Carl Hiassen - Lucky You

"What's that?" Chub, fumbling to open his ragged eyelid, so he might see the birds better. Every part of him burned with fever; he felt infected from head to toe.

"Carrion," the woman had replied, "is another word for dead meat."

"Jesus Willy."

"The trick is to keep moving, OK? Whatever you do, don't lie down and doze off," she'd said, "because they might think you're dead. That's when they'll come for you. And once they get started, Lord ... Just remember to do like I said. Don't stop moving. Arms, legs, whatever. As long as they see movement, buzzards'll usually keep away."

"But I gotta sleep."

"Only when it's dark. They feed mainly in the daytime. At night you should be safe."

That's when she'd pressed the can of pepper spray into his crab-swollen fist and said, "Just in case."

"Will it stop 'em?" Chub peered dubiously at the container. Bode Gazzer had purchased it at the Lauderdale gun show.

"It's made to knock grizzly bears on their asses," the woman had told him. "Ten percent concentration of oleoresin capsicum. That's two million Scoville Heat Units."

"What the fuck's that mean?"

"It means big medicine, Gomer. Good luck."

Moments later: the sound of an outboard engine revving. Sure as shit, they'd left him out here. She and the white guy – deserted him on this goddamn island with his dead friend, and the sky darkening with vultures.

They'd come down for Bode in the midafternoon, just as the woman predicted. At the time, Chub was squatting in the mangroves, huffing the last of the WD-4O. It didn't give a fraction of the jolt that boat glue did, but it was better than nothing.

Teetering from the woods, he'd spotted the buzzards picking eagerly at his partner's corpse – six, seven, maybe more. Some had held strings of flesh in their beaks, others nibbled shreds of camouflage fabric. On the ground the birds had seemed so large, especially with their bare, scalded-looking heads and vast white-tipped wings – Chub had been surprised. When he ran at them they'd hissed and spooked, although not far; into the treetops.

On the bright sand around him he'd noticed the ominous shrinking shadows of others dropping closer, flying tighter circles. That's when Chub decided to run far away from Bode's dead body, to a safer part of the island. He grabbed the pepper spray and half lurched, half galloped through the mangroves. Finally he came to a secluded clearing and keeled in exhaustion, landing on his wounded shoulder.

Almost immediately the first nightmare began: invisible beaks, pecking and gouging at his face. He bolted upright, sopped in sweat. In his next dream, which followed quickly, the rancid scavengers encircled him and, by aligning wing to wing, formed a picket from which he couldn't escape. Again he awakened with a shiver.

It was all her fault, the nigger girl from the Black Tide – she'd put the crazy buzzard talk in his head. They were only birds, for chrissake. Stupid, smelly birds.

Still, Chub kept his good eye trained on their glide pattern, the high thermals.

At dusk he made his way back to the abandoned campsite, in hopes of finding a dry tarp and some beer. When he spotted the paper grocery bag in the bushes, he got an idea about how to pass the long nerve-racking night. He dumped out the crinkled tube of marine adhesive and gave one last squeeze, to make sure he hadn't missed any. Then he shook the can of pepper spray and shot a stream inside the empty bag.

Thinking: Stuffs gotta be heavy-duty to take out a fuckin' grizzly.

Chub had never heard of "Scoville heat" but he assumed from its potent-sounding name that a whiff of two million units would produce a deliriously illicit high – exactly what he needed to take his mind off the buzzards and Bodean Gazzer. Chub further assumed (also mistakenly) that the pepper spray was designed to impair only an attacker's vision and that the fumes could be ingested as easily as those of common spray paint, and that he'd be safe from the caustic effects if he merely covered his eyes while inhaling.

Which is what he did, sucking the bag to his face.

The screams lasted twenty-five minutes; the vomiting, twice as long.

Chub had never known such volcanic misery – skin, throat, eyes, lungs, scalp, lips; all aflame. He slapped himself senseless trying to wipe off the poison, but it seemed to have entered chemically through his pores. Daft from pain, he clawed at himself until his fingertips bled.

When his strength was gone, Chub lay motionless, mulling options. An obvious one was suicide, a sure release from agony, but he wasn't ready to go that far. Possibly, if he'd had his .357 ... but he surely couldn't work up the nerve to hang himself from a tree or slice his own wrists.

A sounder choice, Chub felt, was to club himself unconscious and remin that way until the acid symptoms wore off. But he couldn't stop thinking about the vultures and what the nigger woman had told him: Keep moving! Once the sun came up, blacking out would be dangerous. The deader you looked, the faster the hungry bastards would come for you.

So Chub made himself stay awake. In the end, what he most wanted was to be saved, plucked off the island. And he wasn't picky about whether the rescue helicopter was black or red or canary yellow; or whether it was being flown by niggers or Jews or even card-carrying communist infiltrators. Nor did he give two shits whether they carried him back to Miami or straight to Raiford prison, or even to a secret NATO fortress in the Bahamas.

The main thing was to get away from this horrible place, as soon as possible. Away.

And if, at dawn the next morning, there actually had been a rescue chopper searching Florida Bay, and if it had flown low over Pearl Key, the crew would have noticed something that would have brought them banking around sharply for a second pass: A lone naked man waving for help.

The spotter in the helicopter would've seen through his high-powered binoculars that the stranded man had a lank gray ponytail; that his body was dappled with dried blood; that one shoulder was heavily bandaged and one hand was swollen to the size of a catcher's mitt; that his sunburned face was raw and striated, and that one eye appeared scabbed and black.

And the crew would have been impressed that, despite the stranded man's severe injuries and evident pain, he'd managed to construct a device for signaling aircraft. The crew would've admired how he had lashed together mangrove branches to make a long pole, and on the end of it he had fastened a swatch of shiny fabric.

But in the end, there was nobody to see the stranded man. No helicopters were in the sky over Pearl Key at dawn the next day, or the day after, or for many days that followed.

No one was searching for Onus Gillespie, the person known as Chub, Because no one knew he was missing.

Every morning he stood in the sunniest spot on the island and feverishly waved his makeshift flag at glistening specks in the blue – 7275 from Miami International, F-16s from Boca Chica, Lears from North Palm Beach, all of which were flying far too high over Florida Bay to see him.

Finally the beer was gone, then the beef jerky, then the last of the fresh water. Not long afterwards, Chub lay down in the coarse bleached sand and did not move. Then the vultures came, just like the bitch had said they would.

Nine months later a poacher would find a skull, two femurs, a rusty can of pepper spray and an oilskin tarpaulin. He would be appropriately intrigued by the doomed man's handmade pole and the unusual streamer tied to it:

A pair of skimpy orange shorts, just like babes at Hooters wore.

On the drive to Simmons Wood, they went back and forth with the radio. Tom got a Clapton, while JoLayne took a Bonnie Raitt and a Natalie Cole (on the argument that "Layla" was long enough to count as two songs). They wound up in a discussion of guitarists, a topic as yet unexplored in the relationship. JoLayne was delighted to hear Tom include Robert Cray in his personal pantheon, and as a reward yielded the next two selections. "Fortunate Son" was playing, full blast, when they arrived.