101 Saturday Nights: A Novel

By Douglas V. Maurer

Parrt-conspirational adventure, part dramatic-confessional, part comic-cautionary tale, the novel, 101 Saturday Nights, chronicles the precarious escapes and jocular exploits of avant-garde, expressionistic painter, Cord Baylor.
Riding the crest of cult success and international fame, Baylors life disintegrates into chaos and memory when his magnum opus is stolen by random thieves during a midnight raid. Arriving home to find solace following a friends funeral, Cord is subsequently abducted in his family home at the hands of a gang of marginals hired by his father and step-brother to get the infamous Cord Baylor out of the picture
Once in captivity the absurdist panorama of Cord Baylors world opens up to expose the comic realism at its core, as an epic sweep of events reach a crescendo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514449776

Douglas V. Maurer

Douglas V. Maurer lives in the heart of the Marshlandic Kingdom of Northeast Florida with his wife and ten cats. He is the author of South of Paradise and First Family, the first volume of the Marshlandic Saga.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Douglas V. Maurer.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016900383

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-4979-0

                Softcover      978-1-5144-4978-3

                 eBook         978-1-5144-4977-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 04/30/2016

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Contents

Part 1 —After The Abduction

Part 2 —The Sacred Aloe

Part 3 —Off The Road

Part 4 —A Strange Journey

Part 5 —A Cut In The Fence

Part 1

After The Abduction

Why should I kill myself? Time is killing me.

Jorge Luis Borges

1

IN THE BEGINNING … the name Cord Baylor had been meaningless to Harley Lomaxx. They were both strangers in a land grown increasingly strange. It was only later when Cord’s father, Jacob, reneged on his verbal agreement and refused to compensate Harley for Cord’s abduction that the name—like the bogus kidnapping itself—took on hideous proportions.

Harley Lomaxx had never considered the possibility of failure in his desperate enterprise. Consideration, in most cases, escaped him completely. Thought itself, as disjointed as his mind had become, rarely provided a rational marker. He lived on the edge in a depersonalized zone—exact level unknown—a frightening latitude actually, lodged somewhere between the past and the future, where luck and a certain random unfolding reigned supreme. He assumed collecting from the wealthy industrialist would be light work compared with the actual abduction. As usual, he’d been dead wrong.

The unscrupulous Lomaxx, hunchbacked and mole-ridden, with oily seal-like skin, made an unsightly figure. His mind, although unseen, was an unfit machine, a distressed organ framed in emotional disintegration. A self-made eccentric enveloped in the scarlet histories of continuous criminal intent, sexual debauchery, and a nomadic, freeloading lifestyle, he had the ingrained habits deemed by fundamentalists as morally decadent. Excessively fond of drink, the grain and the grape, Lomaxx had also developed a raving blood dependency on certain chemical concoctions: pills, powders, combination cocktails, and anything else that caused fractional adjustments to the central nervous system. Harley had been on a downward spiral of late, a yo-yo going AWOL, when quite by accident he’d become entangled with the infamous Jacob Baylor.

High society and its persnickety patrons had undoubtedly presented a problem for the viperous Harley Lomaxx. Dealing with the elite crowd had never been his specialty, in this case the old established, the supersnobs: a beguiling crew at best, who were determined of course—usually at all costs—to keep the upper hand. He had learned that lesson the hard way. Jacob Baylor, who was apparently set on stiffing him on the abduction fees they had agreed upon for Cord’s Patrician class indefinite removal, was no exception.

2

Lomaxx and his marginal gang of social misfits were temporarily sheltered with their captive, the renegade avant-garde painter Cord Baylor, in a dungeon-like ex-slavers’ fortress on a deserted peninsula in the northern marshes of Nassau County. (It was once an ancient Timucuan Indian stronghold and part of a mythic marshlandic kingdom, which now bordered the Florida-Georgia state line and made a perfect hideout. The area had originally been discovered and claimed by the French over five hundred years prior to Lomaxx’s detection, but their greedy troupe of gold-seeking adventurers had been slaughtered by the Spanish while trying to complete Fort Caroline on St. Johns Bluff. The Spanish eventually abandoned the bluff, now a historical site just south of Lomaxx’s compound, for a more strategic harbor at St. Augustine, its natural inlet being superior and more conducive to settlement than anything they’d discovered in the tidal marshes of northeastern La Florida.)

This motley crew congregated during nights stained bile green with futility, inebriated, awash with opiates, alcohol, and bright pink pills to slow down the mind and aid the digestive system. They actually slept—usually passing out in the traditional windfall crash—having scaled the highest peaks of delirium and mounted its goddaughter, sweet cinnamon-scented intoxication amid cockroaches and scorpions in the sandstone enclosure facing a barren courtyard only to awaken in a numbing haze.

Cord was confined to what appeared to be an old supply room, with portal-sized openings that faced the incoming tides. On a clear morning, he could see the ocean beyond the dunes. Ghost crabs burrowed in the soft, marble-colored sand beneath his feet, and in the scattered groves of cabbage palm—their fronds brown-edged and drooping—he observed the wheat-shaped sea oats dispersing seedpods in the wind. When the sun was clouded from view, the beachfront, in all its spectral magnificence, took on a grainy almost dismal hue.

In what must have been a gesture of cosmic compensation, Cord could plainly hear the rhythmic crashing of every wave, the pulse in each seismic pattern left momentarily inscribed upon the sand. Yet instead of the comfort waves usually inspired with their systematic rolling, breaking, and crashing, the natural phenomenon made him feel even more alone.

Disconnection as a state of being—at least for Cord Baylor—had never reached this degree of intensity in any of his encounters with reality before. It was too unreal, worse than a dream, and seemingly without end. Shades of blue, every bend and variation he’d ever imagined, formed the backdrop of his continual watching while only the gray skies brought relief from his demented state.

Gravity-bending storms lit up distant sectors in the ever-expansive ocean, startling him in their suddenness. Tangerine rainbows and a snakelike river of glistening turquoise reflecting a drop-off deep at sea only made him sick inside. This was no holiday crib on the shimmering coast of the Riviera Maya; after a while, this innocuous ocean landscape made the diverse interiors of any inner-city neighborhood look desirable by comparison.

The evening skies bore a hint of torrential rain, as Cord sprawled out in his lair recovering from another blistering day in the sun. His back was raw from third-degree burns. Lomaxx had been taking him out to swim twice a day for a week now. Usually, the stooped malcontent stood on the shoreline shouting for answers to his unintelligible questions, then threatening to kill Cord if he didn’t speak, often gagging on his own words.

The artist was already suffering from overexposure—thanks to that boat ride across the Gulf of Mexico just before the abduction—and out in the water there was nowhere to hide from the relentless summer sun. His lips were parched, and his throat was dry.

Talk to me!

I have nothing to say but I’m dying, Cord would reply. Then shouting, "You’ll never get away with this in the end, even my old man knows the gods are on my side."

Still, Lomaxx expected him to bathe and swim. Soap didn’t do him much good in salt water, but it was better than nothing. Lathering up, Cord would float in the waves and watch the brown pelicans cruise just inches over the spray. The two, bird and sea, existed in an elegant helical arrangement that soothed the mind’s need for symmetry. The laughing gulls mocked him sanctimoniously in their red-billed mating suits, as if they had a lease on some unacknowledged sainthood. To Cord they were nothing less than flying rats. All the while he kept his eyes peeled for landmarks, any sign he might recognize, while anxiously trying to pinpoint his location, which in the end remained a futile activity.

Other than the dead certainty he was on the Atlantic shore, and somewhere in a marshy region just outside the castrating din of civilization, it really didn’t matter, as he didn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

The sound of waves crashing made his brain throb, as the salt air fell heavily upon him. The dunes stretched north and south and were laced in late-summer knots of pennywort, daisy-like gaillardia, flowering scarlet maroon—dune stabilizers, as they were known amid wary beach environmentalists. But no people, buildings, or commotion was visible here except the Ruins, which loomed ancient and overgrown like some crumbling Delphic sarcophagus.

Lodged deep within the humid bowels of Lomaxx’s primordial coffin, Cord Baylor touched the outer limits of distortion. For fun, his captors tied him to a tree in the sun, to keep him dehydrated and deplete what remained of his energy, his anger mostly. To Cord, in his sunbaked delirium, detailed rock formations looked like masked outlaws in the shadows of his cave. How easily he’d been overlooked. In this neck of the woods he was just a pebble in the surf, lost and abandoned, with only the lime-brown lizards crawling out from behind crumbling sandstone walls to keep him company. Truly, and in a most unwelcome sense, he felt alone. It was a feeling that rattled his internal confidence, his mental attitude, shaking him to the bone.

During another restless bout with sleep, his father’s voice had boomed in memory, sending out signals in that contentious baritone: Watch out for thieves and women of the night. Stay honest and think for yourself!

Cord woke up in a cold sweat with the purple light of the rising sun spreading like ink across the water. In truth the abduction had happened too fast to combat. A quick blow to the base of the skull and he had been in their command. That seemed light-years ago. Existing on a diet unfit for a dog, he now had the toxic fever of overexposure to deal with. The pain, the silence, the food or lack of it, coupled with the dead weight of time dragging by with nothing to do, were killing him. No paint smeared from head to toe, no pictures coming forth, no work, no joy. His life, he surmised, as an artist and a man, his existence as he’d once known it, was essentially over. If the dull nagging boredom of captivity didn’t destroy him, he only hoped his captors would slip up and somehow eliminate him by default … if not on purpose.

3

Looking back, his wandering mind now peppered with distant and more recent events—as a captive and prisoner, what else could he do?—Cord recalled that the conditions had been right for a walk in the rain. The temperature on that sad day that had become unforgettable, even irreducible, had hovered like a radioactive film around 82 degrees. It hadn’t been raining hard, just a minutely shredded drizzle. The truth was Cord had just wanted to pay his respects to Mrs. William Lear. Inside, he was still numb from Lear’s suicide. He had loved Lear more than his own father. Lear had been his confidant, his mentor, his friend all the years he had worked for the firm. Although much like the firm itself, what he’d accomplished for them, for his father, had never been exactly clear. He was then and forever assured it never would be.

Sitting in his cell and heating up with the morning sun, Cord visualized old Mrs. Lear.

Thanks so much for coming by, she had said to him that fateful day. William loved you like a son, the son we never had.

He’d always known that, and that’s what really hurt.

When they had insisted on moving William Lear to the terminal ward of the hospital as the rectal cancer was slowly eating him alive, he chose the grim repose of death and terminated himself, lest the burden fall on others less capable.

It’s really not a hard choice at all, he had told Cord the day before he did it.

He used a Saturday night special, in honor of the evening. He took his two Scotches on the rocks, as was his usual custom, and then popped a lone bullet into the chamber, intending to make a game of Russian roulette out of the ordeal. The first shot killed him instantly.

Cord remembered William Lear telling him as a teenager how he’d left home at age sixteen to work with a friend on a tugboat in Baltimore harbor. Later they split up over a disagreement of sorts. Lear traveled south to the Gulf of Mexico, then north to the Mississippi Delta, where he landed jobs on oil rigs and shrimp boats, construction sites, and tanker crews. He went on to become a charter boat captain, a gun runner, a drug smuggler, an underground gambling casino operator, and a ringleader in two abortive Caribbean invasions—a true dropout from a Hemingway novel.

Then by sheer accident one night in Biscayne Bay, he gained Jacob Baylor’s attention as a daring but knowledgeable navigator, and he was hired by the firm. William Lear, much to Cord’s chagrin, had died without revealing what he felt were certain undeniable facts about his birth. That Friday afternoon before Lear killed himself, he had begun to confess—admittedly with some sense of lingering doubt—that he’d been a witness to Cord’s disputed conception. That admission alone had been a staggering revelation. Why hadn’t he had the decency to come forward sooner and spare everyone a lot of aggravation and heartbreaking introspection, unless of course he had something to conceal, or Jacob had bought and paid for his silence? Now one could only speculate …

It was no use talking to Jacob Baylor about personal things. He didn’t speak to anyone about anything anymore and hadn’t since the accident. Private detectives and the notebooks of supposed facts they acquired for him at a large charge were the only oracles he consulted, the only information he really trusted, especially when it came to his dead wife’s bastard, his own bastard son Aaron, and his only daughter Jasmine, Cord’s half sister, whom Jacob was obsessed with protecting from what he considered unwarranted advances and unseemly conduct (all imaginary?) from Cord prior to his latest jaunt in Mexico, which would have been the real reason Jacob wanted him out of the picture and had hired Lomaxx to temporarily abduct him, once he’d been informed via his staff of spies that Cord was returning home for a friend’s funeral.

So Cord continued to rot in isolation: his mother’s mistake, her random indiscretion—a token son, no heir to the throne, but a man with a talent and most of all a passion for painting, who subsisted on imagination, favorable criticism, and fringe support from his small circle of patrons. One day he had hoped to show them all that if nothing else, he was the real thing! But that hardly mattered. It was the doing that defined him, the making that carried him to the heights of his stunning artistic revelations.

His mother—as Jacob’s private detective clearly proved—had been having an affair with a nightclub owner. She had never denied the allegations, especially when confronted with the photographs, but always maintained Cord had been conceived after she broke it off with him. This explanation seemed highly unlikely to Jacob, who had never really believed a word of her story.

At least until the yachting accident, when Jacob essentially lost all sense of civility, Cord had been treated as a member of the family. (And no matter what facts eventually would be regarded as the truth, Jacob Baylor was the only father he had ever known, and Cord would always consider him that way.) Then even that line of communication was cut off. The last word from the trustees was that Cord had been disinherited, excommunicated, to which he replied, Whatever!

The implications remained nonetheless. William Lear, or so he confessed by silent admissions, must have witnessed the furtive copulation his father denied, or so had Cord surmised. Or perhaps that had been a lie to cover up Lear’s own indiscretions with his mother. Not that it would do any good to know now. That was so long behind them, or was it?

The real problem now as always was the drinking. Jacob Baylor never remembered anything after he’d been drinking heavily, or so he had always maintained, which seemed a likely excuse for years of cruel and unusual treatment. The night of Cord’s bitterly contested birth was no exception. According to his mother’s story, Jacob had consumed a bottle of Early Times whiskey during the course of the day. Then they had attended a party, where she became highly intoxicated. After that, they supposedly came home, where Jacob had made love to her by the pool, allegedly.

Now he was a confirmed maniac, a mindless invalid who believed no one and denied everything. It certainly could have been possible for William Lear to have observed that act under those raw circumstances, or it could have been an alibi he and his mother had dreamed up to keep old Jacob off the track. Oh yes, these were the times that tried men’s souls. Nothing had changed. They drowned in lies and tactics of evasion, and no one had been bold enough to come clean. It was the same as it ever was … same as it ever would be.

4

Cocaine was the death of Cord’s old college friend Wild Bill Phillips; it destroyed the love of survival that heredity had transcribed on his chromosomes. For seven long years he’d served the sister, Sister Cocaine, while completing his undergraduate degree in chemistry and his master’s in aquatic biology at the University of South Florida. During this time frame, Wild’s Blue Period, he’d labored part-time at the fish farm of a notorious drug dealer, Zoomer Campion.

On the farm, Wild’s job consisted of wading in the breeding ponds to capture exotic fish in a fine-mesh net. The compensation had been minimal and the mosquitos extremely aggressive, not to mention the leeches that attached themselves to his legs as he worked, but as a fringe benefit, he could snort all the high-quality cocaine he dared consume. The massive quantities he ingested earned him the nickname Wild Bill.

To escape the stress of classes, cocaine, and working on the fish farm, Wild often fled to his brother’s apartment on Miami Beach. Other times, better times, he had camped out with Cord’s radical crowd of painters, poets, and musicians in the foothills of Tampa Bay. Before the upsetting, but not completely unexpected, news of his death arrived, Wild had written Cord a long letter, which he’d received while on a painting jaunt in Costa Rica.

Supposedly everything had been going great. Wild was planning to join his brother’s research firm as soon as he graduated so he could reform his wayward lifestyle, if that were even possible, but somewhere along the line he had been swallowed up, his vital spark extinguished like cinders in the wind.

The newspaper report had only mentioned a man drowning at the South Bay Fish Farm. They had spared no details—no relevant explanations and no hint of an investigation. His noble scientific intentions would remain forever unknown, as Wild Bill’s ghost disappeared into the machine’s mosaic of meaningless data.

The truth was Wild Bill Phillips had done enough cocaine to kill a cow.

He’d choked to death on his own vomit as the sister claimed his soul. That fatal last blast must have put him flat on his back, his ravaged, cocaine-scarred heart convulsing, exploding in a protracted seizure.

A couple of the other coke-sluts eking out an existence on the farm had discovered his decomposing corpse. His body had turned a dark shade of cobalt blue.

Cord was reminded of Albrecht Durer’s arresting self-portrait when he thought of Wild. The resemblance had been profound, except Bill was the spiritual prince of the exalted chemical night and the eldest son of a prominent Washington psychiatrist. Now he was permanently unconscious, his blood drained by buzzards, red ants, and leeches; his mind betrayed by deranged doper’s mania; his long hair even cut like Durer’s as it hung limp in the relentless Florida sun. To his friends and family, Wild Bill’s death had been a sign, a storm warning etched in blood to anyone chasing visions of angels.

Cord Baylor had crossed the gulf in the maintenance cabin of an oil barge and then caught a bus down to Sarasota from Tampa Bay, making it just in time for Wild’s wake. After paying his respects to the Phillips family, he’d returned to his father’s octagon-shaped fortress in Longboat Key, Florida and his little arcadia overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. No one had been home that fateful day, except Simon Augustus, the chef, butler, and Jacob’s personal valet, who’d seemed overwhelmed to see Cord again.

Simon had prepared a satisfying lunch while listening intently to his trumped-up tales of life in the tropical forests of Costa Rica, where things were strained on all fronts: personal, artistic, and political. For Cord it was an outsider’s paradise, but he doubted he’d be returning soon. Wars or outbreaks of conflict, like the hordes of troubleshooters trying to gain entry, were threatening on all eastern fronts. Besides, he was out of money and had decided to ask Jacob for another loan, to even beg if need be.

Good luck. Simon smiled, shaking his head.

I’m gonna need it.

Your old room’s ready, Cord. You can take a nap if you’d like, then clean up before dinner.

Cord hadn’t been in the house two hours when Harley Lomaxx and his pill-popping band of malcontents had launched their half-assed abduction.

5

The three of them had broken in through a side door and held Simon Augustus at bay with two very realistic toy submachine guns while taping his mouth shut. Harley Lomaxx and Jack Vendetti, the ringleader and his right-hand man, proceeded to ransack the house for cash and valuables, when Cord had made his grand entrance for a glass of