Shiner’s mother was kissing the pavement, on the place she imagined to be Jesus’ forehead. “Don’t you worry, Son of God,” she kept saying. “I’m right here. I’m not goin’ nowheres!” Her devotion to the stain was remarkable, considering its downwind proximity to a flattened opossum.
A vanload of worried-looking pilgrims arrived, but the deputies ordered them to stay out of the right-of-way. Shiner’s mother raised her head and said: “That’s the collection box on top of the cooler. Help yourselves to a Sprite!”
By now traffic was blocked in both directions. The crew foreman, who was from Tampa and unfamiliar with the local lore, asked the deputies if there was a mental institution in town.
“Naw, but we’re overdue,” said one of them.
They each grabbed an arm and hoisted Shiner’s mother off the highway. “He’s watching! He sees you!” she screamed.
The deputies deposited her in the cage of a patrol car and chased the curious tourists away. Before continuing with the paving job, the crew foreman and his men assembled in a loose semicircle at the center line. They were trying to figure out what the lunatic biddy was ranting about.
Bending over the stain, the foreman said, “If that’s Jesus Christ, I’m Long Dong Silver.”
“Hell, it’s fuckin’ brake fluid,” declared one of his men, a mechanic.
“Oil,” asserted another.
Then the driver of the steamroller said: “From here it kinda looks like a woman. If you close one eye, a naked woman on a camel.”
That was it for the foreman. “Back to work,” he snapped.
The TV crew stayed for the paving. They got an excellent close-up of the Road-Stain Jesus disappearing beneath a rolling black crust of hot asphalt. The scene was deftly crosscut with a shot of a young pilgrim sniffling into a Kleenex as if grieving. In reality she was merely trying to stave off dead-opossum fumes.
The story ran on the noon news out of Orlando. It opened with videotape of Shiner’s mother, tenderly smooching the sacred smudge. Joan anxiously phoned Roddy at work. “There’s TV people in town. What if they hear about the turtle shrine?”
“Pretend we don’t know him,” Roddy said.
“But he’s my brother.”
“Fine. Then you do the interviews.”
Shiner’s mother was booked for disturbing the peace and after three hours was released without bail. Immediately she took a cab to the intersection of Sebring and the highway. The asphalt had hardened, dry to the touch; Shiner’s mother wasn’t even positive where the stain had been. She observed that somebody had stolen her collection box and most of the cold sodas. She was officially out of business.
She made her way to Demencio’s house and set her empty cooler in the shade of an oak tree, away from Sinclair’s crowd. Trish noticed her sitting there and brought a lemonade.
“I heard what happened. I’m so sorry.”
“Pigs tore my gown,” Shiner’s mother said.
“We can mend that in no time,” said Trish.
“What about my shrine. Who’s gonna fix that?”
“Just you wait. There’ll be new stains on the highway.”
Shiner’s mother said, “Ha.”
Trish glanced at the front window of the house, in case Demencio was watching; he’d be miffed if he spotted the old lady on the premises. Her ice-blue parasol stood out like a pup tent.
“You should go home and get some rest,” Trish said.
“Not after I’ve lost the two things in the world I care about most—the Road-Stain Jesus, and my only son.”
“Oh, Shiner will be back.” Trish, thinking: As soon as he needs money.
“But he won’t never be the same. I got a feeling he is bein’ corrupted by the forces of Satan.” Shiner’s mother drained the glass of lemonade. “How about some of that angel food?”
“I’m afraid it’s all gone. Need a lift home?”
“Maybe later,” Shiner’s mother said. “First I got to talk to the turtle boy. My heart’s been steamrolled, I need some spiritual healing.”
“Poor thing.” Trish excused herself and hurried inside to warn Demencio. Shiner’s mother lit a cigaret and waited for the line around the moat to dwindle.
23
The Everglades empties off the Florida peninsula into a shimmering panorama of tidal flats, serpentine channels and bright-green mangrove islets. The balance of life there depends upon a seasonal infusion of freshwater from the mainland. Once it was a certainty of nature, but no more. The drones who in the 1940s carved levees and gouged canals throughout the upper Everglades gave absolutely no thought to what would happen downstream to the fish and birds, not to mention the Indians. For the engineers, the holy mission was to ensure the comfort and prosperity of non-native humans. In the dry season the state drained water off the Everglades for immediate delivery to cities and farms. In the wet season it pumped millions of gallons seaward to prevent flooding of subdivisions, pastures and crops.
Over time, less and less freshwater reached Florida Bay, and what ultimately got there wasn’t so pure. When the inevitable drought came, the parched bay changed drastically. Sea grasses began to die off by the acre. The bottom turned to mud. Pea-green algae blooms erupted to blanket hundreds of square miles, a stain so large as to be visible from NASA satellites. Starved for sunlight, sponges died and floated to the surface in rotting clumps.
The collapse of the famous estuary produced the predictable dull-eyed bafflement among bureaucrats. Faced with a public-relations disaster and a cataclysmic threat to the tourism industry, the same people who by their ignorance had managed to starve Florida Bay now began scrambling for a way to revive it. This would be difficult without antagonizing the same farmers and developers for whom marshlands had been so expensively replumbed. Politicians were caught in a bind. Those who’d never lost a moment’s sleep over the fate of the white heron now waxed lyrical about its delicate grace. Privately, meanwhile, they reassured campaign donors that—screw the birds—Big Agriculture would still get first crack at the precious water.
For anyone seeking election to office in South Florida, restoring the Everglades became not only a pledge but a mantra. Speeches were given, grandiose promises made, blue-ribbon task forces assembled, research grants awarded, scientific symposiums convened … and not much changed. The state continued to siphon gluttonously what should have been allowed to flow naturally toward Florida Bay. In the driest years the bay struggled; turned to a briny soup. In the rainiest years it rebounded with life.
The condition of the place could be assessed best at remote islands such as Pearl Key. When the mangroves were spangled with pelicans and egrets, when the sky held ospreys and frigate birds, when the shallows boiled with mullet and snook—that meant plenty of good water was spilling from the ’Glades; enough for a reprieve from the larceny perpetrated upstream.
It was Chub’s misfortune to have arrived at Pearl Key after an exceptionally generous rainy season, when the island was lush and teeming. Scarcely two months later the flats would be as murky as chocolate milk, the game fish and wading birds would have fled, and in the water would swim few creatures of serious concern to a glue-sniffing kidnapper, passed out with one hand dangling.
His wounded hand, as it happened; swollen and gray, still adorned with a severed crab claw.
As fishermen know, the scent of bait is diffused swiftly and efficiently in saltwater, attracting scavengers of all sizes. Chub knew this, too, although the information currently was stored beyond his grasp. Not even a doctorate in marine biology would’ve mitigated the stupefying volume of polyurethane fumes he’d inhaled from the tube of boat glue. He was completely unaware that his wounded mitt hung so tantalizingly in the water, just as he was unaware of the cannabilistic proclivities of Callinectes sapidus, the common blue crab.
In fact, Chub was so blitzed that the sensation of extreme pain—which ordinarily would have reached his brain stem in a nanosecond—instead meandered from one befogged synapse to
another. By the time his subconscious registered the feeling, something horrible was well under way.
His screams ruined an otherwise golden morning.
The other three had been awake for hours. Bodean Gazzer was patrolling the woods not far from the campsite. Amber was attempting to revise Shiner’s tattoo, using a honed fishhook and a dollop of violet mascara. Before starting she’d numbed his upper arm with ice, but the pricking still stung like hell. Shiner hoped the procedure would be brief, since only two of the three initials required altering. Amber warned him it wasn’t an easy job, changing the letters from W.R.B. to W.C.A.
“The B won’t be bad. I’ll just add legs to make it look like a capital A. But the R is tricky,” she said, frowning. “I can’t promise it’ll ever pass for a C.”
Shiner, through clenched teeth: “Do your best, ’Kay?”
He turned away, so he wouldn’t see the punctures. Occasionally he’d let out a grunt, which was Amber’s cue to apply more ice. Despite the discomfort, Shiner found himself enjoying being the focus of her concentration. He liked the way she’d rolled up the sleeves of the camouflage jumpsuit and pinned her hair in a ponytail; all business. And her touch—clinical as it was—sent a pleasurable tickle all the way to his groin.
“I had a friend,” she was saying, “he was paranoid about dying in a plane crash. So he got his initials tattooed on his arms and his legs, his shoulders, the soles of his feet, both cheeks of his butt. See, because he’d read where that’s one way they can identify the body parts, if there’s tattoos.”
Shiner said, “That’s pretty smart.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t help. He was, like, a smuggler.”
“Oh.”
“His plane went down off the Bahamas. Sharks got him.”
“There wasn’t nothin’ left?”
“One of his Reeboks is all they found,” Amber said. “Inside was something that looked like a toe. Of course, it wasn’t tattooed.”
“Damn.”
To Shiner’s surprise, Amber began to sing as she went at him with the fishhook:
“Smile like a princess but bite like a snake—
Got ice in her veins and a heart that don’t ache.
She a nut-cutting bitch and that’s no lie,
Hack ’em both off with a gleam in her eye …”
Shiner said, “You got a nice voice.”
“White Rebel Brotherhood,” said Amber, “the song I told you about. It’s killer.” As she worked on the tattoo, her face was so close he could feel the soft breath on his skin.
He said, “Maybe I’ll check out the CD.”
“They do it more hip-hop.”
“Yeah, I figgered.”
“Am I hurting you?”
“Naw,” Shiner lied. “Matter a fact, I was wonderin’ if mebbe you could add somethin’ extry. Under the eagle.”
“Such as?”
“A swatch ticker,” said Shiner.
“A what?”
“You know—a swatch ticker. Like the Nazis had.”
Amber glanced up sharply. “Swastika, you mean.”
“Yeah.” He practiced the proper pronunciation. “That’d be cool, don’tcha think?”
“I don’t know how to draw one. Sorry.”
Shiner mulled it over, wincing every so often at the stabs of the fishhook. “I seen some good ones at the colonel’s place,” he said eventually, “if I can only ’member how they went. Look here….”
He cleared a place in the sand and, using a forefinger, drew his version of the infamous German cross.
Amber shook her head. “That’s not right.”
“You sure?”
“You made it look like … like something from the Chinese alphabet.”
“Now hold on,” said Shiner, but he was stumped. Just then Bodean Gazzer came stomping out of the mangroves. He sat near the fire and began wiping dew from his rifle. Shiner called him over.
“Colonel, can you do a swatch ticker?”
“No problem.” Bode saw an opportunity to impress Amber at the kid’s expense. He put down the gun and joined them under the tarp. With a sweep of a hand he erased Shiner’s chicken-scratch swastika. In broad, sure strokes he sketched his own.
Amber briefly scrutinized the design before declaring it had “too many thingies.” She was referring to the tiny stems that Bode had drawn on the ends of the secondary legs.
“You’re wrong, sweetheart,” he told her. “That’s exactly how the Nasties done it.”
Amber didn’t argue, but she thought: Any serious white supremacist and Jew-hater would know how to make a swastika. Bode and Shiner’s confusion on the topic reaffirmed her suspicions that the White Clarion Aryans were a pretty lame operation.
“OK, you’re the expert,” she said to Bode, and began reheating the point of the fishhook with a cigaret lighter.
Shiner felt his stomach jump. He had a hunch Amber was right—the colonel’s swastika was odd-looking; too many angles, and the lines seemed to point in the wrong direction. The damn thing was either upside down or inside out, Shiner couldn’t tell which.
“Where you gone put it?” Bode asked.
“Under the bird.” Amber tapped the designated location on Shiner’s left biceps.
Bode said, “Perfect.”
Shiner didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to offend his commanding officer but he sure as hell didn’t want another defective tattoo. And a fucked-up swastika would be difficult to fix, Shiner knew; difficult and painful.
Amber pressed a fresh batch of ice cubes against his arm. “Let me know when you can’t feel the cold.”
Bode Gazzer edged closer. “I wanna watch.”
Shiner fixed his gaze on the blackened barb of the fishhook and instantly became dizzy.
“Ready?” asked Amber.
Shiner sucked in a deep breath—he’d made up his mind. He’d do it for the brotherhood.
“Anytime,” he said thickly, and locked his eyes shut.
At first he believed the screams he heard were his own. Then, as the animal howling tapered to a stream of profanity, Shiner recognized the timbre of Chub’s voice.
Then Amber saying: “Oh my God.”
And Bodean Gazzer: “What the hell!”
Shiner looked up to see Chub, nude except for Amber’s orange shorts, which he wore up on his head. The shorts were pulled down as snugly as a skullcap, fitted at an angle to hide Chub’s eye patch.
But that’s not what made the others stare.
It was fastened to the end of Chub’s right arm, which hung limp and heavy at his side. where once there was only a pair of dead crab pincers there was now a complete live crab; one of the largest crabs Amber had ever seen, outside the Seaquarium.
“What do I do?” Chub pleaded. “Jesus Willy, what the fuck do I do?” Gummy-eyed from either sleep or glue, he displayed his other hand—his functional hand—for them to see. The knuckles were bloody knobs, from beating on the crustacean.
Amber cast her eyes at Shiner, who had not much experience with marine life and, thus, no counterstrategy. Despite his white brother’s awful predicament, he couldn’t help feeling a sense of reprieve. While the others stood transfixed by the sight of Chub, Shiner discreetly scuffed his feet across the dirt until he’d obscured Bode Gazzer’s dubious swastika sketch.
“The crab!” Chub was bellowing. “The crab, it’s after that g-g-god-damn claw!”
Gravely Bode surmised: “It’s either trying to eat it or fuck it.”
In its bloated and discolored state, Chub’s hand could have been mistaken by a farsighted crab for another member of its species; that was Bode’s hypothesis. Amber had nothing more plausible to offer.
Shiner asked, “How come he got your pants on his head?”
“God only knows,” she said with a sigh.
Chub bolted toward the water. When the others caught up, they found him madly slinging his lifeless crab arm against the stump of an ancient buttonwood.
Shi
ner stepped forward. “I’ll take care a that goddamn thing.”
Bode was alarmed to see the Beretta glinting in the kid’s paw. “Oh, no you don’t,” he said, snatching it away. “I’ll do the honors, son.”
“Do what?” Amber asked.
She felt Shiner’s hand on her shoulder. “Better stand back,” he advised.
Although he was unaware of it, Bodean Gazzer almost hadn’t made it back to camp. Tom Krome and JoLayne Lucks almost caught him alone.
They’d spotted him from about a hundred yards, moving across a salt flat on the crown of the island. The flat was wide and oval-shaped, ringed by mangroves and hurricane deadfall. Normally it filled up as a lagoon during the big autumn tides, but two days of heavy winds had blown out much of the water. Assault rifle in hand, Bode had scattered groups of stilt-legged birds as he clomped through the custardlike marl.
JoLayne and Tom had emerged from the tree line no more than two minutes behind him. They couldn’t risk following the same path across the flat because there was no cover. So they kept low to the ground and skirted the fringe, picking their way through the stubborn mangroves. It was slow going. Tom leading the way, holding the springy branches until JoLayne could squeeze past with the Remington. When they reached the place where the stumpy redneck had reentered the woods, they could make out his heavy-footed crackles and crunches ahead of them. They moved forward carefully, baby-stepping, so he wouldn’t hear.
Then the twig-snapping stopped. JoLayne tugged Tom’s sleeve and motioned him to be still. She came up beside him and whispered: “I smell wood smoke.”
The sound of conversation confirmed it. They were very near the robbers’ camp, possibly too near. Quietly JoLayne and Tom backed off, concealing themselves in a tangled canopy. All around them, the tree limbs were necklaced with freshly spun spiderwebs. Tom leaned back, dazzled.
“Golden-orbed weaver,” JoLayne said.
“It’s gorgeous.”
“Sure is.” She found it interesting that he was so calm, almost relaxed, as long as they were on the chase. It was doing nothing that seemed to unsettle him, the sitting and waiting.