Nature Girl

Eleven

The landing in Tampa was bumpy. At the airport, Eugenie Fonda charged into the first open bar on the concourse. “Margaritaville” was playing over the sound system, so she ordered one.

Boyd Shreave had a beer. He raised the glass and said, “To freedom.”

“I guess,” said Eugenie.

“Come on. This is the start of a brand-new lifetime.”

“What’d you rent us?”

“A mid-sized Saturn.”

Eugenie whistled. “Whoa, baby.”

“What’s wrong with a Saturn?”

She smiled. “Very sensible, Boyd. You gonna put it on Lily’s gold card?”

Shreave looked away, feigning fascination with a basketball game on the TV mounted above the Budweiser display.

“Then why not go nuts? Get an Escalade,” Eugenie was saying. “You’re not some schmuck on an expense account, Boyd. You’re on safari.”

“Fine. I’ll rent the biggest road hog they got.”

“Unless you’re feeling guilty,” Eugenie said, “about mooching off your wife.”

“Yeah, that’s me. Crippled with guilt.” Shreave slapped three fives on the bar. “You done?”

They stood in line at the Avis counter for forty-five minutes and departed with an ordinary Ford Explorer, the last Escalade having been rented to a middle-aged man toting two Halliburton travel cases.

Traffic out of the city was murder. Eugenie Fonda shut her eyes and leaned against the window. Boyd Shreave wondered how to draw her into the frisky spirit of a Florida adventure. Despite their rollicking sex life, Eugenie had always maintained emotional distance, and on the long drive Shreave found himself overtaken by an urge to possess her in every way. As she dozed-twitching whenever he swerved or tapped the brakes-Shreave was galvanized by a preposterous desire for her to be charmed and bedazzled and ravenously alert in his presence. Inwardly he began to speculate about what qualities might have attracted her to Van Bonneville, the killer-to-be, five years earlier. As self-deluded as he was about his own allure, Shreave understood that he had little in common with the homicidal tree whacker who’d been so chillingly profiled on Court TV. The man had shown himself as daring and decisive, traits that had never been ascribed to Shreave.

North of Fort Myers he exited the interstate, located a shopping mall and informed Eugenie that he was going to find a rest room. She acknowledged with a drowsy grunt, reclined her seat and drifted back into an ebbing haze of Valium and alcohol. Shreave beelined for a Barnes amp; Noble, where a bemused clerk led him to the last unshredded paperback copy of Storm Ghoul, which he purchased along with a road map of southwest Florida.

The sun was setting when he and Eugenie finally rolled into Everglades City, which was not a city in the Texan sense of the word. It was, in fact, barely a town.

Eugenie lowered her window to let the cool air rouse her. “Where’s the beach?” she asked Shreave.

“I’m not sure.”

“Where’s anything?”

“Just wait,” he said.

When he stopped at a Circle K and asked directions to the Dancing Flamingo Eco-Lodge, the clerk peered at him as if he was a registered sex offender. He had better luck at the Rod and Gun Club, where a bartender examined the street address provided by the telemarketer and said it was within walking distance. He drew a map on a cocktail napkin and handed it to Shreave.

“Let’s eat first. I’m wasting away,” Eugenie said, and headed toward the restaurant.

Admiring the sway of her hips, the bartender told Shreave he was one lucky bastard. “But I’d stick close if I were you,” he added. “Guys around here, they don’t see many women like that.”

“There aren’t many of ’em to see, no matter where you live,” Shreave said authoritatively.

Dinner was excellent-hearts of palm, conch fritters, stone crabs and Key lime pie. Their table overlooked the Barron River, where jumping fish flashed like squirts of mercury under the dock lights. Eugenie ate heartily, and Shreave discerned an improvement in her mood. After dessert she even kicked off one shoe and tickled his crotch with her bare toes.

“We’re gonna have some major fun tonight,” she said.

Nearly delirious with anticipation, Shreave decided to drive the few blocks to the eco-lodge so that he wouldn’t have to schlep their bags. Following the bartender’s map, he turned on to an unpaved street called Curlew Boulevard.

Eugenie stiffened in her seat. “Boyd?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“This is a fucking trailer park.”

“I can see that,” he said grimly.

The address was 543 Curlew, and the residence was definitely a double-wide. Some wacko had painted psychedelic parrots and monkeys all over the front.

Eugenie Fonda said, “Tell me it’s a joke.”

Shreave felt prickly and light-headed.

“Boyd, are you processing all this?”

“I don’t know what’s going on. I swear to God,” he said.

Then the door of the trailer swung open.

Before his ill-fated employment at the airboat concession, Sammy Tigertail had briefly tried wrestling alligators. Nobody had understood why. It wasn’t a popular job, most Seminole gator wrestlers having retired as soon as the gambling remissions started to flow.

Through newspaper advertisements the tribe had recruited a collection of rough young white guys to perform the alligator shows, a breach of cultural authenticity that didn’t seem to bother the tourists. Sammy Tigertail took his training from a former Harley-Davidson mechanic who, by virtue of three missing toes, went by the nickname of “Nubs.” He had lost the digits in a hatchet fight, but naturally he told audiences that a bull gator had gobbled them. For Sammy Tigertail’s orientation, Nubs demonstrated a few rudimentary pinning maneuvers and counseled him not to eat catfish on performance days, because “them goddamn devil lizards can smell it on your breath.”

Sammy Tigertail’s first match went so well that he jokingly asked who’d dosed the alligator-an eight-footer displaying the ferocity of a beanbag chair. Sammy Tigertail was loose and cocky for the next performance, which featured an even more docile specimen, or so the young Seminole had been told.

Statistically, professional gator wrestling is only slightly more dangerous than hanging wallpaper. The low casualty rate is due less to the agility of the handlers than to the habituated tolerance of the reptiles. Having learned that the reward is a ripe dead chicken, the alligators patiently allow themselves to be dragged around a sand pit and subjected to a sequence of silly indignities. Obviously the success of these stunts relies on a certain critical level of lethargy in the animals. A freshly captured alligator is not the ideal wrestling opponent; unschooled and irritable, even a scrawny one is capable of inflicting grave and potentially crippling injuries.

For the second (and, ultimately, final) show of Sammy Tigertail’s career, the redneck wrestlers thought it would be humorous to sneak a ringer into the gator pit. The chosen candidate was seven feet long and weighed roughly 110 pounds. More crucially, it had no show-business experience, having been snared from a golf-course lagoon the previous evening. Unaware, Sammy Tigertail let out an improvised war cry and leapt with gusto upon the beast, which erupted in writhing, hissing fury. The crowd thought it was fantastic.

Clawed, thrashed and tail-whipped, Sammy Tigertail somehow steered clear of the saurian’s teeth. As they flopped around in the dirt, the Indian managed to lock both arms around the flailing head of his foe, at which point they rolled together into the concrete pond. The depth was barely four feet, but Sammy Tigertail knew that alligators had drowned persons in shallower water. He was also aware that the primitive creature in his grip was capable of holding its breath for hours. That fact, plus the realization that the pond itself was probably septic with gator shit, impelled Sammy Tigertail to break his clinch and kick frantically for the surface.

As he sloshed alone out of the bile-colored water, the audience rose and applauded. The Seminole took a shy bow while the announcer explained over the PA system that the defeated leviathan would remain submerged until it stopped sulking. Forty-five minutes later the alligator indeed rose to the surface and floated belly-up, a pose that suggested a far more serious condition than wounded pride. The rattlesnake-milking demonstration was immediately halted and Sammy Tigertail was summoned back to the wrestling pit. There, to a withering chorus of boos and the tickety-tick of digital cameras, he glumly hauled the scaly corpse from the pond.

A necropsy revealed that Sammy Tigertail had accidentally snapped the alligator’s neck during their underwater tussle, a mishap that would cost the tribe hefty fines from state and federal authorities. Among the voluminous regulations governing the captivity and display of Alligator mississippiensis, none is viewed more seriously than the prohibition against harming the species. No wrestler in the history of the Seminole reservation had ever snuffed an alligator during a paid performance, and Sammy Tigertail’s plea for leniency fell on deaf ears. He was banished for life from the gator pit, the incident serving to reinforce the tribal view that he was cursed by his mixed blood.

Sammy Tigertail chose not to share the dead alligator story with Gillian when he declined her request for a wrestling lesson.

She said, “Aw, come on. I taught you how to play the guitar.”

In fact, she’d shown him the chords to one song, “Tequila Sunrise.” It had been a favorite of his late father.

Sammy Tigertail was grateful, up to a point. “You think all Seminoles wrestle gators? That’s insulting,” he said. “It’s like saying all black men can dunk a basketball.”

The topic had arisen because they’d spotted either an alligator or a crocodile swimming across the pass near the island.

“Don’t tell me you never tried,” Gillian said.

“There’s a trick to it,” Sammy Tigertail replied quietly.

“Show me.”

“I said no.”

“Pretend I’m the gator.” Gillian stretched flat on her belly, arms pressed against her sides, on the floor of the cistern. “Now, you sneak up and jump on me.”

“Some other time.”

“Don’t be such a pussy. Come on.”

She was wearing pastel flip-flops, mesh panties and a white bikini top, which had become her official island ensemble. Sammy Tigertail found it extremely distracting. He wasn’t sure whether Gillian was trying to torment him, or whether she was merely oblivious to his feelings.

“I’m really beat,” the Indian said. All morning he’d been chopping paths through the gnarled cactus plants, which at least had proven to be juicy and pleasantly edible.

“Please?” Gillian said. “Just pretend.”

The Seminole aligned himself on top of her, bracing his elbows to lever some of his weight off her backside. She was warmer than an alligator and, in the absence of a corrugated hide, much softer.

Gillian laughed under the strain and said, “Now what?”

He slipped one hand under her chin and firmly placed his other hand on the crown of her head, effectively clamping her mouth closed.

“The trick,” he explained, “is to pin ’em without pissing ’em off.”

Gillian grunted and began to wriggle. Sammy Tigertail abruptly rolled off. He hoped she wouldn’t comment about him getting hard, but of course she did.

“It’s about time. I was beginning to worry about you,” she remarked as she sat up.

“This isn’t a game. It’s a serious deal.” Sammy Tigertail thought: Uncle Tommy’s right. These girls are bad medicine.

“I totally can’t believe you haven’t tried to bone me yet,” Gillian said. “It took Ethan, like, three and a half minutes the first time we went out. Not to do it, but to try-that’s how long from when we got in the car ’til he jammed my hand down his jeans.”

Sammy Tigertail said, “I’m not as smooth as Ethan.”

“I wouldn’t even jerk him off, okay?”

“Listen.” He stood up and tugged Gillian off the floor. “Hear that?”

It was another low-flying plane.

“Go outside and start waving,” he told her.

“Kiss my butt,” she said.

“What’re you trying to prove?” The Indian seized her by the shoulders. “There’s not a drop of freshwater on this island-no soap, no ice, no electricity. You’re gonna be livin’ on bird eggs and fish, which you said makes you barf. So go on home, okay? Go back to Tallahassee and lose Ethan and start over.”

She pulled away and angrily blurted something that the Indian couldn’t hear because of the plane buzzing low. When it was gone, she said, “I thought this was a free country.”

“Why the hell are you here?” the Seminole asked.

“You go first.”

“A guy died on my airboat and I needed somewhere to go. Somewhere with no white people.”

“Is that how come you won’t screw me?” Gillian said. “That’s just as prejudiced as me asking you about alligator wrestlin’. Know what? It’s even worse.”

Sammy Tigertail heard himself say, “My girlfriend’s white.”

Gillian crossed her arms in mock surprise. “No way!”

“I mean my ex-girlfriend.”

“Name, please.”

“Cindy. She’s a crank freak.”

“Ha, you and I do have something in common. We both pick losers,” Gillian said. “Look here, chief. Someday when I’m a gray-haired old lady I can tell my grandkids that I was kidnapped by a real live Indian and held hostage on a mangrove island in the Everglades. And that I taught him how to play the guitar, and he taught me all about gators, and we ate funky cactus berries and counted butterflies and slept in a broken cistern. That’s a pretty great story.”

Sammy Tigertail could not disagree.

“And it’d be even better,” Gillian said, “if there was a steamy romance to tell ’em about. But I guess I could use my imagination-you wouldn’t mind, right? What they call ‘creative license’?”

“Go wild,” said Sammy Tigertail.

Lily Shreave was having a massage when the phone rang. The masseur’s name was Mikko and he claimed to have trained for eleven years in Bali. Lily had found the fanciful lie endearing, given his Sooners tattoos and Oklahoma accent. She pressed a fifty-dollar bill into one of his large oily palms, motioned him out of the room and reached for her cell.

“It’s not happening,” Dealey said on the other end.

“You’re giving up already? But you just got there.”

“They’re inside a damn trailer, Mrs. Shreave. I have no shot.”

Lily got down from the massage table. “You mean like a Winnebago?”

“Not a motor home,” said Dealey, “a mobile home. I’ll never be able to get the angle I need.”

Lily wrapped herself in a towel. “Is she with him? I don’t understand.”

“Let me paint you the picture. I’m sitting in an SUV at a trailer court in some glorified fish camp in the armpit of the Everglades. I can’t even get out of my vehicle because there’s not one but two pitfucking-bull dogs waiting to gnaw my nuts off. Meanwhile your bonehead husband and his fake-Fonda lady friend just carried their bags into a mobile home that looks like it was built when Roosevelt was president and decorated by one of Tarzan’s apes.”

Dealey sounded very discouraged. Lily said, “This doesn’t make sense. Boyd always stays at Marriotts.”

“Mrs. Shreave, there are no Marriotts here. They’re lucky to have running water.”

Lily asked the private investigator if it was possible to peek inside the trailer.

“Negative. Curtains on all the windows,” he reported, “and, like I said, the dogs won’t let me out of the truck anyway. I’m parked a hundred yards down the road.”

“So what’s the plan?” Lily said.

“The plan is for me to drive back to civilization and get an air-conditioned hotel room with a king-sized bed, order up a sirloin steak and watch the fights on HBO. Then, tomorrow, I wake up and catch the first flight back to Dallas. That’s the plan, Mrs. Shreave.”

She sensed that Dealey wasn’t keen on the great outdoors. “You can’t bail on me now. Give it one more day.”

“Sorry. This is above and beyond.”

“How bad can it be? It’s Florida, for God’s sake.”

Dealey snorted. “Right, maybe I’m at Disney World and I just don’t know it. Maybe it’s a fun ride-Trailer Trash of the Caribbean.”

Lily couldn’t imagine why her husband had dragged his mistress to such a place, but she was intrigued. Perhaps it was some grungy swingers’ club he’d dredged up on the Internet.

“You cannot leave yet,” she told Dealey.

“Yeah? Watch me.”

“Suppose I bump the fee to twenty-five.” The moment Lily said it, she knew she’d gone over the edge. This wasn’t about humiliating a wayward husband; this was about getting off.

“What?” Dealey said.

“Twenty-five grand.”

“You’re a sick woman-no offense.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Lily could hear the pit bulls barking in the background. “Boyd and his bimbo have gotta come out of that trailer eventually,” she said to Dealey. “I bet they’ll do it on the beach at sunrise. Throw down a blanket and go at it like animals-that sounds like her, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not sure there is a beach, Mrs. Shreave.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Florida is one big beach.”

Dealey said, “Twenty-four hours. Then I’m outta here.”

“Fair enough. But trust me on the sunrise thing.”

“I’ll be sure to set my alarm,” the investigator said. “You’re not bullshitting about the twenty-five large?”

Lily Shreave smiled on the other end. “The pizza business is good, Mr. Dealey.”

Boyd Shreave wasn’t nearly as slick as Honey Santana had anticipated.

“Would you and Mrs. Shreave care for some fresh-squeezed orange juice?” she asked.

The woman accompanying Boyd Shreave started to say something but he cut her off. “Orange juice would be fine,” he said, “wouldn’t it, Genie?”

Honey knew from her Googling expedition that Shreave’s wife was named Lily. Days earlier, when he’d faxed her the information for the airline reservations, Shreave had listed his wife as Eugenie Fonda, parenthetically explaining that she preferred to use her maiden name. The slithering lie did not surprise Honey. That Shreave would bring a girlfriend only ratified her initial harsh appraisal of his character.

“So, this is the ‘lodge’?” He scanned the interior of the double-wide. “We were expecting something different,” he said.

“Temporary quarters until the new facility is finished,” Honey fibbed sunnily. “We’re building it way up in the treetops, just like they do in Costa Rica.”

Shreave was skeptical. “People give away a free trip to paradise, they don’t usually put you up at a trailer court. Am I right, or what?”

“Well, I think you’ll be pleased.” Honey was stung that neither Shreave nor his companion had commented upon her tropical mural on the outer wall.

“So, when do we hear the big pitch?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“For the swamp land you’re supposed to sell us. Royal Gulf Hammocks, remember?” Shreave chuckled sardonically. “This is some four-star operation you’re running.”

“Yes-the Hammocks. Of course,” Honey Santana said. “We’ll talk about all that later.” She’d almost forgotten that she was supposed to be working a land-sales scam.

The woman named Genie spoke up. “Isn’t there a beach around here someplace? Or at least a damn tiki bar?”

“Where we’re going is better than the beach-tomorrow morning we leave for the islands.” Honey smiled. “Excuse me, would you?”

The trailer being trailer-sized, Honey could hear the couple arguing in low tones while she was in the kitchen. She was relieved that Shreave hadn’t pegged her as the voice of Pia Frampton, the fictitious telemarketer who’d offered him the trip. Her Laura Bush drawl seemed to have done the trick.

Although Honey owned an electric juicer, she chose to squeeze the fruit by hand. The exercise was therapeutic, keeping at bay temporarily the two tunes-“Smoke on the Water” and “Rainy Days and Mondays”-that had been colliding unbearably inside her head following the unwise visit to Louis Piejack. Earlier in the evening, before the Texans had arrived, Honey had thought she’d spotted Louis in a dark-colored pickup cruising her street. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure; half the guys in town owned trucks like that.

The woman named Genie materialized in the kitchen, offering to help with the tray. Honey said it wasn’t necessary.

“But thank you just the same, Mrs. Shreave.”

“I’m not Mrs. Shreave,” Genie whispered somewhat urgently.

Honey whispered back: “I know.”

“Really? What gave me away?”

“That pearl in your tongue, for starters.”

The woman nodded ruefully. “My name’s Eugenie Fonda. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Honey said. “I won’t try to sell you any real estate.”

“No, you don’t understand-”

Shreave called out Genie’s name, and Honey touched a finger to her lips. The two women returned to the living room, where Shreave had been nosily examining the contents of Honey’s bookcase, which she’d neglected to purge of personal memorabilia.

“Who’s the track star?” He pointed to a shelf of trophies.

“My son.”

“Yeah? He must be pretty fast.”

Honey wanted to change the subject. “Have some OJ, Mr. Shreave.”

“Yeah, it’s really good,” Eugenie Fonda said. She was clutching the glass as if it were the rip cord on a parachute. “Got any vodka to go with it?”

Shreave said, “I ran some seriously swift relays myself, back in the day.”

At first Honey thought he must be joking, but she was set straight by Eugenie’s scornful expression.

“Until I blew out my knees,” Shreave continued.

Soon the rising babel in Honey’s skull made it impossible to follow what he was saying. She considered the possibility that she, too, had made a large mistake. Boyd Shreave didn’t seem like a person who could be easily chastened, moved or transformed. He presented no convictions, or true sense of himself. He’d made the Everglades trip only to prove to his girlfriend that he wasn’t a wimp.

Honey prepared herself for three challenging days.

She said, “You folks do know how to kayak, right?”