“You got it,” said Paul. “No problem-o.”
The pair left the office and headed to the last tee, number twenty-two.
Jethro spilled his bucket on the ground and used the head of a four iron to rake a few red-banded balls over to his feet. “DiMaggio would have been a formidable golfer. You could see it in his dark Italian eyes, etched with the scars of life.” Jethro swung hard and hit the ball with the toe of his club, slicing right, scampering through traffic on A1A and ricocheting off the manager’s door at the Orbit Motel. An old Honduran opened the door, looked around, closed it.
Paul lined up his own shot. He looked out at the range signs, marking distance in fifty-yard increments. In between were small greens with flagsticks.
“What’s the objective here?” asked Paul. “Hit it as far as you can or get it close to the flags?”
“Neither, my worthy companion. It is but to hit the range cart.”
“The what?”
“You do not understand now, but you will in time.”
Paul and Jethro swung through their ration of balls, which took off at random adventures in geometry. They were accompanied by a score of other golfers whose graceful swings resembled the chopping of firewood, and a spray of balls curved, sliced, bounced and whizzed across the range, some hooking high over the safety netting and into the retention pond, where a scuba diver trespassed with a mesh gunnysack full of balls in one hand and a twelve-gauge bang-stick for alligators in the other.
One of the golfers noticed something. Out near the left hundred-yard marker, a small tractor started moving across the range. The driver’s seat was enclosed in a protective wire cage, the tractor pulling a wide scooping device that sucked up balls and squirted them into the collection bin.
The golfer on tee number three sounded the alarm.
“Range cart!”
The customers began hitting balls as fast as they could, a rapid series of twenty-one-gun salutes. Most were wildly off target, but through sheer volume the range cart began taking heavy fire. The driver was used to it by now, a community college student reading Crime and Punishment and drinking a Foster’s as the fusillade of Titleists and Dunlops pinged off the vehicle. A lucky shot smashed one of the red plastic light covers. A small voice in the distance: “I got the taillight! I got the taillight!” A two-wood clanged off the outside of the cage protecting the driver, who was inside a depressing nineteenth-century Russian apartment. He turned the page. Balls flew by.
Paul topped another drive fifty yards. “How does anybody play this game?”
Jethro addressed his ball with a three wood. “Think of it as bullfighting and you will see the truth in it.” He knocked a TopFlite into the Checkers drive-through.
Bianca and Johnny held hands as they crossed the footbridge over the retention lagoon next to the driving range. She giggled and squeezed his arm. “I’m getting wet just thinking about it.”
Johnny choked on some saliva and grabbed the railing for balance.
“You all right?”
He nodded. They continued walking, coming to a fence and meeting a third party in the dark. Johnny paid the man in twenties. The couple began wiggling into position behind a control panel.
“Look! I can see people over there!” said Bianca. “Oh, my God!” She ripped off her bra and plunged her tongue down Johnny’s throat. Her hands went for his zipper.
“Are you ready?” she whispered.
Was Johnny ready? He had the kind of erection SWAT teams could use to knock down doors on crack houses. He fumbled to operate the control panel like he’d been shown.
The man waved goodbye as Johnny and Bianca departed. “Have a safe trip.”
Bianca gave Johnny a hickey as she slid off her panties. She looked over her shoulder at the little people in the distance and her stomach fluttered. She bit Johnny again. “You’re going to remember this the rest of your life….”
The couple had just gotten the rest of their clothes off when they heard a tiny voice in the distance.
“Range cart!”
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
Bianca jumped off Johnny in alarm. “What the fuck was that?”
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
A shower of dimpled balls pelted the range cart with the two naked people.
“They’re trying to kill us!” yelled Bianca.
“No, they’re not,” said Johnny. “It’ll just make it better. Come on, baby.”
Bianca lost it, clawing at the inside of the protective cage like a drowning cat. “I have to get out of here!”
“Don’t open that door!”
She opened it, took a Maxfli in the forehead and fell back unconscious in Johnny’s lap.
4
Rush-hour traffic lurched along The Palmetto Expressway through hardworking Hialeah, past the horse track and industrial park. In the third warehouse off Exit 7, men in back braces pushed handcarts of brown boxes marked THE STINGRAY SHUFFLE through beams of exhaust-filtered sun, loading trucks and vans, which pulled out of the shipping bay toward the highway ramp.
In a windowless room next to the dispatcher’s office, a young man scrolled down his computer screen. He stopped, hit print and waited for a sheet of paper to come off the inkjet.
The supervisor’s office had windows, but they overlooked the loading dock and the men hoisting cases of bestsellers at one of the biggest book wholesalers in the Miami–Fort Lauderdale statistical hub. The young man stood in the doorway.
“What is it?” asked the boss, staring at his own computer screen, squeezing a stress ball advertising a new stress-free-diet book.
“I’m getting some strange sales figures on this one title.”
“Down?”
“Way up.”
The young man handed his printout to the supervisor, who grabbed his reading glasses.
“That is strange. You sure these are right?”
“Triple-checked.”
“Must be an explanation. Maybe a publisher’s promotion. Contest or something.”
“Nope. Already called them.”
“What about the author? Is he touring? Speak at a local college?”
“Hasn’t been seen in years. Could be dead for all we know.”
“Anything on Oprah?”
The young man shook his head.
“Maybe it’s one of these local book clubs. Look — see how the sales are all just at this one bookstore in Miami Beach, The Palm Reader?” He took off his glasses and set the page down. “That has to be it. Must be someone’s selection-of-the-month, and they’re all buying at this store.”
“Three months in a row? The numbers are bigger than any ten book groups could account for. Besides, The Palm Reader is a dump. No self-respecting club would set foot inside with all the classier places nearby.”
The supervisor scratched his head. “Then there’s simply a strong word-of-mouth pocket. The book’s taking off on its own.”
“Sir, The Stingray Shuffle has been out eleven years.”
“This is a crazy business. I’ve seen stuff out twenty years with nothing to show, then someone makes a movie and bang!”
“There’s no movie.”
“The point I’m making is you can’t account for consumer behavior. These things sprout at their own pace, the gestation of the pyramid progression, a classic equation of the hundredth monkey. Revenues are cruising horizontally along the X axis, then suddenly demand reaches critical mass and sales make the all-important vertical swing up the Y axis.”
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Making some money,” he said, picking up the phone. “Let’s call the other bookstores, see if we can’t help this thing along. And beat the other wholesalers while we’re at it.”