Carl Hiaasen (11 page)

When Gillian climbed down from the tree, she said, “I seriously need a bath.”

“Good luck with the plumbing.”

“You said you wanted me to go away. Did you mean it? Because I can tell you’re not too thrilled.”

Against his better judgment, Sammy Tigertail found himself intrigued by the way she looked at that instant, how the breeze was nudging her hair and the sunlight was coloring her cheeks.

He said, “Ethan’s freaked out enough. You’d better go.”

“To hell with Ethan.”

“You don’t get it. Anything could happen out here.”

“Exactly!” Gillian exclaimed. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

Sammy Tigertail couldn’t stop himself from smiling.

She said, “How about this—what if I told you I can play the guitar?”

“I wouldn’t believe you.”

“Don’t move, Cochise.” Gillian ran out, and came back carrying the Gibson. “You got a pick?”

“I sure don’t,” Sammy Tigertail said, curious.

“That’s okay. Check out these fingernails.”

She played. He listened.

That evening, another telemarketer called and tried to sell Honey Santana a term-life policy for $17.50 a month. Instead of scolding the man, she was appallingly patient and polite. “God bless you, brother,” she said before hanging up.

Aghast, Fry dropped his fork in the lasagna. “I’m definitely tellin’ Dad.”

“You’ll do no such thing. I’m absolutely fine,” Honey said.

“You’re not fine, Mom, you’re going bipolar. Maybe even
tri
polar.”

“Just because I’m nice to a stranger on the phone? I thought that’s what you guys wanted.”

“Yeah, but
that,
” Fry said, clearing his plate from the table, “was creepy.”

Honey elected not to mention the aberrant pang of sympathy that had inspired her to visit Louis Piejack at his home that afternoon. Misled by a pleasant greeting and a seemingly benign offer of lemonade, Honey had taken a seat in her former employer’s living room only to hear him announce that (a) his wife was away in Gainesville, receiving chemotherapy, and (b) his testicles had fully recovered from the pummeling Honey had delivered at the fish market. Piejack had gone on to say that the brutal stone-crab amputation and subsequent surgical reshuffling of his fingers, while problematic for his piano ambitions, promised an innovative new repertoire of foreplay. That was when Honey Santana had dashed for the door, Piejack bear-pawing at her with his bandaged left hand. Honey didn’t want Fry to find out because he’d tell his father, who might do something so extreme to Louis Piejack that Skinner would end up in jail.

The boy went to pack while Honey stepped outside to test her latest mosquito remedy—citronella mixed with virgin olive oil, which she slathered on both legs. After several minutes she decided that the night was too breezy for a bug census, so instead she began rehearsing the lecture she intended to lay upon Boyd Shreave, the man who’d called her a dried-up old skank. She planned to wait until the second day of the eco-adventure, when they were so deep in the wilderness that Shreave wouldn’t dare make a run for it. He’d have no choice but to sit and listen while Honey Santana straightened him out.

The theme of her rebuke would be the erosion of manners in modern society, the decay of civility. Honey was prepared to accept responsibility for her own sharp words during the sales call. Perhaps she’d begin by apologizing for mentioning Shreave’s mother.

“That was wrong of me, Boyd, and I’m sorry. But I was upset, and now I want to tell you why—”

“Mom?” Fry’s voice, from behind the screen door. “Who’re you talking to?”

“Nobody. Come out here and sit.”

She scooted over to make a place for him on the top step of the trailer. His backpack was slung over one shoulder and he was eating an apple.

“When’s your old man showing up?” she asked.

“Ten minutes. Who were you talking to?”

“Myself. Lots of perfectly sane people do that, Fry.”

Honey leaned against him. His hair was damp, and it smelled like her shampoo. She felt like hugging his neck and crying.

“They had a plane up today,” he said, “looking for some college girl who supposedly got snatched from one of the islands. Then her boyfriend calls up and says she’s okay. She’d dumped him and took off with a poacher.”

Honey sniffled a laugh. “Sounds like true love.”

Fry turned to gaze up at the nature mural his mother had painted on the trailer, which was partially illuminated by a street lamp. “Your parrot turned out cool. The monkeys are killer, too,” he said.

“Thanks, but the neighbors aren’t real impressed. Hey, whatever happened with that girl you used to like at school? Naomi.”

“Moved to Rhode Island. And her name was Cassie,” Fry said. “So, what’ve you got planned for your friends?”

“I dunno, just hang out. I heard there’s a crafts show in Naples.”

“High-octane excitement,” said Fry.

“Or maybe we’ll break in those kayaks, if the weather’s decent.”

“How come your eyes are all red?”

“Cat dander.” She pointed to Mrs. Saroyan’s spavined gray tabby, which was squatting on the chain-link fence and spraying their mailbox.

Fry reached into his backpack and took out something that looked like a BlackBerry, only smaller. “Here, take this. It’s a GPS receiver, in case you get lost on the water.”

Honey grinned. “Lemme guess where you got it—my guilt-ridden former spouse?”

“He had an extra one lying around. It was my idea.” He showed her how to use it, and she seemed to pay attention.

“Everybody’s so damn worried about me. I suppose I should be touched,” she said.

A pair of headlights appeared at the end of the street.

“That would be him.” Fry stood up.

Honey told her son to have a good time. “But don’t forget to do your homework. I’ll call tomorrow to set up a dinner, so you can meet my friends.”

Of course there would be no such gathering, but Honey had to keep up the act in case Fry was buying it.

“And, for God’s sake,” she added, “wash your jock after track practice.”

“You’d better not be crying. I mean it.”

“I told you, it’s allergies.”

When Perry Skinner braked to a stop in front of the yard, Honey thought she saw him give a small wave. Fry pecked her on the cheek and said, “Love you, Mom.”

“Love you, too. Now stop worryin’ so much, would you?” She smiled and teasingly shoved him toward his father’s truck.

“Don’t run off with any poachers,” he said.

“Hey, I could do worse,” Honey called after him.

Eleven

The landing in Tampa was bumpy. At the airport, Eugenie Fonda charged into the first open bar on the concourse. “Margaritaville” was playing over the sound system, so she ordered one.

Boyd Shreave had a beer. He raised the glass and said, “To freedom.”

“I guess,” said Eugenie.

“Come on. This is the start of a brand-new lifetime.”

“What’d you rent us?”

“A mid-sized Saturn.”

Eugenie whistled. “Whoa, baby.”

“What’s wrong with a Saturn?”

She smiled. “Very sensible, Boyd. You gonna put it on Lily’s gold card?”

Shreave looked away, feigning fascination with a basketball game on the TV mounted above the Budweiser display.

“Then why not go nuts? Get an Escalade,” Eugenie was saying. “You’re not some schmuck on an expense account, Boyd. You’re on safari.”

“Fine. I’ll rent the biggest road hog they got.”

“Unless you’re feeling guilty,” Eugenie said, “about mooching off your wife.”

“Yeah, that’s me. Crippled with guilt.” Shreave slapped three fives on the bar. “You done?”

They stood in line at the Avis counter for forty-five minutes and departed with an ordinary Ford Explorer, the last Escalade having been rented to a middle-aged man toting two Halliburton travel cases.

Traffic out of the city was murder. Eugenie Fonda shut her eyes and leaned against the window. Boyd Shreave wondered how to draw her into the frisky spirit of a Florida adventure. Despite their rollicking sex life, Eugenie had always maintained emotional distance, and on the long drive Shreave found himself overtaken by an urge to possess her in every way. As she dozed—twitching whenever he swerved or tapped the brakes—Shreave was galvanized by a preposterous desire for her to be charmed and bedazzled and ravenously alert in his presence. Inwardly he began to speculate about what qualities might have attracted her to Van Bonneville, the killer-to-be, five years earlier. As self-deluded as he was about his own allure, Shreave understood that he had little in common with the homicidal tree whacker who’d been so chillingly profiled on Court TV. The man had shown himself as daring and decisive, traits that had never been ascribed to Shreave.

North of Fort Myers he exited the interstate, located a shopping mall and informed Eugenie that he was going to find a rest room. She acknowledged with a drowsy grunt, reclined her seat and drifted back into an ebbing haze of Valium and alcohol. Shreave beelined for a Barnes & Noble, where a bemused clerk led him to the last unshredded paperback copy of
Storm Ghoul,
which he purchased along with a road map of southwest Florida.

The sun was setting when he and Eugenie finally rolled into Everglades City, which was not a city in the Texan sense of the word. It was, in fact, barely a town.

Eugenie lowered her window to let the cool air rouse her. “Where’s the beach?” she asked Shreave.

“I’m not sure.”

“Where’s
anything
?”

“Just wait,” he said.

When he stopped at a Circle K and asked directions to the Dancing Flamingo Eco-Lodge, the clerk peered at him as if he was a registered sex offender. He had better luck at the Rod and Gun Club, where a bartender examined the street address provided by the telemarketer and said it was within walking distance. He drew a map on a cocktail napkin and handed it to Shreave.

“Let’s eat first. I’m wasting away,” Eugenie said, and headed toward the restaurant.

Admiring the sway of her hips, the bartender told Shreave he was one lucky bastard. “But I’d stick close if I were you,” he added. “Guys around here, they don’t see many women like that.”

“There aren’t many of ’em to see, no matter where you live,” Shreave said authoritatively.

Dinner was excellent—hearts of palm, conch fritters, stone crabs and Key lime pie. Their table overlooked the Barron River, where jumping fish flashed like squirts of mercury under the dock lights. Eugenie ate heartily, and Shreave discerned an improvement in her mood. After dessert she even kicked off one shoe and tickled his crotch with her bare toes.

“We’re gonna have some major fun tonight,” she said.

Nearly delirious with anticipation, Shreave decided to drive the few blocks to the eco-lodge so that he wouldn’t have to schlep their bags. Following the bartender’s map, he turned on to an unpaved street called Curlew Boulevard.

Eugenie stiffened in her seat. “Boyd?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“This is a fucking trailer park.”

“I can see that,” he said grimly.

The address was 543 Curlew, and the residence was definitely a double-wide. Some wacko had painted psychedelic parrots and monkeys all over the front.

Eugenie Fonda said, “Tell me it’s a joke.”

Shreave felt prickly and light-headed.

“Boyd, are you processing all this?”

“I don’t know what’s going on. I swear to God,” he said.

Then the door of the trailer swung open.

Before his ill-fated employment at the airboat concession, Sammy Tigertail had briefly tried wrestling alligators. Nobody had understood why. It wasn’t a popular job, most Seminole gator wrestlers having retired as soon as the gambling remissions started to flow.

Through newspaper advertisements the tribe had recruited a collection of rough young white guys to perform the alligator shows, a breach of cultural authenticity that didn’t seem to bother the tourists. Sammy Tigertail took his training from a former Harley-Davidson mechanic who, by virtue of three missing toes, went by the nickname of “Nubs.” He had lost the digits in a hatchet fight, but naturally he told audiences that a bull gator had gobbled them. For Sammy Tigertail’s orientation, Nubs demonstrated a few rudimentary pinning maneuvers and counseled him not to eat catfish on performance days, because “them goddamn devil lizards can smell it on your breath.”

Sammy Tigertail’s first match went so well that he jokingly asked who’d dosed the alligator—an eight-footer displaying the ferocity of a beanbag chair. Sammy Tigertail was loose and cocky for the next performance, which featured an even more docile specimen, or so the young Seminole had been told.

Statistically, professional gator wrestling is only slightly more dangerous than hanging wallpaper. The low casualty rate is due less to the agility of the handlers than to the habituated tolerance of the reptiles. Having learned that the reward is a ripe dead chicken, the alligators patiently allow themselves to be dragged around a sand pit and subjected to a sequence of silly indignities. Obviously the success of these stunts relies on a certain critical level of lethargy in the animals. A freshly captured alligator is not the ideal wrestling opponent; unschooled and irritable, even a scrawny one is capable of inflicting grave and potentially crippling injuries.

For the second (and, ultimately, final) show of Sammy Tigertail’s career, the redneck wrestlers thought it would be humorous to sneak a ringer into the gator pit. The chosen candidate was seven feet long and weighed roughly 110 pounds. More crucially, it had no show-business experience, having been snared from a golf-course lagoon the previous evening. Unaware, Sammy Tigertail let out an improvised war cry and leapt with gusto upon the beast, which erupted in writhing, hissing fury. The crowd thought it was fantastic.

Clawed, thrashed and tail-whipped, Sammy Tigertail somehow steered clear of the saurian’s teeth. As they flopped around in the dirt, the Indian managed to lock both arms around the flailing head of his foe, at which point they rolled together into the concrete pond. The depth was barely four feet, but Sammy Tigertail knew that alligators had drowned persons in shallower water. He was also aware that the primitive creature in his grip was capable of holding its breath for hours. That fact, plus the realization that the pond itself was probably septic with gator shit, impelled Sammy Tigertail to break his clinch and kick frantically for the surface.

As he sloshed alone out of the bile-colored water, the audience rose and applauded. The Seminole took a shy bow while the announcer explained over the PA system that the defeated leviathan would remain submerged until it stopped sulking. Forty-five minutes later the alligator indeed rose to the surface and floated belly-up, a pose that suggested a far more serious condition than wounded pride. The rattlesnake-milking demonstration was immediately halted and Sammy Tigertail was summoned back to the wrestling pit. There, to a withering chorus of boos and the tickety-tick of digital cameras, he glumly hauled the scaly corpse from the pond.

A necropsy revealed that Sammy Tigertail had accidentally snapped the alligator’s neck during their underwater tussle, a mishap that would cost the tribe hefty fines from state and federal authorities. Among the voluminous regulations governing the captivity and display of
Alligator mississippiensis,
none is viewed more seriously than the prohibition against harming the species. No wrestler in the history of the Seminole reservation had ever snuffed an alligator during a paid performance, and Sammy Tigertail’s plea for leniency fell on deaf ears. He was banished for life from the gator pit, the incident serving to reinforce the tribal view that he was cursed by his mixed blood.

Sammy Tigertail chose not to share the dead alligator story with Gillian when he declined her request for a wrestling lesson.

She said, “Aw, come on. I taught you how to play the guitar.”

In fact, she’d shown him the chords to one song, “Tequila Sunrise.” It had been a favorite of his late father.

Sammy Tigertail was grateful, up to a point. “You think all Seminoles wrestle gators? That’s insulting,” he said. “It’s like saying all black men can dunk a basketball.”

The topic had arisen because they’d spotted either an alligator or a crocodile swimming across the pass near the island.

“Don’t tell me you never tried,” Gillian said.

“There’s a trick to it,” Sammy Tigertail replied quietly.

“Show me.”

“I said no.”

“Pretend I’m the gator.” Gillian stretched flat on her belly, arms pressed against her sides, on the floor of the cistern. “Now, you sneak up and jump on me.”

“Some other time.”

“Don’t be such a pussy. Come on.”

She was wearing pastel flip-flops, mesh panties and a white bikini top, which had become her official island ensemble. Sammy Tigertail found it extremely distracting. He wasn’t sure whether Gillian was trying to torment him, or whether she was merely oblivious to his feelings.

“I’m really beat,” the Indian said. All morning he’d been chopping paths through the gnarled cactus plants, which at least had proven to be juicy and pleasantly edible.

“Please?” Gillian said. “Just pretend.”

The Seminole aligned himself on top of her, bracing his elbows to lever some of his weight off her backside. She was warmer than an alligator and, in the absence of a corrugated hide, much softer.

Gillian laughed under the strain and said, “Now what?”

He slipped one hand under her chin and firmly placed his other hand on the crown of her head, effectively clamping her mouth closed.

“The trick,” he explained, “is to pin ’em without pissing ’em off.”

Gillian grunted and began to wriggle. Sammy Tigertail abruptly rolled off. He hoped she wouldn’t comment about him getting hard, but of course she did.

“It’s about time. I was beginning to worry about you,” she remarked as she sat up.

“This isn’t a game. It’s a serious deal.” Sammy Tigertail thought: Uncle Tommy’s right. These girls are bad medicine.

“I totally can’t believe you haven’t tried to bone me yet,” Gillian said. “It took Ethan, like, three and a half minutes the first time we went out. Not to do it, but to try—that’s how long from when we got in the car ’til he jammed my hand down his jeans.”

Sammy Tigertail said, “I’m not as smooth as Ethan.”

“I wouldn’t even jerk him off, okay?”

“Listen.” He stood up and tugged Gillian off the floor. “Hear that?”

It was another low-flying plane.

“Go outside and start waving,” he told her.

“Kiss my butt,” she said.

“What’re you trying to prove?” The Indian seized her by the shoulders. “There’s not a drop of freshwater on this island—no soap, no ice, no electricity. You’re gonna be livin’ on bird eggs and fish, which you said makes you barf. So go on home, okay? Go back to Tallahassee and lose Ethan and start over.”

She pulled away and angrily blurted something that the Indian couldn’t hear because of the plane buzzing low. When it was gone, she said, “I thought this was a free country.”

“Why the hell are you here?” the Seminole asked.

“You go first.”

“A guy died on my airboat and I needed somewhere to go. Somewhere with no white people.”

“Is that how come you won’t screw me?” Gillian said. “That’s just as prejudiced as me asking you about alligator wrestlin’. Know what? It’s even worse.”

Sammy Tigertail heard himself say, “My girlfriend’s white.”

Gillian crossed her arms in mock surprise. “No way!”

“I mean my ex-girlfriend.”

“Name, please.”

“Cindy. She’s a crank freak.”

“Ha, you and I
do
have something in common. We both pick losers,” Gillian said. “Look here, chief. Someday when I’m a gray-haired old lady I can tell my grandkids that I was kidnapped by a real live Indian and held hostage on a mangrove island in the Everglades. And that I taught him how to play the guitar, and he taught me all about gators, and we ate funky cactus berries and counted butterflies and slept in a broken cistern. That’s a pretty great story.”