The bartender had heard the same conversation maybe a thousand times, but to a defrocked telemarketer from Texas it was revelatory; a thunderbolt of inspiration.
“It’s paradise here,” Shreave heard himself say. “Heaven on earth.”
The husband turned on his bar stool. “Today I caught eight ladyfish, and a flounder as big as a hubcap. That’s no lie!”
His wife said, “But what about the mosquitoes? I hear it’s torture in the summer.”
Shreave smiled. “That’s what the locals tell all the Yankees. You folks seriously in the market?”
“Aw, we’re just dreamin’ out loud,” the husband said.
“No, we’re serious,” the woman spoke up. “I’m serious. Do you live here?”
Shreave didn’t hesitate. “Just up the road,” he said.
It had of course dawned on him that, being immune to the wonders of the place, he was ideally equipped to exploit it. Erik fucking Estrada, eat your heart out.
The husband introduced himself. Shreave shook his hand and said, “I’m Boyd Eisenhower.”
“Like the president?”
“No relation, I’m afraid.”
The wife asked, “Are you a broker?”
“I handle a few select waterfront properties, yes.”
Shreave was experimenting with a new, low-key style. The beers definitely helped. So far, the couple had not recoiled or grown even slightly leery in his presence; just the opposite. They were so eager to escape Chicago that they hadn’t noticed he was half-trashed.
“And what would it cost,” the husband was saying, “for, oh, a three-two on the river? Hypothetically, I mean.”
“Or a town house on Marco,” the woman added eagerly. “Do you have a card, Mr. Eisenhower?”
“Not with me.” Boyd Shreave experienced a rush like no other. It was, he believed, his deliverance.
“Let me take your number,” he said, reaching for a cocktail napkin.
First thing in the morning, he would inquire about a real-estate license.
I am home, he thought. At last.
The eagle flew south and spent the night in the top of a dead black mangrove along the Lostmans River. Even from a distance Sammy Tigertail could see that the bird was ancient, and he wondered if it was the ghost spirit of Wiley, the demented white writer about whom his Uncle Tommy sometimes told stories.
At dawn Sammy Tigertail motored the johnboat to the base of the mangrove tree and called up at the eagle, which responded by yakking up a fish head. The Indian waved respectfully and headed upriver to check the spot where he’d submerged the corpse of Louis Piejack. It was the same deep hole in which eleven days earlier he had anchored Jeter Wilson, the luckless dead tourist. Recently, Wilson’s rented car had been recovered from the murky Tamiami Trail canal, which was now being searched by snake-wary police divers. Sammy Tigertail wasn’t in any hurry to come out of hiding.
No evidence of Wilson or Piejack had surfaced in Lostmans, so the Indian returned to his campsite near Toms Bight and carefully hid the johnboat. The day before, a chopper had passed overhead half a dozen times-it wasn’t the Coast Guard or the Park Service, but nonetheless Sammy Tigertail was on edge. He knew somebody was looking for something, although he wouldn’t have guessed that it was Gillian St. Croix looking for him, and that she was paying for the helicopter charters with a tuition refund from Florida State University. No longer was she a fighting Seminole.
Concealed by a clumsily woven canopy of palm fronds, Sammy Tigertail spent the daylight hours re-reading Rev. MacCauley’s journal and constructing a new guitar. From the shattered Gibson he had salvaged the neck, the tuning pegs and five strings; the body he was laboriously shaping with his Buck knife from a thick plank of teak that he’d gotten from a derelict sailboat. Sammy Tigertail was by no means an artisan yet it was satisfying work, and a task of which the inventive Calusas would have approved.
A month’s worth of gasoline and provisions had been delivered by Sammy Tigertail’s half brother, Lee, whom Sammy had contacted with a cellular phone that he’d found in Piejack’s johnboat. It was Lee who had delivered the news about Wilson’s car, and he’d agreed it would be premature for Sammy to return to the reservation. During Lee’s visit they had selected future drop sites and a timetable. Aware that his half brother’s wilderness skills were not as advanced as those of a full-blooded Seminole, Lee had also provided a compass, a dive watch, a NOAA marine chart and a bag of flares.
At night Sammy Tigertail was occasionally pestered in his sleep by the spirit of Wilson, who would complain sourly about sharing eternity at the bottom of a river with Louis Piejack.
“I thought you’d like some company,” Sammy Tigertail said the first time the dead tourist appeared at the camp on Toms Bight.
“The guy’s a total scumbag! Not even the damn crabs want a piece of him,” Wilson griped.
He’d brought along Piejack’s ghost for dramatic impact, but the Indian was unswayed. The depraved fish peddler looked no worse in death than he had when he was alive; the river scavengers were avoiding him like a toxin. Wilson, meanwhile, was disappearing by the biteful.
Sammy Tigertail said, “You told me you were lonely.”
“Lonely, yeah-not desperate. The dude’s a major perv,” fumed the dead tourist. “I can’t believe you wasted a perfectly good guitar on this fuckwit!”
His facial bones having been staved in by Perry Skinner’s lethal blow, Louis Piejack was unable to respond effectively in his own defense. It wouldn’t have mattered.
“I wasn’t the one who killed him,” the Seminole said.
“What happened to that guy you plugged?” Wilson inquired. “The porky one in the business suit. Hell, I’d rather hang out with him.”
“He didn’t die,” Sammy Tigertail replied.
“Always some excuse.”
“Go away now. I’m tired.”
“Fuck you, and good night,” said Wilson.
The dream visitations always ended the same way-the expired white men clomping away with their anchors dragging, two sullen figures deliquescing in a funky blue vapor. Afterward Sammy Tigertail would awaken and lie still, studying the stars. His uncle said that whenever a Seminole soul passed on, the Milky Way brightened to illuminate the path to the spirit world. On some crystal nights Sammy Tigertail worried that when his time came, the Maker of Breath would look unfavorably upon his white childhood as Chad McQueen.
He regarded the arrival of the hoary bald eagle as a powerful sign, and it remained near his camp as the days passed. Sometimes the old bird would drop a feather, which the Indian would retrieve and attach to a homemade turban of the style worn by his ancestors in the Wind Clan. Each morning he’d sneak from beneath the ragged palm canopy and scout the tree line to make sure that the great predator was still watching over him. During this period Sammy Tigertail’s sleep was undisturbed, for Wilson and Piejack did not show themselves.
On the same day that Sammy Tigertail finished rebuilding the Gibson, he began composing a tune for his mother. Musically its roots were closer to Neil Young than to the traditional Green Corn chorus, but nonetheless he was pleased by his first effort. Later he took the johnboat on the river and started casting for snook. He hooked a good one that jumped several times, attracting a nine-foot alligator. The animal exhibited no fear of the Indian, who tried to spook it by shouting and smacking the water with a frog gig. Even after the fish was boated, the gator lingered, its black fluted profile suspended in the current behind the transom. The sight reminded Sammy Tigertail of his ignominious stint in the wrestling pit at the reservation; he vowed never to harm another of the great beasts unless it was for survival.
Back at camp he cleaned and fried the snook. Then he doused the fire, stripped off his clothes and swam into the bight to watch a pod of dolphins herding mullet. He was a hundred yards from shore when the mystery helicopter returned, cruising low from the north. Exposed and unable to hide, Sammy Tigertail went vertical in the water, moving his legs only enough to keep his chin above the muddy chop. He hoped that from the air his dark head would look like a bobbing coconut.