by Jay Hopler
When you’re a teenage buckaroo from Ocala, Florida, in London for the first time, where do you go? I went to the London Zoo. Okay, so I was a kid checking out the snakes and gators of my childhood. You learn to love a languid, ugly target.
I found myself in front of the reticulated python. This was one huge serpent. It squeezed out jaguars and crocodiles like dishrags. It was twenty-eight feet long and as thick as my waist, with a snout as long and wide as a croc’s. The scale of the thing was beyond impressive, beyond incredible. If you ever want to feel helpless or see what the odds look like when they’re stacked against you, imagine the embrace of the reticulated python. The tip of its tail at the far end of the concrete pool could have been in a different county. Its head was out of water, resting on the tub’s front edge. The head is what got me, that broad, patient, intelligent face, those eyes brown and passionless as all of Vietnam.
Dead rabbits were plowed in a corner. I felt nothing for the bunnies.
Then I noticed the snake shit. Python turds, dozens of turds, light as cork and thick as a tree, riding high in the water. Once you’d seen them, you couldn’t help thinking you’d smelled them all along. That’s what I mean about Florida, about all the hot-water ports like Bangkok, Manila and Bombay, living on water where the shit’s so thick it’s a kind of cash crop.
Behind me, one of those frosty British matrons whispered to her husband, “I didn’t know they did such things!”
“Believe it, Queenie,” I said.
That snake shit—all that coiled power—stays with me, always. That’s what happened to us in the paddy fields. We drowned in our shit. An inscrutable humanoid python sleeping on a bed of turds: that’s what I never want to be.
So I keep two things in mind nowadays. First, Florida was built for your pappy and grammie. I remember them, I was a kid here, I remember the good Florida when only the pioneers came down and it was considered too hot and wet and buggy to ever come to much. I knew your pappy and grammie, I mowed their lawn, trimmed their hedges, washed their cars. I toted their golf bags. Nice people—they deserved a few years of golf, a garden to show off when their kids came down to visit, a white car that justified its extravagant air conditioning and never seemed to get dirty. That’s the first thing about Florida; the nice thing. The second is this: Florida is run by locusts and behind them are sharks and even pythons and they’ve pretty well chewed up your mom and pop and all the other lawn bowlers and blue-haired ladies. On the outside, life goes on in Florida courtesy of middlemen who bring in things that people are willing to pay a premium to obtain.
Acapulco, Tijuana, Freeport, Miami—it doesn’t matter where the pimping happens. Mr. Vee in his nostalgic moments tells me Havana used to be like that, a city of touts and pimps—the fat young men in sunglasses parked at a corner in an idling Buick, waiting for a payoff, a delivery, a contact. Havana has shifted its corporate headquarters. Beirut has come west. And now, it’s Miami that gives me warm memories of always-Christmas Saigon.
It’s life in the procurement belt, between those lines of tropical latitudes, where the world shops for its illicit goods and dumps its surplus parts, where it prefers to fight its wars, and once you’ve settled into its give and take, you find it’s impossible to live anywhere else. It’s the coke-and-caffeine jangle of being seventeen and readier to kill than be killed and to know that Job One is to secure your objective and after that it’s unsupervised play till the next order comes down.
In this mood, and in a Civic newly liberated from a protesting coed, I am heading west out of Miami, thinking first of driving up to Pensacola when I am sideswiped off the highway. Two men get in the Civic. They sit on either side of me and light up cigarettes.
“Someone say something,” I finally say.
They riffle through the papers in the glove compartment. They quickly surmise that my name is not Mindy Robles. “We know all about this morning. Assault. Grand theft auto.”
“Let’s talk,” I say.
I wait for the rough stuff. When it comes, it’s an armlock on the throat that cuts air supply. When they let me speak, I cut a deal. They spot me for a vet; we exchange some dates, names, firefights. Turns out they didn’t like Mindy Robles, didn’t appreciate the pressure her old man tried to put on the police department. They look at our names—Robles and Marshall—and I can read their minds. We’re in some of these things together and no one’s linked me to Chavez—these guys are small time, auto-detail. They keep the car. They filch a wad of Mr. Vee’s bills, the wad I’d stuffed into my wallet. They don’t know there’s another wad of Mr. Vee’s money in a secret place. And fifty bucks in my boots.
Instead of an air-conditioned nighttime run up the Gulf coast, it’s the thumb on the interstate. I pass up a roadside rest area, a happy hunting ground for new cars and ready cash. I hitch a ride to the farthest cheap motel.
The first automobile I crouch behind in the dark parking lot of the Dunes Motel is an Impala with Alabama license plates. The next one is Broward County. Two more out-of-staters: Live Free or Die and Land of Lincoln. The farther from Florida the better for me. I look in the windows of the Topaz from New Hampshire. There’s a rug in the back seat, and under the rug I make out a shiny sliver of Samsonite. Maybe they’re just eating. Clothes hang on one side: two sports jackets for a small man or an adolescent, and what looks to me like lengths of silk. On the rearview minor, where you or I might hang a kid’s booties or a plastic Jesus and rosaries, is an alien deity with four arms or legs. I don’t know about borrowing this little beauty. These people travel a little too heavy.
The Dunes isn’t an absolute dump. The pool has water in it. The neon VACANCY sign above the door of the office has blown only one letter. The annex to the left of the office has its own separate entrance: SANDALWOOD RESTAURANT.
I stroke the highway dust out of my hair, so the office won’t guess my present automobileless state, tuck my shirt into my Levis and walk in from the parking lot. The trouble is there’s nobody behind the desk. It’s 11:03; late but not late enough for even a junior high jailbait nightclerk to have taken to her cot.
Another guest might have rung the bell and waited, or rung the bell and banged his fist on the counter and done some swearing. What I do is count on the element of surprise. I vault into the staff area and kick open a door that says: STRICTLY PRIVATE.
Inside, in a room reeking of incense, are people eating. There are a lot of them. There are a lot of little brown people sitting cross-legged on the floor of a regular motel room and eating with their hands. Pappies with white beards, grammies swaddled in silk, men in dark suits, kids, and one luscious jailbait in blue jeans.
They look at me. A bunch of aliens and they stare like I’m the freak.
One of the aliens tries to uncross his legs, but all he manages is a backward flop. He holds his right hand stiff and away from his body so it won’t drip gravy on his suit. “Are you wanting a room?”
I’ve never liked the high, whiny Asian male voice. “Let’s put it this way. Are you running a motel or what?”
The rest of the aliens look at me, look at each other, look down at their food. I stare at them too. They seem to have been partying. I wouldn’t mind a Jack Daniel’s and a plate of their rice and yellow stew stuff brought to me by room service in blue jeans.
“Some people here say we are running a ‘po-tel'” A greasy grin floats off his face. “Get it? My name is Patel, that’s P-A-T-E-L. A Patel owning a motel, get it?”
“Rich,” I say.
The jailbait springs up off the floor. With a gecko-fast tongue tip, she chases a gravy drop on her wrist. “I can go. I’m done.” But she doesn’t make a move. “You people enjoy the meal.”
The women jabber, but not in English. They flash gold bracelets. An organized raid could clean up in that room, right down to the rubies and diamonds in their noses. They’re all wrapped in silk, like brightly colored mummies. Pappy shakes his head, but doesn’t rise. “She eats like a bird. Who’ll ma
rry her?” he says in English to one of his buddies.
“You should advertise,” says the other man, probably the Living Free or Dying. They’ve forgotten me. I feel left out, left behind. While we were nailing up that big front door, these guys were sneaking in around back. They got their money, their family networks, and their secretive languages.
I verbalize a little seething, and when none of the aliens take notice, I dent the prefab wall with my fist. “Hey,” I yell. “I need a room for the night. Don’t any of you dummies speak American?”
Now she swings toward me apologetically. She has a braid that snakes all the way down to her knees. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” she says. She rinses gravy off her hands. “It’s our biggest family reunion to date. That’s why things are so hectic.” She says something about a brother getting married, leaving them short at the desk. I think of Jonda and the turbaned guy. He fired her when some new turbaned guy showed up.
“Let’s just go,” I say. “I don’t give a damn about reunions.” I don’t know where Jonda ended up. The Goldilocks doll wasn’t delivered to Laguna Vista Estates, though I had a welcome planned for it.
This kid’s got a ripe body. I follow the ripe body up a flight of outdoor stairs. Lizards scurry, big waterbugs drag across the landings.
“This is it,” she says. She checks the air-conditioning and the TV. She makes sure there are towels in the bathroom. If she feels a little uneasy being in a motel room with a guy like me who’s dusty and scruffy and who kills for a living, she doesn’t show it. Not till she looks back at the door and realizes I’m not carrying any bags.
She’s a pro. “You’ll have to pay in cash now,” she says. “I’ll make out a receipt.”
“What if I were to pull out a knife instead?” I joke. I turn slightly away from her and count the balance of Haysoos’s bills. Not enough in there, after the shakedown. The fifty stays put, my new nest egg. “Where were you born, honey? Bombay? I been to Bombay.”
“New Jersey,” she says. “You can pay half tonight, and the rest before you check out tomorrow. I am not unreasonable.”
“I’ll just bet you’re not. Neither am I. But who says I’m leaving tomorrow. You got some sort of policy?”
That’s when I catch the look on her face. Disgust, isn’t that what it is? Distaste for the likes of me.
“You can discuss that with my father and uncle tomorrow morning.” She sashays just out of my reach. She’s aiming to race back to the motel room not much different from this except that it’s jammed with family.
I pounce on Alice before she can drop down below, and take America with her. The hardware comes in handy, especially the kris. Alice lays hot fingers on my eyes and nose, but it’s no use and once she knows it, Alice submits.
I choose me the car with the Land of Lincoln plates. I make a double switch with Broward County. I drive the old Tamiami Trail across the remains of the Everglades. Used to be no cars, a narrow ridge of two-lane concrete with swamps on either side, gators sunning themselves by day, splattered by night. Black snakes and mocassins every few hundred yards. Clouds of mosquitoes.
This is what I’ve become. I want to squeeze this state dry and swallow it whole.
from THE BUTCHER’S BOY
Thomas Perry
1
The union meeting, thought Al Veasy, had gone as well as could be expected, all things considered. He had finally figured out why the retirement fund was in such trouble all the time, when everybody else in the whole country with anything to invest seemed to be making money. And he had explained what he knew, and the union members had understood it right away, because it wasn’t anything surprising if you read the newspapers. The big unions had been getting caught in similar situations for years. Low-interest loans to Fieldston Growth Enterprises—hell of an impressive name, but zero return so far on almost five million dollars. If the company was as bad as it looked, there would be no more Fieldston than there was growth. Just a name and a fancy address. When the union started to apply pressure some lawyer nobody ever heard of would quietly file bankruptcy papers. Probably in New York or someplace where it would take weeks before the union here in Ventura, California, heard of it. Just a notice by certified mail to O’Connell, the president of the union local, informing him of the dissolution of Fieldston Growth Enterprises and the sale of its assets to cover debts. And O’Connell, the big dumb bastard, would bring it to Veasy for translation. “Hey, Al,” he would say, “take a look at this,” as though he already knew what it meant but felt it was his duty to let somebody else see the actual document. Not that it would do anybody any good by then.
Or now either. That was the trouble and always had been. Veasy could feel it as he walked away from the union hall, still wearing his clodhopper boots and a work shirt that the sweat had dried on hours ago. He could smell himself. The wise guys in their perfectly fitted three-piece suits and their Italian shoes always ended up with everything. The best the ordinary working man could hope for was sometimes to figure out how they’d done it, and then make one or two of them uncomfortable. Slow them down was what it amounted to. If it hadn’t been Fieldston Growth Enterprises it would have been something else that sounded just as substantial and ended up just the same. The money gone and nobody, no person, who could be forced to give it back.
He kicked at a stone on the gravel parking lot. There probably wasn’t even any point in going to the government about it. The courts and the bureaucrats and commissions. Veasy snorted. All of them made up of the same wise guys in the three-piece suits, so much alike you couldn’t tell them from each other or from the crooks, except maybe the crooks were a little better at it, at getting money without working for it, and they smiled at you. The ones in the government didn’t even have to smile at you, because they’d get their cut of it no matter what. But hell, what else could you do? You had to go through the motions. Sue Fieldston, just so it got on the record. A little machinists’ union local in Ventura losing 70 percent of its pension fund to bad investments. It probably wouldn’t even make the papers. But you had to try, even if all you could hope for was to make them a little more cautious next time, a little less greedy so they wouldn’t try to take it all. And maybe make one or two of them sweat a little.
Veasy opened the door of his pickup truck and climbed in. He sat there for a minute, lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and blew a puff out the window. “Jesus,” he thought. “Nine o’clock. I wonder if Sue kept dinner for me.” He looked at the lighted doorway of the union hall, where he could see the men filing out past the bulky shape of O’Connell, who was smiling and slapping somebody on the back. He would be saying something about how we don’t know yet and that it’s too early to panic. That’s right, you big dumb bastard, thought Veasy. Keep calm, and you’ll never know what hit you.
Veasy turned the key in the ignition and the whole world turned to fire and noise. The concussion threw O’Connell back against the clapboards of the union hall and disintegrated the front window. Then the parking lot was bathed in light as the billowing ball of flame tore up into the sky. Afterward a machinist named Lynley said pieces of the pickup truck went with it, but O’Connell said there wasn’t anything to that. People always said things like that, especially when somebody actually got killed. Sure was a shame, though, and it was bad enough without making things up.
2
“Here’s the daily gloom,” said Padgett, tossing the sheaf of computer printouts on Elizabeth’s desk. “Early today, and you’re welcome to it.”
“Thanks,” said Elizabeth, not looking up from her calculations. She was still trying to figure out how that check had bounced. Even if the store had tried to cash it the next morning, the deposit should have been there at least twelve hours before. Eight fifteen, and the bank would open at nine thirty. She made a note to call. It was probably the post office, as usual. Anybody who couldn’t deliver a piece of mail across town in two days ought to get into another business. They had sure delivered the notice o
f insufficient funds fast enough. One day.
Elizabeth put the checkbook and notice back in her purse and picked up the printout. “All those years of school for this,” she thought. “Reading computerized obituaries for the Department of Justice for a living, and lucky to get it.”
She started at the first sheet, going through the items one by one. “De Vitto, L. G. Male. Caucasian. 46. Apparent suicide. Shotgun, 12 gauge. Toledo, Ohio. Code number 79-8475.” She marked the entry in pencil, maybe just because of the name that could mean Mafia, and maybe just because it was the first one, and the other prospects might be even less likely.
“Gale, D. R. Female. Caucasian. 34. Apparent murder. Revolver, .38. Suspects: Gale, P. G., 36; no prior arrests. Wichita, Kansas, code number 79-8476.” No, just the usual thing, thought Elizabeth. Family argument and one of them picks up a gun. She went on down the list, searching for the unusual, the one that might not be one of the same old things.
“Veasy, A. E. Male. Caucasian. 35. Apparent murder. Dynamite. Ventura, California. Code number 79-8477.” Dynamite? Murder by dynamite? Elizabeth marked this one. Maybe it wasn’t anything for the Activity Report, but at least it wasn’t the predictable, normal Friday night’s random violence.
“Satterfield, R. J. Male. Afro-American. 26. Apparent murder/ robbery. Revolver, .32. Washington, D.C. Code number 79-8478.” No.
“Davidson, B. L. Female. Caucasian. 23. Apparent murder/ rape. Knife. Carmel, California. Code number 79-8479.” No again.
Down the printout she went, letting the sheets fall in front of her desk to re-form themselves into an accordion shape on the floor. Now and then she would make a check mark with her pencil beside an entry that didn’t fall into the ten or twelve most common murder patterns. It was Monday, so she had to work fast to catch up. One thing Elizabeth had learned on this job was that a lot of people killed each other on weekends.
