Squirm

by Carl Hiaasen

  After lunch the wind starts gusting, which makes it way harder to cast. Still, I manage to land two more small rainbows and a nice cutthroat, a fish that gets its name from orange gashlike markings below the gills. In the treetops we count several more ospreys and hawks, but no bald eagles. Lil points to a pale rock bluff where she spotted a golden a few days ago, but the bird isn’t there now.

  She rows effortlessly, even in the swift water. One careless stroke and the boat could crash against a boulder and flip. The stretch of the river leading to the takeout is flat and slower, so Summer asks for a turn on the oars. She aims the bow toward a bare notch on the shore and beaches the boat perfectly. Lil’s Explorer is already parked at the ramp, thanks to a shuttle service that the trout guides use. Summer and I steady the boat in the current while Lil backs the trailer down the slope. I get the feeling she can do this with her eyes closed.

  On the drive back to Livingston, we pass a herd of pronghorn antelopes standing in a field watching the cars on the interstate. This blows me away. Summer says the pronghorns always disappear before the first day of hunting season.

  “They’ve got a survival calendar in their brain,” she adds, tapping her head. “Same goes for the elk and deer.”

  When we arrive back at the house, there’s a Montana state patrol car parked out front. The trooper steps from the car and asks Lil if her name is Little Thunder-Sky.

  “Am I in trouble?” she asks.

  “We found a vehicle that’s registered to you. A red Chevy king cab?”

  Summer leans close, whispering: “That’s what Dennis drives.”

  “He doesn’t have his own car?”

  “Oh, it’s totally his. He put it in Mom’s name. Everything’s in her name, including the house.”

  Lil tells the trooper that the truck is used by her husband, who’s away on a trip.

  “A camping trip?” the trooper asks. “Because the vehicle was left on a dirt road way up the Tom Miner Basin. It’s been there a week, at least. Two of the tires are flat.”

  Summer blurts, “What! How did that happen?”

  “A sharp object is how.”

  “Like a broken bottle?”

  “No,” the trooper says. “Like a knife.”

  “Oh no,” Lil murmurs.

  “Have you spoken to him lately?”

  “His phone’s off. He’s in a dead zone,” Summer cuts in.

  The trooper frowns. “I’m afraid we’ll have to tow the truck if your husband doesn’t show up soon. Meanwhile, you should get somebody to go up there and take some new tires.”

  Lil says, “I’ll do it myself, first thing tomorrow.”

  “When is he due home, ma’am?”

  “Honestly, I’m not sure.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “I believe so,” Lil says.

  The trooper glances uneasily at me and Summer, like he’s got something else to ask Lil but doesn’t want to do it in front of us.

  Then he says it anyway: “If you don’t hear from your husband soon, you should call the sheriff’s office. They’re in charge of search-and-rescue.”

  “Thanks for your concern,” says Lil, “but I’m sure he’s all right.”

  After giving us directions to the location where the red king cab was found, the state trooper drives away. Lil hurries into the house.

  Summer and I unpack the drift boat. We lower our voices to discuss this unexpected news about Dennis Dickens—her stepfather, my father.

  None of the possibilities are good.

  FOUR

  Everything I know about my dad is what my mother has told me, which isn’t much.

  He was born in South Miami, no brothers or sisters. His parents died while he was away at college in Gainesville, but Mom doesn’t seem to know the details. When she and Dad first met, he was the assistant manager of a Foot Locker store in Pembroke Pines—he fitted her for a pair of cross-trainers. She said he loved the outdoors, like she did. Their first date was a trip to the Corkscrew Swamp looking for otters.

  In their seven years together, my father held thirteen or fourteen different jobs. All the people he worked for liked him, she said, and he never once got fired.

  He would just quit, for no apparent reason, always on a Thursday.

  “Time for a new life direction!” he’d announce to my mother as he walked through the door.

  “What happened now, Dennis?”

  “Oh, the job wasn’t so bad” was his usual reply. “But I didn’t see the right future for me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe there anymore.”

  “If you don’t stop this nonsense,” Mom would say angrily, “you’re gonna have some serious breathing problems around here, too.”

  This is strictly her version of the conversation, but I bet it’s pretty accurate.

  The day Dad moved out of the house was also a Thursday. Mom ripped up his goodbye note, and now she regrets it.

  “I didn’t know he was serious,” she told us, much later.

  After my father left, Mom began referring to him as “the serial quitter.” I wasn’t old enough to realize what was going on, but Belinda did. She’s totally on my mother’s side, and who can blame her? She says only a loser walks out on his family.

  Mom was surprised when the first check arrived.

  “Where’d he get all this money?” she exclaimed, according to Belinda.

  The older I got, the more I wondered about my father—where he’d gone and why he’d left. Was he running from us, or searching for something?

  As Summer and I put away the fly rods and gear, I ask her if it’s unusual for a person to get his tires slashed in Montana.

  “I never heard of that happening,” she says. “Not around here, anyway.”

  “Where’s the Tom Miner Basin?”

  “Way down in Paradise Valley, on the way to Yellowstone Park. A long time ago it was a hunting ground for the Crow.”

  “Who lives there now?” I ask.

  “Ranchers, rich white people, and bears.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time Mom calls, I’m already in bed.

  “Have you seen your father yet?” she asks.

  “Tomorrow’s the big day.”

  “Please don’t get your hopes up, Billy. Tomorrow’s a Thursday. You know his track record on Thursdays.”

  I don’t tell her about the visit from the state trooper. Instead I give her a fishing report. She’s proud that I caught a trout on my very first day using a fly rod.

  “Did you spot any eagles, Billy?”

  “No, but Lil says several pairs live along the river between here and Big Timber. Some goldens, too. They’re even cooler than baldies.”

  “I never told you this,” Mom says, “but your father was the first one to show me an eagle nest. It was up on a power pole in Key Largo. I’m sure it’s gone by now.”

  “So he’s a birder, too?”

  “He’s got darn good eyes. At least he used to.”

  It sounds like she considers this a nice memory. Sometimes I wish she’d share more of them.

  “How was your day, Mom?”

  “Not so wonderful. I’m in hot water with Uber.”

  “What did you do?”

  “A passenger was being super-rude, so I kicked him out of the car.”

  “I hope you hit the brakes first.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Where did this happen?” I ask.

  “On top of the Barber Bridge, in Vero Beach.”

  “Seriously, Mom?”

  “He emailed the company to complain! Can you believe that?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I totally can.”

  My sister and I had predicted something like this. I ask Mom what the rider did that was so rude.
r />   “He asked me out for a drink, and I very politely said no. A few minutes later I hear him talking to his wife on the phone, pretending to be the perfect husband. Some loud real-estate shark from Miami. Supposedly he was up here looking at properties. Anyway, as soon as he hung up, I stopped the car and told him to get out. Then he had the nerve to call Uber and say I was abandoning him on a dangerous highway. That bridge has a perfectly fine pedestrian lane!”

  “Maybe you should try a different kind of job,” I say to Mom.

  “Why? Usually I get along with everybody.”

  “I’m going to sleep now, okay?”

  * * *

  —

  When I walk out of the house the next morning, the temperature is in the forties. I’m wearing every stitch of clothing I brought, plus a down parka belonging to Dennis Dickens. We’re bringing a ten-gallon container of gasoline, a backpack with some food, and a couple cans of a chemical pepper spray specially invented to discourage a charging bear. Summer calls shotgun, so I take the back seat.

  Lil stops at a repair shop in town to buy two new tires mounted on secondhand rims, which we load in the Explorer. The main road south leads through a narrow pass into the world-famous Paradise Valley. Right away I see how it got its name—snowy peaks rising on both sides of a wide green plain, the Yellowstone River winding like a silver-blue vein through the middle. If someone had shown me a painting, I wouldn’t have believed such a place was real.

  Summer and her mom are quiet on the ride, probably because they’re worried about my father. I’m worried, too. Even though I barely remember the man, there’s still a connection.

  Eventually we come to a highway sign for the Tom Miner Basin. Lil turns down a watered dirt road that runs along a bowl-shaped valley framed by slopes of the Gallatin Mountains. Below us is a sprawling patchwork of cattle ranches and farms, half a dozen shades of green. Crossing one high crest, we can see all the way back to Livingston, and seemingly beyond.

  “The view is fifty-two miles,” Summer reports, “on a clear day.”

  Which it is right now. Not a cloud in the sky.

  Soon the dirt road gets narrow and gnarly. Lil says it leads to a campground near a petrified forest, where some of the trees are fifty million years old. She says that’s when the Tom Miner Basin was covered with ash and lava from an erupting volcano.

  I wouldn’t mind hiking through an actual petrified forest, but we don’t make it to the end of the road. Rounding a bend, we spot my father’s red truck, a jumbo pickup with four doors, pulled halfway onto the shoulder.

  Lil parks behind it. Neither she nor Summer gets out.

  “You don’t see many of those up here,” says Lil.

  She’s pointing at a large prairie rattlesnake. It is the only venomous species in Montana, and normally it’s found on—duh—prairies. This one must have traveled to these woods from a dry, craggy hillside across the valley.

  The snake is minding its own business, sunning beside one of the flattened tires on Dad’s mud-caked pickup.

  Summer says, “He’ll crawl off in a few minutes. Let’s wait.”

  Not me. I hop out for a closer look.

  The rattler’s scales are dullish gray and tan, with a mottled pattern meant to blend with the dusty habitat where it usually lives. It’s not as thick around as its Florida cousins, but I count six rattles on the muscular tail.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Summer calls from inside the Explorer. “We are not impressed.”

  Although snakes don’t have earholes, they’re able to sense the smallest movements of nearby animals. Rattlers also have tiny pits near their nostrils that help them track warm-blooded prey. When I was researching the solution to my school-locker problem, I found a video online that shows a blindfolded rattlesnake striking a balloon filled with hot water. Its aim is dead perfect.

  The prairie rattler lounging by the truck’s deflated tire has realized it’s no longer alone. The triangle head rises slowly, exploring for scents with slow flicks of a forked black tongue. I’m crouching safely out of striking range.

  Lil’s voice has an anxious edge: “Billy, get back here, please.”

  Sensible advice for a normal person, but I don’t want to sit around waiting for the snake to crawl away. I want to look inside my father’s pickup for clues, right now.

  So I toss a handful of pebbles in the dirt near the rattler, which immediately uncoils, zips across the road, and vanishes down the hill.

  Lil steps from the SUV saying, “Most white folks love to shoot those things. You are definitely your father’s son.”

  The doors on Dad’s truck are locked. I wipe the dust from a side window. On the floorboard I see a Rockies baseball cap along with a jumble of empty water bottles and soda cans. On the passenger seat sits an open box of shotgun shells.

  “Do you have a key?” I ask Lil.

  “No, Billy, I don’t.”

  She and Summer get to work using Lil’s jack and wrench. After the lug nuts are unscrewed, I lift off the slashed tires. While Summer and Lil begin bolting the new ones on Dad’s Chevy, I poke around trying to figure out which direction my father walked.

  I locate an uphill path leading toward the thick timber. There are no boot prints, though I didn’t expect to find any. Lil says it rained hard here last night. I walk back to the road, where Summer and Lil are still at work.

  “I found a trail. I’m going to get a head start,” I say.

  Lil glances up. “Why don’t you wait for us, Billy?”

  “I won’t go far. Promise.”

  Summer hands me the backpack and both of the bear-spray canisters.

  “Make lots of noise,” she advises. “Clap, shout, hoot, sing—that way you won’t surprise any grizzlies. They’ll run off as soon as they hear you.”

  Into the woods I go. It feels stupid to be shouting all by myself.

  “Whoa, bear! Hey, bear! Don’t eat me, bear!”

  After a few minutes I sit down on a tree stump to wait. I take out my cell phone to check in with Lil and Summer, but there are no bars, no signal. Any second I expect to hear them coming up the path.

  The woods seem too quiet, and my nerves start to buzz. Unfortunately, like my mother, I have basically zero patience. I just can’t hang around doing nothing.

  So I get up and move on, confident that Lil and Summer will catch up soon.

  Except they don’t.

  FIVE

  My sister has this boyfriend. She claims to be madly in love.

  The kid she’s dating is a total tool, but I keep my mouth shut. Belinda is sick of moving from town to town, and this is her way of telling Mom enough’s enough.

  I know Belinda isn’t wild about the guy. His name is Dawson and he goes to a private school, but that’s not where he got his high opinion of himself. Anybody who goes out of his way to tell you his haircut cost fifty bucks? A serious tool.

  Belinda knows. I don’t need to say a word.

  She tells Mom she can’t possibly imagine her life without charming, handsome Dawson, which is another way of saying she doesn’t care what happens to the eagle nest here in Fort Pierce—she doesn’t want to pack up and move now, not with college on the horizon. She’s made a few good friends at school, and she wants to hang with them the rest of the summer. Simple as that.

  The issue hasn’t come up yet because Mom’s happy right where we are. However, that could change tomorrow if the birds disappear.

  One time, as a favor to my sister, I actually took Dawson fishing in the Indian River Lagoon. He caught a little crevalle that magically grew to ten pounds when he retold the story. The best part was I had to unhook his fish because Dawson wouldn’t touch it. He wouldn’t bait his own hook, either—he said he didn’t want the shrimp to bite him.

  “Shrimp don’t bite,” I pointed out.

>   “Everything bites!” Dawson declared.

  What made me think of him now is that I’m hiking through a place where a person could get seriously bitten by something way bigger than a shrimp, something with actual teeth. Dawson would be wetting his pants.

  The trail winds back and forth before forking into twin paths. I choose the one that veers right, hoping that Summer Chasing-Hawks and Little Thunder-Sky can track me. The ground is too hard-packed to leave any footprints, so I place a dime in the middle of the path to show them which way I went.

  Hiking the swamps of the Everglades is completely different from hiking the high-timber country of the Rockies. For one thing, Montana bears grow much larger than Florida bears. When I said I wanted to see a grizzly, I meant from a safe distance—not nose to nose in the deep woods. That’s why I’m holding a can of pepper spray in each hand.

  And shouting: “Whoa, bear! Hey, bear! Don’t eat me, bear!”

  A porcupine the size of a tumbleweed scuffles past, slow enough for me to snap a picture with my phone. Farther down the trail I spot a white-tailed deer, a buck with a major rack of antlers. He bolts from sight before I can get a photo. I hear him crashing through the trees.

  Maybe the noise will scare off the bears, or maybe the bears are used to nervous deer.

  I’m a little nervous, too—though not really scared. More humans get chomped by gators and sharks in Florida than attacked by wild bears in Montana. I looked it up on the internet last night while I was lying in bed listening to a train rumble through town. Statistically, you’re a hundred times safer hiking through grizzly country than driving a car to the supermarket. That’s what I keep reminding myself.

  After a while I emerge from the tree line and enter a rocky meadow spangled with wildflowers—yellow, purple, crimson, and white. The magpies start to yap, and I figure they’re annoyed by my shouts interrupting their sleepy afternoon.

  “Whoa, bear! Hey, bear! Don’t eat me, bear!”

  Between chants I hear an odd noise—a high-pitched hum, somewhere in the sky. The sun is bright and of course I forgot my shades, so I set down both cans of bear spray and use my hands to block the glare. The humming grows louder and louder until it sounds more like a mechanical buzz.