised that a catastrophic hurricane had caromed ninety degrees and was about to make landfall. Officials at the center got a late jump reacting, but quickly made up time and issued the warning. Along Florida’s west coast, every major television and radio station put out the word that a force-four hurricane was hooking right into Tampa Bay.
Except one.
At Florida Cable News, things hadn’t gone so well during Toto II’s second day on the job. The dog had been dressed in the uniform of a Tampa Bay Lightning hockey player, and the crew had worked much of the morning trying to get it to hold the miniature hockey stick. Just before airtime, a stagehand wrapped a rubber band several times around the stick and Toto II’s right front paw.
Instead of doing the weather dance, Toto spent the better part of the segment trying to chew his leg off.
“He looks like he’s in a lot of pain,” said the anchorwoman.
“No, no, no!” weatherman Guy Rockney said with a chuckle. “He wants to play hockey! He’s trying to get a better grip on the stick.”
“His paw is turning blue!” said the woman. “Help him!”
“You’re overreacting,” said Rockney. He attempted to prop the dog up and make it dance like a marionette on top of the anchor desk.
“Guy, what’s the forecast?” said the annoyed male anchor, watching the production clock.
“Oh, everything will be fine. Sunny. Lots of sun,” Rockney said without looking up from Toto II, who finally bit Rockney between the thumb and forefinger.
“Owww! Dammit!” said Rockney, and he grabbed Toto II by the hair on the back of his neck and snapped his head back. Toto growled and yelped, and Rockney said “Fuck” on the air. He struggled with the dog and fell off his chair, and they both disappeared behind the anchor desk, where there was more growling and cursing. The anchorman dropped his face into his hands; the anchorwoman froze with her mouth open. The station’s switchboard lit up.
Three dark government sedans raced in single file across the state on Interstate 4 toward Tampa Bay. The occupants wore suits, sunglasses. Stern faces, nobody spoke.
Lenny and Serge made their standard supply run to Island Grocery in the afternoon, oblivious to the hurricane fear gripping the rest of the population.
“What’s happening?” said Lenny, standing in an aisle, looking at the empty shelves. “It’s like communism!”
Canned goods, bottled water, potato chips—all gone. Lenny whimpered when he saw the empty beer section.
“We better get moving,” said Serge. They drove to the mainland and hit three grocery stores, but the story was the same. They kept driving around.
“We’re in luck!” said Serge, pointing. “The video store’s still open.”
Lenny hit the brakes and swung into the parking lot.
The place was empty, and the pair had their pick of movies. Serge grabbed Palmetto, Strip Tease, Out of Sight, The Mean Season, Ruby in Paradise, Body Heat, Some Like It Hot and Key Largo.
“This is great!” said Serge. “All Florida, from camp to classic.”
They jumped in Lenny’s Cadillac and headed back to the island. Nobody was going in their direction—everyone was coming the other way over the bridge, the cars in a solid line, standing still. People got out of their vehicles to see the cause of the holdup. Someone’s car had stalled at the foot of the bridge. Over the driver’s protests, six people pushed the vehicle off the road and it rolled down the embankment into the water. The driver yelled. A weeping woman held a swaddled infant on the shoulder of the causeway. The car was full of clothes and personal belongings that floated up in the
passenger compartment as the water line rose in the car. Then just the top of the roof showed, and a bunch of bubbles, and it went under. The traffic resumed without a skipped note, indifferent to the stranded family.
“I smell panic,” said Serge. “These are different animals now. They’re starting to winnow out the weak at the fringe of the herd. We need to hurry or this could affect our snack situation.”
“Affirmative,” said Lenny, and he accelerated. They raced around to convenience stores, grabbing whatever was left, packs of cheese and crackers, Fiddle Faddle, fortune cookies.
They tooled along the Gulf Coast, bobbing their heads to the radio, riding the now.
Serge suddenly bolted up in his seat, and tremors made high-frequency waves in his cheeks. Spitfoam bubbled at the corners of his mouth.
“What’s wrong?” Lenny asked. Serge couldn’t answer, and Lenny pulled over and made an emergency stop on top of a stray cat.
Serge looked like he might be swallowing his tongue, so Lenny grabbed his head and started jimmying his clenched jaws with the car keys. Serge’s muscles began to uncoil and the spell soon passed. Lenny released.
Serge returned to normal and looked around as if he had been rudely awakened.
“What was that?” asked Lenny.
“Flashback.”
“Vietnam?”
“No. The Garo Yepremian pass.”
Lenny quickly remembered and shook with the willies.
“The game was in the bag!” said Serge. “Fourteenzip in the fourth quarter—I was dick-dancin’ on broken glass…”
“We still won,” said Lenny. “Let it go.”
Serge reached in his pocket and pulled out the crack vial that had stored his street tranquilizers. “I’m all out.”
“You want me to try to find a drug hole or maybe break into a veterinary clinic?”
“No way,” said Serge. “This is the only way to experience a natural disaster—throw a little schizophrenia in the soup.”
As they drove, they saw plywood up everywhere. A few people sat outside in chairs and cradled rifles and shotguns, ready for the early-bird looters. It was getting lonely and eerie, like one of those bad sixties sci-fi movies Serge had seen as a child, life after the nuclear war.
Some people had spray-painted the numbers of their insurance policies on the plywood. Others wrote messages directed at the hurricane itself: “Go away, Rolando-berto!”
“Who’s picking the names for these storms?” said Lenny.
There were no other cars anymore, and Serge and Lenny continued on toward the motel, sitting low, rocking out to Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” blasting from the stereo and echoing off the empty buildings, the only sound in the streets.
When Lenny and Serge made it back from the supply run, Florida Cable News was playing on the television over the bar. But everyone in The Florida Room was facing the other way, looking out the windows at the purple sky and the pounding surf rolling in from the Gulf. The waves were enormous and the largest splashed near the back steps of the bar.
“You think something’s going on we haven’t heard about?” asked Lenny. “A tropical storm or maybe a hurricane?”
“No way,” said Art Tweed, pointing back at the bar. “We’ve had the TV on all day. They would have said something.”
So all they did was close the shutters on the windward side and devote themselves to the haste of drinking that accompanies inclement weather at a tropical resort.
An hour later, however, they could ignore the signs no longer. They were faced with the most accurate predictor yet of hurricane landfall.
The surfers showed up.
30
Today the hurricane arrived.
Events stacked up fast, and suddenly it was too late.
It began dark, breezy and chilly. Looked awful but no serious wind yet. Then, in the span of a minute, a stinging rain came onshore and the shallow area of the beach began to roil with whitecaps. The wind increased unevenly. It moved onto land in a series of body-punching gusts. People can brace and still walk against a steady wind, but the sudden bursts caught a dozen guests at Hammerhead Ranch between buildings and made them stumble like they were drunk.
The surfers were swept out to sea, cheering with delight.
Lenny wandered stoned out of the bar and across the parking lot, staring up at the dark sky. Just then, three black sedans with NASA emblems on the doors raced down Gulf Boulevard and whipped into the parking lot of Hammerhead Ranch.
All the sedans’ doors opened at once, and a platoon of G-men in mirror sunglasses jumped out. Dark suits, white shirts, wires running from tiny transistor earphones into their collars.
“We’re looking for Lenny Lippowicz.”
“You found him.”
Lenny was gang-tackled.
“Where’s our moon rock?” They stuffed him inside the lead sedan and drove away.
The wind increased.
Some motel guests jumped in cars and tried to get off the island, but the bridges were barricaded and it was a challenge getting back, their cars pushed sideways lane to lane. A power line popped loose and snaked and sparked at a bus stop. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the load, and the faint outline of large objects started moving across the road. A blow-up kiddie pool sailed in front of a car like a flying saucer. The cloth awning from the entrance of a pizza restaurant came off, aluminum frame and all, and tumbled across Gulf Boulevard. Crazy stuff suddenly appeared out of the blinding rain, plastered on the windshields. Shoe insole, Turkish menu, colostomy bag, Hemingway.
One of the guests missed the driveway and struck a sign support at Hammerhead Ranch. He jumped out of the car, left it running and sprinted for the motel. The rest of the guests were already barricading the rooms. They slid dressers to the doors and pulled mattresses off the box springs, leaning them against the windows. The electrical fuses blew in sequence like a zipper, with a loud pow-pow-pow. The lights went on and off several times and then out for good.
Zargoza and his men stacked steel desks along the western side of the boiler room, trying not to show fear. City and Country hid in their closet. The International Olympic Committee was jammed into another room, praying in a symphony of tongues. Art Tweed stood in an open doorway, watching the storm approach, not afraid to die.
In room one, Serge chomped with appetite from the bag of fortune cookies. “What a rush!”
The door of room ten was barricaded with cardboard boxes containing thousands of zebra-striped beepers. Huddled in the bathroom were the Diaz Boys, except for Juan, who was curled on the floor outside the door holding a metal garbage can lid for a shield.
Juan pounded on the locked door. “C’mon, let me in!”
“No room.”
“It’s because I’m the cousin, isn’t it?”
“Ridiculous!”
Twenty minutes after the first gusts, everyone was packed in tight wherever they had decided to ride it out. Some sat with knees up against their chests, rocking nervously. It was five P.M. and pitch black. Without power there wasn’t just no light, but no artificial noise—no TV or air-conditioning, no radio, no hum of electronic anything. Nobody was talking either. Nothing left to do but hang on. The wind howled against the building and the trees, and waves slapped the pylons of The Florida Room down on the beach. Every few seconds the noise of something unidentified breaking or snapping off was heard in the distance—people in the rooms trying to identify the sound of what just went. The concrete construction of Hammerhead Ranch inspired confidence, but the building was still producing far too many noises for anyone to relax. It didn’t sound like something of cement, more like a wooden ship. There was a rolling, creaking sound—twenty carpenters with claw hammers slowly prying galvanized nails out of soft pine. Glass broke and then a scream—the window in someone else’s room giving out.
It was Johnny Vegas’s room, and the scream was from the beautiful naked woman who ran in the bathroom, refused to come out and started cr
ying.
Hammerhead Ranch was in the worst possible location. The center of Hurricane Rolando-berto was coming ashore fifteen miles north at the Pasco County line. As the storm spun counterclockwise, the deadliest bands of wind tightened and whipped around from the southeast corner of the system right into Hammerhead Ranch. The creaking of the building increased, and more glass shattered. The wind rushed around the motel and jammed up under the eaves. The sound was a roar now, and attention stayed on the windows. Once the glass goes, the hurricane is inside the room, and everything becomes a missile. The panes of rooms thirteen and fourteen shattered, and books and cups and letter trays assaulted Zargoza and his goons. There was a final crash-bang drumroll, and the roof peeled off the motel like the tongue of an old boot. It hung straight up for a second, the guests staring into the sky in disbelief. Then it cracked in half and the top part did a backflip into the side of the condominium next door. Two more gusts and the rest was gone too.
Now everyone was trapped in their rooms by their own barricades, and they tore at the desks, tables, dressers, chairs and mattresses blocking the exits. The same idea hit everyone at the same time: Get to the bar!
The bartender was already inside, quaking in the kitchen. The shutters were fastened hard, and he had no way of seeing the wave of refugees heading his way. Zargoza was first to arrive, and he didn’t mess with preliminaries. He blew the lock with a .44.
The guests piled in, and Serge and Zargoza slid an arcade game in front of the door. Some of the guests had quieted down, some still whining, many clearly a short push away from a total crack-up.
Serge took charge.
“Please calm down,” he said, confidently strolling to the middle of the room. “I want everyone to just chill. What happened to the motel is not going to happen here. This place was built like Gibraltar. The wood’s half petrified. It’s heavy as lignum vitae—some of it won’t even float anymore. Those joists are true four-by-sixes, and the builders cross-nailed it for extra strength. Look at this…”—he walked over and pointed up at the angle joints where the roof met a corner of the room—“…this is ship construction. It’s meant to survive storms at sea, so I think it’s a safe bet it’ll make it on land. You don’t need to worry at all. We got our own generator out here and some stored water. We’re in good shape….”
