The Art of Disposal (44 page)

I went on a boat-ride one Saturday with a bunch of tourists who smelled like suntan lotion, and a rough southern guide who promised to show the group of us some “real monsters, fifteen foot long.” We did see a few. They drifted along the surface of the water, eyes open, bony snouts, like movie set props riding along on an unseen track. But the real monsters were on the boat. Grumpy husbands, straight-lipped wives, crusty-nosed kids; most of them staring at their phones and tablets, disconnected from the sunshine and water and clucking birds. The alligators seemed pretty swell compared to the lot of us squeezed on that tour boat.

I paid cash for a mobile home in a predominately senior citizen community. I saw an ad in a local paper:
Beautiful manufactured home for sale—21K. All serious offers considered. Upscale community. Lot fees and HOA dues = 350 dollars a month. Once the home is bought, Life's Cheap on the Lot!

You hear the phrase “mobile home” and it conjures up all sorts of bad images, but my place is all right. Clean. Almost brand new, with a garden out front that reminds me of my Grandpa Hallot's old Airstream trailer out along the highway. Two bedrooms, one bathroom (but it's big and it has a shower with good pressure and hot water). I draped Irene Sesto's quilt over the back of my new couch—just like I told Eddie I would—and I bought one of those glass-dome cases for my pocket watch. I wind it every morning at eight. It only loses about a minute a week.

My mobile home is all right. But sometimes on a sunny day (which is most of them), when the air is so humid and still that the whole world feels like a room with the windows closed, I walk up to the front door, keys in hand, and I look over my shoulder for any strange cars, and I feel like Jim Rockford from
The Rockford Files
, and I hope no suit-wearing goon will be there inside of my house, waiting at my kitchen table with a gun leveled at me.

I've finally got quiet neighbors: Bob and Nancy Breck. They moved down here from Minnesota when they retired. Bob drove a school bus, and Nancy worked for the USPS. Bob is eighty-three, and he looks it. Sometimes I stop over to Bob's and play a few games of checkers. He talks a lot about the “newts” he sees running here and there: up the walls, through his flowerpots; some of them even make it inside of the house.

“We didn't have nothing like them up north,” he says.

“They're lizards, not newts,” I always tell him. He's talking about anoles: the key-sized green lizards you see everywhere in Florida. Some people call them chameleons because they can change colors, but they're not true chameleons at all. They dash across the sidewalks, so fast they look like bits of dry leaves in the wind.

“What's the difference?” Bob says.

“Newts are amphibians,” I say. “They need to stay moist. Anoles are reptiles. Lizards. A totally different animal.”

But he never remembers. I guess it gets harder to learn a new thing when you're eighty-three, and Bob doesn't really care if a thing is a reptile or an amphibian anyway. Most people don't. I'm in a small group of concerned citizens when it comes to such matters.

“These damn newts are everywhere today,” Bob will say to me, while he's messing around in his flower pots. And I've let it go, trying to tell him that they aren't newts at all. It's funny the way Bob says it—
newts
—with a tinge of love; like he's at war with them, but doesn't really want to win. If they ate bread, he'd be out there every morning feeding them. Even I'm starting to think of them as newts, and it makes me smile.

I took a part-time job at the local pet store. You've got to do something, after all. The owner's a nice enough guy, but he doesn't know nearly as much about aquariums as I do (he'd never even heard of brackish water). I've pretty much taken over that whole section of the store. I'm the new fish guy, and the owner likes it that way. So do the customers. The paycheck is a joke, but it buys some groceries.

I like answering questions. Cleaning the tanks. It took me a little while to get used to being George Chapman, and sometimes I still hear Eddie's voice saying, “take some time… pick a name you can live with”—and I can still see the dead Frenchman's antique store, and hear the creaky stairs as he goes up to his hidden world where he makes forged papers.

But if enough people keep calling you George, pretty soon you start feeling like a George, and it gets harder to remember being Ronnie Lynch. And that's a good thing. Eddie Sesto is still wanted on RICO charges, and for the murder of his wife Irene, and Ronnie Lynch was one of his known associates.

I like to sit in front of the courthouse downtown. There's a pond with a fountain, and people walking by with phones to their ears, and babies in strollers, and crows taking sips from the puddles that form here and there where the fountain sloshes over. Back behind the courthouse is a larger pond, big enough for a rowboat, as black as oil, framed all around by weeping willows with exposed roots. The roots look like strange woody legs, and you get the feeling that the trees came to life underwater and crawled up onto the land; and since you're watching, they stay motionless, scared, waiting for you to go away so they can start walking again.

Deputy Brennan told me how a large alligator settled into that pond a few years back, but that no one had seen it for quite some time.

“I wouldn't go swimming in there either way,” he said. “But they do move around a lot. You'd be surprised: a gator can travel miles over land until he finds a good spot to hide.”

Deputy Brennan was one of the first people I met at The Cottonmouth Tavern in my new hometown. I bought him a Miller Lite and told him I was George Chapman, a salesman from Wisconsin, moved down here to get away from the cold. I ended up playing darts that night with two cops and a bailiff, and I won fifty bucks.

I'm friends with a lot of the local law enforcement. It's the old Ed Kemper philosophy. He was a serial killer who hung out at the local cop bar, befriended the heat, and kept up on the case like he was a junior detective. Even when he confessed to the crimes, his cop buddies just thought he was kidding around. I'm no Ed Kemper, but I do have a few skeletons that I'd like to keep buried; and even if you've got nothing to hide, it never hurts to be nice to the local police. When they pull you over for speeding, they can either give you a ticket, or give you a warning and tell you to be on your way.

Sometimes when I leave work, I walk over behind the courthouse and sit on one of the benches and stare out across the black mirrored surface, hoping to see the cheesegrater back of that supposed alligator, peeking up like rows of nubby black teeth. But all I ever see are map-turtles with yellow eyes, and curly scutes peeling off of their shells, sunning themselves on half-sunken logs.

Everywhere you look down here, there are white water birds with long beaks, strutting and pecking at the grass and in the shallow water. You don't see birds like that up north.

“It's a White Ibis,” Mary Ellen Clark said to me one day when we were out behind the courthouse, walking along the path that goes the whole diameter of that dark pond. Mary Ellen is a clerk at the court, and she isn't married. Eddie was right about that one. It's a whole lot easier dating a single woman.

And her name is Mary Ellen! I almost couldn't believe it when I first met her. I may not have gotten my
Leave It To Beaver
house, but at least I met a southern broad with the same first name as Wally Cleaver's girl, Mary Ellen Rogers. What are the odds? Maybe the universe really does throw you a bone once in a while, just to keep you wondering if there's any point to all of it, and to make sure you don't just up and quit before you've finished your contract.

Sometimes I can hear Bullfrog saying, “
Flow-ruh-da
? That ain't nothin' but Kin-tucky with an ocean.”

And boy was he ever right. You should see some of the taverns down here. There's a five tattoo minimum just to get in, and it's even better if you're missing a few teeth and haven't washed your face in a year. Everything's hogs and Hell's Angels and scraggly beards.

Not that it's all bad. There's a community college downtown, and a library. There's a movie theater that runs old pictures on Friday and Saturday nights at 10 pm, and I watched the old
King Kong
a few weeks back. Things really are what you make of them. You could give a guy an oceanfront house in Santa Barbara, put thirty million in his checking account, and he'd probably still complain because it gets a little too chilly out there on the deck at night.

So I make the best of it. I spend a lot of time with my pug, walking along the shady roads near the lakes and canals, waving to the fisherman.

There's a cemetery near my mobile home community. There's no better place in the world for a cemetery than the deep south. Those weeping trees are meant to hang over gravestones, and the hot muggy song of the bugs adds the spice to the melancholic dish. I walk the dog along the gravel paths, and I stop sometimes and read a stone, and I nod at old ladies wearing black shawls and square sunglasses the size of Texas.

There's a section of stones from the 1800s, and those are the best because they're tall and white and weathered, and they sometimes tell you how the poor guy croaked. I found one that reads:
Jed Thompson: Killed By the Kick of a Horse
—and I always think, “that's a hell of a way to die.” And for some reason, I always picture Eddie Sesto, puffing a cigar and saying back to me, “I wonder what he did to the horse?”

There's a beautiful white country church, two streets over from the cemetery, and I go sit in there once a week, usually on a Wednesday. I like how the light comes in through the stained glass windows, red and blue and green. Father Jay sometimes appears like a spirit cloaked in black rags, and he sits down next to me. All the pews are squeaky. I don't think they make a church pew that doesn't squeak. He's a cool sort of priest who understands that I'm there more for the atmosphere than redemption, so he doesn't push me about showing up on Sundays or anything; he says it's enough just to be sitting there, soaking up God's good energy.

I'd like to say to him, “the only place I'll ever be soaking is in that lake of fire, if there is such a place, with Ricky Cervetti and Dan the Man.” But there are a lot of things a guy will run through his mind and never actually say. You could be looking right at someone and having a real swell time talking to them, but have no idea what's really going on behind their eyes.

There are nights when I miss the old days, and I sit at my kitchen table and open my box of work-related things: the Walther PPK, the Beretta 92, Dan the Man's USMC knife, Mudcap's marble eye, Ricky's black gloves, and the Low-E string garotte. I hold the marble eye up to the lamp and study the glassy red world inside of it, warped and bubbled, and I can still see Carlino's miniature silhouette in there, plunging a knife into Mudcap's gut.

I've only got one aquarium now: a fifty-five gallon with about a million live plants. Red melons, Amazon swords, stargrass, and a carpet of Dwarf Baby Tears. I've got four angelfish and a school of thirteen neon tetras, and that's it. Simplicity. It's the best aquarium I've ever created, and I feel like I've finally reached a level of Zen minimalism where the tank itself looks like a perfect slice of a real lake or river. I can stare at it for hours, and I often do.

Every so often I wake up from a bad dream in which Gideon Cash's toe is everywhere I look: floating in my soup, lying in the gutter along a busy city street, or planted in one of Bob's flowerpots next door, with one of his “newts” sunning itself on the cracked toenail. Sometimes I wake up and the darkness is terrifying, and I can hear the humming of the porch light. I close my eyes again and create vivid scenes with Eddie Sesto, wearing a straw hat and a white shirt, sipping an iced tea and smoking a good cigar. The sand is white and hot, and the ocean water is a soft green, and there are so many people everywhere—and Eddie knows them all. Jody is tan and fit, but the Costa Rican sun has turned her skin a bit leathery, like a sea turtle. She's wearing a black one-piece with a skirt over it. She kisses Eddie, and Eddie kisses her back, and they hold hands, and when a young boy comes along carrying a fish that he's caught from the sea, Eddie stops him and takes a look at it, and gives the kid twenty bucks for the bright silver fish, and I feel like I'm watching a scene from a Hemingway story. When Eddie laughs, you can see how his teeth are yellow, like chunks of old pawnshop ivory.

If I stay on that beach long enough I can smell the saltwater and see the palm trees and hear all the background voices chattering away in only the simple Spanish I know, and then I will finally fall back to sleep.

Sometimes I see Dan the Man, tongue out, choking the life out of that kid with the Low-E string, pulling so hard that the kid is up off the ground. Then I'm striking a match and setting a house on fire, and the night is cold. Other times I see Dan the Man sitting on his couch by the oxygen tank, and his eyes droop like a sad dog's, and he's reading
The Ancient Mariner
. It's hard to bring those two separate guys together into some kind of unified whole.

Sometimes I fret over what I'm going to do when the money finally runs out. The duffel bag is mostly full, but it won't last forever. And I'm too old to start a new career.

You don't see many kids in the mobile home community, but just a few days ago Bob and Nancy's granddaughter came to visit. She's seven years old with long brown hair and a missing front tooth. I was sitting out on my front steps like I do most mornings, drinking a cup of coffee, and along came a little girl on a banana-seat bike with pink ribbon streamers. When she saw me and the pug, she stopped, put down the kickstand, and asked if he was a friendly dog. Kids love a pug. They look like a stuffed animal come to life.

“Yeah, he's nice,” I said. “Go ahead.”

She petted him, and he wagged his tail and pulled on his leash.

“He's funny-looking.”

“But he means well,” I said.

“Umm,” she said, and paused. She tilted her head and put a finger in her mouth. “Would you say he's your
best
friend?”