“Don’t hurt me!” Lenny said, and covered up his face.
“I’m not gonna touch you,” said Serge, and he threw the wet chute in the backseat of Lenny’s Cadillac. Serge walked to an oil-drum garbage can in a corner of the pier and retrieved a small brown paper sack hidden down in the garbage. Serge unpacked the contents: khaki shorts, sandals and a short-sleeve yellow shirt with an M. C. Escher pattern of angelfish turning into juvenile delinquents. He changed into the dry clothes.
Lenny slowly lowered his arms. “Who are you?”
“I’m the messenger,” said Serge. “The one you’ve been waiting for.”
Lenny took another slow drag on his joint. “Far out.”
Serge climbed into the passenger side of the Cadillac and Lenny got in behind the wheel.
Serge pointed down the pier, back toward land. “Step on it, toke-meister.”
And Lenny hit the gas.
O n the edge of the Hillsborough River, in a large open room on the second floor of the Tampa Tribune Building, the skeleton night crew tapped away at computer keyboards.
A young copy editor just out of college named Kirk Curtly worked the rim. He opened a computer file from the directory containing stories that needed headlines written. Kirk had been gently prodded by his supervisors to be more specific in his headlines. On the other hand, he was roundly praised for never having incurred a dreaded correction, which he achieved through inspired vagueness. Kirk tapped his chin with the Montblanc pen he’d gotten for a graduation gift and never used, since everything was done on computers. He typed the headline “Panel Studies Plan.” He looked at its structure and rhythm on the screen. He smiled with satisfaction and sent the story along to the typesetters. He called up another story and tapped his chin again. He typed “Official Mulls Options.” Curtly had a mental Rolodex of short, bureaucratic terms that were perfect for narrow headlines over one-column-wide stories, and he searched for such thin articles in the headline directory to show off his arsenal. It went this way for much of his shift. “Board Picks Member,” “Senate Takes Flak,” “Gov Eyes New Trend,” and his proudest effort: “Pols Nix Proxy Prexy Tap.”
Shortly after midnight, a late news story wormed its way through the Tribune computer system until it came to the headline directory. Kirk looked around. All his colleagues were writing heads on other stories. Only one story left that wasn’t being worked. It wasn’t one column. It ran in big type all the way across the top of page one. Kirk’s hands were unsteady as he opened the file. He read the story. A man in a Santa Claus suit had jumped off the Sunshine Skyway bridge. He began typing. He finished, sent the story along, got up and walked into the men’s room, where he suffered a forty-minute failure of nerve.
The story and headline moved with the speed of light to the copysetter, who was overworked and had exactly eight seconds to proof everything before pressing a button in the upper right of his keyboard, which fired electrons through the building and made the story spit out on a roll of silver-nitrate paper from a machine in the blue-collar section of the building. The page composers, who had exactly six months before their jobs would be sucked out of them by microprocessors, ran it through the waxer and slapped it on the master page, which was photographed by a giant camera, burned into a metal plate and clamped on the huge rollers of the printing press, and hundreds of thousands of copies rolled down conveyor belts to trucks waiting at the loading dock to bring the news to you.
12
It was a hot, clammy afternoon in Biloxi. Keesler Air Force Base was dead. There were no missions for the Hurricane Hunters and no wind, and the air sat heavy on the town. The Prop Wash Bar only had ceiling fans.
Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Lee “Southpaw” Barnes filled his mug from a pitcher of draft and looked across the bar at the group of airmen sitting around two tables near the dart boards. It was the crew of the Rebel Yell, the fierce rivals of Montana ’s plane. The crew stared back at Barnes and his colleagues, and a few began to chuckle derisively.
“I hate those fuckers,” said Barnes. “They think they’re hot shit.”
Marilyn Sebastian leaned up against the jukebox, wearing flight pants and a tight combat-green tank top with a large oval of perspiration between her shoulder blades. Her fiery red hair was out of its usual ponytail and fell over her shoulders. She punched up a Patsy Cline tune and swayed with faraway thoughts. She wrapped her lips around a longneck beer and took a hard pull.
One of the members of the Rebel Yell made a wisecrack and his table broke up. He smiled and stood and strolled over to Marilyn with the cockiness of the oxygen-deficient.
Both crews watched as the airman whispered something to Marilyn, who continued staring into the jukebox. He leaned a second time and whispered something else. Without warning, Marilyn had him by the forearm, with leverage behind his elbow, and smashed his face into the front of the jukebox.
“Bitch!” the airman shouted from the dusty floor.
Both crews sprang out of their chairs. Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes grabbed a whiskey bottle by the neck and smashed it against the bar, cutting tendons in his favorite hand.
Suddenly, the air base’s claxons sounded, and Montana ’s crew was all business. They grabbed their gear and sprinted in formation across the tarmac. The wheels of the Hercules were off the runway in eight minutes.
Four time zones ahead, Hurricane Rolando-berto began to sputter. The cooler waters of the mid-Atlantic sapped its strength, but the National Hurricane Center wanted visual reconnaissance before they downgraded it. It did a loop-de-loop more than a thousand miles due east of Montserrat and languished in random, constantly changing directions, its tracking chart looking like someone with DTs got hold of an Etch A Sketch.
Weather officer “Tiny” Baxter bandaged the ex-lieutenant colonel’s damaged hand. Montana took a wide swing at twenty thousand feet around the storm system. Miami was right, he thought, no longer a defined eye. It was becoming completely unorganized. Milton “Bananas” Foster radioed the report back to Florida; then he began screaming “Mayday!” until Barnes wrestled the microphone from him.
Armed with the report, the books at the National Hurricane Center were officially closed on Rolando-berto.
B ack in Aristotle “Art” Tweed’s hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, lived a man named Paul.
Paul was passive.
He was built for it. At five foot four, he never weighed more than a buck-ten-a small, rumpled man in a similar suit. He had thin gray hair that he kept covered with a black fedora, and his voice was hesitant, barely above whisper. Paul’s was the soft face of the full-time victim. All his features were on the small side, and the fifty-eight years of aging did not etch harsh lines and cracks, but gentle folds. Pink webs of capillaries and other blood vessels were visible on his cheeks and chin. His complexion was extra pale, not quite sickly, but you wouldn’t be surprised if he fainted at any moment.
Paul was a nice guy, to a fault. He was a shy, considerate, deferential, rule-following worrier. He was worried about lawsuits and IRS audits and madmen. He drove slow in the right lane, never took a pen from work, ate extra fiber and overfed parking meters. He was obsequious to telephone solicitors.
When Paul walked by, people thought: The meek shall inherit the earth, but only if their parents were ruthless bastards.
Paul had worked the past twenty-three years as a claims adjuster at Fidelity Insurance, which was trying to cheat on Paul. Even with paltry two percent annual raises, Paul’s salary had grown to a decent level, and Fidelity wanted to replace him with a younger, cheaper worker.
They gave Paul a six-month buyout, which killed his pension in the fine print. Fidelity didn’t mention that the buyout put the company on dicey legal ground and he had every legal right to refuse, which most of his co-workers did. The gracious offer was designed to take advantage of people like Paul, who rolled over on command.