“She’ll crash aground,” I says.
“Better the boat be destroyed than you.”
I put her on auto and finally walked out of the cockpit to take a look at what was happening. A helicopter, obviously military, with two guns showing.
The ’copter fired a round that hit in the water ahead of us—probably not a miss but a warning to stop. We were now less than two miles from shore. I went back to the helm and slowed the boat down to twenty-five knots, hoping that would make them think we were surrendering.
“The water shoals to five feet about a half mile from shore,” says Molière. “We’ll be aground in less than three minutes.”
“What happens then?” I ask as I snapped on my life preserver and made certain Lucas had secured his.
“Get in the water and swim toward shore.”
“Great. I should be able to make it in less than a month. If they don’t hit me with at least twenty rounds in less than a minute, I’ll lose all my faith in the US military.”
“They’re after us, not you,” says Louie. “They want you humans alive.”
“Glad to hear it,” says I.
A round of machine-gun fire now swept across our bow, the teak decking pockmarked with exploding splinters. We were now a mile from shore and a half mile from running aground.
I slowed the boat down to fifteen knots, but a few seconds later another round of gunfire swept across the bow.
Louie and Molière, dragging their bags of loot, left the cover of the cockpit roof, bounced into the sea, and disappeared underwater. Louie-Twoie, shaped for the first time in days as a normal sphere, stayed on the cockpit shelf next to the helm. Karen was standing behind Lucas with her arms around him. I slowed the Carver to six knots.
Suddenly all three of us were slammed against the control panel: our faithful cruiser had hit the shoaling water.
I turned off the engine and walked out of the cockpit to the port side.
“Let’s go,” I says, and climbed awkwardly up on the coaming and jumped into the sea.
I’m a pretty lousy swimmer for a guy who’s worked on boats half his life, but I windmilled clumsily toward shore, Karen with Lucas alongside me.
The helicopter surged up and hovered overhead. A guy at the gun mount shouted something to us. Couldn’t hear a word.
I raised my hands in surrender and then felt something strange: I was being dragged toward shore by the scruff of my neck five times as fast as I could swim. Louie or Molière must be dragging me.
The guy at the gun mount stared down at the strange apparition: an old geezer moving at five or six knots toward shore with both arms in the air.
My legs touched bottom and I realized we were all now near the mangroves at the edge of the southwestern tip of Key Largo. Mangroves are the most useless growths the Good Lord has ever come up with, unless you’re about to be shot and killed by gung-ho guys in an unfriendly helicopter.
Suddenly me and Karen and Lucas were in among the low trees and tough to see from above. But just as I was beginning to feel safe I saw four armed men running along the beach toward us only fifty feet away. Jesus. I immediately felt myself being dragged pretty fast through mangroves.
The men on the beach stopped running and began shooting at us, the bullets crackling through the mangroves like angry bees. Whether to kill us or to get us to stop I don’t know, but we can find out after they declassify the CIA account of the operation in 2121.
The rest is anticlimax. The helicopter never did shoot at us. We didn’t drown. We didn’t get separated. We eluded the guys on the beach who’d continued chasing us, probably because Louie gave me a ride on his porpoise-shaped back and we moved at fifteen knots instead of five. Karen and Lucas rode on Molière’s back just behind us. When we were finally sure the military had given up chasing us, we waded ashore and found an old van parked near a vacant cottage. Louie-Twoie hot-wired it, and soon we were off to less exciting places.
Thank the Lord. I hadn’t been shot at since ’Nam, and I found I didn’t like it today any more than I did then.
TWENTY-NINE
(From LUKE’S TRUE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT OF THE INVASION OF THE FFS, pp. 139–142. Being Molière’s memoir about his writing of his play Love Has No Boundaries.)
Back on Long Island after getting shot up in the Caymans I decided it was time for a change of games. I was losing my enthusiasm for taking on the most powerful government in the history of the earth and having to fiddle around with boring banking and exciting rescue attempts. I decided to write a play.
Playwriting comes easily to FFs. It’s our natural way of being. At home in what Billy charmingly calls “Ickieville” we are playing a variety of roles all the time, the roles often depending on what games we participate in on any given day. We have no “plays” as humans do because they would be redundant. We are acting in plays every moment of every day.
On Earth now we do the same. I, for example, played a French intellectual for three weeks after my arrival, could quote all of Jean-Paul Sartre backwards and forwards, and did a brilliant critique of Emmanuel Carrère’s latest. When I heard from an FF who’d arrived from America about what Louie was doing, I decided to go join the game. But now I was getting a bit bored with stealing money and blackmailing helpless but deserving humans, so decided I wanted to become a Broadway star. Or rather an off-Broadway star, since it takes too long to mount a Broadway play. All I needed was actors and a script, which I would whip off in a few minutes. Money was not a problem.
It actually took longer. Writing always involves first determining one’s audience, and I realized that I was stuck writing this play for humans. I had to limit myself considerably. Like a human writing a play to entertain pets.
The first problem was in using FFs as characters. The only way they could be “real” for a human audience was by their seeming to be human. To work, my play would have to pretend that FFs had human emotions—could love, hate, be jealous, greedy, angry. Well, all play involves pretending so I would create human FFs.
Then there was the problem of the appearance of the FFs in the play. I realized that for humans the changing shapes of FFs was fun. My FFs would have to be continually changing their shapes and apparent beings, and often appear in various mostly human shapes.
Next there was the genre. Since we FFs consider all human beings to be fools, there was really only one genre available for my play: farce. And how appropriate: my French friends had given me the name ‘Molière’ and here I was suddenly deciding to write a farce!
Finally, there was the story. All good human plays stick to the basics: love, hate, rivalry, jealousy, lust, and greed. I’d have to fill the play with all the most powerful human emotions. What I’d do is create a few characters, some human, some FFs, throw them into a dramatic situation, and let nature take its course—human nature of course.
And thus we would have a farce.
THIRTY
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 215–222)
I got to tell you folks, I’d never lived in a spy-thriller before, and I wasn’t certain I was cut out for it. At more than seventy, leaping over tall buildings in a single bound or overpowering six uzi-armed villains with my bare hands was a bit beyond me. In the Caymans the FFs somehow managed to see to it that not a single bullet was fired too close to me and that my major contribution consisted of telling the bad guys that they had a flat tire, running an expensive boat onto some shoals, and watching a few mangroves get chewed up by bullets that scared me… considerably. (Lita has asked me to cut down on the foul language in this book.)
Of course, back in the sixties I lived for a few years in an anti-war war movie with the good guys getting killed and the bad guys getting promoted. And then for a while I lived in a seventies type of film about my lost soul looking for a purpose in life while I protested and got stoned, drunk, and laid, and became more and more disillusioned with protesting, getting stoned, drunk, and laid. That movie ended, as all the good movies
did back then, in unhappy anticlimax.
I didn’t find another starring role until I met Carlita, got married, and we had Lucas and Jimmy. Then we played the Happy Family show: nothing really important happening but all of us having a pretty good time, with no problem greater than “Lucas stole my cupcake.”
Then Louie and the FFs entered our lives. Now I was starring in a spy-thriller, and I was beginning to feel this was a film I’d rather not be cast in.
It was a full two days until Lita, me, and the boys managed to be together again in our old farmhouse outside Greenport. That night in our bedroom Lita and I talked it out. Side by side in the king-sized bed, both of us leaning back against the headboard, she told me we had to break from Louie and the FFs.
“We can’t go on like this,” she says. “I won’t let my sons go through what poor Lucas had to endure down there in the Keys.”
“Actually, I think he enjoyed it,” I says.
“I don’t care if he thought it was the greatest time in his life,” Lita shoots back. “He could have been killed. You could have been killed. No more.”
“Got ya, sweetheart.”
“You’d better get me, and don’t ‘sweetheart’ me when I’m mad as hell.”
“Got it, Mrs. Morton.”
“That’s better.” She smiled. I leaned over and put my arm around her. She stiffened.
“Next time Louie or LT get in touch, you tell them ‘no more.’”
I removed my arm.
“Got it, Mrs. Morton.”
* * *
But they didn’t get in touch with us. There was no sign of Louie or Molière. No message. Nothing. And LT had disappeared without telling me a thing about what he was up to. It didn’t help that LT still hadn’t mastered talking yet so when he tried to explain his plans it came out something like “isboo protatiti barotin sis ooper.” We figured that our house was undoubtedly bugged, our phones tapped, and our emails being read. Louie would probably not want to endanger us by trying to get a message to us or put himself in danger by trying to sneak into our house. Despite her concerns about the danger the FFs put us in, Lita was as curious as any of us to know what was happening to Louie and the other FFs, so she suggested I take Lucas and Jimmy out on Vagabond and see if Louie didn’t get in contact.
So that’s what I did. Me and the boys spent a while losing bait to the most intelligent fishies I’d ever had to deal with. I figured they’d probably been taking lessons from the FFs. They ate so much of our bait I imagined a lot of them would die of obesity. In any case, no Louie, and after three hours we gave up and motored home.
Lita had begun working in New York City five days a week for the Protean Defense League, so I was having to bachelor it. The boys were back in school.
Almost a week after we’d gotten back from our Cayman adventures I was ordered to take the laundry to the local laundromat—too much had accumulated from our Cayman trip. I waited until the boys were out of school and got Jimmy to join me. He loved putting the coins in the slots, something I was happy to subcontract. I was enjoying sitting on one of the reasonably nice chairs when the last bunch of laundry in the basket waiting to be washed began talking to me. Actually, it seemed that it was my dirty sweatshirt hoody that was talking—the one with the logo “Old Age Sucks”—but when I looked closer it seemed to be my underwear.
“Not too happy, are you, Billy?” says a voice I knew was Louie’s.
“I hate doing laundry,” says I.
“You know what I mean,” says Louie. “We’ve got you and Lita and the boys into a mess and we want to get you out of it.”
I looked around the room. Two people were busy sorting their dried clothes while the third was reading an exciting article about detergents in the Reader’s Digest. Jimmy was at the front of the room staring out the window at something. The machines were making a pretty good racket so I figured my whispers either wouldn’t be heard or would be interpreted as the muttering of a senile old man. Old age has its advantages.
“And how do you plan to do that?” I ask.
“I think, Billy,” came the smothered voice, “that the only solution is to have you killed.”
Louie sure was bringing excitement into my life.
“We’ve learned that the Coast Guard boat that boarded us reported to the NSA what they’d found, and the NSA realized that it was you and Lucas. That’s why that helicopter and those military guys showed up off Key Largo. And the men on that ’copter would be able to identify you and Lucas too. And Karen. The NSA knows that you probably helped us escape from the Caymans. They probably realize now that it was you who stopped to help the agents with their flat tire. The only reason they haven’t called you in for questioning is that they still hope they can use you to capture me.”
“Think I could plea bargain by telling them where you live?” I says.
“Probably. If you knew where I lived. No, Billy, I’m afraid the only solution is to kill you. Molière and I think the best plan is to blow up you and your family in your boat. That will free you from worry about the Feds.”
“Yep,” says I. “Death frees people from a lot of worries.”
Louie let out one of his annoying “Ho-ho-hos.” Shook the laundry basket.
“I’d like to rewrite this script a bit,” says I. “Maybe try a plot development that doesn’t involve me and Carlita and the boys getting blown up.”
“No, no,” says Louie. “Getting blown up is just what is needed. We FFs know everything the NSA knows, so we’ve got easy access to people who produce the best false papers in the world. But before you can use them, we’ve got to kill you, blow you and your boat up with a big bomb.”
“Couldn’t you settle for a really small bomb or a few fire crackers,” says I. “And make it seem like the boat blew up without it actually happening? Isn’t that what making movies is all about?”
“Need a big bomb, Billy,” says Louie. “One that will blow all four of your bodies to such small smithereens not even the NSA can find any trace of you—make them decide the fish ate all your remains.”
As I said, I’m not sure I’m cut out for this kind of movie. I’d been hoping I’d live long enough to get to the scenes when I get to win big money at a casino with a luscious babe oohing and aahing beside me and the crowd gasping at my brilliance and the way I handle an Aston Martin. But beginning the movie with my getting blown up didn’t seem too promising.
That night in our kitchen Lita and I talked it out again. She was having a herbal tea while I was drinking a big mug of hot chocolate laced nicely with a coffee brandy. I told her why Louie thought it might be useful if we got killed.
“He thinks we’ve got to have new identities because the government will be monitoring our every move for the rest of our lives,” I says, “or at least as long as there are any FFs around. And they also may threaten to hurt us if Louie and his friends don’t give themselves up. It will help both us and Louie if we take on new identities.”
“Oh, Christ, Billy, this is a mess. I don’t want to give up our present lives.”
“I don’t either,” I says. “But we’ve already lost them. Spending half our time dodging bullets or in courtrooms is not the way we’re used to living.”
“I just want Louie and his friends to let us live without them,” says Lita. “He wants us to pretend to get killed and then take on new identities. Where would we live?”
“Louie thinks he can relocate us any place we want.”
“Damn it, there isn’t any other place I want. Only here. I don’t think we should do this.”
I pushed myself over near her and took her in my arms.
“Then we won’t do it,” I says.
“Thank you,” she says. As if the decision were only mine to make.
“Getting blown up isn’t my thing anyway,” I says.
“I’m glad.”
“And much as I like Louie, I’m beginning to think that every time he has a brilliant new idea, I end up almost getting
killed.”
ITEM IN THE NEWS
Vancouver, British Columbia. March 30th
The World Institute for a Warmer Planet, partly funded (99.44%) by Peabody Energy and the Canadian Natural Gas Pipeline, Ltd., announced today that the people of the island of Tsonga in the South Pacific have been successfully relocated to the island of Wali-Wali only nine hundred miles away. All Tsongaese agreed that Wali-Wali is a lovely island, almost exactly the way Tsonga had been thirty years ago. Wali-Wali, being almost four feet above sea level, will remain an island for at least another twenty years, giving this generation of Tsongaese a happy life until their next migration or possible extinction.
THIRTY-ONE
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 225–231)
Before we went to see his play, Molière told us it had taken him six minutes to write it—seventy pages and an eighty-minute play. It must be nice to have a brain so powerful you could write a four-hundred-page novel between lunch and dinner. Or between your main course and dessert. It takes me a day to get out two or three pages on this book. ’Course it would help if I could type quicker than six words a week.
Molière had a theater—off-Broadway—and a cast of six. And of course he was his own chief “angel.” So a little less than two weeks after he’d come up with his new idea, Love Has No Boundaries opened at the Markham Theater in the East Village. Lita and I decided to go. When the boys learned that Louie-Twoie was part of the play we had to take them too.
First play I’d seen in forty years. Lita had seen a few—mostly protest plays written by grape pickers or illegal immigrants or abused lesbians about picking grapes, being illegal, and getting abused. I figured Molière was more into fun, and I could survive the evening. The fact that the play was advertised as Molière’s Love Has No Boundaries may have helped sales.