“Now where the hell are they?” Piejack wondered, his voice rising above the whine of the motor.
Dealey saw birds diving and silver fish jumping, but no kayaks on the water.
“Maybe they turned back already,” he said hopefully.
Louis Piejack laughed. “Naw, they’re out here somewheres. I’ll find ’em, too. That’s a damn fact.”
Fourteen
The plan was to steal water but no food from other campers. Water was essential for life, Sammy Tigertail said. Pringles were not.
“How would you feel about beer?” Gillian asked.
“That’ll do.”
They searched for hours but spotted no other fires, and encountered nobody else on the water. When the moon disappeared behind a gray-blue ridge of clouds, Sammy Tigertail began navigating back toward the island. He feared getting lost in the web of unmarked creeks, although he didn’t let on to Gillian.
From the bow of the canoe she asked, “Do you know a rain dance?”
“First I need a virgin.”
“I’m serious,” Gillian said.
Sammy Tigertail wasn’t sure if the Seminoles had a dance for making rain. He knew firsthand about the Green Corn Dance, a purification and feasting ritual dating back to the tribe’s Creek origins. The celebration took place every spring and required participants to swallow boiled black concoctions that induced copious vomiting. Sammy Tigertail attended with his mother and his uncle Tommy, who customarily brought a flask of Johnnie Walker to wash away the taste of the black drinks.
Gillian said, “Speaking of virgins, you wanna hear how I lost it? I’ll tell you, if you tell me.”
“Not interested.”
“It was on a riding mower.”
“Stop.”
“On the sixteenth hole of the south course at the Firestone Country Club,” she said.
“I get the picture.”
“Which happens to be the jewel of Akron, Ohio. What about you?”
“I don’t remember,” said Sammy Tigertail. He spotted their island around the bend and increased the pace of his paddling, heedless of his thirst or the blister rising on his left palm.
Gillian went on: “It was my best friend’s big brother. Is that a fucking cliche or what? And you do too remember.”
“We’re almost there,” said the Seminole.
“So-what was her name?”
“Sally Otter.”
“Excellent!”
After stowing the canoe, they ate some cactus berries and moved their sleeping bags from the cistern to open ground, where they could see the stars. They lay down side by side, shoulders touching.
“Hey, Thlocko,” Gillian whispered.
“I’m tired.”
“You go to college?”
“Never finished high school.”
One week after his son was born, Sammy Tigertail’s father had gone to the bank and opened the “Chad McQueen College Fund,” into which he faithfully deposited one hundred dollars every month. When Chad/Sammy had turned twelve, his stepmother had persuaded his father to close the account and invest the accumulated balance-$16,759.12-in 307 Beanie Baby dolls, which she grandly predicted would quintuple in value by the time the boy finished high school. Each tagged with an insipidly perky nickname, the rarest and most valuable of the small stuffed animals was reputed to be Leroy the Lemming, of which Sammy’s stepmother owned four. The collection was locked inside a steamer trunk that occupied many cubic feet of the boy’s bedroom. Upon the sudden death of Sammy’s father, his stepmother immediately hawked her entire Beanie Babies stash for $3,400, which she put down on a new Lexus coupe.
The Indian elected not to share that memory with Gillian. His half-white past was a private matter.
“So what’s your problem with college?” she asked.
“Be quiet,” Sammy Tigertail said.
“Hey, what about the Fighting Irish?”
“The who?”
“Remember you gave me a ration of shit about my Seminoles jersey? What about Notre Dame, huh? How come all the Irishmen aren’t all pissed off about the name of that team?”
Sammy Tigertail reached out and clapped his hand over Gillian’s mouth. “Shut the hell up. I’m begging you.”
She pushed his arm away and rolled over. “Is that how you talked to Sally Beaver?”
“Otter was her name.”
“Whatever,” said Gillian.
The Indian closed his eyes, longing for a peaceful sleep. A thousand years ago, Calusa warriors had lain under the same winter sky. When he was in the eighth grade (and still Chad McQueen), Sammy Tigertail had written a school paper about the Calusa, who had predated by twelve centuries the arrival in Florida of the beleaguered Seminoles. The Calusa’s highly structured society revolved around fishing, and they were accomplished makers of palm-fiber nets, spears, throat gorges and hooks. They traveled widely in dugout canoes, dominating by trade and force all other Indian tribes throughout the peninsula. Sammy Tigertail remembered seeing photographs of intricate tribal masks, shell jewelry and delicate wooden bird carvings excavated from a Calusa midden on Marco Island. The body paint favored by Calusa braves had been mixed with the oil of shark livers, to repel mosquitoes. (Sammy Tigertail once asked his uncle why the Seminoles didn’t try the same formula, and his uncle said he would rather swat a bug than kill a shark.)
But the most remarkable thing that Sammy Tigertail remembered from his middle-school project about the noble Calusa was how suddenly they were wiped out-erased from the landscape barely two hundred years after their first fateful contact with Spanish soldiers, who carried diseases more deadly than their muskets.
The Calusa brave who plugged Ponce de Leon with an arrow had the right idea, Sammy Tigertail thought. He knew those white fuckers were bad news.
In the end, ravaged bands of Calusa were hunted down by mercenary Creeks and other newly armed Indians, who sold them to slavers. Sammy Tigertail recalled that a few hundred Calusa were thought to have escaped with their cacique to Havana in the mid-1700s, and he wondered what had become of them. He’d always thought it sad that the Calusa had disappeared from Florida’s southernmost wilderness before the Seminoles-driven by another rapacious bunch of white men-had settled there. Because the two tribes had never crossed paths, there was no chance that even a droplet of Calusa blood flowed in Sammy Tigertail’s veins. In dark moments he actually worried that he might be descended from one of the slave-hunting Creeks who’d preyed upon the Calusa, for ironically it was displaced Creek clans and other cimmarones who would later become the Seminole Nation.
Sammy Tigertail took several deep breaths and pressed his arms against his sides. He was hoping to feel the power and wisdom of a hundred warriors rising up from the ancient bones and shells beneath him…
Yet when he opened his eyes, he felt no different from the way he’d felt before-like a man who didn’t fit in anybody’s world, red or white.
Emptily he blinked at the milky heavens. The sun had risen and the morning haze was burning off. He lay shirtless on top of the sleeping bag, clutching the Gibson guitar to his breast. Somewhere down by the shore, Gillian was saying, “Right side, Boyd, right side. Watch out for those snags, Genie.”
Which made no sense, until the Indian realized that it wasn’t Gillian’s voice he was hearing from the water. Gillian was in the limbs of the poinciana, signaling for him to get up.
Sammy Tigertail sprang to his feet and unwrapped the rifle. Gillian dropped lightly out of the tree. She touched his arm and said, “You think they’ve got water, Thlocko?”
“Time to behave,” he advised, “otherwise I’m gonna leave you out here alone to die.”
“I can be quiet. I swear I can.” She gave a crisp salute and mimed a zippering motion along her lips.