Elmore Leonard - Gold Coast

“I can hear you,” Vivian said, “the way you’d say it. Did she scream for help?”

“She was nice about the whole thing. What I’m surprised at, she went and called Ed.”

“Well, stay away from her, that’s all.”

“Sure, that’s how he wants it. What I better have, though, are all the back tapes. You think I come to see you, it’s the tapes I need most.”

“Why?” Vivian said.

“You want me to do the job or not?”

Vivian, sitting at her desk, studied him, trying to catch a glimpse of how his mind was working.

“See, now the woman knows she’s being watched, she’s gonna be more careful,” Roland said.

“Thanks to you.”

“No, it’s better this way, let her know where she stands. But I got to listen to the back tapes. See, get to recognize voices if any of ’em call again and don’t use names. You understand?”

“I understand that,” Vivian said, “but I think I better talk to Ed first. He’ll be back in a few days.”

“He went out of town?”

“He’ll be back.”

“Meanwhile,” Roland said, “we’re sitting here humping the dog, huh? What I could do is return ’em before he gets back. Otherwise, something happens, Ed sees the work wasn’t done properly, he looks around for who’s to blame and, like that, you’re back in your overalls picking oranges.”

Roland walked out with a cardboard box full of cassette tapes. Fucking Cubans, he hadn’t met one yet you couldn’t hold their job over ’em like a club and get whatever you wanted.

IF PORPOISE WERE REALLY SO SMART,Maguire would think, how come they put up with all this shit?

The porpoise could ask Maguire the same question. Or Lolly the sea lion.

In the cement-block room off the show pool, Maguire and Lolly would look at each other. Maguire holding the mike to announce Brad Allen and the World-Famous Seascape Porpoise and Sea Lion Show. Lolly waiting to go on, the opening act. Maguire wondering if Lolly ever played with her beachball when no one was around. Lolly wondering-what? Looking at him with her sad eyes.

Maguire would announce the show, hearing his voice outside on the P.A. system as he looked through the crack in the door at the people in the grandstand.

“And now… here’s Brad!”

After the show Brad Allen would say to Maguire, “Look, how many times? You don’t say, ‘Here’s Brad,’ for Christ sake. You ever watch Johnny Carson, the way they do it? You say, ‘And now… heeeeeeeeeeere’s Brad!’ ”

“I don’t know why, but I have trouble with that,” Maguire would say.

Brad Allen was show director, star, working manager of:

SEASCAPE

PORPOISE SHOW

SHARKS * SEA LIONS

S.E. Seventeenth Street Causeway

At Port Everglades

TURN HERE!

He would say to Maguire, “Are you stupid or something? I don’t think it’s that hard, do you?”

“No, it isn’t,” Maguire would say.

“I believe you’re supposed to be experienced-”

“The thing is, down at Marathon we didn’t have the same kind of show,” Maguire would try to explain. “I mean it wasn’t quite as, you know, showy.”

“Down there, did you know the names of the dolphin?” Brad always got onto that. “Could you identify each one by name?”

“Yeah, I knew their names.”

“Then how come you don’t know them here?”

“I know them. There’s Pepper, Dixie, Penny, Bonzai-”

“Robyn says yesterday you were trying to get Penny to do a tailwalk. Penny doesn’t do the tailwalk, Pebbles does the tailwalk.”

“I get those two mixed up.”

“The other day you thought Bonnie was Yvonne. Bonnie’s got the scar from the shark-”

“Right.”

“-and Yvonne’s at least two hundred pounds heavier, ten feet long, you can’t tell them apart. Work on it, okay? Take Robyn over the tank with you and see if you can name them for her. Then come back to the show pool and do the same thing. Is that too much to ask?”

Or, Brad Allen would say:

“The Flying Dolphin Show, you keep leaving out the Mopey Dick part.”

“I forget.”

“He lays up on the ledge on his side, doesn’t move a muscle. Wait for the laughs. Then you say, ‘And that’s’ pause ‘why we call him Mopey Dick.’ ”

“I’ll try to remember,” Maguire would say.

Five months of it, January through May.

Brad Allen waiting for him when he first walked in, pale, a Wayne-County-Jail pallor, carrying his lined raincoat and suitcase, right off the Delta flight. Brad Allen glancing at a letter the Seascape Management Company had sent him, holding the sheet of paper like it was stained or smelled bad.

“It says you’ve had experience.”

“A year at Marathon,” Maguire had said, adding on five months.

“What’ve you been doing since?”

“Well, traveling and working mostly,” Maguire had said. “Colorado, I worked for the Aspen Ski Corporation, also at the Paragon Ballroom. I worked at an airport, a zoo, a TV station. I was the weatherman. I tended bar different places. Let’s see, I was an antique dealer. Yeah, and I worked a job at a country club.”

“Well, this is no country club,” Brad Allen had said. The serious tone, making it sound hard because he had to hire the guy. “How old are you?”

“Thirty,” Maguire had said, subtracting six years-after walking in and seeing how young the help was. Like summer-camp counselors in their sneakers and white shorts, red T-shirts with a flying-porpoise decal and seascape lettered in white. (Brad Allen wore white shorts and a red-trimmed white T-shirt with the porpoise and seascape in red. He also wore a white jacket and red warmups and sometimes a red, white, and blue outfit.)

“How long you been thirty?”

What was Brad Allen? Maybe thirty-two, thirty-three. The guy staring at Maguire, suspicious, wanting to catch him in a lie. For what?

“What difference does it make?” Maguire had said. “I’m an out-going person, I like to be with people, I don’t mind working hard and”-laying on a little extra-“I’m always willing to learn if there’s something I don’t know.”

It took him a few days to get used to the white shorts and the red T-shirt-thinking about what Andre Patterson would say if he saw the outfit; like, man, you real cute. Within two months Maguire was as brown as the rest of them, and his sneakers were beginning to show some character. He did believe he could pass for thirty. Why not? He felt younger than that. He was out in the sunshine. The work was clean, not too hard. He was eating a lot of fruit. Smoking a little grass now and then with Lesley. Not drinking too much. The pay was terrible, two-sixty a week, but he was getting by. Living in a one-room efficiency at an Old-Florida-looking stucco place called The Casa Loma, fifty bucks a week, next door to Lesley who lived in the manager’s apartment with her Aunt Leona. What else? Air-conditioned, two blocks from the ocean-

The people he worked with-R.D. Hooker, Chuck, Robyn and Lesley-reminded him of high school.

Hooker, a strong, curly-haired Florida boy, twenty-three years old. A clean liver, dedicated. Hooker would go down into the eighteen-foot tank, Neptune’s Realm, with a face mask and air hose and play with the porpoise even when he didn’t have to, between shows. One time Hooker said to Chuck, the custodian-trainee, “I don’t know what’s wrong with Bonnie today. First she won’t let me touch her, then she butts me. Then she comes up and starts yanking on my goddarn air hose like to pull it out of my mouth. Knowing what she was doing.”