Carl Hiaasen - Nature Girl

Honey Santana got up and started banging dishes around the sink. Fry wondered when she was going to wind down-sometimes it took hours.

“What is it with men?” she said. “First Mr. Piejack wants to jump my bones and now this person I don’t even know tells me to go screw myself. My day starts with dumb animal lust and ends with rabid hostility-and you wonder why I don’t date.”

Fry said, “Hey, did Aunt Rachel ever get another dog?”

“Don’t you dare change the subject.” Again, Honey snatched up the phone and started punching the buttons.

“Mom, you’re wasting your time. You’ll never get through to that creep.”

She winked at him. “I’m not calling the 800 number. I’m calling my brother to have him trace the 800 number.”

“Oh wonderful,” said Fry.

“And don’t roll your eyes at me, young man, because-oh, hello. Could you ring Richard Santana please?” Honey covered the mouthpiece. “I will most definitely find this person,” she whispered emphatically to her son, “one way or another.”

Fry asked, “And then what, Mom?”

She smiled. “And then I’ll sell him something he can’t afford. That’s what.”

After nightfall Sammy Tigertail ditched the rented Chrysler in a canal along the Tamiami Trail. Then he hitchhiked to Naples and met his half brother Lee in the parking lot of an outlet mall.

“Come home. You’ll be safer on the reservation,” Lee said.

“No, this way is better for everyone. You bring the gear and the rifle?”

“Yep.”

“What about the guitar?”

Sammy Tigertail had only once set foot inside the tribe’s Hard Rock operation. The whole scene was gruesome, except for the rock-and-roll artifacts on display. Sammy Tigertail had zeroed in on a blond Gibson Super 400 that had once belonged to Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, his late father’s favorite band.

“It’s in the truck,” Lee said, “and you owe me big-time, brother. They didn’t want to give it up.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“But I got the big boss to make a call.”

“No shit?” Sammy Tigertail hadn’t known that Lee held any sway with the tribal chairman. “Let’s go,” he said.

His brother drove him to the Turner River, where together they dragged a small canoe from the bed of the pickup; not a native cypress dugout but a shiny blue aluminum model, manufactured at some factory in northern Michigan.

After they loaded in the gear, Lee said, “You see the Man coming, first thing to go overboard is the gun.”

“All depends,” said Sammy Tigertail.

They stood in a thickening darkness, silent but for the oscillating hum of insects.

Lee asked, “You didn’t kill that white man on purpose, did you?”

Sammy Tigertail took a heavy breath. “No, it wasn’t me.”

He told the story of the banded water snake, and Lee agreed that it was clearly a spirit at work. “What do you want me to do with your checks?” he asked.

Every month the tribe sent three thousand dollars to each Seminole, remittance from the gambling profits.

“Give it to Cindy.”

“Sammy, don’t be a fool-”

“Hey, it’s my goddamn money.”

“Okay,” Lee said. Cindy was Sammy Tigertail’s ex-girlfriend, and she had issues.

Lee put a hand on his brother’s shoulder and said good-bye. Sammy Tigertail got into the canoe and pushed it away from the bank.

“Hey, boy, since when do you play guitar?” Lee called out.

“I don’t.” Sammy Tigertail dipped the paddle and turned the bow downriver. “But I got all the time in the world to learn.”

“Sammy, wait. What do I tell Ma?”

“Tell her I’ll be back someday to play her a song.”

Eugenie Fonda had been briefly famous as a mistress in another relationship. In the summer of 1999 she had dallied with a man named Van Bonneville, a self-employed tree trimmer in Fernandina Beach. Soon after the affair had begun, a hurricane pushing thirteen feet of tidal surge struck the coast and smashed Van Bonneville’s house into toothpicks. He survived, but his wife was lost and presumed drowned.

Hurricanes being to tree cutters what Amway conventions are to hookers, Van Bonneville was an exceptionally busy fellow in the days following the tragedy. While neighbors were impressed by his stoicism, his in-laws were disturbed by what they considered an inadequate display of grief by the young widower.

Certain grisly suspicions were floated before the local police, but no one paid much attention until Mrs. Bonneville’s body was found in her Pontiac at the bottom of the St. Johns River. It was her husband’s contention that Mrs. Bonneville’s Bonneville had been swept away by the onrushing flood as she wheeled out of the driveway in a frantic quest for Marlboros. Doubt fell upon this story as soon as police divers revealed that Mrs. Bonneville had been snugly strapped into the driver’s seat. Well known among her friends was the fact that on principle Mrs. Bonneville never buckled her seat belt, even though it was required by state law; an ardent libertarian, she opposed government meddling in all matters of personal choice.

Another clue was her knockoff Seiko titanium, which, unlike the genuine item, was not even slightly water-resistant. The face of the wristwatch was frozen on a time and date that preceded by a full nine hours the hurricane’s landfall, suggesting that the Pontiac had gone into the river well in advance of the fierce weather, and that Mrs. Bonneville’s corpse had been strapped inside to keep her from surfacing prematurely.

In the end, her husband’s fate was sealed by the Duval County medical examiner, who retrieved from a blunt indentation on Mrs. Bonneville’s scalp several sticky ligneous flakes that were later identified as bark particles from a sawed-off mahogany branch. The branch segment measured three feet long and seven inches in circumference on the day it was confiscated from the bed of Van Bonneville’s obsidian-flecked Ford F-150 pickup.

The “Hurricane Homicide” trial was broadcast live on Court TV and later featured during prime time on Dateline. Prosecutors depicted Van Bonneville as a philandering shitweasel who had conspired to do away with his loving wife and blame it on the storm. The motives were laid out as greed (a $75,000 life-insurance policy) and lust, Van Bonneville having acquired a new girlfriend who then went by the name of Jean Leigh Hill. Tall and smoky-eyed, her long languorous walk to the witness stand was the undisputed highlight of the trial.

Eugenie testified that she’d taken up with Van Bonneville believing he was a widower, having fallen for his claim that his wife had perished in a freak tanning booth mishap. It wasn’t until three days after the hurricane that Eugenie had spotted a newspaper story about the missing Mrs. Bonneville. The enlightening article included several quotes from her “tearful and apprehensive husband.” Immediately Eugenie located the one and only love letter that Van Bonneville had scrawled to her, and marched to the police station.

Scandalous headlines were followed by the obligatory book deal. Soon a ghostwriter arrived from New York to help Ms. Hill organize her recollections of the romance, although there wasn’t much to recollect. Eugenie had known Van Bonneville all of eleven days before the crime. They’d gone on one lousy date, to play putt-putt golf, and afterward they’d had putt-putt sex in the cab of his pickup. That it was enough to leave Van Bonneville smitten and dreamy-eyed had been mildly depressing to Eugenie.

Initially she’d been drawn to his rugged looks, particularly his knuckles, which were intriguingly striped with scars. Eugenie had occasionally been a sucker for marred, rough men, but on that first and only night with Van Bonneville she would discover that his wounds were the results of frequent tree-trimming miscues, and that he was as clumsy at foreplay as he was with a pruning saw.