The Pope of Palm Beach Page 21

  A candle flickered on a small table next to a lounge chair in the middle of the living room. There was a telephone that was never answered. It was connected to an answering machine that greeted callers with a fake name.

  A flashlight beam swept through the room until it reached the back wall, which consisted entirely of a built-in wooden bookcase. The beam ran along the spines of the dusty titles. The flashlight stopped on a volume. A hand grabbed it, and the resident settled into the lounge chair with a glass of merlot.

  It was the other side of midnight. He opened the book to page one and read the first sentence. He stopped and checked his glow-in-the-dark wristwatch. He set the book down and waited. Practically to the second, he heard the sound. Someone coming up the driveway. He could hear it because microphones had been installed all around the house and amplified through a stereo. The loud sound of tires gave way to loud footsteps. They arrived at the side porch, then faded away and the car left.

  The resident went through the house to the side door by the kitchen. A baseball bat that sent royalties to Wade Boggs leaned against the wall. The door itself had a three-foot-tall steel plate along the edge that housed the regular knob, then three additional dead bolts and a chain. He checked through a peephole before unfastening them. He opened up, took a quick glance around. The neighbors couldn’t see the door unless they trespassed because that part of the property was concealed by overgrown sea grapes and birds of paradise. He looked down. Three large brown paper bags, neatly folded and stapled across the top as instructed. He gathered them inside and locked up.

  The bags were ripped open on the kitchen table. The first had mail, mainly junk, some bank statements and invoices and subscription magazines addressed to a shell corporation: the Economist, Foreign Affairs, New Republic, Popular Science, Rolling Stone, Mad, Cracked, Model Railroad Monthly and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

  The next bag was heavier. Cans of soup, tuna, Spam, Vienna sausages, cling peaches; bags of noodles, nuts, dehydrated apricots; and three packs of baseball cards. The cupboards were opened and the cans meticulously stacked and arranged according to color. The canned goods were the home’s “bomb shelter” food in case society was interrupted. The baseball cards came with a type of dusty pink gum that would outlast the highway system.

  The last bag was the wild card. Its contents spread across the table. Bic pens, cinnamon dental floss, a box of ammo, mousetraps, the board game Mousetrap, shoelaces, a plastic castle for an aquarium and a bag of green army men.

  After storing everything with obsessive precision, the resident grabbed a rectangular container and headed into the living room, where he tapped flakes of food into a goldfish bowl. “Here you go. Eat in good health. You are my only friend. You’re the only one who understands, and you can be trusted. We’re a lot alike, you and me. We define our own space. You have the bowl, I have the house. And I got you a present. You’re easy to shop for.” He held the plastic castle up to the outside of the glass. “I remember hearing that a castle is all a goldfish needs for entertainment. Anything else is overkill. Because you have a memory span of only a few seconds, the castle is like twenty televisions. Here you go.” He placed it in the back of the bowl and bent down for a closer look. “Like it? The look on your face says, ‘A new castle. Cool.’ Now you’re circling the bowl and coming back—‘What? A castle?’—circling again—‘Holy fuck! A castle!’”

  The man stood up. “I heard that the breed of goldfish we use as pets have developed short attention spans to prevent insanity from the boredom of a confined space. Lucky you.”

  He abruptly lost interest and meandered down the hall toward a converted bedroom, talking now to himself: “You are my only friend. You’re the only one who understands, and you can be trusted. We’re a lot alike, you and me . . .”

  There was a large square table filling much of the room. He flicked a switch and turned a dial. A tiny dot of white light came on and began moving as the model train emerged from the mountain. The resident opened his bag of army men and placed them on the track. The train approached.

  “Halt! Ve vant to see your papers!”

  The train scattered the green men off the track.

  “‘Aaaaahhhhh!’ . . . The French Resistance wins again.”

  He switched off the train and returned to his lounge chair in the living room. He picked up the book he had left on the table. A novel about old Florida. He opened to page one again and reread the first sentence before his mind began jumping thought rails: He had never come close to riding a horse, wax museums were overrated, there might be ants in the kitchen, ketchup or catsup?

  He set down the book and rubbed his eyes.

  Suddenly, a throaty roar filled the house.

  The man frantically grabbed the rifle next to his chair and pointed it at a stereo.

  A bullfrog had hopped onto one of the outdoor microphones. It jumped down. The man set his rifle next to the chair and walked over to the goldfish bowl. “Where the hell did that castle come from?”

  He went into the kitchen and lit a kerosene lantern. He set it on the table and took a seat. He inserted a sheet of paper into the spool of a manual Underwood typewriter.

  Clack, clack, clack, clack . . .

  Twenty-three minutes later, he pulled the page out of the spool and replaced it.

  Clack, clack, clack, clack . . .

  The process was repeated until dawn.

  The man finally stretched and yawned. He removed the final page and neatly aligned it atop all the others from the night’s efforts. He grabbed the stack and walked over to a freestanding antique cabinet. He opened a long drawer, placed the pages next to several other similar stacks, and shut the drawer.

  He went back to the comfort of his lounge chair, where he dozed off with the Remington rifle resting across his chest.

  The Present

  A Chevy Nova arrived outside the Riviera Beach Public Library, next to the train tracks along Old Dixie Highway.

  Signs beside the road indicated that some vote had been taken to change the name of Old Dixie to President Barack Obama Highway.

  “The train tracks had literally been the proverbial tracks, an invisible apartheid force field rigidly separating the two peoples.” Serge clenched a fist. “It was an incorporated town of less than nineteen thousand, but race riots were sufficiently ambitious to garner national TV time in 1967. Brave souls moved across the tracks in 1968 to bring down the color barrier, and Riviera Beach High School integrated to become Suncoast High. The TV crews returned to cover the larger 1971 riot. We lived only eight houses away and could see the network helicopters and tear gas. What a childhood!”

  Coleman gave a thumbs-up with a sweat sock in his mouth.

  Serge hopped out of the car with his camera set on macro. “Earlier that summer, I was wearing flip-flops because of all the sand-stickers, and riding my bike all alone at age nine down to the school’s football field to launch my model rockets. So I packed the little parachutes again and plugged in the nose cones and was about to head out the door. My folks said I couldn’t launch my rockets at the high school that day. I said, no problem, I’ll launch them somewhere else, but they said I couldn’t even go outside. I look out the window, and nobody was outside, like a science-fiction movie about a nuclear winter, except with all the whapping of helicopters.”

  “Wow,” said Coleman. “Grounded by a race riot.”

  “Which I couldn’t understand because by then the neighborhood was fully mixed, and we all got along,” said Serge. “I should know because I was the paper boy, and the black dads were the best tippers, always real nice and paternal to me: ‘Here, son, buy yourself a Frosty.’”

  “Frosties!” said Coleman.

  “Down, boy,” said Serge. “The point is every kid should grow up that way. Instead of being imprinted with anecdotal bullshit, I got a great boots-on-the-ground cultural experience. Then some of the old white guys who were a bit chippy about the changing complexion of the nei
ghborhood—and non-tippers, by the way—would give me grief about the newspaper not being exactly on their doormat. The next day their paper went right on the roof.”

  They climbed out of the Nova and entered the library. Straight to the reference desk. Serge had a question.

  “No beverages in the library.”

  “Right!” Serge drained his coffee and repeated the request.

  The librarian directed them to special collections. Serge took off.

  “No running!”

  “Sorry. Just happy to be alive.” He continued on.

  “No skipping, either.”

  Serge slowed to a walk. “Who put the bee in her bonnet?”

  They arrived at a row of old phone books. Serge pulled out the tattered volume from 1965. He flipped to a page under the letter T. “Coleman, check it out! Check it out!”

  “What?”

  “This listing: Time of Day! That was the coolest when I was a really little kid, because who else could I call at that age without blowback? So I’d sit at the table and dial. And I mean actually dial a real dial back then. This reassuring voice would come on the line, ‘First Marine Bank of Riviera Beach . . . The time is . . . three- . . . oh-two.’ I’d hang up and dial again. ‘. . . The time is three- . . . oh-three.’ Click, dial. ‘. . . The time is . . .’”

  “Let me guess,” said Coleman. “Three- . . . oh-four.”

  “No, still three-oh-three,” said Serge. “Endless fun! . . . And back then there were no answering machines or little beeps on the line that said you had an incoming call. And that night some relative would phone us with a family emergency. ‘I’ve been trying to get through for hours, but the line was busy!’ And my mom would tell Aunt Rita, ‘We’ve been home all day and I haven’t made any calls. I don’t know how— . . . Hold on . . . Serge? You wouldn’t happen to have been on the phone?’ . . . ‘Mom, did you know all the clocks in the house are wrong?’”

  “Another spanking?” asked Coleman.

  “Every pioneer gets a little dusted up.” Serge pulled out his cell phone and pressed buttons, then put it to his ear as it began to ring.

  “Hello?”

  “What time is it?”

  “What?”

  “The time. What is it? You must have a clock or something. Did you know your number used to be Time of Day? I’m sure you’re thrilled to learn that chestnut, and who else would have the courtesy to brighten your life? But along with that vaunted honor comes an obligation to assist the rest of us in reliving our childhoods. What time is it?”

  “Wait. Are you the same guy who calls me every year asking for the time?”

  “Uh . . . maybe.”

  “What is your problem?”

  “Listen, I can’t tell you how tickled I’d be if you could just tell me the time. Then I’ll be out of your life . . . for a year.”

  “Get lost, kook!”

  Click.

  Coleman scratched between his legs. “What time is it?”

  “Definitely not the Age of Aquarius.” Serge flipped through the phone book again. The letter R. His finger ran down the page. “. . . Rangoon, Ratchet . . .” The finger stopped. “Here it is.” He scribbled an address on a scrap of paper.

  Minutes later, a green Nova pulled up in front of a house on Thirty-Fourth Street across from the high school.

  “What is this place?” asked Coleman.

  “Just the childhood residence of one of my all-time favorite Florida authors, Kenneth Reese.”

  “You talked about him before,” said Coleman. “The guy who stopped writing and disappeared?”

  “Such a shame. His books became instant classics.” Serge walked up to the front door and rang the bell. “Everyone gobbled them up back then because they nailed the state.”

  “Does he still live here?” asked Coleman.

  “Doubt it,” said Serge. “The people inside now probably don’t even know the literary significance of their property. Will they be thrilled! On the other hand, the author hasn’t been seen in years. He’s rumored to have turned into an eccentric hermit like Salinger or Pynchon or Sean Connery in Finding Forrester. So for all I know, maybe he does still live here.”

  “Nobody’s answering,” said Coleman.

  Serge rang the bell again.

  They waited.

  “I don’t think anyone’s home,” said Coleman.

  “There’s a car in the driveway.” This time Serge rang the bell and knocked.

  Nothing.

  “Let’s try around back.” Serge led Coleman to the side door. He knocked hard and pressed his face to the jalousie glass to see inside. He quickly stepped back. “I hear someone coming.”

  The door opened.

  “Yes? How can I help you?”

  “What time is it?”

  Chapter 29

  2007

  Midnight approached at the house with no lights.

  The outdoor microphones now had chicken-wire enclosures to prevent any more bullfrog scares. The last one resulted in a rifle bullet through a goldfish tank. Which isn’t really a hole. The entire thing just breaks. The goldfish had to live awhile in a bathroom sink, with no memory that there had ever been a bowl.

  The man in the lounge chair checked his wrist. The stereo played the amplified sound of tires rolling up the driveway. A woman grabbed three paper bags off the passenger seat. She headed around the house again, taking care to avoid all the mousetraps now guarding the back steps. She left the bags and returned to her car’s trunk. This would be a two-trip stop. She removed a heavy box and started back again. She wasn’t paid enough not to ask questions. “What the hell does he need a bear trap for?” She assumed she would soon be receiving instructions to avoid that as well.

  Once the stereo was silent again, the resident retrieved his delivery off the stoop. He opened a bag and took out a new goldfish bowl, then collected his pet from the bathroom. It splashed into the water. “There you go.” Then another splash. “And there’s your stupid fucking castle.” The man had lost faith in the fish. “Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Finally, he opened the box. “Excellent.” He got down on his knees. The bear trap was so strong that it required a special wrench to crank its jaws open into the ready position. He stretched its chain across the floor and padlocked it to an old steel radiator.

  The resident settled into his lounge chair with a book, a rifle, and a slightly elevated sense of safety.

  It took almost a whole day . . .

  Snap.

  He fell to the floor with a throbbing ankle. “Shit.”

  He tried opening the jaws. “They’re too strong.” He spotted the wrench on the counter, but the chain wouldn’t reach. He tried the radiator, but it wouldn’t budge. The only bright side was that this was one of the newer “humane” traps with dull teeth. Deep bruising, but no risk of death from blood loss in case it caught the wrong thing.

  The resident tested the reach of the chain and found that the kitchen table was in range. He dragged the trap over to a chair and sat down to assess the situation. He looked in direction after direction. The back door was too far away. The phone too far away. The canned food in the cupboards even worse.

  He opened a pack of baseball cards, stuck the gum in his mouth and began hitting the keys of a typewriter.

  Clack, clack, clack . . .

  The Present

  The Nova raced away from a house on Thirty-Fourth Street in Riviera Beach.

  “What the hell is wrong with people?” said Serge. “I’m only delivering heritage surprises. That should be happy news.”

  “You’re like the history fairy.”

  “Exactly,” said Serge. “If someone comes to their door with a singing telegram, do they shit on them, too?”

  “Maybe you need a costume.”

  “And what was that crazy reaction back there when I asked to come in for only a few minutes and lie down in Kenny’s bedroom?” said Serge. “I clearly explained I knew it was no l
onger Kenny’s authentic bed, but whoever’s it was now would be more than sufficient. I even promised to make the bed back up after I got under the covers. Didn’t I bend over backward not to be imposing?”

  “You just can’t please some people.”

  Jingle, jingle.

  Serge reached under his driver’s seat and handed a book to Coleman.

  “What’s this?”

  “Our next stop.”

  Coleman read the title. “Conch Town USA?”

  “Finally released in 1991 by Charles Foster,” said Serge. “Based upon his 1939 photography portfolio, along with the groundbreaking Works Progress Administration research performed by Veronica Huss and the eminent Floridaphile Stetson Kennedy. It lay unpublished and forgotten for more than half a century—the final word on the Bahamian fishermen who founded Riviera.”

  “Cool.” Coleman tried handing it back.

  “No, I need your help as navigator. Flip to the map in the middle . . .”

  Fifteen minutes later, Coleman held the book a few inches from his face. “Okay, turn left at the next corner. I think.”

  Serge cut the wheel at Twenty-First Street and Avenue C, camera out the window. Click, click, click.

  “Now make a right, and another right.” Back down Twentieth. Click, click, click. Then Fifteenth, crossing Broadway.

  Coleman looked up. “They’re all empty lots, except for the boat storage yard.”

  “It’s where the first settlers built their houses. Roberts, Sands, Moree. Often clapboard and simple wood frame, much less sturdy than the shipbuilders’ homes of the other Conchs in Key West. But the vegetation is still here.”

  “Okay, trees. Big whoop.”

  “Coleman, much of our state’s visual strikingness has been throttled by the shadow of tall, exotic nuisance trees. Not here: See how everything is low, dominated by palms.” Serge began honking the horn. “It’s a living canvas of what those early Conchs saw every day.”

  “Why are you honking?”