Basket Case

  Yet that's how it must be. There was no abduction. No meeting on the lake. No lethal chase.

  Emma says, "But what if somebody figures out—"

  "Never. It was an accident. The weather was lousy, the sky was dark."

  "I understand, Jack."

  The Union-Register sits in a lawn wrapper on the counter; I haven't got the appetite to peek at the front page. Emma opens it and spies the headline. "What! Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I was waiting until the drugs wore off."

  Excitedly she slips on her reading glasses and spreads the paper over the table, across the breakfast platters. "That figures—Old Man Polk finally dies and I'm not there to edit the story."

  "Read it aloud," I say.

  She gives me a peckish look. "Well, aren't you something."

  "Please?"

  So she reads to me:

  The man who shaped and guided the Union-Register for nearly four decades passed away Friday after a long illness. Mac Arthur Polk was 88.

  A community icon and fervid philanthropist, Polk died at his Silver Beach home with his wife Ellen at his side. Friends said the couple was playing Chinese checkers when he collapsed.

  Though he had been in failing health for some time, Polk remained engaged and outspoken, never losing his passion for the newspaper he inherited from his father.

  In an interview last week at Charity Hospital, he said, "There's no greater privilege than publishing a daily newspaper, and no greater responsibility than delivering the truth, even when it ain't so pretty."

  Emma glances up. "He really say that?"

  "Word for word. Did young Maggad's quote make it on the front?"

  "If it didn't, somebody's out of a job." Emma continues:

  Headstrong and visionary, Polk transformed the Union-Register from a folksy, small-town journal to a dynamic, award-winning newspaper with an increasingly urban circulation of 82,500 weekdays and nearly 91,000 on Sundays.

  "We turned it into a first-class outfit," he said. "The conscience of the community."

  The only son of the Union-Register's founder, Ford Polk, the kid known as Mac started in the newsroom fresh out of college as a telephone clerk, working his way up the ladder to managing editor.

  When his father retired unexpectedly in 1959 to open a dwarf mink farm, Polk took over as publisher. His firm-handed stewardship of the paper continued until 1997, when he sold it to the Maggad-Feist Publishing Group for a reported $47 million.

  "MacArthur Polk was like a second father to me," said Race Maggad III, the chairman and chief executive officer of Maggad-Feist. "He was a teacher, a friend and an inspiration."

  This is too much for Emma, who blurts: "What a hypocritical little prick!"

  The old man would be hopping mad, that's for sure.

  "Otherwise I think he'd have liked the story," she says. "You did a nice job, Jack, considering all the distractions."

  "What are you talking about?" The piece isn't badly done, but plainly it is not my style. "Fervid philanthropist"? Give me a break.

  "What I mean," says Emma, "is that it must've been hard to sit down and write this yesterday, waiting for Cleo's goons to call."

  "But I didn't write it, Emma. Look at the byline."

  "I am looking at the byline."

  Lunging forward, I grab the story out of her hands.

  Outrageous. That craven sonofabitch Abkazion crumpled like the bumper on a Tijuana taxi. He stuck my name on top of Old Man Polk's obituary!

  "Evan wrote this," I protest, waving the newspaper at Emma, "while Juan and I were driving to the lake."

  "I don't get it."

  "Simple. Maggad ordered me assigned to the obit. Abkazion was scared to piss him off so he put my name on it, thus screwing a decent hardworking kid out of a byline."

  "Pretty shitty," Emma concedes.

  I turn to the jump page and skim the remainder of the obituary. There, below the last paragraph, is an italicized credit line: Staff intern Evan Richards contributed to this story.

  I feel rotten and helpless. So does Emma. "You want me to read the rest of it?" she asks halfheartedly.

  "Not aloud. No."

  Another illustrious milestone in the career of Jack Tagger Jr. Finally I get back on the front page, and I didn't even write the damn story.

  Soon I'll be getting that phone call from Charles Chickle offering the cushy trustee gig, yet even the prospect of being paid to torment Race Maggad III fails to cheer me. What happened to Evan sucks; I hate seeing any reporter get shafted.

  Emma tries to help by reminding me that the kid cobbled the old man's obit from my notes, clips and interviews. "It was mostly a rewrite job," she says. "The bulk of the work was yours."

  "Nice try." I reach for the phone. "Has our Evan got a listed number?"

  He answers on the third ring, which is encouraging. I've known interns who would have already hung themselves in despair.

  "Hi, Jack," he says quietly.

  I launch a virulently indignant diatribe against shifty spineless editors, which Evan spoils by informing me that he is not the aggrieved party. He didn't write the MacArthur Polk obituary, either.

  "I choked, man," he confesses. "Abkazion bailed me out. He grabbed all your notes, sat down at the city desk and banged the whole story out with, like, twenty minutes to deadline."

  "I see."

  Evan can't stop apologizing, and he's wearing on my nerves like a whining Chihuahua. "Once you told me the obit was for the front page," he says, "my brain locked up big-time. I'm really sorry, Jack."

  "Don't be. It was wrong for me to dump it on you like that."

  "What do you think Emma's gonna do?"

  "To you? Nothing," I say. "I'm the one who's in trouble."

  "Really?" the kid says anxiously.

  "Oh, she's an animal sometimes. It's scary."

  Emma peers curiously over the top of the newspaper. "Who's an animal?"

  "See you Monday," I say to Evan, and hang up smiling.

  We're back in bed when the telephone rings. Emma's head is resting on my chest and I'm not moving, period.

  The answer machine picks up. The call is from Carla Candilla, her voice hushed and urgent.

  "Derek really did it! 'Ode to a Brown-Eyed Goddess'—Jack, it was so fucking lame."

  She's calling on her cellular from Anne's wedding, which I'd come tantalizingly close to forgetting.

  "It took him half an hour to read," Carla says, "meantime I had to pee like a racehorse. I wrote down a couple lines 'cause I knew you could use a laugh."

  Emma stirs against me. "Jack, who's that on the phone?"

  "The daughter of an old friend. She's the one who loaned me the gun." The gun now resting somewhere in Lake Okeechobee, where I tossed it.

  "Dig this," Carla is saying on the machine. " 'My heart melts anew each time your brown eyes light on me. Passion sings in my breast like the soaring sparrow's harmony.' "

  "Ouch," says Emma.

  "And that's a best-selling writer," I feel duty-bound to report. But at least he wrote her a poem, which is more than I ever did.

  "Can you believe it—birds in his breast!" When Carla's giggle fades, her tone turns more serious. "Anyhow, Mom looks awesome and the champagne is killer, so I guess I'll survive. The real reason I called, I want to make sure you got home okay from your big adventure last night, whatever it was. And I hope your friend's okay, too. Someday I'll get you drunk and make you tell me about it. Oh, one more thing: Happy Birthday, Blackjack."

  Oh Jesus, that's right.

  Emma raises her head. "Today's your birthday? Why didn't you say something?"

  "Slipped my mind." Incredible but true.

  Emma snaps her fingers. "How old again?"

  "Forty-seven."

  So long, Mr. Presley. Hello, Mr. Kerouac. I suppose this will never end, until I do.

  Emma springs out of bed. "Get up, you old fart. We're going shopping."

  That was the most time I'd spent in a mal
l in ten years. Emma was buoyant and sassy; she likes birthdays. She bought me the new Neil Young CD, two pairs of stonewashed jeans and a bottle of cologne that she says is "the bomb." Then she wanted to treat me to a movie, and she wouldn't take no for an answer. It was an action remake of the TV series Petticoat Junction, starring Drew Barrymore, Charlize Theron and Catherine Zeta-Jones, three beautiful sisters who live at a rural railroad depot. In the old television show, the girls had weekly comic encounters with cranky relatives and colorful characters who came and went on the train. In the movie version, however, all three sisters are working undercover for the Mossad. For me, the plot never quite came together.

  A small FedEx box is sitting by the door when Emma and I return to the apartment. My mother's birthday present: a first edition of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. Where she found it I can't imagine, but what a beauty! I've got a shelf devoted to books my mother has given me on birthdays. Tucked into the pages of the Zane Grey novel is a card, and also a long brown envelope. For some reason I open the envelope first.

  Inside is a photocopy of my father's obituary.

  Ever since my mother revealed that she'd seen it, I've been imagining what the article said. Not everybody's death gets written up by a newspaper, so it was intriguing to think that, after ditching Mom and me, Jack Tagger Sr. had done something in life to merit notice of his passing. Perhaps he'd become a beloved saxophone teacher, a crusading social worker or a feisty small-town politician. Maybe he'd invented something new and amazing, some nifty gizmo now taken for granted by the entire human race, including his estranged namesake—the electric nose-hair trimmer, for example, or Styrofoam peanuts.

  I've also pondered the unappealing prospect that my father earned an obituary not because of anything good he'd done, but because of some newsworthy fuckup, scandal or felony. Bruno Hauptmann got quite a boisterous send-off in the media, though I doubt his family made a scrapbook of the clippings. I myself have written obits of local scoundrels that elicited sighs of relief if not cheers from our readers. Communities usually are pleased to be rid of bad eggs, and I've been bracing for the possibility that my father was one.

  Yet it turns out he was neither a miscreant nor a pillar of the establishment. He was merely a character, small and harmless to the planet.

  His obituary is from the Key West Citizen, and is dated March 12, 1973. That explains why it didn't turn up in a computerized library search—many newspapers didn't switch to electronic filing until the late seventies or early eighties. My telephone chase was fruitless because my mother never lived in Key West, so I'd had no reason to call the paper there.

  The headline says:

  Local Performer Dies in Tree Mishap

  Emma, watching me from the opposite armchair, says, "What's the matter?"

  It's the oddest sensation to read about my own father's death yet to hold no living memory of the man. I feel slightly guilty for not feeling sad, though truly I didn't know him. One lousy snapshot was all I had to go on.

  "Read it to me, Jack."

  "That's very funny."

  "I mean it. Fair is fair," she says.

  What the hell. I clear my throat and begin:

  A popular Key West street entertainer died early Monday morning in an accident near Mallory Square.

  Jack Tagger, known locally as "Juggling Jack," was killed when he fell out of a tree, police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

  Tagger had been out walking with friends when he spotted a raccoon perched in the top of an old avocado tree on Whitehead Street. According to witnesses, he shouted, "I saw her first!" and began scrambling up the trunk.

  A limb broke under Tagger's weight, and he plummeted headlong about thirty feet to the pavement.

  The accident occurred at 2:30 a.m. Police said there is a possibility alcohol was involved.

  Emma thinks I'm making this up.

  The bad news is, my old man was a drunken goofball. The good news is, apparently I've got show business in my veins. I continue reading:

  Tagger was a familiar figure during the nightly sunset celebration along the Old Town waterfront. He boasted that he could juggle anything and, to the delight of tourists, he tried. He tossed wine bottles, flaming tiki torches, conch shells, cactus plants and even live animals.

  Last year, he debuted a new act in which he juggled four talking cockatoos. The birds had been taught to recite well-known passages from Shakespeare, Chekhov and Tennessee Williams, a hometown favorite.

  Williams himself quipped, "Jack's damn cockatoos do a better job with 'Streetcar' than half the actors I've seen."

  Emma says, "All right, stop. That's enough."

  "No, please. Let me finish."

  "This is your dad? Really?"

  "It was."

  The obituary is accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of my father juggling lobster buoys on a pier. He's wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and rectangular black sunglasses, but the smile is unmistakable; the same smile from my dreams.

  Onward:

  Little is known about Tagger's life before he arrived in Key West about three years ago. Like many of the island's vagabond street performers, he did odd jobs by day while honing his evening act for the crowds at Mallory Square.

  "He was a fun-loving cat. He made me laugh," said Samuel "Snake Throat" Procter, a local sword-swallower who once crewed with Tagger on a lobster boat.

  Police records show Tagger had been arrested here twice for marijuana possession, and once for driving a moped while intoxicated.

  Funeral arrangements are incomplete at this time. A short sunset ceremony honoring the juggler will be held at the Mallory Square docks on Wednesday. He was 46 at the time of his death.

  Forty-six at the time of his death. Damn, that was a close one. "Are you all right?" Emma asks.

  I hand her the newspaper article, then I open my mother's birthday card. Inside it, she gaily wrote:

  Happy 47th, Jack! (See? You made it!) Love, Mom.

  30

  I found a newsstand that sells the Palm Beach Post, and I'm reading it at the counter of the donut shop. The story about the airboat accident is in the local section, with an aerial photograph of the craft upturned in the lake. One of the dead men remains unidentified while the other is known to be Frederick Joseph Moulter, a sound engineer formerly of Santa Monica, California. The self-styled Loreal. His age is reported as twenty-nine, the same as Hank Williams when he died. I'm guessing Cleo's bodyguard eventually will be identified from fingerprints; a mug shot would be of no use.

  At random moments my mind flashes back to that gothic image of Cleo's boys, Jerry sitting headless in the reeds and Loreal no less dead, scalped and gaping. Juan says we're not meant to forget such things—it's the price of surviving.

  According to the news story, the crashed airboat was stolen from a deer camp near Palmdale. A game warden is quoted speculating that the men were probably out hunting for alligators when they got caught in rough weather and wiped out at high speed. A loaded.22 caliber pistol—a favorite of gator poachers—was found in a jacket worn by young Freddie Moulter. That sneaky little shit!

  The Post says the police are continuing to investigate the two deaths, but foul play is not suspected. The absence of.38 caliber holes confirms my ineptitude with the Lady Colt.

  "Hello, stranger!"

  It's Janet Thrush. I give her a squeeze as I lead her to a booth in the corner. "You had me scared to death," I whisper.

  "Dooms." She laughs. "All you had to do was check your messages." She's wearing a lime-colored halter, a flowered bikini bottom and feathered earrings made from salmon streamers. Her nose is sunburned and her ash-blond hair has been dyed auburn.

  "Wanna hear what happened?"

  "Oh heck, why not."

  "This was, like, Friday a week. The afternoon you and me talked about Jimmy's last will and testimony. Anyways, that night I was get-tin' ready for work—hey, can I have a croissant or a muffin? Coffee would be good, too."
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  I snag a waitress so that Janet can order.

  "Anyways, I'm gettin' dressed for work—"

  "For Janet-Cam."

  "Right. I'm in the bathroom puttin' on the SWAT gear when all hell breaks loose. The front door busts open and then there's voices, men's voices, and they're trashin' out my place big-time. I don't know whether to jump out the window or hide."