Tourist Season (46 page)

“With goddamn rattlesnakes, Jenna?”

“He didn't tell me
that
part. Honest.” She reached out and put her arms around him. “Hold me,” she whispered. Normally another foolproof heartbreaker. Keyes took her hand and patted it avuncularly. He didn't know where it had gone—all his feeling for her—just that it wasn't there now.

“It wasn't all Skip's fault,” Jenna cried. “This was building up for years, poisoning him from the inside. He felt a duty, Brian, a
duty
to be the sentinel of outrage. Who else would speak for the land? For the wild creatures?”

“Save your Sierra Club lecture for the first-graders, okay?”

“Skip is not a bad man, he has a vision of right and wrong. He's a principled person who took things too far, and maybe he paid for his mistakes. But he deserves credit for his courage, and for all his misery he deserves compassion, too.”

“What he deserved,” Keyes said, “was twenty-five-to-life at Raiford.” Ten innocent people were dead and here was Jenna doing Portia from the
Merchant of Venice.
He let go of her hand and stood up, not wishing to test his fortitude by sitting too close for too long. He said, “You'd better go.”

“I took the bus,” Jenna sniffled. “Can you give me a lift?”

“No, I can't.”

“But I really don't want to be alone, Brian. I just want to lie in a hot bath and think sunny thoughts, a hot bath with kelp crystals. Maybe you could come by tonight and keep me company?”

In the tub Jenna would be unstoppable. “Thanks anyway,” Keyes said, “but I'm going to the football game.”

He gave her ten bucks for a cab.

She looked at the money, then at Brian. Her little-girl-lost look, a pale version at that.

“If he's dead,” she said softly, “what'll we do?”

“I'll varnish the coffin,” Keyes said, “you spray for chinch bugs.”

The annual Orange Bowl Football Classic began at exactly eight P.M. on January 1, when the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame kicked off to the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers before a stadium crowd of 73,411 and an estimated worldwide television audience of forty-one million people. The A. C. Nielsen Company, which rates TV shows based on sample American homes, later calculated that the Notre Dame-Nebraska football game attained a blockbuster rating of 23.5, giving it a 38 share of all households watching television that Tuesday night. These ratings were all the more remarkable considering that, for obvious reasons, the second half of the Orange Bowl game was never played.

 

Midway through the first quarter the rains came; stinging needles that sent a groan through the crowd and brought out a sea of umbrellas.

Brian Keyes huddled sullenly in the rain and wished he'd stayed home. He had decided to attend the game only because he couldn't reach Kara Lynn, and because he'd gotten a free ticket (the Chamber of Commerce, showing its gratitude). Unfortunately, his seat was in the midst of the University of Nebraska card section, where raucous fans held up squares of bright posterboard to spell out witty messages like “Mash the Irish!” in giant letters. No sooner had Keyes settled in when some of the rooters had handed him two red cards and asked if he wouldn't mind being their semicolon. Keyes was worse than miserable.

On the field Nebraska was humiliating Notre Dame; no real surprise, since the no-neck Cornhuskers outweighed their opponents by an average of thirty-two pounds apiece. Many of the fans, already sopped and now bored, wondered whose brilliant idea the four-point spread was. By half-time the score was 21-3.

The second-string running back for Notre Dame was a young man named David Lee, who stood six-feet-four and weighed a shade under two hundred pounds and was about as Irish as Sonny Liston. Though nominally listed on the team roster as a senior, David Lee was actually several dozen credits short of sophomore status—this, despite majoring in physical education and minoring in physical therapy. David Lee's grade-point average had recently skied to 1.9, slightly enhancing his chances of graduating from college before the age of fifty—provided, of course, he was not first drafted by a professional football team.

Which now seemed unlikely. During the first half of the Orange Bowl game, David Lee attempted to run with the football three times. The first effort resulted in a five-yard loss, the second a fumble. The third time he actually gained twelve yards and a first down. Unfortunately the only two pro football scouts in the stadium missed David Lee's big run because they spent the entire second quarter stuck in line at the men's room, fighting over the urinals with some Klansmen from Perrine.

David Lee's fortunes changed at halftime. As the two teams filed off the field and entered the tunnels leading to the lockers, a muscular Orange Bowl security guard pulled the young halfback aside and asked to speak with him privately. The guard informed David Lee that there was an emergency phone call from his parents in Bedford-Stuy, and escorted him to a stale-smelling broom closet below the stands in the southwest corner of the stadium. Once inside the room, which had no telephone, the security guard locked the door and said:

“Do you know who I am?”

“No, sir,” David Lee replied politely, as even mediocre Notre Dame athletes were taught to do.

“I'm Viceroy Wilson.”And Wilson it was, not at all dead.

“Naw!” Lee grinned. “C'm on, man!” He studied the security guard's furrowed face and saw in it something familiar, even famous. “Shit, it's really you!” Lee said. “I can't believe it—
the
Viceroy Wilson. Man, how come you wound up with a shitty job like this?”

The young man had obviously not been reading anything but the sports pages in Miami.

“Having a rough time tonight?” Wilson asked.

“You got that right,” David Lee said. “Those honky farmboys are built like garbage trucks.”

“Field looks pretty slippery, too. Hard to make your cuts.”

“Damn right. Hey, what about my momma and daddy?”

“Oh, I lied about that. Lemme see your helmet, bro.”

Lee handed it to him. “Fits you pretty good.”

“Yeah,” Viceroy Wilson said, squeezing it down over his ears. “Lemme buy it from you.”

“Sheeiiit!” David Lee laughed. “You really sumthin.”

“I'm serious, man.” Viceroy Wilson pulled out a wad of cash. “A thousand bucks,” he said, “for the whole uniform, ‘cept for the cleats. I got my own fuckin' cleats.”

The money was Skip Wiley's idea; Viceroy was just as amenable to punching the young man's lights out and stripping him clean.

David Lee fondled the crisp new bills and peered at the visage inside the gold Notre Dame helmet. He wondered if the Carrera sunglasses were some kind of gag.

“Is it a deal or not?” Wilson asked.

“Look, the coach is gonna freak. How about after the game?”

“This is after the game. Believe me, son, the game is over.” Viceroy Wilson nonchalantly handed the college halfback another one thousand dollars.

“Two grand for a football uniform!”

“That's right, bro.”

“You want the jock strap, too?”

“Fuck no!”

When he finally made it back to the Notre Dame locker room, David Lee stood naked except for his spikes and athletic supporter. After apologizing for interrupting the team prayer, he soberly told the coach he had been robbed and molested by a gang of crazed Mariel refugees, and asked if he could sit out the rest of the game.

 

The Orange Bowl Football Classic is as famous for its prodigal halftime production as for its superior brand of collegiate football. The halftime show is unfailingly more extravagant and fanciful than the Orange Bowl parade of the previous evening because the Halftime Celebration Committee adopts its own theme, hires its own professional director, recruits its own fresh-faced talent, and performs for its own television crew. The effect is that of a wearisome Vegas floor show played out across ten acres of Prescription Athletic Turf by four hundred professional “young people” who all look like they just got scholarships at Brigham Young. In recent years the TV people realized that lipsynching by the New Christy Minstrels and clog-dancing by giant stuffed mice in tuxedos were not enough to prevent millions of football viewers from going to the toilet and missing all the important car commercials, so the halftime producers introduced fireworks and even lasers into the Orange Bowl show. This proved to be a big hit and new-car sales went up accordingly. Each year more and more spectacular effects were worked into the script, and themes were modernized with the 18-to-34-year-old consumer in mind (though a few minor Disney characters were tossed in for the children). In the minds of the Orange Bowl organizers, the ideal halftime production was conceptually “hip,” visually thrilling, morally inoffensive, and unremittingly middle-class.

The emcee of the Orange Bowl halftime show was a television personality named John Davidson, selected chiefly because of his dimples, which could be seen from as far away as the stadium's upper deck. Standing in an ice-blue spotlight on the fifty-yard line, John Davidson opened the festivities with a tepid medley of famous show tunes. Soon he was enveloped by a throng of prancing, dancing, capering, miming, rain-soaked Broadway characters in full costume: bewhiskered cats, Yiddish fiddlers, gorgeous chorus girls, two Little Orphan Annies, three Elephant Men, a Hamlet, a King of Siam, and even a tap-dancing Willy Loman. The theme of the twenty-two-minute extravaganza was “The World's a Stage,” an ambitious sequel to previous Orange Bowl halftime galas such as “The World's a Song,” “The World's a Parade,” and more recently, “The World's a Great Big Planet.”

The heart of the production was the reenactment of six legendary stage scenes, each compressed to eighty-five seconds and supplemented when necessary with tasteful bilingual narration. The final vignette was a soliloquy from
Hamlet,
which did not play well in the downpour; fans in the upper levels of the Orange Bowl could not clearly see Poor Yorick's skull and assumed they were applauding Señor Wences.

Afterward all the performers gathered arm-in-arm under a vast neon marquee and, to no one's surprise, sang “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Then the floodlights in the stadium dimmed and the slate rainclouds overhead formed an Elysian backdrop for the emotional climax, a holographic tribute to the late Ethel Merman.

The audience had scarcely recovered from this boggling spectacle of electronic magic—scenes from
Gypsy
projected in three dimensions at a height of thirty stories—when the lights winked on and John Davidson strode to midfield.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, with a smile bright enough to bleach rock, “if I may direct your attention to the east zone, it's my great pleasure to introduce this year's Orange Bowl queen, the beautiful Kara Lynn Shivers!”

In the stands, Brian Keyes went cold. In his obsession with the parade he had forgotten about the game, and the traditional halftime introduction of the queen and her court. It was a brief ceremony—a few of the prize-winning floats circling once in front of the stands before exiting the east end zone. As Kara Lynn's father had griped, it was hardly worth getting your hair done for, eleven crummy minutes of airtime.

But eleven minutes was plenty long enough. An eternity, Keyes thought. A horrible certainty possessed him and he jumped to his feet. Where were the cops—where were the goddamn cops?

The mermaid float entered first, still trumpeting sperm-whale music; then came floats from Cooley Motors, the Nordic Steamship Lines, and the Palm Beach Lawn Polo Society. The procession was supposed to end with a modest contingent of motorcycle Shriners from Illinois, who had been awarded a halftime slot following the untimely cancellation of the entry from Bogotá.

However, something foreign trailed the betasseled Shriners into the stadium: a strange unnamed float. Curious fans who thumbed through their Official Orange Bowl Souvenir Programs found no mention of this peculiar diorama. In their reserved box seats along the forty-yard line, members of the Orange Bowl Committee trained binoculars on the interloper and exchanged fretful whispers. Since the NBC cameras already had discovered the mystery float, intervention was out of the question, image-wise; besides, there was no reason to suspect anything but a harmless fraternity prank.

Though its craftsmanship was amateurish (forgivable, considering its humble warehouse origins), the float actually made a quaint impression. It was an Everglades tableau, almost childlike in simplicity. At one end stood an authentic thatched chickee, the traditional Seminole shelter; nearby lay a dugout canoe, half-carved from a bald cypress; steam rose from a black kettle hung over a mock fire. Grazing in a thicket, presumably unseen, was a stuffed white-tailed deer; a similarly preserved raccoon peered down from the lineated trunk of a synthetic palm. The centerpiece was a genuine Indian, very much alive and dressed in the nineteenth-century garb of trading-post Seminoles: a round, brimless straw hat, baggy pants, gingham shirt, a knotted red kerchief, and a tan cowskin vest. Somewhat anachronistically, the nineteenth-century Indian was perched at the helm of a modern airboat, gliding through the River of Grass. A long unpolished dagger was looped in the Seminole's snakeskin belt and a toy Winchester rifle lay across his lap. His smooth youthful face seemed the portrait of civility.

Brian Keyes sprang for the aisle the moment he saw the Indian. Frantically he tried to make his way down from the stands, but the Nebraska card-flashers
(Irish Suck!)
were embroiled in a heated cross-stadium skirmish with the Notre Dame card section
(Huskers Die!)
. Keyes pushed and shoved and elbowed his way along the row but it was slow going, too slow, and some of the well-fed Cornhusker faithful decided to teach this rude young fellow some manners. They simply refused to move. Not for a semicolon, they said; set your butt down.