Florida RoadKill by Tim Dorsey

Author:Tim Dorsey
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General Interest
Published: 2011-12-30T19:23:05+00:00

Thirteen

The subtleties of mast and boom escaped Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm, and the sails stayed furled. The fifty-horsepower Johnson outboard was different; it was a small internal combustion engine, and they thought of it as a stripped motorcycle hanging off the back of McJagger’s sailboat.

Ringworm manned the helm, and the three motored down the coast of southwest Florida in tattooed cellulite majesty. The boat had everything. A generator, stocked freezer, full kitchen, air-conditioning.

First they went naked. Then they dined on filet mignon and racks of lamb with their hands, and kept their spill-proof nautical coffee mugs filled with Maker’s Mark. They lay on the deck until they got too hot, and they dove into the Gulf until they were cool. Then back spread across the deck. Munch a chunk of leftover pheasant lying around, some more booze, and when it got too hot again, back in the water.

These were pirate days. Laughter filled their lives. Lots of “Yo-ho-ho” and “Shiver me timbers.” Cheese-Dick made an eye patch from a piece of Naugahyde. Stinky sat on the bow with a brandy snifter filled to the brim like a bear with a hive of honey.

They hugged the coast, less than a mile offshore, and watched the New World go by. Stilt homes at Midnight Pass, the twenty-four-hour pier by Venice, the lighthouse outside Charlotte Harbor, and the shorebirds of Cayo Costa and Captiva.

At night, they sat under the stars and watched lights twinkle from Fort Myers Beach. There was a cool breeze and they were still naked, but sunburns kept them warm. And they were overcome by a strange, almost paranormal feeling they couldn’t quite put their fingers on. They were clean.

Three silhouettes sagged in deck chairs in the moonlight. The engine was off, and the sailboat left an opalescent wake of microscopic sea critters as it rode the Gulf Stream quietly toward the Florida Keys. The name on the stern was Serendipity.

The next day everything went south. Stinky was the first to awake, before dawn. There was no land anymore, no more food, and they had run out of gas. He was sure they were in the Bermuda Triangle, and he panicked. He grabbed the metal box of emergency gear and emptied it on the deck. He dumped green dye in the water, flashed a mirror at the sky and blew a referee’s whistle. He strapped on a bandolier of flares and threw a strobing distress beacon overboard. He set off smoke charges on the bow, stern and midships. Ringworm and Cheese-Dick awoke choking and confused in a cloud of smoke to the air horn Stinky was blowing.

McJagger’s sailboat had every essential and useless piece of radar, sonar, laser, loran, radio, telephone, and satellite-tracking, course-charting, weather-forecasting, fish-finding doodad ever overpriced at a marine store. To the bikers, it was all ballast. And in a crisis, ballast went overboard. They ripped out the big floating black globe of a compass in front of the helm and over it went too.

Stinky was messing with a large flare gun, smacking the back of it with his palm when the breech refused to latch.

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