Native Tongue (24 page)

Joe Winder couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Why the sudden anxiety? The laying on of guilt? If he’d known he was in for a full-blown argument, he indeed would have put on some pants.

Nina said, “It’s not just the money. I need someone reliable, someone who will be here for me.”

“Have I ever let you down?”

“No, but you will.”

Winder didn’t say anything because she was absolutely correct; nothing in his immediate plans would please her.

“I know you,” Nina added, in a sad voice. “You aren’t going to let go of this thing.”

“Probably not.”

“Then I think we’re definitely heading in different directions. I think you’re going to end up in jail, or maybe dead.”

“Have some faith,” Joe Winder said.

“It’s not that easy.” Nina stalked to the closet, flung open the door and stared at the clutter. “Where’d you put my suitcase?”

In the mid-1970s, Florida elected a crusading young governor named Clinton Tyree, an ex-football star and Vietnam War veteran. At six feet six, he was the tallest chief executive in the history of the state. In all likelihood he was also the most honest. When a ravenous and politically connected land-development company attempted to bribe Clinton Tyree, he tape-recorded their offers, turned the evidence over to the FBI and volunteered to testify at the trial. By taking a public stand against such omnipotent forces, Clinton Tyree became something of a folk hero in the Sunshine State, and beyond. The faint scent of integrity attracted the national media, which roared into Florida and anointed the young governor a star of the new political vanguard.

It was, unfortunately, a vanguard of one. Clinton Tyree spoke with a blistering candor that terrified his fellow politicians. While others reveled in Florida’s boom times, Clinton Tyree warned that the state was on the brink of an environmental cataclysm. The Everglades were drying up, the coral reefs were dying, Lake Okeechobee was choking on man-made poisons and the bluegills were loaded with mercury. While other officeholders touted Florida as a tropical dreamland, the governor called it a toxic dump with palm trees. On a popular call-in radio show, he asked visitors to stay away for a couple of years. He spoke not of managing the
state’s breakneck growth, but of halting it altogether. This, he declared, was the only way to save the place.

The day Clinton Tyree got his picture on the cover of a national newsmagazine, some of the most powerful special interests in Florida—bankers, builders, highway contractors, sugar barons, phosphate-mining executives—congealed in an informal conspiracy to thwart the new governor’s reforms by stepping around him, as if he were a small lump of dogshit on an otherwise luxuriant carpet.

Bypassing Clinton Tyree was relatively easy to do; all it took was money. In a matter of months, everyone who could be compromised, intimidated or bought off was. The governor found himself isolated from even his own political party, which had no stake in his radical bluster because it was alienating all the big campaign contributors. Save Florida? Why? And from what? The support that Clinton Tyree enjoyed among voters didn’t help him one bit in the back rooms of Tallahassee; every bill he wanted passed got gutted, buried or rebuffed. The fact that he was popular with the media didn’t deter his enemies; it merely softened their strategy. Rather than attack the governor’s agenda, they did something worse—they ignored it. Only the most gentlemanly words were publicly spoken about young Clint, the handsome war hero, and about his idealism and courage to speak out. Any reporter who came to town could fill two or three notebooks with admiring quotes—so many (and so effusive) that someone new to the state might have assumed that Clinton Tyree had already died, which he had, in a way.

On the morning the Florida Cabinet decided to shut down a coastal wildlife preserve and sell it dirt cheap to a powerful land-sales firm, the lone dissenting vote trudged from the Capitol Building in disgust and vanished from the political landscape in the back of a limousine.

At first authorities presumed that the governor was the victim
of a kidnapping or other foul play. A nationwide manhunt was suspended only after a notarized resignation letter was analyzed by the FBI and found to be authentic. It was true; the crazy bastard had up and quit.

Journalists, authors and screenwriters flocked to Florida with hopes of securing exclusive rights to the renegade governor’s story, but none could find him. Consequently, nothing was written that even bordered on the truth.

Which was this: Clinton Tyree now went by the name of Skink, and lived in those steamy clawing places where he was least likely to be bothered by human life-forms. For fifteen years the governor had been submerged in an expatriation that was deliberately remote and anonymous, if not entirely tranquil.

Joe Winder wanted to talk about what happened in Tallahassee. “I read all the stories,” he said. “I went back and looked up the microfiche.”

“Then you know all there is to know.” Skink was on his haunches, poking the embers with a stick. Winder refused to look at what was frying in the pan.

He said, “All this time and they never found you.”

“They quit searching,” Skink said. A hot ash caught in a wisp of his beard. He snuffed it with two fingers. “I don’t normally eat soft-shell turtle,” he allowed.

“Me neither,” said Joe Winder.

“The flavor makes up for the texture.”

“I bet.” Winder knelt on the other side of the fire.

Out of the blue Skink said, “Your old man wasn’t a bad guy, but he was in a bad business.”

Winder heard himself agree. “He never understood what was so wrong about it. Or why I was so goddamn mad. He died not having a clue.”

Skink lifted the turtle by the tail and stuck a fork in it. “Ten more minutes,” he said, “at least.”

It wasn’t easy trying to talk with him this way, but Winder wouldn’t give up: “It’s been an interesting day. In the space of two hours I lost my job and my girlfriend.”

“Christ, you sound like Dobie Gillis.”

“The job was shit, I admit. But I was hoping Nina would stay strong. She’s one in a million.”

“Love,” said Skink, “it’s just a kiss away.”

Dejectedly, Winder thought: I’m wasting my time. The man couldn’t care less. “I came to ask about a plan,” Winder said. “I’ve been racking my brain.”

“Come on, I want to show you something.” Skink rose slowly and stretched, and the blaze-orange rainsuit made a crackling noise. He pulled the shower cap tight on his skull and, in high steps, marched off through the trees. To the west, the sky boiled with fierce purple thunderheads.

“Keep it moving,” Skink advised, over his shoulder.

Joe Winder followed him to the same dumpsite where the corpse of Spearmint Breath had been hidden. When they walked past the junker Cadillac, Winder noted that the trunk was open, and empty. He didn’t ask about the body. He didn’t want to know.

Skink led him through a hazardous obstacle course of discarded household junk—shells of refrigerators, ripped sofas, punctured mattresses, crippled Barcaloungers, rusty barbecue grills, disemboweled air conditioners—until they came to a very old Plymouth station wagon, an immense egg-colored barge with no wheels and no windshield. A yellow beach umbrella sprouted like a giant marigold from the dashboard, and offered minimal protection from blowing rain or the noonday sun. Skink got in the car and ordered Joe Winder to do the same.

The Plymouth was full of books—hundreds of volumes arranged lovingly from the tailgate to the front. With considerable
effort, Skink turned completely in the front seat; he propped his rear end on the warped steering wheel. “This is where I come to read,” he said. “Believe it or not, the dome light in this heap still works.”

Joe Winder ran a finger along the spines of the books, and found himself smiling at the exhilarating variety of writers: Churchill, Hesse, Sandburg, Steinbeck, Camus, Paine, Wilde, Vonnegut, de Tocqueville, Salinger, García Márquez, even Harry Crews.

“I put a new battery in this thing,” Skink was saying. “This time of year I’ve got to run the AC at least two, three hours a day. To stop the damn mildew.”

“So there’s gas in this car?” Winder asked.

“Sure.”

“But no wheels.”

Skink shrugged. “Where the hell would I be driving?”

A cool stream of wind rushed through the open windshield, and overhead the yellow beach umbrella began to flap noisily. A fat drop of rain splatted on the hood, followed by another and another.

“Damn,” said Skink. He put a shoulder to the door and launched himself out of the station wagon. “Hey, Flack, you coming or not?”

The storm came hard and they sat through it, huddled like Sherpas. The campfire washed out, but the soft-shelled turtle was cooked to perfection. Skink chewed intently on its tail and blinked the raindrops from his good eye; the other one fogged up like a broken headlight. Water trickled down his bronze cheeks, drenching his beard. Lightning cracked so close they could smell it—Winder ducked, but Skink showed no reaction, even when thunder rattled the coffeepot.

He adjusted the blaze weather suit to cover the electronic panther collar on his neck. “They say it’s waterproof, but I don’t know.”

Winder could scarcely hear him over the drum of the rain against the trees. Lightning flashed again, and reflexively he shut his eyes.

Skink raised his voice: “You know about that new golf resort?”

“I saw where they’re putting it.”

“No!” Skink was shouting now. “You know who’s behind it? That fucking Kingsbury!”

The wind was getting worse, if that was possible. With his free hand, Skink wrung out the tendrils of his beard. “Goddammit, man, are you listening? It all ties together.”

“What—with Koocher’s death?”

“Everything—” Skink paused for another white sizzle of lightning. “Every damn thing.”

It made sense to Winder. A scandal at the Amazing Kingdom wouldn’t only be bad for business, it might jeopardize Francis Kingsbury’s plans for developing Falcon Trace. If anyone revealed that he’d lied about the “endangered” voles, the feds might roll in and halt the whole show. The EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Interior—they could jerk Kingsbury around until he died of old age.

“Look at the big picture,” Skink said. With a tin fork he cleaned out the insides of the turtle shell. The wind was dying quickly, and the rain was turning soft on the leaves. The clouds broke out west, revealing raspberry patches of summer sunset. The coolness disappeared and the air turned muggy again.

Skink put down the fry pan and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his rainsuit. “It’s beautiful out here,” he remarked. “That squall felt damn good.”

“It might be too late,” Joe Winder said. “Hell, they’ve started clearing the place.”

“I know.” The muscles in Skink’s neck tightened. “They tore down an eagle nest the other day. Two little ones, dead. That’s the kind of bastards we’re talking about.”

“Did you see—”

“I got there after the fact,” Skink said. “Believe me, if I could’ve stopped them …”

“What if we’re too late?”

“Are you in or not? That’s all I need to know.”

“I’m in,” said Winder. “Of course I am. I’m just not terribly optimistic.”

Skink smiled his matinee smile, the one that had gotten him elected so many years before. “Lower your sights, boy,” he said to Joe Winder. “I agree, justice is probably out of the question. But we can damn sure ruin their day.”

He reached under the flap of his rainsuit, grunted, fumbled inside his clothing. Finally his hand came out holding a steel-blue semiautomatic pistol.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got an extra one for you.”

The woman who called herself Rachel Lark was receiving a vigorous massage when Francis X. Kingsbury phoned. She’d been expecting to hear from him ever since she’d read in the
Washington Post
about the theft of the blue-tongued mango voles in Florida. Her first thought, a natural one, was that Kingsbury would try to talk her into giving some of the money back. Rachel Lark braced for the worst as she sat up, naked, and told the masseur to give her the damn telephone.

On the other end, Kingsbury said: “Is this my favorite redhead?”

“Forget it,” said the woman who called herself Rachel Lark, though it was not her true name.

Kingsbury said, “Can you believe it, babe? My luck, the goddamn things get swiped.”

“I’ve already spent the money,” Rachel Lark said, “and even if I didn’t, a deal’s a deal.”

Instead of protesting, Kingsbury said, “Same here. I spent mine, too.”

“Then it’s a social call, is it?”

“Not exactly. Are you alone, babe?”

“Me and a nice young man named Sven.”

The image gave Kingsbury a tingle. Rachel was an attractive woman, a bit on the heavy side, but a very hot dresser. They had met years before in the lobby of a prosecutor’s office in Camden, where both of them were waiting to cut deals allowing them to avert unpleasant prison terms. Frankie King had chosen to drop the dime on the Zubonis, while the woman who now called herself Rachel Lark (it was Sarah Hunt at that time) was preparing to squeal on an ex-boyfriend who had illegally imported four hundred pounds of elephant ivory. In the lobby that day, the two informants had amiably traded tales about life on the lam. Later they’d exchanged phone numbers and a complete list of aliases, and promised to keep in touch.

Rachel’s specialty was wildlife, and Kingsbury phoned her soon after opening the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills. Before then, he had never heard of the Endangered Species Act, never dreamed that an obscure agency of the federal government would casually fork over two hundred thousand dollars in grant money for the purpose of preserving a couple of lousy rodents. Rachel Lark had offered to provide the animals and the documentation, and Kingsbury was so intrigued by the plan—not just the dough, but the radiant publicity for the Amazing Kingdom—that he didn’t bother to inquire if the blue-tongued mango voles were real.

The government check had arrived on time, they’d split it fifty-fifty and that was that. Francis Kingsbury paid no further attention
to the creatures until customers started noticing that the voles’ tongues were no longer very blue. Once children openly began grilling the Amazing Kingdom tour guides about how the animals got their name, Kingsbury ordered Pedro Luz to get some food coloring and touch the damn things up. Unfortunately, Pedro had neither the patience nor the gentle touch required to be an animal handler, and one of the voles—the female—was crushed accidentally during a tongue-painting session. Afraid for his job, Pedro Luz had told no one of the mishap. To replace the deceased vole, he had purchased a dwarf hamster for nine dollars from a pet store in Perrine. After minor modifications, the hamster had fooled both the customers and the male vole, which repeatedly attempted to mount its chubby new companion. Not only had the hamster rejected these advances, it had counterattacked with such ferocity that Pedro Luz had been forced to hire a night security guard to prevent a bloodbath.