Triggerfish Twist Page 8

  “Then I don’t think I like sports,” said Martha, plopping back down and folding her arms.

  Jack Terrier began smacking a fist into an open palm. His son did likewise.

  Serge walked over and put his hand on Melvin’s shoulder, and they watched the Terriers go inside their house laughing.

  “Who was that?” asked Serge.

  “Jason Terrier, star pitcher of the Raptors. His dad’s the coach. We play them Friday night.”

  “Then we better get practicing,” said Serge. “Pop fly! Go long!”

  Melvin ran to the far side of the yard, and Serge reached way back and fired the ball straight up, into a streetlight, and a shower of glass fluttered to the ground.

  Serge looked toward the porch and grinned. “Whoops.”

  Despite the inauspicious start, it was a good practice. Serge took Melvin through all the drills. They even played a little pepper.

  “Serge is a cool name,” said Melvin, tossing the ball. “I wish I had a cool name, too.”

  “Melvin does lack a certain zing,” said Serge, tossing the ball back. “Let me cogitate on this a moment…Melvin…Melvin…hmmm…”

  They tossed the ball back and forth a few more times.

  “Wait! I got it!” said Serge. “From now on you’re Smooth M, The Gangster of Love.”

  “Cool!”

  Serge got down in a catcher’s crouch and punched his glove. “Runners on first and third. You gotta pitch from the stretch. And no breaking stuff. You have to get the ball to the plate in a hurry.”

  Jim and Martha rocked slowly on the porch swing as Melvin worked on his delivery. Before each pitch, Serge flashed a bunch of signs Melvin didn’t understand; after every pitch, he leaped out of his crouch and ran to the “mound” for a conference with Melvin.

  “See?” said Jim. “They’re playing fine.”

  “He seems a little intense,” said Martha.

  The ballplayers called it a day. Melvin ran up the porch steps and turned around and waved.

  “Bye, Serge!”

  “Bye, Smooth M!”

  Martha and Jim looked at each other. “Smooth M?”

  The front door of the Terrier house opened and Jack came out in his coach’s uniform. He started walking across the street.

  “I’ll bet he’s coming over to apologize,” said Jim.

  “When the windchill is thirty-two in hell.”

  Jack stopped in front of the porch.

  “Hi, neighbor,” said Jim.

  Jack pointed at the blue Trans Am at the curb. “Can you move your car?”

  “It’s not my car,” said Jim.

  “It’s in front of your house.”

  “It’s stolen. We just called the police—”

  “See if you can move it. Okay, sport?”

  Jack turned and headed back to his house.

  “But it’s not mine,” Jim called after him.

  “And try to hurry,” said Terrier. “It’s really bothering me.”

  12

  S ERGE A. STORMS was born in West Palm Beach during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  There were problems from the start. To say he was a hyperactive tot didn’t quite capture it. When Serge was three, he covered himself head to foot in Vaseline. When he was four, he found a can of spray paint under the sink and gave every single thing in the house a pretty red stripe before his folks awoke one day.

  By six, Serge appeared to have outgrown the phase. He took up hobbies—healthy stuff like collecting stamps that seemed to provide a constructive lightning rod for his focus.

  It soon became clear there was too much focus. Serge was given a starter stamp kit for Christmas. Then he had to have every U.S. stamp ever issued. He refused to leave a local stamp shop until he was given one of everything. Little Serge made his body completely rigid, and his parents had to carry him out of the shop under their arms sideways like a surfboard.

  Two year later, the violence began. Little things from school. At first it was overlooked because Serge was a spastic, skinny drink of water, and his victims were all bigger, stronger, well-documented bullies. The parents complained, and the teachers expressed concern, but inside they were glad that someone had finally dished it back to the little bastards. The “Serge problem” got nothing but lip service.

  Eventually, however, even the most sympathetic teachers began to have second thoughts. It wasn’t what he did or whom he did it to, but that he was so effective. If he had simply lost control and starting throwing punches after being picked on, well, anyone could understand that.

  Serge would wait.

  That was the chilling part. At an instant-gratification age when most kids have an event horizon of ten minutes, Serge would let months go by. A bully with a full foot and thirty pounds on Serge might bloody his nose before the first day of class in the fall. The next thing they knew, Christmas decorations were up and the bully had forgotten all about the incident. Heck, Serge was now even his friend, lending him cool toys, flattering him. Then it was spring. And one day the bully would finally find himself all alone, separated from the herd. His guard was down, vulnerable in some way like sitting on a toilet with gym shorts around his ankles, and then the stall door crashed open and a volleyball net flew over his head and he had the living piss kicked out of him. The victims were so shaken they refused to identify their attacker.

  At the end of third grade, however, there was an incident so Lord of the Flies it couldn’t be ignored any longer. This time, Serge hadn’t been the bully’s original victim. It was a boy named Joey, the scrawniest kid in class, whom Serge had befriended because he was the one who smuggled the Mad magazines into school. Joey’s arm had been broken. The bully was suspended.

  By the time suspension was over and the bully came back to class, Serge had saved up a hefty amount of allowance. It wasn’t remotely a fair fight. Serge brought in hired muscle from the middle school.

  A passing jogger heard the screams. They found the bully tied to stakes on a fire-ant mound behind the library. Serge was sent to juvenile assessment.

  His cunning got the psychiatrists’ attention. They were fascinated by the contradiction. Violence at Serge’s age usually resulted from faulty impulse control. But Serge never showed rage, never an outburst. Rather, he patiently lined up an elaborate set of destructive dominoes and then set them in motion with a flick of his finger. The psychiatric community was split. They couldn’t decide which drug was best to dope him to the gills.

  Two decades passed. A few months before Coleman and Sharon would burn down his house, Serge was nearing his thirty-fifth birthday. He had spent much of his adulthood under a haze of psychotropic piña coladas. Those were the normal days when Serge wouldn’t black out, nothing terrible happened, and the fire department didn’t have to dispatch a hook-and-ladder again to peel him off the water tower.

  But Serge didn’t like his brain feeling so thick. He couldn’t absorb knowledge, and that was important to Serge. He heard echoes from his childhood, saw bright, elusive flickers of another time, and he wanted to chase them, the melting pocket watches, persistence of memory. Serge was falling in love with the place he had taken for granted growing up, and he became a disciple of Florida history. He began traveling the state, spending entire days in the libraries of the public university system, going through arcane tomes in Special Collections. When Serge was on his meds, he would stare at a page for hours, reading the same paragraph over and over without understanding. His brain was a jug of honey. He’d start pounding his forehead on the table until they asked him to leave.

  Then Serge would walk the streets and pitch his medicine in a gutter. The next day he was back at the library, begging for another chance. He was so sweet and polite he usually got it, and he pored through book after map after magazine after microfilm with encyclopedic retention. But there was a price. That night he would rob and stomp people.

  He had no idea why. It was a very curious thing for Serge to watch, like he was working the lever
s inside a robot gone haywire in a bad 1959 science fiction movie. Sometimes it obeyed the controls; other times it ran amok in the village square.

  The more Serge read and observed, the more he understood his cultural underpinnings, the social dynamic of his time and place. On a warm spring evening, he achieved absolute clarity. He saw in one broad stroke the wholesale collapse of courtesy and community. He wanted to run out in the road and wave his arms and warn the people. But if they stopped their cars, there was an even chance he’d rob and stomp them. What to do?

  By the beginning of summer, Serge had worked his way around the state to Tampa Bay. He stopped taking his medicine again so he could study the library holdings at the University of South Florida. Soon, he began teaching a course at the school. Only two problems: Serge wasn’t a teacher, and the university didn’t know about it. He just wandered out of the library one afternoon and into a small auditorium. A few students were using the room as a study hall. Others were goofing off altogether, watching daytime talk shows on a TV bolted to the wall over the stage. Serge couldn’t have that.

  He looked up at the screen. Someone was interviewing Donny Osmond about his private pain.

  “You know what?” Serge yelled into the auditorium. “Fuck Donny Osmond’s private pain!” He yanked the power cord out of the socket. “Jesus! What a nation of bed-wetters we’ve become!”

  He began pacing the stage in a psychotic state, which the students mistook for professorial. He launched a disjointed, pedantic ramble about history and sociology, which further convinced the students that they had accidentally stumbled into an official part of the curriculum.

  They got up to leave.

  Serge started bopping up and down, playing an invisible electric organ.

  “That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it…K.C. and the Sunshine Band, the greatest musical artists to ever have come out of Florida, getting their start at T.K. Studios in Hialeah as K.C. and the Sunshine Junkanoo Band, named after the imported Bahamian music that influenced their intricate horns and percussion until their brilliance was unfairly splattered with the embarrassing stain of disco…Get down tonight—yowwww!”

  Some students sat back down. This guy’s wacked! Let’s see what happens. Others out in the hall stuck their heads in the door—is there a class going on in here or something?

  Serge resumed pacing and babbling. He kicked off his shoes and trudged across the stage like the barefoot mailmen walking the surf a century ago. He kept it up for almost an hour—the first Pan Am flights from Biscayne to Havana, Arthur Godfrey playing a ukelele in a Miami swimming pool—spitting history nonstop like an auctioneer, his fact-valve stuck open. The students loved it. Ten rivers of sweat poured down Serge’s head, and he became faint. His hand felt for the arm of a chair onstage, and he fell into it like Ted Nugent at the end of a set. A young woman threw him a towel. Serge wiped himself down, got up again and staggered to the front of the stage for the encore: nibbling cheese slices into the shapes of the state’s sixty-seven counties.

  The next day, the auditorium was half full. Some students cut other classes to hear what the buzz was about. Teachers were now showing up, standing along the back wall.

  Serge blasted in from a side door, jumped onstage and dove into a synthesis of popular culture, local history and spiritual philosophy. He gave a manic, high-octane, hour-long presentation featuring multiple characters and voices.

  The third day, the room was full. The fourth, it over-flowed.

  On the fifth, Serge arrived early with his antique Ybor City cigar box. He had sent one of the kids to Audio-Visual for a slide projector, and it now stood in the middle of the stage. The auditorium began to fill. Serge opened the cigar box and lovingly removed his collection of Ektachrome slides and inserted them in the projector’s carousel. “Hmmm,” he said to himself. “Where’s my Orange Bowl lighter? Has somebody been in here? Worry about that later—you got a class to teach.” He grabbed the projector’s remote control in his right hand and walked to the front of the stage. The room went quiet.

  “Florida, the Sunshine State—six hundred and sixty-three miles of beaches, four thousand five hundred islands, a sales tax of six percent, fifteen million people, and a five-hundred-year history that is one big real estate scam.

  “The swampland come-ons didn’t start in the 1920s. They go back half a millennium, all the way across the Atlantic, to the kings and queens and dukes of the Old World. The first explorers discovered that Florida was a worthless peninsula. Way too hot. No strategic value. No gold. Indians kept shooting arrows at you. But these were Europeans, and in their charming continental way they grabbed Florida just to grab it, like those shitty light-blue properties in Monopoly you only buy because you don’t want your evil cousin to get them.

  “Actually, the first owners found Florida wasn’t worthless. It was worse than worthless. They poured money into forts and ag collectives, only to come back the next year and find everyone dead or insane. So they looked around Europe and said, ‘How ’bout a little trade? Nice tropical real estate.’ The deed to Florida started making the rounds.”

  Serge looked over his shoulder at the screen onstage. His thumb clicked the remote, and the projector tumbled the first slide into place.

  “These are the six flags that have flown over Florida as nations passed us around like the clap. The Spanish, the French, the British, the Spanish again—the kid who has to repeat second grade for eating too much library paste—then the United States, and finally the current state flag consisting of a diagonal red cross on a white field with a circular seal depicting an Indian maiden under a sabal palm at sunrise, casting something upon the water, possibly lottery tickets.”

  Click.

  “This is a painting of Ponce de León, a widely misunderstood man. Although he is credited as the first European to discover Florida, he is more widely known for his quixotic and most likely apocryphal search for the Fountain of Youth. A new theory has emerged. Why did Ponce explore? Anyone?”

  A hand went up. “The Age of Discovery?”

  “Wrong!”

  “Convert the Indians to Christianity?”

  “Wrong!”

  “To get chicks?”

  “Bingo!” said Serge. “My own take is that Ponce was suffering a classic conquistador midlife crisis. He’s pushing fifty. He’s done it all. But now the new guys are coming up. Cortez and De Soto. Punks! They got no respect. So there’s Ponce, disillusioned with it all as his landing party begins raping and pillaging yet another Indian settlement, and Ponce is back on the beach staring out to sea, talking to himself. ‘Maybe I should start working out.’”

  Click.

  An hour’s worth of slides and lore.

  Click.

  “And this was taken yesterday. It’s from the food court at the mall up the street. What a telling assemblage of our community. Have we just completely stopped trying? Examine how soft we’ve become as a people, lounging in mail-order shorts between the cheese-kabob kiosk and the Magic Wok, chewing slowly with expressions containing less verve than grazing dairy cattle. What must the rest of the world think? We’ve got physicists from Pakistan gladly pulling sixteen-hour shifts in our convenience stores—and they’re made fun of by Americans like this choice specimen here on the right. I direct your attention to the middle-aged man with the tits in the tight ‘One Hundred Percent Stud’ T-shirt eating a chocolate-chip cookie the size of a manhole cover….”

  Serge turned off the projector and walked to the front of the stage.

  “The shoreline of Florida has been going in and out like an accordion for millions of years. They’ve found pottery fifty miles offshore and shark teeth fifty miles inland. A massive jetliner crashes in six inches of water in the Everglades and vanishes beneath the muck. The first Floridians are all gone, the bloodlines wiped out forever. A thousand generations eating oysters in the same spot and tossing the shells in piles bigger than planetariums. We find an ancient circle—evidence of the first cu
lture at the mouth of the Miami River. And we say, ‘Gee. That’s pretty cool. Let’s put a fucking condo on it!’ Have you seen the barrier islands from the air? They’re five times taller than they are wide—these little tendrils of shifting sand covered with these ridiculous buildings. Do you know what the next decent hurricane is going to do? Are you starting to get the picture? We weren’t the first here, and we won’t be the last. Florida’s just letting us pass through—so enjoy the ride and please pick up your trash.”

  The bell rang and the kids started getting up.

  “Be careful,” Serge admonished. “It’s dumb out there.”

  He leaped off the stage and headed for the exit. He was mobbed. Young women slipped him their phone numbers.

  The dean was among the faculty in back, and he offered Serge a prestigious chair. Serge said he was sorry, but this would have to be his last term at the university. He was being offered too much money by the private sector. The dean said he was sorry, too, but happy for Serge, and they shook hands.

  The dean went back to his office and looked in his files. He began to perspire. There was nobody on the faculty by the name Serge A. Storms. He called the department of education in Tallahassee. They told him there was no teacher certified under that name at any level.

  The dean panicked. He picked up the phone. Then he thought about his career. People had heard him offer Serge the chair. This could be a major embarrassment. He put the phone down. Since Serge was leaving anyway, he saw no real harm in keeping the little secret to himself. There was only one minor loose end. He also had sort of asked Serge to deliver the commencement address.

  13

  T HREE A.M.

  A Kenworth pumped diesel smoke into the north Florida air as it rolled past the official state welcome center on Interstate 75.

  Four hulking men walked across the dark parking lot of the hospitality complex, toward a brown Cutlass Supreme. The largest climbed in the driver’s seat and opened a wallet that wasn’t his, counting money. Four hundred dollars. He threw the wallet on the dash, turned the ignition and grabbed the steering wheel tightly with two sets of tattooed knuckles. H-A-T-E and H-A-T-E. On the other side of the parking lot, in front of a sign that said NO NIGHTTIME SECURITY, a silhouette slumped in the driver’s seat of a rented Chrysler Sebring. Small flames began to lap the back window of the rental.