Skink--No Surrender

  “We’re gettin’ married,” stated Tommy, like it was a done deal.

  “Oh, wow. Way to go.” I stole a glance at Malley, but I still couldn’t see her expression.

  Married?

  “When’s the big day?” I asked.

  “Sunday,” Tommy told me. “Sunrise on the beach at Destin.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Will the bride be wearing handcuffs?”

  “Ha! That’s a good one.”

  “Not funny,” said Malley.

  Tommy told her to lighten up.

  “Doesn’t seem like she’s into it,” I remarked.

  “You don’t know crap about crap,” the poet said.

  Here’s what I did know: My cousin wasn’t legally old enough to get married, and she wouldn’t have married a stone loser like Tommy at any age, for any reason.

  She collected our plates and rinsed them off with river water.

  “You got a preacher lined up for the wedding?” I asked.

  “Nah, I’m doin’ it myself,” Tommy said.

  “That legal?”

  “I wrote the sacred vows for both of us. Right, honey?”

  Malley seemed to wince at hearing him say that word. Honey. It creeped me out, too.

  “Do they rhyme?” I asked. “The vows, I mean.”

  “You kidding? ‘Our hearts were made to be together, in rain or hail or sunny weather. The journey we begin is epic, a love that will forever stay fantastic.’ ”

  “Wow.” What else could be said? It was hideous.

  My cousin bowed her head and pressed her knuckles to her temples, like she did when she got one of her headaches.

  She said, “Know what else rhymes with epic? Ickkk.”

  Tommy Chalmers turned to me. “Dinner’s over. Time for you to go.”

  “But it’s almost dark,” Malley objected.

  Tommy gave a mean grin. “Pirates ain’t scared of the dark, right? Now, go on, Captain No-Beard, get outta here.”

  What you might call a moment of decision.

  “But I like it here,” I said. “You guys are cool.”

  Tommy scratched a mosquito bite on his neck. “You got thirty seconds.”

  Malley took off her hat. With acid in her voice she asked, “Thirty seconds to do what, T.C.?”

  “To jump in the water and swim to shore,” the kidnapper said. “Unless the pirate boy don’t know how to swim.”

  “I’ll sleep out here on the deck and stay out of your way. Promise.”

  “Are you deaf,” Tommy said to me, “or just dumb?”

  “I’m tired is all. Full night’s sleep, I’ll be good to go.”

  “Dude, you’re going now.” He rose and took a step in my direction. “Get offa this boat!”

  “What if I said no?”

  “Then I’d do this.”

  All of a sudden Tommy was waving a gun—a silver-plated revolver. Don’t ask me where it came from. Maybe he’d been hiding it in the back of his jeans.

  My cousin said, “Put that thing away.”

  Meaning she’d seen the pistol before, which explained a few things.

  “Just chill out,” I said to him. My voice cracked high and brittle.

  “Move,” he rasped, “or this is gonna be you.”

  He turned and fired at a tall blue heron that was standing on the riverbank, minding its own business. The bullet pinged off a cypress stump, causing the bird to squawk and flap.

  Tommy took aim again. I didn’t wait for the shot, though I heard it the instant my skull struck him flush in the ribs. He went down still clutching the pistol, and I was more or less on top of him, Malley screaming at both of us.

  Tommy and I got all tangled up, grunting and huffing. It was a joke, really, me trying to overpower a guy so much bigger.

  What was I thinking when I tackled him? I wasn’t thinking. It was pure reflex, no brainwork whatsoever. The jerk had a loaded gun! Shooting at that bird was bad enough, but now he was one arm twist from shooting me.

  You always read about people in hairy situations “fighting for their lives,” and I definitely can say it’s not an exaggeration. My wrestling match with Tommy Chalmers was wildly desperate and awkward—nothing like what you see in the movies. I kept thinking about my mother, how devastated she would be if I never came home.

  Somehow I managed to pin the sweaty wrist of Tommy’s gun hand until he started slugging me with his free hand, which happened to be the one that the catfish gored. It had swollen up like a melon beneath the bloody T-shirt, and the padding didn’t help either of us much. Each blow probably hurt Tommy more than it did me, but he didn’t quit until he caught me square in the gut. The air gushed from my lungs and I felt myself deflating like a cheap raft.

  With no strain Tommy shook free of my grasp, and at that point I assumed I had only seconds to live—not enough time to tell my cousin how sorry I was for botching the rescue. Not enough time for a single tear.

  But then somebody seized me from behind by the shoulders. Suddenly I was hanging in midair, legs kicking, and I remember being totally impressed. I knew Malley was strong, but this was amazing.…

  Except there she stood, six feet away, staring up at me. Her mouth hung open.

  Tommy had squirmed to a sitting position, using his kneecaps to steady the pistol. His eyes were bugging wide, too.

  A low voice from above said, “So this is the youth of America.”

  I wheezed a yell, and twisted around to see his face.

  “Hola, amigo!” said Skink.

  From the looks of him, I figured I was either dreaming or dead.

  SIXTEEN

  Some images are scorched in your memory, for better or worse. The gator had done an epic job on the old governor.

  He was shoeless, shirtless and bareheaded, so the damage was on full display—seeping tooth wounds in his neck, a partial bite imprint on one shoulder, a grid of vivid welts on his chest that matched the armored ridges of the reptile’s tail. He had emerged from the river sopping and crowned with slimy hydrilla weeds that made him look like some sort of demented sea monarch. Among the sprigs of his beard dangled moist purplish leeches, several of which had attached to his hide-like cheeks.

  Battered and punctured, he still stood ramrod straight like the soldier he’d been half a century ago. During the struggle with the alligator his fake eyeball must have popped out, because the socket was now plugged with a glossy brown snail’s shell. His camo pants were blood-splotched, although his smashed foot didn’t look as bad as I’d remembered. That was probably because the rest of him looked worse.

  Waggling in a corner of the governor’s mouth was what I first thought was a cigarette, except they don’t make cigarettes with red stripes. It turned out to be a soda straw just like the one he’d used for underground breathing on the beach. This straw had been used for breathing, too, during his silent, submerged approach to the houseboat.

  After lowering me to the deck he said, “That heron flew away, in case any of you were wondering.”

  “Who are you?” I blurted, figuring it would be best if Tommy Chalmers didn’t know that Skink and I were a team.

  “He’s hurt. He needs help,” Malley said.

  “Nobody move. I mean nobody!” Tommy wasn’t sure whom to aim at—the scrawny runaway who’d attacked him or the cockeyed intruder. He kept jerking the gun barrel back and forth from me to Skink, who didn’t seem particularly concerned.

  “Son, why’d you shoot at that lovely bird?” he asked. “The only acceptable excuse would be a brain injury. Are you afflicted in such a way?”

  “Shut your trap!” Tommy growled. “Talk about me being mental, what’s the deal with putting that bowl in your eye?”

  “It’s the shell from an apple snail that no longer needs it.”

  “Creepy, period,” said my cousin, disappearing into the cabin.

  Calmly, Skink turned and peed over the side of the houseboat.

  “Hey, knock it off!” Tommy protested.


  “Overactive bladder,” the governor whispered. “You reach my age, the plumbing starts to sputter.”

  Tommy stood up. “You escape from a homeless shelter, or was it a nut house?”

  Skink zipped his trousers. “Son, if you have any redeeming qualities, I advise you to reveal them.”

  “My name’s Carson,” I interjected. “This is Tommy.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Carson.” Mischief glinted in Skink’s live eye. He gave an assuring wink when Tommy glanced away. “You must be mighty fond of birds,” he said to me, “to risk taking a bullet for one.”

  “He’s as crazy as you,” Tommy fumed.

  Malley returned with a first-aid kit. “Here’s Band-Aids and some antibiotics. I’d do it myself, but the truth is you really smell.”

  She could be cold, my cousin.

  “I do carry a funk,” Skink said agreeably. “It’s the raw life I lead. Do you have a name, young lady?” As if he didn’t know.

  “Malley Spence,” she replied. “What happened to you? I mean, you’re a disaster—no offense.”

  “I went after a gator. We fought to a draw.”

  There was a startling crack of thunder and the Choctawhatchee lit up. With all the turmoil aboard, none of us had noticed the wall of weather rolling in. The wind started howling, and with it came lashes of hard chilly rain.

  Tommy angrily ordered us into the cabin, where the governor dressed his alligator wounds and hummed a tune I didn’t recognize. Malley sat cross-legged on the floor. scrutinizing the old man with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. As I knelt down beside her, I felt a sharp pain in my ribs where Tommy had punched me.

  He stayed on his feet, his back pressed against the cabin door. I noticed he’d switched the pistol to his uninjured hand. “Who are you? What’re you doin’ out here?” he barked hoarsely at Skink.

  “I believe you’ve found my canoe.”

  “That’s yours?” my cousin asked, though by now she’d realized this unusual character was the bearded accomplice I’d told her about.

  “It got away from me upstream,” Skink said.

  “Too bad” was Tommy’s response. “Finder’s keepers is the law of the sea.”

  “But we’re not on the sea. We’re on a river,” Malley needled.

  “Same deal!”

  The governor spit out the straw. “In any case, I’d appreciate the prompt return of my vessel. Please.”

  It seemed like I was the only one worried about being shot, the only one paying attention to the loaded gun. Skink and Malley were speaking to Tommy as if he were waving a harmless cucumber.

  “No way,” he said. “That canoe’s mine now.”

  The rain was pelting the boat so loudly that he said it twice, to make sure he’d been heard. Skink’s reaction was to begin picking leeches from his face and popping them into his mouth like junior Twizzlers.

  Malley groaned. “That is so incredibly gross.”

  Skink shrugged. “Nourishment, child.”

  He sure knew how to make a first impression.

  “Stop right now!” Tommy shouted over another boom of thunder.

  The governor wiped a sleeve across his blood-flecked lips. “Since you refuse to give back my canoe, I’ll be quietly on my way.”

  “Me, too,” I piped, knowing that he wasn’t going far, that soon he’d be hatching a new scheme to save Malley. “Dude, thanks for letting me hang for dinner,” I said to Tommy, as if we hadn’t been fighting ferociously only minutes earlier.

  He stomped one shoe and declared that nobody was going anywhere until he said so.

  “Don’t move.” His plugged little rat eyes flicked around the cabin. He looked edgy and stressed. Overwhelmed, really.

  Malley said, “What’s your problem, T.C.? If these two are dumb enough to swim through a lightning storm, let ’em go.”

  “No, no, I gotta think.”

  The governor said thinking was highly overrated, which made me and my cousin laugh in spite of the situation. At that point Tommy’s sense of humor was basically nonexistent. After our tussle on the deck, I’m sure he believed that his revolver was the only thing between him and a mutiny.

  He made Skink and me sit side by side with our legs extended, then tried to handcuff us together. The cuffs wouldn’t fit around either of the governor’s thick wrists, which really annoyed Tommy. He told Malley to get the rope off the spare anchor, and pointed to the hatch where I’d stashed my backpack and the nine-iron. She opened the lid and started kicking stuff around, griping the whole time.

  Tommy’s face beaded with sweat, and he grinded his jaws to fight off the pain from his catfish injury. It appeared to me he was getting sick, which was bad news for him but good news for the rest of us.

  After Malley found the rope, Tommy instructed her how to tie us up, since he was unable to do it himself. With him hovering at her shoulder, she bound my wrists behind me and did the same to Skink using double half hitches that looked way more secure than they were. All this time the governor’s eyelids were closed and he kept making clicking sounds with his teeth, like a movie cowboy signaling his horse.

  A deeper wave of darkness set in, night catching up with the storm. Tommy shook the batteries out of the radio and inserted them into a flashlight, which he pinned under one arm. When I asked why he didn’t just turn on the cabin light, Malley said they didn’t want to drain the houseboat’s battery, which was running low.

  “T.C., you don’t look so great,” she said.

  “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  “I’ve got some aspirin in my bag. It works on a fever.”

  Once more I couldn’t believe what she was saying. She should have been cheering for the fever.

  “I’m good,” he said sullenly.

  “Are not. Let me feel your forehead.” When she took a step toward him, he bellowed at her to stay back.

  “I said I’m fine!”

  “Fine! Be an ass.”

  “Don’t mess with me!” Tommy said. Then he raised his arm and shot out one of the cabin windows.

  Malley sat down sobbing. You could see the bullet hole in the flapping sheet, and hear the raindrops peppering the fabric. My ears rang, and I smelled the tang of gunpowder.

  “Such drama,” Skink said.

  Tommy was completely frazzled. He was trying his hardest to scare a man who couldn’t be scared.

  “Know what? Maybe I should just kill you and Captain No-Beard. Dump you both overboard.”

  “Well, that would be labor-intensive,” the governor responded, “not to mention messy. Your smarter option is to get a grip.”

  Tommy lurched close and placed the pistol to Skink’s weed-capped head. “What’d you say, old man?”

  “Don’t!” Malley cried.

  “See, she knows me. She knows what I can do,” Tommy boasted, but he was trembling so much that the flashlight beam coming from his armpit jiggled all over the walls.

  The revolver wasn’t moving that much because Tommy was pressing it hard against Skink’s temple.

  One time I asked my father, who was super-laid-back, if he believed in evil. We’d been watching the TV news when an awful story came on about some guy who went to a crowded movie theater and started shooting everyone, people he’d never met before, even kids. The place looked like a war zone after he was done. The lawyer for the shooter said he had severe emotional problems (which was, like, no kidding), but in my mind that didn’t account for how and why he devised a plan so awful and coldblooded.

  And I remember Dad mulling my question for a few moments before saying that true evil was rare, but, yes, it was real. He also said that it didn’t occur in any other species besides humans, and I believe he was right. Violence and brutal domination exist in the animal world as a means for survival, not as sport or sick amusement.

  Whatever personal issues Tommy Chalmers might have had during his life, it was a streak of pure evil that made him go after my cousin. I felt that way then, and I still do.
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  Poking Skink with the pistol barrel, Tommy said, “Well, old man? What do you think now?”

  “I think you remind me of someone.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The last fool who pointed a gun in my direction.”

  Tommy was on the verge of exploding.

  My cousin said, “T.C., you’re gonna ruin everything. Just chillax.”

  “What! Don’t you hear how he’s talkin’ to me?”

  “So what? He’s nutty as a fruitcake.”

  “Ouch,” said the governor.

  Another crash of thunder rattled a wedge of glass from the shot-out windowpane. Malley used the distraction to scoot closer, and I felt her arm reaching behind me. At first I thought she was trying to loosen the knots, but actually she was placing an object in one of my hands.

  It was the pocketknife from my backpack. She must have secretly removed it while retrieving the rope out of the hatch.

  Tommy looked shakier by the minute. He backed away from Skink and braced himself against the frame of the doorway.

  I said, “Just let us go, dude. Then you can get on with your cruise.”

  He shook his head, muttering, “Too late for that. No way. Too late.” The flashlight flickered the way cheap ones do.

  The governor turned slightly toward Malley. “How’d you two meet?”

  Like we were all sitting in a booth at Applebee’s, waiting for our salads.

  “He found me in a chat room,” my cousin said.

  Tommy didn’t care for the insinuation that he was some kind of stalker. He said, “Hey, babe, get it right. Who found who?”

  “They’re getting married in a couple days,” I cut in. “Tommy’s a poet. He wrote the wedding vows himself.”

  “Sweet,” said Skink.

  “He’s looking for a word that rhymes with orange.”

  “Don’t be a dorkface,” Tommy snapped.

  “He made it sound like we had a ton in common,” Malley went on. “YOLO and so forth.”

  “YOLO?” said the governor.

  “It stands for ‘you only live once,’ ” I explained.

  “Ah.”

  “My mom and dad were sending me off to boarding school,” Malley said, “up in freaking New Hampshire. The more I thought about it, the more it sounded like a prison sentence. I don’t do cold, okay? So then Tommy—he was calling himself ‘Talbo’ online—came up with this radical idea. He said hey, girl, why don’t we just take off together, you and me. A trip to the middle of nowhere. And I said let’s go for it.”