Skink--No Surrender (2 page)

He was, however, famous for something else.

When I caught up to him, half a mile down the beach, I told him that Wikipedia said he was dead.

“Wiki who?” he said.

“It’s a community encyclopedia on the Internet.”

“You might as well be talking to a Martian.” He kept walking, the waves splashing over his boots.

I said, “Dude, I really want to hear your story.”

“First tell me about your cousin. You’re worried about her.”

“Not really.”

“That’s bull.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe a little worried. She was supposed to meet me here tonight, but she never came, which is weird.”

“You tried calling her?”

“Sure. Over and over.”

The man nodded. “Hold my eye,” he said, and plucked the left one out of his face.

I was home, in bed, when Malley finally texted: “Grounded again. Sorry I couldn’t sneak away.”

A perfectly believable excuse, except for one hitch. After leaving the beach, I’d jogged the seven blocks to her house and seen that the lights in her bedroom were turned off. Malley was a total night owl; she always stayed up way past midnight. It was only ten-thirty when I’d crouched
behind the oak tree in her front yard, watching her window. The room had been completely dark, which meant that Malley wasn’t home.

Which meant she couldn’t be grounded.

From my bed I texted back: “R u ok?”

“Fine. Call u 2morrow.”

Of course I couldn’t sleep after that, so I went out to the living room, where Trent was watching television—a cage-fighting match on pay-per-view. I’m serious.

“Your mom’s snoring like a buffalo,” he said.

“They snore, too? I thought they just snorted.”

“Hey, champ, before you sit down? Grab me a cold one from the fridge.”

Trent drinks more Mountain Dew than any mortal human on the planet. It’s hard to watch, because he slurps the stuff so fast that it drips off his chin like green drool. We’re talking
gallons
of sugary caffeine, every day.

I brought him a bottle anyway. Trent is my stepfather, and we’re cool. He treats me like a kid brother, and I treat him the same way. He’s harmless and good-natured, and dumb as a box of rocks.

“Is that ice cream?” he asked me.

No, Trent, it’s a cheese ball with chocolate sauce
.

“Want some?” I said.

“Maybe later, champ. You believe these two beasts?” Trent was addicted to cage fights. “Yo, see that? It’s real blood,” he said.

“Wow.” That was the best I could do. The truth is
I’d rather sit through a documentary on Calvin Coolidge than watch two buzz-cut goons beating the crap out of each other in a supersized dog kennel.

Mom married Trent last December, not quite three years after my father had passed way. Dad was an awesome guy, and I miss him worse than anything. He was way smarter than Trent, but he died in a really stupid way. He’d be the first to admit it.

Here’s what happened: He drank two beers, hopped on his skateboard and crashed full-speed into the rear of a parked UPS delivery truck. It was a large vehicle, but my father didn’t see it in time. That’s because he was too busy unwrapping a Butterfingers candy bar while he coasted down A1A.

No helmet, naturally. We’re talking about a forty-five-year-old man with a master’s degree in engineering from Georgia Tech. Unbelievable.

At the funeral one of his surfer buddies stood up and said, “At least Randy died doing something he truly loved.”

What?
I thought.
Bleeding from his eardrums?

Afterwards Mom was a wreck, and she pretty much stayed that way until she met Trent, whose only known hobby is golf. He works as a real-estate agent here in Loggerhead Beach, but business is slow, so he’s got an unhealthy amount of spare time. His second-favorite TV program is a cable reality show called
The Bigfoot Diaries
.

To yank Trent’s chain, I told him I’d spotted a Skunk Ape on the beach.

“Get out,” he said.

“Well, he
smelled
like a Skunk Ape.”

“Just wait, champ. Someday they’ll catch one of those hairy monsters, and I can’t wait to see the look on your face.”

Trent is a true believer in Bigfoots, Sasquatches and Skunk Apes, which is what they’re called in Florida.

“The one I met had a glass eye,” I said matter-of-factly. “I dusted the sand off it for him.”

“That’s real hilarious, Richard.” He tipped the liter of Mountain Dew to his lips and chugged the backwash. “I heard they’re gonna start hunting ’em with drones, like they do with the Taliban. How cool is that?”

“Ultracool,” I said, and went back to bed.

I fell asleep listening to Willie Nelson, one of Dad’s favorites. When I woke up in the morning, there was a text from a girl named Beth, Malley’s best friend on the track team.

“She’s gone!” Beth said.

“Gone where?” I texted back.

“She won’t say! What do we do?”

TWO

My uncle looked surprised to see me. He had on his work clothes. His name’s Dan, and he runs a bucket truck for Florida Power & Light.

“Is Malley around?” I asked.

“No, Richard, she left yesterday.”

“For where?”

“School. She didn’t tell you?”

“I thought her classes didn’t start for a couple weeks.”

“Come on in,” Uncle Dan said. “I just got home from work.” Hurricane season he works a night shift because the pay is better, and he’s got seniority. “You want some breakfast? Sandy’s still asleep.”

He poured me a bowl of cornflakes and on top he sliced a banana that was so old and mushy that, honestly, a starving chimpanzee wouldn’t have touched it.

“Yeah, Malley flew up for early orientation,” he said.

I just nodded while I chewed my cereal, avoiding the funky brown slices.

“She forgot all about it,” Uncle Dan said, “until two days ago when her dorm adviser called. But that’s Malley.”

“Classic,” I said.

Uncle Dan and Aunt Sandy were sending Malley to an all-girls boarding school called the Twigg Academy. Basically, they didn’t want to deal with her on a daily basis anymore. She’s a handful, no question.

Malley had told me the tuition at Twigg is thirty-nine grand a year, not including the meal plan. Add the cost of winter clothes plus airplane tickets back and forth to New Hampshire, and who knows how her parents planned to pay for that kind of an education. Malley suspected they were taking a second mortgage on their house, meaning they must’ve been semi-desperate.

“It’s weird she didn’t tell you she was leaving,” Uncle Dan remarked, “so you guys could say goodbye.”

“No big deal,” I said, a total lie.

Malley and I were born only nine days apart. Except for vacations, both of us have spent our whole lives in Loggerhead. I couldn’t picture her at a boarding school in a place so cold that car engines froze. Truthfully, I couldn’t picture her at a boarding school, period. Malley wearing a uniform to class? No way.

“Did she talk much to you about this move to Twigg?” Uncle Dan asked. “Because we got the impression she was sort of looking forward to it. I think all of us need a break.”

“She seemed okay with it,” I told him, which was true.

Malley had been incredibly calm and low-key when she told me the news. Where, if it had been me who was
getting shipped to some snotty private academy, I would’ve been highly pissed off.

New Hampshire? Seriously?

Still, I wasn’t ready to swallow Malley’s “early orientation” story.

To Uncle Dan I said: “She borrowed a book from me. You mind if I go get it?”

“ ’Course not, Richard.” He was attempting to make waffles with a digital waffle-maker that my mother had bought him for his birthday. Programming the thing was complicated enough to keep him distracted while I snooped through Malley’s room.

Her One Direction poster was still on the wall. So were Bruno Mars and the Jimi Hendrix Experience—Malley was into all kinds of music. The closet wasn’t as empty as I thought it would be, and right away I noticed that she hadn’t taken her winter clothes to school. There was a heavy parka that had a hood lined with fake rabbit fur, and a red fleece with the L.L. Bean price tag still attached.

Okay, it was only August. Maybe she planned to come home for a visit and get her coat and fleece before the weather up north got cold, or maybe Sandy was going to pack everything and send it to her.

Or maybe Malley hadn’t really flown to New Hampshire.

Her laptop was gone and her desk was cleaned out, except for one drawer. Inside was a white envelope that
had the initials T.C. printed on the front, above an address in Orlando.

T.C. was a guy named Talbo Chock, who was older than Malley. He lived near Disney World and supposedly was some hot club DJ. Malley had never met him in person, but she’d made friends with him online, which was beyond stupid. I’d told her so more than once.

Even though the envelope wasn’t addressed to me, I opened it.

A note in Malley’s handwriting said: “Talbo, pleeze don’t forget about me when I’m away at Twitt’s ‘boring’ school. Try to land a gig in Manchester so we can finally get together!”

Included with the note was a wallet-sized photo. It was her class picture from last year, before she got her braces removed—a picture she didn’t like, and one she would never have given to a guy she was trying to impress.

Malley always kept some cute selfies on her iPhone. She could easily have texted one to Talbo Chock; she could have texted him the note, too.

But the envelope wasn’t really meant for T.C., and Malley hadn’t simply forgotten to mail it. She’d left it inside her desk on purpose, for her parents to find. I put it back in the drawer.

As soon as I got home, I Googled that street address in Orlando, which turned out to be a motel near Sea World. I called the place, and—big shock—nobody named Talbo Chock was registered there.

Next I looked up the Twigg Academy and dialed the academic office.

“When does early orientation start for new students?” I asked the lady who answered the phone.

“We don’t do early orientation,” she said.

I called Beth right away to tell her. She wasn’t surprised. Her conversation with Malley that morning had lasted barely two minutes.

“She swore me to secrecy,” Beth said, “but she didn’t tell me enough to even call it a secret.”

“What about Talbo Chock?”

“All she said was, ‘Don’t worry, girlfriend, he’s a man of the world.’ ”

“So was Jack the Ripper.”

“I’m scared, too,” Beth admitted.

“Let me see what I can find out.”

The stranger who’d buried himself on the beach wasn’t just a regular homeless person, if there is such a thing. A long, long time ago he’d been governor of Florida—as in
the
governor.

According to Wikipedia, Clinton Tyree was a college football star before going to Vietnam and winning a bunch of army combat medals. After the war, some friends talked him into running for governor, even though he didn’t like politics. He campaigned on a promise to clean up all the corruption in Tallahassee, our state capital, and apparently
he tried hard. Frustration set in, then sadness, depression—and even, some said, insanity.

Then, one day halfway through his term of office, Clint Tyree flat-out disappeared from the governor’s mansion. Nobody kidnapped the man; he just bolted. The politicians who’d been fighting against him said it proved he was crazy, but his supporters said that maybe it proved just the opposite.

All kinds of wild rumors got started, and some of them turned out to be true. According to one Wikipedia entry, the ex-governor became a wandering hermit of the wilderness, and over the years he’d been a prime suspect in several “acts of eco-terrorism.” Interestingly, he’d never been arrested or charged with any serious crimes, and it seemed to me that the targets of his anger were total scumbags anyway.

The Web article included interviews with a few witnesses who’d supposedly encountered Clinton Tyree by chance. They said he’d lost an eye, and was going by the name of “Skink.” They had differing opinions about whether or not he was nuts. The most recent entry quoted the governor’s closest friend, a retired highway patrol trooper named Jim Tile, who said:

“Clint passed away last year in the Big Cypress Swamp after a coral snake bit him on the nose. I dug the grave myself. Now, please let him rest in peace.”

Except the man was still alive.

I found him only a mile or so up the beach from where
he’d been the night before. He’d constructed another fake turtle nest, though he hadn’t yet concealed himself beneath the sand. He was kneeling outside the pink ribbons, calmly skinning a rabbit.

“Roadkill,” he explained, when he caught me staring.

“There’s a deli on the corner of Graham Street. I can get you a sub.”

“I’m good, Richard.” The shower cap was arranged on his head in the manner of a French beret. In the light of day I could see the color was baby blue.

“You didn’t walk very far today,” I said.

“Nope.”

“How come?”

“Maybe I’m feeling too old and broken down.”

He
was
old, but he looked solid and tough as nails, as Trent liked to say about the cage fighters on TV.

“They had your picture on the Internet,” I said, “from like forty years ago.”

“No doubt I’ve aged poorly.”

“Even without the beard I could totally tell it’s you.”

It was some beard, too. The night before, in the moonlight, it had looked distinguished, like Dumbledore’s. Now I could see how ungroomed and patchy it was. To the twisted tendrils Skink had attached what appeared to be broken seashells—until you got a closer look.

“Are those what I think they are?” I asked.

“Bird beaks.”

“Okay, that’s not funny.”

“From turkey vultures, Richard.”

“But … why?”

“Kindred spirits,” he said.

In the sunlight I saw that his good eye was a deep forest green, and that the artificial one—the one I’d cleaned for him—was brown and shaped differently than the other.

“What’s the latest on your cousin?” he asked.