He hurried back to where he’d left the girl. Somehow she had gotten out of the canoe but he found her nearby, grunting and thrashing among the mangroves. He lugged her to a small clearing, where he cut off the palmetto ropes and uncorked the socks from her mouth and cleaned the scratches on her shins and arms.
“Stop crying,” he said.
“You killed my friends! I heard the shots.”
“Your friends are fine. All I did was scare ’em away.”
“What about me?” Gillian wiped her eyes with a sleeve of the sweatshirt. “They just left me here to rot?”
“I spooked ’em off with the gunfire.”
“What about Ethan? That guy I was with? I bet he just ran and never looked back.”
Sammy Tigertail said, “You remind me of my last girlfriend.”
Gillian sniffled and smiled. “Yeah?”
“It’s not a compliment. Take off that goddamn sweatshirt.”
“No way. I’m cold.”
He opened his duffel and dug out a gray fleece pullover, which he tossed to her. Grudgingly she removed the FSU sweatshirt.
“Give it here,” Sammy Tigertail said.
“I don’t see why you’re so pissy. It’s just a name,” she said, zipping up the fleece, “like the Atlanta Braves.”
He unsheathed a Buck knife and shredded the sweatshirt. Gillian sat stunned.
“It’s not just a name,” said Sammy Tigertail. “Do you have any clue what your people did to my tribe?”
Gillian said, “Chill, okay?” She didn’t take her eyes off the knife. “It wasn’t my people. My people were up in Ohio.”
“Yeah, screwing the Shawnee and the Chippewa.” Sammy Tigertail was depressed to think that this bubblehead would soon be a schoolteacher. It affirmed his view that white people were devolving with each generation.
He sheathed the knife and told her to take a seat in the canoe. “We’re outta here,” he said.
“Can’t we wait until the sun comes up? What if we flip over in the water?” Gillian was slapping haplessly at a mosquito. “Ethan said there’s sharks all over the place. He’s majoring in marine biology. My girlfriend’s engaged to his roommate. Well, practically.”
“I’m gonna count to three.”
She frowned. “You want me to shut up, I’ll shut up.”
Sammy Tigertail knew it was foolish to bring her along. If she remained on the island, the marine patrol or the Coast Guard would find her within hours after her friends reported her missing. She’d be hungry and sunburned, but unharmed…
Unless the other kids got hung up on the way back to the mainland. In that case, it might be several days before Gillian was located. By then the insects would have made a wreck of her and she’d be dangerously dehydrated, not that Sammy Tigertail should have cared.
Yet he did care-not much, but enough to unsettle him. He felt corrupted by the sentiment, which he blamed on his polluted half-white blood.
Into the night he paddled as fast as he could, the canoe gliding in a wash of moonlight. It occurred to the Indian that since he had no idea where he was going, it was technically impossible to get lost. At daybreak he’d stop at the nearest island, conceal the canoe and construct a lean-to that would be invisible from the air.
From the bow came Gillian’s voice: “What should I call you? I mean, since you won’t even tell me your name.”
“Thlocklo Tustenuggee,” he said.
It was his great-great-great-grandfather’s Seminole name.
“Thlocka what?” said Gillian.
Sammy Tigertail pronounced it again, although not as mellifluously as the first time. Since returning to the reservation, he had struggled to master the traditional Muskogee dialect.
“Never mind,” Gillian mumbled.
“Tiger Tail,” he said between strokes. “That’s my other name.”
“Cool. I like ’em both.”
The tip of the paddle struck something hard under the surface, jolting the canoe. Gillian yipped and said, “Easy, dude!”
Sammy Tigertail cursed under his breath as the hull screaked across a submerged oyster bar.
A few minutes later the girl said, “I did two semesters of crew.”
“What?”
“Rowing. We can take turns with the paddle,” she offered. “I’m serious. It’ll give me somethin’ to keep my mind off the damn bugs.”
“Why’d you ask to come with me?”
“I dunno, Thlocko. Why did you let me?” Gillian laughed. “I’m semi-drunk and totally stoned. What’s your excuse?”
“I’m weak,” Sammy said flatly. He dug harder against the tide.
“So, am I your first-ever hostage?” she asked.
He thought of Wilson, the tourist. “The first live one,” he said.
“You’re funny.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Me one funny Injun.”
Honey Santana grew up in Miami, where her parents owned a jewelry store on Coral Way. She had three older sisters, each of whom married urologists and moved across the causeway to Miami Beach. Honey was different. Even as a child she’d felt suffocated and disoriented in the city. Crowds made her dizzy and traffic gave her migraines.
She inherited her father’s impatience and her mother’s lousy sense of direction, a combination that made her teen driving years exceptionally eventful. On the night of her senior prom, Honey’s date got blasted on Cuervo and passed out on top of her in the spacious backseat of his father’s Continental Mark IV. The task of navigating homeward fell to Honey, who missed the turn off Eighth Street and continued due west on the Tamiami Trail, all the way to the opposite coast of Florida. Honey’s date, who would grow up to be a heartthrob on a popular Latin soap opera, awoke to the surreal vision of Honey skipping barefoot in her ice-blue prom gown along the Naples beach.
On the return drive across the Everglades, the young man pulled over numerous times to throw up. The last of these pit stops occurred near a kidney-shaped pond in which a large alligator was wolfing down a purple gallinule. Honey got out of the car to watch, aghast but fascinated. After a while she went back to the Lincoln and found her date snoring in a splash of his own vomit. She took a long thoughtful walk around the pond, counting three more alligators and five old beer cans, which she gathered up.
From the road came the sound of squealing brakes. Honey turned and saw a westbound pickup skid to a halt, tires smoking. The man who stepped out wore a dark flannel shirt and pale dungarees and white rubber boots that came up to his knees. He walked over to Honey and asked if she was all right. Then he took the rusty beer cans from her arms and lobbed them one by one into the bed of his truck.
Immediately Honey Santana forgot about the tuxedoed nitwit passed out in the Continental.
The man in the rubber boots had broad shoulders, his hair was sun-bleached and his face was baked caramel brown. Honey thought he was uncommonly good-looking. He told her he was a commercial fisherman from Everglades City, and a volunteer firefighter. He said he was heading home from Dania, where he’d purchased two new propellers for his crab boat. He said his name was Perry Skinner.
“Perry, do you have a pen I can borrow?” Honey asked.
In the console of the truck he found a black marker that he used for numbering boxes of crab claws.
“That’ll do fine,” Honey said.
She walked over to the Lincoln and picked up the limp right arm of her date. She removed the silver cuff link and rolled up the sleeve. With the black marker she wrote out the word LOSER in fat block letters stretching from the young man’s wrist to his elbow.
Perry Skinner, who was standing behind Honey, said, “I can’t take you home. I’ve gotta work tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to go home,” she told him. “Anywhere except home would be lovely.”