Nature Girl

Fourteen

The plan was to steal water but no food from other campers. Water was essential for life, Sammy Tigertail said. Pringles were not.

“How would you feel about beer?” Gillian asked.

“That’ll do.”

They searched for hours but spotted no other fires, and encountered nobody else on the water. When the moon disappeared behind a gray-blue ridge of clouds, Sammy Tigertail began navigating back toward the island. He feared getting lost in the web of unmarked creeks, although he didn’t let on to Gillian.

From the bow of the canoe she asked, “Do you know a rain dance?”

“First I need a virgin.”

“I’m serious,” Gillian said.

Sammy Tigertail wasn’t sure if the Seminoles had a dance for making rain. He knew firsthand about the Green Corn Dance, a purification and feasting ritual dating back to the tribe’s Creek origins. The celebration took place every spring and required participants to swallow boiled black concoctions that induced copious vomiting. Sammy Tigertail attended with his mother and his uncle Tommy, who customarily brought a flask of Johnnie Walker to wash away the taste of the black drinks.

Gillian said, “Speaking of virgins, you wanna hear how I lost it? I’ll tell you, if you tell me.”

“Not interested.”

“It was on a riding mower.”

“Stop.”

“On the sixteenth hole of the south course at the Firestone Country Club,” she said.

“I get the picture.”

“Which happens to be the jewel of Akron, Ohio. What about you?”

“I don’t remember,” said Sammy Tigertail. He spotted their island around the bend and increased the pace of his paddling, heedless of his thirst or the blister rising on his left palm.

Gillian went on: “It was my best friend’s big brother. Is that a fucking cliche or what? And you do too remember.”

“We’re almost there,” said the Seminole.

“So-what was her name?”

“Sally Otter.”

“Excellent!”

After stowing the canoe, they ate some cactus berries and moved their sleeping bags from the cistern to open ground, where they could see the stars. They lay down side by side, shoulders touching.

“Hey, Thlocko,” Gillian whispered.

“I’m tired.”

“You go to college?”

“Never finished high school.”

One week after his son was born, Sammy Tigertail’s father had gone to the bank and opened the “Chad McQueen College Fund,” into which he faithfully deposited one hundred dollars every month. When Chad/Sammy had turned twelve, his stepmother had persuaded his father to close the account and invest the accumulated balance-$16,759.12-in 307 Beanie Baby dolls, which she grandly predicted would quintuple in value by the time the boy finished high school. Each tagged with an insipidly perky nickname, the rarest and most valuable of the small stuffed animals was reputed to be Leroy the Lemming, of which Sammy’s stepmother owned four. The collection was locked inside a steamer trunk that occupied many cubic feet of the boy’s bedroom. Upon the sudden death of Sammy’s father, his stepmother immediately hawked her entire Beanie Babies stash for $3,400, which she put down on a new Lexus coupe.

The Indian elected not to share that memory with Gillian. His half-white past was a private matter.

“So what’s your problem with college?” she asked.

“Be quiet,” Sammy Tigertail said.

“Hey, what about the Fighting Irish?”

“The who?”

“Remember you gave me a ration of shit about my Seminoles jersey? What about Notre Dame, huh? How come all the Irishmen aren’t all pissed off about the name of that team?”

Sammy Tigertail reached out and clapped his hand over Gillian’s mouth. “Shut the hell up. I’m begging you.”

She pushed his arm away and rolled over. “Is that how you talked to Sally Beaver?”

“Otter was her name.”

“Whatever,” said Gillian.

The Indian closed his eyes, longing for a peaceful sleep. A thousand years ago, Calusa warriors had lain under the same winter sky. When he was in the eighth grade (and still Chad McQueen), Sammy Tigertail had written a school paper about the Calusa, who had predated by twelve centuries the arrival in Florida of the beleaguered Seminoles. The Calusa’s highly structured society revolved around fishing, and they were accomplished makers of palm-fiber nets, spears, throat gorges and hooks. They traveled widely in dugout canoes, dominating by trade and force all other Indian tribes throughout the peninsula. Sammy Tigertail remembered seeing photographs of intricate tribal masks, shell jewelry and delicate wooden bird carvings excavated from a Calusa midden on Marco Island. The body paint favored by Calusa braves had been mixed with the oil of shark livers, to repel mosquitoes. (Sammy Tigertail once asked his uncle why the Seminoles didn’t try the same formula, and his uncle said he would rather swat a bug than kill a shark.)

But the most remarkable thing that Sammy Tigertail remembered from his middle-school project about the noble Calusa was how suddenly they were wiped out-erased from the landscape barely two hundred years after their first fateful contact with Spanish soldiers, who carried diseases more deadly than their muskets.

The Calusa brave who plugged Ponce de Leon with an arrow had the right idea, Sammy Tigertail thought. He knew those white fuckers were bad news.

In the end, ravaged bands of Calusa were hunted down by mercenary Creeks and other newly armed Indians, who sold them to slavers. Sammy Tigertail recalled that a few hundred Calusa were thought to have escaped with their cacique to Havana in the mid-1700s, and he wondered what had become of them. He’d always thought it sad that the Calusa had disappeared from Florida’s southernmost wilderness before the Seminoles-driven by another rapacious bunch of white men-had settled there. Because the two tribes had never crossed paths, there was no chance that even a droplet of Calusa blood flowed in Sammy Tigertail’s veins. In dark moments he actually worried that he might be descended from one of the slave-hunting Creeks who’d preyed upon the Calusa, for ironically it was displaced Creek clans and other cimmarones who would later become the Seminole Nation.

Sammy Tigertail took several deep breaths and pressed his arms against his sides. He was hoping to feel the power and wisdom of a hundred warriors rising up from the ancient bones and shells beneath him…

Yet when he opened his eyes, he felt no different from the way he’d felt before-like a man who didn’t fit in anybody’s world, red or white.

Emptily he blinked at the milky heavens. The sun had risen and the morning haze was burning off. He lay shirtless on top of the sleeping bag, clutching the Gibson guitar to his breast. Somewhere down by the shore, Gillian was saying, “Right side, Boyd, right side. Watch out for those snags, Genie.”

Which made no sense, until the Indian realized that it wasn’t Gillian’s voice he was hearing from the water. Gillian was in the limbs of the poinciana, signaling for him to get up.

Sammy Tigertail sprang to his feet and unwrapped the rifle. Gillian dropped lightly out of the tree. She touched his arm and said, “You think they’ve got water, Thlocko?”

“Time to behave,” he advised, “otherwise I’m gonna leave you out here alone to die.”

“I can be quiet. I swear I can.” She gave a crisp salute and mimed a zippering motion along her lips.

Eugenie Fonda recognized Boyd Shreave’s self-transformation from ambivalent dullard to condescending asshole as a last-ditch attempt to raise his game. It wasn’t the first time one of her lovers had tried to re-invent himself, but for sheer detestability Boyd had outdone all the rest. He’d pay dearly for it, of course. Instead of lounging on a beach with chilled rum runners in hand-Eugenie’s ideal of a proper Florida vacation-they were paddling through a funky-smelling, bug-infested swamp. Worse, she was doing all the hard work; as a kayaking partner, Boyd was useless, his strokes splashy and mistimed. He snottily spurned instruction from their tour guide, who-Eugenie had noticed in the light of day-was quite attractive. Most of Eugenie’s past loser boyfriends would have been hitting on Honey Santana by now, but not Boyd. He’d decided to advertise his virility by behaving like a conceited dipshit.

“I gotta take another leak,” he announced to the world. Eugenie Fonda disregarded him. Honey spun her kayak and said, “Everything okay back there?”

“No, it’s not. I’ve gotta piss again,” Shreave said.

“We’ll stop for lunch up ahead.” Honey pointed to an island a half-mile away.

“Better hurry,” Boyd growled to Eugenie, “or you’ll be up to your ankles in something nasty.”

He resumed his spastic paddling, which immediately put the kayak off course. To neutralize him, Eugenie shed her life vest and matter-of-factly unstrung her halter.

“What’re you doin’?” she heard Boyd ask.

“My New Year’s resolution: no more tan lines.”

“But what if another boat comes by?”

“Who cares, Boyd? They’re just tits.”

From then on he was so preoccupied that he scarcely paddled at all, which had been Eugenie’s objective. Unhindered by his inept flailing, she guided the kayak effortlessly with the tide. As they closed in on the mangrove island, Honey called out, “Right side, Boyd, right side. Watch out for those snags, Genie.”

No sooner had the bow creased the bank than Shreave stepped into the shallows, clambered ashore and vanished. Honey Santana and Eugenie Fonda dragged the kayaks up on dry land.

“Can I ask you something?” Honey said.

“Yeah, but there’s no good answer. I was bored, I guess,” Eugenie said. “I mean really bored.”

“He sure doesn’t seem like your type.”

“I’ve never met my type. That’s a problem,” Eugenie said. “How about you?”

Honey nodded. “Once I did. We stayed together a long time.”

“I’d settle for that. You have no idea.”

Shreave reappeared. His hat was crooked and he was struggling to remove a twig from the zipper of his pants. He said, “Ladies, you won’t believe what yours truly found up the hill.”

“An ounce of charm?” Eugenie said.

“A campfire!”

“Way out here?” Honey looked concerned.

“It’s still warm,” Shreave reported, “and it smells like greasy fish.”

Honey said they should move to another island immediately.

“What’re you scared of? They’re gone now.” Shreave swept his arms dismissively. “Besides, I’m starving.”

“Well, that settles it. His Majesty wants supper.” Eugenie opened her backpack and removed a light cotton pullover, which she put on despite Boyd’s adolescent protests. She had no intention of marching topless through spiderwebs.

Fry woke up giggling. He didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t much care. He heard his father’s voice say, “Nice job, champ.”

“Whah?”

“You T-boned a garbage truck.”

Fry tried to remember.

“On your skateboard,” his dad said.

“Shit,” Fry mumbled. Normally he tried not to cuss in front of his parents, but at the moment he had no self-control. The sun was blinding and his neck throbbed when he turned away.

His father said, “The truck was parked, by the way. Six tons of solid steel and you couldn’t see it.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.” Fry laughed again and scrambled to recover. “I know it’s not funny. Really, I know it’s not.”

“You’re wasted,” his father said. “Don’t get too used to it.”

“Ohhhhhh.” Fry closed his eyes, floating. He comprehended that he was in his father’s pickup, and it was speeding along the Tamiami Trail.

“They gave you some heavy-duty pain pills,” Perry Skinner said.

“For what?”

“Three busted ribs. Concussion with a hairline skull fracture. Plus you’ve got a knot on your head as big as a strawberry.”

Fry tried to touch it but all he could feel was smooth plastic.

“What’s the deal?” he asked.

“The hospital wanted to hold you for observation but we had to get a move on, so I stopped at the mall and bought a football helmet.”

“Bucs or Dolphins?”

“Dolphins,” his father said. “In case you get dizzy and fall, I didn’t want you to spill your brains all over the place.”

Fry’s memory was returning in muddy waves. “Where was I going when it happened? To school, right?”

“Yep.”

“Dad, are you driving superfast, or is it the medicine?”

“Both.”

Fry recalled looking up and seeing the garbage truck broken down directly in his path, unavoidable. He wondered what he’d been thinking about at the time, what had distracted him so completely.

“Where we goin’?” he asked.

“For a boat ride,” Perry Skinner replied.

“Why?” Fry didn’t feel like getting on a boat. He felt like going home and shutting the blinds and crawling under the sheets.

“Because I can’t leave you alone is what the doctors told me. In case you have a damn seizure or somethin’,” his father said sharply. “There’s nobody else to watch over you ’cept me.”

“What about Mom?”

Skinner didn’t answer. Fry now remembered seeing Louis Piejack cruise past the trailer that morning. He also remembered rushing to tell his dad at the crab docks.

“What about Mom?” he asked again. This time he opened his eyes. “Dad?”

“That’s where we’re goin’, to find your mother.”

“But where is she?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

“Is Mr. Piejack after her?” Fry asked.

“It’s possible.”

Fry slumped to one side, the football helmet clunking against the truck window.

Perry Skinner said, “I should’ve let ’em keep you in the hospital. What the hell was I thinking?”

“I would’ve just snuck out and hitched a ride.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Neither of them spoke again until they reached the flashing yellow light that marked the turn toward Everglades City.

Fry’s father said, “Your skateboard made out better than you. One of the wheels got snapped off, but that’s it.”

“Dad, you gonna bring your gun?”

“What?”

“When we go look for Mom. Are you takin’ the gun?”

“I am.” Perry Skinner cleared his throat.

“Good call,” Fry said.

Louis Piejack gazed through the binoculars and said, “Jackpot!” Then he said it another six or seven times.

“What is it?” Dealey asked miserably from the bow.

“Get your camera ready. I see titties.”

Dealey squinted ahead. The bay was a rippled puddle of glare, and the two kayaks were at least five hundred yards away.

“No good,” he said to Louis Piejack. “It’s too far, plus they’re backlit.”

“They ain’t Honey’s, but those are some major-league boobs. Rig up that damn camera.”

Dealey snapped open one of the Halliburtons and removed a Nikon body, which he attached to a small tripod. From the other case he took a 600-millimeter telephoto lens. Assembly was achieved with shaking fingers, for Dealey was afraid of dropping the expensive equipment overboard.

Louis Piejack laid off on the throttle, crowing, “Jackpot! Jackpot! They stopped at the island!” His good right hand held the field glasses to his eyes while his swathed left paw steered the johnboat.

“It’s still backlit, don’t you understand? There’s no shot from here,” Dealey complained.

“That’s Dismal Key. I know another way in.”

Dealey said, “Go slow, okay? Camera gets splashed and we’re out of business.”

And I’m out two grand, he thought.

“But I want movies,” Piejack said, “not pitchers.”

Dealey packed the Nikon away. He said they needed to get much closer to record usable videotape.

“Noooooo problem.” Piejack was fuzzy from the Vicodin tablets he’d eaten for lunch. It wasn’t easy maintaining a high-level addiction to prescription painkillers with one’s dominant hand swaddled so cumbersomely. Piejack had assigned Dealey-under threat of execution-to open the bottle and count out five tablets, which with lizardly flicks of his scabbed tongue he’d slurped from his captive’s palm. Dealey, mortified, had said nothing.

Piejack circled to the far side of the island and poked the johnboat along an overgrown mangrove creek. The talon-like branches clawed at Dealey’s skin and tore holes in his suit jacket, but Piejack seemed unconcerned. He ran the boat hard aground, snatched up his shotgun and jumped out. Dealey followed, lugging the camera gear.

“Don’t get no ideas,” Piejack warned.

“You think I’m crazy?”

In fact, Dealey had thought of nothing but escape since they’d motored out of Everglades City. Now, trailing Piejack into the heart of the island, Dealey waited for the loopy kidnapper to falter. With providence, Piejack soon would pass out from the excess of narcotics, presenting Dealey with a couple of options. Running like hell would be high on the list, but where would he go? Even if he got the johnboat running, Dealey wasn’t confident that he could find his way to the mainland.

A more practical idea was to snatch the shotgun while Louis Piejack slept, and then force the nimrod to ferry him back to town. Even with a plan in mind, Dealey remained anxious, for nothing on the streets of Fort Worth had prepared him for such a situation-being trapped in the Everglades with a maimed and trigger-happy fishmonger.

“Shut up,” Piejack barked.

“I didn’t say a word.”

“Then who the hell did?” Piejack halted, raising a begauzed hand. Dealey heard nothing except his own rapid breathing; the camera cases were heavy.

“Over there.” Piejack pointed to a fifteen-foot hill sprinkled with scrub and cactus plants. “You first.”

“Gimme a break.”

“How ’bout a load of bird shot up your butthole instead?”

The slope consisted almost entirely of broken oysters and seashells. Dealey’s shoes crunched noisily as he advanced, Piejack goosing him crudely with the barrel of the sawed-off. As they approached the top, Dealey heard voices on the other side. Piejack directed him toward a clump of sticky vines, where they took cover.

The three kayakers were in a clearing under a big tree, about fifty yards away. Boyd Shreave and Eugenie Fonda were sitting on a duffel bag, eating from plastic containers and sharing a gallon jug of water. The woman from the trailer park, Louis Piejack’s beloved Honey, stood spritzing her arms with bug juice.

“My God, ain’t she a treasure.” Piejack sighed. “Take out your camera, Hawkeye.”

“She’s got her clothes on. They all do.” Dealey felt sure that in his earlier sighting, Piejack had hallucinated the naked breasts.

“Just make me a goddamn movie,” Piejack whispered menacingly.

Dealey rigged up the camera and began to tape, Piejack hovering at his left shoulder. Through the viewfinder it appeared that Boyd Shreave was talking constantly, and that neither of the women was paying the slightest attention.

Dealey felt Piejack’s hot breath on his ear. Then, in a singsong voice: “Where’s my lil’ Honey Pie runnin’ off to?”

“How should I know?”

“Stay on her! Stay on her!”

Dealey said, “Easy, Louis.” He kept the camera trained on Honey as she made her way into a brushy stand of small trees.

“I bet she’s gonna pee,” Piejack said excitedly.

He’s probably right, thought Dealey, discreetly pressing the pause button.

“Are you still shootin’? Keep shootin’!” Piejack was panting like a broken-down dog. “Can you see her? I can’t see her no more.”

The crackpot was unaware that the tape had been stopped, so Dealey easily could have faked it. He could have kept quiet and pretended to record Honey squatting in the bushes, Piejack hopping beside him in elation.

Yet even Dealey, whose life’s work was invading and exploiting the most private moments of others, had moral boundaries. A sex tape was evidence; a pissing tape was trash.

The investigator pivoted with artistic deliberation, touched the record button and boldly advanced with the lens aimed squarely at his captor.

Louis Piejack began backing up. “Now what the hell you doin’?”

“Makin’ a movie,” Dealey replied, “about the sickest piece of shit I ever met.”

At the crest of the oyster mound, Piejack’s expression changed from ragged confusion to rage. He dug his heels into the loose shells and leveled the sawed-off at Dealey’s gut.

“Don’t come no closer. You’re done,” he said.

“I’m not so sure about that.” Dealey adjusted the exposure and continued taping.

Piejack peered at the red dot blinking beneath the lens. “Turn that damn thing off.”

“Don’t you want to be famous?”

“What for?”

“Stinking up the planet,” said Dealey.

“That’s it. Get ready to die, you sonofabitch.”

“Then good luck, Louis. You’re gonna need it.”

Piejack scowled. “What the fuck’s that s’posed to mean?”

“Good luck opening your precious medicine bottle without me to help,” Dealey said.

Piejack pensively nibbled his upper lip. “It’s those goddamn kiddy-proof caps. They’re murder with one hand.”

“Oh, you’ll figure out a way.” Dealey noticed a brown iodine-stained nub on the trigger of the shotgun. It was a thumb, sprouting from the gauze where a forefinger ought to have been. Dealey briefly zoomed in on it.

“Make up your mind, Louis.”

Piejack grunted. “You think I won’t shoot? Ha!”

Dealey heard a dull crack and the kidnapper disappeared from the viewfinder. In his place stood a muscular young man holding a rifle. Dealey lowered the camera and saw Piejack, facedown and lifeless in a cactus patch.

“I owe you, bud,” the investigator said to the stranger, who retrieved Piejack’s shotgun and tucked it under one arm.

Then he walked up to Dealey and ungently pinched his nose.

“You’re not real,” the man said accusingly.

“I am too,” Dealey quacked, struggling to pull free.

“Look at your damn suit.”

“I can explain!”

The man with the rifle said, “Don’t lie to me. You’re a death spirit.”

Perfect, Dealey thought. Another Florida wacko.

The man let go of Dealey’s nose and said, “Take off your shoes and socks.”

Dealey stowed the video camera and did what he was told. The man balled up the sweaty socks and crammed them into Dealey’s cheeks.

“You got any water?” he demanded.

Dealey shook his head apologetically.

“Hell,” the young man said. He motioned with the rifle. “Stand up and follow me.”

When Dealey pointed to his Halliburtons, the man shrugged. Dealey hoisted the two cases and trudged heavily after the stranger. The broken oyster shells gouged the soles of the investigator’s feet, and before long he heard himself whimpering.

This is the worst job I ever took, he thought. By far.