Carl Hiaasen - Nature Girl

“Yeah. All night long,” he said.

Lily blew a kiss and vanished down the hallway.

Boyd Shreave tugged up his pants, sat down and, during detumescence, polished off the slushy dregs of his daiquiri. He was not one who appreciated irony, so at that moment all he experienced was a loutish sense of deprivation.

Because he had no intention of coming back from Florida. He would never again see his wife naked on the carpet.

Dismal Key is a crab-shaped island located on the Gulf side of Santina Bay, between Goodland and Everglades City. Local records list the first owner as a Key West barkeep named Stillman, who planted lime groves on Dismal and shipped the fruit to market on a schooner called the Oriental. Stillman died in either 1882 or 1883, and thereafter the mangrove island was purchased by a hardy South Carolinian named Newell, who took residence with his wife and their four children. They stayed until 1895, no small feat of endurance.

After the turn of the century, Dismal Key became a way station for itinerant fishermen and a home for a series of self-styled loners, the last of whom was a whimsical soul named Al Seely. A surveyor and machinist, Seely was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 1969 and informed that he’d be dead in six months. With a dog named Digger, he took a small boat to Dismal Key and occupied an abandoned two-room house with its own cistern. There he began writing an autobiography that would eventually fill 270 typed double-spaced pages. For a hermit, Seely was uncommonly gregarious, providing a guest book for visitors to sign. Still very much alive in 1980, he welcomed a group of local high schoolers who were working on a research project. To them he confessed that he’d moved to the Ten Thousand Islands with the notion of killing wild game for food but had found he didn’t have the heart for it. He lived off a small veteran’s pension and the occasional sale of one of his paintings.

“People often ask how Dismal Key got its lugubrious name. I wish I knew,” Seely wrote in his journal, discovered years after he vacated the island. “But since I haven’t as yet turned up even a clue, I suggest that they visit me during July or August when the heat, the mosquitoes, and the sand flies are at their rip-roaring best and they will at least discover why it’s not called Paradise Key.”

On the January morning when Sammy Tigertail beached his stolen canoe on Dismal Key, the temperature was sixty-nine degrees, the wind was northerly at thirteen knots and insects were not a factor. Gillian was, however.

“I’m starving,” she announced.

Sammy Tigertail tossed her a granola bar and hurriedly began unpacking.

“Is this supposed to be breakfast?” she asked.

“And lunch,” he said. “For dinner I’ll catch some fish.” He worked fast, expecting at any moment to hear the ranger helicopter that patrolled Everglades National Park. That he was two miles outside the park boundary would have been pleasing news to Sammy Tigertail, who knew neither the name of the island nor the route that had led him there.

Gillian gobbled down the granola bar and complained of a killer hangover. “You got any Tylenols?”

“Sleep it off,” the Seminole advised unsympathetically.

He hauled the canoe into the mangroves and carefully covered it with loose debris from what appeared to be a rotted dock. Using the paddle as a machete, he began hacking his way uphill through a thicket of formidable cactus plants. Gillian followed, toting the guitar case. Jagged shells crunched under their feet.

Beneath a vast and ancient royal poinciana was a half-sunken concrete structure that Sammy Tigertail recognized as a cistern. It had a blistered tin roof that seemed intact, promising not only shade but concealment. The Indian was relieved that he wouldn’t need to construct a lean-to, a wilderness task he had never before attempted.

Farther along they came to a rubble of sun-bleached boards, cinder block, trusses and window frames-the remains of Al Seely’s homestead. In a nearby ravine lay hundreds of empty Busch cans older than Gillian, who picked one up and studied it as if it were an archaeological treasure.

Sammy Tigertail walked back to the shoreline to retrieve the rest of the gear. He returned to see Gillian slashing at a cactus with the end of the paddle.

“I heard they use ’em for food in the desert. I heard they taste pretty good,” she said.

“This ain’t the Sahara, girl.”

“Fine. You’re the Indian,” she said. “Tell me what’s safe to eat around here.”

Sammy Tigertail didn’t have a clue. Since returning to the reservation from the white man’s world, he’d been unable to shake a fondness for cheeseburgers, rib eyes and pasta. Because of modern commerce coming to the Big Cypress, there had been no need to familiarize himself with the food-gathering skills of his ancestors, who’d farmed sweet potatoes and made bread flour from coontie. Sammy Tigertail wouldn’t have recognized a coontie root if he tripped over it.

“Later I’ll go catch some fish,” he said again.

“I hate fish,” Gillian stated. “One time when I was only four, my dad brought home a salmon he caught on Lake Erie and we all got really, really sick. Our cat, Mr. Tom-Tom, he took two bites and dropped dead on the kitchen floor. Me and my sister threw up for about five days straight, and swear to God the puke was, like, radioactive. I mean, it practically glowed.”

Sammy Tigertail said, “You’re so full of crap.”

“No way! It really happened,” Gillian said, “and ever since then I can’t eat fish.”

“You will now. You’re on the South Beach hostage diet.”

The cistern was littered with leaves and animal scat. It looked like a solid place to hide, because there was no sign that it had held water in many years. Sammy Tigertail squeezed through an opening under the roof, chased off a wood mouse and announced: “We picked the right island.”

Unfazed by the scrambling rodent, Gillian said, “Are we up on a hill? I didn’t think they had hills around here.”

“It’s made of oyster shells. The whole thing.” Sammy Tigertail stripped off his shirt.

“Made by who?” she asked.

“Native Americans-but not my people. Hand me the rifle, please.” He tied his shirt around the barrel and methodically went through the cistern taking down spiderwebs.

Long before the Seminoles arrived, southwest Florida had been dominated by the Calusa tribe, which fought off the Spaniards but not the sicknesses they brought. The most striking remnants of the sophisticated Calusa civilization were their monumental oyster middens, engineered to protect the settlements from flooding and also to trap fish on high tides. Sammy Tigertail felt proud, and inspired, to be camping on an authentic Calusa shell mound. He hoped to be visited in his sleep by the spirits of their long-dead warriors-perhaps even the one whose well-aimed arrow had been fatal to the invader Ponce de Leon.

“They must’ve been the horniest Indians anywhere,” Gillian mused, “if all they ate was oysters.”

Sammy Tigertail stared at her. “What kind of grades do you get in college?”

“I made the dean’s list twice.”

“God help us.”

“Screw you, Tonto.”

Once they finished cleaning the cistern, they loaded in the gear. Gillian lay down on top of her sandy sleeping bag and said she was going to crash.

“What’s that music?” Sammy Tigertail asked. “You got an iPod or something?”

It sounded like the opening bars of “Dixie.”

Gillian rolled over and said, “Shit. My cell.” She took it out of her fanny pack and checked the caller ID. “Oh great, it’s Ethan.”

The Indian snatched the phone. “What’re you going to tell him?”