Skink--No Surrender

  Southbound on U.S. 331, I went around a battered pickup loaded with bulbous watermelons. The old heap was only doing thirty and the road was clear on both sides, but the passing move freaked Malley out. I couldn’t help smiling when she covered her eyes.

  “Oh, you think you’re so cool,” she said.

  “It’s Driving 101. Be nice and I’ll give you a lesson.”

  “I so can’t wait till you get your first ticket!”

  The thought had crossed my mind, too. I didn’t want to do anything to attract police attention, because Malley and I definitely didn’t look like we were on our way to a church picnic—two scruffy teenagers cruising around in a car that didn’t belong to us, with thousands of dollars hidden in a shoe box.

  Skink’s driving mix was playing, the music that had gotten him through Vietnam, he’d said. When a song called “Born to Be Wild” came on, Malley reached to turn it off. Then she changed her mind and turned up the volume. We passed a sign for Eden Gardens State Park, which she thought was funny because my booster-seat book was East of Eden.

  The rippled shine of Choctawhatchee Bay came into view, and I pulled off at a picnic area on the north side of the causeway. I took some money from the trunk of the car and approached a dock where a heavyset man was hosing down his Pathfinder, a basic open eighteen-foot fishing boat. The engine was a big two-stroke Yamaha.

  “Know where I could rent something like this?” I asked.

  The man shook his head. “Most places you gotta be twenty-one.”

  “Seriously?”

  “On account of the insurance,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “ ’Less you do a private deal.”

  “I’ve got cash,” I said.

  The man got thoughtful. I’d never met him before, but there was something familiar about that chubby, sunburned face and oversized balding head.

  “You ever run a outboard this size?” he asked.

  “All the time,” I lied. His engine had five times more horsepower than the one on my little skiff back home. Still, I was pretty sure I could handle it.

  “Don’t b.s. me, buddy.”

  “Want me to show you?”

  The man licked his dingy teeth and thought some more. “You got any ID?”

  I handed over the driver’s license that Mr. Tile had given me. The man glanced at my photo, nodded and gave it back.

  “I’ll pay you two hundred bucks for a four-hour rental,” I said. “That’s good money.”

  The man scratched the reddish stubble on his hedgehog chin. “Make it two-fifty—but first I need to see if you know the bow of the boat from the butt.”

  My cousin got out of the car to find out what was going on.

  “Hello, I’m Malley,” she said to the man.

  “My name’s Dime.”

  The wind shifted and I caught a toxic whiff of B.O. Instantly I made the connection. “You have a brother named Nickel?”

  “Sure do,” said Dime, “and a sister named Penny.”

  “Call Nickel, okay? He’ll vouch for me.”

  “He’s on his way back from Bonifay, and anyhow he don’t carry a phone. And this ain’t his boat, it’s mine, so git on board. Let’s see if you’re full a b.s.”

  Malley watched from a picnic table while I carefully motored Dime around a tongue of flat water that opened into the bay. The Pathfinder’s engine needed new spark plugs and the steering felt tight, yet I had no trouble maneuvering to Dime’s satisfaction.

  One key difference between driving a boat and driving a car is that a boat has no brakes. That means you need to throttle down and coast to your stopping point, or if there’s an emergency, slam it straight through Neutral into Reverse, and hang on. All the gears on Dime’s engine seemed to be working fine. As the boat gained speed, the rush of fresh air dispersed his foul odor and I could breathe freely again.

  I accelerated until the Pathfinder planed off, then I finished the tryout with a smooth 360. Dime took over the controls and steered back to the dock.

  “O-right,” he said. “Four hours max. But I need a deposit, ’case you two decide to cruise off to Alabama.”

  “How big a deposit?” Malley asked warily.

  “I’d say seven hunnert bucks.”

  “And I’d say you’re rippin’ us off.”

  “Okay, be that way,” Dime said. “Good luck findin’ you selves a nuthuh boat.”

  We had more than enough to pay the seven-hundred-dollar deposit, but I wasn’t sure that Dime would give it back when we returned. Malley and I had counted what remained in the shoe box: $9,970. It was a huge amount of cash, don’t get me wrong, but I thought Skink might need every dollar for medical bills.

  I put five fifties for the boat rental in Dime’s outstretched hand. “If we’re not back by sundown, the car is yours. That’s our deposit, okay?”

  He snorted louder than the wild boar. “You must think I’m a damn fool,” he growled, yet he gave the Malibu a long look over his shoulder.

  I tossed him the keys. “My word’s solid. You can ask Nickel.”

  “He’s my brother, not my boss.”

  “Didn’t he tell you about the shoe box?”

  Dime’s brow crinkled warily. “That was yore C-note?”

  So now I knew—a hundred bucks was all that Nickel had taken from the buried stash as a fee for ferrying me to the houseboat.

  “He earned it,” I said to Dime.

  “Yeah, well, he shoulda took more.”

  Malley jerked her chin toward the boat. “How much gas is in the tank?”

  “Enough. Y’all ain’t goin’ upriver, right?”

  She eyed him narrowly. “What’s the difference where we go?”

  “ ’Cause the river’s full a sunk stumps and snags you cain’t see,” Dime said. “Hit one them suckers and I’ll have to sell that car a yours to buy me a new boat.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll stay out in the bay, where it’s safe.”

  One more lie from the lips of Richard Sloan, but who was counting?

  TWENTY-ONE

  Malley didn’t want to wear a life vest. She said it made her look fat.

  “And check out the mildew. Gross!”

  “It floats, Mal. That’s all that matters.”

  But the life jackets on Dime’s boat were so old and rotted that they tore apart when we tried to put them on. This happened about two miles up the river, after we ran into choppy water during a gusty squall.

  The Pathfinder had a center console with a low windshield. To keep my head dry, I fitted on the governor’s shower cap, which had stayed crumpled in my back pocket throughout all our escapades.

  Malley said, “Okay, now you’re creeping me out.”

  “Don’t you believe in mojo?”

  “No, but I believe in dweebs, and that’s what you look like. Please take off that nasty thing.”

  “Nope.”

  On board was the cooler holding our snacks and drinks. I’d also brought the shoe box, to spare Dime from temptation.

  Malley pleaded for me to slow down, with good reason. The rain was so heavy that we could barely see ten yards beyond the bow. I eased back on the throttle, scanning the water for obstacles. My cousin unwrapped one of the brick-like subs from the convenience store and gave me half. We each took a bite and made the same sickly face.

  “What’s your guess, Richard—is this stuff ham or turkey?”

  “Vinyl,” I said.

  But we were hungry, so we forced ourselves to eat. The weather wasn’t fierce like the night before. There was no lightning in the dense veil of clouds that settled over the Choctawhatchee, blocking out the sun. We advanced through a strange murky twilight, the hard rain turning to a soupy mist. Every now and then we’d hear the plop of a turtle tumbling from a log, but to our eyes the banks were a haze. At one point my cousin yipped at the sight of a jagged tree limb floating dead ahead, but I’d already spotted it and steered clear.

  Eventually we passed a
nother boat, a flat-bottomed skiff drifting downstream. In it was a young couple bobber-fishing for bream and bass. Even in full rain suits the man and woman looked miserable, liked drenched rats. I’m sure Malley and I looked worse. She asked them if they’d seen a white houseboat with a possible hole in the hull, and they said no. The man was using a bait bucket to bail water, which reminded me to check our bilge pump. The wire connections were rusty, like most everything on Dime’s boat, yet the bilge was humming like a champ.

  “Quick question,” said Malley as we motored onward. “Did my parents really put up a ten-thousand-dollar reward, or was that just hype for the billboards?”

  “Are you kidding? It was totally legit—ten grand for any tip leading to your safe return. Why does that surprise you?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a lot of money,” she said.

  “Well, how much do you think you’re worth?”

  She rolled her eyes. “To them, or me?”

  “To everybody who cares about you,” I said. “Quit being such a pain in the ass.”

  She acted startled. “What did you just say?”

  “You heard me, Mal.”

  I nudged the throttle forward and kept to the middle of the river—or where I guessed the middle to be. As we rounded a sharp bend, Malley pinched my elbow and shouted. I saw it, too, a bulky object bobbing in the current off the starboard side. The boat was going too fast to stop in time, so I coasted past and circled back.

  The thing in the water was a gray hard-shell suitcase, just like the one I’d seen in the cabin of the houseboat.

  “Definitely T.C.’s,” said my cousin. “See the Mega-Moonwalker sticker?”

  The Mega-Moonwalker’s Ball was an electronic music festival in Denmark, where Tommy Chalmers claimed to have performed as the star DJ. Malley said anyone could buy the concert decals online for four bucks.

  I put the engine in Neutral, reached over the gunwale and hauled the suitcase aboard. “Not very heavy,” I remarked.

  “Don’t ask me. He kept it locked.”

  Fortunately, Dime had stowed a toolbox on the boat. I took out the screwdriver (rusty, of course) and pried at the latches of the suitcase until they popped open. Inside were the belongings of a professional criminal, not an aspiring musician.

  Three license plates from three different counties.

  A half-dozen credit cards and debit cards, none belonging to Thomas Chalmers.

  Two disposable cell phones.

  The blond wig he’d worn when he picked up Malley at the Orlando airport.

  A fake mustache that looked like a diseased caterpillar.

  A uniform shirt from a pest-control service that had the name “Bradley” stitched on the pocket, a shirt from a cable TV company that had “Chico” on it and a shirt from a septic-tank business that simply said “Supervisor.”

  And, tucked inside a blue plastic binder, a manila file titled “Malley Spence.” The ink was smeared because river water had leaked into the suitcase. My cousin grabbed the binder from my hand and practically clawed it open.

  The first page of the file was a printout of a photograph that she’d texted to the man she knew then as Talbo Chock. There was nothing bad about the picture—Malley in her emerald-green tracksuit, smiling at the camera. Her bony arms were folded and her cinnamon hair was tied in a ponytail, the way she always wore it when she trained.

  Without a word, my cousin ripped up the photo, crumpled the shreds and threw them into the water. The rest of the file was notes that Tommy Chalmers had carefully compiled, a profile of his target based on details that she herself had provided.

  “Don’t tear that up,” I said to Malley. “It’s evidence.”

  “Yeah. Evidence of my total stupidity.”

  “Do not—”

  But all the papers went flying. They came fluttering down around us, settling in the river as softly as leaves.

  I scrambled to find a net to scoop with, but there wasn’t one. It didn’t matter. Tommy’s stalker notes turned to tissue in the currents.

  “Let’s go,” my cousin said. “We’ve gotta be getting close.”

  A hundred yards farther we spotted a red bundle—Malley’s nylon travel bag. She dragged it dripping over the transom and said, “Okay, Richard, what’s the deal?”

  “Not sure.” I believed I knew what had happened, but I wanted to be certain.

  The next item we found was a white fiberglass hatch cover that had snapped off its hinges, followed by the lid of a small toilet seat that I recognized. Ahead of us snaked a bobbing trail of marine debris, which confirmed my fears.

  “The houseboat sank,” I told my cousin. “All this stuff broke loose when it went down.”

  She threw up her hands. “So is T.C. dead, or what?”

  “Just keep your eyes open.”

  I steered forward at a crawl.

  My backpack and its contents, including Silent Spring, must still be at the muddy bottom of the Choctawhatchee. Later, when everything was over, I rode my bike to the Loggerhead Mall and bought another copy of the book, which I finished in four straight nights. I even skipped an evening redfish trip so I could keep reading, which prompted my mother to feel my forehead and take my temperature.

  Toward the end of Silent Spring is a chapter describing how mosquitoes and certain other insects can become totally resistant to toxic pesticides that had been successfully (and lethally) used against them for years. For example, a Danish scientist reported observing a species of fly frolicking in a bath of DDT, the horribly destructive poison that for a long time was the world’s favorite weapon against unwanted bugs. That fly in Denmark had adapted and evolved over rapid generations until DDT was no more harmful to it than a puddle of ginger ale.

  How does that happen? The way Rachel Carson explained it, only the toughest and most resistant flies survived all that DDT spraying, and they mated with other tough survivors to produce even tougher ones—superflies that thrived in the face of the same chemical assault that had killed their weaker ancestors.

  Survival of the fittest, literally.

  When I was done with the book I thought about Skink, who also refused to be exterminated. I wondered to what degree his mother and father and grandparents and great-grandparents were as hardy and resourceful, or if he was simply a supreme freak of nature—one of those rare, random individuals who is blessed with all the strongest traits of his gene pool, and no fatal weaknesses.

  Of course he’d ridicule any such description of himself. Yet here is the vision that loomed out of the gray mist in a tailing eddy on the Choctawhatchee River one rainy summer afternoon:

  A lone man standing motionless on the water, his ragged reflection encircled in the liquid halo of an eerie bluish-purple sheen.

  Not walking on the water, Jesus-style, but just standing there, his bare feet (one of them mangled) clearly visible on the surface.

  Still impressive, right?

  Malley and I might have mistaken him for a holy apparition except for the camo pants and the golf club he wielded as a crutch—an antique nine-iron with a peeling leather grip.

  I waved. He waved.

  My cousin, who seldom admits to being mystified, said: “Okay, that is insane.”

  “Why, it’s the youth of America!” Skink sang out. “Outstanding!”

  As we drew closer I noticed a large, unnatural shadow in the depths beneath him, and the shape of it—a pale rectangular platform—became more distinct. The old man wasn’t standing on the water; he was standing on the roof of the sunken houseboat.

  “Tried to cork that hole in the hull,” he muttered. “Too little, too late.”

  I slipped the engine into Neutral. Deftly the governor hooked the toe of the nine-iron in our bow cleat to hold us in the current.

  “You all right?” Malley asked.

  “I’ve been better, butterfly.”

  A review of his assorted injuries: the deep head gash resulting from his confrontation with Dodge Olney, the pulverized
right foot resulting from an eighteen-wheeler running over it; a gory lacework of bruises, scrapes and scabbing punctures resulting from his wrestling match with a mammoth, highly pissed-off alligator.

  Now add to this woeful list a through-and-through gunshot wound. The slug had entered beneath his collarbone and exited beneath his left shoulder blade, miraculously missing all vital organs and crucial arteries.

  Survival of the fittest, but also the luckiest.

  We helped him climb aboard.

  “Where’s T.C.?” asked Malley.

  “Where’s the canoe?” was my question.

  “Son, I assume you’re carrying an anchor. Use it.”

  With a grunt I heaved out Dime’s heavy anchor, which snagged fast on the bottom. The Pathfinder came to an abrupt stop, the bow pointing upstream like a compass needle. I recognized the bluish-purple slick on the surface as oil and gas, leaking up from the houseboat.

  Malley’s eyes were riveted on the submerged wreck. “Is that where he is?”

  “It would have been useful,” said Skink, “to know he had another gun.”

  “Sorry. There was a lot going on.”

  “You hungry?” I asked him.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Malley flipped open the lid of the cooler. The governor grabbed the remaining icky sub, a Snickers bar and two bottles of water, which he chugged. We sat there watching him eat, waiting for him to tell us what had happened. He asked for his ridiculous shower cap, which I was happy to return. He was such a bloody mess that the snail shell covering his eye socket was probably the last detail a stranger would have noticed.

  I kept glancing down at the hazy silhouette of the houseboat, half expecting to see the rising corpse of Tommy Chalmers.

  “That heron? I asked him why he’d shot at it,” the governor began, “because I believe everyone deserves an opportunity to explain themselves. His answer was unsatisfactory, as was his attitude.”

  I’m thinking: Again with the bird?

  “Next we had a discussion about identity theft. To dishonor a fallen soldier like the late Corporal Chock by stealing his name is a loathsome act. Mr. Chalmers didn’t exhibit the proper remorse, and I became provoked. I’ll take another candy bar.”