Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (121 page)

AFTER THE DISASTER
of the special legislative session, nobody had seen Marlon. He had slipped back to the governor’s mansion and didn’t come out for two weeks, seeing no one but the pizza man.

Escrow and Pimento struck a frosty truce. They had to coax Marlon out of the mansion. The campaign was about to start.

The state trooper in the mansion’s guard shack said Marlon hadn’t set foot outside. Escrow tried the doorbell again and again. He and Pimento began peeking in the windows. Escrow tried the doorbell for the fifth time. “Come on, Governor! Open up! You have to come out sometime—”

Marlon opened the door. He turned and walked back into the mansion without a word.

Escrow and Pimento glanced at each other, then walked through the open door and followed Marlon to the living room. Empty pizza boxes and trash everywhere.

The governor flopped down on the sofa and grabbed the remote control. He was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and he needed a shave.
Dr. Strangelove
was on the big-screen TV.

“
Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!
”

Pimento got the coffee going and Escrow rounded up
the pizza boxes. Under the boxes were some books and folded-over magazine articles.

“Pimento, look at this….
Robert Kennedy and His Times…Eyes on the Prize
…He’s reading again!”

Escrow set his briefcase on the coffee table and flipped the latches. He removed a videocassette and went over to the TV. Slim Pickens was flying through the air on an atomic bomb.

Escrow hit “eject” and put in his own tape.

“Governor, we have some work to do. The first debate is only a week away.”

Footage from a vintage Florida debate came on TV. A decidedly younger Jeb Bush at one podium and Governor Lawton Chiles at the other. The year was 1994.

“Okay, now pay close attention,” said Escrow, like they were watching a football training film.

On the screen, Chiles wore an avuncular smile. “
The old he-coon walks just before the light of day
.”

Marlon got a funny expression. He spoke for the first time. “What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“Nobody knows,” said Pimento. “But what it effectively translated to was: ‘Sit down, son. You ain’t finished learnin’ from the Old Man.’”

“Check this out,” said Escrow. He fast-forwarded to Chiles at a press conference: “
We’ve got to go to the lick log
.”

Marlon scrunched up his face. “He won with that stuff?”

“Every time.”

THEY
slowly got Marlon going again, brought in the barbers and manicurists, put him back on a pizza-free diet.

By the night of the campaign’s opening debate at East
Tallahassee High School, Escrow and Pimento thought they had their man turned around.

A half hour into the debate, they were crestfallen.

Then the moment of truth: electric chair or lethal injection?

Marlon stared at his hands and pooch-kicked it. Escrow cursed and threw papers. Then he watched as Gomer Tatum got a running start at the question, did a triple lutz and nailed the landing.

Pimento yelled out to Marlon: “Go to the lick log!”

Escrow gave him an elbow. “Shut up with the fuckin’ lick log already!”

“You shut up!” They started shoving until the Rolling Stones people pulled them apart.

Up in the closed-off balcony, lobbyist Todd Vanderbilt was putting the moves on a fetching Brazilian woman he’d picked up at Perry’s party. It was a little chilly, so she wore a Miami Heat jacket. She pushed him away coyly. “I have to make a quick phone call. Can I borrow your cell phone?”

“But what if I get calls?”

“I’ll only be a minute.” She winked and ducked into the ladies’ room and began puttying plastic explosive into the phone.

Down below, Marlon was rushed out to a waiting limo and back to the governor’s mansion. He walked around the living room in a trance, said he was feeling a little down, and headed off to bed. Escrow and Pimento slept on the couches.

Shortly after two in the morning, Marlon sat up in bed. He thought he heard something. There was a tapping at his door. “Pssssst!”

He got up and opened it.

It was Pimento. “Governor, let’s get going.”

“I’m not going anywhere except back to bed. I’m depressed, and you’re crazy.”

Pimento opened a large brown envelope. As press secretary, he was responsible for all photographic work. He had routinely sent the film from one of Marlon’s cameras through the developing lab months ago.

He didn’t say anything as he removed a black-and-white eight-by-ten and handed it to the governor.

Marlon had to sit down. It was the group photo of his platoon in Kosovo, the one the old man had taken by the well.

“You gotta pull out of this,” said Pimento. “The people need you…. Come with me.”

Marlon put on some jeans and a USF Bulls T-shirt. They crept down the back staircase without waking Escrow and waved to the state trooper as they tiptoed to the garage.

Fifteen minutes later, Marlon was standing next to Pimento as he tried to jimmy the lock on the back door of the state archives.

“What are you doing that for? I’m the governor. I can go in there twenty-four hours a day. All I have to do is call the Capitol Police…”

“Wouldn’t be the same,” said Pimento. “Keep a lookout.”

A few more seconds with the slot screwdriver and Pimento had them inside. Their footsteps echoed down a marble hallway between rows of display cases bathed in moonglow from the skylights.

“Look at all this stuff,” said Marlon. “I didn’t even know this was here.”

They took their time. Spanish doubloons. A stuffed
panther. A swimsuit Marilyn wore on vacation with Joltin’ Joe. A mess kit used during training on Useppa Island before the Bay of Pigs. Alan Shepard’s space helmet. The barefoot mailman’s bag. A mermaid costume from Weeki Wachee.

“Over here!” Pimento whispered urgently, waving Marlon down to the last display case. “This is what we came for.”

Marlon caught up with him and peered into the case. It was empty except for a single pair of worn-out old shoes in a soft golden light. Pimento picked the lock with a nail file and slowly opened the glass door. He licked his lips and rubbed his palms together. Then he carefully reached into the case and began lifting the shoes off their pedestal.

“Are you keeping a lookout?” he asked Marlon.

“Yeah, here comes an Indiana Jones boulder.”

Pimento handed the shoes to Marlon. “Try ’em on.”

Marlon sat down on the cold floor and kicked off his sneakers. He slid on the old brown shoes and laced them up. He stood and took a few practice steps.

“How do they feel?” asked Pimento.

“A little big.”

“You have to grow into ’em.”

“How far did you say he walked in these?”

“One thousand and three miles, from Century in the northwest tip of the panhandle to Key West. It slingshotted him from nowhere into the U.S. Senate in 1970,” said Pimento. “That’s how he got the nickname Walkin’ Lawton Chiles. He was elected governor in 1990 and died in office in 1998.”

Marlon closed his eyes and clicked his heels together. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home….”

Pimento patted him on the back. “Follow the yellow brick road.”

They returned the shoes to the case and snuck back out the jimmied door.

Pimento climbed behind the wheel and checked his watch. “We gotta hurry. Sun’s coming up soon.”

They drove across town and parked next to a large treed lot and hopped a fence. Pimento ran a short burst and Marlon caught up.

“This is far enough,” said Pimento. He got down on the ground and Marlon followed his example. They crept a few yards until they were perched behind a large stone slab. Marlon looked around. There were stone slabs everywhere. Nothing but oak trees and tombstones.

“We’ll do the stakeout here.”

“For what? The Great Pumpkin?”

“Shhhhhhh!”

Marlon lowered his voice to a whisper. “What are we looking for?”

“That’s his grave over there.”

“Whose grave?”

“Who else? Walkin’ Lawton’s.”

They sat and waited in silence. Marlon was nodding off as the sky started to turn light. Pimento nudged him and pointed. “There he is! There he is!”

“Where?”

“Right there! Look!”

“You’re making this up. I don’t see any—wait. What’s that?”

In the dim gray light, a small hunched silhouette slipped silently across the grave.

An old raccoon.

“
WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN
?” shouted Escrow. “I was just about to call out the National Guard!”

Marlon didn’t answer. He and Pimento ran for the master bedroom. Escrow appeared in the doorway and found the two darting around the room, dumping dresser drawers into suitcases.

“You two are bad chemistry,” said Escrow. “I want you both to stop and sit down. You’re scaring me.”

“No time,” said Marlon. “Got a campaign to catch.” He ran to the living room.

Escrow looked at Pimento. “What did he say?”

Pimento smiled. “I think he’s ready to make a serious run.”

Fifteen minutes later, Escrow was in the back of the eastbound limo going over his clipboard. “Sorry about my reaction back there, sir. Yes, activity is the best thing. Keep your mind occupied. Good to see you’re with the program again….”

Marlon leaned forward and turned up the stereo until he couldn’t hear Escrow. It was Johnny Cash. “
Well, I’m going down to Florida, and get some sand in my shoes…. I’ll ride that Orange Blossom Special, and lose these New York blues
.”

“Does it have to be that loud?” yelled Escrow.

“What!”

“I SAID, DOES IT HAVE TO BE SO—”

Marlon killed the stereo.

“—LOUD?…Thank you.” Escrow looked down at the clipboard. “Okay, we head east to your next stop in Jacksonville, then back to the capital for a fund-raiser…”

“No,” said Marlon.

“No, what?”

“We’re not coming back. We’re going all the way.”

“All the way where?”

Marlon didn’t answer.

Escrow pointed at his clipboard. “We have a tight schedule to keep.”

Marlon leaned and tore the paper off the clipboard, wadded it in a ball and tossed it on the floor.

Escrow glared at Pimento. “What are you laughing at?”

“Nothin’.”

Marlon saw something out the window as they were leaving Tallahassee. “Take this turn,” he told the driver.

They pulled into a Winnebago dealership.

“What are we doing?” asked Escrow.

“If we’re going to win this election, we’ll need the right wheels,” said Marlon. “In a perfect world, we’d make whistle-stops in a caboose on the Orange Blossom Special. But it ain’t around anymore. This’ll have to do.”

They walked across the lot, turning a corner at the end of the showroom. And there it was. The moment Marlon saw it, he knew he had to have it.

The salesman smiled. “I don’t think we’ll need to worry about that credit check, Governor.”

Marlon sent the limo driver back to Tallahassee, and they climbed into their new campaign vehicle.

“This is more like it,” said Marlon, sitting high up in the fighting chair behind the steering wheel.

Pimento was riding shotgun and Escrow was in back, in the rest room.

The RV had previously been traded in following a country music tour sponsored by a soft drink bottler.

As the Winnebago bounded across Florida for the Atlantic Ocean, the other drivers on Interstate 10 saw the colorful artwork on the side. Slices of citrus spraying glistening droplets, and big bright letters in a tangerine script running the length of the RV.

ORANGE CRUSH
.

“
CHECK OUT THE
cool bridge!” yelled Pimento.

He and Marlon had great views from the front of the RV. The
Orange Crush
started across the historic Main Street Bridge, and the pair leaned to look out their windows, down through the old blue girders at the barges and ships in the sweeping St. Johns River far below.

“There’s the former Independent Life building,” said Marlon, pointing. “You can always recognize a picture of Jacksonville’s skyline by that glass skirt.”

“Hey, Escrow, you’re missing it!” Pimento called back.

Escrow sat at the mobile kitchenette, checking his watch and fuming. “We’re going the wrong way! We were supposed to meet the security people an hour ago!”

“Relax and enjoy your life,” said Marlon. “We’ll get to the convention center.”

“But you won’t have time to change!”

“You worry too much.”

The
Orange Crush
arrived at the Prime Osborn Convention Center only moments before the second gubernatorial debate. The Rolling Stones security was in a tizzy. Marlon was supposed to have arrived at an undisclosed location three hours early, so they could send out a decoy convoy, create a diversionary mock disaster, then make him suddenly appear onstage in a puff of smoke to the opening chords of “Jumping Jack Flash.”

Instead, Marlon pulled right up to the front entrance and was mobbed. Albert Fresco tried to get the attention of the cameras. “I demand to be allowed in the debate. I’m not highfalutin. I’m a working stiff, down-to-earth and madder than a…”

House Speaker Gomer Tatum was already at his podium in a new suit, and he didn’t know what to make of Marlon climbing up onstage in jeans and a T-shirt.

The Jacksonville debate was going with the town hall format. Audience members would ask questions, either candidate could jump in, anyone was allowed to follow up and roll with the topics wherever they went, no time limits. If everything went according to plan, the network would have a free-for-all on its hands.

Jackie Monroeville was onstage, dabbing extra makeup off Tatum’s face with a Kleenex. “Just keep hammering him on the electric chair. It’s his soft underbelly!” She held another Kleenex under his mouth and made him spit out some last-second food. A network technician in a headset held up three fingers, then two, one, and finally a fist. He swung his arm and pointed at the moderator’s table.

“Good evening, this is Florida Cable News correspondent Blaine Crease, and welcome to the second Florida gubernatorial debate….”

A homemaker from Atlantic Beach planted by the Democratic Party asked the first question. “Governor, at the last debate you didn’t seem to make your position clear about the electric chair.”

“We should have lethal injection,” said Marlon.

“But last summer you said you’d love to throw the switch yourself, even jiggle it.”

“That was a year ago. You gotta grow….”

Another plant: “Governor, people are getting fed up with the two-party system. What do you think about the Reform Party candidate? He had a fresh message.”

“He’s the south end of a northbound horse.”

Scattered laughter. Escrow paced in the stage wings, bumming cigarettes.

The local chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention asked Marlon why he hadn’t returned the group’s litmus test questionnaire on moral values.

“Because you’re busybodies.”

The man bristled. “Just what I thought! I saw in the paper where you opposed our boycott of Disney for giving homosexuals health benefits!”

“Come, join us,” said Marlon. “There’s plenty of room in the new millennium.”

More laughter.

“You mean the thought of them doing that doesn’t make your skin crawl?”

“I don’t know,” said Marlon. “I don’t think about it. How often do
you?
”

The crowd was laughing pretty good now. The man’s head turned bright red and someone yanked him back down into his chair.

On the side of the stage, Jackie was pulling out her hair. She yelled to Tatum: “You’re letting him run away with it!”

He couldn’t hear her over the applause for Marlon. Jackie wrote quickly in big letters on a chalkboard and held it up: “JUMP IN!”

Tatum jumped in. “I’ll fry ’em until they’re good and dead!”

But the question was about day care, and Jackie
smacked herself with the chalkboard. She started scribbling again on the board and held it up.

Tatum stared offstage as he read the sign haltingly into the microphone. “What…are…we…going…to…do…about…welfare…and…quotas?”

That grabbed the crowd’s attention. A lot of grumbling and heads bobbing in agreement.

Jackie looked at Tatum with expectant eyes. Remember what we rehearsed?

“No more free ride,” said Tatum, a little less stiff. “We’re sick of the people who sit at home watching TV and having babies, sponging off those of us who get up every day and go to a job!”

Tatum didn’t so much get applause as angry shouts of alliance. “Yeah!” “Sick of it!”

Tatum’s voice gained confidence and volume. “I’m tired of unqualified people getting the promotions that we’ve earned just because of some stupid law!”

The shouting from the audience increased. “Hell, yeah!” “We’ve had it!”

“I’m sick of criminals on weekend furloughs in our neighborhoods!”

“Right on!” “You tell ’em!”

Tatum was at full throttle. “I’m sick of the handouts! I’m sick of the constant attacks on the family! And I’m sick of the godlessness!”

The whole auditorium cheered and yelled. Tatum turned to Marlon. “Do you agree with me?”

“No.”

The audience gasped. There was a thud backstage. Escrow had fainted.

Marlon grabbed the microphone from his podium and
jumped down from the stage. He walked up the middle aisle, stopped and looked around.

“Why are we so angry?”

He continued up the aisle, looking at individual faces.

“We’re all blessed. We’re living in a wonderful place in a bountiful time—the luckiest people on earth….”

He turned and walked back toward the stage.

“Do you know why we have it so good? Because many of our parents and grandparents left their bodies in faraway places, never to see their families again. Normandy, the Chosin Reservoir, Dong Ap Bia, Suva Prizka.”

He stopped and raised an arm.

“Who here lost a relative in World War II?”

Several hands went up.

“Korea?”

More hands.

“Vietnam?”

The place was so quiet you could calibrate a sound meter. Marlon climbed up and sat casually on the edge of the stage.

“We owe them everything, and we can never pay them back. But there’s one little thing we can do to honor their memory…. What do you say we cut each other some slack?”

Marlon set the microphone down on the stage. The debate had barely begun, but he walked down the aisle toward the exit.

“Where are you going?” Blaine Crease shouted from the moderator’s table.

Marlon turned. “I’m goin’ to the lick log.”

The press corps flipped through slang dictionaries. The Rolling Stones security tried to keep the crowd back, but Marlon was mobbed again as he left the convention cen
ter. People yelled out questions as he climbed up to the driver’s seat of the RV.

“Any campaign promises?”

“I promise not to tell you what you want to hear.”

The
Orange Crush
pulled out of the parking lot.