Red Thunder

[114] WE SPOTTED BLUE Thunder a quarter mile ahead of us soon after we got off the Pike. Kelly pressed the accelerator and we caught up with Dak without taxing the engine much. With a short toot on the horn, Kelly pulled past and then let the Corvette have its head for a bit. Blue Thunder was just a blue dot in the mirror when Kelly hit 90 mph.

We passed the jackleg backwoods church with all the signs again. There was a guy up on a ladder painting one of them. He was a little guy, in his seventies, dressed in paint-spattered overalls with no shirt. His bare arms looked incredibly scrawny, but I’ll bet he could have arm-wrestled me to death. I know this type of peckerwood, they work hard all their lives and why we don’t have guys like that lifting weights at the Olympics I’ll never know. There were a couple dozen open cans of what looked like interior latex sitting on the ground, all bright colors.

He was actually getting pretty good results. I’d sure seen worse roadside art, anyway. Nobody was ever likely to hang his stuff in a museum, but I liked it a lot better than that dude who slung paint at canvases and then sold his crap for thousands of dollars, and his stuff is hanging in museums.

He’d erected a few more four-by-eight slabs of grade-Z plywood, riddled with knotholes, and was creating new signs on them. He’d already altered some of his old ones.

“Looks like he’s had a new revelation,” Kelly said.

“Born again, again,” I suggested.

I saw Jesus several times on the signs, with a face as mournful as a basset hound. Blood was flowing from his thorny crown. He was on the cross in one picture, preaching on a mountaintop in another. And in a new one, he seemed to be coming down a ramp from a flying saucer. It looked like the one in The Day the Earth Stood Still. He probably saw that movie when he was twenty. A new sign read:

JESUS IS HERE

IN HIS FLYING SAWSER

[115] DO YOU HAVE YOUR

HEAVENLY HORDING PASS?

The sign he was working on read:

EZEKIEL SAW THE WHEE

He stopped his work and glared at us as we passed.

We turned the corner onto the Broussards’ private road… and Kelly slammed on the brakes. There was a heavy chain suspended between two posts, with a NO TRESPASSING sign hanging from it. We sat there looking at it for a while, then heard Blue Thunder sliding to a stop behind us. Kelly and I got out of the car. Alicia and Dak joined us at the chain.

“Looks like we’ve been stood up,” I said.

“And me with my brand new party dress,” Dak said. “Damn.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Dak kicked at the loose shell a few times, then once more, hard, for luck.

“Should we walk in?” Alicia wondered. “He did say he’d see us today.”

“You think so?” Dak said. “I think the chain is pretty clear.” He showed us the shiny new-and very heavy-duty-padlock. “They’re avoiding us. We get to the house, nobody’s go

“I think he’s right,” I said.

WHEN WE GOT back to the Blast-Off the parking lot was almost full of the kind of twenty-year-old vehicles normal for the early evening, with a smattering of even older rattletraps that would be classics if they weren’t so rusted out. And parked close to the office in the yellow-striped “Manager” spot was a low, wide, brawny civilian version of the military HumVee, or Hummer. It was black and red, and looked as if it had just been driven off the showroom floor.

“Gotta be Travis,” Kelly said.

Dak and I paused for a moment to admire the thing, so we were a [116] few steps behind Alicia and Kelly as they ducked around the front desk and into the apartment behind. There was a great smell coming from back there, and laughter.

Jubal, Travis, and my mom were sitting around the worktable in the living room. Aunt Maria was just coming through the kitchen door with a steaming tray full of fried plantains and conch fritters. She set it on the table and scooped up a big bowl with tortilla chips at the bottom and another bowl that had held some of her famous homemade salsa, and headed back into the kitchen.

“Smells mighty good, Maria.” Travis ate a plantain from the tray.

“Real good, ma’am,” Jubal said, munching one. There was a salsa stain in his beard and another on his shirt.

The worktable is just an ordinary ten-foot folding cafeteria table. It’s usually covered with junk, knickknacks in various stages of assembly.

Aunt Maria is artistic. She had tried her hand at hundreds of kinds of handmade souvenirs until she found the best money-maker, which was shell sculpture. She made little tableaux of shell people, mostly with clam shells but with small cone and spiral shells and bits of coral and other stuff, stuck together with glue and clear silicone. She made shell families standing before shell houses, shell golfers swinging bobby-pin irons, shell surfers on oyster-shell boards hanging ten on shell waves, shell dogs peeing on shell fire hydrants. Some of her larger scenes were based on abalone shells, or conch shells sawed open. No two creations were alike, and we sold a lot of them.

My mother is not so artistic. While Aunt Maria glues her shells together, Mom paints four-inch plastic replicas of the Blast-Off Motel sign, mounts them on bases, and puts them in clear globes with water and plastic snow or glitter. Snowing in Florida? is usually the first thing the tourists say, but then a surprising number buy one.

Over the years we’ve made and sold dozens of different kinds of kitschy items like the snow globe and the shell people. I put out a plywood sandwich board every morning advertising souvenirs, lowest prices in town. It made the difference between staying open and filing for bankruptcy, sometimes.

Jubal was sitting on a folding chair at one end of the table, bent over [117] a “tree” of six plastic Blast-Off signs, all co

“You ever made none of dese, Manuel?” he asked. About ten thousand, I thought.

“A few, Jubal. I’ve made a few.”

“I’m makin’ a dozen, me. You mama, she-”

“Betty,” Mom said, smiling at Jubal.

“You Betty, she give me dis one here.” He picked up a finished globe and shook it up, hard, then held it up and watched the snow swirl. “I never see no snow, me,” he said.

“One day, Jubal, one day,” Travis said. He was sitting between Mom and Aunt Maria’s empty chair, working on some unidentifiable shell sculpture. There was glue on his fingers and a small patch of his hair was standing straight up with silicone sealer in it. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

I suddenly felt feverish and a little sick to my stomach. I needed some fresh air. The closest way was through the kitchen.

Aunt Maria was in there, cooking up a huge pot of her famous picadillo. Nothing makes Maria happier than new mouths to feed, and I could tell from the empty jars on the stove that she was pulling out all the stops. Picadillo is basically just beef hash, but then you add olives and raisins and huevos estilo cubano and three or four kinds of peppers, pickled or fresh, all of them hot. We had it fairly often, but without all the trimmings and with cheaper cuts of meat than Maria was using today. I could smell her wonderful coconut bread baking in the oven.