Afterwards they rested on shore. Skink, struggling into his laceless boots: “If he gets out of here, he deserves to be free.”
Augustine said, “But he won’t.”
“No, he’ll go the wrong way. That’s his nature.”
Then Skink was moving again, an orange flame weaving through the trees ahead of them. Bonnie, hurrying to keep up: “So something’ll get him. Panthers or something.”
Augustine said, “Nothing so exotic, Mrs. Lamb.”
“Then what?”
“Time. Time will get him.”
“Exactly!” the governor boomed. “It’s the arc of all life. For Lester we merely hasten the sad promenade. Tonight we are Darwin’s elves.”
Bonnie quickened her pace. She felt happy to be with them, out in the middle of nowhere. Ahead on the trail, Skink was singing to himself. Feeling the horns sprouting from his temples, she supposed.
Two hours later they emerged from the woods. A rip of wind braced them.
“Oh brother,” Augustine said, “any second now.”
With a grimace, Skink removed the backpack. “This is for your hike.”
“It’s not that far.”
“Take it, just in case.”
Bonnie said, “God, your eye.”
A stalk of holly berries garnished the empty withered socket. The governor groped at himself. “Damn. I guess it fell out.”
Bonnie could hardly look at him.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I got a whole box of extras somewhere.”
She said, “Don’t be foolish. Go to the mainland with us.”
“No!”
A mud-gray wall of rain came hissing down the road. Bonnie shivered as it hit them. Skink leaned close to Augustine: “Give it a couple three months, at least.”
“You bet.”
“For what?” Bonnie asked.
“Before I try to find that place again,” Augustine said.
“Why go back?”
“Science,” said Augustine.
“Nostalgia,” said the governor.
The squall doused the torch, which he lobbed into a stand of red mangroves. He tucked his hair under the plastic shower cap and said good-bye. Bonnie kissed him on the chin and told him to be careful. Augustine gave an affable salute.
For a while they could make out his tall shape, stalking south, under violet flashbursts of high lightning. Then he was gone. The weather covered him like a shroud.
They turned and went the other way. Augustine walked fast on the blacktop, the backpack jouncing on his bare shoulders.
“Hey, the scar is looking good,” Bonnie said.
“You still like it?”
“Beauty.” She could see it vividly whenever the sky lit up. “A corkscrew in the shower—you weren’t kidding?”
“God, I wish,” said Augustine.
They heard a car behind them. As it approached, the headlights elongated their shadows on the pavement. Augustine asked Bonnie if she wanted to hitch a ride. She said no. They stepped off the road to let the car go by.
Soon they reached the tall bridge at Card Sound. Augustine said it was time to rest. He unzipped the backpack to see what the governor had packed: a coil of rope, two knives, four bandannas, a tube of antiseptic, a waterproof box of matches, a bottle of fresh water, chlorine tablets, some oranges, a stick of bug repellent, four cans of lentil soup and a tin of unidentifiable dried meat.
Augustine and Bonnie shared the water, then started up the bridge.
Needles of rain stung Bonnie’s bruises as she climbed the long slope. She tasted brine on the wind, and wasn’t embarrassed to clutch Augustine’s right arm—the gusts were so strong they nearly lifted her off the ground.
“Maybe it’s another hurricane!”
“Not hardly,” he said.
They stopped at the top. Augustine threw the pistol as far as he could. Bonnie peered over the concrete rail to watch the splash, a silent punctuation. Augustine placed his hands firmly on her waist, holding her steady. She liked the way it felt, the trust involved.
Far below, the bay was frothed and corrugated; a treacherously different place from the first time Bonnie saw it. Not a night for dolphins.
She drew Augustine closer and kissed him for a long time. Then she spun him around and groped in the backpack.
“What’re you doing?” he shouted over the slap of the rain.
“Hush.”
When he turned back, her eyes were shining. In her hands was the coil of rope.
“Tie me to the bridge,” she said.
Epilogue
The marriage of BONNIE BROOKS and MAX LAMB was discreetly annulled by a judge who happened to be a skiing companion of Max Lamb’s father. Max returned to Rodale & Burns, pouring his energies into a new advertising campaign for Old Faithful Root Beer. Spurred by Max’s simpleminded jingle, the company soon reported a 24 percent jump in domestic sales. Max was promoted to the sixth floor and put in charge of an $18 million account for a low-fat malt liquor called Steed.
By the end of the year, Max and EDIE MARSH were engaged. They got an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Edie became active in charity circles. Two years after the hurricane, while attending a Kenny G concert to benefit victims of a Colombian mud slide, Edie met the same young Kennedy she’d long ago tried so avidly to debauch. She was mildly amazed when, while greeting her, he slipped a tongue in her ear. Max said it surely was her imagination.
BRENDA ROURKE recovered fully from her injuries and returned to the Highway Patrol. She requested and received a transfer to northern Florida, where she and JIM TILE built a small house on the Ochlockonee River. For Christmas he gave her an engraved gold replica of her mother’s wedding ring, and two full-grown rottweilers from Stuttgart.
After being rescued in the ocean off Islamorada, AVILA was taken to Miami’s Krome Detention Center and processed as “Juan Gómez Duran,” a rafter fleeing political oppression in Havana. He was held at Krome for nine days, until a Spanish-language radio station sponsored his release. In return, brave “Señor Gómez” agreed to share the details of high-seas escape with radio listeners, who were moved by his heart-wrenching story but puzzled by his wildly inaccurate references to Cuban geography. Afterwards Avila packed up and moved to Fort Myers, on the west coast of Florida, where he was immediately hired as a code-enforcement officer for the local building-and-zoning department. During his first four weeks on the job, Avila approved 212 new homes—a record for a single inspector that stands to this day. Nineteen months after the hurricane, while preparing a sacrifice to Chango on the patio of his luxurious new waterfront town house, Avila was severely bitten on the thigh by a hydrophobic rabbit. Too embarrassed to seek medical attention, he died twenty-two days later in his hot tub. In honor of his short but productive tenure as a code inspector, the Lee County Home Builders Association established the Juan Gómez Duran Scholarship Fund.
One day after the state trooper was shot in the parking lot, paramedics again were summoned to the Paradise Palms Motel in the Florida Keys. This time a guest named LEVON STICHLER had suffered a mild myocardial infarction. On the ride to the emergency room, the old man deliriously insisted he’d been held captive at the motel by two bossy prostitutes. Doctors at Mariners Hospital notified Levon Stichler’s daughter in Saint Paul, who was understandably alarmed to learn of her father’s hallucinations. After hanging up the phone, she informed her children that Grandpa would be coming to stay for a while.
The gnawed remains of IRA JACKSON, identified by X rays, were cremated and interred at a private ceremony on Staten Island. Several Teamster bosses sent flowers, as did the retired comptroller of the Central States Pension Fund. Three weeks after the hurricane, the African lion that attacked Ira Jackson was captured while foraging in a Dumpster behind a Pizza Hut in Perrine. The tranquilized animal was dipped, vaccinated, wormed and nicknamed “Pepperoni.” It is now on display at a wildlife park in West Palm Beach.
The murder of TON
Y TORRES remains unsolved, although police suspect his wife of arranging the crime so that she could hoard the hurricane money from Midwest Casualty. Detectives seeking to question NERIA TORRES learned that she’d moved to Belize, leased an ocean-front villa and taken up with an expatriate American fishing guide. A court-ordered inspection of her late husband’s bank records revealed that before leaving the United States, Mrs. Torres moved $201,000 through a single checking account. The house at 15600 Calusa was never repaired and remained abandoned for twenty-two months, until it was finally condemned and destroyed.
Five weeks after the hurricane, FRED DOVE went home to Omaha and presented his wife with two miniature dachshunds orphaned by the storm. He, DENNIS REEDY and eight other Midwest Casualty adjusters were honored for their heroic work on the Florida crisis-response team. To publicize its swift and compassionate processing of hurricane claims, the company featured the men in a national television commercial that aired during the Bob Hope Christmas Special. Fred Dove was hopeful that EDIE MARSH would contact him after the commercial was broadcast, but he never heard from her again.
Faced with a class-action lawsuit by 186 customers whose homes had more or less collapsed in the hurricane, builder GAR WHITMARK declared bankruptcy and revived his construction companies under different names. He was killed thirteen months later in a freak accident on a job site, when high winds from a tropical storm knocked a bucket of hot tar off a roof and through the windshield of his Infiniti Q45. His troubled widow gave up prescription medicine and joined the Church of Scientology, to which she donated her late husband’s entire estate.
The body of CLYDE NOTTAGE JR. was flown from Guadalajara to Durham, North Carolina, where—at his family’s request—an autopsy was performed at the Duke University Medical Center. Four days later, Mexican authorities arrested DR. ALAN CAULK, seized his laboratory and deported him to the Bahamas. Oddly, no sheep were ever found at the Aragon Clinic.
Despite contradictory affidavits from two preeminent psychiatrists, attorneys for durham gas meat & tobacco persuaded a judge in Raleigh to declare Clyde Nottage Jr. mentally unfit. The posthumous certification was based on disturbing medical evidence supplied by Mexican officials, and sealed forever by the North Carolina courts. Sixty days after Nottage’s death, DGM&T resumed production of Bronco cigarets. The advertising contract with Rodale & Burns was not renewed.
Eleven months after the hurricane, a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a gruesome find in a remote upland area of the Crocodile Lakes Wildlife Refuge in North Key Largo: a deformed human jaw. Locked to the bone was an adjustable iron bar popularly used to deter auto theft. Dental X rays identified the owner of the mandible as LESTER MADDOX PARSONS, a career felon and convicted killer wanted for violent assaults on two Florida Highway Patrol officers. According to the Monroe County Medical Examiner, evidence at the scene indicated that Parsons likely starved to death. A search of the hammocks turned up the remaining pieces of his skeleton, except for the skull.
AUGUSTINE HERRERA sold his late uncle’s wildlife farm and moved with BONNIE BROOKS to Chokoloskee, a fishing village on the edge of Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands. There he bought a crab boat and built a pineboard house with space for a large library, including a wall for his collection of skulls, now numbering twenty.
BONNIE BROOKS took up watercolors, cycling and outdoor photography. Her remarkable picture of a pair of bald eagles nesting in the boughs of a cypress made the cover of Audubon magazine.
Most of the wild animals that escaped from FELIX MOJACK’S farm during the hurricane were recaptured or, unfortunately, killed by armed home owners. The exceptions include one female cougar, forty-four rare birds, more than three hundred exotic lizards, thirty-eight snakes (venomous and nonvenomous) and twenty-nine adult rhesus monkeys, which have organized into several wily troops that roam Dade County to this day.
Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida. He is the author of twelve novels, including the best-selling Nature Girl, Skinny Dip, Sick Puppy, and Lucky You, and three best-selling children’s books, Hoot, Flush, and Scat. His most recent work of nonfiction is The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport. He also writes a weekly column for The Miami Herald.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1995 by Carl Hiaasen
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from
the song “Box of Rain,” lyrics by Robert Hunter.
Copyright © 1970 by Ice Nine Publishing Co.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76741-7
v3.0
Carl Hiaasen, Stormy Weather
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