“But I told you about my accident!” Shreave interjected.

Eugenie waved him off. “Don’t even start. You fell on a cactus, big fucking deal. Everything still works fine.” Then, letting her gaze drift below his belt, she added: “More or less.”

That did the trick. Wordlessly Shreave plunged down the steps and reeled toward the parking lot.

As his car screeched away, Eugenie Fonda experienced a tug of remorse. If only he’d surprised me just once, she thought.

Flowers just don’t cut it.

Five

From 1835 to 1842, the United States government for the second time directed its military might against a small band of Indians settled in the wilderness of Florida. During those years the Seminoles were pursued by almost every regiment of the regular army, and more than fifty thousand volunteers and militiamen. By the time it was over, the Second Seminole War had cost the United States an estimated thirty million dollars, a mountainous sum in that era, and more than three thousand lives.

The toll was all the more astounding because, at the peak of its strength, the Seminole tribe had no more than a thousand warriors.

Absurdly outnumbered, braves would lure the white infantry deep into the boggy swamps and pine barrens, then attack in lightning flurries. The strategy proved highly effective at first, but in the end the Indians were overrun. Their home camps were razed, hundreds of families were wiped out and nearly four thousand tribal members were deported to Indian Country, the bleak plains of Oklahoma. Nevertheless, the small numbers of Seminoles who remained in Florida refused to surrender, and to this day their descendants have never signed a peace treaty with Washington, D.C.

In late 1880, the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology dispatched the Rev. Clay MacCauley to Florida “to inquire into the condition and to ascertain the number of Indians commonly known as Seminole.” MacCauley spent the winter of 1881 traveling to tribal settlements at Catfish Lake, Cow Creek, Fisheating Creek, the Miami River and Big Cypress. His account, published six years later, was praised for its rich descriptions and perceptive commentary.

Sammy Tigertail’s father bought him a copy for four dollars at a used-book sale at the big public library in downtown Fort Lauderdale. The volume became one of the boy’s most treasured belongings, and it was not exaggerating to say that it changed his life.

“They are now strong, fearless, haughty and independent,” MacCauley wrote in summary of the Indians he met, then added:

The moving lines of the white population are closing in upon the land of the Seminole. There is no farther retreat to which they can go. It is their impulse to resist the intruders, but some of them at last are becoming wise enough to know that they cannot contend successfully with the white man. It is possible that even their few warriors may make an effort to stay the oncoming hosts, but ultimately they will either perish in the futile attempt or they will have to submit to a civilization which, until now, they have been able to repel and whose injurious accompaniments may degrade and destroy them.

From the moment he first read those words, Sammy Tigertail had dreamed of shedding his plain life as a Chad and disappearing into the Big Cypress, hideout of Sam Jones and Billy Bowlegs and other heroes of the second war. Above all, the great-great-great-grandson of Chief Tiger Tail would not allow himself to be degraded and destroyed by the white man, a process he feared had already commenced during his suburban childhood. He planned grandly to recast himself as one of those indomitable braves who resisted the intruders, or died trying.

But then he was only a teenager, stoked with idealism and newfound native pride.

Now, re-reading MacCauley by firelight, Sammy Tigertail struggled to envision the noble and fiercely insulated culture so admiringly documented in those pages. He wondered what the journalist-preacher would say about the twenty-first-century clans that eagerly beckoned outsiders to tribal gambling halls, tourist traps and drive-through cigarette kiosks. For not the first time the young man contemplated the crushing likelihood that the warrior he aspired to become had no place to go.

As much as Sammy Tigertail cherished the Mark Knopfler guitar, embracing it made him think of the casino from whose garish walls it had been lifted. The great Osceola would not have allowed his people to put their name on such a monstrous palace of white greed; more likely he would have set a torch to it.

But Osceola was long gone, dragged in chains out of his beloved Florida and left to die on a dirt prison floor at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina. As for Dire Straits, the band had split up while Sammy Tigertail was still in grade school.

Morosely he closed the MacCauley book and reached for the Gibson. He didn’t feel torn between two cultures so much as forsaken by both. Soon, he knew, the spirit of the dead tourist would appear again. Sammy Tigertail was certain that what had happened to Wilson on the airboat was no ordinary heart attack; it had been arranged by the Maker of Breath, to touch off the events that now found the Seminole marooned on a mild winter night in the Ten Thousand Islands.

Obviously the high spirits were testing him.

Sammy Tigertail let his left hand wander up and down the frets of the guitar while he chopped at the strings with his right. For a pick he used a broken seashell, half of a pearly pink bivalve. The music he made was in its dissonance both melancholy and defiant, the bass notes pounding a martial beat. He played until his fingertips stung, and then he stretched out on the ground near the fire.

Before long he drifted off, lulled by the soft crackle of the embers and a breeze moving through the leaves. After a time his sleep was interrupted by singing, which he assumed was the ghost of Wilson returning to pester him. Who else would be warbling “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer” in the sacred dead of night?

Yet Wilson didn’t show himself, and the unseen chorus began to swell. Soon Sammy Tigertail could make out several voices, some unmistakably female.

He sat up, realizing it wasn’t a dream-the wind had switched direction, bringing not only white man’s music but harsh bursts of laughter and acrid whiffs of lighter fluid. Hurriedly the Seminole arose and kicked sand over his campfire. Then he loaded his rifle and headed upwind into the darkness. He was not an experienced tracker, nor was he particularly light-footed in the bush, but his heart was true and his aim was improving.

Lily Shreave hadn’t expected to see her husband when she walked in the front door.

“What’re you doing here? It’s six-thirty-you’re late for work,” she said.

“I called in sick,” Boyd Shreave told her. “You were right. We need to talk.”

“Well, well.” Lily motioned him to the couch. “I’m gonna have myself a cocktail. You want one?”

Her husband said definitely not, and sat down. He felt steadier than the last time they’d spoken, having now devised a more compelling explanation for his monkish behavior. In a fog of vanity, Shreave believed that Lily’s simmering hunger for him was genuine. He would have been poleaxed to learn that she’d just returned from meeting a private investigator who was compiling evidence for a divorce.

When Lily returned to the room she was sipping a martini. She had also stripped down to thong panties as red as a pepper.

“So.” She put down her drink and straddled him. “Let’s talk.”

But Shreave couldn’t. He sat mute and immobilized as Lily planted both fists in his sternum and began churning piston-like against his crotch. That her gyrations reminded him of Eugenie Fonda wouldn’t have been so bewildering had he known that only an hour earlier his wife had been studying his mistress’s upright style of lovemaking on a videotape recorded by the private eye, shooting through a window of Eugenie’s apartment. Later, while viewing the tape, Lily had commented with clinical neutrality upon Boyd’s weak performance.