‘the bucket brigade,’ beginning

Very rough draft of first few short sections of what I hope will end up being a finished new short story in the coming months.

The Bucket Brigade

Sunset, Key West, Florida
I figured it was about as good as anything to start with.

I live outside Ft. Myers, the north side. Just across the river, where it’s cheaper. That made the lower Keys about a half-day’s drive, at a decent clip. I headed out late one morning, after nearly bagging it twice and just going back to bed. Took I-75 South to where it cuts across the Everglades. Through Alligator Alley, they call it. I didn’t see any alligators, except cartoon ones on signs advertising titty bars and casinos. Which was fine by me. The first time you step outside to find a 6-footer sunning on the driveway you share with your moron neighbor, and his bulging wife in a gaping Buccaneers bathrobe is swatting at the beast with a broom, shouting, “Git, demon! Git!,” you’ll lose all interest in spending any extra time in the company of the dumb brutes. Gators, I mean. Because next thing you’re having to put a motivating .22 slug in the big lizard’s tail, before that horrible woman gets her thick legs snapped clean off right in front of you. Or else local law enforcement will be showing up to lounge around in your yard for most of the day, drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups that sure as shit will wind up in your bushes. Your tax dollars at work. A nice reminder of how you, for one, used to actually work for a living.

And I’ll tell you what, some body parts ought never to flop out like that. I’m no prude, by any stretch, but something that’s gotten that unnaturally huge and is then that close can put you right off having a meal.

Just past Miami, I picked up Hwy. 1. Then started island hopping. Largo, Islamorada, Marathon, Big Pine, Sugarloaf, Big Coppitt. Plus some others I don’t remember or feel like looking up now. They aren’t any of them as pretty as they’re supposed to be.

I’d been living outside of Ft. Myers for about six years. That’s after moving down from Valdosta, where a civie job at the Air Force base had stranded me for much of my life. I’d never been all the way across the Everglades before. Now I guess I have.

Down in the Keys I got stalled for about a half hour just past the hump on that really long bridge. A tractor-trailer dragging a doublewide jackknifed a couple hundred feet to the other side, stopping traffic both ways. I heard about it on the radio later. Finally got to Key West in late afternoon, driving straight into what passes for downtown. I parked one street over from Duval. That’s the big party street with all the bars and Arab T-shirt shops. This was around 3:30, and I had some time to kill. Sunset was supposed to be at 6:18.

I walked around a little while. South on Duval past the end of the shop. A couple old gays in matching pink shirts and with those big red flowers that look like sex behind their ears were selling coconuts with straws in them. I got down finally to that painted concrete buoy where everybody has a picture taken. Some hairy Europeans in sandals were standing in front of it yelling “Ya!” at each other. Then I headed back up, until I found the bar that holds the contests for Hemingway lookalikes. I always thought I’d have liked him. Papa, they call him. I never read anything by the guy. I’m not much of a reader. I just like that he did what he wanted and to hell with everybody else, right up until the end, when he said to hell with himself, too. I can sometimes see how that could happen to a guy.

At the end of the bar with the only empty seats, there was some fool with a banged-up iguana sitting on the stool next to him. With a goddamn collar around the lizard’s neck. Every so often, that sad old lizard would lift himself up on his back legs, propping his front feet onto the edge of bar. Then he’d his tongue in and out of a half-full shot glass.

The guy caught me looking. “Peach schnapps,” he said. “Iz just loves the stuff.”

“That’s Izzie,” he added, nodding at the lizard. “Buy my next round, and you can take your picture with him.”

The man then nodded at the bartender, who yawned, and looked over my way.

“Just a Budweiser,” I said. “For me.”

“Suit yourself,” the iguana guy said, turning his back to me. “Plenty more of you where you came from.”

I don’t doubt that was true. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to bankroll this pathetic song-and-dance. Because seriously, peach schnapps? No self-respecting real lizard would touch that junk. Alligator? No. Komodo dragon? Hell no. I mean, aspire to something, for fuck’s sake.

I finished my beer, looked at my watch, then ordered another beer. I did this all two more times, then went to drain my own lizard. That made me smile when I thought it, but I didn’t have anybody then to tell it to.

“Mallory Square?” I asked the bartender on my way out.

I got there at 6, almost on the dot. Some guy with his skin painted silver in a silver outfit that looked like tinfoil was pretending to be a statue. Another guy was running cats over ropes and big wires just a few feet up from the ground. With a little hoop of fire at the end of it all, the asshole. I’m no fan of cats, which are arrogant little monsters, but that’s just vicious. Their fur could catch fire, and goddamn what an ugly, awful mess. There were also jugglers, at least three of them. I really hate jugglers. No reason that I know. I just hate them.

I started working myself toward the front of the crowd. Easing around people as they shifted in place and yammered at each other about how yesterday was so great, and you should have seen it last Saturday. I got to the front just in time for the sun to blink out below the horizon. I might have missed it, but everybody cheered like someone had just gotten a touchdown. I looked up just in time.

“Amazing, huh?” the guy next to me said. Shaking his head from side to side, like he was agreeing with himself. “Nature’s glory once again wins out.” He was wearing a yellow Hawaiian shirt with bug-eyed Tikis. They had little wooden hands that were strumming ukuleles.

“It was sure a sunset, all right,” I said. “I hear they happen every day. Pretty much everywhere.”

You’d have thought I’d just peed on his feet, the look he gave me.

When I got back to my car, I took out the little notebook. Flipped to the page and ran my finger down the list to find the entry. Then I drew a line through it. One down.

 # # #

I’d been ready for a while when the dog finally died. Ready enough, anyway. I’d been waiting for the incontinent bag of shit and bones to kick it for a couple years. But he just kept hanging on, like a dead body part that sort of flaps there beside you. A bulldog, pure of breed, I think. Never had any papers, so I can’t verify it. White all over, except for one small egg-shaped black spot beside one eye. Made him look from a distance kind of like he had a third eye. Also another bigger spot, almost a perfect circle, around his horrible asshole. A living target that spit out steaming bullets of misfortune. Fourteen years and change that damnable dog survived. He lived too long. It can happen to any of us.

My ex-wife, my second one, had named him Bam-Bam. I called him Shitbird, when I spoke to him at all. And I know I could have started on the list while he was still alive. But whenever I’d gotten anyone to come take care of the hopeless animal for even a few days, I always came home to some patch of rug soaked clean through with piss. And shit piles in the damndest places. How a dog so nearly blind could manage to get into some of the spots he went to crap is beyond me. He had a horrible gift.

I didn’t blame him for the messes he made or the trouble he caused. He was old. We all get old. But I still wished a lot of the time that he was dead.

People kept saying: Put him down, put him down. Better for you both. And I could have had him dead months, maybe even years before, with no qualms from any self-respecting veterinarian. But I just felt like if the old wreck had made it that far, then it just wasn’t my call. I’d just have to wait it out. And goddamn it, life can drag and drag if you let it.

Then one morning, he was dead. His head was turned to one side with his tongue barely poking out. His butt was drooped into his last fresh pile of crap. It was still attached to him like a thick strand of foul rope. He died doing what he did best. We all should be so lucky.

# # #

Mt. Rushmore, Keystone, South Dakota
I took the Greyhound all the way, into Rapid City. Then I rented a car that smelled like cigarettes and wet wood to drive out to the monument. You could see if from a long ways away. I pulled over into one of the official viewing areas and got out, leaning on the front of the car and staring at the stone presidents for a few minutes. Waiting on the magic. A guy who’d walked up and stood there hoping for me to talk finally gave up and pointed out that George Washington’s nose was about a foot longer than the rest of their noses. I hadn’t known that.

“Y’know what they say about big noses,” I finally said back to him. “Maybe that’s how he really got to be the father of our country, huh?”

I thought that was pretty funny, and I’m not usually all that funny. The guy obviously didn’t think so. He frowned at me chuckling to myself and turned on his heel.

Driving back to the bus station, I couldn’t help feeling that was an awful lot of trouble and expense just to make a dick joke that only I laughed at.

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