Nature Girl

“Standard operating procedure,” Eugenie explained. “We don’t ever use our real last names. None of us do.”

  Honey Santana was crestfallen. “You work there, too?”

  “Next time just hang up the phone. End of story,” Eugenie said. “They won’t call back. The list of numbers we got, it’s a mile long.”

  “This is awful.” Honey pressed her knuckles to her temples. “I’m talking about basic old-fashioned civility and respect. The man told me to go screw myself. He called me a dried-up skank.”

  Shreave stiffened. “After you insulted my mother.”

  “I did no such thing!” Honey discarded the apology she’d rehearsed. Shreave didn’t deserve it. “All I did was ask a simple, very reasonable question: Did your mom raise you to be a professional pest? Did she bleed and suffer through your birth, Boyd, so that you could grow up to be a nag and a sneak? My guess would be no. My guess is that your folks had higher hopes for you. And what about Lily?”

  Shreave wobbled, exposed once more.

  “The real Mrs. Shreave,” Honey went on. “Tell me she’s happy that this is how your career has peaked. Tell me she’s proud and content to be married to a telephone solicitor.”

  Eugenie Fonda broke in. “Okay, sweetie, we’re all on board. Boyd’s real sorry he called and bothered you. He’ll never do it again. Now can you please get us outta here?”

  “No, I don’t believe he cares one bit.” Honey scrutinized Shreave for a shadow of remorse. “He definitely does not get the point.”

  Shreave confirmed this by saying, “I get it, all right: You’re as crazy as a shithouse rat.”

  Eugenie glowered at him. “Very smooth.”

  “She fucking kidnapped us!”

  Honey said, “I thought you’d enjoy it out here. Be honest—did you ever see any place so amazing?”

  Shreave hooted. “Only every week on Survivor.”

  “His favorite show,” Eugenie said, whacking a spider on her ankle. “That and Maury Povich.”

  Honey was lost. She felt like a sap.

  “You can go now,” she said, digging into the stash of Cheerios.

  Boyd hopped up and plumped his Indiana Jones hat. Eugenie Fonda said, “Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll get lost in five minutes without her.” She turned to Honey. “Come on. You’ve had your fun.”

  “Keep heading east and you’ll be fine.”

  “We won’t be fine. We definitely will not be fine.”

  “Then stay with me.”

  Shreave growled, “Fuck that. Let’s go.”

  Honey watched them hustle down the path toward the creek. She rested her head on one of the duffels and hoped, against all odds, that they’d find their own way back to Everglades City. She truly didn’t wish to see them again. Her speech had bombed, and now the whole plan seemed depressingly misguided. She hated to give up, but it appeared that Boyd Shreave was a hopeless cause.

  The sky had changed color, and Honey felt a cooling shift in the wind. She didn’t mind spending the night alone; poachers typically operated in secret, and the ones with the gun were probably long gone. She’d make a fire and, before sunset, go for a skinny-dip in the creek. In the morning she would return to the mainland and then wait for Fry after school. She planned on finding her way back using Perry Skinner’s GPS, into which she had programmed several waypoints while leading the Texans through the islands.

  Far away she heard an airplane, and soon the drone of its engine turned into a light chorus of humming. The tune, though pleasant, was unfamiliar. She tried to hum along but couldn’t nail the key. There was a rustle nearby and Boyd Shreave reappeared, silky strands of spiderwebs trailing from both earlobes. He stomped into the clearing and said, “Okay. Get your ass in gear.”

  Honey sat up. Genie emerged from the trees and said, “You win. The joke’s on us.”

  “What joke? You said you were going back.”

  Shreave said, “Oh, and I guess we’re supposed to swim.”

  Honey got a knot in her gut. “The kayaks are gone?”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Eugenie said thinly.

  Boyd Shreave whipped out a stubby pistol and leveled it at Honey’s heart. “Don’t just sit there all innocent. Tell your pals to bring back our goddamn boats.”

  Honey said she didn’t have any pals on the island. “I don’t know who stole the kayaks. Honest to God.”

  Eugenie Fonda skeptically eyed the gun in Shreave’s hand. “I don’t know, Boyd. In the daylight it sure looks like a toy.”

  He laid it flat in his palm for examination. “It’s not a toy,” he said, with no abundance of confidence.

  “Whatever. Put the damn thing away,” Eugenie told him. “She’s tellin’ the truth.”

  “Great. Now you’re takin’ sides against me.”

  “I know where he got it—from under my bed,” Honey Santana said. “And he’s right, it’s not a toy.”

  Shreave smirked at Eugenie. “Told you. Ha!”

  Defiantly he shoved the weapon back into his pants, which lit up with a dull crackle. Shreave yowled and pitched backward as if he’d been clipped by a freight train. For what seemed like half a minute he flopped and shuddered on the ground, clutching his groin with curled, bone-white fingers.

  Eugenie Fonda watched the spectacle without comment. Honey explained, “Actually it’s not a gun, either. It’s an electric Taser.”

  With a sigh Eugenie said, “What a fucking pinhead.”

  “I wouldn’t touch him just yet.”

  “Oh, don’t worry.”

  With the stolen kayaks in tow, Sammy Tigertail relocated to the southeastern leg of the island. He built a new campfire while Gillian amused herself with Dealey.

  When she pulled the crumpled socks from his mouth, he asked, “Who are you?”

  “Thlocko’s hostage.”

  “I guess that makes two of us.”

  “No, you’re just temporary. Like a POW,” she said. “He also goes by ‘Tiger Tail.’ That’s a Seminole chief.”

  “Don’t I get a chance to explain?”

  “Doubtful. He’s hard-core.” Gillian opened one of the Halliburtons and began tinkering with the Nikon.

  Dealey said, “Don’t do that.” When he reached for the camera, she swatted his hand.

  Sammy Tigertail looked up from the fire and threatened to throw both of them in Pumpkin Bay, which he had misidentified as the nearest open body of water. It was, in fact, Santina Bay, an error of no immediate consequence.

  “Ten thousand islands and these assholes had to pick this one,” the Seminole said.

  Retreat had fouled his mood. The place was being infested by white people and white spirits. Two rifle shots had failed to scare off the kayakers, forcing Sammy Tigertail to abandon the shell-mound campsite upon which he had hoped to commune with the ancient Calusas. Now the three tourists were settling in, and Sammy Tigertail was stuck with both the college girl and the spirit of the dead white businessman.

  “I’m not a goddamn ghost!” Dealey protested, displaying his bloody feet as evidence of mortality.

  Gillian snapped a few close-ups and set the Nikon down. The Indian handed his guitar to her and told her to play something soft. She slowly worked into “Mexico,” by James Taylor, which Sammy Tigertail recognized and approved. It would have sounded better on an acoustic but he couldn’t complain. For the first time he noticed that Gillian had a lovely voice, and he feared it would add to her powers over him. Still, he didn’t tell her to stop singing.

  When the number was over, Dealey stated that he was thirsty. Gillian told him to join the club. “We’ve been living for days on cactus berries and fried fish. I’d blow Dick Cheney for a Corona,” she said.

  “What do you want with me?” Dealey asked the Seminole, who took the Gibson from Gillian and began twanging the B string over and over.

  Gillian leaned close to Dealey and whispered, “Thlocko won’t talk to you because he thinks you’re a spirit. He says he’s done hassling with dead wh
ite guys.”

  “Then tell him to let me go.”

  “Go where?” Gillian smiled. “Please. You are so not getting out of here. Hey, who was that jerkoff with the Band-Aids on his hand?”

  Dealey said he didn’t know the man. “Some freak named Louis who’s stalking a woman from the trailer park. He clubbed me with that shotgun and made me go with him.”

  “That’s rich,” said Gillian, “getting kidnapped twice in the same day. It might be a world record.”

  “I’m not makin’ this up. That’s the guy who gave me the black eye!”

  Gillian told Dealey that she believed him. Sammy Tigertail instructed her to stop speaking to the death spirit.

  “But I think he might be real,” Gillian said, giving Dealey a secret wink.

  “That could be bad for him,” said the Seminole, who’d already considered the possibility. Unlike the spirit of Wilson, Dealey hadn’t faded away when Sammy Tigertail opened his eyes. More suspiciously, he’d made himself visible and audible to Gillian, who was plainly not an Indian.

  Sammy Tigertail fingered a D chord and began to strum feverishly. He wished he had an amplifier. Gillian pulled out Dealey’s digital Nikon and took some shots of the Seminole playing, which she showed to him in the viewfinder. She said, “Damn, boy, you could be quite the rock star.”

  The Seminole liked the way he looked holding the Gibson, though he tried not to appear too pleased. “I don’t want to be a rock star,” he said.

  “Sure you don’t,” said Gillian. “All the free poon and dope you can stand, who’d want to live like that?”

  “I need quiet. I can’t think.” Sammy Tigertail carefully wiped down the guitar and put it away. Then he unrolled his sleeping bag and ordered Dealey to crawl inside.

  “Zip him up. I mean all the way,” Sammy Tigertail told Gillian.

  “Even his head?”

  “Especially his head.”

  Dealey turned pink. “Don’t! I’m claustrophobic!”

  “Where are those damn socks?” Sammy Tigertail asked.

  “No—not that! I’ll keep quiet, I swear.”

  Gillian said, “Come on, Thlocko, can’t you see he’s scared shitless?”

  “Then you squeeze in there with him. For company,” Sammy Tigertail said. “There’s room for two.”

  “Gross.”

  “He can’t try anything. He’s dead.”

  “Nuh-uh,” she said.

  Dealey turned on one side to make space. Gillian slid into the sleeping bag behind him, positioning her elbows for distance enforcement. The Seminole zippered the top, sealing them in warm musty darkness. He said, “I told you, I need to think.”

  After a few moments he heard their breathing level off. He sat down not far from the lumpy bulk. It was a mean thing to do, putting Gillian together with a possible death spirit, but maybe she’d finally come to her senses and abandon the notion of staying on the island. No normal young woman would tolerate the sack treatment, but then Gillian was miles from normal.

  A part of Sammy Tigertail didn’t want to drive her away; the weak and lonely part. But what did he need her for? Surely not to teach him the Gibson. He could learn on his own, like so many of the great ones. His father had told him that Jimi Hendrix had taken one guitar lesson in his whole life, and that the Beatles couldn’t even read music.

  “Hey.” Dealey’s hushed voice, inside the bundle.

  “Hey what?” said Gillian.

  Sammy Tigertail edged closer to listen.

  “There’s a motorboat,” Dealey was saying.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “No, there’s a boat on the island. That’s how we got here.”

  “You and Band-Aid Man?” Gillian said.

  “Yeah, his boat,” Dealey whispered. “I think I could find it.”

  “And your point is?”

  A short silence followed. The larger of the two lumps shifted in the sleeping bag. Sammy Tigertail massaged the muscles of his neck, waiting.

  “The point is,” Dealey said impatiently, “with the boat we can get away from him!”

  “And why in the world would I want to do that?” Gillian whispered back, with an earnestness that made the eavesdropping Seminole smile in spite of himself.

  Sixteen

  The vice mayor of Everglades City borrowed from his neighbor a skiff rigged with a 35-horsepower outboard and an eighteen-foot graphite pole for pushing across the shallows. Perry Skinner brought a cooler of water and food, a spotlight, two bedrolls and the .45 semiautomatic. Fry, who was still hammered from the pain medicine, dozed in the bow for an hour while his father poked around Chokoloskee Bay. There was no sign of Honey and her guests, or of Louis Piejack’s johnboat.

  Fry awoke as the sun was setting.

  “What now?” he asked his father.

  “We keep lookin’.”

  “Can I take off this helmet? I feel okay.”

  “You lie.” Perry Skinner knew that Honey would blame him if anything happened to the boy. She would, in fact, go berserk.

  Fry felt his ribs and grimaced. “It’s gettin’ dark,” he said.

  “Better for us.”

  “But they’ll hear us coming a mile away.”

  “Give me some credit, son.”

  Perry Skinner hadn’t forgotten the art of night running, which was essential to prospering as a pot smuggler in the islands. He had never been busted on the water because the feds couldn’t find him, much less catch him. They’d arrested him on dry land at daybreak, along with half the male population of Everglades City. Five DEA guys had come crashing through the screen door, Honey half-naked and hurling a fondue pot at the lead agent, who’d been too entertained to book her.

  During his outlaw career Skinner had been exceptionally cautious and discreet. His only mistake was trusting a man he’d known since kindergarten. To save his own hide, the friend had ratted out both Perry and Perry’s brother, betrayal being the boilerplate denouement of most drug-running enterprises. Skinner only fleetingly had contemplated revenge against the person who’d turned him in. It was, after all, his first cousin.

  The shit had gone down before Fry was born, and he wouldn’t have been born at all if Honey Santana hadn’t been waiting for Skinner when he got out of prison; waiting in a lemon-colored sundress and white sandals. It was a total surprise, especially the smile. She’d mailed 147 letters to Skinner while he was locked up; few were conciliatory and none were forgiving. Yet there she’d been, all dressed up and glowing in the Pensacola sunshine when he’d stepped through the gates at Eglin. The first words from her mouth were: “If you ever run another load of weed, I’m gonna cut off your pecker and grind it into snapper chum.”

  Perry Skinner had resumed a life of honest crabbing, and things at home had been good, for a while.

  “You gave the GPS to your mom?” he asked Fry.

  “Yep.”

  “And showed her how to use it?”

  “I tried,” Fry said.

  “What are the odds?”

  “Fifty-fifty. She still can’t figure out the cruise control on her car.”

  Nothing ever changes, Skinner thought. “How are you feelin’? And tell the truth.”

  “Shitty.”

  “That’s more like it.” Skinner was still worried about bringing Fry. He was not a fan of hospitals, and leaving the boy with strangers in the emergency room had seemed unthinkable at the time.

  “You gonna shoot him, Dad?”

  “Piejack? If it comes to that, yeah.”

  “But what if we’re too late? What if he already did something bad to Mom?”

  “Then he dies for sure,” Skinner said.

  Fry nodded. It was the answer he’d expected.

  Louis Piejack hadn’t heard anyone sneak up behind him. The blow had caught him at the base of the skull and he was out cold before he hit the cactus patch.

  At dusk he regained consciousness, roused by an onslaught of medieval pain. He thrashed fre
e of the clinging limbs, lost his balance and skidded backward into a ravine full of Busch beer cans. His landing sounded like a Krome Avenue head-on.

  In the twilight, the prone and panting Piejack surveyed upon his fishy clothing and sunburned flesh a bristle of fine needles. Incessant stinging enabled him to map mentally a pattern of perforation extending from his forehead to his shins. Miraculously spared from puncture were the tender digits protruding from the grubby gauze on his left hand. Unfortunately, because of the surgical bungling, his forefinger and thumb were now situated so far apart and at such inopportune angles as to render impossible the simplest of tweezing motions. Consequently Piejack had to rely on his weaker and less facile right hand to pluck at the tiny cactus spines, the number of which he calculated to exceed one hundred.

  A less inspired degenerate might have been laid low by such a handicap, but Piejack quickly collected himself. He didn’t much care who’d clobbered him, or why. He wasn’t overly concerned about losing his shotgun, or forgetting where he’d beached the johnboat. Nor did he feel especially motivated to hunt down his former captive, the fatass suit with the video camera, before the law came looking.

  Louis Piejack had only one thing on his mind: Honey Santana.

  He was fixated in the twitchy, pathological style of true-blue stalkers, and as he lay throbbing among the rusted beer cans he found himself deliciously reliving the single lightning-quick grope that had catapulted him toward this adventure; a deftly aimed hand, snaking out to cup Honey’s magnificent right breast as she’d unsuspectingly leaned over the display cooler to set on chipped ice a tray of fresh wahoo steaks. That she’d been wearing a bra had in no way diminished Piejack’s thrill; if anything, the intimate crinkle of fingertip upon fabric had only heightened his arousal.

  Honey’s retaliatory malleting had caught him off guard, yet he’d experienced only the slightest ebb of lust as his nuts swelled to the size of Brazilian limes. Soon thereafter Piejack had been abducted by the Miami thugs and subjected to the sadistic stone-crab torture.

  In fact, his whole existence had been a scroll of searing agony since he’d fondled Honey Santana, yet he desired her more avidly than ever. He’d come to believe that she secretly felt the same way, a pathetic delusion fueled by Honey’s surprise visit to his house. It was true that she’d hastily fled, but Piejack had chosen to interpret her apparent revulsion to his overtures as a tease.