Eight

Sammy Tigertail was doing fine until the girl named Gillian started messing with his guitar. That’s when he stripped a palmetto frond and wove the leaves into a twine rope and tied her wrists to her ankles. Oddly, she did not resist.

“You don’t dress like an Indian,” she remarked as he cinched the knots. “Those are pretty nice threads.”

“Haven’t you heard? We’re all richer than Trump now.” He resumed packing his belongings into the stolen canoe.

“I had a boyfriend who played in a rock group. He had a Gibson, too,” Gillian said, “only not as cool as yours. His band was called the Cankers. Mostly they did covers of Bizkit and Weezer. Know what else? He got his thingamajig pierced.”

“I’m warning you,” said the Seminole.

“His scrotum. They all did-it was the bass player’s idea.”

Sammy Tigertail crouched directly in front of her. “If you go on with this story,” he said, “I’ll leave you here for the buzzards.”

Gillian squirmed. “You don’t scare me,” she said, but dropped the subject of her ex-boyfriend’s pierced privates.

“So where are you taking me?”

Sammy Tigertail didn’t answer because he didn’t know. He gagged her mouth with a balled-up pair of athletic socks and carried her to the canoe, which was wedged in some mangroves. Then he picked up the rifle and jogged back across the island.

In the moon glow he saw that Gillian’s friends were sleeping where they’d dropped, not far from the wisping campfire. Sammy Tigertail raised the gun and fired a shot over the beach. Quickly he stepped back into the tree line. As soon as he heard voices, he fired twice more.

Now the college kids were all on their feet, yelling and scrambling for their belongings. A male voice called Gillian’s name, and soon others chimed in. The Seminole squeezed off another round and the kids fell silent as they clambered into the remaining canoes.

Sammy Tigertail waited until they were out of sight and he could no longer hear their frantic paddling. He walked to the water’s edge and stood there, listening to the waves and trying to decide what to do next. Gillian had screwed up the whole plan. Her friends would go back to Chokoloskee and tell everyone that a sniper had chased them off the island, and that Gillian was missing. Airplanes and helicopters would be sent to search for the tangerine-colored canoe, which-Sammy Tigertail realized glumly-would stand out like a burning flare on the tea-brown creeks.

He hurried back to where he’d left the girl. Somehow she had gotten out of the canoe but he found her nearby, grunting and thrashing among the mangroves. He lugged her to a small clearing, where he cut off the palmetto ropes and uncorked the socks from her mouth and cleaned the scratches on her shins and arms.

“Stop crying,” he said.

“You killed my friends! I heard the shots.”

“Your friends are fine. All I did was scare ’em away.”

“What about me?” Gillian wiped her eyes with a sleeve of the sweatshirt. “They just left me here to rot?”

“I spooked ’em off with the gunfire.”

“What about Ethan? That guy I was with? I bet he just ran and never looked back.”

Sammy Tigertail said, “You remind me of my last girlfriend.”

Gillian sniffled and smiled. “Yeah?”

“It’s not a compliment. Take off that goddamn sweatshirt.”

“No way. I’m cold.”

He opened his duffel and dug out a gray fleece pullover, which he tossed to her. Grudgingly she removed the FSU sweatshirt.

“Give it here,” Sammy Tigertail said.

“I don’t see why you’re so pissy. It’s just a name,” she said, zipping up the fleece, “like the Atlanta Braves.”

He unsheathed a Buck knife and shredded the sweatshirt. Gillian sat stunned.

“It’s not just a name,” said Sammy Tigertail. “Do you have any clue what your people did to my tribe?”

Gillian said, “Chill, okay?” She didn’t take her eyes off the knife. “It wasn’t my people. My people were up in Ohio.”

“Yeah, screwing the Shawnee and the Chippewa.” Sammy Tigertail was depressed to think that this bubblehead would soon be a schoolteacher. It affirmed his view that white people were devolving with each generation.

He sheathed the knife and told her to take a seat in the canoe. “We’re outta here,” he said.

“Can’t we wait until the sun comes up? What if we flip over in the water?” Gillian was slapping haplessly at a mosquito. “Ethan said there’s sharks all over the place. He’s majoring in marine biology. My girlfriend’s engaged to his roommate. Well, practically.”

“I’m gonna count to three.”

She frowned. “You want me to shut up, I’ll shut up.”

Sammy Tigertail knew it was foolish to bring her along. If she remained on the island, the marine patrol or the Coast Guard would find her within hours after her friends reported her missing. She’d be hungry and sunburned, but unharmed…

Unless the other kids got hung up on the way back to the mainland. In that case, it might be several days before Gillian was located. By then the insects would have made a wreck of her and she’d be dangerously dehydrated, not that Sammy Tigertail should have cared.

Yet he did care-not much, but enough to unsettle him. He felt corrupted by the sentiment, which he blamed on his polluted half-white blood.

Into the night he paddled as fast as he could, the canoe gliding in a wash of moonlight. It occurred to the Indian that since he had no idea where he was going, it was technically impossible to get lost. At daybreak he’d stop at the nearest island, conceal the canoe and construct a lean-to that would be invisible from the air.

From the bow came Gillian’s voice: “What should I call you? I mean, since you won’t even tell me your name.”

“Thlocklo Tustenuggee,” he said.

It was his great-great-great-grandfather’s Seminole name.

“Thlocka what?” said Gillian.

Sammy Tigertail pronounced it again, although not as mellifluously as the first time. Since returning to the reservation, he had struggled to master the traditional Muskogee dialect.

“Never mind,” Gillian mumbled.

“Tiger Tail,” he said between strokes. “That’s my other name.”

“Cool. I like ’em both.”

The tip of the paddle struck something hard under the surface, jolting the canoe. Gillian yipped and said, “Easy, dude!”

Sammy Tigertail cursed under his breath as the hull screaked across a submerged oyster bar.

A few minutes later the girl said, “I did two semesters of crew.”

“What?”

“Rowing. We can take turns with the paddle,” she offered. “I’m serious. It’ll give me somethin’ to keep my mind off the damn bugs.”

“Why’d you ask to come with me?”

“I dunno, Thlocko. Why did you let me?” Gillian laughed. “I’m semi-drunk and totally stoned. What’s your excuse?”

“I’m weak,” Sammy said flatly. He dug harder against the tide.

“So, am I your first-ever hostage?” she asked.

He thought of Wilson, the tourist. “The first live one,” he said.

“You’re funny.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Me one funny Injun.”

Honey Santana grew up in Miami, where her parents owned a jewelry store on Coral Way. She had three older sisters, each of whom married urologists and moved across the causeway to Miami Beach. Honey was different. Even as a child she’d felt suffocated and disoriented in the city. Crowds made her dizzy and traffic gave her migraines.

She inherited her father’s impatience and her mother’s lousy sense of direction, a combination that made her teen driving years exceptionally eventful. On the night of her senior prom, Honey’s date got blasted on Cuervo and passed out on top of her in the spacious backseat of his father’s Continental Mark IV. The task of navigating homeward fell to Honey, who missed the turn off Eighth Street and continued due west on the Tamiami Trail, all the way to the opposite coast of Florida. Honey’s date, who would grow up to be a heartthrob on a popular Latin soap opera, awoke to the surreal vision of Honey skipping barefoot in her ice-blue prom gown along the Naples beach.