Carl Hiaasen - Nature Girl

“You okay?” Skinner got up and guided her into the rocker.

She waited until the boom box in her brainpan went quiet. Then she said, “You heard what happened to Louis Piejack.”

“Sure did.”

“You hire those thugs to maul him?”

Skinner smiled. “And why would I do that, Honey? To avenge your honor?”

“Did you or didn’t you?”

“Go get your purse. I want to check your prescription bottles.”

“That’s real funny.”

Skinner took a heavy drag off the joint. “Louis owed money to lots of people, including one old dude in Hialeah who I know for a fact has a wicked sense of humor and no appetite for excuses.”

“So you’re saying it wasn’t you? You didn’t pay those guys to feed Louis’s fingers to the crabs?” Honey said.

Skinner blew smoke up at the cedar beams. “You act disappointed.” He pinched the joint and dropped it into a breast pocket. “Makes you feel better, I probably would’ve done something worse if I’d been there when he touched you.”

“Yeah, such as?”

“Gutting him from his asshole to his nose with the dirtiest blade I could find.”

Honey heard herself gulp. “You’re just saying that ’cause that’s what you think I want to hear. Don’t patronize me, Perry.”

“Unbelievable,” he said quietly.

She studied his expression for a trace of something more than the usual exasperation. He walked to the door of the porch and held it open.

Honey rose from the rocker. “Promise me one thing,” she said. “Promise you won’t have anyone over while Fry’s here-that girl who sells propane to the RV parks, and whoever else you’re sleeping with these days. Not with Fry in the house, okay?”

“I’ll try to restrain myself.”

“Oh, and the dentist wants him to floss twice a day.”

“For God’s sake, Honey.”

“He’s a teenager. Somebody’s got to be the drill sergeant.”

“Is he allowed to whack off once in a while?” Skinner asked.

Honey jabbed him in the ribs on her way out. “Only after he’s done his algebra,” she said.

Packing for Florida, Eugenie Fonda endeavored to convince herself that she truly wasn’t a desperate woman. Chronically restless maybe, but not hard up.

She expected that the trip would cause Boyd Shreave to get so carried away that he would stamp a romantic interpretation upon every casual sigh and gesture. This was common with inexperienced philanderers. Eugenie was determined not to repeat the big mistake she’d made with Van Bonneville, which was to underestimate the besotting power of routine sex. Certain men could misread the most perfunctory hand job as a pledge of lifetime devotion. Although Boyd Shreave wasn’t the type to rush out and murder his wife, he was probably capable of other lust-crazed misbehavior.

Eugenie was certain that she could control him. To that end, she packed four bikinis, in escalating degrees of skimpiness. She applied the same unsubtle strategy to her selection of travel panties and bras. Boyd was not a complex machine.

While struggling to shut her suitcase, Eugenie Fonda caught a sideways glimpse of herself in the bedroom mirror. She shook off her robe and stood there for a minute of blunt self-appraisal. At the end she concluded that she looked pretty darn good-nice legs, premium tits and not a crease on her face; nothing that a light foundation couldn’t hide anyway.

Undoubtedly she was the best thing that had ever happened to Boyd. He, unfortunately, was destined to be at most a very short paragraph in her future autobiography.

Eugenie slumped on the edge of the bed. What am I doing? she wondered. Why am I hopping on a plane with this slacker?

Of course he’d promised he would change. They all said that, and they never changed one little bit. Yet Eugenie always tried to persuade herself that the men she dated weren’t really dim, just deceptively shy; that deep in their souls glowed something precious and rare, which they were waiting for just the perfect moment to share.

She straightened up and told herself to get a grip. It wasn’t like she was whoring on the streets; she was vacationing with a guy who wasn’t physically repulsive and whose companionship was not entirely unbearable. Life is a ride, so what the hell.

From a hand-carved jewelry box she took the pearl stud that had been given to her by a man she’d met on a Denver talk show during her book tour. He was a famous self-help guru-blissfully married, of course-who by coincidence was also staying at the Brown Palace. At half past midnight he’d shown up at her suite toting a two-hundred-dollar bottle of cabernet, a girl-on-girl porn tape and an elephant’s dosage of Levitra, every last milligram of which he would ultimately require for a six-minute erection.

Eugenie stuck out her tongue at the mirror and deftly inserted the glossy pearl.

She understood that she must be heedful, and she must be firm. The trip to the Ten Thousand Islands meant something very different to her than it did to Boyd Shreave.

He wanted to make a whole new man of himself.

She just wanted to get out of Texas for a spell.

Fry was fast enough to run relays but he preferred the mile because it gave him time to think. When things were all right at home, Fry typically won by ten or eleven seconds. When he was worrying about his mother, he usually came in dead last.

One time he didn’t even finish the race. He was in second place with a quarter mile remaining when he heard sirens, at which point he veered off the track and sprinted nine blocks home to see if his mom was being arrested. That morning she had threatened to hunt down and emasculate the plumber who’d sold her a defective toilet fixture that had flooded the trailer. Knowing she didn’t believe in idle threats, Fry assumed from the sound of the police cars that she had carried out the revenge mutilation. Fortunately, it turned out to be a routine fender bender in the traffic circle. The errant plumber was alive and unlacerated, mopping the double-wide under Honey Santana’s glowering supervision.

The day before the mystery couple was due to arrive, Fry returned from track practice and found his mother painting extravagantly on the outside wall panels of the trailer.

“What’s with the parrot?” he asked.

Honey said, “It’s a scarlet macaw, and don’t tell me there’s no macaws in the Everglades because I know that, okay? The store didn’t have any pink paint so I couldn’t do a flamingo.”

Fry said, “Why not a spoonbill?”

“Same difference.”

“No, they’ve got more red in the feathers.”

“Thank you, Mr. Audubon,” Honey said, “but I wanted something more-what’s the word?-iconic. Spoonbills are okay, but let’s face it, they look like ducks on stilts. Now, when you see a big regal macaw”-Honey was beaming at her florid masterpiece-“you think of a tropical rain forest.”

She dunked her brush in the paint can and went back to work. Fry failed to curb himself from saying, “Mom, we don’t have rain forests here, either.”

“Get busy on your homework, wiseass.”

“Can I ask why you’re painting the place?”

“So it won’t look like a mobile home,” Honey said. “Nothing fancy, a basic jungle motif-palms, vines, banana plants. I bought, like, four different shades of green.”

Fry sat down on his backpack and contemplated the obvious futility of opening an eco-lodge in a trailer park. Based on what he saw, he didn’t have high hopes for his mother’s nature mural. She had bestowed upon her psychedelic macaw the lush eyelashes of a dairy cow and the dainty tongue of a fruit bat.

He said, “Next you’ll be doing monkeys.”

“Matter of fact, I am.” She spun around to face him. “Look, kiddo, this ain’t the frigging Smithsonian. This is a sales job, okay? Once we get the tourists into the kayaks and out in those islands”-she was pointing fervently with the paintbrush-“they’ll be so blown away by how gorgeous it is, the mural won’t matter. Instead of macaws and gibbons they get bald eagles and raccoons. Instead of a rain forest they get mangroves. So what.”