“Well, he’s not available at the moment.”
“That’s okay. I’ll come back another time.”
Shelly noticed me staring at the shovel. She laughed and said, “Don’t worry, it wasn’t Lice I was puttin’ in a hole. It was last night’s dinner.”
I nodded as if that was the most normal thing in the world, burying food in your backyard.
“Lobster shells,” she explained. “I don’t want ’em stinking up the garbage, ’cause they’re out of season. Next thing you know, some nosy neighbor calls the grouper troopers and then, Houston, we’ve got a problem.”
Some of the locals in the Keys poach a lobster here and there in the off months. Not even my dad gets upset about that.
“Whatcha wanna talk to Lice for?” Shelly asked.
“Just some business between him and my father,” I said.
She was so much taller than me, I had to tilt my head back just to see her expression. She was smiling when she said, “Important business, huh?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come on inside and have somethin’ to drink.”
“No thanks. I’m soaking wet.”
“So’s Lice,” Shelly grunted, “but from the inside out.”
She jerked open the screen door and I followed her into the trailer. Lice Peeking was stretched facedown on the blue shag carpet, and he wasn’t moving. I didn’t see any blood, which was a relief, but I couldn’t hear him breathing.
Shelly said, “Oh, don’t worry. He’s not dead.” She gave a sharp kick to his ribs and he started to snore.
“See?” she said. “Tell me your name again.”
“Noah Underwood.”
“You’re Paine’s oldest?”
“That’s right,” I said.
Shelly tossed me a Coke from the refrigerator and said, “Your daddy’s a curious specimen.” Somehow it sounded like a compliment.
I guzzled the soda in about thirty seconds while I edged toward the door. The perfume that Shelly had on was making me dizzy. It smelled like a bag of tangerines.
She sat down on a cane stool and motioned me to do the same, but I stayed on my feet. I wasn’t sure what would happen if Lice Peeking woke up, and I wanted to be ready to run.
Shelly said, “I’ve known Paine since back when he and Dusty used to fish charters out of Ted’s. He was always a gentleman—your daddy, I mean, not Dusty.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How come you’re actin’ so skittery, Noah?”
I couldn’t come out and tell her that she was the reason, that everything about her—from her face to her feet—was at least twice as big as my mother’s.
So I said, “I’m going to be late for violin practice.”
Which was incredibly lame, because we don’t even own a violin. Abbey takes piano lessons on a portable electric keyboard that my father bought from a consignment shop in Key Largo.
“Now, Noah,” Shelly said, “that’s not the truth, is it?”
“No, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t grow up to be one of those men who lie for the sport of it,” she said, “and most men do. That’s a fact.”
As Shelly spoke, she was staring down at Lice Peeking, and not in an admiring way. “That’s why the world is so messed up, Noah. That’s why history books are full of so much heartache and tragedy. Politicians, dictators, kings, phony-baloney preachers—most of ’em are men, and most of ’em lie like rugs,” she said. “Don’t you dare grow up to be like that.”
At first I thought she was making fun of me, but then I realized she was serious.
“Your daddy doesn’t drink, does he?” she said. “That’s truly amazing.”
It was sort of unusual, for the Keys. People who didn’t know my father automatically assumed he had to be drunk to do some of the things he did, but he wasn’t. He never touched a drop of alcohol, even on New Year’s. It wasn’t a religious thing; he just didn’t care for the taste.
“Why can’t I find a guy like that?” Shelly said in a small voice.
I couldn’t help but notice that she was using Lice Peeking’s head as a footrest. It didn’t seem to bother him, though. He kept snoring away.
“You go to the public school?” she said. “Then you must know Jasper Jr.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Is that boy still nasty as a pygmy rattler?”
“Nastier,” I answered honestly.
Shelly shook her head. “He’s been that way since he was about three foot high. Honestly? I don’t see a bright future there.”
Her mentioning Jasper Jr. reminded me of what my dad said about Shelly and Dusty Muleman, about how she’d gotten so fed up with him that she’d moved out. I decided to find out if she still felt that way.
“Didn’t you used to work on the Coral Queen?” I asked.
“For almost three years,” said Shelly.
“Was it a fun job?”
She rolled her eyes. “Tending bar? Oh yeah, it was a barrel of laughs. Very glamorous, too. Come on now, what’re you drivin’ at?”
“Nothing. I swear.”
“There you go again, Noah.”
Shelly was sharp when it came to sniffing out fibs, so I just came out and asked her: “Did you ever hear about anything crooked going on with that boat?”
“Crooked how?” she asked.
“Like dumping sewer water into the basin.”
She laughed in a way that sounded hard and bitter. “Sweetie,” she said, “the only sewage I ever saw was the human kind. That’s what you call the ‘downside’ of my job.”
“Oh.”
“This has somethin’ to do with your old man, doesn’t it? About him sinkin’ Dusty’s boat?”
“Maybe.” It sounded silly as soon as I said it. “Maybe” almost always means “yes.”
“Okay, let’s hear the whole story.” Shelly cocked her head and cupped one of her ears, which had, like, five silver rings in it. “Come on, Noah,” she said, “I’m listening.”
There was no way I wasn’t going to cave in and blab everything. She was a pro at shaking the truth out of guys who were a lot bigger and tougher than I was.
But then Lice Peeking came to the rescue. He stopped snoring, flopped over on his back, and opened one bleary red eye.
Shelly thumped him with both heels and said, “Get up, you sorry sack of beans, before I park that slimy aquarium on your head.” I didn’t wait around to see if she was serious.
FOUR
The next morning the lawyer stopped by our house. Mr. Shine looked about a thousand years old, but Mom said he knew his way around the courthouse. She had hired him twice before to get my father out of trouble.
Mr. Shine put his briefcase on the kitchen table and sat down. He looked mopey and gray, and his eyelids drooped. Abbey said he reminded her of Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh.
My mother made a pot of coffee and began dropping hints that Abbey and I should leave them alone. Abbey grabbed a bagel out of the toaster and ran off to play on the computer. I got my spinning rod from the garage and biked up to the drawbridge at Snake Creek.
The police won’t let you fish from the top of the bridge because of the traffic, but you can go down underneath and cast from the sandbags, in the shade. Sometimes homeless people sleep under the bridges, but they usually don’t bother anybody. The last time I’d been to Snake Creek, some woman in an army jacket had made a campsite high on the bank, under the concrete braces. She’d even started a small fire, burning the wood slats from a broken stone-crab trap. I gave her a nice mangrove snapper that I caught, and she had it cleaned and cooking over the flames in five minutes flat. She said it was the best meal she’d eaten in a year. The next day Abbey and I went back with some homemade bread and a pound of fresh Gulf shrimp, but the lady was gone. I never even got her name.
On the day Mom was meeting with Mr. Shine, nobody was under the bridge when I got there. The tide was running in from the ocean, and schools of finger mullet
were holding in the still water behind the pilings. Every so often they’d start jumping, trying to escape some bigger fish that was prowling for lunch. I started casting a white bucktail and in no time jumped a baby tarpon that wasn’t even ten pounds. Then I hooked something heavy, probably a snook, that ran out a hundred feet and broke the line.
As I was tying on another jig, I heard an outboard engine—it was a johnboat, maybe twelve feet long, motoring along Snake Creek. Two people were in the boat, and as it drew closer I recognized them as Jasper Jr. and an older kid named Bull.
They spotted me right away. I probably should have taken off, but I was really enjoying myself, fishing under that bridge. So I set down my spinning rod and watched Jasper Jr. nose the johnboat into the shallows.
Bull was in the bow. He climbed out first and looped a rope around one of the pilings. He’s a hefty guy, but that’s not how he got his nickname—people call him Bull because you can’t believe a word he says. For instance, he told everyone at school he was dropping out to play double-A ball for the Baltimore Orioles. This is at age sixteen, right? We all knew that Bull couldn’t catch a pop fly if it landed in his lap, so we weren’t exactly surprised to see him bagging groceries that spring at the Winn-Dixie.
After Bull tied off the johnboat, he called up to me: “Hey, buttface, better run for your life. Jasper’s got a speargun!”
“Yeah, right,” I said.
When Jasper Jr. hopped out of the boat, I saw that he didn’t have a speargun or any other weapon. Even so, running away would have been an excellent idea. I just didn’t feel like it.
Jasper Jr. walked up and asked, “What’re you lookin’ at?”
“Absolutely nothing,” I said with a straight face.
“I told you I was gonna find you, didn’t I?”
I knew that Jasper Jr. wasn’t looking for me at Snake Creek—he and Bull were heading out to poach lobsters or pull some other mischief.
But I played along. “Well, you found me. Now what?”
That’s when he socked me in the right eye. It hurt, too. Jasper Jr. seemed surprised that I didn’t fall down.
So was Bull. He said, “You got a hard head, for a buttface.”
The way my cheekbone was throbbing, I figured that Jasper Jr.’s knuckles weren’t feeling so good, either. He was trying to act like a tough guy, but I noticed that his eyes were watering from the pain. I probably could have knocked him flat, but I didn’t.
My father’s a large man, very strong, but he says fighting is for people who can’t win with their brains. He also says there are times when you’ve got no choice but to defend yourself from common morons. If Jasper Jr. had taken another swing at me, I definitely would have punched him back. Then Bull would have beaten me to a pulp and the whole thing would have been over.
But Jasper Jr. didn’t hit me again. Instead he spit in my face, which was worse in a way.
He forced a laugh and called me a couple of dirty names and headed back toward the johnboat. He was shaking the hand that he’d hit me with, as if there were a crab or a mousetrap attached to it. Bull was following behind, cackling like a hyena. They got into the boat, and Jasper Jr. jerk-started the outboard while Bull shoved off from the bow.
I pulled up the front of my shirt and wiped the spit off my face. Then I grabbed my fishing rod and took aim.
The bucktail jig I happened to be using weighed one-quarter of an ounce, which doesn’t sound like much until it thumps you between the shoulder blades, which is where I thumped Jasper Jr. It was an awesome cast, I’ve got to admit. The hook on the jig snagged firmly in the mesh of Jasper Jr.’s ratty old basketball jersey, and he let out a howl. I gave a stiff yank and he howled again.
In a panic he twisted the throttle and the johnboat picked up speed, but that didn’t help—Jasper Jr. was stuck on the end of my line like a moray eel. He hollered for Bull to cut him loose, which was all right with me. I’d made my point.
Bull found a knife and clambered to the back end of the boat, which turned out to be a humongous mistake. With so much weight in the stern—Bull, Jasper Jr., plus the engine—the bow tilted upward and the johnboat began taking on water.
No sooner had Bull reached behind Jasper Jr. to cut the fishing line than the motor gurgled to a dead stop. The blue-green water of Snake Creek was pouring in over the transom, but nobody in the johnboat moved. Jasper Jr. was yelling at Bull and Bull was yelling back, and they just kept getting wetter and wetter. By now the motor was completely submerged and the bow was pointed nearly straight up in the air, which meant that the boat was about to capsize.
Bull was the first to jump, with Jasper Jr. right behind him. They started swimming like maniacs toward the bumpers of the bridge, cursing the whole way. They were making such an awful racket that the mullet scattered out of the eddies, and I knew that the fishing was pretty much shot for the afternoon.
So I reeled in my line and made my way up the slope, toward the highway.
“You did what?” Abbey said when I told her what happened. “Geez, you’re as whacked as Dad.”
“I didn’t sink their stupid boat. They sunk it themselves.”
Abbey muttered in exasperation, “If this keeps up, we’re gonna get run out of town. Mom’ll have to put the house up for sale.”
“Jasper Jr. spit on me,” I said.
“What happened to your eye?”
“He did that, too.”
After examining my bruise, Abbey seemed more sympathetic. “From now on, don’t go anywhere without Thom or Rado,” she advised.
It would have been a sensible plan, except that Thom’s family was heading to North Carolina for the rest of the summer, and Rado was going camping in Colorado with his mother and stepdad. Thom and Rado were my best friends, and without them I was basically on my own.
Mom came into the bedroom, and the first thing she noticed, naturally, was my black eye. I told her the whole story—Abbey hung around to make sure. My mother was real angry, but I begged her not to call Dusty Muleman and tell him what Jasper Jr. had done.
“It’ll just make things worse,” I said.
“What could be worse than getting punched and spit at?” she asked.
“Lots of things. Trust me, Mom.”
“Noah’s right,” Abbey said.
“We’ll discuss this later.” My mother’s mouth wasn’t moving much when she talked, which meant she was still mad. “Noah, please go wash up. There’s a gentleman waiting in the living room to speak with you.”
“Who is it?” I asked. “Is he from the police?”
“No, from the newspaper,” Mom said, making that sound even worse. “Apparently your father thought it would be a brilliant idea to have an article written about himself. He sent the reporter here to ‘interview’ you.”
Abbey rolled her eyes. “You’ve gotta be joking.”
“I wish I were,” said my mother. “Hurry up, Noah, and put on a clean shirt, please. I don’t want you looking like some sort of juvenile delinquent.”
“Then you ought to put some makeup on his shiner,” Abbey suggested.
“No way!” I said.
But it was too late.
The reporter’s name was Miles Umlatt. He was thin and blotchy, and his nose was scuffed up like an old shoe.
Mom had stationed him on the sofa so he could set up his tape recorder on the coffee table. On his lap he held a lined yellow pad that was covered with scribbles.
I sat down in the tall armchair where my father usually sits. Mom had dabbed some flesh-colored powder around my black eye, and she must have done a good job because Miles Umlatt didn’t seem to notice. He asked what grade I was in, what sort of hobbies I enjoyed, did I own a dog or a cat—the usual stuff. He was pretending to be nice, but I could tell it was a real chore. He was dying to get to the juicy parts.
“I understand you’ve been to visit your father,” he said finally. “That must’ve been tough.”
“Not really.” I was trying to sound kind o
f cool and bored.
“Yes, well, this isn’t the first time your dad’s had a scrape with the law, is it?”
“No, sir.”
“What do you remember about the other times?” he asked.
I just shrugged. It was amazing that Mom had left me alone in the room with this guy. I knew she was hovering somewhere nearby, but at least for now I was free to say what I wanted.
“I found an old clipping about the Carmichael family,” Miles Umlatt said. He held up the photocopy to show me.
“That was a long time ago,” I said.
“Only three years.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, although three years sounded about right.
Here’s what had happened, the way my father told it: The Carmichaels drove their forty-foot, gas-hogging motor home all the way to the Keys from someplace up in Michigan. They were too cheap to rent space at an RV park, so they parked along Highway One near the Indian Key Bridge and camped there for three nights.
Which would have been no big deal, except for the way they treated their dogs—they had two chocolate Labrador retrievers that rode along with them in the motor home. One morning my dad was heading out on a tarpon-fishing charter when he spotted Mr. Carmichael whipping the dogs with a bungee cord. I guess the dogs had had an accident inside the Winnebago or something. Anyhow, they were crying and yipping and trying to get away, but Mrs. Carmichael (who was the size of a whale) was standing on their leashes so that Mr. Carmichael could beat them.
When Dad saw that, he sort of freaked. He beached the skiff, took out his tarpon gaff, and flattened every single tire—I think there were, like, eight of them—on the Carmichaels’ RV. Then he put the two Labradors in his boat and went fishing.
The sheriff’s deputies were waiting on the dock at the end of the day. My father confessed right away, as he always does, but he wouldn’t apologize. He also wouldn’t say what he’d done with the dogs because he knew they’d be safer away from the Carmichaels.
That time, Dad spent only two nights in jail before he let my mom bail him out. Eventually he pleaded guilty to vandalism and, I guess, dognapping, although he agreed to pay for the Labradors and a new set of Winnebago tires. Later we found out that Dad probably would’ve beaten the charges because the Carmichaels had refused to come back to the Keys for a trial. They wrote a letter to the judge saying that my father was a raving lunatic and they were scared to be in the same county with him, which was ridiculous.