Maximum Bob

5

They crossed the middle bridge over to Palm Beach, Dale Crowe Junior driving, his uncle Elvin sitting back to take in the sights, what had changed in the ten years he was out of circulation.

On Royal Palm Way, Dale said, “Over here, they see you driving around at night in a pickup truck they’re liable to stop you. They don’t even need a reason.”

Elvin said, “I won’t worry about it if you won’t.” He was cool for a guy his age, close to fifty. He had on a straw cowboy hat he said was the Ox Bow model and three-hundred-fifty-dollar boots he said had once belonged to his big brother Roland, now dead. Went off to Miami and got himself shot by a woman. Elvin talked about his brother a lot, saying how Roland had worked for the Italians down there and was paid a good buck for his services, wore three-hundred-dollar boots and suits made in Taiwan China. This was while they’d stopped for pizza at a place on Dixie Highway and had two pitchers of beer. It was going on eight o’clock now, dark out.

Dale said, “I get stopped and have to take a Breathalyzer I’m fucked.”

“What’re you worried about,” Elvin said, “they might put you in jail? Tell them you’re about to do five years, have to catch you later.”

“Shit,” Dale said.

He had cooled down since yelling at the judge in court and they threatened to put cuffs and leg-irons on him, then let him go when the judge didn’t make a case of it. He had seven days to think of what prison would be like. Elvin, eating pizza, said he’d give him some pointers on how to jail. Since they’d be together this week.

Dale had let his uncle move in while his two roommates were finishing up thirty days for criminal mischief. Got freaked on crack and kicked in a guy’s windshield for no reason. Now Elvin was talking about staying on after Dale left. The house was in Delray Beach, a dump but only a few blocks from the ocean. Smell that salt air, Elvin said, it would clean the stink of prison off him. Dale said, well, his roommates were about to get their release, he believed either today or tomorrow. If Elvin wanted to stay he’d have to talk to them about it. Elvin said he’d had enough of roommates to last him. If he stayed, they’d have to leave. Like that, taking over. Dale had said, “You don’t know my roommates.” Elvin said, eating pizza, “And they don’t know me, huh? You don’t either.”

That was a fact. Ten years old when his uncle was arrested for murder and stood trial, Dale knew him more from photographs than face-to-face. Elvin in his airboat. Elvin standing with Dale Senior, the oldest brother. Elvin with Roland, both big guys, twins to look at them, except Elvin was a few years younger. When Roland was shot dead and Elvin sent to prison for killing a man he thought was the one had got the woman to kill Roland, nobody in the family seemed surprised.

Elvin was saying now, “This is a pretty street, you know it? Look at those palm trees. Those are the tallest palm trees I ever saw.” He said, “I wouldn’t mind living over here. It sure beats the shit out of Delray Beach.” He said, “Summer I’d go back to the Glades, though, get me an airboat.” He said, “Not too much traffic now, huh? The snowbirds’ve all gone home. I don’t know why anybody wants to live up north. I go even as far as the Georgia line I get a nosebleed.” He said, “Go on over to Ocean Boulevard and turn south.”

Now they were riding along next to the Atlantic Ocean, black out there all the way to the sky.

Elvin said, “Nice public beach but no place to park. So it becomes a private beach for all the rich people live along here behind their walls. It’s interesting how rich people fuck you and you don’t even know most of the time they’re doing it, huh? I had a cellmate my last year at Starke name of Sonny? Cute boy, use to work for a rich doctor. He’s still rich, only he isn’t a doctor no more. They took his license away.”

Dale said, “Right there’s where Donald Trump lives.”

Elvin said, “Is that right? Who’s Donald Trump?”

Before they ate and were driving around West Palm, Dale had pointed out the building Barnett Bank was in, its shiny black glass rising above old structures around it, and said, “You know what they call that building? Darth Vader.”

And Elvin had said, “Who’s Darth Vader?”

Dale could see how he might not have heard of Donald Trump in prison, but everybody in the world knew who Darth Vader was. Either one, though, was hard to explain, so Dale let it go. Elvin wasn’t interested anyway. He wanted to drive down to Ocean Ridge.

“What for?”

“The doctor I mentioned?” Elvin said. “He lives there,” and began telling about Dr. Tommy Vasco and Sonny, who was his cellmate up at FSP his last year.

“Actually it wasn’t quite a year. Couple of weeks before my release I sold him for two hundred dollars. Sonny had this blond hair you could see clear across the yard. I could’ve got more, but I let a buddy of mine have him.”

Dale stared at his headlight beams on the two-lane blacktop, trees now closing in on both sides. He could feel his uncle, the size of him, sitting there in that cowboy hat. Dale set his tone of voice to be casual, uncritical, saying, “Well, I ain’t getting into any of that. I’ll tell you right now.”

Elvin said, “I know cons that remain virgins, I’m not telling you it can’t be done.”

Dale shook his head at the road. “I won’t even talk to a queer.”

“Listen to me,” Elvin said. “I’m a person was never married on the outside. But you get in there, something happens to you. Soon as I was put in with the population I started looking for a wife. Generally speaking, you poke or get poked. They’ll fight over your skinny butt or you’ll fight to keep it your own. It’s got nothing to do with being queer, it’s how it is. Sonny come along toward the end there, I kicked out this puss I had and said that one’s mine, the cute blond. Don’t nobody even look at her. It was okay with Sonny. He’s the type goes along with whatever… Is this Ocean Ridge?”

“Manalapan,” Dale said. “Ocean Ridge is next.”

“Anyway,” Elvin said, “here’s this boy has to do a mandatory twenty-five on a life sentence and he’s I mean depressed, doesn’t think he can hack it. He needed somebody like me to cheer him up. See, he’d keep house, tend to my wants, and I’d take good care of him.”

Dale said, “What’d he do?” watching the road, seeing condos and big homes now.

“He killed a woman. Beat her to death and got first-degree.”

Dale said, “Was this in the newspaper?”

“It musta been, was about a year and a half ago. At the time, Sonny was living with this Dr. Tommy Vasco, being his little helper. Sonny’d get girls for the doctor and the doc’d write drug prescriptions using fake names and Sonny’d go out and sell the stuff, mostly Quaaludes and Xanax, make himself some money.”

“He got girls?” Dale said. “Whyn’t the doctor get his own girls?”

“He use to, when he was married and playing around. He was always drunk or stoned,” Elvin said. “Till his daddy swore he’d cut him off if he didn’t behave hisself. See, this Tommy Vasco was a fuckup all his life. His daddy sent him to medical school down on one of the islands, set him up after, bought him this big house… His daddy use to be a doctor, owns all kinds of property down in Miami, a rich tightass kind of guy, real strict and he has this fuckup for a son. You get the picture?”

“Wants the old man to think he’s a good boy,” Dale said, “so he pulls the shades down and does all his partying at home.”

“There you go. And has Sonny get the women and the dope, all different kinds. But now the women, that’s something else. The doctor was partial to big blond women, no Latins. They had to be big but not fat and have good-size titties on ‘em.”

Dale said, “How many women would he have at a time?”

“Oh, he’d have two or three there for a party. See, what Dr. Vasco liked was for Sonny to take movies of him and a couple women in bed doing it. Then after, they’d sit around drinking, doing the cocaine and watch themselves on TV. Well, this one night… I forgot to mention, the doctor’s favorite was a woman name Pola from Lake Worth. Big woman almost six foot and built. Sonny said she was bigger’n he was and Sonny musta been, oh, five eight or nine and kinda chubby. I’d call him that sometime, ‘Hey, Chubby, look at what I got for you.’”

Dale thinking, Jesus. Not wanting to hear about it.

“And I’d give him a candy bar for being a sweetie. Anyway,” Elvin said, “this woman I mentioned, Pola, come by one night alone, no other women there. They have their party, chop some rails, put a movie on. This Pola says to the doctor she bets his daddy would just love to see one of these movies, kidding with him. Sonny thinks she didn’t mean anything by it, but he says the doc started to go crazy at the idea. He slaps her and she hits him back. They get in a fistfight and pretty soon she’s beating up on him. So the doc yells at Sonny to help him. But Sonny, not being a fighter, picks up a poker from the fireplace and hits her with it. This woman he says come at him like a tiger and he had to keep hitting her till he give her a good one over the head and it killed her. So then the doctor tells him what to do. Put her in her car and drive up to Lake Worth. The idea, leave the car on the street with her in it and it’ll look like she was mugged and the guy went too far, so take her purse. Sonny does all this, he’s getting out of her car, when who drives up shining a light on him…”

Dale was nodding. Man, he could see it.

“The police. Sonny was charged, he had her blood all over him, and convicted,” Elvin said. “He tried to tell them it was Dr. Tommy Vasco made him do it. They looked into it but couldn’t put nothing on the doc except the fake prescriptions he wrote. He got like six months and can’t practice medicine no more, which he barely did anyway. Sonny got life, the mandatory twenty-five, and is now keeping house for this buddy of mine. Okay. You want to know something else?”

Dale said, “What?”

“The judge that convicted Sonny and the doc is the same one gave me ten years straight up, minimum, and gave you five on that dinky violating probation charge. Judge Bob Gibbs, he must be one busy son of a bitch.”

Coming to Ocean Ridge they had to stop at a light on A1A, dark and quiet out there, quiet in the pickup now, Dale seeing Judge Gibbs leaving the courtroom as he yelled at him. The judge walked out and now Dale tried to imagine a blond-haired guy hitting a big blond woman with a fireplace poker. As the light turned green and they started up again, he said, “You want to take a look at this doctor’s house, where it happened?”

“I want to see the doctor,” Elvin said.

“What for?”

“Sonny asked me to.”

It didn’t make sense to Dale.

“Like you have a message for him?”

“In a way,” Elvin said. “Sonny wants me to hurt him.”