He wondered about the man named Wilson, held fast with trap ropes and anchors on the bottom of Lostmans River. The sun was high and the water was warming, so it was possible that bull sharks would cruise in from the Gulf. Wilson wouldn’t feel a thing.
A half dozen fishing boats flew past the young Seminole as he made his way through Rabbit Key Pass. Some of the anglers waved but Sammy Tigertail looked away. It had been nearly two days since he’d slept, and his senses were dull. Shortly after noon he beached the canoe on a small boot-shaped island. He unloaded his gear, taking special care with the guitar and the rifle, which was wrapped in a towel. He found a crown of dry land and made camp. It occurred to him that he hadn’t brought much food, but he wasn’t worried-his brother had sent along two spinning rods and a useful assortment of hooks and lures. Sammy Tigertail was not as resourceful in the wild as some of his full-blooded kin, but he did know how to catch fish.
With noisy seabirds wheeling overhead, he lay down beneath a tree and fell into a hard sleep. The spirit of Wilson arrived, strung with slimy ropes and dragging all four anchors. The sharks hadn’t yet found him, although the blue crabs and snappers had picked clean his eye sockets. He was still half-drunk.
“I was expecting you sooner,” said the Indian.
“How come you didn’t take my money before you dumped me in the river?”
“Because I am no thief.”
“Or at least the doobs. That was a waste, my friend,” Wilson said.
Sammy Tigertail allowed that he was sorry Wilson had died on the airboat excursion.
“It was that fuckin’ snake, wasn’t it?” Wilson asked.
“Naw, it was your heart.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“What do you want from me?”
The dead tourist held up the disposable camera. The cardboard was sodden and peeling apart.
“How about another picture?” said Wilson. “For my guys back at the bar on Kinnickinnic Avenue-something they could frame and hang in the pool room.”
Kinnickinnic sounded like an Indian word, though Sammy Tigertail didn’t know which tribe had been run out of Milwaukee.
“Aw, come on,” Wilson said. “They got an autographed photo of Vince Lombardi and a game jersey signed by Brett Favre. But a picture of me, dead and with my eyeballs chewed out-that’d be tits!”
Sammy Tigertail said, “Sorry. No more photos.” He was extremely tired, and he wanted the dream to be over. He hoped that a shark would devour the disposable camera while chewing on Wilson. Sammy Tigertail wanted no one to see the humiliating, though undeveloped, images of him posing with the obnoxious white tourist.
“It’s freezing in that damn river,” Wilson complained.
“I had to move your body off the reservation. There weren’t many options.”
“I didn’t know the water got so cold in Florida.”
“Just wait till summer. It’s like soup,” Sammy Tigertail said.
Wilson scowled and spit out a clot of brown muck. “You sayin’ this is it for me? I gotta spend the rest of eternity out in this goddamned swamp? Dripping wet and smellin’ like fish shit? Not to mention these fuckin’ anchors.”
Sammy Tigertail said, “I can’t blame you for being angry.”
“I shoulda croaked in the casino. I shoulda had my heart attack in the bar when that hooker was bouncin’ on my lap. That’s how I should be spendin’ the hereafter,” the spirit of Wilson fumed, “not out here all alone in the middle of nowheres.”
“Deal with it,” the Indian said.
“Fuck you. This was the worst vacation I ever had.”
The dead tourist stomped the camera to pieces and shambled away, the anchors screaking across the floor.
Sammy Tigertail awoke in a state of prickly agitation. It was dusk, with a chilly northwest wind blowing in off the Gulf. He put together one of the spinning rods, tied on a plastic minnow plug and hurried to the beach in hopes of fooling a redfish or a snook.
But while the young Indian had been arguing with the white man’s spirit, a big tide had rolled in. It was not good for beach fishing, and even worse for an untethered canoe.
In the fading light, Sammy Tigertail paced the shore, scanning anxiously in all directions. There was no sign of the bright blue craft. The wind and the fast-rising water had carried it away and possibly overturned it.
Again he felt cursed. He trudged back to camp and built a fire. Then he took out the Gibson guitar and placed it across his lap. Running his hands along the instrument’s magnificent curves, he found himself soothed by the dancing flames reflected in the cool polished wood.
Since he didn’t know any chords, Sammy Tigertail began strumming with a wild and random vigor. He had no amplifier, yet he imagined that he was filling the night universe with music. It was good therapy for a stranded man.
Four
The crab boat that Sammy Tigertail had borrowed to transport Wilson’s body belonged to a man named Perry Skinner, Honey Santana’s ex-husband and the father of her only son. Skinner hadn’t asked Sammy Tigertail why he needed the boat, because Skinner didn’t care to know. He was vice mayor of Everglades City and therefore inoculated from official scrutiny in most matters criminal and otherwise.
“How’s school?” he asked Fry.
“Electrifying.”
“And your mom?”
“That’s sorta why I’m here.”
“I figured,” Perry Skinner said. “Pass the catsup.”
They were the only ones eating burgers at the Rod and Gun Club.
“She still call me your ‘ex-father’?”
“Sometimes,” Fry said, “and sometimes it’s just ‘your worthless dope-smuggling old man.’”
“That’s cold.” Skinner drew a smiley face in mustard on his burger. “Such bitterness ain’t real attractive,” he said.
“I don’t know that she means it.”
Like practically every red-blooded male of his generation in Everglades City, Skinner and his brother had gotten popped running loads of weed. “What happened was a long time ago, Fry. I went away and did my time,” he said. “Thirty-one months at Eglin, I made a point of improving myself. Where you think I learned to talk Spanish?”
“I know, Dad.”
“Your mom coulda divorced me while I was gone, but she didn’t.”
Fry emptied two packets of sugar into his iced tea. He’d already heard everything his mother and father had to say about each other. It was interesting to him that neither had remarried.
Skinner tore into his hamburger and asked, “How much does she need this time?”
“A thousand bucks,” his son said.
“For what, may I ask?”
“Two kayaks.”
“How nice,” Skinner said.
“Plus paddles and life jackets.” Fry hesitated before telling his father the rest. “See, she quit her job at the fish market.”
“Yeah, I know. Only she got sacked is the way I heard it.”
“Now she wants to do ecotours through the backcountry-nature trips for bird-watchers and stuff,” Fry said.
His father took another big bite and grunted.
“She might be good at it.” The boy spoke loyally but without conviction.
“What the hell happened at the fish market? Did she say?”
“What did you hear?”
Skinner put down his burger and sanded his chin with a paper napkin. “I heard she flipped out and attacked Louis Piejack with a claw hammer.”
“After he grabbed her boob,” Fry said. “And it wasn’t a hammer. It was a crab mallet.”
His father blinked slowly. “Louis grabbed her?”
“Yes, sir, that’s what Mom told me. And I believe her.”
Skinner nodded as if he believed it, too. “Then he’s damn lucky she didn’t crack his skull instead of his nuts.”
Fry could tell that his father was angry.
“Did he hurt her? Tell the truth.”
“No, sir, I don’t believe so.”