The camera panned with Blaine as he moved through the village. He came upon some stilts without a hut on top. A campfire burned in front of it, and a small animal the size of a Cornish game hen turned on a makeshift rotisserie.
“…The destruction and the hardship is so severe that the residents have been reduced to cooking their own pet dogs!…”
The people sitting around the campfire behind Blaine couldn’t have looked happier.
When the report ended, Jethro Maddox stood and picked up a ratty canvas bag. “It’s time we got going. This is a moveable feast.”
But Art was still immobilized by intermittent sobbing.
“We’ll never get to Kilimanjaro with that attitude.” Jethro grabbed him under an armpit and coaxed him off the stool. He led Art to the parking lot and got him into the passenger seat of his blue Malibu, then went to the driver’s side and climbed in, and they began heading east across the panhandle on Highway 98.
They entered Okaloosa County, “ Florida ’s Finest Beaches,” and drove through Fort Walton and Destin. Recent storms had taken bites all up the coast. Some homes were still set back high and safe with wide beaches; elsewhere, waves lapped the stilts. They entered Walton County, “The Best Beaches in Florida,” and drove through the movie-set town of Seaside, featured in The Truman Show. They entered Bay County, “ Florida ’s Most Beautiful Beaches,” and came to Panama City, spring break territory. Jethro eyed the motel balconies. “Life has a cruel way of taking the youngest and the brightest.” The balconies were enclosed in bars and cages to prevent the brightest from falling on their heads.
They continued east. Fighter jets buzzed high above Tyndall Air Force Base. They hit Gulf County, no motto. The waterfront housing was spare and humble as they approached Port St. Joe. They stopped at the Indian Pass Trading Post near Cape San Blas and ate shellfish in Apalachicola, down on the elbow knot under Florida ’s panhandle.
In the restaurant, Art spoke for the first time since The Flora-Bama. “Where are we going?”
“It is not the destination but the journey.”
Art stared sadly at him.
“Okay, we’re going to Tampa. I have a gig with the Look-Alikes.”
I t had all the makings of a Girl Power roadtrip, “Daytona or Bust.”
Steppenwolf was on the stereo as City and Country headed out of Apalachicola after a seafood lunch.
“If this were the early 1800s, we’d be in the third-largest cotton port on the Gulf,” City told Country. “The bridge and half the things in town are named after Dr. John Gorrie, the first person to figure out how to make ice cubes.”
After Apalachicola, erosion had its way with the highway. There was no beach, and the waves hit the side of the road and sprayed cars. Some sections of road had collapsed in the sea and been repacked with new tar. There was no shoulder. If the wheels went out of the lane, they rolled into the water.
City drove with one hand, then the other, pulling her T-shirt off over her head and revealing a purple bikini top. She put on a tennis visor. In the passenger seat, Country slouched way down and stuck her feet up on the dash. She pushed a floppy hippie hat down over her long hair. She had a white tank top from a Jacksonville radio station and white shorts, and she watched the road over the top of raspberry-tinted Janis Joplin glasses perched at the end of her nose.
They stopped for gas and cheddar popcorn.
“I taught my Rottweiler Chinese,” the Miami man ahead of them at the cash register told his friend.
“Get outta here.”
“No lie. You know how everyone in Dade is buying vicious dogs because of crime? I read where burglars are giving the dogs commands, because everybody uses the same ones-sit, stay, heel-and houses are cleaned out while expensive pit bulls and German shepherds stand there stupid.”
“Why Chinese?”
“Can’t use Spanish. Half the burglars in Miami are bilingual.”
“How do you say sit in Chinese?”
“I’m not gonna tell you!”
Back on the road, City and Country talked bad romance.
“Remember that one guy you thought was Mr. Right because he drove up for your date in an expensive Lincoln?” asked Country. “Then he took you cruising back and forth across campus for three hours and activated those low-rider shock absorbers that bounced the front wheels two feet off the pavement until it nearly detached your retinas.”
“Very funny,” said City. “Okay, remember that guy who came to pick you up with an entirely new haircut?”
Country stopped laughing and cringed. Shaved into the side of her date’s head: “Ingrid,” with a heart and a dagger through it. He’d seemed normal enough when he asked her out-then he arrived with that crazy shit carved in his skull. “How do ya like it?” he asked. Country plotzed in the doorway.
And their date still lay ahead. A dinner so painfully uncomfortable for Country that everything tasted like packing peanuts. Then an evening at the 4-H fair. Country returned home at midnight, quickly locked the door and threw a giant stuffed animal across the apartment.
“Nice panda,” said City.
“Shut up,” said Country.
The red Alfa Romeo sailed through a yellow light in Perry and kept going east.
T he traffic light in Perry turned red, stopping a blue Malibu.
Jethro Maddox checked his roadmap, then stuck it back in the visor. “When you took vacations as a small child, did you ever play the license-plate game?”
Art didn’t respond. The light turned green and Jethro made a right onto U.S. 19.
“I now enjoy a similar game when I am on the road-Pick the Fugitive,” Jethro continued. “It works very well in Florida. Anyplace you are on the highway, there must be a hundred fugitives come through a day… You study the people in the other vehicles and try to determine who is on the lam.”
Art couldn’t help but look around at the traffic, and Jethro joined him.
Cars full of suitcases and colorful rafts, with “Heart of Dixie” license plates, Florida Gators wheel covers and Fob James for Governor bumper stickers. There was a truckload of fruit pickers riding in back with a load of cantaloupe and marijuana; a retired couple from Newark muling stolen gems; a cold-call bauxite salesman with Michigan fraud warrants, driving a station wagon eaten up by harsh winters in Saginaw. Three runaway teens from Texarkana in a hot Taurus; the deposed president of Paraguay in a Chevy with bad transmission; and an ex-KGB agent stranded in Florida during the Soviet collapse who was now a freelance troubleshooter for the Broward County Democratic Committee.
“I pick that one,” said Jethro. He pointed at a van with a faded Molly Hatchet mural.
Inside the van were two sour-smelling men-a couple of open beers and loaded pistols on the greasy upholstery between them.
“I’ll bet the discussion in that van has just drifted into speculation about how much cash liquor stores keep on hand,” said Jethro.
“…About five hundred dollars just before the night drop,” the van’s passenger told the driver.
“I have seen it with alarming frequency,” Jethro told Art. “It is a well-worn path: The Downward Spiral into Paradise. They all follow the same internal riffraff gyroscope and drag their traveling cavalcade of dumbness across the Florida state line for a final stand that only ends in crime tape and headlines…”
“…Maybe six hundred bucks on the weekend,” said the van’s driver.
Jethro grabbed a day-old newspaper off the floorboard and handed it to Art. Strong-arm robbery. Exploitation of the elderly. Church funds missing. Handicapped woman raped. Four-year-old bludgeoned to death by boyfriend while mother went to buy crack.
Art became troubled. He looked up from the paper and resumed examining the nature of the traffic around him. He realized he had spent far too much time in the small pond; he never knew the outside world was so upsetting. His small-town values and obligations to the community kicked in. The knowledge that he would soon die gave Art a chance to be selfless and do something positive for the world before he left.