"Nature Girl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hiaasen Carl)

Nine

Fry was fast enough to run relays but he preferred the mile because it gave him time to think. When things were all right at home, Fry typically won by ten or eleven seconds. When he was worrying about his mother, he usually came in dead last.

One time he didn’t even finish the race. He was in second place with a quarter mile remaining when he heard sirens, at which point he veered off the track and sprinted nine blocks home to see if his mom was being arrested. That morning she had threatened to hunt down and emasculate the plumber who’d sold her a defective toilet fixture that had flooded the trailer. Knowing she didn’t believe in idle threats, Fry assumed from the sound of the police cars that she had carried out the revenge mutilation. Fortunately, it turned out to be a routine fender bender in the traffic circle. The errant plumber was alive and unlacerated, mopping the double-wide under Honey Santana’s glowering supervision.

The day before the mystery couple was due to arrive, Fry returned from track practice and found his mother painting extravagantly on the outside wall panels of the trailer.

“What’s with the parrot?” he asked.

Honey said, “It’s a scarlet macaw, and don’t tell me there’s no macaws in the Everglades because I know that, okay? The store didn’t have any pink paint so I couldn’t do a flamingo.”

Fry said, “Why not a spoonbill?”

“Same difference.”

“No, they’ve got more red in the feathers.”

“Thank you, Mr. Audubon,” Honey said, “but I wanted something more-what’s the word?-iconic. Spoonbills are okay, but let’s face it, they look like ducks on stilts. Now, when you see a big regal macaw”-Honey was beaming at her florid masterpiece-“you think of a tropical rain forest.”

She dunked her brush in the paint can and went back to work. Fry failed to curb himself from saying, “Mom, we don’t have rain forests here, either.”

“Get busy on your homework, wiseass.”

“Can I ask why you’re painting the place?”

“So it won’t look like a mobile home,” Honey said. “Nothing fancy, a basic jungle motif-palms, vines, banana plants. I bought, like, four different shades of green.”

Fry sat down on his backpack and contemplated the obvious futility of opening an eco-lodge in a trailer park. Based on what he saw, he didn’t have high hopes for his mother’s nature mural. She had bestowed upon her psychedelic macaw the lush eyelashes of a dairy cow and the dainty tongue of a fruit bat.

He said, “Next you’ll be doing monkeys.”

“Matter of fact, I am.” She spun around to face him. “Look, kiddo, this ain’t the frigging Smithsonian. This is a sales job, okay? Once we get the tourists into the kayaks and out in those islands”-she was pointing fervently with the paintbrush-“they’ll be so blown away by how gorgeous it is, the mural won’t matter. Instead of macaws and gibbons they get bald eagles and raccoons. Instead of a rain forest they get mangroves. So what.”

Fry said, “You’re right, Mom.”

“And you know what? If they don’t get it, then screw ’em. They should go back to the big city and commune with the pigeons and rats, ’cause that’s all the wildlife they deserve.”

Fry regretted questioning the realism of her artwork. Once Honey Santana launched a project, extreme delicacy was required in commentary. To criticize even mildly was to risk agitating her or, worse, sparking a more fanciful initiative.

“You have any more questions?” she asked sharply.

“Yeah, one.” Fry stood up. “Got an extra paintbrush?”

Boyd Shreave hurried to pack before his wife came home. He didn’t want her to see his Florida wardrobe, seven hundred dollars’ worth of Tommy Bahama boat shorts and flowered shirts that he’d charged to her MasterCard. They all fit neatly inside a new Orvis travel bag that he’d spotted at a high-end fishing shop downtown.

He was finished by the time Lily walked in the front door. With evident skepticism she eyed the Orvis bag. “What’s the name of this place you’re going?”

Falling back on Eugenie’s advice, he dredged up another dead president. “The Garfield Clinic,” he said.

“Garfield, like that lazy cat in the comics?”

“No, it’s the name of the doctor who discovered my disease.”

“No offense, Boyd, but leprosy is a disease. The fear of being groped is a mental condition.”

“Disorder,” he said stiffly.

“What’s it called again?”

Shreave paused long enough to nail the pronunciation. “Aphenphosmphobia-you can look it up. Dr. Millard Garfield was the one who first documented it.”

His wife said, “Is that right.”

“He died a few years ago.” Boyd Shreave hoped she would wait until tomorrow morning, after he was gone, to get on the Internet and check his story. “So they named the clinic after him,” he added.

“Quite an honor,” Lily said dryly.

Shreave didn’t waver. “I’m feeling worse every day. I sure hope they can help.”

“And Relentless is picking up the tab?”

“They said they’ve got an investment in me. They said I have a big future with the company.” It felt like he was working the phones, the lies were rolling so comfortably off his tongue.

“So what exactly is the therapy for this kind of thing?” Lily asked. “You sit in a rubber room with a bunch of other nuts and practice fondling each other?”

“That’s so funny.”

“I’m serious, Boyd. I want to know if you’re ever going to get better.”

“Why do you think I’m making the trip?” he said. “Garfield is like the Mayo Clinic for aphenphosmphobics.”

“If you say so.” His wife headed for the kitchen. “I’m having a drink. Want one?”

Boyd Shreave stood at the window and watched the neighbor’s tiny Jack Russell take a mastiff-sized dump on his lawn.

Lily returned with two strawberry daiquiris and thrusted one at him. “Might as well get into the tropical spirit.”

Shreave raised the glass and said, “To Dr. Garfield.”

“Ha! To hell with that quack,” Lily said. “I bet I can cure you quicker.”

Her mischievous tone caused Shreave to hack out a nervous chuckle. He had not forgotten the aborted bagel-shop blow job, or the attempted red-thong seduction on the couch.

“Sit down,” she said, motioning toward a wingback chair. “Sit and enjoy.”

“Lily, this isn’t a game.”

“Oh relax. I promise not to lay a hand on you.”

“You better not.”

“I swear on Daddy’s grave.”

What grave? Shreave thought. The man was cremated and scattered over a golf course designed by Fuzzy Zoeller.

“Boyd, sit,” said his wife.

He surrendered his daiquiri and sat.

“Excellent. Now shut your eyes,” she instructed.

“What for?”

Lily put down the two glasses and said, “You want the cure, or not?”

Shreave squeezed his eyelids closed, half-expecting her to latch onto his crotch. He decided to stage a fainting episode if that happened-complete with convulsions and flecks of spittle.

“Clear your mind of every distraction, every random thought,” his wife said, “except for one. I want you to focus all your concentration and energy on this simple image until it fills your whole consciousness, until you can’t possibly think about anything else even when you try.”

“Okay, Lily.” Shreave assumed that she was cribbing from Deepak Chopra or some other flake.

She said, “Boyd, I want you to focus on the fact that I’m not wearing any panties.”

That’s original, he thought.

“Think about the tight jeans I’m wearing. Think about what you could see if you really tried,” Lily said, “but don’t you dare peek.”

That’s what Boyd Shreave was tempted to do. Despite his determination to remain unaroused, he found himself imagining in all its velvet detail the very thing that his wife wanted him to imagine. How she loved tight pants! “Smuggling the yo-yo,” she called it.

“What’s the point of this?” he asked somewhat shrilly.

“Hush.”

He heard a zipping noise and then the unmistakable sliding of fabric on skin as she pulled off the jeans.

“Come on, Lily, don’t.”

“Just take a deep breath. Let yourself go.”

“You don’t understand. This is an irrational fear that’s out of my control.” He was quoting from the unofficial aphenphosmphobia Web site. “Are you trying to humiliate me, or what?”

“Boyd, open your eyes,” his wife said, “and look down.”

He did.

“Now, tell me you don’t want to be touched,” she said. “Tell me that’s not a happy, sociable cock.”

It was hard to argue the point. As Boyd Shreave assessed the telltale tent pole in his pants, he began to reconsider his staunchly monogamous commitment to Eugenie Fonda. The sole reason he’d been deflecting Lily’s advances was to avoid the rigors and inconvenience of maintaining two sexual relationships simultaneously. However, Shreave’s domestic agenda recently had changed, as had his outlook. Tomorrow he was jetting off to start a thrilling new chapter of an otherwise drab and forgettable life; what possible harm could come from a quick good-bye fuck with his wife?

“Boyd?” said Lily.

He looked up and saw her stretch like a sleepy lioness on the Persian carpet. He noted approvingly that she’d been truthful about her lack of underwear. Her blouse and heels lay in a pile with the blue jeans.

He said, “Okay. You win.”

“What do you mean?”

Shreave rose and briskly began to unbuckle his belt. Lily studied him curiously.

“Go to town,” he said, dropping his pants.

She sat up and drew her knees together, blocking her husband’s view of the shadowy treasure.

By now he was nearly levitating with lust. “It’s okay, honest,” he said. “Grab all you want.”

Lily’s brow furrowed unpromisingly. “That’s not how this therapy goes. The first stage is look but don’t touch.”

“Excuse me?”

“Like you said, Boyd, this is a very serious disorder. I’d never forgive myself if you had a coronary or something while I was sucking you off.”

“I’m willing to take that chance,” Shreave declared with a desperate stoicism. “I feel good, Lily-in fact, I feel terrific. It’s what they call a breakthrough!”

“No, let’s wait to see what the experts at Garfield say. We shouldn’t try anything too wild until we’re sure it’s safe.”

“But I’m fine,” he squeaked, watching sadly as his wife wiggled into her clothes.

“We definitely made progress tonight,” she added brightly. “I can’t wait till you get back from Florida-we’ll do it all night long, if the shrinks say it’s okay. We’ll touch our brains out.”

“Yeah. All night long,” he said.

Lily blew a kiss and vanished down the hallway.

Boyd Shreave tugged up his pants, sat down and, during detumescence, polished off the slushy dregs of his daiquiri. He was not one who appreciated irony, so at that moment all he experienced was a loutish sense of deprivation.

Because he had no intention of coming back from Florida. He would never again see his wife naked on the carpet.

Dismal Key is a crab-shaped island located on the Gulf side of Santina Bay, between Goodland and Everglades City. Local records list the first owner as a Key West barkeep named Stillman, who planted lime groves on Dismal and shipped the fruit to market on a schooner called the Oriental. Stillman died in either 1882 or 1883, and thereafter the mangrove island was purchased by a hardy South Carolinian named Newell, who took residence with his wife and their four children. They stayed until 1895, no small feat of endurance.

After the turn of the century, Dismal Key became a way station for itinerant fishermen and a home for a series of self-styled loners, the last of whom was a whimsical soul named Al Seely. A surveyor and machinist, Seely was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 1969 and informed that he’d be dead in six months. With a dog named Digger, he took a small boat to Dismal Key and occupied an abandoned two-room house with its own cistern. There he began writing an autobiography that would eventually fill 270 typed double-spaced pages. For a hermit, Seely was uncommonly gregarious, providing a guest book for visitors to sign. Still very much alive in 1980, he welcomed a group of local high schoolers who were working on a research project. To them he confessed that he’d moved to the Ten Thousand Islands with the notion of killing wild game for food but had found he didn’t have the heart for it. He lived off a small veteran’s pension and the occasional sale of one of his paintings.

“People often ask how Dismal Key got its lugubrious name. I wish I knew,” Seely wrote in his journal, discovered years after he vacated the island. “But since I haven’t as yet turned up even a clue, I suggest that they visit me during July or August when the heat, the mosquitoes, and the sand flies are at their rip-roaring best and they will at least discover why it’s not called Paradise Key.”

On the January morning when Sammy Tigertail beached his stolen canoe on Dismal Key, the temperature was sixty-nine degrees, the wind was northerly at thirteen knots and insects were not a factor. Gillian was, however.

“I’m starving,” she announced.

Sammy Tigertail tossed her a granola bar and hurriedly began unpacking.

“Is this supposed to be breakfast?” she asked.

“And lunch,” he said. “For dinner I’ll catch some fish.” He worked fast, expecting at any moment to hear the ranger helicopter that patrolled Everglades National Park. That he was two miles outside the park boundary would have been pleasing news to Sammy Tigertail, who knew neither the name of the island nor the route that had led him there.

Gillian gobbled down the granola bar and complained of a killer hangover. “You got any Tylenols?”

“Sleep it off,” the Seminole advised unsympathetically.

He hauled the canoe into the mangroves and carefully covered it with loose debris from what appeared to be a rotted dock. Using the paddle as a machete, he began hacking his way uphill through a thicket of formidable cactus plants. Gillian followed, toting the guitar case. Jagged shells crunched under their feet.

Beneath a vast and ancient royal poinciana was a half-sunken concrete structure that Sammy Tigertail recognized as a cistern. It had a blistered tin roof that seemed intact, promising not only shade but concealment. The Indian was relieved that he wouldn’t need to construct a lean-to, a wilderness task he had never before attempted.

Farther along they came to a rubble of sun-bleached boards, cinder block, trusses and window frames-the remains of Al Seely’s homestead. In a nearby ravine lay hundreds of empty Busch cans older than Gillian, who picked one up and studied it as if it were an archaeological treasure.

Sammy Tigertail walked back to the shoreline to retrieve the rest of the gear. He returned to see Gillian slashing at a cactus with the end of the paddle.

“I heard they use ’em for food in the desert. I heard they taste pretty good,” she said.

“This ain’t the Sahara, girl.”

“Fine. You’re the Indian,” she said. “Tell me what’s safe to eat around here.”

Sammy Tigertail didn’t have a clue. Since returning to the reservation from the white man’s world, he’d been unable to shake a fondness for cheeseburgers, rib eyes and pasta. Because of modern commerce coming to the Big Cypress, there had been no need to familiarize himself with the food-gathering skills of his ancestors, who’d farmed sweet potatoes and made bread flour from coontie. Sammy Tigertail wouldn’t have recognized a coontie root if he tripped over it.

“Later I’ll go catch some fish,” he said again.

“I hate fish,” Gillian stated. “One time when I was only four, my dad brought home a salmon he caught on Lake Erie and we all got really, really sick. Our cat, Mr. Tom-Tom, he took two bites and dropped dead on the kitchen floor. Me and my sister threw up for about five days straight, and swear to God the puke was, like, radioactive. I mean, it practically glowed.”

Sammy Tigertail said, “You’re so full of crap.”

“No way! It really happened,” Gillian said, “and ever since then I can’t eat fish.”

“You will now. You’re on the South Beach hostage diet.”

The cistern was littered with leaves and animal scat. It looked like a solid place to hide, because there was no sign that it had held water in many years. Sammy Tigertail squeezed through an opening under the roof, chased off a wood mouse and announced: “We picked the right island.”

Unfazed by the scrambling rodent, Gillian said, “Are we up on a hill? I didn’t think they had hills around here.”

“It’s made of oyster shells. The whole thing.” Sammy Tigertail stripped off his shirt.

“Made by who?” she asked.

“Native Americans-but not my people. Hand me the rifle, please.” He tied his shirt around the barrel and methodically went through the cistern taking down spiderwebs.

Long before the Seminoles arrived, southwest Florida had been dominated by the Calusa tribe, which fought off the Spaniards but not the sicknesses they brought. The most striking remnants of the sophisticated Calusa civilization were their monumental oyster middens, engineered to protect the settlements from flooding and also to trap fish on high tides. Sammy Tigertail felt proud, and inspired, to be camping on an authentic Calusa shell mound. He hoped to be visited in his sleep by the spirits of their long-dead warriors-perhaps even the one whose well-aimed arrow had been fatal to the invader Ponce de Leon.

“They must’ve been the horniest Indians anywhere,” Gillian mused, “if all they ate was oysters.”

Sammy Tigertail stared at her. “What kind of grades do you get in college?”

“I made the dean’s list twice.”

“God help us.”

“Screw you, Tonto.”

Once they finished cleaning the cistern, they loaded in the gear. Gillian lay down on top of her sandy sleeping bag and said she was going to crash.

“What’s that music?” Sammy Tigertail asked. “You got an iPod or something?”

It sounded like the opening bars of “Dixie.”

Gillian rolled over and said, “Shit. My cell.” She took it out of her fanny pack and checked the caller ID. “Oh great, it’s Ethan.”

The Indian snatched the phone. “What’re you going to tell him?”

“That he’s an asshole. Seven hours later he calls to see if I’m alive!”

“Say one word about me, I’ll-”

“What-kill me? Rape me? Stake me to an anthill?”

The phone stopped ringing.

“Hey, where you goin’?” she asked.

“To make a call,” Sammy Tigertail said.

“Watch my battery. I didn’t bring a charger.”

He laughed. “I didn’t bring any electricity.”

He went outside and dialed his mother’s house at the reservation. Her machine answered, so he left a message saying that he was camping in the Fakahatchee, collecting tree snails.

Next he phoned his uncle Tommy, who answered on the tenth ring.

“Who’s Gillian St. Croix?” he said, reading from his caller ID, “and why are you calling from her number?”

“Long story. Is anybody hunting for me?”

“No, but they’ve been out to the reservation asking about a man from Milwaukee.”

Sammy Tigertail’s heart quickened as he thought of Wilson at the bottom of Lostmans River. “Do they know about the airboat ride?”

“My guess is no. But that drunken shithead ran the SunPass lane on Alligator Alley, so they got a photo of his car heading west. They figure he probably drove into the canal on his way to Big Cypress.”

“I like that theory.”

“We’re doing what we can.”

“What kind of questions are they asking?”

“Don’t sweat it,” Uncle Tommy said.

Sammy Tigertail was worried. What if the dead tourist had big-shot kin back in Wisconsin? The search might drag on for months.

“Where the hell are you?” asked his uncle.

“Some island near Everglades City. I don’t even know the name.”

“No problem. I’ll get the air force up and we’ll find you.”

Tommy Tigertail had been the financial architect of the tribe’s early bingo enterprises, which had made him a power player in the Seminole hierarchy. He was not a fan of white men, but he liked their toys. A Falcon jet and several luxury turboprops were available to him on an hour’s notice.

“You can stay at the town house on Grand Bahama until the heat’s off,” he told his nephew.

“Thanks, but I’m okay out here,” Sammy Tigertail said. “I’m learning the guitar.”

“Your brother told me. Is she with you-this Gillian girl?”

“Temporarily.”

“Don’t lose your senses, boy. White pussy is bad medicine.”

Sammy Tigertail chuckled. “Speaking of which, you seen Cindy?”

“Yeah. She says she’s finally off the crystal and dating a realestate man from Boca Grande. I told her she’ll be getting your remittance, and she said you’re a prince.”

“Hang on a second.” Sammy Tigertail flattened himself against the cistern wall and scanned the sky.

“She said she’s going to take the first check and buy herself some new boobs,” his uncle continued. “She wanted me to be sure and tell you thanks.”

Sammy Tigertail heard the thing clearly now, coming in fast from the south. “Uncle Tommy, I gotta go,” he said, and vaulted through the narrow opening.

He landed hard on the bare cement floor, and lay there listening as a small plane passed very low over the island. A shadow moved to block the sunlight, and there was Gillian standing over him-pointing the rifle at his chest. Sammy Tigertail noticed that she’d removed his shirt from the point of the barrel, indicating a possible seriousness of purpose.

“Are you arresting me?” he asked.

Gillian sighed in exasperation. “Gimme the damn phone.”