"Pretend we don't know him," Roddy said.
"But he's my brother."
"Fine. Then you do the interviews."
Shiner's mother was booked for disturbing the peace and after three hours was released without bail. Immediately she took a cab to the intersection of Sebring and the highway. The asphalt had hardened, dry to the touch; Shiner's mother wasn't even positive where the stain had been. She observed that somebody had stolen her collection box and most of the cold sodas. She was officially out of business.
She made her way to Demencio's house and set her empty cooler in the shade of an oak tree, away from Sinclair's crowd. Trish noticed her sitting there and brought a lemonade.
"I heard what happened. I'm so sorry."
"Pigs tore my gown," Shiner's mother said.
"We can mend that in no time," said Trish.
"What about my shrine. Who's gonna fix that?"
"Just you wait. There'll be new stains on the highway."
Shiner's mother said, "Ha."
Trish glanced at the front window of the house, in case Demencio was watching; he'd be miffed if he spotted the old lady on the premises. Her ice-blue parasol stood out like a pup tent.
"You should go home and get some rest," Trish said.
"Not after I've lost the two things in the world I care about most the Road-Stain Jesus, and my only son."
"Oh, Shiner will be back." Trish, thinking: As soon as he needs money.
"But he won't never be the same. I got a feeling he is bein' corrupted by the forces of Satan." Shiner's mother drained the glass of lemonade. "How about some of that angel food?"
"I'm afraid it's all gone. Need a lift home?"
"Maybe later," Shiner's mother said. "First I got to talk to the turtle boy. My heart's been steamrolled, I need some spiritual healing."
"Poor thing." Trish excused herself and hurried inside to warn Demencio. Shiner's mother lit a cigaret and waited for the line around the moat to dwindle.
23
The Everglades empties off the Florida peninsula into a shimmering panorama of tidal flats, serpentine channels and bright-green mangrove islets. The balance of life there depends upon a seasonal infusion of freshwater from the mainland. Once it was a certainty of nature, but no more. The drones who in the 1940s carved levees and gouged canals throughout the upper Everglades gave absolutely no thought to what would happen downstream to the fish and birds, not to mention the Indians. For the engineers, the holy mission was to ensure the comfort and prosperity of non-native humans. In the dry season the state drained water off the Everglades for immediate delivery to cities and farms. In the wet season it pumped millions of gallons seaward to prevent flooding of subdivisions, pastures and crops.
Over time, less and less freshwater reached Florida Bay, and what ultimately got there wasn't so pure. When the inevitable drought came, the parched bay changed drastically. Sea grasses began to die off by the acre. The bottom turned to mud. Pea-green algae blooms erupted to blanket hundreds of square miles, a stain so large as to be visible from NASA satellites. Starved for sunlight, sponges died and floated to the surface in rotting clumps.
The collapse of the famous estuary produced the predictable dull-eyed bafflement among bureaucrats. Faced with a public-relations disaster and a cataclysmic threat to the tourism industry, the same people who by their ignorance had managed to starve Florida Bay now began scrambling for a way to revive it. This would be difficult without antagonizing the same farmers and developers for whom the marshlands had been so expensively replumbed. Politicians were caught in a bind. Those who'd never lost a moment's sleep over the fate of the white heron now waxed lyrical about its delicate grace. Privately, meanwhile, they reassured campaign donors that screw the birds Big Agriculture would still get first crack at the precious water.
For anyone seeking election to office in South Florida, restoring the Everglades became not only a pledge but a mantra. Speeches were given, grandiose promises made, blue-ribbon task forces assembled, research grants awarded, scientific symposiums convened ... and not much changed. The state continued to siphon gluttonously what should have been allowed to flow naturally toward Florida Bay. In the driest years the bay struggled; turned to a briny soup. In the rainiest years it rebounded with life.
The condition of the place could be assessed best at remote islands such as Pearl Key. When the mangroves were spangled with pelicans and egrets, when the sky held ospreys and frigate birds, when the shallows boiled with mullet and snook that meant plenty of good water was spilling from the 'Glades; enough for a reprieve from the larceny perpetrated upstream.
It was Chub's misfortune to have arrived at Pearl Key after an exceptionally generous rainy season, when the island was lush and teeming. Scarcely two months later the flats would be as murky as chocolate milk, the game fish and wading birds would have fled, and in the water would swim few creatures of serious concern to a glue-sniffing kidnapper, passed out with one hand dangling.
His wounded hand, as it happened; swollen and gray, still adorned with a severed crab claw.
As fishermen know, the scent of bait is diffused swiftly and efficiently in saltwater, attracting scavengers of all sizes. Chub knew this, too, although the information currently was stored beyond his grasp. Not even a doctorate in marine biology would've mitigated the stupefying volume of polyurethane fumes he'd inhaled from the tube of boat glue. He was completely unaware that his wounded mitt hung so tantalizingly in the water, just as he was unaware of the cannibalistic proclivities of Callinectes sapidus,the common blue crab.
In fact, Chub was so blitzed that the sensation of extreme pain which ordinarily would have reached his brain stem in a nanosecond instead meandered from one befogged synapse to another. By the time his subconscious registered the feeling, something horrible was well under way.
His screams ruined an otherwise golden morning.
The other three had been awake for hours. Bodean Gazzer was patrolling the woods not far from the campsite. Amber was attempting to revise Shiner's tattoo, using a honed fishhook and a dollop of violet mascara. Before starting she'd numbed his upper arm with ice, but the pricking still stung like hell. Shiner hoped the procedure would be brief, since only two of the three initials required altering. Amber warned him it wasn't an easy job, changing the letters from W.R.B.to W.C.A.
"The Bwon't be bad. I'll just add legs to make it look like a capital A.But the Ris tricky," she said, frowning. "I can't promise it'll ever pass for a C."
Shiner, through clenched teeth: "Do your best, 'K?" He turned away, so he wouldn't see the punctures. Occasionally he'd let out a grunt, which was Amber's cue to apply more ice. Despite the discomfort, Shiner found himself enjoying being the focus of her concentration. He liked the way she'd rolled up the sleeves of the camouflage jumpsuit and pinned her hair in a ponytail; all business. And her touch clinical as it was sent a pleasurable tickle all the way to his groin.
"I had a friend," she was saying, "he was paranoid about dying in a plane crash. So he got his initials tattooed on his arms and his legs, his shoulders, the soles of his feet, both cheeks of his butt. See, because he'd read where that's one way they can identify the body parts, if there's tattoos."
Shiner said, "That's pretty smart."
"Yeah, but it didn't help. He was, like, a smuggler."
"Oh."
"His plane went down off the Bahamas. Sharks got him."
"There wasn't nothin' left?"
"One of his Reeboks is all they found," Amber said. "Inside was something that looked like a toe. Of course, it wasn't tattooed."