Nature Girl

Twenty-four

For once, Honey Santana’s head was absolutely clear. No tunes blared. No sirens whined. No trains whistled. A rare and welcome clarity prevailed.

A brutish criminal had clobbered her son, and there was only one appropriate response: Honey clamped both hands around Louis Piejack’s oily neck.

It felt right; empowering, as Oprah might say.

Honey knew that if the man shot her, she would die strangling him. Saving Fry was all that mattered.

Honey forced Piejack against a pigeon plum tree, trapping the shotgun between their bodies. The barrel lodged lengthwise in her cleavage, the dirty muzzle sticking up at her chin. Fire ants began pouring out of Piejack’s bandaged hand, which he flogged against his thigh until the surgical dressing fell off in a putrid husk.

To hinder his movements she pressed harder, though at first the lecherous fishmonger seemed to enjoy the rough frontal contact. He winked moistly and ran his spotted tongue around his lips.

When Honey squeezed harder, Piejack’s smirk faded. His yellowed eyes began to bulge and seep. Brownish spittle bubbled from the corners of his mouth, and his rank breath came in short, croupy emanations. As she dug her fingertips into his Adam’s apple, Honey regretted having trimmed her nails the week before. She nonetheless felt capable of inflicting mortal damage, and, despite his narcotic intake, the sonofabitch was definitely uncomfortable. She could tell by his gurgling.

“Watch out!” It was Fry.

To Honey’s immense relief, the boy hadn’t been hurt. Piejack’s gun butt had cracked the football helmet and knocked him flat, but Fry had sprung up quickly. Honey caught glimpses of him circling the scene, darting in to throw wild, ineffectual punches.

“I told you to get outta here!” When she opened her mouth to yell, her broken jawbone clacked like a castanet.

“No way!” Fry shouted back.

“Do-as-I-say!”

“Mom! Look!”

“Oh shit.”

From wrists to shoulders, her sleeves shimmered with fire ants. They were abandoning Piejack en masse, using Honey as a bridge. By the hundreds they streamed down her arms, but she was afraid to release her grip on Piejack to slap them away. He’d need only a moment, Honey knew, to regain control of the sawed-off.

As Fry flayed at the insects with a palmetto frond, Honey tried not to think about where the blood-red hordes might be heading. Piejack’s misshapen face was darkening due to loss of oxygen, yet he continued to grapple ferociously with good hand and bad for possession of the shotgun. So heated was the scuffle that Honey failed to notice a column of ants disappear between the top buttons of her shirt. The stings seared, like a sprinkle of hot acid, and she wondered how much she could endure.

Not enough, it turned out. Within seconds she was breathless from the pain. She let go of Piejack, tore off her shirt and flung herself down. When she stopped rolling, he stood over her panting and clutching the sawed-off. His shoes still reeked of Fry’s vomit.

Honey sat up and crossed her arms, to cover her bra. Her chest was burning along a sinuous track of tiny crimson bites.

“They’s one in your curls,” Piejack croaked.

As shaky as he was, the man had managed to hook one of his reconnected digits, possibly a pinkie, over the shotgun’s trigger. With the more nimble fingers of his good hand he was grubbing dirt from his ears.

Honey flicked the ant from her hair and thought: Where the hell is my son?

To find out if Piejack’s hearing had returned, she asked in a level tone, “What’re you going to do now, Louis?”

“What the hell d’ya think? I’m gonna shoot yer fine ass,” he said, “but first I’m gonna fuck it.”

He coughed up something, scowled at the taste and spat. Honey peered out between his knees, looking in vain for Fry.

Piejack said, “Your kid’s run off. But I’ll catch him later, don’tcha worry.”

His eyeballs rolled and he gulped slowly, like a toad. It was plain that Honey had injured him.

“Lose them pants,” he told her.

“Not a chance, Louis.”

“You know damn well I’ll shoot.”

“And that’s the only way it would ever happen between us-if I was dead,” Honey said.

“Now, that ain’t too bright.” Piejack touched the sawed-off to her forehead. “But if that’s how you want it…”

Honey expected her whole life to flash past, like people said it would, yet only a single event from her thirty-nine years replayed in fast-forward: Fry’s arrival.

She’d gone into labor on a Monday afternoon, six weeks early. Radioed Perry out on the crab boat. He raced home, carried her to the truck and sped ninety-five miles an hour across the state to Jackson Hospital in Miami. A sweet old Cuban doctor asked if she wanted an epidural, and Honey answered no because she figured the baby would be small and it wouldn’t hurt so much coming out. But it hurt plenty, and lasted way longer than she’d expected: fifteen hours and forty-one minutes. Perry stayed by her side. When there was pain he’d squeeze Honey’s hand, and when there wasn’t, he’d read to her from a book of fishing stories by Zane Grey. Honey had no interest in fishing, but it was the first time she’d heard her husband read aloud and for some reason she found it calming.

Then the cramps got fierce. Doctor told her to push. Nurses told her to push. Perry told her to push. Honey remembered biting her lip, thinking: Thank God the little guy didn’t go full term. He’d split me open like a melon! And all of a sudden there he was, wriggling on the sheets like a purple tadpole: Fry Marti Skinner, four pounds and fourteen ounces.

From the first breath he seemed uncommonly self-assured. Never cried once in the delivery room, not even when Perry snipped the cord. The nurses were freaking because the child wouldn’t make a peep, but Honey wasn’t worried. Boy was smart. Knew he was safe and loved.

Mom and Dad were the ones who’d wept when the nurses bundled Fry off to the preemie ward and wired him up like a mouse in a laboratory tank. Fluid in the lungs, the doctor said, avoiding the term pneumonia so as not to further derail Honey, who was already frantic. She refused to leave the hospital, Skinner bringing her meals and books and fresh clothes. Fifteen days later Fry was home and his mother was whole, though not unchanged.

It was natural now, with time running out, that the final thought in her head would be of her son.

Who now emerged helmetless from behind the pigeon plum tree. He was carrying a bleached and broken two-by-four.

Honey willed herself to be silent and locked her gaze upon Louis Piejack’s shotgun. Best that he kept pointing it at her, not elsewhere.

Slowly Fry crept forward.

What colossal balls, marveled Honey, and steeled herself for the end.

Louis Piejack had never been enthralled by the great outdoors. The unsentimental commerce of seafood had drawn him to the Ten Thousand Islands. It was simple: If you were a fish peddler, you went where there were fish. Piejack couldn’t fathom why tourists and tree huggers gushed about the Everglades. He had no use for the vicious bugs and the infernal heat; his free hours were spent at home with the windows latched and the AC blasting and a case of Heinies cooling in the refrigerator.

It was into that cozy chamber of comfort that Piejack had dreamed of moving Honey Santana, but he now wondered if it was worth all the grief. Pretty as she was, her attitude remained piss-poor. She was tough and outspoken and damn near fearless-qualities which in a female did not appeal to Piejack. Plus she had a rotten temper; for squeezing her boob she’d walloped his nuts, and for clocking her bratty son she’d nearly strangled him.

Piejack preferred not to shoot her, but he was running out of fight. As the dreamy effect of the painkillers ebbed, so did his optimism for a blissful union. From the day he’d set his sights on Honey, physical affliction had been his only companion. Anesthetized by lust, he’d doggedly pursued the quest, convinced that he could melt Honey’s frigid resistance. So far he’d failed spectacularly. Even in his addled state, Piejack comprehended that this was a woman who wouldn’t settle easily into the role of obedient homemaker-slash-sex slave. He’d have to battle for every lousy feel, and she was strong enough to make him pay with blood. Piejack knew a Key West shrimper who’d gotten himself into the same sort of fix, with an Internet bride from the Philippines. Three nights into the honeymoon, the girl had pinned his scrotum to the mattress with a cocktail fork, then set fire to the motel room. Piejack shuddered at the thought.

He allowed the muzzle of the shotgun to kiss Honey’s forehead. “I don’t really wanna shoot ya, angel, and I gotta feelin’ you really don’t wanna die. So just do what Louis says and everything’s gonna be fine.”

Expressionless, she gazed up the barrel.

“Now, git yourself naked and let’s start this romance off proper,” Piejack said. “Then we’ll take the boat home and be happy ever after, just you, me and Charlie Main. As for your boy, well, he’s better off with his daddy. You can visit him maybe on Saturdays, if I don’t need you at the market. That’s the fuckin’ deal, angel, take it or leave it.”

Honey said, “I need time to think, Louis.”

“How long, goddammit?”

“About three seconds.”

“Okay,” Piejack said. “One…two…”

On the count of three, something sharp and heavy struck him from behind and knocked the air from his lungs. Piejack pitched sideways, thinking: This ain’t love.

The first white person to betray Sammy Tigertail had been his stepmother, who’d dumped him at the reservation the morning after his father was buried. The second white person to betray him had been Cindy, his ex-girlfriend, who’d started screwing anyone with a functioning cock after the Seminole demolished her backyard meth lab and confiscated a butane-powered menorah that she’d swiped from a local Hanukkah display.

Sammy Tigertail would concede that his Native American heritage wasn’t a factor in either instance of treachery-his stepmother was simply a self-centered shrew who didn’t want to be saddled with a teenager, while poor Cindy was a buzzed-out tramp who would have cheated on Prince William for a thimbleful of crank. As it turned out, both women had done Sammy Tigertail a favor. One had liberated him from his pallid existence as Chad McQueen, and the other had sprung him from a destructive and potentially gene-thinning romance.

Like many modern Seminoles, he had never been personally abused, subjugated, swindled or displaced by a white settler. The “injurious accompaniments” to which the Rev. Clay MacCauley had alluded in his nineteenth-century journal were old, bitter history; there had been no significant perfidy or bloodshed for generations. By the 1970s Florida was being stampeded from coast to coast, and the fortunes of the Seminoles had begun to change in a most unexpected way. It all started with a couple of bingo halls, and the knowledge that bored white people were fools for gambling. Soon they were swarming to the reservations by the busloads, and the bingo venues expanded to make room for card games and electronic poker.

Even as its numbers dwindled, the tribe’s prominence was inversely escalating to a dimension that boggled the elders. Wealth brought what three bloody wars had failed to win from the whites: deference. Once written off as a ragged band of heathens, the Seminole Nation grew into a formidable corporate power with its own brigade of lawyers and lobbyists. The Indians found themselves embraced by the lily-white business establishment, and avidly courted by politicians of all persuasions.

Some tribal members called it justice while others, such as Sammy Tigertail, called it a sellout. His uncle Tommy, who had helped mastermind the Seminole casino strategy, respected and even sympathized with the misgivings of his half-blooded nephew.

“My heart was in the same place,” he’d once told Sammy, “but then one day I asked myself, Who is there left to fight? Andrew Jackson’s dead, boy. His face is on the twenty-dollar bill, and we’ve got suitcases full at the casinos. Every night we stack ’em in a Brink’s truck and haul ’em to the bank. It’s better than spitting on the old bastard’s grave. Think of it, boy. All their famous soldiers are gone-Jackson, Jesup, Clinch-yet here we are.”

Yeah, thought Sammy Tigertail, here I am. Risking my dumb ass to help a white man rescue his wacko ex-wife.

The shot had sounded odd; like a firecracker in a toilet.

Skinner was running hard, the Indian close on his heels. Still it took several minutes to cross the island, choked as it was with vines and undergrowth. Eventually the two men burst into a broad clearing and Sammy Tigertail saw, on the other side, his own campsite. Some sort of unholy fight was under way-yelling, grunting, writhing amid the dirt and shells.

No one appeared to have been wounded, despite the ominous echo of gunfire earlier. The Seminole briefly considered dashing to his canoe, for the frenzied scene in front of him promised a messy climax that was certain to further complicate his life. There are at least 9,999 other islands, he thought, where a man might find peace and isolation.

And Sammy Tigertail might have bolted if it weren’t for the improbable sight of Skinner’s adolescent son whaling at a figure whom the Indian recognized as the malodorous mutant he’d clocked with his rifle butt, the one Gillian called Band-Aid Man and Skinner called Piejack. The man had rebounded impressively from the head bashing, for he was able to fend off the boy while at the same time wrestle a youthful and athletically built woman. From her salty dockside vocabulary, Sammy Tigertail pegged her as the kid’s missing mother, Skinner’s former wife. She and Band-Aid Man were struggling for control of a metallic object that looked like a modified shotgun of the crude, chopped-down style favored by redneck felons and myopic urban gangsters. The Seminole heard the weapon make two dull clicks, as if a shell had jammed in the chamber.

Ahead he saw Skinner go down at full speed, tumbling and grabbing at his left knee. What happened next took only a few seconds, but it unfolded before Sammy Tigertail with a halting and grim inevitability. Skinner’s ex-wife pushed away from Piejack and scrambled to Skinner’s side. Their son made two steps in the same direction before Piejack grabbed his ankle and jerked him violently backward, causing him to drop the piece of lumber he’d been wielding.

The man then leered and displayed for the boy’s horrified parents the shiny black.45, which had been jarred from Skinner’s grasp when he fell. “Lookie who’s here!” Piejack cackled at Skinner. “This is perfect! Now I aim to pay you back for what your Latino gorillas did to my hand.”

As the fiend placed the weapon to Fry’s temple, Sammy Tigertail regretted losing his composure and busting his rifle into pieces, as now he had no means by which to end the mayhem. Without moving a step, he took inventory. Skinner was still down and in terrible pain. Honey Santana embraced him, whispering and sniffling softly. Her lower jaw was badly bruised and hanging slack. A few yards away, Piejack kept one arm hooked around their son’s neck, the kid looking sick and dizzy again. Balanced tenuously in Piejack’s bare and gangrenous left hand was Skinner’s semiautomatic, the trigger covered by a discolored kernel of a finger. The discarded sawed-off was on the ground.

“Get lost, asswipe.” It was Piejack, finally taking notice of the Seminole. “This ain’t yer bidness.”

The creep might be right, Sammy Tigertail thought, but here I am.

“Be on your way,” Piejack said, “’less you wanna hole in your belly.”

The Indian could almost hear his uncle saying: What’s happening there has nothing to do with you. It’s more crazy shit among white people, that’s all.

“Can I get my guitar?” Sammy Tigertail asked. He had spotted the Gibson, his fondest connection to the white world, in the cinders of the dead campfire.

Piejack said, “That thing’s yours? Ha!”

Sammy Tigertail recalled a quote he’d memorized as a teenager. It was from Gen. Thomas Jesup, appraising the long Indian war in Florida:

We have, at no former period of our history, had to contend with so formidable an enemy. No Seminole proves false to his country, nor has a single instance ever occurred of a first rate warrior having surrendered.

Sammy Tigertail’s uncle had said it was mostly true. He’d also said there were some in the tribe who’d dropped their weapons and run like jackrabbits; others who’d taken bribes from the U.S. generals in exchange for scratching their names on worthless treaties.

Many Seminoles were first-rate warriors, Sammy’s uncle had said, but a few were not.

“What’re you waitin’ on? Take the fuckin’ guitar and vamoose,” Piejack said, “’fore I shoot your red ass off.”

That’s ugly, Sammy Tigertail thought. Ugly and unnecessary.

Crossing the clearing, he could sense the boy watching him. Skinner’s ex-wife, too. The Seminole fixed his eyes on the blond Gibson, shining among the ashes.

“Mister, wait,” the kid said.

Sammy Tigertail didn’t look up. He lifted the guitar and wiped it with a bandanna. With chagrin he noted a nasty ding in the finish.

“Don’t you dare leave us here,” said the boy’s mother. “Please.”

The Indian offered no response. He’d made up his mind.

“For God’s sake, Sammy.” It was Mr. Skinner, rising.

The Seminole thought of his great-great-great-grandfather, Chief Thlocklo Tustenuggee, tricked with promises of peace and then imprisoned. Manifest destiny, otherwise known as screwing native peoples out of their homelands, had been a holy crusade among white men of that era. Immune to guilt or shame, they dealt suffering and death to mothers, infants, even the elders. One American president after another, breaking treaties and spitting lies-the boundlessness of their deceptions was altogether stunning.

Sammy Tigertail in his young life had never betrayed a soul. He owned a working conscience that could have sprung from either of his bloodlines. His mother was a moral, hardworking woman; his father had been a decent and truthful man.

“You some kinda retard, or what? I said to get the hell outta here,” Band-Aid Man barked.

“Just a minute.”

“I said now!”

The Indian looked up and saw Piejack waggling the.45.

“Bad idea,” Sammy Tigertail said, and began moving toward him.

The man told him to back off, or else. The Seminole continued to advance with long, even strides.

Wide-eyed, Piejack struggled to level the gun.

“Louis, don’t be an imbecile!” Honey pleaded.

When he got six feet away, Sammy Tigertail turned. He stepped up to Perry Skinner and held out the guitar. All he said was: “I believe Mr. Knopfler would understand.”

“Who?” Piejack croaked. “Unnerstand what?”

Skinner took the instrument by the neck and, limping forward, poised it like an ax.

“Duck,” the Indian advised the former Mrs. Skinner, and then he dived to cover her son.

The gun in Louis Piejack’s paw spit an ice-blue spark, but the blond Gibson came down hard, splintering his filthy skull.