Carl Hiassen - NativeTongue

Joe Winder's trousers were soaked from the thighs down. Nina took a long look and said: "You've been fishing."

"Yes."

"In the middle of the day."

"The fish are all gone," Winder said dismally. "Ever since they bulldozed the place."

Nina sat cross-legged on the floor. She wore blue-jean shorts and a pink cotton halter; the same outfit she'd been wearing the day he'd met her, calling out numbers at the Seminole bingo hall. Joe Winder had gone there to meet an Indian named Sammy Deer, who purportedly was selling an airboat, but Sammy Deer had hopped over to Freeport for the weekend, leaving Joe Winder stuck with three hundred chain-smoking white women in the bingo hall. Halfway out the door, he'd heard Nina's voice ("Q 34; Q, as in "quicksilver," 34!"), spun around and went back to see if she looked as lovely as she sounded, and she had. Nina informed him that she was part-timing as a bingo caller until the telephone gig came through, and he confided to her that he was buying an airboat so he could disappear into the Everglades at will. He changed his plans after their first date.

Now, analyzing her body language, Joe Winder knew that he was in danger of losing Nina's affections. A yellow legal pad was propped on her lap. She tapped on a bare knee with her felt-tipped pen, which she held as a drummer would.

"What happened to your big meeting?" she said. "Why aren't you at the Kingdom?"

He pretended not to hear. He said, "They dumped a ton of fill in the cove. The bottom's mucky and full of cut trees." He removed his trousers and arranged them crookedly on a wire hanger. "All against the law, of course. Dumping in a marine sanctuary."

Nina said, "You got canned, is that it?"

"A mutual parting of the ways, and not a particularly amicable one." Joe Winder sat down beside her. He sensed a lecture coming on.

"Put on some pants," she said.

"What's the point?"

Nina asked why his tongue was blue, and he told her the story of the bogus mango voles. She said she didn't believe a word.

"Charlie practically admitted everything."

"I don't really care," Nina said. She stopped drumming on her kneecap and turned away.

"What is it?"

"Look, I can't afford to support you." When she looked back at him, her eyes were moist and angry. "Things were going so well," she said.

Winder was stunned. Was she seriously worried about the money? "Nina, there's a man dead. Don't you understand? I can't work for a murderer."

"Stop it!" She shook the legal pad in front of his nose. "You know what I've been working on? Extra scripts. The other girls like my stuff so much they offered to buy, like, two or three a week. Twenty-five bucks each, it could really add up."

"That's great." He was proud of her, that was the hell of it. She'd never believe that he could be proud of her.

Pen in mouth, Nina said: "I wrote about an out-of-body experience. Like when you're about to die and you can actually see yourself lying there – but then you get saved at the very last minute. Only my script was about making love, about floating out of yourself just as you're about to come. Suspended in air, I looked down at the bed and saw myself shudder violently, my fingernails raking across your broad tan shoulders. I gave it to the new girl, Addie, and she tried it Friday night. One guy, she said, he called back eleven times."

"Is that a new record?"

"It just so happens, yes. But the point is, I'm looking at a major opportunity. If I start selling enough scripts, maybe I can get off the phones. Just stay home and write – wouldn't that be better?"

"Sure would." Winder put his arm around her. "You can still do that, honey. It would be great."

"Not with you sitting here every day. Playing your damn Warren Zevon."

"I'll get another job."

"No, Joe, it'll be the same old shit." She pulled away and got up from the floor. "I can't write when my life is in turmoil. I need a stabilizer. Peacefulness. Quiet."

Winder felt wounded. "For God's sake, Nina, I know a little something about writing. This place is plenty quiet."

"There is tension," she said grimly, "and don't deny it."

"Writers thrive on domestic tension. Look at Poe, Hemingway – and Mailer in his younger days, you talk about tense." He hoped Nina would appreciate being included on such an eminent roster, but she didn't. Impatiently he said, "It isn't exactly epic literature, anyway. It's phone porn."

Her expression clouded. "Phone porn? Thanks, Joe."

"Well, Christ, that's what it is."

Coldly she folded her arms and leaned against one of the tall speakers. "It's still writing, and writing is hard work. If I'm going to make a go of it, I need some space. And some security."

"If you're talking about groceries, don't worry. I intend to pull my own weight."

Nina raised her hands in exasperation. "Where can you find another job that pays so much?"

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.