"But he'll be back, right? The owl?"
"Yeah. It's close to hunting time for him anyway. He'll be back by morning."
With the high water we were able to paddle right up to the dock and tied off. I used the Snows' hidden key and opened the great room and unloaded our gear and the cooler and food. I showed Sherry the gravity shower and she didn't hesitate. While she was busy I made up a dinner of cheese and stone wheat bread with sweet butter and sliced tomato we'd brought and then stole a bottle of wine from the Snows' counter collection and chilled it in our iced cooler.
By the time I'd taken my own shower Sherry was sitting back in one of the Adirondack chairs on the open deck. Jeff had set up a half-dozen chairs in a semicircle facing west. There is no theater like it and the falling sun was already spreading crimson rays into the tops of the far sawgrass and into Sherry's blond hair.
"Is that Wally out there?" she said to me and nodded out to the east. The question threw me and I looked out in search of a boat or a plane or anything that might contain a man.
"There. On that mound."
I looked again and in the low light could make out the hump and curled tail of a good-size alligator taking in the last warmth of the day. Sherry then quietly whistled the opening stanzas of a television cartoon from both our childhoods I recognized as Wally Gator, "the swingin'est alligator in the swamp. See ya later, Wally Gator."
"You do have a memory, girl," I said.
"For frivolity."
"No. Not always."
"Then sit with me here, Max, and we'll get serious," she said, and in her voice was more than just an invitation for sitting.
While the sky turned shades of pink and then deepened to orange and finally a purple shade of plush velvet, we sat and ate and let the wine leak into our abused backs and sun-soaked heads and when the air finally started to chill I got out the sleeping bags and covered Sherry's legs with the flannel side.
"Very gentlemanly, Max," she said. But when I crouched to kiss her she hooked her wrist around the back of my neck and she, the flannel-lined bag, and I slid slowly to the deck.
"Well, I guess I don't have to be quite so gentlemanly," I said and rolled over on top of her. Even in the darkness I could see the flicker of green in her eyes. And tucked in a depression next to her collarbone, the sparkle of the necklace she always wore, the two jewels, an opal and a diamond, joined together. I knew it was a present from her husband. I had ignored the reminder in the past, and despite the way it picked up the light this night, I ignored it again.
We made love under the stars, a canopy of glitter that out here in darkness spread incomparably from horizon to horizon with no city lights or building corners or even high tree lines to obscure it. The sight was so stunning and rare I was fooled that first night: when I looked down into Sherry's eyes I thought that glorious look on her face was my doing. Then, on a whim of suspicion I looked up behind my shoulder and beheld the real reason for her radiance.
"Oh, I see," I said. "The real stars in your eyes."
She laughed, caught, at least partially, by the truth.
"Oh, all right," she said, reaching up and pulling my face down to the crook of her shoulder and neck where she could still see the sky past my head. "Tomorrow night, we can switch places."
FIVE
"Shut the fuck up, Wayne."
"Oh, you got a better idea? We're sittin' here with no smoke, no cash, and no chance of scoring any more deals. What? What else we got, dawg?"
Christ, thought Buck, tipping the sweating bottle of Budweiser up and taking a long slow drink off the beer. Even out here these guys are picking up somebody else's bullshit lingo, watching some MTV shit or listening to the hip-hop radio crap out of Miami.
Dog. Hell, he could still hear his daddy's voice saying if you had a good dog and some shotgun shells you could eat forever out in the Glades for free. But that didn't last, did it? Didn't even last for the old man, did it?
"You tell him, Buck. Tell him he's full of shit," said Marcus, the younger one.
Buck took another pull off the beer and the two watched him, each waiting for a yea or nay from the man. He took his time at it.
"Wayne might have hisself an idea," Buck finally said. "He ain't thought it out yet, but there might be some possibilities there."
Wayne sat back in his wooden, straight-backed chair, balancing on the back legs, smirk on his face that made him look even more like a cartoon balloon with his features drawn on with a marker, his face all pudgy and white and hairless with his baseball cap turned backward so it yanked his eyebrows up and out of shape. Marcus kept his eyes down toward the tabletop.
There's your dog, son, Buck thought, slapped on his snout and chastised like some mutt.
"We're gonna have to get somethin' goin' soon unless you boys want to go on up the road and get a job at the Wendy's," Buck said.
"Shit. Ain't doin' nothin' at no Wendy's but a ten up," Wayne said. The reference to an armed stick-up raised Marcus's head, floating on a smile. He and Wayne snickered and both reached out and tapped knuckles.
Buck shook his head. His father had warned him about getting involved with chuckleheads like these two. But it wasn't like Buck had a lot of choices these days. After his last stint up at Avon Park Correctional for burglary and possession of stolen property he was looking at a three-strike rule and after he was released he'd come home to the Ten Thousand Islands thinking he might try to live straight for a while, stay the hell out of trouble. But none of his old running buddies had stuck around to ride with. The place was still a shithole if you wanted to do anything but scrape boat bottoms or hire on with a commercial fishing crew or work in the stone crab warehouse. You could try to make some extra cash by catching gators and selling the skins that, yeah, was illegal but really hadn't been considered that by anyone who grew up here because their daddies and their daddies' daddies had always done it. You could pilot an airboat around the Glades and the islands, taking tourists from New York or the Midwest out on the water trails and point out the hyacinths and gator holes and give tutorials on the flora and fauna. But someone was always askin' some stupid-assed question and you couldn't just yell at 'em to shut up, or if you did, you got fired by the tour operator.
Buck had called Bobby the Fence about the electronics and such that they'd got the other night over in the suburbs but Bobby was working a deal with a guy he said had hijacked an entire eighteen-wheeler full of big-screen televisions and would have to get back with him. Or maybe that was just bullshit to set him up for the lowball price that Buck was already expecting. Things were tight, but this wasn't a place where ingenuity let a man down. Buck was only a kid when things were tighter and they were doing a lot of surviving in the Ten Thousands on what seasonal stone crabs you could catch and living on the fish you pulled for your own consumption. But then the state of Florida put a couple of brains together in Tallahassee and came up with a cap on the amount of fish each commercial rig could catch. They called it conservation but the locals here in the southwest corner of the peninsula called it money out of their pockets. It was during these slow 1980s that the best cash crop coming off the Gulf of Mexico was in the form of bales. Marijuana suppliers bringing product up from South America were constantly trying to find a new pipeline to avoid federal authorities. Buck's father, one of the best guides in the Everglades, had already come across a few lonely bales out near some access roads where the small plane pilots either got scared and dumped their loads or simply missed the dirt strip by a few hundred yards with the last one out the door. He had also come upon some water-soaked packages out on the fishing grounds and the scuttlebutt would be that boaters trying to bring in loads to land had dumped them while being chased by the Coast Guard. Buck's father was never one to waste, no sir. Knowing people, he got the word out and was able to conceal his finds until someone contacted him. He didn't get full price, but the cash was American and he didn't want to smoke the shit anyway.