Key West Normal (Key West Capers Book 16), page 1
PRAISE FOR LAURENCE SHAMES’ NOVELS
“Characters flashier than a Key West sunset and dialogue tastier than a conch stew.”
– New York Times Book Review
“As enjoyable as a day at the beach.”
—USA Today
“Funny, suspenseful, romantic, and wise.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Smart and consistently entertaining.”
—Chicago Tribune Book Review
“Delicious dark humor and healthy cynicism.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Hilarious and always on the mark.”
—Washington Times
Key West Normal
LAURENCE SHAMES
Copyright © 2021 Laurence Shames
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 9798457366824
DEDICATION
To Marilyn,
the mate that fate had me created for
Prologue
S ome folks say you can’t make this stuff up.
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never tried to make stuff up. I’ve never had to. Why would I? I live in Key West, Florida. Weird stuff happens every day here. Except, in Key West, it doesn’t necessarily count as weird. After a while it just starts seeming normal. Maybe it’s not what you would call average normal or most-places normal. I guess you could just say it’s Key West normal.
Maybe I see more weird stuff than the typical person or even the typical Key Wester because of where I live. I don’t live in a house or a bungalow or an apartment or a condo. I live in a hot dog. I don’t mean a hot dog like you would eat. Where I live is in what used to be a vending wagon where a guy sold hot dogs alongside Smathers Beach, which is on the ocean side and faces south toward the Florida Straits. I should mention that Smathers is already a strange, sort of pretend-beach to begin with, because it’s really made of gnarly coral nubs that the city hides under hundreds of dumptrucks full of sand at the start of every tourist season. Don’t ask me where all that sand comes from. Somewhere in Florida there must be a gigantic hole in the ground that I guess gets bigger every year and will eventually cave in or maybe they’ll just start calling it a lake.
Anyway, the hot dog where I live is basically a small trailer that a guy named Sonny used to hitch behind his car. Before we fixed it up to live in, it had a deep fat fryer and slosh pan for heating sauerkraut and some napkin holders and a frame for the giant containers of mustard and ketchup with those plunger tops to squirt the stuff out. You get the picture; just a basic set-up for selling franks and fries.
But what made it special is that the whole trailer was made to look like a hot dog so people would know what he was selling. The sides belly out and are painted brown like a toasted bun; the window where the guy took money and handed out the food is in the middle. The top has a big red curving wiener with a long squiggle of bright yellow mustard on it.
Usually, when the hot dog wagon was still a going operation, it would be parked halfway up the promenade, not very far from the public restrooms where I and a lot of other guys would take our showers. On one side of the hot dog wagon would be a pizza truck painted orange and green, which I guess are the colors of the Italian flag. Anyway, it made it look Italian. On the other side would be a taco truck with a sombrero on top. Then there were sno-cones and ice cream. If you happened to have some money, you could have a four-course lunch without ever putting shoes on or moving more than thirty feet from the Atlantic Ocean. I guess the trucks did a nice business during season. Tourists would line up all the way back to the seawall, and with all the different kinds of sunburn stuff they wore, you could hardly smell the sauerkraut or the pizza or the onions. Sometimes people would turn around from the cash register and give me their spare change. I never asked for it and I tried never to look at someone else’s food, which I think is pretty rude. But I guess I looked hungry. Most people are really pretty nice, and besides, who has a change pocket in a bathing suit?
Anyway, at some point the hot dog guy skipped town, and that’s really where this story starts. But don’t ask me exactly how long ago it happened, because I’m not very good at remembering time stuff, and neither is anybody else who’s lived in Key West for a lot of years. I guess it’s the heat, the humidity, the being pretty much cut off from the rest of the world and what happens in it. Calendars just don’t tell you much down here. Anyway, the guy skipped town and no one knew why. The rumor, which turned out not to be the real reason anyway, was that he’d never believed in things like permits or inspections or sales tax, and eventually the fines built up to where they were more than the hot dog wagon was worth. So the thing sat empty for weeks or maybe even months, who remembers? Anyway, quite a while. Stickers, like different kinds of parking tickets, I guess, started sprouting all over it. Some of the stickers were yellow, some were blue, some were red, some were pink. One evening Fred and I got to talking about it.
You’ll hear more about Fred as we go along. He’s my best friend and roommate, though at the time we didn’t have what you’d really call a room, only a few tarps spread out in a clearing in the mangroves just east of the airport. So one evening we’re sitting around our little campfire, and I ask Fred a question. This happens a lot, because I get curious about stuff that I just can’t figure out. So I ask Fred. Fred’s a lot smarter than I am. He has a lot more experience of the world. He understands things, how stuff works. So I say to him, just sort of thinking out loud, “I wonder what’s with all the different colors.”
“All what colors, Piney?” he says. I should mention that Piney is what he calls me, though my actual name, or at least what everyone else calls me, is Pineapple. Just Pineapple. That’s it. Used to be, a very long time ago, I had a more regular name, two names actually, first and last, but the first name never suited me and I never even knew the guy that the last name came from, so I just sort of let it go. No big loss. A relief, to tell the truth. If someone shouted out that old name while I was walking down the beach, I don’t think I’d even turn my head.
Anyway, I have this habit, a bad habit I guess, of sometimes just starting a conversation in the middle, picking up from stuff I’ve been thinking but haven’t yet said aloud, so of course the other person has no idea what I’m talking about. So Fred says, “What colors, Piney?”
“The stickers,” I say. “On the hot dog. There’s all these different kinds.”
“Different kinds of cops,” Fred says. Like I told you, he knows the world, how things work. “Permit cops. Health department cops. Tax cops. They all get different color stickers.”
“The pink’s my favorite.”
“Wagon’s gonna get hauled away at some point,” he says. “Has to happen. Mark my words. Prob’ly the only reason it hasn’t happened yet is that the different cops can’t decide whose job it is. You take it. No, YOU take it. Not my jurisdiction. Sure ain’t mine. Passin’ the buck. That’s what they do. All of ‘em. Lazy slobs. Sittin’ in their air-conditioned cars drinkin’ coffee. That’s what they do. Drink coffee, act tough, then pass the buck.”
Well, I knew by then that Fred sometimes got a little worked up or bitter-sounding when talking about cops or the authorities in general, and I was a little sorry I even raised the subject, though I was just curious about the stickers. Still, I didn’t want to get him all upset, especially while we were eating. I should mention that Fred works way more often than I do. Day labor for cash. Roofing, demolition, cutting coconuts before they fall on cars, that type of thing. So he buys most of our food. He’s very generous about it, which I appreciate, especially because, since I gave up drinking, which is another story altogether, I seem to be hungry all time. Anyway, if I remember right, that night I had ravioli and he had Beef-a-Roni. I saw he was upset about the whole business with the stickers and the different cops, so I let the subject drop.
Fred didn’t. A few minutes later, he kicks a piece of driftwood to get some sparks going in the fire and scatter the mosquitoes, and he says, “Maybe we should take it.”
“Take what?”
“The wagon. The hot dog.”
“Take it? Um, it doesn’t belong to us.”
He’s finished his food by then and is picking his teeth. “Don’t belong to no one else neither.”
Me, I’m a slow eater, a one-ravioli-at-a-time kind of person. Eat one, think about it; eat one, think about it. So I’m still working on mine. I swallow and say, “It belongs to Sonny, right? The hot dog guy.”
“Used to. Not no more. It’s abandoned. It’s a wreck. It’s anybody’s. Law of the sea.”
“But it isn’t in the sea,” I point out. “It’s on land. Right next to the curb.” It isn’t often that I feel like I’m a step ahead of Fred, but at that moment I thought I was.
I should have known better. Without missing a beat, he says, “Yeah, but did you notice the license plate?”
“What license plate?”
“No license plate. It’s gone.”
That Fred sure notices a lot of things. Me, I’d mainly just been looking at the different colored stickers.
“Gone,” he says again. “And no license plate means no owner. Abandoned. Ditched. Which means that one of these days, maybe even tomorrow, who knows, when the cops get their thumbs out of their fat, lazy asses long enough to figure out whose job it is, someone’s gonna haul it away and stick it in an impound yard where it’ll rot or eventually get crushed
“Typical of what?” I say.
I guess Fred regards this as a dumb question, since he doesn’t bother answering, just kicks the fire again, which makes the frogs and crickets go quiet for a few seconds. You might be noticing by now that Fred gets worked up pretty easily. Something bothers him, he starts talking about it, which you might think gets it off his chest, except kind of the opposite happens. He gets some momentum going and talks himself into being even more bothered and red-faced than he was at the start. It must be tiring to be like that. Me, I’m pretty much the opposite. I like to be calm. In fact, I’d rather be calm than just about anything else. So I just sit still for a minute or two.
Then Fred says again, “I think maybe we should take the thing. Roll it up here and live in it.”
“Roll it up here?”
“It’s got wheels, don’t it?”
“Well, yeah, it does, but—”
“Wheels and a hitch. So we get some rope, loop it around our waist, kind of a simple harness like–”
“Like donkeys?”
“Like Clydesdales,” he says. Fred’s kind of a short guy, stocky, a little bow-legged, but he thinks big.
So I’m trying to picture it: The two of us yoked in, leaning way forward, sweating, grunting, pulling a giant hot dog covered with violation stickers up the A1A. Now, the sweating and the grunting, I’m okay with that part. It doesn’t bother me at all. But I admit I am really scared about maybe getting caught and getting in bad trouble. “I don’t know about this, Fred,” I say. “We’d have to go right past a couple of motels, past the airport, there’d be cars going by, maybe even a cop car.”
Fred’s way ahead of me, of course. “We do it four a.m.,” he says. “Road’s empty. Airport’s dead. Any cops on duty, they’re prob’ly down on Duval breakin’ up fights at closing time. Worse comes to worst, we drop the rope, sit down on the curb, and act like we don’t know nothing and weren’t doing anything. Play dumb. Just play dumb. Usually the best approach.”
“Makes me nervous.”
“Me too a little. Okay, I admit it. But havin’ a place to live, Piney. Dry when it rains. Warm when it’s cold. I say it’s worth takin’ a chance. It’s not a risk-free world out there.”
I know he’s right but I wish he wasn’t. I’m just such a wimp when it comes to trouble. Feels like I spend a lot of my life trying to avoid it. You might be thinking there’s nothing special about that, everybody tries to keep out of trouble. But that doesn’t go with things I’ve seen down here. I’ve seen guys who go out of their way to get in trouble, like they’re always on the hunt for rules they can get caught breaking. Even dumb little rules. Like with the public shower. Sign says No Shampoo. So they bring shampoo, usually one of those little packets that motels give out and sometimes end up in the garbage. Guard calls them on it, they get nasty. Next thing you know, it’s gone from shampoo or no shampoo to getting cuffs slapped on and your head pushed down while getting shoved into the squad car. Some guys seem to like that. Gives them something they need, I guess. Everybody’s different.
Anyway, all I’m saying is I don’t look for trouble. Mostly I just try to go unnoticed. Problem is, it’s hard go unnoticed when you’ve got a harness on and you’re towing away someone else’s hot dog wagon in the middle of the night. But Fred talks me into it, of course. That’s how it usually goes with us. Fred decides. I go along.
So Fred decides we should take the wagon on a night when there isn’t any moon. To be honest, I don’t see where this matters much, since there are orange streetlamps ten times brighter than the moon like every fifty feet along the road. But okay, it’s Fred’s plan. Fred gets some rope. He probably steals it from a job site, but I don’t need to know that kind of thing.
So, ahead of time, we try to flatten out the path that leads to our clearing and also make it wide enough for the hot dog to pass through. This takes a lot of work with a machete. Fred has one, of course, and don’t ask me where it came from. He keeps it right next to his bedroll when he’s sleeping. Sometimes in the middle of the night he gives a whimper like a little baby and I can see his fingers sort of twitch toward the handle of it. I figure he’s dreaming about being attacked or something, so I whisper, it’s okay, Fred and he settles right back down again. Anyway, we had to dig out a few coral rocks and trim a few of those mangrove roots that look like teepees and are really a bear to cut with a rusty machete. But we managed. We didn’t need or want much extra clearance, just enough to lug the hot dog through and then have it pretty much disappear.
So the big night finally comes. We eat early, give ourselves plenty of time to rest up. Around midnight, the planes finally stop taking off and landing. I should mention that, where we are, the planes go by so low that you can count the rivets on their wings. You can see the treads on their tires when they’re landing. It’s very loud, but then again, if we weren’t smack dab in the middle of the approach path, there’d be a hotel or condo here and we wouldn’t have a place to live. You have to take the bad with the good. Or the good with the bad. I never remember which way it goes. Anyway, it’s something Fred says, and I agree.
Judging by the stars, it’s around 3:30 when we head out. It’s low tide, so there’s a little bit of that rotten egg smell in the air. Not a strong smell, just a whiff of something extra added to the salt and dried-out seashells. It’s kind of funky but I like it or maybe I’m just used to it. When we’re not right under a streetlamp we can see some stars, sort of smudgy from the haze. A couple of times we see people in the mangroves by the seawall. There’s a guy asleep under a turned-over rowboat. There’s a guy fishing, not catching anything, but that’s usually how it goes. So we’re walking along, not fast, because the truth is we’re both scared, and then I start to think about something and at some point I say to Fred, “What if we don’t like it?”
“Don’t like what, Piney?”
“The hot dog. Living in it. Sleeping inside. What if we don’t like it? Would we put it back?”
“Put it back? And take a whole ‘nother chance at getting caught? Plus, then it would be worse, ‘cause we’d have to explain how we got it in the first place, and how long we had it, and what we used it for, and all that stuff.”
I hadn’t thought of the explaining part. Having to explain would make me very nervous and I’d probably get all tongue-tied and make things worse than they already were.
“If we don’t like it,” Fred goes on, “we drag it off to the side or push it onto the salt flat and go back to living like we are. Nothing lost.”
“But then it would go to waste,” I say.
“Yeah, what of it?”
“You said you’d hate to see it go to waste.”
“Piney, it’s not a perfect world. Things go to waste sometimes.”
“So why’s it different if we waste it or someone else does?”
He gives me a certain look he gets when I’m asking too many questions. “Why are you making this so complicated? You looking to bail? You chickening out on me?”
I guess I should mention that Fred has had six or eight beers since dinner, so he’s probably feeling braver than I am. I remember that feeling—drinking to keep up my nerve, I mean. Usually turned out not to be a great idea. Then again, I’ve never really understood what’s so terrible about chickening out. Guys make it sound like it’s the worst thing you can do, like you’ll never live it down. I just don’t get that. Say guys are diving headfirst into water where they can’t see the bottom. At the last second, you chicken out. This is something to be ashamed of? Like I say, I don’t get it. Anyway, to me this was not a question of chickening out or not chickening out, but a question that I gave Fred my word that I’d go through with this, so I told him again I would.
So we keep walking down the promenade. Every now and then a scooter goes by, every now and then a car. I feel a stab in my stomach every time. Finally we reach the hot dog. It looks awfully big to drag around but awfully small to live in. We sit down on the seawall to rest and try to look innocent. Then Fred moseys over and casually looks at how the hitch is set up. Then he backs off like he’s really not that interested. Then he bends down like maybe he dropped a dime or something and ties the rope around the hitch. Then he looks back at me, so I guess there’s no getting out of it now. My mouth is dry. It’s hard to breathe. I push myself up from the seawall and sort of lasso myself inside the loop of the rope next to Fred.
