Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (15 page)

Zale directed me to turn onto a dirt track that led back away from the main road, and as we bounced over the dried ruts I was glad Ol’ Lightnin’ could offer the choice of four-wheel drive if we needed it. Gramma Josie’s house stood several hundred yards apart from the other homes, at the dead end where the concrete block home nestled under several large old trees. In the distance, across a large, bare field with scrubby-looking grass, I could see the pale blue of water through a stand of trees, probably a pond or lake out there.

The house made no effort at pretension. It was a simple rectangular house with an Old Florida-style porch running across the front that looked as though it had been screened in only recently. Three good-sized oak trees shaded the front yard, their branches filled with the spiky fronds of air plants. An enormous black Dodge pickup was parked on the dirt alongside the house, and I pulled in and parked next to it. Through the Jeep’s windshield, I could see a wood frame shed out back with gardening tools, coils of rope, life jackets, and several helmets hanging on the walls. Two mud-splattered all-terrain vehicles faced outward in the center of the dirt floor.

As we climbed out of the Jeep and walked around the black truck, we were dwarfed by the size of the tires alone. Zale pointed up at the cab. “This means my uncles are here.” He didn’t look too happy about it.

Crossing the well-tended lawn to the screen door on the side of the porch, I looked around at the house and yard, and realized that there was little here that distinguished it as a Native American home. A rope swing hung from one of the old oaks, and a white cooler and a pair of oars leaned against the side of the house. A couple of orchid plants, their roots reaching out of their latticed wooden boxes, hung in a small gumbo-limbo tree closer to the house.

Zale rapped his knuckles on the wood screen door frame. “Gramma? It’s me, Zale.”

A large man wearing a black cowboy hat and mirrored sunglasses swung the door open. He reached out and tousled Zale’s hair. “Look who’s here, Mama. It’s Molly’s boy.” His voice was deep, but he spoke in a monotone. He stepped aside so Zale could pass, but it wasn’t a welcoming gesture.

He continued to hold the door for me, so I followed Zale across the porch and into the shadowed house. The shades were drawn across the inside windows, and I could barely see anything at first after coming inside from the bright sunlight. Zale crossed the room, his outline blurring in the dark recesses. I wasn’t sure whether I should follow him or not. Then I made him out, and I realized he was bending down to kiss a small form sitting in a large wingback chair.

When he stood up, I crossed the room and started to say, “I don’t know if you’ll remember me—” but she cut me off before I could finish.

“Seychelle? Give Gramma a kiss.”

Her eyes, as I closed the gap between us, looked milky white and her smile showed big gaps where teeth should have been. Her gray hair was braided and wrapped round her head, and though she seemed to be smaller, either because I had grown or because she was shrinking, her ears remained the most remarkable aspect of her appearance. She’d always had these huge brown ears that looked like withered pancakes of Indian flatbread, and as I closed in to kiss her on the cheek, she turned her head aside when her son made a comment. I accidentally kissed her right on that dangling leathery lobe.

Zale was making the introductions, but I wasn’t really listening. I was certain I was turning every shade of red imaginable. I could still taste that ear. The texture of it was imprinted on my lips, and I longed to wipe my mouth on my sleeve. The man who had opened the door for us, Josie’s son Earl, was sitting on the other end of the couch, where they motioned me to sit. The younger man, who Zale said was Earl’s son Jimmie, was smiling at my discomfort. As I recovered from my fit of embarrassment, I began to follow the conversation.

It seemed that Gramma Josie refused to get a satellite television dish, so the uncles had come over to tell her that they had seen Molly on TV—that she was in jail. They had just been discussing what they were going to do about it when we drove up. They were arguing over whether or not they should call Molly’s mom, Ada Mae, out in Arizona.

“I don’t think she’d want you to do that,” I said. I knew that Molly and her mother had never been close, and the last thing Molly needed was the additional worry of having to deal with a frantic mother. Besides, according to Zale’s report, she would be a drunk, frantic mother. And, though Gramma Josie herself had had a dalliance with a white man that had resulted in Ada Mae’s birth, in general, Molly’s white father was ignored by her mother’s side of the family. These days, intermarriage was pretty common for Seminoles, but the old prejudices against marrying outside the tribe still ran fairly strong among the older folk.

“You think you know my niece better than me?” Earl asked. “I just saw her in Lauderdale a few days ago, and I been seeing her all these years.”

I started to open my mouth to defend myself, then thought better of it. Surely, Molly’s Uncle Earl didn’t know about our long silence. I was probably reading too much into his comment.

He said, “You brought the boy here, but you are not family.”

“Dad—enough.” The younger of the two men, Jimmie, Molly’s cousin, interrupted his father’s next remark. He was dressed in Ralph Lauren chinos and a golf shirt, unlike his father who wore faded black jeans and an Indian patchwork shirt beneath his black leather jacket. Jimmie looked like a South Beach businessman, and I imagined he was often mistaken for a Latino. Older than Molly, Jimmie had been in college, at FIU, when we were in high school. We’d thought of him as a real bore back then because he was studying business and marketing or something like that. Molly used to joke that when her cousin was a teenager, he used to take
Forbes
into the bathroom to jerk off. He was the one who, after expressing very brief condolences to Zale, brought up the will.

“Zale, I also heard on the news that your father left you the majority owner of Pontus Enterprises. Is this true?”

Zale turned to me. I gather it had not occurred to him before that it might possibly not be true. Or else he just didn’t want to talk about it.
 

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s true.”

“So that son of a bitch finally did something right, eh?” Jimmie said with a smile that only played around his eyes.

This side of Molly’s family pretty much agreed with me on her choice of husbands, but the question wasn’t a fair one for Zale. I jumped in. “I talked to Molly last night at the Fort Lauderdale police station,” I said. “She told me that, according to the will, Zale will be the owner of all the hotels and the restaurants and most likely the casino gambling boats. I don’t know if you’ve been following the news story—”

“Miss, when it comes to the issue of gambling in this state, we follow it all very closely,” Jimmie said.

“Right,” I said, taking a deep breath. They sure weren’t making any of this easy on me. “Well then, you know that Nick had sold TropiCruz to this guy, Ari Kagan, but now there are problems with the sale. It looks like Pontus will get the casino boats back, and it seems that Mr. Kagan isn’t too happy about that.”

“Nick was a fool for getting involved with them in the first place,” Jimmie said. “The Italians, they had rules, you know? They didn’t mess with your family. They had a gripe with you, they just took you out. These Russians, they’ve got no rules, no respect.”

I glanced over at Zale to see if he was listening, if he understood the implication of Jimmie’s words. The boy was staring down at his hands, his face hidden in the shadows. “Well, that was part of the reason why Molly asked me to bring Zale out here,” I said. “To keep him safe and get him away from the press, who will now be salivating over Richie Rich here.” I smiled at Zale, hoping he would take the nickname as a joke. He didn’t look up.

Jimmie Tigertail stood and began pacing in the living room. “Zale, this is good news. This will eventually give the tribe control over the entire TropiCruz fleet of casino gambling boats. I tried for years to get Molly to talk to that idiot husband of hers, to get him to see the damage he was doing to the tribe’s gambling revenues.”

“I don’t mean to be argumentative here, but Zale will be the owner, not the tribe.”

Earl, who was sitting in a rocker next to his mother, still wearing the dark shades and hat, ignored me. He leaned forward and spoke to the boy for the first time. “But he will certainly do what is best for us, won’t you, son?”

Zale lifted his head, and the look on his face was that of a good kid who liked to make grown-ups happy, and now he was uncomfortable not knowing the right answer. He looked at me, then swung back to face his great-uncle.

“Son,” Earl Tigertail said, and there was an undercurrent of command in his voice. He leaned forward, his hands clenched in fists, the tendons in his forearms stretched taut under the skin. “You do realize that these gambling ships are a direct threat to Indian casinos? The casinos are our livelihood. They put food on our tables.”

Yeah, I thought, and put the ATVs in your garages and the sixty-inch televisions in your living rooms. Last I heard, every member of the tribe got an income of several thousand dollars a month.

“Come on. Even once Zale inherits the company,” I said, “it’s not like he’ll really be running it.”

Jimmie walked over and clamped a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Less than five years and you’ll be eighteen. Then they won’t be able to stop you. In the meantime, Pontus is not publicly owned. The court will appoint managers, and they will know that if they don’t do as you want, you’ll can them as soon as you take over. You could make it happen, Zale. You could get rid of those damn ships for us.”

Earl leaned forward and grabbed his wrist. “I know you wouldn’t do anything to hurt the tribe, would you?”

Before Zale had a chance to answer, Gramma Josie pushed herself to a stand. Her son and grandson rushed to her side, but she waved them off and reached out for Zale. He stood and offered her his arm.

“We go outside, talk.” She pointed her finger at me, and I took that as meaning that I was supposed to follow.

As we passed through the kitchen, a younger Seminole woman was standing at the counter stirring something that looked like batter in a large ceramic bowl. Josie said something to her in Creek, and she nodded her assent, then the old woman waved Zale on toward the back door.

Outside, the sun’s glare was brutal, the sky now cloudless, but the Florida winter air was not going to climb to the punishing temperatures we would see come spring. She led us to the farther of two chickee huts behind the house. I hadn’t seen them when we’d first driven up, as the house hid them from view. When we passed the first hut, I saw the blackened logs in a fire ring in the center of the round of dirt. Various cooking utensils hung from the cypress poles that supported the palmetto roof, and I wondered if Josie still liked to cook out there sometimes.

The shade afforded by the palmetto fronds was far easier on the eyes, and when Josie settled herself on a wood bench and then pointed to a second bench, we dragged it across the dirt and sat opposite her.

What I knew about Gramma Josie’s life came from the stories I’d picked up from Ada, Molly’s mom, when we were kids. She told us once that Josie had been born in 1915 in an Indian camp on the North Fork of the New River, near where the river goes under Broward Boulevard today, and not far from where we had grown up. That had so amazed me and Molly that we took the skiff that afternoon and motored up the North Fork to try to look for Indian arrowheads, not realizing that our TV view of Indians was less than accurate. By 1915 the Seminoles had been using guns for more than a century. Molly’s mom once told us that when Josie was a little girl, her family brought her along when they conducted business at the Stranahan’s trading post in the growing town of Fort Lauderdale. She was one of the first Seminole children to start to learn English. Josie had to leave Fort Lauderdale when her family moved to the Hollywood Reservation, and it was there that Josie was married. Later widowed, with a son almost grown, Josie gave birth to a daughter, Ada Mae, Molly’s mom, who was half white. It had been Seminole custom for many years to kill half-breed babies. Josie had to fight the tribal elder who came to take the baby from her arms in order to drown the child in the Dania Canal. Ada Mae, who knew this story, told it often to show others why she hated all things Indian. But at that time, just after the Second World War, half-breed children didn’t fit entirely into either world, and the white world she chose to embrace didn’t exactly welcome her, either.

Molly’s mother would tell us these stories, swaying in the kitchen, a highball glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and she’d curse the Indians and their way of life. Ada Mae left the reservation as soon as she graduated from high school. She married a white man, and other than when her mother occasionally visited the family, or demanded that her granddaughter be brought out to visit her, Ada had little to do with Seminole life from then on. Josie’s son Earl had married and gone to live with his wife’s clan out at Big Cypress, and Josie followed him out there in the 1970s when she decided that she wanted to continue to cook and sleep in a chickee as she had done for the first fifty years of her life. Molly had only ever known her grandmother as a resident of “B.C.,” as Ada used to call the Big Cypress.

Josie slapped her brown craggy hand on the bench next to her and Zale obeyed, moving across to sit next to his great-grandmother. She took his hand in hers and drew it onto the folds of her skirt. The contrast between his long white fingers and her brown gnarled ones made me remember how Molly had held his hand in exactly the same way, and how I had marveled then, too, at this sunny, fair boy in this Indian family.

“Your mother gone be fine. You stay wid me. Don’ you worry about Uncle Earl.”

“He scares me, Gramma,” Zale said. He spoke very loudly. I guessed that Josie’s deafness could only have worsened over the past decade.

She laughed a wheezy, almost girlish chuckle. “Earl remember the old Indian way. He don’ like the white way.”