“You got a hard-on for quarters?” I asked. “They don’t bag nothing but the change.”
“You have people with you. Three or four of ’em so you can carry more.”
“You think four loads of quarters divided four ways is more’n one load divided one way? You ain’t been studying your arithmetic.”
“You take the bills too,” Squire said. Like, of course, he knew that.
“Where am I?” I asked Leeli.
Her expression begged me to shut up.
“Seriously. Did we wake up somewhere’s else this morning? Some other planet where stupid rules?”
Carl chuckled and I said, “Fuck is your problem, man? All you do’s sit around and make fun of shit. What put you so high in the roost? Far as I can tell, Squire’s your intellectual superior and he ain’t got the brains of a box of popcorn.”
“You the one’s acting superior,” Ava said, and forked up some slaw.
“Fuck, I am superior! Superior to this shit. Maybe it gets you wet listening to the criminal genius here, but it don’t even give me a tickle.”
Squire told me to watch my mouth, I was talking to a lady, and I said, “Come on, you fucking chihuahua! Step to me!”
Leeli caught my arm and said, “Maceo!” I jerked free and swatted my shrimp basket, backhanding it across the deck. People bespotted with ketchup splatter from the basket stared at us from the adjoining tables. The assistant manager, who could have passed for fourteen, looked like he was about to cry. Leeli was yelling at me, Squire was avoiding my eyes, Ava was calmly wiping her sleeve with a napkin. Carl giggled and said, “Fucking chihuahua!”
One of the citizens I’d splattered, a thick-necked, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, Chevy-Suburban-driving son of the suburbs, his belly sagging like a hundred-year-old hammock, gave his pregnant wife a comforting pat on the shoulder and heaved up from his cheeseburger, but Ava saved his ass by intercepting him on the way to our table and slipped him a twenty for his dry cleaning bill. Other folks put in their claim and once she had satisfied them, she sat back down and said to me, “Temper like that, it’s a wonder you still on the street.”
Calmer now, I felt no call to answer. I gave her a fuck-you smile and popped one of Leeli’s shrimp into my mouth. It was covered with grit that had blown up from the beach, which made it extra crunchy.
“You so smart,” Ava said, “whyn’t you tell us how you’d handle the Joyland?”
“Wouldn’t nothing but a damn fool mess with it. Too many cops. Too many boyfriends might wanna play hero. You feel the need to rob something, head out on the freeway. You know the back roads along the exits, you can take down two gas stations easy and be sitting in a bar before the cops get motivated.”
“I suppose it was your expertise landed you in prison.”
“Oh I was a fool. No doubt about that. It don’t mean I’m still a fool.”
Challenged, I delivered a lecture on proper criminal procedure, most of it learned in Raiford, but salted in with personal experiences that I embellished for dramatic effect. “You gotta terrorize a place,” I told them. “People ain’t always scared, they see the gun. Sometimes they can’t believe you’re for real and they go to debating what to do. You don’t want that, you want ’em scared. So you say something lets ’em know how scared they oughta be.”
“Yeah?” Squire said churlishly. “Like what?”
I made my hand into a gun and pointed it at his chest. “Hands up! Who wants to die?” You say that, it gets their attention every time.
“I like that,” Carl said, grinning. “Hands up who wants to die?”
“Takes the punch out of it, you say it with a smile,” I said. “Tell ’em like you mean it.”
With that, Carl jumped up and snarled, “Hands up! Who wants to die?”
The pregnant lady yipped and the people at the table behind me grabbed up their belongings and scooted. Ava pulled Carl down into his chair and I said to him, “That’ll get it done.”
Leeli stood and said, “Can we just go? Please!”
We set off down the boardwalk toward the car and she fell into step with Ava and Carl. Irritated by this, not wanting to be stuck with Squire, I dropped off the pace, lollygagging along. That’s how Leeli wanted to play it, I told myself, to hell with her. I’d find myself a sweeter can of tuna. I started eye-fucking the bikini girls strolling past and when one made a smart-ass remark, getting her friends to laughing at me, I told her once she lost that babyfat she oughta try a real dick, but right now it’d likely be too much for her.
Ava drove south and then west on State Road 44 toward Orlando. She went to talking about the old days, the 60s, when there was so many UFOs in the sky—because of the rockets at the Cape, she guessed—you could see them from out on 44 every night. “Boys useta take us down here to see ’em,” she said, “’cause they thought we’d let ’em get fresh while we were stargazing.” Leeli, who was riding shotgun next to Carl, said, “I bet they were right, huh?”
“’Course they were,” Ava said, and they shared a laugh.
“You ever see any UFOs?” Leeli asked.
“All the time! You look up in the sky, you couldn’t help seeing ’em. Pretty soon what you thought was a group of stars would get to darting around, making these really sharp turns, flying in formation.”
She asked Leeli to fish around in her tote bag and find her cigarettes. Once she got a smoke going, she said, “Couple times we saw one real close.”
“A flying saucer?”
“Uh huh. We saw this one shoot a green light from its belly. Straight down to the ground.”
“Maybe it was Santa Claus you saw,” I suggested. “Waving his green flashlight.”
Ava took a glance back toward me. “You don’t believe in UFOs, Maceo?”
“’Bout as much as I believe in liberty and justice for all.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Leeli said. He’s a contrary sort.
I told Leeli she didn’t know squat about me and then said to Ava, “Whatever you saw, wasn’t no flying saucer. Ain’t no sense to any of that business.”
“That might be,” Ava said. “Most things don’t make sense, especially you try and understand ’em too hard.”
“I suppose that’s profound, but I’m just a dumb Florida Cracker. It goes right by me.”
Ava flicked ash and sparks out the window. “You might catch up to it one of these days,” she said.
It struck me that Ava must be a lot older than I’d estimated, she was dating back in the 60s, but I didn’t stay with the thought. I was a six pack along into a decent buzz and still feeling sour about Leeli, fully occupied with self-pity and scorn. When we stopped for gas I pulled Leeli aside, fed her all the I’m-sorry she could swallow and persuaded her to switch seats with Squire. I discovered a sensitive spot under her ear and before long I had her squirming pretty good, though each time my fingers traipsed near the old plantation home, she’d give them a spank. Squire began telling a lie about a beauty queen he’d gone with in high school and Ava shut him up quick, saying she needed to concentrate on the road. That clued me in she was upset about Leeli, and I felt satisfied in mind.
Scattered around the edges of Disneyworld were a number of shooting ranges where for a few dollars you could fire assault rifles. Given the encouragement this surely offered the freaks who flocked to the ranges, you had to wonder if the city fathers of Orlando didn’t unconsciously long to see TV coverage of a giant blood-spattered mouse. While Carl and Squire were busy playing soldier at Buck’s Guns and Sporting Gallery, me and Ava and Leeli walked to a nearby 7-11 and bought some forty-ouncers, one of which I chugged walking back to the parking lot. The girls sat talking on the hood of Ava’s truck. I wasn’t drunk enough to feel mean, but I felt separate from things. The cars racing along the six-lane were shiny toys with glaring headlights and dabs of meat inside. The strip malls lining the road were grimy slot-car accessories. The heat came from a neon tube inside my head and the starless orange-lit sky was a gasoline-soaked rag someone had throwed over the whole mess so’s to hide it from company. What I’m saying, it wouldn’t have taken much to upgrade me to mean. Ava was pitching hard at Leeli, touching her thigh, the back of her hair. I just kept working on my second forty. If I could drink fast enough, I wouldn’t care what they did and I’d be able to ignore some deeper thoughts that were trying to gnaw out my brains like a squirrel with a nut meat.