No Sunscreen for the Dead Page 7

  “Grab that side. We need to roll this thing into the bathroom.”

  Coleman grunted. “It’s heavy.”

  “It has wheels.”

  The wheels squeaked as the industrial-gray box began the journey.

  “It’s a straight shot through the door, but a bit tight, so just watch your fingers.”

  “Ow! Shit!” Coleman hopped around, flapping his left hand.

  Serge sighed and finished the job on his own. “Okay, next item . . .”

  . . . Carl Effluent felt his cheek being lightly tapped with the barrel of a gun. He found himself tied to a straight-backed motel chair with duct tape across his mouth. A thousand points of light dotted the ceiling from one of those new educational projectors that make constellations.

  “You’re awake,” said Serge. “That’s great because it’s fun time! Up there is Sagittarius, and down here is to-go food from Waffle House. I absolutely love Waffle House!”

  Coleman nodded. “I like menus where you can just point at pictures.”

  Serge lowered the beds that he’d tipped up against the walls to make room for the humidifier. “I also made a run to Home Depot, but more on that later.” He held something under Carl’s nose. “Up for a waffle? No? Suit yourself.”

  “It’s good,” said Coleman, wiping syrup-hands on his shirt. A beer can popped.

  Serge sat on the corner of the bed. “Ready to have fun? I sure am! You know what I just realized? I love the word ‘waffle’! Say it three times and you can’t be in a bad mood. It’s just not possible. Try it!”

  The duct tape was ripped off a mouth. “Waffle?”

  “You have to say it three times.”

  “Waffle, waffle, waffle?”

  Serge giggled and replaced the tape. “For some reason that just tickles me. You know what else is fun? Fun facts! And I’ve got a doozy for you! It’s not exactly on point, but life doesn’t stay on point, either, so why should we? You simply go out for a waffle one morning and end up in a motel room with a hostage and a humidifier. Ain’t existence weird like that? Ready for your fun fact of the day? In Florida, Waffle Houses have a strategic role far more important than breakfast. When a hurricane bears down on our state, the Federal Emergency Management Agency employs a variety of traditional meteorological metrics, but they’ve also developed something called the Waffle House Index . . .”

  Serge got up and emptied bags from Home Depot. Two large plastic pails, a half-dozen jugs and a windup timer.

  “. . . A man named W. Craig Fugate came up with the index because, while weather data measures a storm’s strength in the air, FEMA didn’t have a real-time gauge on the ground of disruption to infrastructure. Fugate studied the problem and decided one of the most accurate measurements would be Waffle House status. Why? The Waffle House people are maniacs! They’re absolutely obsessed with staying open no matter what, so they’ve developed cutting-edge disaster preparedness. To cope with supply lines being interrupted and power going out, many locations have installed generators and employ an emergency limited menu of non-perishables. I swear this is all completely true . . .”

  Serge uncapped the jugs and began pouring the thick, gooey contents into the pails. “During major storms, FEMA establishes direct lines to Waffle House headquarters to update their color-coded index. Green: restaurants open, all systems go! Yellow: limited crisis menu. Red: the unthinkable, closure. It all reached a pinnacle during Hurricane Matthew on October 16, 2016, when the index went solid crimson from Fort Pierce all the way to Titusville, and FEMA swung into action. So Waffle Houses are secretly a network of land-based weather buoys disguised as restaurants, you know what I mean?”

  Serge went over to the bathroom sink, pouring water in the pails and stirring with a stick. Then he sealed them in plastic wrap. He returned and plugged a portable DVD player into the motel’s TV set.

  “The main event!” Serge sat on the bed next to Carl and rocked with anticipation. “If this doesn’t get your heart pumping, you’re already dead. Sorry, bad choice of phrase. We’re going to watch Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo with Spencer Tracy, depicting the daring bombing mission of Doolittle’s Raiders! . . .” He turned on the movie and fast-forwarded. “For my money, the best scene is when the planes fly in for training at Eglin Air Force Base up in our panhandle. Can you dig it? How many people actually know that the famous mission was launched from my home state? . . . Look! Look! They’re using actual black-and-white aerial footage of the military complex near Destin as they come in for a landing! And here’s my favorite quote from the whole movie when one of the crew looks out the window.”

  “. . . Florida, palm trees, alligators, bathing beauties! . . .”

  Serge checked his watch. “Thirty seconds. Show’s over.” The TV went black.

  Carl struggled and whined.

  “Right,” said Serge. “Curiosity. Comes up a lot in my work. You want to know what’s going to happen to you?”

  He ripped the duct tape off Carl’s mouth. A brief scream.

  “Quiet,” said Serge. “I carry an astonishing amount of tape.”

  “Don’t kill me! Please, I’m begging!”

  “Kill you?” said Serge. “Don’t be ridiculous. You might kill yourself, but I just teach school . . . Coleman, assistance.”

  “Twice in one day?”

  “Consider yourself an overachiever.”

  The pair began dragging Carl’s chair backward toward the bathroom. The screaming started again, and the duct tape went back on.

  Coleman stood in the doorway. “Where are we going to put him? There’s no room anymore with that big thing in here.”

  “Help me get him on top of the humidifier . . .”

  In minutes, Carl was lashed with braided ropes, naked, spread-eagled on his back across the cold metal.

  “What’s the plan this time?” asked Coleman.

  “Wait here.” Serge disappeared and quickly returned with the plastic buckets. He twisted open a cap on the machine and began pouring.

  “But I thought these things just used water,” said Coleman.

  “They also allow you to add pleasantly scented aroma additives so your house smells like a pine forest or a chick’s apartment. I’ve whipped up my own custom additive, but I had to seriously dilute it or the humidifier would gunk up.”

  “Hey, I remember that smell,” said Coleman. “I was in kindergarten.”

  “Me too,” said Serge, topping off the unit’s internal tank. “Nostalgia always makes your job go faster.”

  Then Serge went to work with a screwdriver on the bathroom’s light switch plate. He pulled the unit out of the wall and disconnected one of the wires. Then he grabbed his last purchase and wrapped wires around a pair of screws, introducing them into the light switch’s circuit.

  “What’s that?” asked Coleman.

  “One of those timers people use on lights to save electricity.” Serge pointed at the ceiling. “In this case, the timer also controls the bathroom’s ventilation fan.”

  “The light and the fan are still going.”

  “Because the timer’s not on.” Serge cranked the spring-loaded mechanical dial, and the light went out. “Six hours ought to do it.”

  “Six hours for what?”

  “That big honkin’ humidifier will make the air too moist—and that dude too sweaty. My science project requires that the room be vented once the machine’s reservoir is empty.” He pressed the power button, and the large device hummed to life with a salesman on top. “Which brings us to the bonus round!”

  Serge and Coleman stepped just outside the bathroom, interlocked arms and square-danced. Singing a duet:

  “. . . Ohhhhh! . . . The bonus round, the bonus round! . . .”

  “. . . What the hell’s up with the bonus round? . . .”

  “. . . It’s one last chance for this piece of snot . . .”

  “. . . I’ll bet he’s thinking, Thanks a lot! . . .”

  “. . . Got himself in a serious Serge s
pot . . .”

  “. . . That big machine’s getting red-hot . . .”

  “. . . How much time has he got? . . .”

  “. . . What else rhymes? Polyglot! . . .”

  “. . . Will he make it? Will he not? . . .”

  “. . . Is his life fucking shot? . . .”

  “. . . Not . . . quite . . . yet . . .”

  “. . . Why? . . .”

  “. . . Ohhhhhhhh! . . . The bonus round, the bonus round! . . .”

  Carl screamed under the duct tape at the clearly insane antics of his captors.

  Serge came back in and idly tapped his fingers on the salesman’s forehead. “This is a first! The bonus round has actually already been decided. The results just haven’t been tabulated. Here’s the deal: We had an argument earlier, only a little dustup where crazy things were said in the heat of the moment that we’d all like to take back. I’ll be the first to admit I was a tad harsh on you, hurling accusations when I don’t know the first technical thing about humidifiers except they’re totally stupid in Florida. And by stupid, I mean special, so don’t get me wrong again. Still, I have a hunch you oversold the Hornsbys on the size of the unit. On the other hand, you claimed you were totally ethical. So if you didn’t exploit them on the unit’s capacity, my experiment won’t work, and you’ll just be clammy until they find you. If the unit’s too big, however, yikes! . . . But why go there until it’s time? You’re a salesman: Be Mr. Positive!”

  Serge sprinted out of the bathroom and dug through his duffel bag, removing several small figures.

  Coleman ambled over. “Whatcha going to do with those?”

  “Observe.” Serge ran back in the bathroom, pulled out the humidifier’s reservoir, and dumped the figures inside.

  “Jesus!” said Coleman. “Those are some of your favorite souvenirs!”

  “My whole collection,” said Serge. “But I’m an artist, and I’m taking one for the team. I’ll order more on eBay.”

  They left the bathroom and closed the door. Serge used an entire roll of duct tape to create an airtight seal all the way around the frame.

  Coleman cracked a Schlitz. “I can still hear him trying to yell, even with the tape.”

  “Must be afraid of the dark.” Serge zipped up a duffel bag. “Let’s rock.”

  Chapter 8

  1970

  Theodore Pruitt Jr. sat in his bedroom surrounded by shelves of impressive model rockets. On his desk was an assortment of the latest shortwave radio equipment. He slowly turned a dial and picked up Jakarta . . .

  Everything had changed for Ted. It happened back in 1959. For the rest of his life, Ted Pruitt Jr. would never forget the day he found his mother sitting alone on the edge of her bed crying.

  Teddy walked over. “What’s the matter, Mom?”

  She just clutched him as tight as she could and cried even harder.

  His father was gone. She would later explain something went wrong with his blood. Try as they might, nothing would ever be the same.

  Years passed quickly as Ted worked his way up through grade school and then senior high. He was a slight youth, and he was picked on, not overly so, just the usual of what was going around back then. His mother always worried about him, as mothers do. Ted never showed the loss of his father, but it was there. Others his age were into sports and cars and music, and most parents had no idea where they were spending their Saturday nights. Ted spent a lot of time by himself in his room, working on that growing collection of rockets that filled all four walls. His favorites were working replicas of the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo programs. Then there were the elongated desks with three shortwave receivers, tape recorders, a small library of global listening guides, and wires everywhere, some going out the window to a special antenna now rising from the roof. He was compensating. He wanted to be his dad.

  Could have been worse, his mom thought. She had barely made it through 1968, when parents’ fears spiked. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been shot. Protests in the streets, rebellious music, marijuana and LSD everywhere. Glenda Pruitt was almost relieved that her son was nerding his way through the times. But there was one thing it couldn’t shelter him from.

  Vietnam.

  By 1970, Ted was nearing graduation, about to turn eighteen, and Glenda had nervously monitored the previous draft lottery. Birthdays picked at random, ranked 1 to 366. From what the other parents were saying, it wasn’t good. The war was growing and they were taking practically everyone, deep into the lottery. As a single working mom, she didn’t have money for college and a deferment. Unless his birthday drew an extremely high lottery number this year, she had already decided to drive him to Canada. She hadn’t told her son yet because they both knew that her late husband wouldn’t approve. He’d often spoken of duty to country.

  Ted continued to fly his rockets and tune his radios. One of his passions was writing letters to foreign shortwave stations that broadcast for English-language audiences. Then Ted would turn on his tape recorder at the appointed time and hope his correspondence would be read on the air. It was something the hobbyists did. And it was a lot of disappointment. A lot. Some of his unsuccessful tapes had been recorded over twenty times. But then he finally got a letter read in Madrid, and another in West Berlin.

  A month later, Ted raced into the kitchen yelling so loud that his mother almost had a heart attack.

  “Don’t scare me like that!”

  “Mom! You’ve got to listen to this! It’s great!” He set his recorder on the table and pressed the play button.

  A thick accent rose from a tin speaker. “. . . This is Radio Moscow, and today we have a letter from Ted Pruitt, a high school student in West Palm Beach, Florida, United States. Ted asks, ‘If in the Soviet Union all citizens are supposed to be equal, then why is there so little personal freedom?’ Ted, if you’re listening, it is a very good question. The reality is that you’ve only heard your own government’s side of the story. Look at the violence in your own streets, government police attacking young people who are only expressing their rightful outrage against an unjust war. If you ever had the chance to visit and know us, you would have a much different opinion. We are a peaceful, freedom-loving people. Thank you very much for writing, Ted . . . And now a letter from Scotland . . .”

  Ted pressed the stop button and looked up with excitement. “What do you think?”

  “Uh, that’s very impressive,” said Glenda. “But you do realize it’s propaganda.”

  “I know, I know!” said Ted. “But isn’t it cool they read my letter?”

  “Yes, son, it is very cool.”

  He snatched the tape recorder and ran back to his room to write more letters . . .

  . . . The next afternoon, a knock at the door.

  Glenda answered. She immediately thought the person had the wrong address. Standing on her front porch was a college-aged man in torn jeans, sandals and a tie-dyed T-shirt. In other words, a hippie. He had one of those big white man’s Afros. And a guitar.

  “May I help you?” asked Glenda.

  “Yes.” The man tilted his head to see past her into the house, which Glenda didn’t really care for. “Does Ted Pruitt live here?”

  “I’m sorry, but he passed away years ago.”

  “No, I mean the high school student.”

  Glenda stopped and looked him over again. “You’re here to see my son?”

  “Yes, is he in?”

  From behind: “Who is it, Mom?”

  “Nobody.” She turned back to face the stranger at the door. “Exactly what do you want with him?”

  “I’m a big shortwave enthusiast! And, well, not too many other people are,” said the young man. “I heard Ted’s letter read yesterday on Radio Moscow, and I thought, ‘That is so cool! They’ve never read any of my letters.’ Can I talk to him?”

  Ted came up behind his mom. “Who is it?”

  “Ted Pruitt?” asked the young man at the door. “I’m Tofer Baez. I love shortwave r
adio, and I heard Moscow read your letter. That is incredible! Do you think we could talk shop? Trade tips on equipment and stations?”

  “Heck yeah! I don’t know anyone at school who’s into shortwave.”

  “Me neither,” said Tofer.

  “Mom, what are you doing? Let him in.”

  Before Glenda even realized it, she was stepping aside.

  “Do you play the guitar?” asked Tofer.

  “No.”

  “I can show you some easy chords,” said Tofer. “I know the Beatles and Stones and Jefferson Airplane.”

  “That’s groovy.”

  “Let’s go to your room.”

  Glenda warily watched them trot down the hall, and Tofer glanced back just before closing the door.

  She stood with folded arms. “I don’t like that guy.”

  Two hours later they came out, and Tofer waved bye before driving away in a VW microbus.

  “Son, can you come in the kitchen a second and have a seat?”

  “Sure.” Ted sat down. “What is it?”

  “What were you doing all that time in your room with the door closed?”

  “Nothing. Just talking shortwave and playing the guitar.” He smiled. “I know three songs now.”

  “Something’s not right about him,” said Glenda.

  “Mom! He’s the coolest guy I know, even cooler than the coolest guys in high school who won’t even talk to me. And he goes to college.”

  “You don’t know him. He’s a stranger,” said his mom. “And since when does a college guy take such an interest in a high school student he’s never met? I think he’s trying to sell you drugs. That’s how they get you hooked.”

  “Mom! Tofer doesn’t do drugs. He said he’s high on life.”

  “That’s even weirder. I don’t like him.”

  But Glenda, nonetheless, allowed Tofer into their home the next day, and the next. And even reluctantly let Ted go when Tofer invited him to his apartment. If I pull back too hard with his new friend, he’ll totally rebel.

  After hours of worry, she’d regretted her decision and sprang out of her chair that night when she heard the VW microbus dropping Ted off.