Hammerhead Ranch Motel

8

Way up north in the Gulf of Mexico, the very tip of Florida ’s panhandle meets the Alabama border on a remote barrier island named Perdido Key. In the middle of the island, right at the state line, is a ramshackle roadhouse built in 1962 called The Flora-Bama Lounge. It is an outpost of sorts-a peculiar, isolated place standing in relief against the bright, flat landscape of shore and ocean. It takes persistent driving and a good map to get to, and the people who make it there are not in a hurry to get anywhere else. An old peach windsock flaps over the roof to aid customers who arrive by parachute and seaplane.

On an uneventful day late in the year, at exactly noon, a burly old man with white hair and beard sat on the last barstool at the Gulf end of The Flora-Bama. He looked out the back door at the waves and laughing gulls. His name was Jethro Maddox, and he was on his eighth Bud.

Jethro’s tired eyes scanned the Redneck Riviera. “This is like Paris in the twenties,” he told the bartender, who was distracted by a TV tracking map showing a newly formed hurricane.

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated!” Jethro lifted his beer and drained it all at once and then looked at the can. “I have drunk you, beer, and I thank you. We are now one…”

Jethro smacked the empty can on the bar and burped with abandon. “There is no shame in a belch if it is the truth…” And he promptly toppled backward off his stool and disappeared from sight.

The bartender heard muttering from the direction of the floor-“Ouch! Galanos! I will kill you!”-and he leaned over the bar looking for Jethro. “Are you okay?”

Jethro stood and whisked off his sweater and fit his fishing cap back on his head. “I am fine,” he said and remounted the stool. “A man will hurt, but he must forget his hurt. The great DiMaggio played with hurt, and there was a grace when he struck out that others do not possess when they connect hard… We will drink to DiMaggio. Another cold one…”

As the bartender popped the top on another can, he heard a deep drone high above and stepped over to the window and looked up. “Must be a hurricane plane returning to Keesler.”

“Ah, brave aviators. They are a noble crew filled with the vigor of their youth,” said Jethro, “and they will never feel more alive and proud than when they face the knowledge of death.”

W e’re all gonna die!” screamed Bananas Foster in the cockpit of the WC-130 Hercules ten thousand feet over The Flora-Bama Lounge.

Nobody paid any attention. They were all reading books, writing letters or doing tedious chores on the boring return flight over the Gulf of Mexico. Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes scraped diligently with a quarter on an ancient scratch-and-sniff foldout in one of his magazines, but instead of an arousing bouquet from the southern female glands, all he got was a musty attic.

Sebastian and Honeycutt stared together out the lower windows in the cargo hold, tracing the shoreline with their eyes. They tried to identify the features of the Florida panhandle. Santa Rosa Island, Pensacola Bay, the Naval Air Station, Perdido Key. There was a scattering of cotton-puff clouds far below, throwing shadows on the ground, and they could make out the white wake of a shrimp boat in the Gulf. They could even see teeny-tiny cars driving along the coast, and they wondered where those people’s lives were headed.

A red Alfa Romeo convertible sped east along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico on Route 292, Free’s “All Right Now” blasting from the stereo. Two tall, athletic, college-age women looked up at the plane in the sky and wondered what was going on in those lives.

They were the kind of women who were sexy at a range of a quarter mile, and their loose hair blew and snapped in the wind with a wild coquettishness. They wore big T-shirts over bikinis, and their sunglasses were cheap and cool. They gave off wanton vibrations. The scene could have been from a devil-may-care, coming-of-age independent flick that takes the jury award at Cannes, or maybe a tragedy-strikes-good-kids-in-a-small-town made-for-TV movie that opens with Meredith Baxter Birney staring through drizzling rain on a windowpane, popping pills and wondering when it all started to go so horribly wrong.

The driver was Ingrid Praline, a twenty-one-year-old blonde from Alabama with Scandinavian blood, and in the passenger seat was LaToya Olsen, a military brat from the Bronx.

Ingrid’s hair and cheekbones recalled Ursula Andress in Dr. No. She often braided her hair into pigtails and wore denim bib overalls, and the giant Lolita package gave men hemorrhagic fever. LaToya favored a young Lena Horne; she had the face of an angel, especially the eyes, and she often kept her hair pulled back in a bun, but now it was down.

The two had most recently worked at a Piggly Wiggly in Tuscaloosa, where their boss was a spitting-mean little bumper car of a woman. She hated Ingrid and LaToya on sight because they had potential, and she gave them all of the most undesirable chores. The pair first met on rubber-glove duty corralling an errant bowel movement in the men’s room.

They immediately became inseparable. LaToya was the talkative one and Ingrid was the mental sponge. Ingrid was far from dumb, but she had grown up in a crippling parochial environment. Her mother was Olga Svjörlvladablatt, a hardworking third-generation Swedish immigrant, but her father was Jebediah “Jeb” (“Bo”) Praline, fifth-generation Jim Beam, and global knowledge was viewed in their home as a new strain of syphilis that the line of Praline men had yet to build up a natural resistance against.

In contrast, LaToya had seen it all. She had been everywhere as a Navy kid. Subic Bay in the Philippines; Rota, Spain; and Naples, Italy, before spending her teen years at an intelligence station near London, where she picked up her British accent. She talked a streak about the outside world, and Ingrid could never get enough.

That’s how the nicknames started. After a month, they stopped using their given names altogether. Instead, Ingrid always called LaToya “City,” and LaToya always called Ingrid “Country.”

“ Pensacola is actually older than St. Augustine, but it wasn’t a continuous settlement, so St. Augustine gets all the attention,” said City. “There’s a bar over on the mainland called Trader Jon’s. It’s a freakin’ aviation museum, but Trader is getting on in years and they may have to close it down. The customers are trying to save it…”

They passed a pile of shells outside an oyster shack and a man at the shoulder of the road using a tire iron to take out his frustration on a broken-down Pontiac Firebird. City called attention to the sea oats and boardwalks and dunes of sugar-white sand. “The sand is so white because it’s finely ground quartz.” They passed a “Welcome to Florida ” sign.

City pointed at the beach side of the road. “That’s The Flora-Bama Lounge, home of the Interstate Mullet Toss…”

A young man beat on his Firebird with a tire iron as a red Alfa Romeo blew by. He dropped the iron and began marching east along the beach highway on Perdido Key in a mixture of anger, confusion and fear.

It was the worst day of Art Tweed’s life.

Art had begun the day in Montgomery, Alabama, where he worked as an accountant for the state. His full name was Aristotle “Art” Tweed. He was from a rural family, and his parents had named him Aristotle in the hopes that it would imbue intelligence in the manner that “Biff” would not. His parents raised him good-natured, gullible and tragic, and he felt obligations to the community that were almost quaint in their rarity. He had grown tall and skinny with lots of freckles and a short mop of red hair that was a shocking orange shade more often found on puppets than people.

Art Tweed’s problems started that morning when the phone rang.

“Oncology Department, Montgomery Memorial Hospital. Is this Art Tweed?”

“Yep.”

“Just need to go over some lab results,” said a woman’s voice. “As a follow-up to your physician’s consultation, we received a second confirmation from the lab today that the neoplasm is indeed malignant and inoperable. Do you have any questions?”

Art stopped eating his Cap’n Crunch. “Neoplasm?”

“Tumor, pancreatic.”

“What?”

“This is Art Tweed, twenty-eight years old, correct?”

“Yeah, but-?”

“The Art Tweed who recently had tests at Montgomery Memorial?”

“That was just a routine physical for the state insurance pool.”

“You don’t know you have a tumor?”

“Tumor?”

“Oh my. The chart shows an initial consultation. You never discussed this in person with a doctor?”

“Nope.”

“Whoops,” said the woman. “I think I’ve just made a terrible mistake. It’s my first week on the job. I wasn’t supposed to say anything before you met for counseling with a physician.”

Art fell apart. He began yelling.

“Please calm down,” said the woman. “You’re making this very hard on me.”

“How long do I have?”

“Sir, if you’re not going to-”

“I’m the one with the tumor!”

“Well! Aren’t you the self-centered one! Everything is me, me, me.”

“How much time?”

The woman harrumphed. “Four weeks! I hope you choke on ’em!” And she hung up.

Art had been driving in the Pontiac ever since. No particular route or direction, just a three-hour anxiety meltdown behind the wheel watching his life before his eyes, wiggling at the end of a stick. He ended up at the Gulf of Mexico and made a left. He was finding it increasingly difficult to stay within his lane and freak out at the same time, and he was just about to pull over when the Firebird threw a rod on the Alabama side of Perdido Key.

He crossed the Florida state line on foot and saw a pay phone outside a tavern. He felt in his pocket but only came across paper money.

The tavern was a wooden building that appeared to be falling down and going up at the same time. Old and rickety, but with newer additions built on hodgepodge over the years, and the result looked like it was hammered together by enemies of the owner. Rip Van Winkle walked out the front door and climbed on a Harley. Art caught the door before it closed and went inside The Flora-Bama Lounge.

He spotted the bartender at the far end of the place and headed for him as he pulled ones from his wallet. Early Aerosmith-the good stuff-was on the juke-“Take me back to south Tallahassee…down cross the bridge to my sweet sassa-frassy…” Art told the bartender his car was history and he needed quarters for the phone.

The bartender was making change when Art noticed the only other person in the bar, a burly old man with white hair and beard, wearing a sweater and fishing cap. Art turned away to avoid conversation, but it was too late.

“You appear to be on a journey. I am on a journey, too. Sit and appreciate some alcohol with me and we will journey together.”

“What the hell’s he talking about?” Art asked the bartender.

The bartender shrugged and handed Art his change and a Bud. “It’s on him.”

The man slid his stool over to Art and held out a hand. “Name’s Jethro Maddox. A name is what a man makes of it, not what others may make of him. I sometimes write my name in my shorts-”

“Right, right,” Art said impatiently, and quickly shook the hand. He snatched his change off the bar and took a fast sip of beer. He put the can down and turned toward the door. Something made him hesitate. He decided he’d better have another sip for the road, and he reached back for the can. He took a second sip, paused, and started gulping.

“You remind me of my greener days, when I, too, had unquenchable appetites, or was that Gertrude Stein? It doesn’t matter. It was Paris in the spring and the wine made me burn with desire, and then I beat a mime with the bottle-”

“Please stop talking,” said Art.

Art then experienced an unusual rumble of emotion moving up his chest, and the next thing he knew, he was facedown on the bar sobbing like a baby.

“Cowards and men do not cry the same, and a man can cry with dignity and not confuse the two. But when women get going, they can sometimes throw ashtrays with the velocity of Sandy Koufax, and it is best to leave the house.”

“Will you shut up!”

“It is a woman that is causing you this pain, is it not? I was married to four, which is also the number of wisdom teeth I was separated from, and they caused me much less distress in the end.”

“Shut up! Just shut up!”

But Jethro Maddox did not shut up and Art did not stop crying until the fourth round of beer. Art didn’t want to say anything, but it just blurted out-about how he was dying and the engine blowing on his car, and then more sobbing.

“We are all dying,” replied Jethro. “I do not say that without compassion, for death is in a hurry with you. Find something worth living for and grip it by the neck with both hands… I have found something, and it has changed me forever.”

“Don’t tell me-Hemingway.”

“Of course, Hemingway. Touched my soul. Once I started reading, I could not stop until I finished it all.”

“I had to read it in school,” said Art. “The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea.”

“What?”

“His masterpieces.”

“No, no!” said Jethro, waving Art off as if he were talking foolishness. “I haven’t read a word of that stuff. I’m talking about the Hemingway biographies. I’ve read all twenty-three.”

“But if you never read him, how come you talk like-”

Jethro cut him off, reaching in his pants and producing a Berlitz pocket reference book: English-Hemingway/Hemingway-English.

“The Papa mystique made me question my existence,” said Jethro. “That is why I joined the Look-Alikes. They are my whole life now.”

“Look-Alikes?”

“We gather in Key West every year for the look-alike contest at the Hemingway Festival. There are something around three hundred of us, with a permanent colony living in trailers down on the island. A British entertainment consortium discovered us and signed us up. We tour five months a year.”

Jethro pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it to Art. “Jethro Maddox, assistant regional manager, Hemingways Unlimited Ltd… Live appearances, historic anniversaries, ground-breakings, movie extras, children’s birthdays.”

“That’s an old card. We don’t do the birthdays anymore since last time when a couple of the guys threw up in the kiddie pool and on the bunnies.”

Something on the television caught the bartender’s attention and he turned up the volume. A newsman appeared on the screen, talking dramatically into a weatherproof microphone as he walked along a beach.

“…This is Florida Cable News correspondent Blaine Crease reporting to you from the Cape Verde Islands, where the latest hurricane spawned during this treacherous season has dealt a devastating blow to the simple people who inhabit this remote atoll…”

The camera panned with Blaine as he moved through the village. He came upon some stilts without a hut on top. A campfire burned in front of it, and a small animal the size of a Cornish game hen turned on a makeshift rotisserie.

“…The destruction and the hardship is so severe that the residents have been reduced to cooking their own pet dogs!…”

The people sitting around the campfire behind Blaine couldn’t have looked happier.

When the report ended, Jethro Maddox stood and picked up a ratty canvas bag. “It’s time we got going. This is a moveable feast.”

But Art was still immobilized by intermittent sobbing.

“We’ll never get to Kilimanjaro with that attitude.” Jethro grabbed him under an armpit and coaxed him off the stool. He led Art to the parking lot and got him into the passenger seat of his blue Malibu, then went to the driver’s side and climbed in, and they began heading east across the panhandle on Highway 98.

They entered Okaloosa County, “ Florida ’s Finest Beaches,” and drove through Fort Walton and Destin. Recent storms had taken bites all up the coast. Some homes were still set back high and safe with wide beaches; elsewhere, waves lapped the stilts. They entered Walton County, “The Best Beaches in Florida,” and drove through the movie-set town of Seaside, featured in The Truman Show. They entered Bay County, “ Florida ’s Most Beautiful Beaches,” and came to Panama City, spring break territory. Jethro eyed the motel balconies. “Life has a cruel way of taking the youngest and the brightest.” The balconies were enclosed in bars and cages to prevent the brightest from falling on their heads.

They continued east. Fighter jets buzzed high above Tyndall Air Force Base. They hit Gulf County, no motto. The waterfront housing was spare and humble as they approached Port St. Joe. They stopped at the Indian Pass Trading Post near Cape San Blas and ate shellfish in Apalachicola, down on the elbow knot under Florida ’s panhandle.

In the restaurant, Art spoke for the first time since The Flora-Bama. “Where are we going?”

“It is not the destination but the journey.”

Art stared sadly at him.

“Okay, we’re going to Tampa. I have a gig with the Look-Alikes.”

I t had all the makings of a Girl Power roadtrip, “Daytona or Bust.”

Steppenwolf was on the stereo as City and Country headed out of Apalachicola after a seafood lunch.

“If this were the early 1800s, we’d be in the third-largest cotton port on the Gulf,” City told Country. “The bridge and half the things in town are named after Dr. John Gorrie, the first person to figure out how to make ice cubes.”

After Apalachicola, erosion had its way with the highway. There was no beach, and the waves hit the side of the road and sprayed cars. Some sections of road had collapsed in the sea and been repacked with new tar. There was no shoulder. If the wheels went out of the lane, they rolled into the water.

City drove with one hand, then the other, pulling her T-shirt off over her head and revealing a purple bikini top. She put on a tennis visor. In the passenger seat, Country slouched way down and stuck her feet up on the dash. She pushed a floppy hippie hat down over her long hair. She had a white tank top from a Jacksonville radio station and white shorts, and she watched the road over the top of raspberry-tinted Janis Joplin glasses perched at the end of her nose.

They stopped for gas and cheddar popcorn.

“I taught my Rottweiler Chinese,” the Miami man ahead of them at the cash register told his friend.

“Get outta here.”

“No lie. You know how everyone in Dade is buying vicious dogs because of crime? I read where burglars are giving the dogs commands, because everybody uses the same ones-sit, stay, heel-and houses are cleaned out while expensive pit bulls and German shepherds stand there stupid.”

“Why Chinese?”

“Can’t use Spanish. Half the burglars in Miami are bilingual.”

“How do you say sit in Chinese?”

“I’m not gonna tell you!”

Back on the road, City and Country talked bad romance.

“Remember that one guy you thought was Mr. Right because he drove up for your date in an expensive Lincoln?” asked Country. “Then he took you cruising back and forth across campus for three hours and activated those low-rider shock absorbers that bounced the front wheels two feet off the pavement until it nearly detached your retinas.”

“Very funny,” said City. “Okay, remember that guy who came to pick you up with an entirely new haircut?”

Country stopped laughing and cringed. Shaved into the side of her date’s head: “Ingrid,” with a heart and a dagger through it. He’d seemed normal enough when he asked her out-then he arrived with that crazy shit carved in his skull. “How do ya like it?” he asked. Country plotzed in the doorway.

And their date still lay ahead. A dinner so painfully uncomfortable for Country that everything tasted like packing peanuts. Then an evening at the 4-H fair. Country returned home at midnight, quickly locked the door and threw a giant stuffed animal across the apartment.

“Nice panda,” said City.

“Shut up,” said Country.

The red Alfa Romeo sailed through a yellow light in Perry and kept going east.

T he traffic light in Perry turned red, stopping a blue Malibu.

Jethro Maddox checked his roadmap, then stuck it back in the visor. “When you took vacations as a small child, did you ever play the license-plate game?”

Art didn’t respond. The light turned green and Jethro made a right onto U.S. 19.

“I now enjoy a similar game when I am on the road-Pick the Fugitive,” Jethro continued. “It works very well in Florida. Anyplace you are on the highway, there must be a hundred fugitives come through a day… You study the people in the other vehicles and try to determine who is on the lam.”

Art couldn’t help but look around at the traffic, and Jethro joined him.

Cars full of suitcases and colorful rafts, with “Heart of Dixie” license plates, Florida Gators wheel covers and Fob James for Governor bumper stickers. There was a truckload of fruit pickers riding in back with a load of cantaloupe and marijuana; a retired couple from Newark muling stolen gems; a cold-call bauxite salesman with Michigan fraud warrants, driving a station wagon eaten up by harsh winters in Saginaw. Three runaway teens from Texarkana in a hot Taurus; the deposed president of Paraguay in a Chevy with bad transmission; and an ex-KGB agent stranded in Florida during the Soviet collapse who was now a freelance troubleshooter for the Broward County Democratic Committee.

“I pick that one,” said Jethro. He pointed at a van with a faded Molly Hatchet mural.

Inside the van were two sour-smelling men-a couple of open beers and loaded pistols on the greasy upholstery between them.

“I’ll bet the discussion in that van has just drifted into speculation about how much cash liquor stores keep on hand,” said Jethro.

“…About five hundred dollars just before the night drop,” the van’s passenger told the driver.

“I have seen it with alarming frequency,” Jethro told Art. “It is a well-worn path: The Downward Spiral into Paradise. They all follow the same internal riffraff gyroscope and drag their traveling cavalcade of dumbness across the Florida state line for a final stand that only ends in crime tape and headlines…”

“…Maybe six hundred bucks on the weekend,” said the van’s driver.

Jethro grabbed a day-old newspaper off the floorboard and handed it to Art. Strong-arm robbery. Exploitation of the elderly. Church funds missing. Handicapped woman raped. Four-year-old bludgeoned to death by boyfriend while mother went to buy crack.

Art became troubled. He looked up from the paper and resumed examining the nature of the traffic around him. He realized he had spent far too much time in the small pond; he never knew the outside world was so upsetting. His small-town values and obligations to the community kicked in. The knowledge that he would soon die gave Art a chance to be selfless and do something positive for the world before he left.

“Have you considered my advice?” asked Jethro. “Have you thought about something that moves you? Something to focus your energies?”

Art had. He became obsessed with the number of bullies he saw.

He decided to kill one of them.