Squirm

  “Know how much I had on me yesterday? Twenty thousand and eighty-one dollars. Are you listenin’?” Burnside takes a sneering drag off the cigarette. “Rich fella from California, he calls up and says he and his college fraternity brothers are doin’ a big coon hunt. They’re all makin’ bets on first and biggest, and he wants me to be his personal guide. When I tell him my usual fee, which ain’t cheap, he says, ‘No problem, pardner.’ So I drive my three Walkers all the way from San Antonio, and when I get here, he drops this fat stack of cash on the table. I count it all out and say, ‘Mister, this is way too much. Nobody in their right mind would ever pay that kinda money to track a damn raccoon.’ And he says, ‘That’s not what we’re gonna hunt.’ Then, when he tells me what it is he really wants to shoot, well, I can’t repeat the words that came outta my mouth. This was at a Cracker Barrel, too.”

  “We saw you guys arguing outside the motel.”

  “Yeah, that was shortly after,” Burnside says.

  “After what?”

  “After I threw the man’s cash in his face.” He picks up his coffee and opens the truck door. “I got a long drive home,” he says.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Burnside. I didn’t know—”

  “Whatever you might think of me, boy, I don’t break the law.”

  I ask about the scar on his twisted finger.

  “Snakebite. It was either me or Andy, so I took the hit. He’s dumber than the other two dogs put together, comes to rattlers.”

  “Diamondback?”

  “A six-footer, thick as my arm. You know your snakes, huh?”

  “Can I ask one more thing, Mr. Burnside?”

  “Make it quick.”

  “How do you train those hounds not to bark?”

  “Trade secret,” he answers with a raspy chuckle. “Love, patience, and lots of bacon treats.”

  Sometimes you can be dead wrong about a person. Once the embarrassment of your mistake passes, it’s actually a good feeling—being surprised in a positive way by human behavior. Not everyone lives by a code of honor, but the dog man does. He said no to a major pile of money.

  I wait until the kennel truck’s taillights are out of sight before running to my father’s pickup. When I tell Dad what Axel Burnside said, he gives a joyful whoop and says, “The hunt’s off! Let’s hit the road!”

  Summer starts rocking out, doing jazz hands in the back seat. I grab the dog-bait hamburgers Dad bought last night, dash back into the 7-Eleven, and motor straight for the microwave.

  That’s our breakfast, and those day-old burgers taste fantastic. The cinnamon buns we’re saving for later.

  The town of Immokalee is in the rearview mirror when Dad’s phone starts ringing. He presses the answer button and crows: “I’ve got some amazing news!”

  Pause.

  “What? Say that again.”

  Another pause, heavier than the first.

  “Are you serious? But how?”

  Dad pulls his foot off the gas pedal.

  “Tell me where he is!” he shouts at the phone.

  Now he’s turning the truck in a steep one-eighty, tires yelping on the pavement. I spin around to look at Summer, who offers a bleak shake of her head.

  Dad tosses the phone in my lap and slams the heel of his fist against the dashboard.

  “Was that your informant?” Summer asks.

  “Correct.”

  “So what’s wrong, Dennis?”

  “The panther hunt is still on. That’s what’s wrong.” His tone is oddly flat, showing no trace of the anger he must be feeling.

  It can’t be easy facing the fact you’ve got a fool for a son.

  I tell him how sorry I am. “The dog man lied to me! He said he was driving straight back to Texas. He stood there lying to my face, and I believed every stupid word.”

  “Burnside wasn’t lying. He’s gone,” Dad says, still with that dull metal voice. “Lincoln Baxter’s doing the hunt all by himself. He’s on his way to the ranch right now.”

  The speedometer says sixty-six, which is twenty-one miles per hour over the speed limit. Getting stopped by police is the last thing we need, but there’s not much I could say that would make my father slow down.

  Summer asks how Baxter can find a panther if he’s not using the hunting dogs.

  Dad says: “Same way he does it with grizzlies, I guess.”

  “Except big cats don’t show themselves the way bears do.”

  “If they’re hungry enough, they might.”

  Summer sniffs. “I predict he won’t even get a shot!”

  “Can we take that chance? No.”

  My father ends the discussion by cranking up the radio. After a few miles he relaxes his death grip on the steering wheel, and the speedometer needle begins to drop. When it hits forty-five, I turn down the music. Dad doesn’t object.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird,” I ask, “that your informant—whoever he is—would know exactly what the poacher’s doing at four in the morning?”

  “I wouldn’t say that’s weird.”

  “Then he must be tailing him, like we are.”

  “No, Billy, my informant is not sneaking around, following Lincoln Baxter.”

  “Then how does he know so much?” Summer demands.

  “Because my informant isn’t a he,” says Dad. “She’s a she.”

  Now I get the picture. It’s a love story gone wrong.

  FOURTEEN

  I’ve never had an official girlfriend. There were friends who happened to be girls, but we never got to “relationship” status.

  The one I liked most, I guess, was Anna Lee. This was when we lived in Key Largo. She was a star volleyball player, even though she stood barely five feet tall. I forget where we met, or how the subject of unusual hobbies came up. But on the afternoons she didn’t have volleyball practice, we’d ride our bikes up County Road 905 to hunt for snakes. We were scouting old junk piles, which are major reptile magnets because of all the mice and rats.

  Anna Lee had no fear. I’d flip over a board or a scrap of sheet metal, and she’d grab anything she saw—even black racers and coachwhips, which bite like maniacs. I’ve never met any person with faster moves than Anna Lee. She wouldn’t wear gloves, either, even in the upland hammocks, where scorpions were an issue. Poisonous centipedes, too. Anna Lee wasn’t scared of anything.

  I wish I could remember her last name. Goldman, Goldstein, Goulding? I could probably find her somewhere online, but then what?

  Exactly. She’s there, and I’m…wherever.

  Lincoln Chumley Baxter IV married a girlfriend of his named Daisy Marlowe. The ceremony took place at one of the many Baxter family estates. Daisy loved the outdoors, though not for the same reasons as Lincoln. He bought her a fancy Italian shotgun and she got pretty good at blasting clay pigeons out of the air, but she had no desire to shoot real birds or anything else that was alive.

  Daisy Marlowe Baxter wasn’t aware her husband was a big-game poacher until my father told her. Then she became his secret informant.

  According to Dad, their one and only meeting took place after he followed her to a fancy “spa and wellness resort” in a place called Monterey. Daisy Baxter was lying on a massage table under a tall white tent overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Her face, arms, and legs were plastered with green “healing” clay that smelled suspiciously like Play-Doh, and her eyes were covered with slices of cucumber.

  That’s the reason she didn’t see my father scaling the wall of the resort. She was startled to hear a strange voice saying: “Mrs. Baxter, there’s something you ought to know about Lincoln, something that might test your affections.”

  A security guard tried to hustle Dad off the property, but Daisy Baxter sat up, flicked the cucumbers off her eyelids, and said she wanted to hear what this odd, soft-spoken tresp
asser had to say.

  Dad recalled being uneasy because Mrs. Baxter wore only a towel. He politely aimed his gaze elsewhere while he explained that a hunter friend of his had been approached by Lincoln Baxter about guiding him to a Yellowstone grizzly bear.

  Daisy Baxter became very upset. “I suspected Linc was up to something shady, but I had no idea it was this bad! How can I help?”

  “Convince him to stop. Tell him how wrong it is, and not just because it’s illegal. He’ll listen to you.”

  “Are you kidding?” Mrs. Baxter replied. “He’ll look me dead in the eye and claim he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve questioned him before about these ‘special’ hunts, and he swears they’re legit. Except he never posts any pictures, which is strange.”

  That’s my father’s memory of the first conversation with his “informant.” It might not be word for word, but it’s probably pretty close.

  The bottom line is that Daisy Baxter agreed to contact Dad whenever Lincoln went on one of his suspicious trips. She checks in often with her husband—like she did a few minutes ago—and the next call she makes is to my father. She even bought an app called Spouse-Finder, which can locate Baxter within a radius of two hundred yards, using the GPS signal in his phone.

  In exchange for her supplying all that key information, Dad made one promise to Daisy: he would never personally do anything to harm her husband.

  “Does that include getting him tossed in jail?” Summer asks.

  “Oh, Mrs. Baxter’s got no problem with that,” Dad says. “She thinks the experience might straighten him out, though I doubt it. He’s got plenty of money for bail and slick lawyers.”

  We’re approaching the ranch on a long unpaved road. Dad’s no longer in touch with Mrs. Baxter because the cell service quit, but a fresh set of tire tracks is visible on the packed gravel ahead. Dad switches off the headlights so nobody will see us coming. He drives extra slowly, watching for stray cattle—and a black Range Rover.

  A bank of wispy fog makes it feel like we’re bouncing through the clouds. Summer and I are wide awake now.

  “What would happen,” I ask my father, “if Baxter found out his wife was secretly helping you monkey-wrench these hunts? Would he hurt her?”

  “She’s got a black belt, Billy. We’re talkin’ tae kwon do. Daisy Baxter’s not afraid of Lincoln.”

  “Would he leave her if he knew the truth?”

  “A better question,” Summer pipes from the back seat, “is why she doesn’t leave him?”

  Dad says he’s obviously no expert on marriage. “Some are more complicated than others. That’s one of the few things I know for sure.”

  The gate to the ranch property is made of wire fencing and aluminum crossbars. A NO TRESPASSING sign is screwed to one of the wood posts, and a NO HUNTING sign is nailed to the other.

  We could easily climb over, but Dad doesn’t want to leave his truck parked on the dirt road, where ranch workers would notice it. They’d call a towing company and then come looking for us.

  Hanging from the gate latch is a heavy-duty brass padlock. Summer tries to pick it open with a bent paper clip. The lock won’t surrender, and I can hear her cussing under her breath.

  “My turn,” Dad says impatiently, pulling out a pair of bolt cutters.

  After he steers the truck through the entrance, I shut the gate behind us and hang the broken lock back on the latch. A few miles down the ranch road, we finally nose out of the fog. Dad coaxes the pickup into a thick stand of palmettos, the fronds screaking against the paint.

  He turns off the engine, and we sit to listen. The mockingbirds are waking, and cows bray in the distance. A soft violet glow in the sky means the sun will be rising soon. Hungry mosquitoes pour into the cab of the truck.

  “Vicious little vampires,” my father growls.

  We jump out and spray each other’s clothes with bug juice. Summer and I sort the hiking gear while Dad prepares the spy quadcopter—he wants it airborne at daybreak.

  Lincoln Chumley Baxter IV is nearby, stalking a panther.

  “I wonder where,” Summer says.

  The answer comes with the crack of a gunshot echoing across the misty scrub.

  My father looks up from the drone and says, “Oh no.”

  * * *

  —

  One time, before Belinda or I was born, Dad surprised Mom with a trip to see wild flamingos, her second-favorite bird on the planet. They drove through Everglades National Park to a place actually called Flamingo, on the shore of Florida Bay. In a rented boat they went searching for a famous flock that lived near the tidal flats, not far from the ranger station.

  But that day the flamingos weren’t there, not even one. My mother took lots of cool pictures of blue herons, white pelicans, cormorants, and even a pair of roseate spoonbills. She had a fantastic trip, but Dad was bummed because he couldn’t find the only birds he’d promised to show her.

  A few years later, waiting at a dentist’s office, he saw a magazine article about a place in the Bahamas where flamingos can be found any time of the year, guaranteed. Right away he started planning another expedition.

  Mom pointed out that they now had two small children, and that an island vacation wasn’t cheap. Dad said no problem, and charged the plane tickets to their credit card. Then he took Belinda and me to the courthouse to get U.S. passports, which we used exactly once—for that Bahamas trip.

  I’d like to say I remember it, but maybe looking through Mom’s photo album makes me think I remember. After all, I was only two and a half.

  Even so, I carry in my mind a crystal vision of those flamingos—rows and rows of them wading with slow jointed strides across the shallows. With bowed heads, they stir their down-curved bills through the clear water, sifting for tiny brine shrimp and baby crabs.

  As our motorboat approaches, the birds all stop feeding and turn toward the sound of the engine. One starts to flap away and more follow, rising in soft puffs of color—some have blood-orange feathers, some are hot pink, and the younger ones look pale, almost milky. The front edges of their wings are as black as asphalt, matching the tips of their bills.

  The flamingos rise in clusters before melting together into a single V-shaped squadron. They aren’t exactly sleek. Their heads seem too heavy for those long thin necks, and their legs dangle behind them like loose ropes. Yet flying as a single wave, they make an unforgettable sight, a swipe of creamy rose paint on a bright blue canvas.

  I see my mother in the bow of the boat, aiming her camera at the soaring birds. My father sits beside her, his hands steadying her shoulders. There’s no picture in Mom’s photo album of the two of them like that, but I swear I remember the moment. Belinda won’t admit she remembers, too. She’ll say only that after Dad set me on her lap, I kept waving and waving at the flamingos until they disappeared beyond the mangroves.

  Sometimes, when the memory of that morning gets hazy, I take out my passport just to look at the ink stamp that says “Bahamas Immigration.” The passport is expired now, but I’ll probably hang on to it. Belinda says that island trip was the last real family thing we did together. Mom never figured out how my father paid off the credit-card bill, but my guess is Aunt Sophie helped.

  What made me think about the wild flamingos is the red-topped sandhill crane that’s studying us now as we creep through the Everglades scrub. Sandhills are my mother’s third-favorite bird. Like bald eagles and flamingos, they usually choose a mate for life. This one is out walking all by itself.

  Summer whispers, “We’ve got sandhills in Montana, too.”

  It’s weird to see a girl carrying a shotgun, but then again I’ve never seen anybody carrying a shotgun. Dad assures me that Summer knows how to shoot.

  “And it’s got nothing to do with being a Crow,” she adds, throwing me a sharp look. “The key is go
od eyes and steady hands.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I say.

  Guns make me nervous. So do gunshots. When most people hear one, the natural impulse is to go the other way. We’re doing just the opposite, sneaking toward the shooter as quickly as we can. The unspoken fear is that we’re too late, that the shot we heard was Lincoln Chumley Baxter IV killing one of the last panthers in Florida.

  My father is carrying the quadcopter. I’ve got the hatchet, bug spray, binoculars, water bottles, and a few protein bars that we dug out of the console in the truck.

  The lonesome sandhill crane croaks loudly as we trudge past. Normally I’d stop and text a photo to Mom, but we’re in a major hurry.

  Summer and I are still eagerly waiting to hear Dad’s master plan.

  “It’s flexible,” he tells us.

  “So it’s not really a plan,” I say. “It’s more of a floating concept.”

  “Keep your voice down, Billy.”

  We’re following a game trail so narrow that we’re forced to move single file. Summer goes first because she’s the one with the gun. When Dad asks her if the safety switch is on, she sighs: “Of course. Duh.”

  We’re all jittery, breathing fast. When a spooked rabbit darts between Dad and me, I jump like two feet in the air.

  Finally we enter a small clearing, and Dad motions for me to pass him the binoculars.

  “You see something?”

  “Stay low, please. Both of you.”

  Summer and I drop to the ground. My father raises the binoculars and clearly dials in on something.

  “What is it?” Summer asks.

  “Baxter’s Range Rover. He tried to cover it with palmetto branches, but I see the sun glinting off the chrome grille.”

  “But do you see him?” I ask.

  “Not yet.”

  “So it’s drone time.”

  “Correct.” Dad hands me the binoculars. “You’re kneeling in an ant pile, son.”

  There’s nothing like firebolts of pain to take a person’s mind off a sketchy situation. These particular ants—the nasty red variety—have scaled my hiking shoes and sneaked under the cuffs of the pants I foolishly thought would protect me. Now the little ghouls are biting my legs. I roll on the ground kicking and clawing at myself, trying not to yell. Summer has intelligently scooted out of the way. By the time I finish neutralizing the nibbling insects, the quadcopter is in the air.