Sick Puppy (3 page)

How come you don’t believe we got our load hijacked! one of them exclaimed.

Because it’s ridiculous, said Tia.

Really it was more of a trade, said one of his pals. The young man give us three grand cash and the use of his pickup and told us to meet back here in a hour.

Tia flared her eyebrows. This total stranger, he hands you three thousand bucks and drives off in a—

All fifties, one of the men said, waving a handful of bills. A grand each!

Tia, giggling through the handkerchief: You guys are seriously fulla shit.

No, ma’am, we ain’t. We might smell like we are, but we ain’t.

The one waving the fattest wad was talking loudest. What we told you, he said, that’s the honest-to-God truth of how we come to be here tonight, watchin’ you dance. And if you don’t believe it, Miz Tee-uh, just come out back to the parkin’ lot in about fifteen minutes when the boy gets back.

Maybe I will, said Tia.

But by then she was busy entertaining a table of cable-TV executives, so she missed seeing Twilly Spree drive up to the neon-lit strip club in a full-sized county garbage truck. When Twilly got out, one of the men in blue coveralls tossed him the keys to the black pickup.

“You guys go through all that dough I gave you?” Twilly asked amiably.

“No, but just about.”

“And it was worth every dollar, I bet.”

“Oh yeah.”

Twilly shook hands with each of the men and said good-bye.

“Wait, son, come on inside and have just one beer. We got a lady wants to meet you.”

“Rain check,” said Twilly.

“No, but see, she don’t believe us. She thinks we robbed the bingo hall or somethin’. That’s how come you gotta come inside just for a minute, to tell her it’s no bullshit, you paid us three grand to rent out the shitwagon.”

Twilly smiled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Hey, man, where’s the load? The truck, it looks empty.”

“That’s right,” Twilly said. “There’s nothing to haul to the dump. You guys can go straight on home tonight.”

“But what happened to it?”

“Best you don’t know.”

“Oh Lord,” one of the garbagemen muttered to his pals. “This is a crazy-ass boy. He’s gone done some crazy-ass thing.”

“No,” Twilly said, “I believe you’d approve. I really do.” Then he drove off, thinking how wrong Dr. Boston had been. Anger wasn’t such a complicated emotion.

Palmer Stoat ordered an antipasto salad, garlic rolls, fettuccine Alfredo, a side of meatballs, and before long Desie had to look away, for fear of being sick. He was perspiring, that’s how hard he went at the food; droplets of sweat streaking both sides of his jawline. Desie was ashamed of herself for feeling so revulsed; this was her husband, after all. It wasn’t as if his personality had transformed after they got married. He was the same man in all respects, two years later. Desie felt guilty about marrying him, guilty about having second thoughts, guilty about the rhinoceros he’d shot dead that morning.

“From here to the salad bar,” Stoat was telling her. “That’s how close she was.”

“And for that you needed a scope?”

“Better safe than sorry. That’s Durgess’s motto.”

Stoat ordered tortoni for dessert. He used a fork to probe the ice cream for fragments of almonds, which he raked into a tidy pattern along the perimeter of the plate. Watching the fastidious ritual plunged Desie deeper into melancholy. Later, while Palmer reviewed the bill, she excused herself and went to the rest room, where she dampened a paper towel to wipe off her lipstick and makeup. She had no idea why, but it made her feel much better. By the time she finished, her husband was gone from the restaurant.

Desie walked outside and was nearly poleaxed by the smell. She cupped her hands to her mouth and looked around for Palmer. He was in the parking lot, beneath a streetlight. As Desie approached him, the odor got worse, and soon she saw why: a sour mound of garbage ten feet high. Desie estimated it to weigh several tons. Palmer Stoat stood at the base of the fetid hill, his eyes fixed lugubriously on the peak.

“Where’s the car?” Desie asked with a cough.

Palmer’s arms flopped at his sides. He began squeaking like a lost kitten.

“Don’t tell me.” She struggled not to gag on the stink. “Dammit, Palmer. My Beemer!”

Haltingly he began to circle the rancid dune. He raised an arm, pointing in outraged stupefaction. A cloud of flies buzzed about his face, but he made no effort to shoo them away.

“Goddammit,” Desie cried. “Didn’t I tell you to put the top up? Didn’t I?”

3

Twilly made it back to the Italian restaurant in time for the show. Under the amused supervision of several police officers, a detachment of workers with rakes and shovels had begun the unsavory task of digging out the BMW. This Twilly watched through field glasses from high in a nearby pine tree. There was no sign of the press, which was a shame—here was a story made for TV. Over the rhythmic crunch of digging, Litterbug’s voice could be heard admonishing the sanitation workers to be careful, goddamn you, don’t scratch the paint! Twilly found it comical, considering the likely extent of the Beemer’s contamination. He imagined virgin leather upholstery ripening under an ambrosial lode of orange rinds, cottage cheese, Heineken bottles, coffee grounds, eggshells, crumpled wads of Kleenex, potato skins, sanitary napkins, pizza crust, fish heads, spare ribs, leaky toothpaste tubes, bacon grease, coagulated gravy, cat litter and chicken necks. Twilly wished he could infiltrate the cleanup crew, to see the ghastly sight up close.

Litterbug’s wife/girlfriend could be observed pacing, arms folded, beneath a flickering streetlight. Twilly couldn’t make out her expression, but the clip in her step suggested impatience. He wondered if she truly cared about the BMW; in any event, the insurance company would buy her a new one. Twilly also thought about the sanitation workers, being called out so late on such a strange job. He had a feeling they might be enjoying themselves, exhuming a fancy red sports car from a heap of refuse, but still he hoped they were getting overtime.

It was quite an extensive operation, and Twilly wondered why he wasn’t feeling a commensurate sense of satisfaction. The answer came with a sour jolt as he studied the litterbug through the binoculars; watched the man unwrap a piece of candy—probably an after-dinner mint from the restaurant—then crumple the wrapper and drop it nonchalantly to the ground. The dumb fuckwad didn’t get it! Didn’t make the link between his piggish misbehavior on the turnpike and the malicious defilement of his automobile. He probably figured it was the random mischief of vandals; a prank.

I should’ve left a message, Twilly thought glumly. I should’ve made it crystal clear. He muttered a curse and climbed cautiously through the darkness down the trunk of the tree. By the time he reached the parking lot, the excavation of the car was complete. Litterbug and his wife/girlfriend could be seen leaving in a taxi. The soiled BMW was being hooked to a tow truck, whose burly driver wore a baby blue hospital mask and joked with the sanitation crew, which was shoveling the last dregs into a Dumpster.

Twilly asked one of the cops what had happened to the red convertible.

“Somebody emptied a garbage truck on it,” the officer reported with a harsh chuckle.

“Jesus,” said Twilly. “Why?”

“Who the fuck knows. It’s the sick society we live in.”

Twilly said: “I saw all these police cars, I was afraid there was a murder.”

“Naw, just some big shot left his ragtop down in the wrong neighborhood.”

“He famous or something?”

“I never heard of him before tonight,” said the cop, “but obviously he’s got some juice. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, I’d be home in my underwear watching basketball. Stand back now.”

The tow truck driver was maneuvering out of the parking lot, the cop waving directions. Twilly knew better than to press for the litterbug’s name; he didn’t need it anyway. He approached one of the sanitation workers and asked if the Beemer was totaled.

“Yeah, and it ain’t right. A sweet car like this.”

Twilly said, “Completely ruined, huh?”

“You can’t never get the interior clean, not after somethin’ such as this. We’re talkin’ about a minimum—I’m guessin’ now—four tons of raw garbage.” The man stopped working and rested his weight on the stem of the shovel. “I mean, hell, an expensive car like that—why trash it when you can just steal the damn thing? Any fool leaves the convertible top down deserves to lose his wheels. But this? This is evil shit, you ask me. Taking this much trouble to destroy a perfectly splendid vehicle. Deeply evil shit.”

“Sick world,” Twilly Spree said, in his own defense.

.  .  .

He was born in Key West, where his father had gone to sell commercial waterfront. Little Phil Spree was a real estate specialist. If a property wasn’t on the sea or the Gulf, Little Phil wasn’t interested. He would buy and sell beach until there was no more beach to buy or sell, then pack up the family and move to another town where, Little Phil typically would exult, “the coast is clear!” Florida has thirteen hundred miles of shoreline, and young Twilly got to savor plenty of it. His mother, who kept out of direct sunlight, wasn’t crazy about the tropics. But Little Phil was making excellent money, so Amy Spree basically stayed indoors for eighteen years, tended to her complexion and endeavored to occupy herself with hobbies. She grew bonsai trees. She started writing a romance novel. She learned to play the clarinet. She took up yoga, modern dance and strong martinis. Meanwhile Twilly ran wild, literally. Every free moment was spent outdoors. His parents couldn’t imagine what he was up to.

When Twilly was four, Little Phil briefly moved the family to Marco Island, which was famous for its white dune-fringed beaches. The sand was spangled with ornate tropical seashells, which Twilly collected and organized in shoe boxes. Usually he was accompanied by a sitter, hired by his mother to make sure he didn’t wander into the Gulf of Mexico and drown. Years later, at age fourteen, Twilly hot-wired a friend’s station wagon and drove back to Marco, in order to prowl the shore for shells. He arrived late at night in a howling downpour, and fell asleep in the car. When he awoke at dawn, he comprehended for the first time what his old man did for a living. The island had sprouted skyline; a concrete picket of towering hotels and high-rise condominiums. Waterfront, of course. Twilly fixed his eyes downward and marched the beach, his shoe box under one arm. He hoped he was seeing a mirage, a trick of the fog and clouds, but when he glanced up, the hotels and condos were still there, looming larger than before. As the sun began to rise, the buildings cast tombstone shadows across the sand. Soon Twilly found himself standing in a vast block of shade—shade, on an open beach under a bright clear sky! He sunk to his knees and punched the hard-packed sand with both fists until his knuckles were skinned.

A woman tourist came up to Twilly and told him to stop carrying on, as he was upsetting her children. The woman wore a stretch two-piece swimsuit and spoke with a New England accent. Her toenails were colored magenta and her nose was buttered with zinc oxide and in one hand she brandished an Arthur Hailey paperback. Twilly howled and resumed pummeling the beach. The woman glowered over the rims of her sunglasses. “Young man,” she said, “where is your mother?”

Whereupon Twilly whirled and chomped down on her bare foot and didn’t let go until a beefy hotel security man came and pried him off. Little Phil arrived later that day with lawyers and a checkbook. On the trip home Twilly had nothing to say to his father. At bedtime Amy Spree went to her son’s room and found him mounting a gaily painted human toenail in his seashell display. The next morning she took him to a psychologist for the first time. Twilly was given a battery of tests, none of which pointed toward violent sociopathy. Though Amy Spree was relieved, her husband remained skeptical. “The boy’s not right,” he would say. Or: “The boy’s not all there.” Or sometimes: “The boy’s playing on the wrong team.”

Eventually Twilly tried to talk to his father about Marco Island and other heartaches. He reminded him that Florida for eons had been underwater and was steadily sinking again, the sea and the Gulf rising each year to reclaim the precious shoreline that Little Phil and others were so avidly selling off. So what? Little Phil replied. That’s why people got flood insurance. Twilly said, No, Dad, you don’t understand. And Little Phil said, Yeah, well, maybe I don’t understand geology so good but I understand sales and I understand commissions. And if this goddamn place starts sinking to where I can see it with my own eyes, then me, you and your mother are packin’ up and moving to Southern California, where a man can still make a dandy living off oceanfront.

And Twilly said, Forget I even mentioned it.

On the eve of Twilly’s eighteenth birthday, Little Phil drove him to a banker’s office in Tampa, where it was explained to Twilly that he was about to inherit approximately $5 million from a man he had met only once, Little Phil’s father, the late Big Phil. Big Phil Spree made his fortune off copper mines in Montana, and had retired at age sixty to travel the world and play golf. Not long afterward he dropped dead in a sand trap on the sixteenth hole at Spyglass. His will left a third of his money to Little Phil, a third in trust to his only grandchild, Twilly, and a third to the National Rifle Association.

As they walked out of the bank, Little Phil threw an arm around his much taller son and said: “That’s a shitload of dough for a young fellow to handle. But I believe I know what your grandfather would have wanted you to do with it.”

“Let me guess. Oceanfront?”

“You’re a smart one,” said Little Phil, beaming.

Twilly shook free. “Mutual funds,” he announced.

“What?” Little Phil was aghast.

“Yep.”

“Where’d you hear about such nonsense?”

“I read.”

“Look around, boy. Hasn’t real estate done right by us?” Little Phil rattled off all the fine things in their life, from the swimming pool to the ski boat to the summer time-share in Vermont.

Twilly said: “Blood money.”

“Uh?”

“What Grandfather left me is mine, and I’ll do what I please with it. That’ll be no-load mutuals.”

Little Phil grabbed his shoulder. “Lemme see if I understand. I’m offering you a half partnership in a two-hundred-and-twenty-room Ramada at Daytona,
beachside,
but you’d rather stick the cash on that insane roulette wheel otherwise known as the New York Stock Exchange?”

“Yep,” said Twilly.

“Well, I always knew you were playing for the wrong team. This ices it,” said his father. “Did I mention the motel comes with a liquor license?”

A few months later Little Phil ran off to Santa Monica with a secretary from a title-insurance company. Despite her son’s unease in structured settings, Twilly’s mother beseeched him to enroll at Florida State University, in the state capital of Tallahassee. There Twilly majored in English for three semesters before dropping out and moving in with a poetry professor, who was finishing a doctorate on T. S. Eliot. She was a dynamic and intelligent woman who took a fervid interest in her new boyfriend, particularly his inheritance. She encouraged him to use the fortune to do good and noble deeds, beginning with the purchase of a snazzy new 280-Z for her garage. Eventually Twilly was spiffed up and presented to the dean of the English department, who proposed the funding of a resident Poet’s Chair to be named in honor of Twilly’s late grandfather, a man who wouldn’t have known W. H. Auden from Dr. Seuss.

Twilly said sure, what the hell, but the gift was never made; not because Twilly welched but because in the interim he was arrested for assault and battery on a state legislator. The man, a Democrat from Sarasota County, had been written up in the news for blocking clean-water reforms while at the same time accepting illicit campaign donations from a cattle ranch that was flushing raw manure into an estuary. Twilly had spotted the legislator in a restaurant and followed him to the rest room. There Twilly shoved him into a stall and lectured him for forty minutes on the immorality of water pollution. In fear the legislator feigned contrition, but Twilly saw through the act. Calmly he unzipped his jeans, pissed prodigiously on the man’s Bally loafers and said: “There, that’s what your pals on the ranch are doing to Black Drum Bay. How do you like it?”

When a sanitized version of the incident hit the press, the dean of the English department decided it would set a poor precedent to accept grant money from a deranged felon, and broke off contact with Twilly Spree. That was fine with Twilly, for although he enjoyed a good poem, he felt subversion was a worthier cause. It was a view that only hardened as he grew older and met more people like his father.

“Dick says you’re the man.” Robert Clapley raised his bourbon and gave a nod.

“Dick exaggerates,” said Palmer Stoat, well practiced at false modesty.

They were having a late lunch at a walnut-paneled country club in a suburb of Tampa. The governor had set it up.

“Dick’s not the only one,” Clapley said, “to sing your praises.”

“That’s very flattering.”

“He explained the situation?”

“In a general way,” Stoat said. “You need a new bridge.”

“Yes, sir. The funding’s there, in the Senate bill.”

“But you’ve got a problem in the House.”

“I do,” Clapley said. “A man named Willie Vasquez-Washington.”

Palmer Stoat smiled.

“Have you got any earthly idea,” said Clapley, “what he’s after?”

“I can find out with a phone call.”

“Which will cost me how much?” Clapley asked dryly.

“The call? Nothing. Getting your problem fixed, that’ll be a hundred grand. Fifty up front.”

“Really. And how much kicks back to your friend Willie?”

Stoat looked surprised. “Not a dime, Bob. May I call you Bob? Willie doesn’t need your money, he’s got other action—probably some goodies he wants hidden in the budget. We’ll work things out, don’t worry.”

“That’s what lobbyists do?”

“Right. That’s what you’re paying for.”

“So the hundred grand. . . .”

“My fee,” Stoat said, “and it’s a bargain.”

“You know, I gave a sweet shitload of money to Dick’s campaign. I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“Get used to it, Bob.”

Robert Clapley was new to Florida, and new to the land-development business. Palmer Stoat gave him a short course on the politics; most of the cash flying around Tallahassee could be traced to men in Clapley’s line of work.

He said, “I tried to reach out to Willie myself.”

“Big mistake.”