Carl Hiaasen (4 page)

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 eating 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?”

“Yes, sir, that’s what Mom told me. And I believe her.”

Skinner nodded as if he believed it, too. “Then he’s damn lucky she didn’t crack his skull instead of his nuts.”

Fry could tell that his father was angry.

“Did he hurt her? Tell the truth.”

“No, sir, I don’t believe so.”

Skinner got up from the table and went out to his truck. He came back with a folded wad of hundreds, which he pressed into Fry’s left hand.

“Dad, there’s something else,” the boy said.

“How come I’m not surprised?”

“Mom needs two plane tickets. She wondered if maybe you could cash in some of your miles.”

Skinner was instantly suspicious. “She takin’ you somewheres on a trip?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You’d clue me in if she was, right?”

“For sure,” said Fry. “She didn’t say what the tickets are for, but she told me to tell you don’t worry, it’s no big deal.”

Skinner waved the waitress over and paid the bill. “Plane tickets are too a big deal,” he said.

“Mom said you could cash out your miles and it wouldn’t cost you anything—”

“Son, you don’t understand. Come on, let’s go.”

When they were outside, in the parking lot, Skinner lowered his voice and said, “I’m not worried about how much the tickets cost or don’t cost. I’m worried about what she’s up to.”

Fry thought: If only I knew.

But to his father he said, “So, what do I tell her?”

“Tell her to come talk with me.”

“Aw, Dad.”

“What—you think that’s
my
idea of a good time?” Skinner snorted. “Tell her to swing by and see me if she wants the damn tickets. Tell her it won’t take but a minute.”

He got in the truck and lowered the window. “What kind of grades are you makin’ these days?”

“Not bad.
B
’s and
A
’s,” Fry said. “Hey, thanks for lunch.”

“Anytime. Always great to see you, buddy.” Perry Skinner put on his sunglasses and fitted a plug of Red Man into his cheek. “I’m countin’ on you to let me know if your mom starts actin’ up again. You’ll call, promise?”

The boy got on his bike.

“Don’t worry. She’s all right,” he said, and pedaled away before his father could get a good look at his eyes.

Honey Santana didn’t despise her ex-husband as much as she claimed. She felt compelled to bad-mouth Perry Skinner because it was he who had filed for divorce, beating her to the punch. By that time they’d already agreed that staying married would be lunacy, their feelings for each other having been flayed raw by one emotional upheaval after another. Honey’s attorney had been fumbling around, trying to draft a basic divorce petition, when she’d received the court papers from Perry. Her pride had been scalded, because among the women she knew, it was always the wife who divorced the husband and never the other way around.

After the split, Skinner had been shockingly prompt with the alimony and child support. He’d also been cooperative on the numerous occasions that Honey Santana needed extra cash, mainly because these requests were passed along by Fry, whose affections Skinner prized. Honey felt lousy about sending her son on these begging missions, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Being alone with Perry still flustered her, four years after the divorce. It wasn’t his attitude that was intimidating but rather the way he’d look at her—like he still cared yet didn’t want her to know, which was, for Honey, difficult to handle.

Sometimes she envied her divorced friends, who seemed liberated by toxic and spiteful relationships with their exes. Of course most of those husbands had been caught screwing around, which wasn’t the case with Skinner. Honey Santana had simply worn him out with her bewildering projects and antic crusades. He was feeling whipsawed and she was feeling caged, and there had seemed to be no practical solution except splitting up.

Still, Honey couldn’t forgive Perry for filing first, which made it appear as if the whole damn thing was her fault when it wasn’t. He could have been a more patient and empathetic partner. He could have been a better listener, and not so quick to believe the doctors….

“I’m sorry, but at the customer’s request this number is not published.”

Oh please, Honey thought. He’s a nobody, for God’s sake.

She tried again, spelling the name more slowly, but she got the same recording. It was unbelievable: Boyd Shreave, anonymous low-life salesman, kept an unlisted home number.

Honey went outside and picked up a section of lead drainpipe and whacked it half a dozen times against the siding of the trailer. Feeling somewhat better, she went back inside and sat down at Fry’s computer, which he’d forgotten to disable, and Googled the name Shreave. Although only one match turned up, her spirits sailed.

It was a story from the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
appearing under the headline
JURY BOOTS SALESMAN’S LAWSUIT.

A Tarrant County jury has awarded only $1 to a local salesman who claimed he was permanently injured while demonstrating corrective footwear to a prospective customer.

Boyd S. Shreave had sought more than $2 million in damages from his former employer, Lone Star Glide-Boots, following the mishap in August 2002.

According to the lawsuit, Shreave was making a sales visit to an elderly Arlington woman when he inserted a graphite orthotic device in one of his own shoes. While parading back and forth to show off “the comfort and unobtrusiveness” of the item, Shreave allegedly stumbled over the woman’s oxygen tank and ended up painfully straddling a potted cactus.

He claimed that the accident resulted in “irreparable cervical trauma” to his neck, and that the cactus needles “grossly disfigured” his groin area, causing “inestimable mental anguish, humiliation and loss of marital intimacy.”

Attorneys for Lone Star Glide-Boots argued that the incident was entirely Shreave’s fault because he’d mistakenly put a left-footed corrective wedge into his right shoe. They also charged that he had “flagrantly” violated company policy by attempting to sell such devices to a person who had long ago lost the use of both legs to diabetes.

The customer, 91-year-old Shirley Lykes, testified that Shreave was “a slick talker, but clumsy as a blind mule.”

The six-member jury deliberated less than an hour. The foreman later explained that the panel decided to give $1 to Shreave “so he could go out and buy some tweezers”—an apparent reference to the lingering cactus thorns that the salesman had complained about.

Shreave, who now works for another company, declined comment.

Honey Santana printed out the article. Gleefully she waved it at Fry as soon as he walked in the door after visiting Perry Skinner.

“Check this out!” she said.

“Don’t you even want to hear his answer?” Fry asked.

“Your ex-father? I already know his answer.”

Fry handed her the cash. “He wants to talk about the plane tickets.”

“Fine, I’ll call him tomorrow.”

“No, Mom, in person.”

Honey frowned. “What crawled up
his
butt and died?”

Fry sat down at the table and skimmed the newspaper article. After finishing, he glanced up and said, “I thought his name was Eisenhower.”

“Nope. He lied,” Honey said, “per the usual.”

“Sure it’s the same guy?”

“Sweetie, how could it
not
be?” She took the printout and taped it to the refrigerator. “Listen, I’ve got another small favor to ask. I need you to go on the computer and do your magic.”

Fry said, “No chance. I’m done for the day.”

“Please? It won’t take long.”

The boy headed down the hallway, Honey trailing behind. “He’s got an unlisted number, can you believe that?”

“Easily,” Fry said.

“But thank God for that stupid lawsuit,” his mother went on, “because it means there’s a court file somewhere in Texas with Mr. Boyd Shreave’s address and home phone number in it. If you can find it on-line, then I can…”

Fry fell into bed and shut his eyes. “You can what? Call up this a-hole and give him a piece of your mind?”

“Yeah. Exactly,” Honey Santana said.

“And that’s all you’re gonna do? Promise?”

“Well, I might have a little fun with him. Nothing he doesn’t deserve.”

Fry sighed. “I knew it.”

“Jesus, I’m not gonna do anything dangerous or against the law.”

Fry opened his eyes and gave her a hard stare. “Mom, I’m not going to Texas with you.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Oh, come on. Even if you con Dad into givin’ you the plane tickets, I’m not going.”

Honey laughed lightly. “Well, I’m not flying to Texas, either. Fry, that’s the nuttiest thing I ever heard—you honestly think I’d jump on a jetliner to go chasing after this slug? Just ’cause he called me a dried-up old whatever.”

“Then who are the tickets for?” her son demanded.

Honey got up and cranked open a window. “I’m starving. You want a snack?”

Fry groaned and yanked the sheet across his face. “I told Dad you were doing okay. Please don’t make a liar out of me.”

“Hush,” said his mother. “How about some popcorn?”

To distance himself from an overhead air-conditioning vent, the haunted-looking Sacco had moved into the cubicle left empty by Boyd Shreave. When Eugenie Fonda passed him a playful note, Sacco swatted it away as if it were a scorpion. His skittishness hinted at a bruised and volatile soul, which naturally piqued Eugenie’s curiosity. Even the man’s telephone voice sounded spent and frayed, although he still managed to churn plenty of leads. After Eugenie slipped him a second note, casual and innocuous, Sacco scrawled a one-word response—“GAY!”—and sailed it back to her desk. By the end of the shift she found herself missing Boyd, dull lump that he was.