Then the cramps got fierce. Doctor told her to push. Nurses told her to push. Perry told her to push. Honey remembered biting her lip, thinking: Thank God the little guy didn’t go full term. He’d split me open like a melon! And all of a sudden there he was, wriggling on the sheets like a purple tadpole: Fry Marti Skinner, four pounds and fourteen ounces.
From the first breath he seemed uncommonly self-assured. Never cried once in the delivery room, not even when Perry snipped the cord. The nurses were freaking because the child wouldn’t make a peep, but Honey wasn’t worried. Boy was smart. Knew he was safe and loved.
Mom and Dad were the ones who’d wept when the nurses bundled Fry off to the preemie ward and wired him up like a mouse in a laboratory tank. Fluid in the lungs, the doctor said, avoiding the term pneumonia so as not to further derail Honey, who was already frantic. She refused to leave the hospital, Skinner bringing her meals and books and fresh clothes. Fifteen days later Fry was home and his mother was whole, though not unchanged.
It was natural now, with time running out, that the final thought in her head would be of her son.
Who now emerged helmetless from behind the pigeon plum tree. He was carrying a bleached and broken two-by-four.
Honey willed herself to be silent and locked her gaze upon Louis Piejack’s shotgun. Best that he kept pointing it at her, not elsewhere.
Slowly Fry crept forward.
What colossal balls, marveled Honey, and steeled herself for the end.
Louis Piejack had never been enthralled by the great outdoors. The unsentimental commerce of seafood had drawn him to the Ten Thousand Islands. It was simple: If you were a fish peddler, you went where there were fish. Piejack couldn’t fathom why tourists and tree huggers gushed about the Everglades. He had no use for the vicious bugs and the infernal heat; his free hours were spent at home with the windows latched and the AC blasting and a case of Heinies cooling in the refrigerator.
It was into that cozy chamber of comfort that Piejack had dreamed of moving Honey Santana, but he now wondered if it was worth all the grief. Pretty as she was, her attitude remained piss-poor. She was tough and outspoken and damn near fearless-qualities which in a female did not appeal to Piejack. Plus she had a rotten temper; for squeezing her boob she’d walloped his nuts, and for clocking her bratty son she’d nearly strangled him.
Piejack preferred not to shoot her, but he was running out of fight. As the dreamy effect of the painkillers ebbed, so did his optimism for a blissful union. From the day he’d set his sights on Honey, physical affliction had been his only companion. Anesthetized by lust, he’d doggedly pursued the quest, convinced that he could melt Honey’s frigid resistance. So far he’d failed spectacularly. Even in his addled state, Piejack comprehended that this was a woman who wouldn’t settle easily into the role of obedient homemaker-slash-sex slave. He’d have to battle for every lousy feel, and she was strong enough to make him pay with blood. Piejack knew a Key West shrimper who’d gotten himself into the same sort of fix, with an Internet bride from the Philippines. Three nights into the honeymoon, the girl had pinned his scrotum to the mattress with a cocktail fork, then set fire to the motel room. Piejack shuddered at the thought.
He allowed the muzzle of the shotgun to kiss Honey’s forehead. “I don’t really wanna shoot ya, angel, and I gotta feelin’ you really don’t wanna die. So just do what Louis says and everything’s gonna be fine.”
Expressionless, she gazed up the barrel.
“Now, git yourself naked and let’s start this romance off proper,” Piejack said. “Then we’ll take the boat home and be happy ever after, just you, me and Charlie Main. As for your boy, well, he’s better off with his daddy. You can visit him maybe on Saturdays, if I don’t need you at the market. That’s the fuckin’ deal, angel, take it or leave it.”
Honey said, “I need time to think, Louis.”
“How long, goddammit?”
“About three seconds.”
“Okay,” Piejack said. “One…two…”
On the count of three, something sharp and heavy struck him from behind and knocked the air from his lungs. Piejack pitched sideways, thinking: This ain’t love.
The first white person to betray Sammy Tigertail had been his stepmother, who’d dumped him at the reservation the morning after his father was buried. The second white person to betray him had been Cindy, his ex-girlfriend, who’d started screwing anyone with a functioning cock after the Seminole demolished her backyard meth lab and confiscated a butane-powered menorah that she’d swiped from a local Hanukkah display.
Sammy Tigertail would concede that his Native American heritage wasn’t a factor in either instance of treachery-his stepmother was simply a self-centered shrew who didn’t want to be saddled with a teenager, while poor Cindy was a buzzed-out tramp who would have cheated on Prince William for a thimbleful of crank. As it turned out, both women had done Sammy Tigertail a favor. One had liberated him from his pallid existence as Chad McQueen, and the other had sprung him from a destructive and potentially gene-thinning romance.
Like many modern Seminoles, he had never been personally abused, subjugated, swindled or displaced by a white settler. The “injurious accompaniments” to which the Rev. Clay MacCauley had alluded in his nineteenth-century journal were old, bitter history; there had been no significant perfidy or bloodshed for generations. By the 1970s Florida was being stampeded from coast to coast, and the fortunes of the Seminoles had begun to change in a most unexpected way. It all started with a couple of bingo halls, and the knowledge that bored white people were fools for gambling. Soon they were swarming to the reservations by the busloads, and the bingo venues expanded to make room for card games and electronic poker.
Even as its numbers dwindled, the tribe’s prominence was inversely escalating to a dimension that boggled the elders. Wealth brought what three bloody wars had failed to win from the whites: deference. Once written off as a ragged band of heathens, the Seminole Nation grew into a formidable corporate power with its own brigade of lawyers and lobbyists. The Indians found themselves embraced by the lily-white business establishment, and avidly courted by politicians of all persuasions.
Some tribal members called it justice while others, such as Sammy Tigertail, called it a sellout. His uncle Tommy, who had helped mastermind the Seminole casino strategy, respected and even sympathized with the misgivings of his half-blooded nephew.
“My heart was in the same place,” he’d once told Sammy, “but then one day I asked myself, Who is there left to fight? Andrew Jackson’s dead, boy. His face is on the twenty-dollar bill, and we’ve got suitcases full at the casinos. Every night we stack ’em in a Brink’s truck and haul ’em to the bank. It’s better than spitting on the old bastard’s grave. Think of it, boy. All their famous soldiers are gone-Jackson, Jesup, Clinch-yet here we are.”
Yeah, thought Sammy Tigertail, here I am. Risking my dumb ass to help a white man rescue his wacko ex-wife.
The shot had sounded odd; like a firecracker in a toilet.
Skinner was running hard, the Indian close on his heels. Still it took several minutes to cross the island, choked as it was with vines and undergrowth. Eventually the two men burst into a broad clearing and Sammy Tigertail saw, on the other side, his own campsite. Some sort of unholy fight was under way-yelling, grunting, writhing amid the dirt and shells.