Florida, and: The Noonday Witch

Abstract

FLORIDA / Roger Weingarten I drove the tail end of the hurricane into the outskirts of Orlando. Waves pressed the road from both sides and a woman impaled on a branch of sunlight rode the top of a Volkswagen bus floating on a lake where the pavement curved toward Bill's parents' house. I hadn't slept for two days. Cigarettes and hard-selling radio preachers helped me swerve around an armadillo, kept me awake. When I got there, he threw his suitcase into the boot and said, I can't take it one more minute. When I woke looking up at a gas jockey snapping gum and grinning through the windshield at my rolled and tufted face, Bill was confiding to the animal in the center of the steering wheel that he found his mother masturbating on the toilet, her light blue bath robe folded twice on the floor. Then you, he went on, in your red miracle of a Chevrolet, sailed in on the warm end of the storm. 64 · The Missouri Review And where did that get us? Almost Virginia, replied the attendant, leaning an elbow into the window. That'll be four dollars on the nose. We watched him grab a front bumper and swing into the dark underbelly of the car. He waved a finger knowing we couldn't help but admire his confidence and grace. Bill said when I was drummer for the school jazz band, I could play the solo from "Caravan" until they were climbing the bleachers—style like that doesn't live forever. He opened the door, crossed the road and started hitchhiking back to Florida. I pulled a U-turn in front of a school bus. The driver honked. Bill got in, smiled and said to the rear view mirror, you don't have to do this. But you forgot your suitcase. He didn't laugh at that one. I didn't care, but I wondered what it felt like to have a family so sharp in your gut that it could pin you in the air like a butterfly, pale green and fragile under glass. Roger Weingarten THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 65 THE NOONDAY WITCH / Roger Weingarten But for the pair of white surgical gloves, but for the jacaranda mimosa folia blossom pinned to a shoulder, and a cut-off pool cue brandished by an extremely small, tightly wound creature in a wet suit, fins, with a cleft chin squeezed like toes into a stocking, the fourteenyear -old daughter of the sexually assaulted, roadside tavern owner's widow insisted she knew the familiar sway of this would-be rapist crawling over sawdust after she drew a pistol from her waistband, a bead, and fired a round into the half fish, half human staggering toward the suburbs, where he snatched an octogenarian exstate congresswoman out of her second-floor verandah, who pulled her licensed handgun from an umbrella and fired, forced to chauffeur this would-be mugger to any outskirt sanctuary. Alerted by a neighborly ham radio aficionado, who happened to be hosing off under a shrub, a crew of drivers leaped from a wrecker. Sirens and blue lights died around the dry-rotting mausoleum of the once-great estate of a retired pornographer who gave himself the airs of a country squire. The cops hushed, waiting for a teetering, bronze torso over the door to fall upon the alleged 66 · The Missouri Review kidnapper, who bolted through a hole in a sarcophagus with hostage, laying rubber into a highspeed chase over washboard roads and nauseating switchbacks, rolling over in reverse into a forest that never slept. The escapee at daylight, breaking in his sidekick, attempted a B & E under a sod roof, where an American Legionnaire, firing a thirty-ought six and a hot coffee can of grease, apprehended the culprit. Successfully suing everybody, the octogenarian stepped out of retirement into a landslide, while the Legionnaire, awarded a plaque "for exceptional and meritorious conduct," opened a restaurant frequented by the Jacaranda Mimosa Folia Bandit after a quick release from a private asylum completely cured. Roger Weingarten THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 67 ...