Stormy Weather (24 page)

“Great,” said Avila. “You think traffic sucks now, just wait.”

The man said, “Yeah, one time I got stuck behind Reagan’s motorcade in the Holland Tunnel. Talk about a fuck story—two hours we’re breathing fumes.”

Avila inquired how long the man had been in Dade County. Couple months, he answered. Moved down from New York.

“And I never saw nuthin’ like this.”

Avila said, “Me, neither.”

“I don’t get it. Some houses go down like dominoes, some don’t lose a shingle. How’s that happen?”

Avila checked his wristwatch. He wondered if the guy had the fifteen grand on him, or maybe in the trunk of the car. He glanced in the back seat: a crumpled road map and two empty Mister Donut boxes.

The man said, “My guess is somebody got paid off. There’s no other way to make sense of it.”

Avila kept his eyes ahead. “This ain’t New York,” he said. Finally the traffic started to move.

The customer said a trailer park not far from his neighborhood got blown to smithereens. “Old lady was killed,” he said.

“Man, that’s rough.”

“Wonderful old lady. But every single trailer got destroyed, every damn one.”

Avila said, “Storm of the century.”

“No, but here’s the thing. The tie-downs on those mobile homes was rotted out. The augers was sawed off. Anchor disks missing. Now you tell me some inspector didn’t get greased.”

Avila shifted uncomfortably. “Straps rot fast in this heat. How much farther?”

“Not long.”

The customer picked up Krome Avenue to 168th Street. There he turned back east and drove for a mile to a subdivision called Fox Hollow, which had eroded to more or less bare foundations in the hurricane. The man parked in front of the skeletal remains of a small tract home.

Avila got out of the Cadillac and said, “God, you weren’t kidding.”

The roof of the house was totally blown away; gables, beams, trusses, everything. Avila was stunned that Mr. Reynolds was allowing his family to remain in such an unprotected structure. Avila followed him inside, stepping over the wind-flattened doors. The place looked abandoned except for the kitchen, where a pack of stray dogs fought over rancid hamburger in the overturned refrigerator. Avila’s customer grabbed an aluminum baseball bat and chased the mongrels off.

Peeking into the flooded bedrooms, Avila saw no sign of the customer’s family. Immediately he felt the whole day go sour. Just to be sure, he said, “So where’s your ninety-year-old grandmother?”

“Dead and buried,” Ira Jackson replied, slapping the bat in the palm of one hand, “on beautiful Staten Island.”

As the man from New York prepared to nail him to a pine tree, Avila concluded that Snapper was responsible for hiring the attacker. Clearly the plan was to murder Avila and take control of his crooked roofers. Where was the mighty fist of Chango? Avila wondered grimly. Had the double-chicken sacrifice misfired?

Then the man from New York explained himself—who he was, what had happened to his mother, and why Avila must die a horrible drawn-out death. At first Avila pleaded innocence, feigning outrage at the fate of Beatrice Jackson. Soon he realized that the survival skills so essential to a county bureaucrat—the ability on a moment’s notice to shift blame, dodge responsibility and misplace crucial paperwork—were of no use to him now.

Avila reasoned it was better to tell the truth than to have it tortured out of him. So, out of sheer bladder-shriveling fear, he confessed to Ira Jackson.

Yes, it was he who’d been assigned to approve the mobile homes at Suncoast Leisure Village. And yes, he’d failed to perform thorough and timely inspections. And—yes, yes! God forgive me!—he’d taken bribes to overlook code violations.

“Didn’t you see those goddamn rotten straps?” demanded Ira Jackson, who was making a crucifix with fallen roof beams.

“No,” Avila admitted.

“The augers?”

“No, I swear.”

“Never even checked?” Ira Jackson pounded ferociously with a hammer.

“I didn’t see them,” Avila said morosely, “because I never drove out there.”

Ira Jackson’s hammer halted in midair. Avila, who was lashed to a broken commode in a bathroom, lowered his eyes in a pantomime of shame. That’s when he saw that the toilet bowl was alive with bright-green frogs and mottled brown snakes, splashing beneath him in fetid water.

With a shiver he said, “I never went to the trailer park. The guy sent me the money—”

“How much?”

“Fifty bucks a unit. He sent it to the office, so I figured what the hell, why waste gas? Instead of driving all the way down there, I …” Here Avila caught himself. It seemed unnecessary to reveal that he’d played golf on the afternoon he was supposed to inspect Suncoast Leisure Village.

“… I didn’t go.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

“No. I’m very, very sorry.”

The expression on Ira Jackson’s face caused Avila to reevaluate his decision to be candid. Evidently the doughnut man intended to torture him, no matter what. Ira Jackson bent over the crucifix and went back to work.

Raising his voice over the racket, Avila said, “Christ, if I knew what he was doing with those trailers, he never woulda got permits. You gotta believe me, there’s no amount of money would make me take a pass on cut augers. No way!”

“Shut up.” Ira Jackson carried the cross to the backyard and began nailing it to the trunk of a pine. It had been a tall lush tree until the hurricane sheared off the top thirty feet; now it was merely a bark-covered pole.

With each plonk of the hammer, Avila’s spirits sank. He said a prayer to Chango, then tried a “Hail Mary” in the wan hope that traditional Catholic entreaty would be more potent in staving off a crucifixion.

As the man from New York dragged him to the tree, Avila cried, “Please, I’ll do anything you want!”

“OK,” said Ira Jackson, “I want you to die.”

He positioned Avila upright against the cross and wrapped duct tape around his ankles and wrists to minimize the squirming. Avila shut his eyes when he saw the doughnut man snatch up the hammer. The moment the cold point of the nail punctured his palm, Avila emitted a puppy yelp and fainted.

When he awoke, he saw that Chango had answered his prayers with a fury.

At nine sharp on the morning of August 31, an attractive brunette woman carrying two miniature dachshunds walked into a Hialeah branch of the Barnett Bank and opened an account under the name of “Neria G. Torres.”

For identification, the woman provided an expired automobile registration and a handful of soggy mail. The bank officer politely requested a driver’s license or passport, any document bearing a photograph. The woman said her most personal papers, including driver’s license, were washed away by the hurricane. As the bank officer questioned her more closely, the woman became distraught. Soon her little dogs began to bark plangently; one of them squirted from her arms and dashed in circles around the lobby, nipping at other customers. To quiet the scene, the banker agreed to accept the woman’s auto registration as identification. His own aunt had lost all her immigration papers in the storm, so Mrs. Torres’s excuse seemed plausible. To open the account she gave him one hundred dollars cash, and said she’d be back in a few days to deposit a large insurance check.

“You’re lucky they settled so fast,” the banker remarked. “My aunt’s having a terrible time with her company.”

The woman said her homeowner policy was with Midwest Casualty. “I’ve got a
great
insurance man,” she added.

Later, when Edie Marsh told the story to Fred Dove, he reacted with the weakest twitch of an ironic smile. Under the woeful circumstances, it was as good as a cartwheel.

Edie, Snapper and the two noisy wiener dogs had moved into his room at the Ramada. No other accommodations were available for a radius of sixty miles, because the hotels were jammed full of
displaced families, relief volunteers, journalists, construction workers and insurance adjusters. Fred Dove felt trapped. His fear of getting arrested for fraud was now compounded by a fear that his wife would call the motel room, then Edie Marsh or Snapper would answer the phone and the wiener dogs would start howling, leaving Fred Dove to invent an explanation that no sensible woman in Omaha, Nebraska, would ever accept.

“Cheer up,” Edie told him. “We’re all set at the bank.”

“Good,” he said in a brittle tone.

The long tense weekend had abraded the insurance man’s nerves—Snapper, gimping irritably around the small motel room, slugging down vodka, threatening to blast the yappy dachshunds with a massive black handgun he claimed to have stolen from a police officer.

No wonder I’m edgy, thought Fred Dove.

To deepen the gloom, sharing the cramped room with Snapper and the dogs left the insurance man no opportunity for intimacy with Edie Marsh. Not that he could have availed himself of a sexual invitation; the withering effect of Snapper’s previous coital interruption endured, as Snapper continued to tease Fred Dove about the red condom.

Also looming large was the question of Edie’s aptitude for violence—a disconcerting vision of the crowbar episode was scorched into Fred Dove’s memory. He worried that she or Snapper might endeavor to murder each other at any moment.

Edie stretched out next to him on the bed. “You’re miserable,” she observed.

“Yes indeed,” said the insurance man.

With his bum leg elevated, Snapper was stationed in an armchair three and one half feet from the television screen. Every so often he would take a futile swipe at Donald or Marla, and tell them to shut the holy fuck up.

“Sally Jessy,” Edie whispered. Fred Dove sighed.

On the TV, a woman in a dreadful yellow wig was accusing her gap-toothed white-trash husband of screwing her younger sister. Instead of denying it, the husband said damn right, and it was the best nooky I ever had. Instantly the sister, also wearing a dreadful wig and lacking in teeth, piped up to say she couldn’t get enough. Sally Jessy exhaled in weary dismay, the studio audience hooted, and Snapper let out a war whoop that set off the dogs once again.

“If the phone rings,” Fred Dove said, “please don’t answer.”

Edie Marsh didn’t need to ask why.

“You got any kids?” she asked.

The insurance man said he had two, a boy and a girl. He thought Edie might follow up and ask about their ages, what grades they were in, and so on. But she showed no interest.

She said, “Cheer up, OK? Think about your cruise to Bimini.”

“Look, I was wondering—”

Snapper, growling over one shoulder: “You two mind? I’m tryin’ to watch the fuckin’ show.”

Edie signaled for Fred Dove to follow her to the bathroom. He perked up, anticipating a discreet blow job or something along those lines.

But Edie only wanted a quiet place to chat. They perched their butts on the edge of the bathtub. She stroked his hand and said, “Tell me, sugar. What’s on your mind?”

“OK, the company sends me the check—”

“Right.”

“I give it to you,” said Fred Dove, “and you deposit it in the bank.”

“Right.”

“And then?”

Edie Marsh answered with exaggerated clarity, like a schoolteacher coaxing an exceptionally dull-witted pupil. “
Then
, Fred, I go back to the bank in a couple days and cut
three
separate cashier’s checks for forty-seven thousand
each
. Just like we agreed.”

Undeterred by the condescension, he said: “Don’t forget the hundred dollars I gave you to open the account.”

Edie let go of his hand and brushed it, like a cockroach, off her lap. Lord, what an anal dweeb! “Yes, Freddie, I’ll make absolutely sure your check says forty-seven thousand
one hundred
. OK? Feel better?”

The insurance man grunted unhappily. “I won’t feel better till it’s over.”

Edie Marsh didn’t inform Fred Dove about the phone call from the real Neria Torres. She didn’t want to spook him out of the scam.

“The best part about this deal,” she said, “is that nobody’s in a position to screw anyone else. You’ve got shit on me, I’ve got shit on you, and we’ve both got plenty of shit on Snapper. That’s why it’s going down so clean.”

Fred Dove said, “That gun of his scares me to death.”

“Not much we can do. The asshole digs guns.”

Outside, Donald and Marla began scratching at the bathroom door in the frenetic manner of deranged badgers.

“Let’s get out there,” Edie Marsh said, “before Snapper loses it.”

“This is nuts!”

Edie mechanically guided Fred Dove’s head to her bosom. “Don’t you worry,” she said, and he was momentarily transported to a warm, fragrant valley, where no harm could ever come.

Then, on the other side of the door, a gun went off, the dachshunds bayed and Snapper bellowed profanely.

“Jesus!” Edie exclaimed.

The insurance man burrowed in her cleavage. “What’re we going to do?” he asked, desolately.

Avila thought: I’m either dead or dreaming.

Because it should hurt worse than this, being nailed to a cross. Even if it’s only one hand, it should hurt like a mother. I ought to be screaming at the top of my lungs, instead of just hanging here with a dull ache. Hanging like a wet flag and staring at…

It
must
be a dream.

Because they don’t have lions in Florida. And that’s what that monster is, a full-grown African lion. King of the motherfucking jungle. So real you can see the red-brown stains on its mouth. So real you can smell its piss. So real you can hear the dead man’s spine dear God Almighty being crunched in its fangs.

The lion was eating the doughnut man.

Avila was frozen in the pose of a scarecrow. He was afraid to blink. Between bites, the big cat would glance up, yawn, lick its paws, shake the gnats off its mane. Avila noticed a blue tag fastened to one of its ears, but that wasn’t important.

The important thing was: He definitely wasn’t dreaming. The lion was real. Clearly it was sent to save his life.

And not by the Catholic God—Catholics had no expertise in the summoning of demonic jungle beasts. No, it was a funkier, more mystical deity who had answered Avila’s plea from the cross.