The Stingray Shuffle Read online

  “It’s funny how when you’re high, time seems to slow down,” City told Country.

  “Absolutely,” said Country. “It just creeps. Everything takes forever. The least little thing becomes an eternity…Tick, tock, tick, tock…”

  Serge slowly turned his head toward the passenger seat and glared.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Lenny. “It was your idea to bring them.”

  “…Tick, tock, tick, tock…”

  “I thought it would be fun,” said Serge. “Get the women’s perspective for a change instead of the same old barbarian stuff I’m used to. But it’s gone horribly awry, and now I’m being held prisoner in a Cheech and Chong marathon.”

  “I’m soooo hungry,” said City.

  “Does this car have music?” asked Country. “Let’s play some music.”

  “Yeah, crank up the tunes,” said City.

  Lenny reached for the radio.

  “Only classic album rock,” said Serge. “It’s all I can handle right now.”

  The car began to throb with bass.

  “What about contemporary urban?” asked Lenny.

  Serge shook his head. “I respect the rapper, but I need to be in the proper mood to appreciate social and economic polemics about who can play a turntable better.”

  Lenny twisted the dial to another station. The Beatles came on, “All You Need Is Love.”

  Serge nodded his approval. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to relax with the soothing music.

  “You know, they’re absolutely right,” said Country. “All you do need is love. It’s the most profound thing I’ve ever heard in my life…”

  “They get straight to the heart of the matter,” said City. “You’ve got love, what else do you need?…”

  “Think about it, one small word, just four little letters, yet they make all the difference…”

  Serge turned around and faced them again.

  “What?” said City.

  6

  A weather-beaten seventeen-foot flats skiff motored slowly through the first light of day in the upper Florida Keys. It was a falling tide, and orange and pink and green Styrofoam balls dotted the water. Flocks of spoonbills glided low over the shallows, timing the tide to the minute, heading for feeding grounds as they had for thousands of years. Tiny, low mangrove islands punctuated the horizon, which disappeared toward Cape Sable and the Everglades.

  An old man stood in the back of the skiff, his hand on the outboard throttle, a “Sanibel Biological Supply” fishing cap on his head. Yellow rubber waders with suspenders. The man had risen at precisely four-thirty, as he did every morning, and stepped onto the porch of his stilt house, eye level with the coconuts in the trees, barely visible in the blackness. Unseen water lapped the rock revetment; palms rustled. He grabbed the balcony railing and concentrated on being thankful. Then he went downstairs and turned on the Weather Channel. There was a rim of light on the horizon when he headed down the dock with a mug of Sanka and an insulated sack of tuna sandwiches. He mixed gasoline and oil in the two-stroke fifty-to-one ratio and jerked a bucket of frozen mullet from a dockside freezer. He pulled the cover off the outboard, wiping spots with a rag, spraying points with silicone, replacing the cover. The davits clicked as he cranked the skiff down into the water. Soon he was planing up across the bay, snaking between the islands, until he was in the thick of the floating Styrofoam. The man throttled down.

  He idled the boat and reached for one of the balls with a long-handled gaff, grabbing it and pulling up the crab trap tied underneath with rope. He pushed the outboard throttle stick to the side, turning the propeller starboard and putting the skiff in a perpetual clockwise circle as he shook blue crabs out of the trap and into a seventy-gallon cooler. Then he reached in a gray bucket for a dead fish and rammed it into the empty trap’s wire-mesh bait hole and threw it all back over the side, the Styrofoam ball bobbing in the wake a few times as the trap settled back to the bottom. The man motored up for the next float and repeated the process, again and again, float after float—the whole time drinking coffee, eating sandwiches, juggling gaff, bait, traps, throttle. Back-country ballet. But he only stopped at the green floats; the orange and pink belonged to the other guys, and you didn’t mess with them unless you wanted to get shot. Back-country justice. The man tossed his last trap in the water and headed home. He knew he was getting close when he saw the toilet seats.

  On the north side on Plantation Key, the approach from the bay was extra shallow and rocky, and a channel had been cut long ago. The pass was known as Toilet Seat Cut or Little Stinker. It was originally designated with regular nautical markers, but the locals had since hung toilet seats on all of them. They were painted in vibrant colors, with names and dates and little drawings of people and pets. The old man looked off to the side. Spoonbills chiseled at tide-exposed oysters; tarpon fins slit the surface. An ibis stood frozen in an inch of water among the mangrove roots, then snapped its neck forward, spearing a fish with its beak. A pink toilet seat went by.

  The sun finally rose as the old man cranked the skiff back up the davits and flushed fresh water through the lower unit with rabbit ears. He hoisted the cooler of crabs into the back of a pickup and headed for market.

  The man had come into a modest amount of money in the sixties and bought a house and several commercially zoned parcels in the Florida Keys. Now their worth was in ransom range. The rental checks from the gas stations and seashell shops were steady, and the man no longer had need for the crab money. That wasn’t work; it was religion.

  He loved the stilt house. Two stories, tin roof, screened-in wraparound balcony. Inside, you couldn’t see the walls for all the built-in bookshelves. You knew he was a book guy by the way the shelves were filled, not just packed rows of vertical spines, but more books crammed in on top. It might have been a space problem except the man only collected one other thing: beer signs. The shark Bud Lite sign, the palm tree Corona, the flamingo drinking Miller. At night, the neon came on, and so did the strands of white Christmas lights tracing the porch’s eaves. People driving by on US 1 often mistook it for a tavern and pulled over. “Hello? Anyone here?”—climbing the stairs and knocking on the screen door—“Is the bar open?”

  The old man would trudge across the porch and reach for the handle. “It is now.”

  That’s how he started his third collection. He collected friends, many of whom he met when they were on vacation and initially thought his place was a pub. They returned year after year. He kept a refrigerator on the porch, stocked with beer. There was a basket of colored markers on top, and he told his visitors to “sign the guest book,” and the refrigerator was now covered with names and hometowns from across the USA and parts of Europe.

  He was a big hit with the neighbors, too, something of a local celebrity. But that had taken a little more time. The man may have been old, but he wasn’t weak or withered. In fact, he was scary. A burly, tight fist of a man, he kept fit swimming in the bay and pulling crab traps. His face was hard and leathery, and the shaved skull made him look like Mr. Clean. The neighbors were afraid of him at first; they aggressively avoided his property and gave him wide berth in town. There was talk he used to be a professional wrestler or a Green Beret or a bagman for the mob. But then they saw all the people dropping in from the highway, laughing on the porch late into the starry night. The bravest neighbor tiptoed up to the porch during one of the happy hours and knocked timidly.

  “Frank! Come on in!” said the old man. Expansive smile and expansive, muscular arm that went around the neighbor’s shoulders and jerked him off the steps into the party.

  “You know my name?”

  “Sure, Frank. You’re my neighbor. I was wondering when you were going to drop by. Beginning to think you were afraid of me or something…. Hey, everybody! This is Frank!”

  “Hi, Frank!”

  “Frank, you want a beer? There’s the fridge. Help yourself. And write something if you want…”

>   Another knock at the door.

  “Gotta get that. Make yourself at home…”

  The old man became an institution. So did his parties, which sometimes lasted days, people sleeping or passing out all over the house, prompting the man to install a bunch of hammocks. Half the time strangers were cooking breakfast in his kitchen when he got back from crabbing.

  “I grabbed some of your eggs. Hope you don’t mind,” said a young woman in a long University of Miami T-shirt and nothing else, stirring a frying pan. “Want some?”

  “Sorry, can’t stay. But have at it.”

  During his gatherings, the man was content to sit on a stool in the corner of the porch, smiling, not saying anything, letting others have the spotlight. It only grew the legend. When a shrimpy guy is humble and quiet, well, that’s just pitiful, but when it’s a genuine tough guy, people can’t resist building the story. The neighbors took to him like a lovable circus bear. That he was. Except when someone was being bullied; then he became a grizzly.

  The old man liked the Caribbean Club at Mile Marker 104, where signs still made a big deal about a snippet of Key Largo putatively being filmed there. The usual crowd had gathered around the man’s stool one Friday night when they heard a woman’s protests from the pool tables.

  “Ow! You’re hurting me!”

  A tall young man in a workout jersey had her by the arm. “We’re leaving.”

  “Let me go!”

  Nobody intervened as he dragged her out the door.

  “Excuse me,” said the old man, setting down his draft and getting off his stool. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Sixty seconds later, the woman ran back into the bar, followed by the old man, who casually returned to his stool and picked up his beer. “Where were we?…” Then they heard the ambulance siren.

  The rumors spread, and the man got credit for ten times what he ever did, once driving off an entire motorcycle gang armed only with a bullwhip.

  After dropping his crabs at the market each morning, the man always drove up to Mile 82 and the Green Turtle Inn. He stuck quarters in the news boxes out front and carried the stack of papers inside.

  “Hey, it’s Ralph!” “Hi, Ralph!” “How the crab business treatin’ ya, Ralph?”

  It didn’t seem the man’s reputation could get any bigger until one of the breakfast regulars came across an old paperback at the Islamorada Library. “What’s this?”

  She thumbed down the row of books. There was another, and another, finally a whole bunch, all with Ralph’s name on the cover.

  The next morning at the restaurant, everyone had books, wanting autographs. “Ralph, why didn’t you tell us you were a writer?”

  “What’s to tell? That was another lifetime ago.”

  They talked about him after he left. “Wow, a tough guy who’s sensitive and writes books.”

  “Just like him not to mention it.”

  “That’s so cool!”

  Ralph Krunkleton had seen life the way other people only dream. He had an uncanny knack for being at the right place at the right moment, an almost perfect sense of literary timing. Almost. He always seemed to be one human skin removed from huge success. The problem: Ralph wrote mysteries, which got no respect.

  In 1958, he was twenty-seven years old and fifty pounds lighter. Goatee and turtleneck. It was San Francisco, drinking coffee at the City Lights Bookstore and listening to bad poetry. The beatnik movement was exploding, and he knew them all. Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti. Ralph wrote his first novel, a quixotic tale of wanderlust on America’s highways and living in The Now, a stream-of-conscious bohemian murder mystery called B Is for Bongo. Another book came out that same year, and Jack Kerouac’s career took off.

  Ralph was still in San Francisco nine years later when the Summer of Love broke out at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. He began taking notes at the Fillmore, where he hung out with Jefferson Airplane and giant pulsing amoebas. He wrote a zeitgeist tome about hippies traveling the country in a brightly painted school bus, dropping LSD and getting murdered one by one. It was called Bad Trip. Tom Wolfe’s career took off.

  New York two years later, Ralph was thrown in the back of a paddy wagon with Norman Mailer during an antiwar demonstration.

  “I suppose you’re going to write a murder mystery about this!” said Mailer.

  “Maybe I will!” Ralph shot back.

  The Naked and the Murdered was published the following year and faded quickly after a single printing. Mailer became an asshole.

  Ralph was last represented by the renowned agent Tanner Lebos. Ralph met Tanner in 1969 at a Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park. Tanner was wearing a Simon T-shirt; Ralph a Garfunkel. It was meant to be. They started talking. Tanner was struggling to get his literary firm up and running. He took Ralph on, and they were together almost twenty years. By the mid-seventies, however, their careers were on clearly diverging trajectories.

  Ralph began spending more and more time in Florida until he was there year-round. He split his days between his homes in the Keys and Sarasota, where he played liar’s poker with John D. MacDonald, McKinley Kantor and the rest of the gang at Florida’s version of the Algonquin Round Table.

  “Stick to mysteries, kid,” said MacDonald. “Trust me. You’ll see.”

  In the late seventies, Tanner paid Ralph a visit. They did lunch poolside at the Polo Lounge in Palm Beach. Ralph came in a corduroy leisure suit; Tanner wore tangerine sunglasses and an ascot. The conversation didn’t go well.

  “One favor,” said Tanner.

  “What’s that?”

  “One book that’s not a mystery. Just one.”

  “I don’t feel it.”

  “You louse up more good books by throwing bodies around. Look at Fitzgerald—where would The Great Gatsby be if it was a mystery?”

  “Technically, it is a mystery.”

  Tanner began to simmer. “Let’s enjoy our food.”

  While Ralph stayed down in the bargain bins, Tanner went on to become one of the hottest literary agents in Manhattan, eventually branching into theatrical representation. As they say, he was going places. Ralph was not. It continued another ten years until the big split-up in 1987. There had been a loud argument in the parking lot of a Longboat Key seafood restaurant, complete with police cars and women screaming and Tanner and John MacDonald wrestling at the base of a grinning lobster in a chef’s hat.

  The phone was ringing in the stilt house when Ralph got back from morning coffee at the Green Turtle. He picked it up.

  “Ralph, it’s me, Tanner. New York.”

  Silence.

  “Ralph? You there?”

  “Tan?”

  “Bet you didn’t expect to hear from me.”

  “It’s been a while. What? Ten years?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Good to hear your voice.”

  “I love you, too. Listen, you’re not going to believe this, but I just got a call from your publisher. Your book’s taking off. They’re going back to press.”

  “Which book?”

  “The Stingray Shuffle. But the others are starting to catch the draft, too. It could be big.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “They want you back on tour.”

  “But that book’s been out for years. You said yourself it was dead.”

  “It’s a crazy business.”

  “I don’t want to tour. I like it here.”

  “Don’t be a shmuck. Why did you write in the first place? So people would read your books. Well, now they’re reading them. And they want to talk to you. You owe it to your fans.”

  Ralph was a stand-up guy. When Tanner put it that way, he couldn’t refuse.

  “What are they talking about?”

  “Twenty cities, plus a few book festivals, a little TV and a celebrity mystery train.”

  “Could you repeat that last part?”

  “It’s the new thing. Mysteries are big now—who would have thought? They hav
e all these fancy dinners and cruises and train rides where people pay a fortune to act all this shit out. Don’t worry about the details—you’ll be getting faxes.”

  “I don’t have a fax machine.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I have one of the new faxless fax machines. And you’ll need some clothes.”

  “When is this supposed to start?”

  “They were planning next Thursday. But that was before Publishers Weekly hit the stands. Have you seen it?”

  “I’m in the Keys.”

  “There’s an article on you, page sixty-seven. They’ve made you out like some kind of tropical Salinger. Nobody can get in touch with you. They can’t find anyone who’s seen you in years or even has a recent photo. There’s talk you’re keeping some dark secret, but they’re not even sure you’re still alive.”

  “That’s crazy. I’m in town all the time. Have coffee at the same place every day. There are no secrets—”

  “I’ve told the publisher I want to push back the tour a month so we can grow the ambient buzz about your bizarre need for privacy and seclusion, and when the public appetite is too much to stand, then we put you on the road.”

  “The publisher isn’t going to go along with this foolishness.”

  “They already have a team working on your mystique. They want everyone wondering who or what it is you’re hiding from.”

  “I’m not hiding from anything—”

  “Start.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t leave the house, and don’t answer the phone. Unless it’s me.”

  “How will I know it’s you?”

  “Caller ID.”

  “I don’t have caller ID.”

  “Even better. Adds to the myth. The recluse completely out of touch, shunning the new technology. We’ll build you up like those Japanese living in island caves who think the war’s still on. Maybe you’ve even gone insane…”