”
“Yep. Big one.”
“Brown means information, which means God left another message on my machine.”
Serge threw the Challenger in reverse and squealed backward a hundred yards. He stared at the sign, then at Coleman.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“He speaks through you.”
“Cool.” Coleman switched to his flask. “What’s this dream parkway jazz about anyway?”
“The sign reveals all.”
Serge got out and stood fervently before the sun-faded paint. At the top, a rust-streaked logo of an old-style movie camera. Below: Elvis spent July and August of 1961 in this area filming his ninth major motion picture Fo//ow That Dream . . . The main set was located 5.8 miles ahead at the bridge that crosses Bird Creek.
Serge dashed back to the car. Coleman dove in after it began moving.
They sped west through Crackertown.
The odometer ticked under Serge’s watchful eye. “. . . Based on the novel Pioneer, Go Home! by Richard Powell . . .”
Coleman pointed at the running camcorder on the dashboard. “I thought this documentary was about spring break.”
“It is,” said Serge. “In the movie, Elvis plays Toby Kwimper, whose family drives to Florida and homesteads on the side of the highway. Presley was such a force of nature, he created his own spring break. Plus another righteous Florida footnote: One of the film hands from Ocala brought his eleven-year-old nephew to the set, and he was bitten by the Elvis bug, dedicating his life to rock ‘n’ roll. That child? Tom Petty!”
The odometer reached 5.7.
“Is that the bridge?”
“Elvis lives!”
The Challenger skidded to a stop on the tiny span. Serge got out with his camcorder, filming the surrounding marsh. “Coleman, there’s much to do. We must get down on that bank and fashion a bivouac like the Kwimpers’ from available natural materials. Then I’ll buy a guitar and rehearse the theme song while you round up extras from the day-labor office. Nothing in the universe can make me waver until this mission is complete.”
“What about the guy in the trunk?”
“Or we can do that.”
Chapter Eight
MEANWHILE . . .
A British Airways jumbo jet cleared the Dolphin Expressway and touched down at Miami International. The control tower had to-the-horizon visibility for minimum landing separation. Minutes later, another transatlantic from Berlin. And Rome. And Madrid. Then the domestics, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Nashville.
The cadence of swooping turbines rattled the inside of a tiny bar on the back of an ill-stocked package store with Honduran cigars and a bulletproof Plexiglas cage for night sales that was so thick it was like looking at the cashier through an aquarium.
Only four customers in the late afternoon. Guillermo and his boys. The bar sat just north of the airport on the side of Okeecho-bee Boulevard. The interior was dark, choked with cigarette smoke from insufficient ventilation, which consisted of an open back door on a windless day. Out the door: roosters and roaming dogs pulling wet clothes from laundry lines. Beyond that, an unassuming drainage canal that began a hundred miles away near Clewiston, cutting south through a million sugarcane acres, then the Everglades, past western quarries and jumping the turnpike for a perfect, man-made straight diagonal shot through Hialeah, eventually assuming natural bends when it became the Miami River before dumping into Biscayne Bay.
The connectivity of that waterway could stand as a spiritual metaphor for the irreversible series of events Guillermo and his colleagues were about to set in motion, but that would just be shitty writing. Before coming to the lounge, they’d fished the bullet from Miguel’s shoulder with tweezers and tequila. Not a bad job of swabbing the wound. Now Miguel wanted more tequila, and Guillermo wanted quiet as the TV over the bar went Live at Five from the so-called Lottery Massacre in West Perrine. When the report finished, Guillermo asked the
“Yep. Big one.”
“Brown means information, which means God left another message on my machine.”
Serge threw the Challenger in reverse and squealed backward a hundred yards. He stared at the sign, then at Coleman.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“He speaks through you.”
“Cool.” Coleman switched to his flask. “What’s this dream parkway jazz about anyway?”
“The sign reveals all.”
Serge got out and stood fervently before the sun-faded paint. At the top, a rust-streaked logo of an old-style movie camera. Below: Elvis spent July and August of 1961 in this area filming his ninth major motion picture Fo//ow That Dream . . . The main set was located 5.8 miles ahead at the bridge that crosses Bird Creek.
Serge dashed back to the car. Coleman dove in after it began moving.
They sped west through Crackertown.
The odometer ticked under Serge’s watchful eye. “. . . Based on the novel Pioneer, Go Home! by Richard Powell . . .”
Coleman pointed at the running camcorder on the dashboard. “I thought this documentary was about spring break.”
“It is,” said Serge. “In the movie, Elvis plays Toby Kwimper, whose family drives to Florida and homesteads on the side of the highway. Presley was such a force of nature, he created his own spring break. Plus another righteous Florida footnote: One of the film hands from Ocala brought his eleven-year-old nephew to the set, and he was bitten by the Elvis bug, dedicating his life to rock ‘n’ roll. That child? Tom Petty!”
The odometer reached 5.7.
“Is that the bridge?”
“Elvis lives!”
The Challenger skidded to a stop on the tiny span. Serge got out with his camcorder, filming the surrounding marsh. “Coleman, there’s much to do. We must get down on that bank and fashion a bivouac like the Kwimpers’ from available natural materials. Then I’ll buy a guitar and rehearse the theme song while you round up extras from the day-labor office. Nothing in the universe can make me waver until this mission is complete.”
“What about the guy in the trunk?”
“Or we can do that.”
Chapter Eight
MEANWHILE . . .
A British Airways jumbo jet cleared the Dolphin Expressway and touched down at Miami International. The control tower had to-the-horizon visibility for minimum landing separation. Minutes later, another transatlantic from Berlin. And Rome. And Madrid. Then the domestics, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Nashville.
The cadence of swooping turbines rattled the inside of a tiny bar on the back of an ill-stocked package store with Honduran cigars and a bulletproof Plexiglas cage for night sales that was so thick it was like looking at the cashier through an aquarium.
Only four customers in the late afternoon. Guillermo and his boys. The bar sat just north of the airport on the side of Okeecho-bee Boulevard. The interior was dark, choked with cigarette smoke from insufficient ventilation, which consisted of an open back door on a windless day. Out the door: roosters and roaming dogs pulling wet clothes from laundry lines. Beyond that, an unassuming drainage canal that began a hundred miles away near Clewiston, cutting south through a million sugarcane acres, then the Everglades, past western quarries and jumping the turnpike for a perfect, man-made straight diagonal shot through Hialeah, eventually assuming natural bends when it became the Miami River before dumping into Biscayne Bay.
The connectivity of that waterway could stand as a spiritual metaphor for the irreversible series of events Guillermo and his colleagues were about to set in motion, but that would just be shitty writing. Before coming to the lounge, they’d fished the bullet from Miguel’s shoulder with tweezers and tequila. Not a bad job of swabbing the wound. Now Miguel wanted more tequila, and Guillermo wanted quiet as the TV over the bar went Live at Five from the so-called Lottery Massacre in West Perrine. When the report finished, Guillermo asked the
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