16 Tiger Shrimp Tango (16 page)

Serge tentatively opened one eye at Coleman as he continued to work on the window.

“. . . But once you get sick, it’s clear sailing.” Coleman illustrated by moving a level palm through the air and whistling. “All the great organic psychedelics are like that. If it doesn’t involve a little tummy unrest, keep shopping.”

Serge opened the other eye. “Enough of this dumb show. I’m going in the park . . .”

“Wait for me!”

They arrived at the entrance and stared up at concrete teeth.

“Coleman, remember we’re in a family setting, so don’t attract any unnecessary attention.” Then Serge clenched the coffee tube in his teeth and sprinted into the jaws.

Chapter Eighteen

FORT LAUDERDALE

E
arth-friendly canvas grocery bags sat on a kitchen counter. Out came split-pea soup, rigatoni and five plum tomatoes that had been scrutinized back at the produce section.

A female voice called into another room. “Dad, it looks like you have a message on the answering machine.”

“A what?”

“Answering machine!”

“Okay.”

Ronald Campanella had retired from the New York City Fire Department two years before with prestigious honors and lingering joint problems from falling through the floor of a burning housing project. That was back in the early nineties. Both knees had scars from multiple surgeries. He didn’t like to wear shorts.

The woman unloading canned vegetables and Benefiber was Brook Campanella. Brook, for Brooklyn. That kind of family. Four generations from the borough across the East River from the Manhattan skyline. Ebbets Field still choked him up. So the idea of Ronald spending his golden years in Florida held no allure, but he made the retirement move anyway, because he was supposed to.

Brook was the caboose. With three adult offspring already in college, Muriel Campanella had come home from a routine doctor’s visit with an unroutine announcement. Surprise! They did the math. Ronald and Muriel would be raising a teenager in their sixties.

The answering machine rested on a small antique end table in the living room. The eighth-floor condo had an open floor plan from kitchen to balcony. Next to the answering machine sat a yellowed firehouse group photo from 1987, a King James Bible with family records, and a young portrait of Muriel, who had recently passed from a family history of heart disease. That’s when Brook decided to follow her father south and help around the place. Florida needed paralegals as much as New York.

That hadn’t been her plan. The whole family always said a law degree was in the cards for their National Merit Scholar. They scrimped and saved for tuition. Brook flew through her first year with straight A’s. Then a conspiracy of interruptions. Always family. Crisis after crisis, and it usually involved money. She began a cycle of repeatedly dropping out and re-enrolling, until the financial woes forced her into night school. Then there wasn’t money for that. Then her mother’s health . . . and now her father. Family always came first.

“Oh, and the mail came,” Brook told her dad as she opened a large brown envelope containing the kind of application forms that never provide enough space for address and Social Security. The top of the documents had the name of a local college whose campus sat between a pain clinic and a liquor store in a nearby strip mall. The two businesses next to the college had an unusually high overlap in clientele. Oh, well, at least the move to Florida and her mom’s modest life insurance policy would allow her to resume classes. Brook was a ferocious student. Under the best of circumstances, there was at least a year left of credits toward a degree, which meant Brook would be taking her bar exam in six months.

She opened another envelope and called to her dad again. “Looks like you got your replacement credit card.”

Ronald walked into the kitchen and grabbed a banana. “You mean for the one someone used to buy ten plasma TVs in San Diego?”

“At least the card company’s fraud-alert system caught it. You’re not responsible for a penny.”

“But how is that even possible when the card was still in my wallet in Florida.”

“They steal the digital data and replicate the magnetic strips.”

“What?”

“It’s computers, Dad.”

He shrugged and headed into the other room to check the phone message.

A wrinkled, almost pink index finger pressed a button. The message began to play.

Brook was making neat rows of Jell-O boxes in the cupboard when her father returned. She looked over at him with a smile. “Hey, Dad—” Her smile vanished. “Dad, what’s the matter? You’re white as a ghost!”

A half-eaten banana hit the floor. Ronald’s legs began to betray him. He pulled out a chair and grabbed the edge of the kitchen table as he eased himself down.

Brook ran over and sat next to him. She leaned in with a hand on his shoulder. “Dad, what is it? What’s going on?”

Speechless. He just pointed into the other room.

Brook dashed over to the answering machine. She pressed the button to replay the last message.

“This is Special Agent Rick Maddox with the DEA in Washington, D.C., and I am calling concerning prescription medication that you illegally purchased and took possession of during the last two years. Please call me back immediately to schedule a mutually agreeable arrangement in order to avoid the undue embarrassment of an arrest at your residence.”

Brook spun around at the message’s conclusion. “Dad, there has to be some kind of mistake.”

He tried to stand. “I need some water.”

“I’ll get it.” She raced to the sink.

Ronald’s hands shook as he took a few timid sips.

Her hand on his shoulder again. “Don’t worry. They’ve gotten something wrong somewhere.”

“But I’ve had a lot of prescriptions over that time. My knees, a colonoscopy, root canal. It was all legitimate.”

“Except these are from new doctors,” said Brook. “Not like the ones back in New York that you’d been going to for years. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned about medical corruption in South Florida.”

“What are you saying?” asked Ronald.

“That you didn’t do anything wrong,” said Brook. “It must have been a doctor. Maybe his license lapsed. Or maybe your prescriptions were on the level, but he was over-prescribing for other patients and your name accidentally got lumped in.”

He began standing again. “Then I’ll call the agent back and straighten this whole thing out.”

Her hand tightened on his shoulder. “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I only work for tax attorneys, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s that you never respond to this kind of inquiry without counsel.”

“But I don’t have a lawyer.”

She pulled a cell from her purse. “You’ll soon have one of the best.”

For the next half hour, she paced and burned through Verizon minutes, working her way down a list of referrals until she had one of the most expensive criminal defense firms on the line . . .

ORANGE BLOSSOM TRAIL

“I absolutely love Gatorland! But what to do first?” Serge ran back and forth over the same five feet of pavement. “A hundred and ten family-owned acres of real Florida nature exhibits, not the bogus indoor air-conditioned ones where they lure gators out of the water with heat lamps from gas-station fried-chicken counters.” His head jerked back and forth. “There’s so much true wildness I’m suffocating from selection shock. What’s the most natural thing here? . . . Ooo, over there!”

Coleman followed Serge as he dashed across a boardwalk and skidded to a stop. They peered down inside a glass dome.

“What is it?” asked Coleman.

“The Dome of Dreams.” Serge knelt to see through the front of the glass. “It’s a classic pneumatic injection-molding machine that lets you watch while it makes a tiny wax alligator, then uses a hamburger flipper to scoop it into the chute for your recovery.”

“Looks futuristic,” said Coleman.

“And it’s the best kind of futurism—old!” Serge extracted bills from his wallet as fast as possible. “This primitive souvenir machine was considered space-age back in the sixties.”
Slurp, slurp, slurp.
“I remember as a kid watching the intricate hydraulics pump out my little wax dolphins and Weeki Wachee mermaids, thinking: ‘We can’t let the Soviets get hold of these.’ ”

The machine sucked Serge’s currency into the slot. Steel rods began pushing together the halves of the mold. “It’s working! It’s working!” Serge hopped up and down and turned to passersby. “It’s working!” He completed a pirouette. “Coleman! What are you doing! You’re going to crack the dome!”

Coleman was pressing his forehead hard against the middle of the glass. Serge grabbed him from behind. “It’s solid! You can’t put your head through it!”

“Good call.” Coleman stood up straight. “Dodged another close one.”

“People are staring,” said Serge. “I told you, it’s baby-stroller zone: absolutely no unnecessary attention . . . Holy cow! The mold is opening! The mold is opening!” He turned to the crowd on the boardwalk. “The mold is opening! Come see, it’s a miracle! . . . No, don’t stare at me. Look in the dome. And why isn’t there a line forming like the old days? Wait, I know how to start a line. Look! On the side of the alligator, it’s the Virgin Mary!”

More people stopped to stare.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to attract attention.”

“Not to ourselves,” said Serge. “To the dome.”

“The burger flipper’s coming,” said Coleman.

“And the cool thing about the machine is it’s similar to those carnival cranes that fish for prizes, except with the domes you win every time, guaranteed!”

“The flipper stopped.”

“What the— Oh God, no! My alligator is stuck at the end of the injection platform and won’t fall into the chute! It’s like those satanic vending machines with bags of Skittles hung up on the corkscrews, but this time I can’t pound the crap out of the sacred dome.” He covered his eyes. “Why! Why! Why!” He opened them with a smile: “I know! These are old machines before they invented those little security doors preventing you from sticking your arm up inside through the chute to steal stuff.” Serge dropped to the ground. “I think I can reach.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Coleman. “It’s pretty far up there.”

“Look down in the dome and be my navigator,” said Serge. “I’m up to my elbow now. How far is it?”

“Not even close.”

Serge twisted on the ground and grunted as he strenuously pushed his arm. “I’m all the way in as far as I can go. Tell me what’s going on.”

“You got your wish,” said Coleman. “A line’s forming.”

“No, I mean inside the machine.”

“Oh, that—you’re
so
close. Fingertips almost there.”

“I can’t reach any farther. My arm is completely inside the chute.”

“But, man, if you could see how close you are.”

“Okay, fuck it,” said Serge. “I’m getting that alligator, but I’ll need your help. Lift my torso and when I give the word, jerk me hard to the right.”

“What for?”

“To dislocate my shoulder. It should give me an extra inch.”

Coleman bent down and grabbed him around the chest. “Tell me when.”

“Now! . . .
Ahhhh! Ahhhhh!
The pain! . . .”

“You got the alligator!”

“I know! I can feel it in my hand! Now pull me out . . . Coleman, pull me out . . . Coleman!”

“I am pulling, but you won’t budge.”

“Coleman, I’m seriously stuck and my shoulder’s out. I can’t do this myself.”

“I don’t know what to say. I’m pulling as hard as I can.” Coleman reached for a tighter grip around his chest. “Serge, you should see the size of the crowd now. I think they all want to be like us.”

“I can’t see them,” said Serge. “My face is pressed to the ground and wedged against the bottom of this thing.”

“I know,” said Coleman. “Your voice is going under the small space beneath the machine and echoing out the back.”

“Put some elbow grease into it!”

Coleman pulled harder and began giggling.

“It’s not funny,” echoed Serge’s voice. “I can’t live like this.”

“I’m sorry,” said Coleman, stifling more laughter. “It’s just the way your face is crammed down there with your arm all the way inside, and your hand is raised up in a glass bubble holding a wax alligator like some holy object. I mean this mescaline is good, but damn.”

“Wait, I felt something move. Okay, I’m going to twist my arm and you pull as hard as you can. Ready? Now! . . .
Ahhhhhhh!
”

The arm came free and they tumbled backward on the boardwalk. Serge stood and dusted himself off, grinning mildly at the agape crowd. He gestured at the machine with the gator in his hand. “I’m finished with it now. You can go ahead and use it. I just left a little skin in the chute.”

Coleman tugged his sleeve. “Security’s probably coming.”

“I don’t see anyone, but let’s move along anyway because there’s so much to experience here.” Serge looked around the other boardwalks, the covered verandas and gator-filled ponds. “Where’s the next most natural setting? . . . Ooo, a penny-flattening machine . . .”

Coleman found himself in a chase again. He arrived out of breath. Serge was already sorting through pocket change in his hand. “The penny machines are even better than the domes. But you need the shiniest penny. Then you just stick it in this slot here and start cranking the big wheel . . .”

“It fell in the chute,” said Coleman. “We didn’t have to get limbs inside this one.”

“We’re on a roll now!”
Slurp, slurp.
“Where’s more nature? . . . Over there! The souvenir shop!”

Serge left the gift store with a topped-off shopping bag. “It’s weird. Souvenirs and coffee turn me into Ivana Trump.”

“Next nature stop?” asked Coleman.

“Up there!” Serge shielded his eyes. “They put in a zip line for my convenience . . .”