Now she was offering a bone with some meat on it. Truffles was a dessert bar a few miles down the road, where a slice of cake cost eight bucks and usually fed four people. Mutt nodded. "Chocolate fudge cake with raspberry sauce."
Vicki smiled and said, "Okay, sweetie." She turned to leave. "See you in the activity room in an hour?" He nodded and let his eyes fall on the chessboard. Vicki was the only one who even came close to competing with him. Although, to be honest, that had little to do with her skill as a chess player. Mutt could usually get her to checkmate in six moves, but he often dragged it out to ten or twelve, sometimes even fifteen. With each impending move, she would tap her teeth with her fingernails, and her feet would become more nervous, unconsciously bouncing beneath the table, causing her knees, calves, and ankles to rub against each other. While his eyes focused on the board, his ears listened beneath the table.
Vicki left, and Mutt walked over to the tray where Vicki had placed the spoon. He picked it up, began scrubbing it with a bleach-soaked paper towel, and went through six more towels before it was clean. An hour later, the room sterile, he walked down the hall with his chess set. En route to the activity room, he placed a thirty-six-gallon trash bag in the big, gray community trash can. The can needed cleaning, but Vicki was waiting, so it could wait. He walked into the activity room, saw Vicki, and knew he'd have to clean the chess set after they played-every piece-but it was worth it just to hear her think.
At 5:00 p.m., Mutt finished cleaning his room, his bed, his chess set, his toothbrush, the buttons on his clock radio, and the snaps on his boxers. Out of the corner of his eye, he looked again at the chocolate-raspberry cake covered in deep red raspberry sauce, sitting surrounded by roast beef, green beans, and mashed potatoes. The voices were tuning up and the volume growing louder, so he knew the Thorazine hadn't been in his breakfast. In spite of Vicki's apparent denial, it had to be the applesauce. He knelt down, eyed the mashed potatoes, and wondered if they had been altered. Tampered with. After seven years of total compliance in taking his medication, his own secondguessing surprised him. It was a process and a power he had not known in quite some time. The fact that he was even considering not eating both the applesauce and the chocolate cake would have been mind-boggling except for the fact that he was already mind-boggled.
Finally, he looked out the window and let his gaze fall upon the back porch of Clark's. Due to a southwest wind, he could smell the grease, the fish, the fries; and he could almost taste the cheese grits and see the condensation dripping down a jumbo glass of iced tea. Mutt was hungry, and unlike his neighbor down the hall, his stomach was not in hell. He hadn't eaten in twenty-four hours, and due to the growl, he knew it was right where he left it. But hunger or no hunger, he picked up the tray and smelled each plate, making his taste buds excrete like a puppy with two peters. He held the tray at arm's length, walked to the toilet, methodically scraped the contents of each plate into the bowl, and assertively pushed down on the flush lever.
The voices screamed with approval as the water swirled and disappeared. In an hour Vicki would saunter in, collect the tray, and saunter out. But even in all that sauntering, she would know. Thanks to the cameras, Vicki knew most everything, but he couldn't stop now. This train had no brakes. Mutt again looked at Clark's. The back porch was full, brown tilting Budweiser bottles sparkled like Christmas lights, servers carrying enormous trays holding eight to ten plates wedged themselves between picnic tables, and mounds of food covered every tabletop. In the water next to the dock swam a few hot-rod teenagers who had parked their Jet Skis just close enough for the eating public to admire and yet not touch, and a collage of skiing, pleasure, and fishing boats waited their turn to go up or down the funnel-necked boat ramp. Mutt knew that even after the sirens sounded, after Gibby had grabbed his syringe and the search teams had been dispatched, no one would suspect this, at least not immediately. He might have enough time.
Quickly, he grabbed his fanny pack, walked down the hall to Gibby's office, and lifted the fly-tying vise off his desk. He also grabbed a small Ziplock bag full of hooks, spools of thread, and little pieces of hair and feathers. He quickly tied one red Clauser, laid it in the middle of Gibby's desk, and then stuffed both the vise and the bag in his fanny pack. He opened Gibby's top desk drawer, stole fifty dollars from the cash box, scribbled a note, pinned it to the lamp on his desktop, and walked back to his room. The note read, Gibby, I owe you fifty dollars, plus interest. M.
If he was going on a trip, he would need something to occupy the voices, and they loved two things: chess and tying flies. He stuffed his chess set into his fanny pack next to the vise, along with seven bars of Zest, each sealed in its own airtight Ziploc bag. He lifted his bedroom window, took a last look at his room, and swung one leg out. Contractors had originally constructed the windows to set off a silent alarm at the security guard's desk when opened more than four inches. But Mutt had fixed that too about six years ago. He liked to sleep with it open at night. The smells, the sounds, the breeze-it all reminded him of home. He swung his left leg out the window and took a deep breath of air. The September sun was falling, and in an hour, an October moon would rise straight over Clark's back door.
He put his foot down and cracked the base of an azalea bush, but he hadn't liked it since they planted it there last year. It made him itch just to look at it. And it attracted bees. So with a smile on his face, he stomped it a second time and hit the ground running. Halfway across the grassy back lawn, he stopped midstride as if stricken with rigor mortis and thrust his hand in his pocket. Had he forgotten it? He searched one pocket, digging his fingers into the fuzz packed into the bottom, and the worry grew. Both back pockets and the panic came knocking. He thrust his left hand into his left front pocket and broke out in a sweat.
But there in the bottom, surrounded by dryer lint, his fingers found it: warm, smooth, and right where it had been since Miss Ella gave it to him following the first day of second grade. In the dark confines and security of his pocket, he ran his fingers across the front and traced his fingernail through the letters. Then the backside. It was smooth and oily from the years in his pocket. That settled, the fear subsided, and he started running again.
Running was something he used to do a lot, but in the last few years he had had little practice. His first year at Spiraling Oaks, his walk had looked more like that of a soldier stomping the earth-a side effect of too much Thorazine. A few days on that stuff and his mind began to doubt where the earth was. Fortunately, Gibby decreased the dosage, and his steps became more certain.
He made it across the back lawn, through the cypress trees bathed in lush green fern, and onto the sun-faded and seagull-painted dock without hearing any commotion behind him. If no one saw him leap off the dock, he might have time for a second helping.
He dove off the end of the dock and into the warm, brackish, and sweet Julington Creek. The water, tinted brown with tannic acid, wrapped around him like a blanket, bringing with it an odd thing: a happy memory. He dove farther in, pulling twelve to fifteen times down, down into the water. When he heard a jet Ski roar above, he waited a few seconds and surfaced.
Chapter 2
THE LOW FUEL LIGHT CLICKED ON AT 1:58 A.M., LIGHTing up the inside of my Dodge pickup with an orange glow and breaking my hypnotic gaze on the broken yellow line. "I see you. I see you." I could have driven another fifty miles on what remained, but home was another two hours away. Coffee sounded pretty good.
I preferred driving at night, but for the last three days, I had been up early and awake late. My work had taken me to South Florida to photograph a wiry old South Florida alligator hunter on Kodachrome for an eightpage spread in a national travel magazine. For some reason, Travel America had yet to make the jump from slides to digital-something I had mostly done about four years ago. I can shoot either, but if you press me or pick up my camera when I'm shooting for myself, you'll find Kodachrome. They're hard to hit, but I'm a slide junkie.
The long
hours had caught up with me. I glanced in the rearview mirror and my eyes looked like a road map of long-forgotten, red county highways. Limp strands of shoulder-length hair that, except for the tips, had not been cut in about seven years fell below my collar. Evidence of my rebellion. One of the last times I had come home to see her, Miss Ella brushed my cheek and told me, "Child, there's too much light in that face to hide it behind all that hair. Don't go hiding your light under a bushel. You hear me?" Maybe the mirror showed that too. Maybe my light had grown dim.
A week ago, my agent, Doc Snake Oil, phoned me and said, "Tuck, it's an easy three days. You drive down, hop in this guy's airboat, watch him wrestle a couple of big lizards, down a few cold beers and a couple pounds of gator tail, and drop five grand in your bank account." Doc paused and drew on the unfiltered cigarette that never left his mouth during waking hours. The inhalation was purposeful, and he let the words "five grand" resonate through the phone.
I loved his voice but had never told him. It had that beautiful tonal resonation of a forty-year smoker. Which he was. He exhaled and said, "This is a vacation compared to where you were last month. Warmer too. And chances are good we can sell secondary rights of any unused pics and get you a second cover from this spread alone. Besides, people in Florida love it when a native cracker sticks his head in a gator's mouth."
It sounded reasonable, so I left home in Clopton, Alabama, and drove my three-quarter-ton truck to the Florida Everglades where the boisterous sixty-two-year-old Whitey Stoker shook my hand. Whitey had the biceps of a brick mason, the chin of a prizefighter, and no fear when it came to alligators-or bootleg moonshine that he sold in cases out the sides of his boat. Late into the first night, he looked at me with his spotlight bobbing atop his head, like a coal miner who'd found a vein of gold, and said, "You mind?"
"Suit yourself." And he did.
In three days, we-or more truthfully, Whitey-caught seven alligators, the biggest of which was twelve feet, eight inches. But that's not all. We also sold twelve cases of unlabeled Mason jars to everybody from little guys with fourday beards and nervous eyes, who were poling twelve-foot canoes, to potbellied wannabes wearing captain's hats and gold watches and driving two-hundred-thousand-dollar cigarette boats. Whitey played the role of the ignorant Florida cracker pretty well. No, he played it to perfection. In truth, he had tapped into a thriving market, and as its sole distiller and distributor, he had the market monopolized and cornered. Whitey may have made a living removing nuisance alligators from golf-front retirement villas before they ate the owner's little lapdog that liked to squat down by the lagoon, but he was supporting his retirement with white lightning. Once he got a few drinks in him, I discovered that he was all too happy to talk about it. "Yeah, I can clear a thousand a week. Been that way since the late '80s."
Whitey was something of a health nut. In a twisted sort of way. Breakfast was a thick cup of black coffee sifted through a pantyhose filter that had been squeezed across a coat hanger, topped with two tablespoons of Coffeemate. He used the hose to clean out the weebles. Lunch consisted of a piece of bologna slapped between two slices of Wonder Bread smothered in mustard, chased with an RC Cola and a Moonpie. Dinner was a production, and in true form, he saved the best for last. For five nights, Whitey, who wore neither a shirt nor bug repellant, fired up a well-used and seldom-cleaned grease cooker that stood center-stage atop his back porch. After years of unrestricted use, the porch was more slippery than, to quote Whitey, "snot on snot."
Whitey had taken a blowtorch to a beer keg, cut the top off, and wedged it into a rod-iron frame that housed a burner fed by a two-hundred-gallon propane tank that leaned against the house. Whitey pointed to his cooker and said, "It used to rattle and slide about, so I bolted it to the deck." The setup was more akin to a jet engine than a backyard cooking device. The first time he fired it up, it sounded like a low-flying jet. Each night, Whitey sparked the burner, heated the keg half-filled with reused grease, and then threw in several pounds of gator tail that had spent all day soaking in buttermilk, beer, Louisiana hot sauce, and four handfuls of pepper. In spite of Whitey's affection for his own conversation, the old guy was really rolling out the red carpet-albeit a greasy one. The mixture of cold beer, mosquitoes, fried gator tail, hot sauce, and the sound of croaking bullfrogs and mating alligators, topped off with a sixty-mile-an-hour moonlit airboat ride across the Everglades, was a welcome release.
I veered off 1-10 West at the first exit, touched the brake, and started paying attention. On the seat next to me sat a brown paper sack stained with dark brown grease spots and filled with three more pounds of fried gator. Stashed behind the seat were two milk jugs of Whitey's best recipe. "Here," he said like a German waitress at Oktoberfest, dishing out beer steins. "It'll cure what ails you." The jugs should have come with a label that read, WARNING: EXTREMELY FLAMMABLE. I'm not much of a drinker, but I just didn't have the heart to tell him. So I drove north and transported illegal liquor across state lines.
I was never much of a health nut either. Three of my favorite foods are ranch-style beans, cornbread, and sardines. Most guys, when they travel, will stop at a nice restaurant and order a steak, or they'll drive through fast food and order a Whopper. Don't get me wrong, I love both, but few things are better than ranch-style beans sopped up with some cornbread, or a can of sardines covered in Louisiana hot sauce and scooped up with a pack of saltine crackers. I'll even eat them cold if I can't find a microwave or a stove. I know it sounds gross, but it's a simple pleasure, and other than the sodium, it's almost healthy.
Coasting down the exit onto State Road 73, I saw one poorly lit gas station with a single pump and old signBessie's Full Service.
Bessie's was decorated with a collage of eight tilted and swinging neon beer signs that crowded the insides of the windows. The "Open 24 Hrs" sign dangled from one hook, half-concealed by the "Lottery Tickets Sold Here" poster. Inside, a small television showed the Home Shopping Network. Currently, the jewelry hour. The screen zoomed in on two hands displaying a cheesy bracelet with matching earrings. The bottom left-hand corner of the screen read, "4 Easy Payments of $99.95."
Behind the cash register, with her head pointed up at the TV, was a short yet enormous woman with a hyena's laugh. In dramatic disgust, she tossed her head, raised the remote control, and pressed the recall button. The screen immediately changed to a flash of explosions and machine-gun fire followed by a handsome, dark-haired Brit who straightened his tie and checked his watch-an Omega Seamaster Chronometer with a blue face. The screen flashed again and said, "007 will return in a moment." She threw the remote back onto the countertop and dug her hand back into a half-eaten bag of barbeque pork rinds.
Apparently, Bessie's primarily sold diesel, but that did not explain the deep double ruts that circled behind the station. Underneath the pump, an industrial-size plastic trash can spilled over with more trash around it than in it. Grease puddles stained the cement, although a few had been hastily covered with sand and what looked like powdered clothes detergent. A paper towel dispenser hung on the steel support post, but somebody had stolen the squeegee, and cobwebs now filled the empty space left by the absence of paper towels. A faded Coke machine stood against the front of the building, but all the "Empty" lights were lit up, further accentuating the seven bullet holes that riddled the center. To the right of the building, several strands of heavy chain draped across the one-car mechanics bay. A "Closed" sign hung from the lowest chain and swung every time the big barking dog behind it leaned against the door. Painted across the front of the garage in red spray paint were the words, "Forget Dog, Beware of Owner." A smaller sign read, "Rottweiler Spoken Here."
I pulled close to the pump and parked behind an oddly out-of-place Volvo station wagon with New York tags. It looked like something purchased directly out of a primetime commercial. A cellular antenna and shiny black bike racks covered the top. In the racks, the owner had locked a small chrome dirt bike with knobby tires and training wheels tha
t might fit an eager five-year-old.
I shut off my diesel and stepped out. I can't really explain my fascination with diesel engines, or trucks, but both do something for me. The low, gutteral whomp, the clickety-clack of valves slamming against metal under the inordinately high compression, the manual six-speed transmission, the rough, gut jolting suspension. Maybe it just reminds me of driving the tractor.
Bessie gave me a once-over-something that didn't take long. What she saw was anything but noteworthy. I'm slender, about six feet, shoulder-length sandy hair, thirtyish, fit-looking but starting to show some wear, jeans, T-shirt stained with hot sauce, running shoes. I yawned, stretched, and slung the Canon over my shoulder. After nine years, the camera had become an appendage.
"Hey, good-lookin'," Bessie sang over the intercom. I waved behind me and unscrewed my gas cap. "You need any help, darlin', you let me know." I waved again and turned, and she leaned over the countertop, accentuating two of her more obvious features. Something she had done before.
When I opened the cab door to grab my wallet, the barking from behind the garage door went from nuisance to ballistic. The sound told me saliva was spewing everywhere. Bessie slapped the countertop with her huge palm and yelled, "Hush, Maxximus!" The dog paid her no attention, and when I pushed down the lever and turned the gas on, the "Closed" sign started banging against the door just like they do in the movies seconds before the tornado swoops down and levels the earth. I looked over my shoulder and heard the dog rapidly running back and forth between the front door and the garage door. His toenails were cleaning out the grooves in the floor as he dug in and pressed his nose into the small crack at the bottom. With no change in the dog's behavior, Bessie yelled again at the top of her lungs, "Maxximus, don't make me do it. I'll mash that dad-blame button in two shakes if you don't shut up!"