Carl Hiaasen - Nature Girl

“I should’ve never let go of you,” his mom said when he arrived with his suitcase and fishing rod. “This is where you ought to be.”

“I believe so,” the boy said.

“Remember the time you caught that cottonmouth with your bare hands? You were only seven.”

“I didn’t know it was poisonous,” the boy reminded her. It had been an embarrassing episode. “I thought it was a water snake,” he added.

“But you weren’t afraid!” his mother said supportively. “That’s when I knew you belonged here, and not in that other world. First thing we do now is fix your name-starting today you’re a Tigertail, same as me.”

“Chad Tigertail,” the boy said proudly.

His mother winced and shook her head. The boy agreed: Chad was definitely too white for the reservation.

“What about Sammy?” he suggested.

“Perfect. That was your great-grandfather’s name.”

“Was he a fighter?”

“No, a trapper. But your great-great-great-grandfather was a chief.”

“Tiger Tail?” the boy cried excitedly. “The Tiger Tail?”

It was true. Sammy was descended from one of the last great Seminole warriors, Thlocklo Tustenuggee, a cunning leader whose fate Sammy chose to regard as a mystery. Most accounts said the U.S. Army had shipped the chief off to New Orleans, where he’d died of tuberculosis in a stinking military dungeon. But at least one teller of the Tiger Tail legend claimed he’d committed suicide by swallowing ground glass on the ship to Louisiana. Another said he’d escaped to Mexico and ultimately made his way back to Florida, where he’d lived to be a very old man.

Sammy felt honored to be half of a true Tigertail and, except for his Irish blue eyes, he looked full-blooded. To make up for the time lost during his white childhood, he spent hours listening to the stories of the elders. He envied them for having grown up in a time when the tribe lived in relative isolation, buffered by swamp from the other world.

Now things were different. Now there were casinos and hotels and truck stops, and the stampede of outsiders meant big money for the Seminole corporations. A few of the tribal bosses even flew around Florida in private jets and helicopters, which impressed some people but not Sammy Tigertail. He remained on the reservation and worked hard, although his frequent bad luck caused others to whisper that he was cursed by the paleness in his past. It was a thought that also had occurred to Sammy Tigertail, and shadowed him now like a buzzard as he paddled alone across Chokoloskee Bay.

He wondered about the man named Wilson, held fast with trap ropes and anchors on the bottom of Lostmans River. The sun was high and the water was warming, so it was possible that bull sharks would cruise in from the Gulf. Wilson wouldn’t feel a thing.

A half dozen fishing boats flew past the young Seminole as he made his way through Rabbit Key Pass. Some of the anglers waved but Sammy Tigertail looked away. It had been nearly two days since he’d slept, and his senses were dull. Shortly after noon he beached the canoe on a small boot-shaped island. He unloaded his gear, taking special care with the guitar and the rifle, which was wrapped in a towel. He found a crown of dry land and made camp. It occurred to him that he hadn’t brought much food, but he wasn’t worried-his brother had sent along two spinning rods and a useful assortment of hooks and lures. Sammy Tigertail was not as resourceful in the wild as some of his full-blooded kin, but he did know how to catch fish.

With noisy seabirds wheeling overhead, he lay down beneath a tree and fell into a hard sleep. The spirit of Wilson arrived, strung with slimy ropes and dragging all four anchors. The sharks hadn’t yet found him, although the blue crabs and snappers had picked clean his eye sockets. He was still half-drunk.

“I was expecting you sooner,” said the Indian.

“How come you didn’t take my money before you dumped me in the river?”

“Because I am no thief.”

“Or at least the doobs. That was a waste, my friend,” Wilson said.

Sammy Tigertail allowed that he was sorry Wilson had died on the airboat excursion.

“It was that fuckin’ snake, wasn’t it?” Wilson asked.

“Naw, it was your heart.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“What do you want from me?”

The dead tourist held up the disposable camera. The cardboard was sodden and peeling apart.

“How about another picture?” said Wilson. “For my guys back at the bar on Kinnickinnic Avenue-something they could frame and hang in the pool room.”

Kinnickinnic sounded like an Indian word, though Sammy Tigertail didn’t know which tribe had been run out of Milwaukee.

“Aw, come on,” Wilson said. “They got an autographed photo of Vince Lombardi and a game jersey signed by Brett Favre. But a picture of me, dead and with my eyeballs chewed out-that’d be tits!”

Sammy Tigertail said, “Sorry. No more photos.” He was extremely tired, and he wanted the dream to be over. He hoped that a shark would devour the disposable camera while chewing on Wilson. Sammy Tigertail wanted no one to see the humiliating, though undeveloped, images of him posing with the obnoxious white tourist.

“It’s freezing in that damn river,” Wilson complained.

“I had to move your body off the reservation. There weren’t many options.”

“I didn’t know the water got so cold in Florida.”

“Just wait till summer. It’s like soup,” Sammy Tigertail said.

Wilson scowled and spit out a clot of brown muck. “You sayin’ this is it for me? I gotta spend the rest of eternity out in this goddamned swamp? Dripping wet and smellin’ like fish shit? Not to mention these fuckin’ anchors.”

Sammy Tigertail said, “I can’t blame you for being angry.”

“I shoulda croaked in the casino. I shoulda had my heart attack in the bar when that hooker was bouncin’ on my lap. That’s how I should be spendin’ the hereafter,” the spirit of Wilson fumed, “not out here all alone in the middle of nowheres.”

“Deal with it,” the Indian said.

“Fuck you. This was the worst vacation I ever had.”

The dead tourist stomped the camera to pieces and shambled away, the anchors screaking across the floor.

Sammy Tigertail awoke in a state of prickly agitation. It was dusk, with a chilly northwest wind blowing in off the Gulf. He put together one of the spinning rods, tied on a plastic minnow plug and hurried to the beach in hopes of fooling a redfish or a snook.

But while the young Indian had been arguing with the white man’s spirit, a big tide had rolled in. It was not good for beach fishing, and even worse for an untethered canoe.

In the fading light, Sammy Tigertail paced the shore, scanning anxiously in all directions. There was no sign of the bright blue craft. The wind and the fast-rising water had carried it away and possibly overturned it.

Again he felt cursed. He trudged back to camp and built a fire. Then he took out the Gibson guitar and placed it across his lap. Running his hands along the instrument’s magnificent curves, he found himself soothed by the dancing flames reflected in the cool polished wood.

Since he didn’t know any chords, Sammy Tigertail began strumming with a wild and random vigor. He had no amplifier, yet he imagined that he was filling the night universe with music. It was good therapy for a stranded man.

The crab boat that Sammy Tigertail had borrowed to transport Wilson’s body belonged to a man named Perry Skinner, Honey Santana’s ex-husband and the father of her only son. Skinner hadn’t asked Sammy Tigertail why he needed the boat, because Skinner didn’t care to know. He was vice mayor of Everglades City and therefore inoculated from official scrutiny in most matters criminal and otherwise.