The Stingray Shuffle Read online

  The Japanese were ready.

  The barons had decided to move to the top of the Citrus Tower and watch through binoculars.

  “Gentlemen—the Centipede!”

  The sheet came off.

  The Centipede ripped down three rows of trees, then left the grove and took off in the direction of town. The barons’ binoculars swung around to the west side of the tower, toward the distant screams.

  The resulting public outcry got the state into the act.

  The foreign labs were closed down and a domestic contractor brought in. The contractor was well connected with state government. It had previously only stamped out interstate highway signs at twenty thousand dollars each but was able to convince officials that the technology was interchangeable. An appointed board quickly approved the no-bid contract. Work resumed.

  The accidents stopped but not progress. It went backward. Picking efficiency dropped below sixty percent for the first time since 1980. Everything got behind schedule. Cost overruns, redundant parts, the device mutating into unworkable configurations without apparent design or goal. But political contributions were up, and the Florida Robotic Harvester program was considered a smashing success.

  The barons were furious. They called in their own markers, and the state met behind closed doors to strike a compromise. It would offer the contractor an incentive. A harvester would be worth tens of millions of dollars a year to a private inventor. If it was made by a contractor working for the taxpayers, however, those rights reverted to the state. The deal: develop a functional prototype by the fall and keep all proceeds for the first three years. It was a fifty-million-dollar carrot. Everyone agreed.

  Roscoe Weege was president and owner of Signs of the Times, the traffic sign company that was busy undeveloping the state’s robotic citrus picker.

  Roscoe was convinced the project was impossible, and he told the state he had complete faith in his workers. Roscoe’s plan was to minimize costs, jack up expenses, and milk the thing as long as he could. What did he care? The quarter million a year in R&D seed money was chump change. Just keep up the appearance of work. He hired the remnants of the German team, ninety-year-old scientists who had come to the country in 1945 after the Americans beat the Russians to Peenemünde and scooped up all the best scientists. The Russians took the next bunch. Those that neither country wanted paid their own way to the States and now worked on the harvester. They gladly accepted Roscoe’s fifty percent pay cut because it was that or face war trials at The Hague.

  The harvester research was the redheaded stepchild at Roscoe’s company. The real money was in his other contract with the Florida department of agriculture—an exclusive arrangement to provide the state with sterile Medflies in the event of another citrus infestation. Roscoe had studied the equation from ten different angles before offering the bribes.

  The Medfly—now that was an organism Roscoe could respect. Short for Mediterranean fruit fly, the Medfly was a highly destructive, ambitiously reproducing little life bundle whose sole mission was to inject oranges and grapefruit with its eggs, which hatched and gorged themselves on the host fruit until they broke out and laid their own eggs. The buggers multiplied so fast that discovery of a single fly always set off statewide panic. That’s why the groves were saturated with Medfly monitors, essentially the old Shell No-Pest Strip, little boxes with openings and sticky pieces of cardboard inside. In the mid-nineties, three Medflies were found in one of the monitors in western Florida, and the state immediately blanketed ten counties with a cheap insecticide that headed off the outbreak and gave people diarrhea and short tempers.

  Roscoe was a visionary. He knew people wouldn’t put up with that for long. There was another option to deal with Medflies, and even better, it was expensive. Sterile Medflies. The insects had ultrabrief life spans. Drop, say, a million sterile flies—outnumber the virile guys a hundred to one—and math would take care of the rest. Roscoe invited the key people to lunch, wrote the right checks, and soon he had his exclusive contract. All Roscoe had to do now was wait for the next outbreak and the tide of public opinion to come in.

  That was two years ago. Roscoe had grown weary. His contract was set to expire, and others were now interested. Roscoe went to the scariest bar in rural Polk County, The Pit, the kind of place where people hire guys to kill their spouses. Roscoe began drinking with a man named Lucky. Lucky had killed two people, one of each, a husband and a wife. Different couples.

  Roscoe said he had a proposition.

  “It’ll cost ya.”

  Roscoe said that wasn’t a problem—now here’s what he wanted done….

  “There’s got to be a catch,” said Lucky. “Where’s the risk? The difficulty?”

  “That’s just it. There is none.”

  “Something’s not right,” said Lucky.

  “Will a thousand-dollar retainer be enough?”

  Lucky wrote his number on a napkin.

  Roscoe got up one morning the following week and waited by the mailbox. The truck arrived. “Morning, Mr. Weege.”

  “Morning, Rex.”

  The mailman handed Roscoe a stack of letters. Roscoe ran inside and spread them out on his rolltop desk. There it was, an envelope postmarked Venezuela. He slit the flap with a Wallace in ’72 letter opener and removed a single piece of stationery. Three dead Medflies Scotch-taped to the front. He dialed Lucky’s number.

  Midnight. Lucky sat in the dark cab of his four-by-four pickup, listening to the radio and drinking white lightning. Polk was strange radio country. The most enlightened station was static. Lucky turned the dial through various programs about them queers, them exterterrestials, fishin’, shootin’, huntin’, prayin’ in classrooms and can’t-miss investin’.

  Lucky stubbed out a Winston. “Let’s get this over with.”

  He climbed down from the pickup and headed into a dark orange grove.

  Two days later, Roscoe heard what he’d been waiting for on the evening news.

  “…State agriculture officials tonight announced the discovery of three Medflies in a Polk County citrus grove. Officials are meeting at this hour at the capitol in Tallahassee to decide on the appropriate response, but a well-placed source tells us aerial spraying is out, and as many as a million sterile flies may be released…”

  Roscoe’s phone rang before the report was over. It was Tallahassee.

  “Yes, sir, I just saw it on the news…. No problem…. I’ll have ’em ready.”

  Roscoe hung up and poured a drink. “This is the easiest money I’ll ever make.”

  It was more than easy. Breeding Medflies—well, try not to breed them. A sealed warehouse, two flies, a bunch of rotten fruit, and you’re in business. The expensive step was the sterilization, which was why Roscoe skipped it.

  The C-130 transport plane flew over the heart of Florida citrus country at three thousand feet. Roscoe was in the back of the cargo bay, supervising workers with gloves, goggles and gas masks as they released the first flies from special bio tanks. Bright light and a whispering roar filled the plane as the aft cargo door slowly lowered, the insects momentarily swirling around in a dense swarm before taking to the sky.

  Roscoe laughed. The state had started with only three flies, and those were already dead. But look out below! A million horny flies on the way!

  The copilot came back in the bay and yelled over the engines that someone wanted to talk to Roscoe on the radio. The workers cracked open another tank of flies as Roscoe headed for the cockpit.

  It was one of the state agriculture officials: “I just heard the good news.”

  “Yes, we’re releasing the flies now,” Roscoe said into the microphone.

  “No, I’m not talking about that,” said the official. “It’s the Germans. They’ve done it!”

  “Done what?”

  “The mechanical picker. It works! We tested it this morning. Mr. Weege, you’re on your way to becoming an extremely rich man!”

  The microphone bounced on t
he cockpit floor. “Hello? Hello?”

  The workers releasing flies looked up when they heard the shouting.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” yelled Roscoe, running through the cargo hold, snatching at the air, trying to catch flies with his bare hands, hysterical, still running, right out the back of the plane and into the wild blue.

  2

  It was another perfect chamber of commerce morning in Miami Beach. The sewage slick had cleared up, and the last of the ninety-two Haitians who swam ashore after the daily capsizing were apprehended in the Clark Gable booth at Wolfie’s deli before most people knew what was happening.

  The sun was high and strong, beach worshipers covered the sand in European swimsuits, and fashion photographers barked instructions at malnourished girls. “Turn!…Pout!…Look like you’re on heroin!”

  An inbound 747 appeared over the Atlantic, its passengers getting their first glimpse of land after the six-hour flight from the Continent. The jumbo jet’s shadow crossed the beach and the futuristic lifeguard shacks and the art deco hotels on Collins Avenue.

  All up and down Collins, people lounged on sidewalk patios. They shielded their eyes and looked up at the jet. The new café society, drinking espresso, speaking French and German, smoking Turkish cigarettes without guilt. There was a traffic dispute. Frat brothers in a Jeep that said No Fear! began shouting profanities at another car. Men in linen suits got out of a Mercedes, dragged one punk from the Jeep and flamenco-danced on his crotch until they heard sirens and fled. Nobody saw anything. Chicness resumed.

  Five distinguished women in their late forties sat on the patio in front of the Hotel Nash. Tasteful single-piece bathing suits, sunglasses, wide-brimmed straw hats. A pitcher of mimosas and five cell phones on the table, next to five books. It was the quarterly literary field trip of their reading club, Books, Booze and Broads. The name was a whimsical joke on themselves; they were trying to break out of obsessively responsible lives now that all their children had left for college. Two cell phones rang.

  The five books on the table were all the same paperback, The Stingray Shuffle, by Ralph Krunkleton. The women had been on a Krunkleton kick lately.

  “I think this was his best book yet,” said the Latino businesswoman, getting off the phone.

  “Me, too,” said the redheaded commercial artist. “All those crazy orange harvesting machines.”

  “I loved how Roscoe ran right out the back of the plane with the Medflies,” added the attorney with cropped blond hair. “Never saw that coming.”

  “Wait till you find out what happens to the five million dollars,” said the petite veterinarian.

  “Shhh! Don’t tell me! I’m not there yet!” said the self-assured aerospace engineer, flagging down a waiter for another pitcher.

  The club went way back, started quite by accident in 1971. It was a Monday morning in July, an office waiting room filled with crying, screaming children who occasionally broke free and had to be chased. They were in Gainesville, the middle of Florida far from ocean breezes, and the room was muggy with the musk of spent diapers. The air conditioner didn’t work, and a single electric fan whirred unevenly atop a crumpled stack of Southern Bride.

  A clerk slid open the reception window and looked at her clipboard. “Samantha Bridges?”

  A tall, young blonde stood up, an infant strapped to her chest and a two-year-old girl by the hand. She capped a bottle of milk and stuck it in a pocket in her demin overalls.

  There was a short discussion at the window. The clerk shook her head.

  “Sorry? What do you mean you can only send him another letter?” Samantha’s voice was beyond loud, but the other women didn’t seem to notice, bouncing tots on knees. Another day in paradise at the office of child-support enforcement.

  “I waited two hours for you to tell me you can only send another letter? He’s ignored all the others!”

  The clerk told Sam that if she would have a seat, a supervisor would get to her when he was free.

  “In another two hours?”

  Samantha went back to her chair and sat down and got out the milk bottle.

  “Mommy…” said the two-year-old at her side.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “Mommy…” Her mouth was still open, but she had stopped talking.

  Samantha patted the infant on her chest, trying to get a burp. “What? What is it, dear? Are you okay?”

  The girl threw up in Samantha’s lap. Samantha looked down, and the infant regurgitated on her shoulder. A dozen children wailed all around. Her checking account was empty.

  Samantha raised her eyes to a blank spot on the concrete wall and tried to imagine an afternoon at the beach.

  The other women in the waiting room had all been there. Each had that hardened, dazed, lack-of-sleep look usually only seen on men at the end of extended military campaigns. One of the women had once dated a Navy SEAL, who told her about going through some kind of grueling test called Hell Week. One week, she thought. Big deal. If you really want to toughen them up, have ’em trade places with single moms.

  Samantha returned to her apartment on the campus of the University of Florida, where she lived in a wing of married student housing nicknamed “divorced student housing.” There were day classes and night waitress shifts and midnight feedings and more trips to the support office. Summer became fall. Samantha began recognizing some of the regulars from the support office at her apartment building. They became a group. Teresa Wellcraft, Rebecca Shoals, Maria Conchita, Paige Turner. And Samantha—everyone called her Sam. She was the tallest, a full six feet, blond hair in a semishort soccer-mom cut. She had also played soccer. And lacrosse. And basketball. And batted cleanup on her high school softball team. That’s where the self-reliance came from. Sam viewed the world in a resting state of unfairness and it was up to nobody but her to change it. She never let anything pass. Rudeness, bad service, Sam was all over you. She favored sweatpants and sports bras and majored in law enforcement.

  Paige was the smallest, and she let everything pass, and Sam was always stepping in and defending her, which only embarrassed Paige all the more.

  “Please, let’s just go,” said Paige. “It’s no big deal.”

  “No! Not until this fucker honors his competitor’s coupons!”

  Paige had grown up inland, and her Okeechobee twang was mistaken for southern. She was the classic girl next door, big brown eyes and no hint of guile. Her hair was always in a ponytail. She would have been more comfortable never saying a word and not joining the group, except Sam pressured her, and she felt more comfortable acquiescing. She wanted to be a veterinarian.

  Maria filled the conversation voids left by Paige and then some. She cared about people and wanted to let every one of them know it. At length. Before the pregnancy, she had volunteered at hospices for the terminally ill, where lonely residents pretended they were asleep when they saw her coming. Her personal passion was clothes, and her fashion sense was that unfortunate combination of wrong and bold. She also had trouble with makeup, rooted in her philosophy that more is more. She was big and gangly, almost as tall as Sam. She had flunked out of fashion design and went on to probation in graphic design.

  Rebecca had the artistic side that so tragically eluded Maria. She excelled at painting and could pick up a musical instrument for the first time and become competent in an hour. She was the reluctant beauty, the one in the group the men hit on the most. Medium height but curvy, with nice cheekbones, bedroom eyes and the kind of exquisite auburn hair with natural body that caused other women to make up things about her behind her back. It didn’t bother Rebecca. Nothing did. She was the flower child of the group, barefoot, daisies in the hair, undeclared major.

  Teresa was the brain, Phi Beta Kappa, insanely organized with cross-indexed filing systems and a gravity-well memory. She used big words. Propinquity. Weltschmerz. But all that was overshadowed. There was no other way to say it. Teresa was a fatso. She also bit her nails to the skin, yo-yo dieted, ch
ecked constantly to see if the stove was off and quit smoking every week. She had a knack for tinkering, which led to her double major in chemical and electrical engineering. For Christmas she installed dimmer switches in everyone’s apartment.

  The women quickly discovered they had several things in common. Number one, assholes in their pasts. Number two, a surplus of guts. Not man guts, where you charge a pillbox, dive in a raging river or punch a biker outside the Do Drop In. This was woman guts. Quietly enduring when there is no acceptable alternative but to endure.

  Third thing in common: They loved to make chili, which they did every Friday, seven sharp. The weekly cook-off was the best thing they could have done. Being a single mom at a major football university was the formula for clinical depression, like being in prison with a view of Bourbon Street. Marking time until the next get-together made it all seem a little less hopeless.

  The fourth thing in common, however, that was the primary reason these five particular women bonded so tightly. They agreed never to talk about it. Ever.

  After a month of chili Fridays, the book club was born of necessity. They loved reading, but there was no time with the kids, not even for literature classes, which forced them to pool notes.

  “Who knows what Moby-Dick’s about?”

  “Man wants to kill fish. Fish kills man. Lots of details about boats.”

  “The Jungle?”

  “The rich are mean.”

  “Invisible Man?”

  “White people are mean.”

  “Clockwork Orange?”

  “The British are mean.”

  “Brave New World?”

  “The future is scary and weird.”

  “Naked Lunch?”

  “Junkies are scary and weird.”