Fry reached into his backpack and took out something that looked like a BlackBerry, only smaller. “Here, take this. It’s a GPS receiver, in case you get lost on the water.”
Honey grinned. “Lemme guess where you got it-my guilt-ridden former spouse?”
“He had an extra one lying around. It was my idea.” He showed her how to use it, and she seemed to pay attention.
“Everybody’s so damn worried about me. I suppose I should be touched,” she said.
A pair of headlights appeared at the end of the street.
“That would be him.” Fry stood up.
Honey told her son to have a good time. “But don’t forget to do your homework. I’ll call tomorrow to set up a dinner, so you can meet my friends.”
Of course there would be no such gathering, but Honey had to keep up the act in case Fry was buying it.
“And, for God’s sake,” she added, “wash your jock after track practice.”
“You’d better not be crying. I mean it.”
“I told you, it’s allergies.”
When Perry Skinner braked to a stop in front of the yard, Honey thought she saw him give a small wave. Fry pecked her on the cheek and said, “Love you, Mom.”
“Love you, too. Now stop worryin’ so much, would you?” She smiled and teasingly shoved him toward his father’s truck.
“Don’t run off with any poachers,” he said.
“Hey, I could do worse,” Honey called after him.
Eleven
The landing in Tampa was bumpy. At the airport, Eugenie Fonda charged into the first open bar on the concourse. “Margaritaville” was playing over the sound system, so she ordered one.
Boyd Shreave had a beer. He raised the glass and said, “To freedom.”
“I guess,” said Eugenie.
“Come on. This is the start of a brand-new lifetime.”
“What’d you rent us?”
“A mid-sized Saturn.”
Eugenie whistled. “Whoa, baby.”
“What’s wrong with a Saturn?”
She smiled. “Very sensible, Boyd. You gonna put it on Lily’s gold card?”
Shreave looked away, feigning fascination with a basketball game on the TV mounted above the Budweiser display.
“Then why not go nuts? Get an Escalade,” Eugenie was saying. “You’re not some schmuck on an expense account, Boyd. You’re on safari.”
“Fine. I’ll rent the biggest road hog they got.”
“Unless you’re feeling guilty,” Eugenie said, “about mooching off your wife.”
“Yeah, that’s me. Crippled with guilt.” Shreave slapped three fives on the bar. “You done?”
They stood in line at the Avis counter for forty-five minutes and departed with an ordinary Ford Explorer, the last Escalade having been rented to a middle-aged man toting two Halliburton travel cases.
Traffic out of the city was murder. Eugenie Fonda shut her eyes and leaned against the window. Boyd Shreave wondered how to draw her into the frisky spirit of a Florida adventure. Despite their rollicking sex life, Eugenie had always maintained emotional distance, and on the long drive Shreave found himself overtaken by an urge to possess her in every way. As she dozed-twitching whenever he swerved or tapped the brakes-Shreave was galvanized by a preposterous desire for her to be charmed and bedazzled and ravenously alert in his presence. Inwardly he began to speculate about what qualities might have attracted her to Van Bonneville, the killer-to-be, five years earlier. As self-deluded as he was about his own allure, Shreave understood that he had little in common with the homicidal tree whacker who’d been so chillingly profiled on Court TV. The man had shown himself as daring and decisive, traits that had never been ascribed to Shreave.
North of Fort Myers he exited the interstate, located a shopping mall and informed Eugenie that he was going to find a rest room. She acknowledged with a drowsy grunt, reclined her seat and drifted back into an ebbing haze of Valium and alcohol. Shreave beelined for a Barnes amp; Noble, where a bemused clerk led him to the last unshredded paperback copy of Storm Ghoul, which he purchased along with a road map of southwest Florida.
The sun was setting when he and Eugenie finally rolled into Everglades City, which was not a city in the Texan sense of the word. It was, in fact, barely a town.
Eugenie lowered her window to let the cool air rouse her. “Where’s the beach?” she asked Shreave.
“I’m not sure.”
“Where’s anything?”
“Just wait,” he said.
When he stopped at a Circle K and asked directions to the Dancing Flamingo Eco-Lodge, the clerk peered at him as if he was a registered sex offender. He had better luck at the Rod and Gun Club, where a bartender examined the street address provided by the telemarketer and said it was within walking distance. He drew a map on a cocktail napkin and handed it to Shreave.
“Let’s eat first. I’m wasting away,” Eugenie said, and headed toward the restaurant.
Admiring the sway of her hips, the bartender told Shreave he was one lucky bastard. “But I’d stick close if I were you,” he added. “Guys around here, they don’t see many women like that.”
“There aren’t many of ’em to see, no matter where you live,” Shreave said authoritatively.
Dinner was excellent-hearts of palm, conch fritters, stone crabs and Key lime pie. Their table overlooked the Barron River, where jumping fish flashed like squirts of mercury under the dock lights. Eugenie ate heartily, and Shreave discerned an improvement in her mood. After dessert she even kicked off one shoe and tickled his crotch with her bare toes.
“We’re gonna have some major fun tonight,” she said.
Nearly delirious with anticipation, Shreave decided to drive the few blocks to the eco-lodge so that he wouldn’t have to schlep their bags. Following the bartender’s map, he turned on to an unpaved street called Curlew Boulevard.
Eugenie stiffened in her seat. “Boyd?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“This is a fucking trailer park.”
“I can see that,” he said grimly.
The address was 543 Curlew, and the residence was definitely a double-wide. Some wacko had painted psychedelic parrots and monkeys all over the front.
Eugenie Fonda said, “Tell me it’s a joke.”
Shreave felt prickly and light-headed.
“Boyd, are you processing all this?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. I swear to God,” he said.
Then the door of the trailer swung open.
Before his ill-fated employment at the airboat concession, Sammy Tigertail had briefly tried wrestling alligators. Nobody had understood why. It wasn’t a popular job, most Seminole gator wrestlers having retired as soon as the gambling remissions started to flow.
Through newspaper advertisements the tribe had recruited a collection of rough young white guys to perform the alligator shows, a breach of cultural authenticity that didn’t seem to bother the tourists. Sammy Tigertail took his training from a former Harley-Davidson mechanic who, by virtue of three missing toes, went by the nickname of “Nubs.” He had lost the digits in a hatchet fight, but naturally he told audiences that a bull gator had gobbled them. For Sammy Tigertail’s orientation, Nubs demonstrated a few rudimentary pinning maneuvers and counseled him not to eat catfish on performance days, because “them goddamn devil lizards can smell it on your breath.”
Sammy Tigertail’s first match went so well that he jokingly asked who’d dosed the alligator-an eight-footer displaying the ferocity of a beanbag chair. Sammy Tigertail was loose and cocky for the next performance, which featured an even more docile specimen, or so the young Seminole had been told.
Statistically, professional gator wrestling is only slightly more dangerous than hanging wallpaper. The low casualty rate is due less to the agility of the handlers than to the habituated tolerance of the reptiles. Having learned that the reward is a ripe dead chicken, the alligators patiently allow themselves to be dragged around a sand pit and subjected to a sequence of silly indignities. Obviously the success of these stunts relies on a certain critical level of lethargy in the animals. A freshly captured alligator is not the ideal wrestling opponent; unschooled and irritable, even a scrawny one is capable of inflicting grave and potentially crippling injuries.