As for my father, he said anything was possible, even Dusty Muleman being related to a dead millionaire. Not long after he quit guiding, Dusty bought the Coral Queen, got her outfitted for gambling, and partnered up with the Miccosukees. That wasn’t even two years ago, and now he was one of the richest men in Monroe County, or so he said. He drove up and down Highway One in a black Cadillac SUV, and he wore bright flowered shirts and smoked real Cuban cigars, just to let the world know what a big shot he was. But according to Dad, Dusty still showed up every night at the casino boat, to count the money personally.
Abbey said, “Muleman’ll have that tub fixed up good as new in a week. What was Dad thinking? If he was serious, he would’ve burned the darn thing to the waterline.”
“Don’t give him any ideas,” I said.
Lice Peeking lived in a trailer park on the old road that runs parallel to the main highway. I got there at lunchtime but he was still asleep. When I offered to come back later, his girlfriend said no, she’d be happy to wake him. She was a large lady with bright blond hair and a barbed-wire tattoo around one of her biceps. My dad had told me about her. He’d said to make sure I was extra polite.
The girlfriend disappeared down the hallway and came back half a minute later, leading Lice Peeking by his belt. He didn’t look so good and he smelled even worse—a combination of beer and B.O. was my guess.
“Who’re you?” he demanded, then sagged down on an old sofa.
The girlfriend said, “I’m off to the store.”
“Don’t forget my cigarettes,” Lice Peeking told her.
“No way. You promised to quit.”
“Aw, gimme a break, Shelly.”
They argued for a while and seemed to forget they had company. I pretended to look at the aquarium, which had pea-green slime on the glass and exactly one live fish swimming in the water.
Finally, Lice Peeking’s girlfriend said he was hopeless and snatched the wallet out of his jeans and stomped out the door. When he got himself together, he asked once more who I was.
“Noah Underwood,” I said.
“Paine’s boy?”
“That’s right. He asked me to come see you.”
“About what?”
“Mr. Muleman,” I said.
From Lice Peeking’s throat came a sound that was either a chuckle or a cough. He fished under one of the sofa cushions until he found a half-smoked, mushed-up cigarette, which he balanced in a crusty corner of his mouth.
“I don’t s’pose you got a match,” he said.
“No, sir.”
He dragged himself to the kitchenette and knocked around until he came up with a lighter. He fired up the moldy butt and sucked on it for a solid minute without even glancing in my direction. The smoke was making me sick to my stomach, but I couldn’t leave until I got an answer. For two years, until last Christmas Eve, Lice Peeking had worked as a mate on Dusty Muleman’s casino boat.
“Mr. Peeking?” I said. His real name was Charles, but Dad said everyone had called him Lice, for obvious reasons, since elementary school. It didn’t look like his bathing habits had improved much since then.
“What do you want, boy?” he snapped.
“It’s about the Coral Queen. My dad says Mr. Muleman is dumping the holding tank into the marina basin.”
Lice Peeking propped himself against the wall of the trailer. “Really? Well, let’s just say that’s true. What’s it got to do with you or me or the price of potatoes?”
“My father’s in jail,” I said, “for sinking that boat.”
“Aw, go on.”
“I’m serious. I thought everybody’d heard by now.”
Lice Peeking started laughing so hard, I thought he might have an asthma attack and fall on the floor. Obviously the news about my father had brightened his day.
“Please,” I said, “will you help us?”
He stopped laughing and snuffed the nub of his cigarette on the countertop. “Now why would I do a dumb fool thing like that? Help you do what?”
I explained how the toilet scum from the gambling boat flowed down the shoreline to Thunder Beach. “Where the turtles lay their eggs,” I said, “and all the kids go swimming.”
Lice Peeking shrugged. “Say I was to help you—what’s in it for me?”
Dad had warned me that Lice Peeking wasn’t accustomed to doing something simply because it was decent and right. He’d predicted that Lice Peeking might demand something in return.
“We don’t have much,” I said.
“Aw, that’s too bad.” He made like he was playing a violin.
I knew money would be tight at our house as long as Dad was in jail—my mother only works part-time at the law firm, so the pay isn’t so hot.
“What about my dad’s truck?” I asked. “It’s a ’97 Dodge pickup.” Giving it up was my father’s idea.
“No, I already got wheels,” Lice Peeking said. “Anyway, I’m not s’posed to drive on account of they yanked my license. What else?”
I thought of offering him Dad’s fishing skiff, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was a cool little boat.
“Let me talk to my father,” I said.
“You do that.”
“Will you at least promise to think about it?”
“You listen here,” Lice Peeking said. “What do I care about baby sea turtles? I got my own daily survival to worry about.”
He pointed to the door and followed me out. I was halfway down the steps of the trailer before I got up the nerve to ask one more question.
“How come you don’t work for Mr. Muleman anymore?”
“Because he fired me,” Lice Peeking said. “Didn’t your old man tell you?”
“No, sir, he didn’t.”
To keep from wobbling, Lice Peeking braced himself with both arms in the doorway. His face was pasty in the sunlight, and his eyes were glassy and dim. He looked like a sick old iguana, yet according to my dad, he was only twenty-nine. It was hard to believe.
“Ain’t you gonna ask why I got canned?” he said. “It was for stealin’.”
“Did you do it?”
“Yep, I sure did.”
“How much?” I asked.
Lice Peeking grinned. “It wasn’t money I stole from Dusty,” he said. “It was Shelly.”
“Oh.”
“What can I say? I needed a lady with a big heart and a valid driver’s license.”
I said, “I’ll be back after I see my father.” “Whatever,” said Lice Peeking. “I’m gonna hunt down a beer.”
My mother says that being married to my father is like having another child to watch after, one who’s too big and unpredictable to put in time-out. Sometimes, when Mom and Dad are arguing, she threatens to pack up our stuff and take me and Abbey out of the Keys to “go start a normal life.” I think my mother loves my dad but she just can’t understand him. Abbey says Mom understands him perfectly fine, but she just can’t figure out how to fix him.
When I got back from the trailer park, my mother was in the kitchen chopping up onions. That’s how I knew she’d been crying. Nobody in our family likes onions, and the only time Mom ever fixes them is when she’s upset. That way she can tell Abbey and me that it’s only the onions making her eyes water.
I knew she’d been to the jail, so I asked, “How’s Dad?”
My mother didn’t look up. “Oh, he’s just dandy,” she said.
“Is there any news?”
“What do you mean, Noah?”
“About when he’s getting out.”
“Well, that’s entirely up to him,” Mom said. “I’ve offered to put up his bail, but apparently he’d rather sit alone in a cramped, roach-infested cell than be home with his family. Maybe the lawyer can talk some sense into him.”
Of course I couldn’t tell her what my father had asked me to do. She would’ve raced back to the jail, reached through the bars, and throttled him.
“Think they’ll let me visit him again?” I asked.
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“I don’t see why not. It isn’t as if his social schedule is all booked up.”
From the tone of her voice I knew she was highly irritated with my father.
“I spoke to your Aunt Sandy and your Uncle Del,” she said. “They offered to call him in jail and try to talk some sense into him, but I told them not to bother.”
Aunt Sandy and Uncle Del are Dad’s older sister and brother. They live in Miami Beach—Sandy in a high-rise condominium with a gym on the top floor, and Del in a nice house with a tennis court in the backyard. This is a sensitive subject at our home.
Several years after my grandfather disappeared in South America, a large amount of money was discovered in a safe-deposit box that he’d kept at a bank up in Hallandale. Nobody ever told Abbey or me exactly how much was there, but it must have been a lot. I remember Dad talking about it with my mother, who always wondered how a charter-boat captain could afford to put away so much cash. She had a point, too—nobody we knew ever got rich in the fishing business.
Anyway, Grandpa Bobby had left instructions that the money was to be split evenly among Sandy, Del, and my father, but Dad wouldn’t take a nickel. My mother didn’t argue about it, either, which made me think there must have been a good reason for steering clear of that cash. Aunt Sandy and Uncle Del were more than happy to take Dad’s share, and they’ve been living the high life ever since.
“They wanted to send some hotshot Miami lawyer down to handle his case,” Mom said, “but I told them it wasn’t necessary.”
“You’re right. It’s not such a big deal.”
“That’s not what I said, Noah. It is a big deal.” She scraped the chopped onion bits into a bowl, which she covered with plastic wrap and placed in the refrigerator. Later, when she was alone in the kitchen, she would empty the whole thing into the garbage.
“I’m at the end of my rope with your father,” she said.
“Mom, everything’s going to work out.”
“You children need to have food on the table! The mortgage needs to be paid!” she went on angrily. “Meanwhile he’s sitting in jail, talking about fighting for his principles. He wants to be a martyr, Noah, that’s fine—but not at the expense of this family. I won’t stand for it!”
“Mom, I know it’s a rough time—” I said, but she cut me off with a wave of her hand.
“Go clean up your room,” she said. “Please.”
Abbey was waiting at the top of the stairs. She put a finger to her lips and led me down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. She cracked open the door and pointed.
There, lying open on the bed, was my mother’s suitcase. Not her vacation suitcase, either, but the big plaid one.
“Uh-oh,” I said in a whisper.
Abbey nodded gravely. “She’s serious this time, Noah. We’ve got to do something.”
THREE
By the time they let me visit my father again, the Coral Queen had been pumped dry, mopped clean, and refitted with new gambling equipment. I was hoping Dad wouldn’t ask about it, but he did.
“No way!” he exclaimed when I told him that Dusty Muleman was back in action.
“They must’ve had twenty guys working on that boat,” I said.
My father was crushed. “I should’ve taken it out and sunk it in Hawk’s Channel,” he muttered, “or the Gulf Stream.”
Luckily we were alone in the interview room. I assumed that my father had convinced the big jowly deputy—and probably everyone else at the jail—that he was harmless and fairly normal. He was good at that.
“Mom heard you might get transferred to the stockade in Key West,” I said.
“Not anymore,” Dad reported in a confidential tone. “The lieutenant here likes me. I’m teaching him how to play chess.”
“You play chess?”
“Shhhh,” my father said. “He thinks I do. Hey, how’s Abbey?”
“All right,” I said.
“Tell her to hang in there, Noah.”
“She says you need professional help.”
Dad sat back and chortled. “That’s our girl. Did you go see Lice Peeking?”
I described my visit to the trailer park. My father wasn’t surprised that Lice turned down the old truck and wanted money in exchange for providing evidence against Dusty Muleman.
“Dad, how are we going to pay him when …”
“When we’re flat broke? Excellent question,” my father said. “See if Lice will take my bonefish skiff. It’s worth ten or twelve grand at least.”
Secretly I’d been hoping that one day Dad would give me that boat. It was an original Hell’s Bay with a sixty-horse Merc, a really sweet ride. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, my father would take me and Abbey out fishing. Even if the snappers weren’t biting, we’d stay until sunset, hoping to see the green flash on the horizon. The flash was kind of a legend in the Keys—some people believed in it and some didn’t. Dad claimed that he’d actually witnessed it once, on a cruise to Fort Jefferson. For our fishing expeditions either Abbey or I always brought a camera, just in case. We had a stack of pretty sunset pictures, but no green flash.
“You sure you want to give away the skiff?” I asked.
“What the heck, it’s the best we can do,” Dad said.
“I guess so.” I tried not to sound too bummed.
“Hey, did you meet the famous Shelly?”
“Yeah. She’s kind of scary,” I said. “Lice said he stole her from Dusty—what did he mean exactly?”
I figured it was one of those I’ll-explain-it-when-you’re-older questions that my dad would brush off, but he didn’t.
“Shelly was Dusty’s second or third wife, after Jasper Jr.’s mother,” he said. Then he paused. “Actually, maybe they were only engaged to be married. Anyway, one day she got fed up with Dusty and moved in with Lice.”
I wondered how miserable life with the Mulemans must have been to make Lice Peeking look like a prize.
“Dad, when’re you coming home?” I asked.
“After the trial,” he replied.
The plan was to use his big day in court to expose Dusty Muleman’s illegal polluting.
“But Mom says you can bail out and come home and still have your trial later,” I said.
“No, I need to stay here and show I’m totally committed to the cause. You know how many jails around this world are full of people who spoke up for what they believed in and lost their freedom? Lost everything they had? Look at Nelson Mandela,” my father said. “He spent twenty-seven years in a South African prison. Twenty-seven years, Noah! A couple of weeks won’t hurt me.”
“But Mom misses you,” I said.
That seemed to catch him off guard and take the steam out of his big speech. Dad looked away.
“It’s a sacrifice, I know,” he said. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this.”
I didn’t say anything about Mom and the plaid suitcase because she’d put it away. That morning I’d peeked in their bedroom closet—her clothes were still hanging there. So were Dad’s.
When I stood up to leave, my father perked up slightly. He said, “Oh, I almost forgot. A reporter from the Island Examiner might drop by the house. It’s all right for you to speak with him.”
“About what?” I asked.
“My situation.”
“Oh. Sure, Dad.”
His “situation”? I thought. Sometimes it’s like my father lives on his own weird little planet.
In July the days get long and stream together. I try not to look at the calendar because I don’t want to think about time passing. August comes way too soon, and that’s when school starts in Florida.
Summer mornings are mostly sunny and still, though by midafternoon huge boiling thunderheads start to build over the Everglades, and the weather can get interesting in a hurry. I’ve always liked watching the sky drop down like a foamy purple curtain when a summer storm rumbles across Florida Bay. If you’re on the ocean side of the islands, it can sneak up on you from behind,
which happens a lot to tourists.
That’s where we were going, to Thunder Beach, when a squall rolled through after lunch. Thom, Rado, and I hunkered in the mangroves and held our skateboards over our heads, to keep the raindrops out of our eyes. It took like half an hour for the leading edge of the storm to pass. Then the wind dropped out, and the only sound was a soft sleepy drizzle.
We crawled from the tree line and brushed the leaves off our arms. Not surprisingly, the lightning had spooked everyone away from the park except us.
Before heading to the water, we scanned the shoreline for pollution warnings. Whenever the biologists from the health department find too much bacteria, they post DANGER! signs up and down Thunder Beach—no swimming, no fishing, no anything. Only a certified moron would dive in when the beach was posted.
I was glad to see that the water was okay, especially when a big loggerhead turtle bobbed up to the surface. The three of us stayed real quiet because we thought the turtle might be coming ashore to lay her eggs, although usually they waited until dark. Loggerheads have lousy eyesight, so we were pretty sure she didn’t notice us sitting there, but she didn’t swim any closer.
We wouldn’t have bothered her if she’d decided to crawl up and dig a nest. Most of the Keys are made of hard coral rock, and there aren’t many soft beaches like you find up the coast at Pompano or Vero. The momma turtles down here don’t have lots of options, so we leave them alone. It’s the law, too.
After the loggerhead swam off, we jumped in and goofed around until Thom cut his ankle on a broken beer bottle that was buried in the sand. Rado and I helped him hop back to shore, where we tied his Dolphins jersey around his foot to keep the cut from getting dirty. Rado took him home while I skated alone down the old road, back toward Lice Peeking’s place.
Nobody answered the door, and I was already down the steps when Shelly appeared from behind the trailer and nearly scared the you-know-what out of me. She was barefoot and carried a long rusty shovel.
“What’d you want now?” she asked. She wore cutoff jeans and a sleeveless top that showed off her barbed-wire tattoo.
“I need to talk to Mr. Peeking again,” I said.