Sick Puppy

  "What should I call you?" Lisa June Peterson asked.

  "Let me think on that. You hungry?"

  "I was." She turned away while he worked at the haunches of the dead fox with a small knife.

  He said, "This is my first time back to Tallahassee."

  "Where do you live now?"

  "You know what's tasty? Possum done right."

  Lisa June said, "I'll keep my eyes peeled."

  "Tell me again what it is you do for Mr. Richard Artemus."

  She told him.

  Clinton Tyree said: "I had an 'executive assistant,' too. She tried, she honestly did. But I was pretty much an impossible case."

  "I know all about it."

  "How? You were just a baby."

  Lisa June Peterson told him about the research that Governor Artemus has asked her to do. She did not tell him the scheme that had been kicking around her head, keeping her up nights; her idea to do a book about Clinton Tyree, Florida's lost governor.

  "Did your boss say what he wanted with my files?" The grin again. "No, I didn't think so."

  "Tell me," said Lisa June.

  "You poor thing."

  "What is it?"

  "Your Governor Dickie has an errand for me, darling, and not a pleasant one. If I don't oblige, he's going to throw my poor helpless brother out on the street, where he will surely succumb to confusion. So here I am."

  Lisa June felt a stab of guilt. "Doyle?"

  Clinton Tyree raised a furry eyebrow. "Yes. My brother Doyle. I suppose that was in your damn research, too."

  "I'm so sorry." But she was thinking: Dick Artemus isn't capable of such a cold-blooded extortion.

  The ex-governor speared the sliced pieces of fox on the point of a whittled oak branch, balancing it over the flames. "The reason I came to see him—your boss—is to let him know the dire ramifications of a double cross. He needs to be aware of how seriously I regard the terms of this deal."

  Lisa June Peterson said: "Isn't it possible you misunderstood?"

  Clinton Tyree gazed down at her with a ragged weariness. Then he dug into a dusty backpack and brought out a brown envelope crookedly folded and dappled with stains. Lisa June opened it and read the typed letter that had been delivered to Clinton Tyree by his best friend, Lt. Jim Tile. It didn't matter that there was no signature at the bottom—Lisa June recognized the bloated phrasing, the comical misspellings, the plodding run-on sentences. The author of the threat could only be the Honorable Richard Artemus, governor of Florida.

  "My God." Despondently she folded the letter. "I can't hardly believe it."

  Clinton Tyree snatched her under the arms, drawing her face close to his. "What I can't believe," he rumbled, "is that your boss had the piss-poor, shit-for-brains judgment to come fuck with me. Me of all people."

  His crimson eye jittered up toward the stars, but the good eye was fixed steady and lucid with wrath. "Anything bad happens to my brother from all this nonsense, someone's going to die a slow, wretched death involving multiple orifices. You get the picture, don't you?"

  Lisa June Peterson nodded.

  The ex-governor eased her to the ground. "Try some fox leg," he said.

  "No, thanks."

  "I advise you to eat."

  "Maybe just a bite."

  "People speak of me as Skink. You call me captain."

  "OK," said Lisa June.

  "Any reason you need to be home tonight?"

  "No. Not really."

  "Dandy," said Clinton Tyree, stoking the campfire. "That'll give us time to get to know each other."

  The flight from Fort Lauderdale to Gainesville took ninety minutes, plenty of time for Palmer Stoat to reflect on a productive half day of work. With a two-minute phone call he'd made forty grand. The woman on the other end was the chairperson of the Miami-Dade County Commission, who had obligingly moved to the bottom of the night's agenda an item of large importance to Palmer Stoat. It was a motion to award the exclusive fried-banana concession at Miami International Airport to a person named Lester "Large Louie" Buccione, who for the purpose of subverting minority set-aside requirements was now representing himself as Lestorino Luis Banderas, Hispanic-American.

  To avoid the unappetizing prospect of competitive bidding, Lester/Lestorino had procured the lobbying services of Palmer Stoat, whose sway with Miami-Dade commissioners was well known. Once he had identified the necessary loophole and lined up the requisite voting majority, all that remained for Stoat was to make sure the fried-banana contract was placed far down on the agenda, so that the "debate" would be held no sooner than midnight. The strategy was to minimize public input by minimizing public attendance. A sparse crowd meant sparse opposition, reducing the likelihood that some skittish commissioner might get cold feet and screw up the whole thing.

  It was a cardinal rule of political deal fixing: The later the vote, the better. So stultifying was the average government meeting that not even the hardiest of civic gadflies could endure from gavel to gavel. Generally, the only souls who remained to the wee hours were being paid to sit there—lawyers, lobbyists, stenographers and a few drowsy reporters. And since the shadiest deals were saved for the end, when the chamber was emptiest, competition was fierce for space at the tail of the agenda.

  Lester Buccione had been elated to learn that the fried-banana contract would be taken up last, in tomb-like tranquillity, and that for this favor the chairperson of the Miami-Dade Commission had demanded only that one of her deadbeat cousins be hired as a part-time cashier at one of Lester's new fried-banana kiosks. So pleased was "Lestorino" that he had promptly messengered to Palmer Stoat's home a cashier's check for the $40,000 fee, which divinely had mended Stoat's tattered confidence—five-digit reassurance that the planet had not skittered off its axis, that the rightful order of the urban food chain had not been perverted, despite the harrowing madness that had ruptured Stoat's personal universe.

  He had been fingering the check from Lester Buccione, savoring its crisp affirmation, when out of the blue his missing wife had telephoned and asked him to charter another plane to Gainesville. Right away! And Palmer Stoat had thought: Thank God she's finally come to her senses. He would fly up to get her and then they would go away for a while, somewhere secluded and safe from the demented dog dismemberer, the lascivious bald cyclops, the sadistic Blond Porcupine Man, the doll-stroking Clapley...

  The plane landed at half-past two. Stoat searched for Desie inside the terminal but she wasn't there. One of his cell phones rang—Stoat carried three—and he snatched it from a pocket. Durgess was on the line: No luck so far with the rhino, but good news about Robert Clapley's cheetah! They'd found one in Hamburg, of all places, at a children's zoo. The cat would arrive within days at the Wilderness Veldt Plantation, where it would be caged, washed and fattened up in advance of the big hunt. Anytime you're ready! said Durgess, more perky than Stoat had ever heard him. I'll inform Mr. Clapley, Stoat said, and get back to you.

  He walked to the airport parking lot and squinted into the sunlight, not knowing exactly what to look for. A horn honked twice. Stoat turned and saw a white Buick station wagon approaching slowly. A man was driving; no sign of Desie. The car stopped beside Palmer Stoat and the passenger door swung open. Stoat got in. In the backseat lay Boodle, an orange-and-blue sponge football pinned beneath his two front paws. His tail thwapped playfully when he saw Stoat, but he clung to the toy. Stoat reached back and stroked the dog's head.

  "That's the best you can do?" the driver said.

  "He stinks," said Stoat.

  "Damn right he stinks. He spent the morning running cows. Now give him a hug."

  Not in a two-thousand-dollar suit I won't, thought Stoat. "You're the one from Swain's," he said to the driver. "Where the hell's my wife?"

  The station wagon started moving.

  "You hear me?"

  "Patience," said the driver, who looked about twenty years old. He wore a dark blue sweatshirt and loose faded jeans and sunglasses. He had sha
ggy bleached-out hair, and his skin was as brown as a surfer's. He drove barefoot.

  Palmer Stoat said, "You tried to scare me into thinking you cut up my dog. What kind of sick bastard would do that?"

  "The determined kind."

  "Where'd you get the ear and the paw?"

  "Not important," the young man said.

  "Where's Desie?"

  "Whew, that cologne you're wearing... "

  "WHERE IS MY WIFE?"

  The Roadmaster was heading north, toward Starke, at seventy-five miles an hour. Stoat angrily clenched his hands; moist, soft fists that looked about as menacing as biscuits.

  "Where the hell are you taking me? What's your name?" Stoat was emboldened by the fact that the dognapper appeared to be unarmed. "You're going to jail, you know that, junior? And the longer you keep my wife and dog, the longer your sorry ass is gonna be locked up."

  The driver said: "That blonde you sometimes travel with, the one with the Gucci bag—does Desie know about her?"

  "What!" Stoat, straining to sound indignant but thinking: How in the world does he know about Roberta?

  "The one I saw you with at the Lauderdale airport, the one who tickled your tonsils with her tongue."

  Stoat wilted. He felt a thousand years old. "All right. You made your damn point."

  "You hungry?" the driver asked.

  He turned into a McDonald's and ordered chocolate shakes, fries and double cheeseburgers. As he pulled back on the highway, he handed the bag to Palmer Stoat and said, "Help yourself."

  The food smelled glorious. Stoat came to life, and he quickly went to work on the cheeseburgers. Boodle dropped the foam football and sat up to mooch handouts. The driver warned Stoat not to feed the dog anything from the McDonald's bag.

  "Doctor's orders," the young man said.

  "It's all your fault he got sick in the first place." Stoat spoke through bulging, blue-veined, burger-filled cheeks. "You're the one who yanked all the glass eyeballs out of my trophy heads. That's what he ate, the big dope—those taxidermy eyes."

  "From the trophy heads. Yes, I know."

  "And did Desie tell you what his surgery cost?"

  The driver fiddled with the knobs on the stereo system. Stoat recognized the music; a rock song he'd heard a few times on the radio.

  "I tell you what," the young man said, "these speakers aren't half-bad."

  "Why'd you steal my dog?" Stoat swiped at his lips with a paper napkin. "Let's hear it. This ought to be good." He finished engulfing one double cheeseburger, then wadded the greasy wax wrapper.

  The young man's eyebrows arched, but he didn't look away from the highway. He said to Stoat: "Don't tell me you haven't figured it out."

  "Figured what out?"

  "How I chose you. How all this rough stuff got started—you honestly don't know?"

  "All I know," Stoat said with a snort, "is that you're some kinda goddamn psycho and I did what you wanted and now I'm here to collect my wife and my dog." He fumbled on the door panel for the window switch.

  "Oh brother," said the driver.

  Stoat looked annoyed. "What now?"

  The driver groaned. "I don't believe this."

  "Believe what?" said Palmer Stoat, clueless. Casually he tossed the balled-up cheeseburger wrapper out of the speeding car.

  "Believe what?" he asked again, a split second before his brainpain detonated and the world went black as pitch.

  19

  In Twilly Spree's next dream he was down in the Everglades and it was raining hawks. He was running again, running the shoreline of Cape Sable, and the birds were falling everywhere, shot from the sky. In the dream Desie was running barefoot beside him. They were snatching up the bloodied hawks from the sugar white sand, hoping to find one still alive; one they could save. McGuinn was in Twilly's dream, too, being chased in circles by a scrawny three-legged bobcat—it might have been hilarious, except for all the birds hitting the beach like russet feather bombs. In the dream Twilly saw a speck on the horizon, and as he drew closer the speck became the figure of a man on the crest of a dune; a man with a long gun pointed at the sky. Heedlessly Twilly ran on, shouting for the hawk killer to stop. The man lowered his weapon and spun around to see who was coming. He went rigid and raised the barrel again, this time taking aim at Twilly. In the dream Twilly lowered his shoulders and ran as fast as he could toward the hawk killer. He was astonished when he heard Desie coming up the dune behind him, running even faster. Twilly saw the muzzle flash at the instant Desie's hand touched his shoulder.

  Except it wasn't Desie's hand, it was his mother's. Amy Spree gently shook her son awake, saying, "My Lord, Twilly, were you dreaming? When did this start?"

  Twilly sat up, chilled with sweat. "About a week ago."

  "And what do you dream about?"

  "Running on beaches."

  "After all these years! How wonderful."

  "And dead birds," Twilly said.

  "Oh my. You want a drink?"

  "No thanks, Mom."

  "Your friend is relaxing out on the deck," said Amy Spree.

  "I'm coming."

  "The man with the pillowcase over his head?"

  "Yes, Mom."

  "She says it's her husband."

  "Correct."

  "Oh, Twilly. What next?"

  Amy Spree was a stunning woman of fifty-five. She had flawless white skin and shy sea-green eyes and elegant silver-streaked hair. Twilly found it ironic that in divorcehood his mother had chosen Flagler Beach, given both her aversion to tropical sunlight and her previous attachment to a philandering swine who hawked oceanfront property for a living. But Amy Spree said she was soothed by the Atlantic sunrises (which were too brief to inflict facial wrinkles), and harbored no lingering bitterness toward Little Phil (whom she dismissed as "confused and insecure"). Furthermore, Amy Spree said, the shore was a perfect place to practice her dance and clarinet and yoga, all of which required solitude.

  Which her son interrupted once a year, on her birthday.

  "I never know what to get you," Twilly said.

  "Nonsense," his mother clucked. "I got the best present in the world when you knocked on the door."

  They were in the kitchen. Amy Spree was preparing a pitcher of unsweetened iced tea for Twilly, his new lady friend and her husband, who was trussed to a white wicker rocking chair once favored by Twilly's father.

  "How about a dog?" Twilly asked his mother. "Wouldn't you like a dog?"

  "That dog?" Amy Spree eyed McGuinn, who had hungrily positioned himself at the refrigerator door. "I don't think so," said Amy Spree. "I'm happy with my bonsai trees. But thank you just the same."

  She put on a straw hat as broad as a garbage-can lid. Then she carried a glass of tea outside to Desirata Stoat, on the deck overlooking the ocean. Twilly came out later, dragging Palmer Stoat in the rocking chair. Twilly placed him on the deck, next to Desie. Twilly sat down on a cedar bench with his mother.

  Amy Spree said, "I am not by nature a nosy person."

  "It's all right," said Desie, "you deserve to know." She looked questioningly at Twilly, as if to say: Where do we start?

  He shrugged. "Mrs. Stoat's husband is a congenital litterbug, mother. An irredeemable slob and defiler. I can't seem to teach him any manners."

  Desie cut in: "There's an island over on the Gulf Coast. My husband's clients intend to bulldoze it into a golf retirement resort. A pretty little island."

  Twilly's mother nodded. "I was married to such a man," she said with a frown. "I was young. I went along."

  An unhappy noise came from Palmer Stoat. The pillowcase puckered in and out at his mouth. Desie put one foot on the chair and began to rock him slowly.

  "What's the matter?" she asked her husband. "You getting thirsty?"

  Twilly said, "His gourd hurts. I whacked him pretty hard."

  "For tossing garbage out of the car," Desie explained to Twilly's mother.

  "Oh dear," said Amy Spree. "He's always had trouble controll
ing his anger. Ever since he was a boy."

  "He's still a boy," Desie said fondly.

  Amy Spree smiled.

  "That's enough of that," said Twilly. He jerked the pillowcase from Palmer Stoat's head and peeled the hurricane tape off his mouth. "Say hello to my mom," Twilly told him.

  "Hello," Stoat mumbled, squinting into the sunlight.

  "How are you?" said Amy Spree.