“Where’s that storm going now?” asked weatherman Guy Rockney. Toto II danced on the map in a little pirate outfit as a ceiling camera filmed the dog from overhead.
“Looks like it’s still heading north,” said Rockney, “so you can breathe easy, Tampa Bay.”
U p the coast of Florida and around the horn to Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, a pre-hurricane custom was under way. Journalists flocked to the beach communities, facing out to sea, moving laterally along the coast like fiddler crabs as landfall predictions changed by the hour-trying not to be the guy who missed by two hundred miles last year and now served mashed potatoes with an ice cream scoop in the Action News 9 cafeteria. They stood on seawalls and piers and jetties and beaches, in bright raincoats, in even brighter sunshine, from Biloxi to Panama City.
A reporter in a hazard-orange raincoat stood on a wharf in Pascagoula. Her image filled the screen of the TV set anchored high on the wall of the crew lounge at MacDill Air Force Base on the south end of the Tampa peninsula. The crew of The Rapacious Reno had been deployed to Tampa for public relations duty, and they lay around the lounge drinking coffee, smoking and eating out of vending machines. They drew doodles and worked crosswords.
Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Lee “Southpaw” Barnes lit a Pall Mall. Milton “Bananas” Foster kept saying, “I got a baaaaaad feeling about this mission!”
Marilyn Sebastian was turned on as William “The Truth” Honeycutt beat the crud out of a vending machine whose corkscrew didn’t drop his Jujyfruit.
“Nine-letter word beginning with G for a colorless syrup used in food preservation and skin lotions,” said weather officer “Tiny” Baxter.
“Glycerine,” said Major Larry “Montana” Fletcher, and Baxter leaned over and jotted in his newspaper.
An oscillating siren went off. The crew jumped up and ran out the door and across the runway in their flight suits.
When they got inside the plane, most were stunned to see three dozen old men with white beards sitting on a long bench in the cargo bay, wearing parachutes and drinking beer.
“Jumpin’ Jesus!” said Barnes. “I’m not believin’ my motherfuckin’ eyes!”
“Easy now. Everything will be all right,” said Montana. “This has all been officially approved by headquarters. These are the Flying Hemingways.”
“The what?”
“You’ve heard of the Flying Elvises? Same thing, only different.”
“Those were professional skydivers who dressed like Elvis. But these guys-” They all turned to see the Look-Alikes chugging beer, bumping into each other, farting and belching in graded octaves like a pipe organ.
“These orders come from the top,” said Montana. “PR duty just like when we do flyovers for air shows, holidays and funerals of large political donors. Before we do recon on the hurricane, we’re supposed to fly over the beach and drop the Hemingways as the entertainment for something called the Proposition 213 Jamboree.”
“What’s that?”
“No idea. But the mayor of a place called Beverly Shores apparently has a lot of clout. He pulled the strings.”
Twenty minutes later, they were at ten thousand feet, almost directly over the Proposition 213 stage. The back gate of the Hercules dropped open. A green light in the cargo bay came on. The Hemingways struggled to their feet and clipped their static lines to an overhead cable. They were pressed together in a tight line, with only seconds to all get out of the plane once the signal was given. Jumpmaster Jethro Maddox stood by the open doorway and gave the high sign. The line began to move. He smacked each on the butt as they ran past and dove out of the plane. “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!…”
It was not a precision team, and by the sixth jumper their legs tangled and they started going down in a chain reaction. A few at the front made it out of the plane, but the rest of the line snarled, and the Look-Alikes toppled over on the floor into a big blob like a single brainless organism, a giant polyp of Papa-plasm. Honeycutt radioed Montana what was going on, and Montana pulled the nose of the Hercules up as high as he could, pouring the rest of the Hemingways out the back of the plane like a margarita.
They left the Hercules at all angles, on top of each other, arms and legs spindling. Down at the rally, spectators watched with binoculars. It looked like the jump the night before D day, when bad weather sprayed the pre-invasion force all over the countryside, everywhere but the target. Some Hemingways landed hundreds of yards out in the Gulf, others on the boulevard and in the shopping plazas. One chute snagged on a sailboat mast. Another Hemingway came down behind the walls of a N.O.W. retreat and was beaten severely. Jethro Maddox ended up hanging from the tallest palm tree on the grounds of Hammerhead Ranch. He pedaled his legs in the air until he was exhausted. Then he began consuming the six-pack that was stored in the pack usually reserved for the emergency chute. He fell asleep in his harness.
An hour later, The Rapacious Reno was somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. “You can’t fly for shit,” Barnes told Montana. “And another thing…”
Montana held a hand up for Barnes to be silent as weather officer Baxter called the pilot over the intercom. Montana turned the plane over to Barnes and joined Baxter at the weather console. They studied the instruments with concern.
Baxter looked up. “Sir, we have a change of direction in the storm.”
“Better call Miami,” said Montana. “Give ’em the news.”
D ue to global warming, El Niña, La Niña, and a host of end-of-the-millennium volcanic eruptions, mud slides and biblical floods, the National Hurricane Center in Miami was only mildly surprised that a catastrophic hurricane had caromed ninety degrees and was about to make landfall. Officials at the center got a late jump reacting, but quickly made up time and issued the warning. Along Florida ’s west coast, every major television and radio station put out the word that a force-four hurricane was hooking right into Tampa Bay.
Except one.
At Florida Cable News, things hadn’t gone so well during Toto II’s second day on the job. The dog had been dressed in the uniform of a Tampa Bay Lightning hockey player, and the crew had worked much of the morning trying to get it to hold the miniature hockey stick. Just before airtime, a stagehand wrapped a rubber band several times around the stick and Toto II’s right front paw.
Instead of doing the weather dance, Toto spent the better part of the segment trying to chew his leg off.
“He looks like he’s in a lot of pain,” said the anchorwoman.
“No, no, no!” weatherman Guy Rockney said with a chuckle. “He wants to play hockey! He’s trying to get a better grip on the stick.”
“His paw is turning blue!” said the woman. “Help him!”
“You’re overreacting,” said Rockney. He attempted to prop the dog up and make it dance like a marionette on top of the anchor desk.
“Guy, what’s the forecast?” said the annoyed male anchor, watching the production clock.
“Oh, everything will be fine. Sunny. Lots of sun,” Rockney said without looking up from Toto II, who finally bit Rockney between the thumb and forefinger.
“Owww! Dammit!” said Rockney, and he grabbed Toto II by the hair on the back of his neck and snapped his head back. Toto growled and yelped, and Rockney said “Fuck” on the air. He struggled with the dog and fell off his chair, and they both disappeared behind the anchor desk, where there was more growling and cursing. The anchorman dropped his face into his hands; the anchorwoman froze with her mouth open. The station’s switchboard lit up.
T hree dark government sedans raced in single file across the state on Interstate 4 toward Tampa Bay. The occupants wore suits, sunglasses. Stern faces, nobody spoke.