Elmore Leonard - Gold Coast

Chuck listened to every word and said, “Yeah? How come she was doing that?”

Maguire said, “It sounds like she’s getting her period.”

Hooker said, “What’s it got to do with her acting nasty?”

Maguire would listen to them talk, amazed, nobody putting anybody on or down. Maguire said, “R.D., you ever talk to them? I mean understand them?”

“Sometimes,” Hooker said. “Like I’m getting so I can understand Penny when I ask her a question?”

“No shit,” Maguire said. “What do you ask her?”

“Oh, feeding her I might say, ‘You like that, huh? Isn’t that good?’ ”

“And what does she say?”

“She goes like-” Hooker did something with the inside of his mouth and made a clickity-click, kitty-cat, Donald Duck sound.

“Oh,” Maguire said.

Hooker came on his day off and worked with the two young dolphins in the training tank, hunkered down on the boards for hours, talking to them gently and showing them his hands. Dedicated.

Chuck was on his way to becoming dedicated. He personally wrote two hundred post cards to Star-Kist Tuna, Bumble Bee, VanCamp, Ralston Purina, and H.J. Heinz, telling them to quit murdering dolphin or he would never eat their products again.

Robyn was dedicated, though didn’t appear to be. She was a serious girl and didn’t smile much or seem to be listening when you said something to her. Unless it was Brad Allen who said it. Brad Allen could tell Robyn to dive down to the bottom of the show pool with Dixie, shoot up over the twelve-foot bar and do a tailwalk across the pool, and Robyn would try it. When Brad Allen told her she was doing a good job, Robyn became squirmy and maybe wet her white shorts a little. Nice tight shorts-

Though not as tight or short as Lesley’s. Lesley’s showed a little cheek. She never pulled at them though, the way Robyn did when she got squirmy. What Lesley got was pouty. She’d put on her hurt look and say, “It’s not my turn to feed the sharks, it’s hers. If you think I’m going in there every day you’re out of your fucking mind.” Lesley was dedicated, but not to nurse sharks. She didn’t think it was funny when she was standing hip deep in the pool trying to feed a hunk of bluerunner to a shark, and Maguire, on the platform above, would say to the crowd, “Let’s give Lesley a nice hand”-pause-“she may need one some day.”

Lesley had a pile of wavy brown hair she combed several times an hour. One night, during Maguire’s fourth month, Lesley said to him, “I think I’m falling in love with you.” She looked so good lying there in the dim light with her hair and her white breasts exposed, Maguire almost said he loved her, too. But he didn’t.

Brad Allen was very dedicated. Brad Allen was also serious and tiresome. He made Maguire tired. Maguire wondered why Brad Allen didn’t get tired of being Brad Allen. Once, Maguire took a couple of puffs on a joint before announcing the show and said, over the P.A. system, “Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Brad,” holding the “here’s” almost as long as he could. And after the show Brad Allen said to him, “Now that’s a little better.”

Seascape, the layout, reminded Maguire of a small tropical World’s Fair; round white buildings, striped awnings, and blue and yellow pennants among shrubs and royal palms.

There was Neptune’s Realm you could walk into and look through windows to watch the porpoise and sea creatures glide past, underwater. Topside they put on the Flying Dolphin Show.

There was Shark Lagoon, a pool full of brown nurse sharks and a few giant sea turtles.

There was the Porpoise Petting Pool, where you could touch Misty and Gippy’s hard-boiled-egg skin and feed them minnows, three-for-a-quarter.

At the Grandstand Arena Brad Allen put on the main event, the World-Famous Seascape Porpoise and Sea Lion Show: “where these super-smart mammals perform their aquatic acrobatics.”

Back in the Alligator Pit a Seminole Indian used to wrestle twelve-foot gators, but the Seminole quit and went to Disney World, and R.D. Hooker only tried it a couple of times; so the alligators and a crocodile were there if you wanted to look at them.

Yellow- and white-striped awnings covered the refreshment stand and gift shop. A fifty-cent Sky Ride in two-seater gondolas gave you a low aerial view of the grounds, the tanks and pools of blue water, the white cement walks and buildings among the imported palm trees: a clean, manicured world just off the S.E. 17th Street Causeway.

“If you don’t like it, why don’t you quit?” Lesley said, getting a little pouty.

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it, I said it wasn’t real ,” Maguire said, Maguire driving Lesley’s yellow Honda, heading home to the Casa Loma. “It’s like a refuge. Nothing can happen to you there, you’re safe. But it’s got nothing to do with reality. It’s like you’re given security, but in exchange for it you have to give up your self . You have to become somebody else.

Lesley said, “Jesus, what’s safe about getting down in the water, feeding those fucking sharks? I’ve done it every day this week, you know it? Robyn’s off probably giving Brad some head.”

Maguire said, “Come on, the sharks feed all night. You jiggle a piece of fish, it’s for the tourists. I’m not talking about that kind of being safe. I mean here , you live in a little world that’s got nothing to do with the real world. You’re sheltered-”

“ I’m sheltered?”

“ We are, working there. What’s a really big problem? Misty eats some popcorn, gets constipated. Pebbles is grouchy, won’t imitate the Beatles. Everybody’s going, ‘Christ, what’s the matter with Pebbles?’ Spend months , maybe a year training a dolphin to jump through a hoop, come up seventeen feet in the air and ring the school bell.”

Lesley said, “Yeah?” She still didn’t get it.

“They’re doing something that dolphins don’t normally do, right?”

Lesley thought a moment. “Yeah-but they jump. Out in the wild they jump all the time.”

“They shoot baskets? They bowl out there?”

“It’s to show how intelligent they are,” Lesley said, “how they can be trained.”

“Here’s the point,” Maguire said, wishing the Honda was air-conditioned, wishing the lady in front of him would turn, for Christ sake, if she was going to turn, turn . “They don’t normally, the dolphin, they don’t pretend they’re playing baseball out in the ocean or jump up and take a piece of fish out of somebody’s mouth, right?”

“If you don’t like it,” Lesley said, “what do you do it for?”

Jesus, Maguire thought. He said, “Just follow the point I want to make, okay? I’m not saying I don’t like it. I’m only saying it’s like playing make-believe. The dolphin wouldn’t be here, they wouldn’t be doing the tricks if we didn’t teach them. You see what I mean? They’d be out there doing something else, we’d be doing something else. But no, we made this up. The dolphins and us, we’re playing with ourselves. We’re going through the motions of something that doesn’t have anything to do with reality.”

“So?”

Oh, Christ. “So-if they’re not real dolphins doing all that kind of shit, what’re we? Reciting the canned humor, throwing them pieces of codfish-what’re we?”

“I was a waitress, a place on Las Olas,” Lesley said. “That was real, real shit. You like to ask me what I’d rather do?”

“I’d like to borrow your car this evening,” Maguire said. “What’re the chances?”

He poured himself a white rum with a splash of lemon concentrate, left the venetian blinds half closed and sat for awhile, the room looking old and worn-out in the dimness. Fifty bucks a week including black and white TV, it was still a bargain. He could hear the hi-fi going next-door, Lesley boogying around the apartment to the Bee-Gees, ignoring her aunt, who was a little deaf. A nice woman, Maguire would sit and talk to her sometimes, listen to episodes from her past life in Cincinnati, Ohio, until he’d tell her he had to go to bed, wake up early. Lesley never sat and listened even for a minute. Lesley would roll her eyes when she saw an episode coming and get out of there. Lesley had no feelings for others; but she sure had a nice firm healthy little body.