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.