Part 1 (2/2)

”Out!” he said.

”He broke my ankle!” said Snake.

”I break your head,” said the bartender. He gripped the end of the bat, c.o.c.ked it for a swing, waited.

”OK OK OK,” said Snake. Using a stool for support and keeping an eye on the bartender, he pulled himself up, then hobbled to the door. When he got there, he turned and pointed at Puggy, still lying under the bar.

”When I see you,” Snake said, ”you're dead.” Then he pushed open the door and hobbled outside. Puggy noticed that it was dark.

The bartender watched Snake leave, then turned to Puggy.

”Out,” he said.

”Look, mister,” said Puggy, ”I ... ”

”Out,” said the bartender, gripping the bat.

Puggy got to his feet, noticing, as he did, that he had peed his pants. He looked on the bar. His voting money was gone, all of it. Eddie must have grabbed it while Snake was trying to stomp him.

”Oh, man,” said Puggy.

”Out,” said the bartender.

Puggy was starting toward the door when, from the other end of the bar, the bearded man, who had watched the fight, not moving from his stool, said, in English, ”You can stay.”

The bartender looked at the bearded man, then shrugged and relaxed his grip on the bat.

Puggy said, ”I got no money. They took all my money.”

The bearded man said, ”Is OK. No charge.”

Puggy said, ”OK.”

He was drinking his second free beer, feeling better again about how the day was going, except for peeing his pants, when the door opened. He flinched, thinking it might be Snake come back to kill him, but it was a guy in a suit, carrying a briefcase. The suit went to the far end of the bar and started talking foreign with the other two men. Then the bearded man called down to Puggy.

”You want to make five dollars?”

”Sure,” said Puggy. This was some town, Miami.

It turned out that the job was moving a wooden crate out of the trunk of a Mercedes parked outside.

The crate was very heavy, but the bearded man and the man in the suit did not help. Puggy and the bartender, breathing hard, lugged the crate inside, past the bar, past the toilet, down a hallway to a room that the bearded man unlocked, which took a while because there were three locks. The room was bigger than Puggy thought it would be, and there were other crates inside, different sizes. They set the crate down and went back out. The bearded man locked the door and gave Puggy a five-dollar bill.

”You are strong,” he said.

”I guess,” said Puggy. It was true, although a lot of people didn't see it because he was also short.

”Come back tomorrow,” said the bearded man. ”Maybe I have another job for you.”

That was how Puggy began his employment at the Jolly Jackal. Usually he came to work in the late afternoon and stayed until Leo (that was the bartender's name) or John (that was the bearded man's name) told him to go home. Some days they didn't need him to do anything, but they let him stay anyway. When they did need him to work, it was always moving heavy crates-sometimes from the Mercedes to the room; sometimes from the room to the Mercedes. Each time, when it was done, John gave him a five. One time, Puggy asked what was in the crates. John just said, ”Equipment.”

Mainly, Puggy watched TV and drank beer, which Leo almost never charged him for. It was like a dream. If Puggy had known jobs were like this, he would have tried to get one a long time ago.

At night, when they told him to leave, he went back to his tree. He had found the tree on his third night in Coconut Grove. He'd spent the first two nights in a park near the water, but some kind of nasty ants were biting him, plus, on the second night, from a distance, he'd seen Eddie and Snake go past, heading toward the dinghy dock. Snake was limping.

So Puggy went looking for another place. He discovered that, if you walked just a short way in Coconut Grove, you could be in a whole different kind of neighborhood, a rich people's neighborhood, with big houses that had walls around them and driveway gates that opened by a motor. There were strange trees everywhere, big, complicated trees with roots going every which way and vines all over them and branches that hung way out over the street. Puggy thought it looked like a jungle.

He found a perfect tree to live in. It was just inside a rich person's wall, but across a big, densely vegetated yard from the house, so it was private. Puggy got into the tree by climbing the wall; he was a natural climber, even after many beers. About twenty feet up in the tree, where three ma.s.sive limbs branched off from the trunk, there was a rickety, mossy wooden platform, a kids' treehouse from years before. Puggy fixed it up with some cardboard on the platform and a piece of plastic, from a construction site, that he could drape over the top when it rained. Sometimes he heard people talking in the house, but whoever they were, they never came back to this end of the yard.

Late at night, there was always music coming from one end of the house. It was some kind of music with a flute, soft, coming through the jungle to Puggy. He liked to lie there and listen to it. He was very happy the way things were going, both with his career and with his tree. It was the most secure, most structured, least turbulent existence he had ever known. It lasted for almost three weeks.

”I look at this ad,” the Big Fat Stupid Client From h.e.l.l was saying, ”and it doesn't say to me, 'Hammerhead Beer.'”

Eliot Arnold, of Eliot Arnold Advertising and Public Relations (which consisted entirely of Eliot Arnold), nodded thoughtfully, as though he thought the Client From h.e.l.l was making a valid point. In fact, Eliot was thinking it was a good thing that he was one of the maybe fifteen people in Miami who did not carry a loaded firearm, because he would definitely shoot the Client From h.e.l.l in his fat, glistening forehead.

At times like these-and there were many times like these-Eliot wondered if maybe he'd been a bit hasty, quitting the newspaper. Especially the way he'd done it, putting his foot through the managing editor's computer. He'd definitely burned a bridge there.

Eliot had spent twenty-one years in the newspaper business. His plan, coming out of college, had been to fight for Justice by using his English-major skills to root out and expose corruption. He got a job at a small daily newspaper, where he wrote obituaries and covered munic.i.p.al meetings in which local elected officials and engineering consultants droned on for hours over what diameter pipe they needed for the new sewer line. Eliot, listening to this, slumped over a spiral reporter's notebook covered with doodles, figured there was probably some corruption going on there somewhere, but he had no idea how even to begin looking for it.

By the time he'd moved up to the big-time city newspaper, he'd given up on trying to root things out and settled into the comfortable niche of writing features, which it turned out he was good at. For years he wrote about pretty much whatever he wanted. Mostly he wrote what the higher honchos in the newsroom referred to, often condescendingly, as ”offbeat” stories. They preferred issues stories, which were dense wads of facts, written by committees, running in five or six parts under some t.i.tle that usually had the word ”crisis” in it, like ”Families in Crisis,” ”Crisis in Our Schools,” ”The Coming Water Crisis,” et cetera. These series, which were heavily promoted and often won journalism contests, were commonly referred to in the newsroom as ”megat.u.r.ds.” But the honchos loved them. Advocacy journalism, it was called. It was the hot trend in the newspaper business. Making a difference! Connecting with the readers!

Eliot thought that the readers.h.i.+p of most of these series consisted almost entirely of contest judges. But more and more, he found himself getting ordered to work on megat.u.r.ds, leaving less and less time for him to work on stories he thought somebody might actually want to read.

The end came on the day when he was summoned to the office of the managing editor, Ken Deeber, who was seven years younger than Eliot. Eliot remembered when Deeber was a general-a.s.signment reporter, just out of Princeton. He was articulate and personable, and he could be absolutely relied on to get at least one important fact wrong in every story, no matter how short. But Deeber did not write many stories; he was too busy networking. He rose through the ranks like a Polaris missile, becoming the youngest managing editor in the paper's history. He was big on issues stories. That's why he summoned Eliot to his office.

”How's it going, Eliot?” Deeber had said, starting things off. ”Everything OK with you?”

”Well,” said Eliot, ”I'm kind of ... ”

”The reason I ask,” said Deeber, who was not the least bit interested in whether or not everything was OK with Eliot, ”is that John Croton tells me you haven't turned in a thing on the day-care project.”

The day-care project was the current megat.u.r.d. It was going to explain to the readers, in five parts with fourteen color charts, that there was a crisis in day care.

”Listen, Ken,” said Eliot, ”There are already five people working on the ... ”

”Eliot,” said Deeber, the way a parent talks to a naughty child, ”you were given an a.s.signment.”

Eliot's a.s.signment was to write a sidebar about the Haitian community's perspective on the day-care crisis. Deeber believed that every story had to have the perspective of every ethnic group. When he went through the newspaper, he didn't actually read the stories; he counted ethnic groups. He was always sending out memos like: While the story on the increase in alligator attacks on golfers was timely and informative, I think more of an effort could have been made to include the Hispanic viewpoint. The main reason why Deeber's car ignition had never been wired to a bomb is that reporters have poor do-it-yourself skills.

”I know I had an a.s.signment,” said Eliot. ”But I've been working on this story about ... ”

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