Nature Girl

  “That’s more than five months,” she added.

  “Wow,” Shreave said.

  “Too long, Boyd. Way too long.”

  “Yeah.” Already the back of his neck was moist and clammy.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” Lily leaned forward, letting her robe fall open. Shreave couldn’t help but observe that her breasts seemed larger than Eugenie Fonda’s. He wondered if he’d somehow forgotten what they looked like, or if his wife had secretly been to a plastic surgeon.

  She touched his arm softly, then lobbed a question that lay there like a ticking grenade: “Boyd, is there something you want to talk to me about?”

  Oh Christ, does she know? he wondered anxiously. Or is she fishing?

  Working from slickly worded scripts had dulled Shreave’s talent for the improvisational lie. He knew he needed something better than an oil change to handle Lily’s current line of interrogation.

  “It’s not you, it’s me,” he began.

  Slowly she pulled her robe closed and crossed her arms.

  “It’s a flashback from the accident in Arlington,” he said, aware that he was raising a touchy subject.

  “Three years ago?” Lily raised her eyebrows, but Shreave soldiered on.

  “I’m what they call ‘clinically depressed.’ The doctor says it’s affected my…you know…”

  “Libido.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Anyhow, I got some of those pills, but they haven’t helped at all.”

  “What brand? The kind Bob Dole uses?” Lily was very active in the local Republican leadership committee, and a longtime admirer of the former senator from Kansas.

  Shreave said, “The exact same stuff, but it doesn’t work on me. I still haven’t got the slightest interest in…you know…”

  “Fucking?”

  “Right. Off the agenda completely.” He shrugged in resignation.

  His wife said, “Well, what do you suppose you’re so depressed about?”

  “Hell if I know. But the doctor says that’s pretty common.”

  Lily nodded sympathetically. “And who’s your doctor?”

  “Kennedy,” Shreave said, following Eugenie Fonda’s presidential advice on made-up names. “Some hotshot shrink over in Irving. Don’t worry, he’s on the company HMO.”

  Lily got up to refill his coffee cup, which Shreave interpreted positively. “Is something wrong at work?” she asked.

  “Are you kidding? They love me. I’m up for a promotion.”

  “That’s great news.” Lily bit her lip. “This is my fault, too, Boyd. I’ve been so tied up with the restaurants that I didn’t notice what was happening between us.”

  In fact she’d been very busy—quietly closing a deal to sell her six pizza joints to the Papa John’s corporation for a boggling sum of cash and common stock, none of which she intended to share with Boyd Shreave in the upcoming divorce. Lily felt sure that her husband’s unfaithfulness would make him an unlikely candidate for alimony in the eyes of most Texas judges, especially the Republican ones. In the meantime, Lily was finding it strangely enjoyable—almost exciting—to toy with him.

  She said, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s get dressed.”

  Shreave frowned. “Where are we going?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “But Judge Joe Brown is on in fifteen minutes.”

  “Great. Now I’m married to Rain Man.” Lily steered Boyd out of the kitchen, saying, “When’s the last time Judge Joe gave you a hard-on?”

  Later, in the car, Shreave sat solemn and petrified. He feared that Lily was taking him on a shopping adventure to the adult-video store a few blocks from their house—the same place he’d been renting DVDs for his clandestine visits to Eugenie Fonda’s apartment. Shreave had no faith that the video-store clerk would be merciful enough to pretend not to recognize him, or to not mention the $37.50 in late fees he’d piled up.

  But Lily went speeding past the porn parlor, and Shreave sagged in relief. She wheeled into a busy strip mall and led him into a bagel shop, which he vaguely recalled from a long-ago date, before they were married.

  “We came here the morning after our first night together,” Lily reminded him.

  “Oh, I remember,” Shreave said.

  “The night, or the bagels?”

  “Both.” Shreave forced a laugh. He was sweating like a hog with typhoid.

  Lily clearly was planning something dramatic, and Shreave waited in a state of pale dread. He couldn’t possibly resume sexual relations with his wife and still carry on with Eugenie; it would be way too much work. While some men were able and even eager to juggle the needs of many women, Shreave withered at the thought. Whether on the job or in the sack, he’d never been burdened with an abundance of ambition.

  “We’ll have two raisin cinnamons,” Lily told the waiter, “with cream cheese.”

  “And ice water for me,” Shreave added urgently.

  For some reason his wife had not removed her sunglasses. She appeared to be smiling to herself as she pulled her frosted hair back into a ponytail. From her handbag she took the car keys, which she let fall with a jingle to the linoleum floor.

  “Oops,” she said, and disappeared beneath the tabletop.

  Shreave gripped the arms of his chair as if plummeting on a crippled jetliner.

  “What are you doing!” he whispered bleakly.

  The question was answered by the sound of a zipper, his own. “Sshhh,” came the muffled counsel from his wife. “Just relax, sweetheart.”

  Never before had Boyd Shreave felt a need to fake impotence, and he was not up (or rather, down) to the task. As Lily rapidly got the better of him, he floundered in a state between panic and marvel—not once in thirty-five years had he been publicly fellated, and now it had happened twice in as many weeks, with different women! Most men would have found the coincidence thrilling, but Shreave worried about the heavy implications. He understood that yielding to his wife would officially reinitiate his marital obligations, and compromise his secret life.

  He ignored the gapes of other diners and pretended to study the menu listings printed on the paper place mat, all the while endeavoring to compress his knees together. However, Lily would not be dislodged.

  Just as surrender seemed imminent, the raisin cinnamon bagels arrived. Shreave seized the moment to stage a mishap, overturning a tumbler of cold water on his lap. Lily came out sputtering from beneath the table, Shreave loudly chastising the innocent waiter for his clumsiness.

  The restaurant manager picked up their tab for breakfast, but the couple rode home in a slack and deflated silence.

  The circumstances of Sammy Tigertail’s conception had not been concealed from him. His father drove a Budweiser truck three times a week between Naples and Fort Lauderdale, and was a regular customer at the Miccosukee service plaza where Sammy Tigertail’s mother worked in the gift shop. Because she had serious doubts about trying to raise a half-white son on the reservation, Sammy Tigertail’s mother reluctantly agreed to let his father keep the boy.

  So, for his first fourteen and a half years, Sammy Tigertail was Chad McQueen. He lived in a middle-class subdivision in Broward County with his father and, beginning at age four, a stepmother who aggressively attempted to acculturate him. Growing up, the boy showed no interest in soccer leagues or video games or skateboarding. His passion was roaming the outdoors, and learning the rock music that his father played on the car radio. By the time he was in first grade, the kid was singing along to Creedence and the Stones and the Allman Brothers. Everybody said he was going to turn out fine, despite his Indian genes.

  Then one day his father died suddenly. After the funeral, the boy’s stepmother drove him back to the Everglades and dropped him at the truck stop. He had sensed it coming, and he was privately looking forward to the move. Every other Sunday his father had taken him to visit his real mother at the Big Cypress, and the boy liked it out there.

  “I should’ve never let go of you,
” his mom said when he arrived with his suitcase and fishing rod. “This is where you ought to be.”

  “I believe so,” the boy said.

  “Remember the time you caught that cottonmouth with your bare hands? You were only seven.”

  “I didn’t know it was poisonous,” the boy reminded her. It had been an embarrassing episode. “I thought it was a water snake,” he added.

  “But you weren’t afraid!” his mother said supportively. “That’s when I knew you belonged here, and not in that other world. First thing we do now is fix your name—starting today you’re a Tigertail, same as me.”

  “Chad Tigertail,” the boy said proudly.

  His mother winced and shook her head. The boy agreed: Chad was definitely too white for the reservation.

  “What about Sammy?” he suggested.

  “Perfect. That was your great-grandfather’s name.”

  “Was he a fighter?”

  “No, a trapper. But your great-great-great-grandfather was a chief.”

  “Tiger Tail?” the boy cried excitedly. “The Tiger Tail?”

  It was true. Sammy was descended from one of the last great Seminole warriors, Thlocklo Tustenuggee, a cunning leader whose fate Sammy chose to regard as a mystery. Most accounts said the U.S. Army had shipped the chief off to New Orleans, where he’d died of tuberculosis in a stinking military dungeon. But at least one teller of the Tiger Tail legend claimed he’d committed suicide by swallowing ground glass on the ship to Louisiana. Another said he’d escaped to Mexico and ultimately made his way back to Florida, where he’d lived to be a very old man.

  Sammy felt honored to be half of a true Tigertail and, except for his Irish blue eyes, he looked full-blooded. To make up for the time lost during his white childhood, he spent hours listening to the stories of the elders. He envied them for having grown up in a time when the tribe lived in relative isolation, buffered by swamp from the other world.

  Now things were different. Now there were casinos and hotels and truck stops, and the stampede of outsiders meant big money for the Seminole corporations. A few of the tribal bosses even flew around Florida in private jets and helicopters, which impressed some people but not Sammy Tigertail. He remained on the reservation and worked hard, although his frequent bad luck caused others to whisper that he was cursed by the paleness in his past. It was a thought that also had occurred to Sammy Tigertail, and shadowed him now like a buzzard as he paddled alone across Chokoloskee Bay.

  He wondered about the man named Wilson, held fast with trap ropes and anchors on the bottom of Lostmans River. The sun was high and the water was warming, so it was possible that bull sharks would cruise in from the Gulf. Wilson wouldn’t feel a thing.

  A half dozen fishing boats flew past the young Seminole as he made his way through Rabbit Key Pass. Some of the anglers waved but Sammy Tigertail looked away. It had been nearly two days since he’d slept, and his senses were dull. Shortly after noon he beached the canoe on a small boot-shaped island. He unloaded his gear, taking special care with the guitar and the rifle, which was wrapped in a towel. He found a crown of dry land and made camp. It occurred to him that he hadn’t brought much food, but he wasn’t worried—his brother had sent along two spinning rods and a useful assortment of hooks and lures. Sammy Tigertail was not as resourceful in the wild as some of his full-blooded kin, but he did know how to catch fish.

  With noisy seabirds wheeling overhead, he lay down beneath a tree and fell into a hard sleep. The spirit of Wilson arrived, strung with slimy ropes and dragging all four anchors. The sharks hadn’t yet found him, although the blue crabs and snappers had picked clean his eye sockets. He was still half-drunk.

  “I was expecting you sooner,” said the Indian.

  “How come you didn’t take my money before you dumped me in the river?”

  “Because I am no thief.”

  “Or at least the doobs. That was a waste, my friend,” Wilson said.

  Sammy Tigertail allowed that he was sorry Wilson had died on the airboat excursion.

  “It was that fuckin’ snake, wasn’t it?” Wilson asked.

  “Naw, it was your heart.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  The dead tourist held up the disposable camera. The cardboard was sodden and peeling apart.

  “How about another picture?” said Wilson. “For my guys back at the bar on Kinnickinnic Avenue—something they could frame and hang in the pool room.”

  Kinnickinnic sounded like an Indian word, though Sammy Tigertail didn’t know which tribe had been run out of Milwaukee.

  “Aw, come on,” Wilson said. “They got an autographed photo of Vince Lombardi and a game jersey signed by Brett Favre. But a picture of me, dead and with my eyeballs chewed out—that’d be tits!”

  Sammy Tigertail said, “Sorry. No more photos.” He was extremely tired, and he wanted the dream to be over. He hoped that a shark would devour the disposable camera while chewing on Wilson. Sammy Tigertail wanted no one to see the humiliating, though undeveloped, images of him posing with the obnoxious white tourist.

  “It’s freezing in that damn river,” Wilson complained.

  “I had to move your body off the reservation. There weren’t many options.”

  “I didn’t know the water got so cold in Florida.”

  “Just wait till summer. It’s like soup,” Sammy Tigertail said.

  Wilson scowled and spit out a clot of brown muck. “You sayin’ this is it for me? I gotta spend the rest of eternity out in this goddamned swamp? Dripping wet and smellin’ like fish shit? Not to mention these fuckin’ anchors.”

  Sammy Tigertail said, “I can’t blame you for being angry.”

  “I shoulda croaked in the casino. I shoulda had my heart attack in the bar when that hooker was bouncin’ on my lap. That’s how I should be spendin’ the hereafter,” the spirit of Wilson fumed, “not out here all alone in the middle of nowheres.”

  “Deal with it,” the Indian said.

  “Fuck you. This was the worst vacation I ever had.”

  The dead tourist stomped the camera to pieces and shambled away, the anchors screaking across the floor.

  Sammy Tigertail awoke in a state of prickly agitation. It was dusk, with a chilly northwest wind blowing in off the Gulf. He put together one of the spinning rods, tied on a plastic minnow plug and hurried to the beach in hopes of fooling a redfish or a snook.

  But while the young Indian had been arguing with the white man’s spirit, a big tide had rolled in. It was not good for beach fishing, and even worse for an untethered canoe.

  In the fading light, Sammy Tigertail paced the shore, scanning anxiously in all directions. There was no sign of the bright blue craft. The wind and the fast-rising water had carried it away and possibly overturned it.

  Again he felt cursed. He trudged back to camp and built a fire. Then he took out the Gibson guitar and placed it across his lap. Running his hands along the instrument’s magnificent curves, he found himself soothed by the dancing flames reflected in the cool polished wood.

  Since he didn’t know any chords, Sammy Tigertail began strumming with a wild and random vigor. He had no amplifier, yet he imagined that he was filling the night universe with music. It was good therapy for a stranded man.

  Four

  The crab boat that Sammy Tigertail had borrowed to transport Wilson’s body belonged to a man named Perry Skinner, Honey Santana’s ex-husband and the father of her only son. Skinner hadn’t asked Sammy Tigertail why he needed the boat, because Skinner didn’t care to know. He was vice mayor of Everglades City and therefore inoculated from official scrutiny in most matters criminal and otherwise.

  “How’s school?” he asked Fry.

  “Electrifying.”

  “And your mom?”

  “That’s sorta why I’m here.”

  “I figured,” Perry Skinner said. “Pass the catsup.”

  They were the only ones e
ating burgers at the Rod and Gun Club.

  “She still call me your ‘ex-father’?”

  “Sometimes,” Fry said, “and sometimes it’s just ‘your worthless dope-smuggling old man.’”

  “That’s cold.” Skinner drew a smiley face in mustard on his burger. “Such bitterness ain’t real attractive,” he said.

  “I don’t know that she means it.”

  Like practically every red-blooded male of his generation in Everglades City, Skinner and his brother had gotten popped running loads of weed. “What happened was a long time ago, Fry. I went away and did my time,” he said. “Thirty-one months at Eglin, I made a point of improving myself. Where you think I learned to talk Spanish?”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “Your mom coulda divorced me while I was gone, but she didn’t.”

  Fry emptied two packets of sugar into his iced tea. He’d already heard everything his mother and father had to say about each other. It was interesting to him that neither had remarried.

  Skinner tore into his hamburger and asked, “How much does she need this time?”

  “A thousand bucks,” his son said.

  “For what, may I ask?”

  “Two kayaks.”

  “How nice,” Skinner said.

  “Plus paddles and life jackets.” Fry hesitated before telling his father the rest. “See, she quit her job at the fish market.”

  “Yeah, I know. Only she got sacked is the way I heard it.”

  “Now she wants to do ecotours through the backcountry—nature trips for bird-watchers and stuff,” Fry said.

  His father took another big bite and grunted.

  “She might be good at it.” The boy spoke loyally but without conviction.

  “What the hell happened at the fish market? Did she say?”

  “What did you hear?”

  Skinner put down his burger and sanded his chin with a paper napkin. “I heard she flipped out and attacked Louis Piejack with a claw hammer.”

  “After he grabbed her boob,” Fry said. “And it wasn’t a hammer. It was a crab mallet.”

  His father blinked slowly. “Louis grabbed her?”