When Honey squeezed harder, Piejack’s smirk faded. His yellowed eyes began to bulge and seep. Brownish spittle bubbled from the corners of his mouth, and his rank breath came in short, croupy emanations. As she dug her fingertips into his Adam’s apple, Honey regretted having trimmed her nails the week before. She nonetheless felt capable of inflicting mortal damage, and, despite his narcotic intake, the sonofabitch was definitely uncomfortable. She could tell by his gurgling.
“Watch out!” It was Fry.
To Honey’s immense relief, the boy hadn’t been hurt. Piejack’s gun butt had cracked the football helmet and knocked him flat, but Fry had sprung up quickly. Honey caught glimpses of him circling the scene, darting in to throw wild, ineffectual punches.
“I told you to get outta here!” When she opened her mouth to yell, her broken jawbone clacked like a castanet.
“No way!” Fry shouted back.
“Do-as-I-say!”
“Mom! Look!”
“Oh shit.”
From wrists to shoulders, her sleeves shimmered with fire ants. They were abandoning Piejack en masse, using Honey as a bridge. By the hundreds they streamed down her arms, but she was afraid to release her grip on Piejack to slap them away. He’d need only a moment, Honey knew, to regain control of the sawed-off.
As Fry flayed at the insects with a palmetto frond, Honey tried not to think about where the blood-red hordes might be heading. Piejack’s misshapen face was darkening due to loss of oxygen, yet he continued to grapple ferociously with good hand and bad for possession of the shotgun. So heated was the scuffle that Honey failed to notice a column of ants disappear between the top buttons of her shirt. The stings seared, like a sprinkle of hot acid, and she wondered how much she could endure.
Not enough, it turned out. Within seconds she was breathless from the pain. She let go of Piejack, tore off her shirt and flung herself down. When she stopped rolling, he stood over her panting and clutching the sawed-off. His shoes still reeked of Fry’s vomit.
Honey sat up and crossed her arms, to cover her bra. Her chest was burning along a sinuous track of tiny crimson bites.
“They’s one in your curls,” Piejack croaked.
As shaky as he was, the man had managed to hook one of his reconnected digits, possibly a pinkie, over the shotgun’s trigger. With the more nimble fingers of his good hand he was grubbing dirt from his ears.
Honey flicked the ant from her hair and thought: Where the hell is my son?
To find out if Piejack’s hearing had returned, she asked in a level tone, “What’re you going to do now, Louis?”
“What the hell d’ya think? I’m gonna shoot yer fine ass,” he said, “but first I’m gonna fuck it.”
He coughed up something, scowled at the taste and spat. Honey peered out between his knees, looking in vain for Fry.
Piejack said, “Your kid’s run off. But I’ll catch him later, don’tcha worry.”
His eyeballs rolled and he gulped slowly, like a toad. It was plain that Honey had injured him.
“Lose them pants,” he told her.
“Not a chance, Louis.”
“You know damn well I’ll shoot.”
“And that’s the only way it would ever happen between us-if I was dead,” Honey said.
“Now, that ain’t too bright.” Piejack touched the sawed-off to her forehead. “But if that’s how you want it…”
Honey expected her whole life to flash past, like people said it would, yet only a single event from her thirty-nine years replayed in fast-forward: Fry’s arrival.
She’d gone into labor on a Monday afternoon, six weeks early. Radioed Perry out on the crab boat. He raced home, carried her to the truck and sped ninety-five miles an hour across the state to Jackson Hospital in Miami. A sweet old Cuban doctor asked if she wanted an epidural, and Honey answered no because she figured the baby would be small and it wouldn’t hurt so much coming out. But it hurt plenty, and lasted way longer than she’d expected: fifteen hours and forty-one minutes. Perry stayed by her side. When there was pain he’d squeeze Honey’s hand, and when there wasn’t, he’d read to her from a book of fishing stories by Zane Grey. Honey had no interest in fishing, but it was the first time she’d heard her husband read aloud and for some reason she found it calming.
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.”