The Nirvana Blues

  One-way sunglasses hid his eyes: below them, cruel teeth and fat lips clenched a Havana cigar. A pet ferret on a pink leash attached to the leg of his chair dozed on the warm tile. A single yellow rose protruded from a silver bud vase on the glass-top table. Beside it lay a Magic Marker pen and a grapefruit.

  “Well, I got him, Mithter B. Here he ith. Thigned, thealed, and delivered.” He poked the .45 snout against his own ear, nudging an itch.

  Forehead wrinkled in a prepossessing scowl, Bonatelli assessed Joe, lips pressed together, accenting his bulldog jowls.

  Joe said, “Hello, Mr. Bonatelli.”

  “Hello, Joe. Welcome to my humble abode. Won’t you sit down, please?”

  A plump, menacing hand indicated the other metal deck chair. Gingerly, Joe settled into it: the springy legs squeaked; he jounced uncomfortably.

  “You want me to get you anything, Mithter B.?” the gorilla mask asked.

  “No, that’s all right, Algernon.” Bonatelli raised his pinkie-ringed finger, probing thoughtfully in a large, flabby nostril. “We won’t keep you here but a minute, Joe. I just thought we had better meet, get to know each other, so to speak.” In a rather obscene way he deserted the nostril and adjusted a testicle.

  “Well, you know … it’s a real nice place you got here…” Joe fumfered inanely.

  “I earned it by tolerating no interference in my business interests, Joe.” Bonatelli spoke almost gently, yet his words so reeked of menace that Joe’s heart almost ceased. He nodded stupidly.

  “Yessir, well, you know, I can certainly understand that.”

  “Really?” Bonatelli exhaled cigar smoke almost dreamily and parted his lips as if to threaten further, but remained mute. Thirty seconds, during which time Joe sweated cats and dogs, ticked by.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Joe said at length, hoping to break the scary silence.

  “Now Joe, please. Don’t act dumb.” Bonatelli’s smile complemented his mellifluous voice. He opened a sharklike mouth, revealing gold-capped, irregular, rotten teeth. The mouth stank of power and corruption. It was permanently adjusted into a scornful sneer. “I dislike wasting time.”

  “I don’t want to waste your time, sir. I mean, I didn’t even ask to be brought here.”

  “I brought you here, Joe, because I want us to reach an understanding.” He released words slowly, giving an impression of selecting them very carefully before opening his mouth.

  “About what?”

  “Please.” Bonatelli turned his face slightly and raised both hands as if to ward off an unpleasant odor. “These things are understood. We don’t have to spell them out. That would be in bad taste.”

  Joe nodded dumbly, wondering, What next?

  Bonatelli removed the cigar and pursed his ugly lips. Though facing Joe, the one-way shades made it impossible to tell if his eyes were open, closed, or fixed on the swimming pool. Inside, Joe shriveled. His mouth was dry and chalky, his tongue had swelled. His palms were sticky with fear. Quite clearly, he had never been this close to annihilation. His gorilla-masked kidnapper had grown unearthly still, as if the inner human being had evaporated in the withering presence of the Tarantula of Chamisaville.

  “Joe, I’d like you to do something for me.” Bonatelli leaned forward, and, with a passel of noisy creaks, he grasped the grapefruit, handing it to Joe. “I want you to take this grapefruit, and with this pen—” his other hand picked up the Magic Marker “—I’d like you to write your name across the skin of this thing.”

  Hesitantly, Joe accepted the grapefruit from the gangster—and the pen. Were they booby-trapped? Would they explode in his face? What kind of a joke was this anyway?

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “You will.”

  Joe uncapped the Magic Marker. He checked Bonatelli, who observed him with deadly disdain. “You mean … just like … I mean … write my name on this grapefruit?”

  Nothing about Bonatelli moved: but, from the vibes implied by the sneer and the scowl, Joe figured Yup, that’s what the man had said. So he tore his eyes away from those shades, and, feeling sublimely ridiculous, as well as mortally threatened (while garish headlines flickered across his faltering brain), he started printing his name around the equatorial circumference of the large yellow fruit.

  BABE “MORON” MINIVER ICED GANGLAND-STYLE BY SELF-AUTOGRAPHED GRAPEFRUIT! KLUTZ SUFFOCATES WHEN NOSE IS JAMMED INTO LETHAL SNUFFER! BONATELLI RELEASED ON OWN RECOGNIZANCE IN BIZARRE MINIVER EXECUTION!

  Finished, he recapped the pen and placed it on the table.

  “That’s good,” said the Capo di Tutti Capo in Chamisaville. “Now, give me the grapefruit.”

  Joe obeyed. Lips pursed, the fat man revolved the fruit in his hands, inspecting Joe’s name, then he gave it a choppy sideways toss—the grapefruit landed in the swimming pool.

  “The gun, Algernon.” Responding to Bonatelli’s just-barely-snapped fingers, the gorilla mask almost tripped over his big, sneakered feet, lunging to deposit that .45 in the fat man’s powerful, pudgy fist.

  Eyebrows arched, Bonatelli dramatically fingered the weapon, giving Joe his money’s worth. No more cold-blooded pistol had ever settled into a crueler mitt. Joe hoped they wouldn’t hang him upside down in the plaza and spit upon his broken corpse. Bonatelli seemed more likely to butt-whip him insensate than to pull a trigger.

  Instead, that sourpuss blob swung his attention to the grapefruit bobbing in the swimming pool. Raising the heater, he took deliberate aim, making certain the menace soaked in. Just before the heartless little giant squeezed off a shot, Joe realized, somewhat joyfully, that he was only being symbolically eradicated here: water geysered into the air about three feet off-target.

  Impassively, Bonatelli fixed his sights on the yellow globe and let fly; the report of a bullet that again missed by a mile deafened Joe.

  Inwardly enraged, to judge by the teeth clamped down on his cigar, Bonatelli leaned forward slightly and emptied the clip at the bobbing grapefruit. He came close: the yellow ball bounced and jiggled in the froth created by impacting slugs … but it also remained unscathed, pristine—whole.

  Incredulously, Bonatelli confronted the swimming pool through his hostile lenses. Joe bit his lower lip, suppressing a screechy giggle. The Tarantula of Chamisaville, hoping to paralyze his hapless prey with fear, had instead almost capsized him with slapstick.

  “Another clip, please.” Bonatelli spoke without taking his eyes off the object of his animosity and derision.

  Algernon scrambled in his pocket to produce more firepower. The fat man fumbled with the .45, looking for a button to punch, releasing the clip. Evidently, however, he had not been on the business end of a betsy for many a moon. His big blunt fingers slithered helplessly around the gunmetal while Algernon dangled in suspended animation above him, offering the loaded clip. Finally, Bonatelli disgustedly handed the gun to Joe’s kidnapper, and said softly, “You put it in.”

  Algernon complied and returned the pistol to his boss.

  Bonatelli aimed … and fired. The lead slammed into chlorinated agua, and, had the grapefruit possessed a tongue, hands, and ears, it would have waggled the tongue tauntingly while sticking thumbs in said ears and wiggling its fingers nyah-nyah-nyahingly.

  Another careful bead … and one more bullet splatted harmlessly into the drink an armlength away from a bull’s-eye. Quietly, Bonatelli removed the cigar from his mouth and placed it on the table. Then, veins protruding from his forehead, he concentrated mightily—and cut loose, splashing water from here to Timbuktu, but leaving the object of his wrath unscathed.

  With that, the crime boss shuffled erect and held still for a moment, teetering as his rolls of flab joggled, resettling according to the new location of gravitational pull. His black bikini disappeared underneath doughy drifts of pink flesh. Seated, he had seemed enormous to Joe: but erect, although he must have weighed close to three hundred pounds, Bonatelli couldn’t have topped five feet, three inches. Dully
enraged, obviously in spiritual pain, Bonatelli waddled over to the edge of the pool, extended his right arm at a downward slant, and aimed very carefully at the grapefruit six feet away merrily bobbing in the limpid water. Even at that distance, Joe heard the gangster suck in a long, rasping breath.…

  Blam! Pause. Blam! Pause. Blam! Blam! Blam!

  Fruitlessville.

  Joe couldn’t help it—he snickered. Fortunately, nobody heard as his irreverent scorn was lost in a final explosion. Airborne, the grapefruit remained as perfect as a full moon. It splashed down unblemished, “Joe Miniver” blaring out for all the world to snarl at.

  Apoplectic, but in control, the old gangster flung his weapon into the pool. Tightly, he said, “Go in there and get it.”

  “Yeth thir!” Algernon gamboled clumsily to the edge of the pool, pinched his gorilla nose, and jumped in feetfirst, soaking the Tarantula of Chamisaville from his belly to his tiny pups. Too late, as he grappled for the grapefruit, Algernon realized the water was over his head.

  “Help!” He glubbed and gurgled, went under, kicked into the air again, screamed “I can’t thwim!,” and sank like a marble tombstone.

  To Joe, Bonatelli said, “Save him.”

  “Me?”

  Obviously tired of being beleaguered by assholes, Bonatelli tilted his head slightly, firing dumdum bullets of icy boredom through the one-way shades. All kinds of piano wire, ice picks, and shallow quicklimed graves commuted themselves in that glance. Overcoming his astonishment, Joe leaped up, gallivanted to poolside, heroically plunged into the drink, and grabbed the gorilla mask, lugging him a few yards to where his feet touched the ground.

  Bonatelli made an acerbic gesture with his cigar. “Now retrieve me that fruit.”

  Obediently, Joe clumped through the water in his soggy clothes, plucked up his namesake, and propelled himself over to the pool’s edge, depositing the invincible fruit at Bonatelli’s elegantly coiffed toes.

  The fat man raised his left foot and brought it down hard: SQUASH! Pink pulp and bitter juice sprayed out, catching Joe in the kisser. He blinked, splashed water, went under, and surfaced in pain and gasping.

  “Now take a powder, termite,” Bonatelli snarled, waddling back to reclaim his cigar and settle slowly, like a large python laboriously coiling itself after noshing a tapir, into his deck chair.

  Joe fumbled into the shallow end, hauled himself onto the warm tiles, and for a moment wavered, bewilderedly staring at Joseph Bonatelli. That’s it? All over? Chamisaville’s leading businessperson had troubled himself to snatch Chamisaville’s leading fool and most inept drug-dealing neophyte, in order to annihilate a symbolically tattooed grapefruit right before his terrified eyes … and nothing more? Where were the 280-pound sadistic enforcers waiting to work him over with rubber hoses? How come nobody had broken his fingers in the men’s room, or shoved needle-sharp bamboo shoots underneath his fingernails? They hadn’t even cattle-prodded his testicles! Or given him until sundown to make like a breeze and blow this constipated burg!

  “H-how do I get out?” Joe managed to stammer at last, almost disappointed by his unexpected freedom.

  “Same way you got in,” said the dignified, deadly blob.

  “Through the house?”

  But having dismissed him, the fat man had turned deaf. So Joe backed away, convinced it had to be a trick, waiting for the sky to fall. As in a James Bond movie, the grisly son of a bitch would trip a button with his foot, and the tiles would open up, dropping Joe into a pit full of gorgeous peroxide blond amazons with steel-fanged vampire dentures, razor-sharp metal fingernails, and needlelike, four-inch-long dart pasties over their lovely nipples.

  Yet the gangster chief sat in his chair, immobile and undeadly, imperviously smoking a cigar; while in shock, the gorilla-masked man named Algernon tarried meekly, submerged up to his chest … and the juice from the smashed grapefruit dribbled slowly across the shiny tiles, seeping into grassy cracks like albino blood.

  A small army-green bubble helicopter appeared overhead and began descending toward the Bonatelli lawn. A white sign on its side said U.S. FOREST SERVICE. But that was no Floresta flunky at the controls, Joe thought, as the copter drew closer. In fact, had he not known better, he would have sworn that the diminutive figure inside was none other than the Tarantula’s mortally wounded, hospital-ridden offspring, Ephraim by name.

  Bonatelli’s gravelly voice interrupted his reverie: “Good-bye, Joe.”

  Nobody, not even the maid, was around as Joe squished obsequiously across priceless Persian carpets and out the already open front door. Neither man nor beast leaped at him from the bushes as he scurried for the Green Gorilla. And no snipers took potshots at him from high up in the spruce and elm trees as he collapsed behind the wheel and reached for the ignition key.

  Wait a minute! Whoa boy! Alto! Stop!

  So that was their gimmick. At the switch of a key, the dynamite bomb lodged against his firewall would detonate, pulverizing the Green Gorilla, and airmailing Joe Miniver, in multidimensional flesh confetti, to the four corners of Chamisa County.

  “Jump out and check under the hood!” a voice cried.

  Whereupon one of the world’s most chickenshit and off-the-wall reasoning processes interceded. “If I do that,” Joe replied, “they might see me and be offended that I don’t trust them. Or maybe he’ll think I’m hanging around, trying to spy on his helicopter.”

  So with squeezed-shut eyes and gritted teeth, he flipped the keys and pounded the accelerator. A baroom! sounded, but only of the engine catching. Barely daring to open his eyes much more than slits, and miserably hunched over, hoping to absorb the shock of an explosion should one come, Joe peeled out, shotgunning the Bonatelli mansion with bits of Florentine gravel.

  No invisible, molybdenum-reinforced, unbreakable wire stretched across the driveway sliced off his truck’s cab, gruesomely decapitating Joe in the process. And his tires triggered no Claymore mines or Bouncing Betties that might have hamburgered his vehicle with him in it. The gates, of course, loomed as an obstacle. When he dismounted to open them, would some cackling becloaked monster in an ivy-shrouded tower observing him via a remote-control TV screen, throw a switch to slam 100,000 volts through the ornate gate-handle as Joe’s fingers closed over it?

  Instead, the wrought-iron portals opened as if by magic when he approached them. And, if not exactly whistling Dixie, Joe egressed much as he had ingressed—whole, hale, and bewildered.

  He was free, back into the actual world, with nothing to remind him of the surreal adventure except a soggy costume!

  * * *

  TRIBBY GORDON’S OFFICE was located on the second floor of a shabby prefab hovel situated a quarter-mile north of the post office. The building also housed a pawnshop, Noelle Paxton’s tattoo parlor, and three hippie jewelers. Joe counted “One, two, three…” waiting for Tribby to terminate a coughing fit, then opened the door. Peering through opaque layers of cigarette smoke resembling a Dickensian London fog, he spotted his frazzled pal seated behind a beaver-mound pile of legal papers surrounded by a half-dozen butt-laden cut-glass ashtrays, reading a copy of Trout, by Ray Bergman.

  “Hard at work, I see.” Joe left open the door, hoping a miraculous breath of fresh air might clear out the place before he collapsed from smoke inhalation or suffered a fatal asthma attack. “It’s nice to know that when you pay a man fifty bucks an hour, he’s sparing no effort in diligently prosecuting your business.”

  “Don’t come to me with your problems, Joseph. Let Scott Harrison handle your divorce. I’m tired of flakking marriages for my friends: they never pay, and hate me in the end anyway. Did you bring extra flies?”

  “I got a whole box. But how come, every time we go fishing, I always have to supply all the flies?”

  “I’m a busy man,” Tribby grumbled. “Do you know what the divorce rate is in this county? Three out of every two marriages end up in divorce. The average live-in relationship, nonwedded, after which the concubin
e—male or female—sues for half the property, lasts three months. Every day at least twenty new dwellings involving these basket cases start construction. Every afternoon I have to spend at least two hours driving around the valley, handing my card out to lovey-dovey couples who’ll be tearing each other apart like Siamese fighting-fish as their dream houses near completion. Did you bring the coke?”

  “I haven’t been home yet.”

  “Heidi still has it?”

  “I told you—I left it there last night.”

  “What about Natalie’s offer?”

  “You mean as opposed to her husband’s bagful of propositions?”

  “Need I repeat that you said he wound up by threatening meat-grinders?”

  “Granted. But…”

  “Well?”

  “Oh sure. I suppose it makes sense to accept her offer. But today I spent hours over at Eloy’s land and it’s so beautiful it breaks my heart.”

  “Why don’t you think about it, then? No hurry. We got lots of time … an hour, two hours. Maybe even two hours and forty-five minutes. Don’t want to rush into anything. But the fish are awaiting, let’s split. Later we’ll talk.”

  “First, I think I should tell you something.”

  “So tell.”

  “I got snatched by Joseph Bonatelli a few minutes ago.”

  “‘Snatched’?”

  “Kidnapped. Some lisping thug in a gorilla mask took me at gunpoint out to the don’s digs for a meeting with the Tarantula himself.”

  “Hmm. How come you’re all wet? What happened?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. I think he tried to threaten me by shooting a grapefruit with my name on it. But he missed. And I wound up jumping into his pool to save his errand boy—my kidnapper—who couldn’t swim. As I was leaving, a little Forest Service helicopter started to put down on the lawn, and, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that the dwarf was behind the wheel.”