by Carl Hiaasen
“What happened?” I asked.
“The man dropped his pants and mooned the truck.”
Malley cheered. “Major style points!”
“He was gone by the time the deputies got there,” Mr. Tile reported. “So was the coyote.”
“Oh well,” I said. “It’s better than leeches.”
The day after we got home, Detective Trujillo interviewed me for a couple hours. He never once asked if the person who gave me a ride upstate was Clinton Tyree, former governor of Florida, so technically I never had to lie about meeting the man. Some old stranger drove me to the Panhandle is what I said, which was close enough to the truth.
The detective didn’t ask me about exotic woodpeckers, either, and why would he?
Back when I didn’t believe the ivorybill still existed, Skink had warned me that if word of a sighting ever leaked out, the river basin would be overrun by tour boats, swamp buggies and roadside souvenir shops, all sorts of greedheads trying to make a buck off the bird. He’d said the one he saw might be the last of its kind on the entire planet, or maybe the first of a hardy new generation, but either way it deserved peace and solitude. He might as well have been talking about himself.
I put the ivorybill in this story because it’s key to what happened, the main clue that led me to Malley. I also don’t believe anybody’s going to see that particular bird again until it chooses to be seen. Same goes for Skink.
My cousin spent like five hours talking with Detective Trujillo and a female officer. After that, the case was officially closed and the “Help Us Find Malley” billboards were taken down. The police department put out a press release saying she was home safe and asking the media to respect her family’s privacy. The press release also said that the suspect in Malley’s abduction had accidentally drowned before the authorities could apprehend him. The gory details were left out.
That gray suitcase full of evidence, which we’d brought back for Detective Trujillo, ended up in a police warehouse somewhere. There was nobody to investigate, nobody to arrest. Terwin Crossley had acted alone, and died alone.
In fairness to alligators, they don’t often kill human beings. It happens at most once or twice a year, which sounds like a lot until you consider that Florida has more than one million wild gators and eighteen million people. Statistically, bumblebees are more deadly.
The first thing my cousin did when she got home was rinse the black dye from her hair. A doctor checked her out, and she’s going to be fine. The handcuff marks on her wrists have already faded away. Once a week she goes to see a counselor—“head shrinker,” in Malley’s words—and honestly I think it’s helping her, even though she says the lady smells like petunias and vinegar.
Sometimes Malley and I talk about what took place on the river that afternoon. We saw a man die, and we’ve both had bad dreams about that. T.C. was a rotten guy but it was still a gruesome thing to see.
If I hadn’t snagged his shirt with the fishing lure, he probably wouldn’t have toppled into the water, and the alligator wouldn’t have grabbed him. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have been out there in the first place, trying to paddle away, if he hadn’t done anything wrong.
I’ve got no idea what kind of childhood Terwin Crossley had, whether his parents were kind and loving, or cold and cruel. Maybe he was one of those kids who never had a chance to become a decent person, or maybe he was born a creep.
Either way, I’m not brokenhearted over what happened to him, not after what he did to Malley, not after the twisted threats he made from the canoe. As far as I’m concerned, the gator that ate T.C. deserves a medal from Crime Stoppers. Maybe I’ll go straight to hell for saying that, but it’s the truth. I can’t speak for my cousin, because she’s never put that particular thought into words.
We’ll never know if the animal that took Terwin Crossley was the same one that had swum off with the canoe two days earlier. After the kidnapper’s body was recovered, state wildlife officers set out baited hooks in the area. That’s standard procedure after a fatal alligator attack, and they almost always nab the culprit.
Not this time, though. They didn’t catch anything, not even a dumb garfish.
Mostly what Malley and I wonder about is whether Skink somehow knew what would happen to T.C., even before the gator appeared—whether it’s possible for a person to be so powerfully connected to nature that he develops an almost mystical kind of intuition. The governor’s reaction to that shocking scene was so mild and matter-of-fact that you couldn’t help but wonder if he was expecting something like that all along.
Malley’s not a hundred percent convinced he did, and neither am I.
I do believe, though, that some things aren’t meant to be understood. And I also believe in karma.
I’ve never told my mother that Skink taught me how to drive. My plan is to surprise her when I get my learner’s permit.
One weekend we went to Saint Augustine to see Kyle and Robbie, who were there for a surfing contest. On the way up, Mom semi-casually mentioned something you might call a cool coincidence, and also ironic: Her own mother, my late Grandma Cynthia, had handed out campaign buttons and bumper stickers for Clinton Tyree all those years ago when he ran for governor. Weird but true.
That night after dinner my brothers got me alone and quizzed me about the Malley adventure. They said I had “balls of steel” for going to find her all by myself. It took every ounce of self-restraint not to tell them about Skink, who in my mind was the true hero of the rescue.
Not to mention one of the coolest old farts ever.
Just about everything he told me was true. The Rousseau novel he quoted from is called Émile. The Shakespeare line he tossed at us came from a play called Corialanus. “Sporange” is a real word (“a cellular structure where spores are produced”), and it really does rhyme with orange.
The governor was also right about Linda Ronstadt—she’s got an awesome voice. I downloaded her Heart Like a Wheel album after my mother bought me a new smartphone to replace the one at the bottom of the river. I offered to pay her back, but she said no.
Which worked out okay, because I needed the money for something else. I’d gone back to work for that car-washing service—and I mean, every day—so I had exactly two hundred bucks in my fist when I walked into the surf shop in Saint Augustine.
The owner, Kenny, my dad’s friend, was behind the counter. After I counted out the cash, he said, “Thanks, dude,” and put it in the drawer of the register.
“Don’t you want to know what it’s for?” I asked.
“The skateboard you took last year.” Kenny was smiling. “Look up,” he said.
A bubble-eye video camera was mounted on the ceiling above the counter. I counted three more in the store.
“So you knew all this time it was me who stole it?”
“You didn’t steal it, Richard. You just forgot to pay. I knew you’d be back one of these days.”
“You did? How?”
“Because you’re Randy’s son, and that’s what he would have done.”
“No, he would never have taken it in the first place.”
“Maybe he would, if he’d lost his dad when he was young and needed something special to keep the memory close,” said Kenny. “You tried that board yet?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, you should. It would make him happy.”
After I got back home, I pulled the Birdhouse from my hiding spot in the box springs beneath my mattress. I didn’t want Mom to get sad if she saw it, so I waited until she left for the office before I put on my helmet and rode the board down A1A.
Damn, it’s fast.
Obviously, Malley didn’t have to go away to the Twigg Academy. After everything that’s happened, I think Uncle Dan and Aunt Sandy would love for her to stay at home until she’s, like, thirty-five. They were seriously shaken up. Malley promised to cut back on the daily drama, which she has, so far. Her parents call or text her all the time, which is underst
andable, though it annoys Malley.
School started last week, and she’s a major celebrity because of the kidnapping. The attention makes her really uncomfortable, which is epically not like my cousin. She even shut down her Facebook page and got off Twitter. In the halls kids sometimes stop her to ask about T.C.—who he was, how he chose her—and she tells them just enough of the bad stuff to make sure the same thing never happens to them.
A few days ago she broke the seventeen-minute mark for the 5,000-meter run. It would have been a state cross-country record for a girl her age, except it didn’t happen at a track meet. Malley had been running by herself with her stopwatch early in the morning at the high school. She does this all the time. She says nobody bothers her because nobody can catch her.
What she doesn’t know is that she’s never really alone when she runs. One of us is always hanging around near the track, out of sight, just to make sure there are no fake Talbos on the scene. Some mornings I’m the designated lookout. Other days it’s Uncle Dan, Aunt Sandy or Mom. Even Trent helps out. We’ve got our hiding spots.
T.C. is no threat to Malley anymore, but all of us who care about her are still extra protective. Maybe that will change someday, but I’m not so sure.
Speaking of Trent, he finally sold two houses, one of them a sweet oceanfront estate. To celebrate he bought my mother a jade necklace, got himself a new set of golf clubs and gave me a supernice fly rod.
Then he took us to dinner at his favorite steakhouse and, okay, I couldn’t resist asking if he’d ever heard the legend of the Florida swamp zombie.
“What the heck’s a swamp zombie?” he said, all intrigued.
“It’s like a Bigfoot, only smarter and gnarlier. I actually saw one in action. He had buzzard beaks hanging from his face.”
My mother knew who I was talking about. She gave me a don’t-make-fun-of-your-stepfather look.
“Never heard a that one,” said Trent, hitching an eyebrow. “Are you bustin’ my niblets, champ?”
“Yeah, I am. There’s no such thing as a swamp zombie.”
The next night I had my first so-called date with Beth. We went to a Will Farrell movie and she laughed almost as loud as me, which was a good sign. Next weekend we’re going fishing on my skiff near the inlet. Beth officially broke up with Taylor, so everything’s cool in that department.
Except now Taylor keeps texting Malley begging her to go out. She’s told him to get lost in, like, thirteen different languages, literally. Malley’s got an app that translates her snarky insults into Spanish, French, German, Greek, I forget all the others.
My cousin can be brutal.
Mr. Tile left a voice message saying I should go online and read an article that appeared in the Pensacola News Journal just a few days after we left Walton County. Check out the headline:
ANONYMOUS DONOR HONORS FALLEN MARINE
The story said an unknown person had opened a scholarship fund at Northwest Florida State College in the name of the late Earl Talbo Chock, a young Marine corporal killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.
What made the donation curious was the odd amount—$9,720—and the fact that it was all cash, delivered by the postal service in a plain shoe box along with a short handwritten note of instruction.
According to the newspaper, Talbo Chock’s mother and father were eager for the mysterious benefactor to come forward so they could properly thank him or her for the generous memorial. They said a tall homeless man had recently been observed at their son’s gravesite, standing ramrod straight, saluting the plain white cross. When a cemetery worker approached him, the stranger made a “crude gesture” and limped away.
Talbo Chock’s parents wondered if that was the same person who’d sent the shoe box full of cash to the college, and they asked for the public’s help in identifying him.
I tried calling back Mr. Tile at least half a dozen times, but his phone went straight to voice mail. He had nothing more to tell me, I guess. He just wanted us to know Skink was all right. I printed out the article and gave it to Malley when we went on one of our turtle walks.
The three-quarter moon looked like a ripe peach coming up over the ocean. I’ll never forget the color of the sky because that was the first night my cousin and I found a mother turtle on a nest.
We’d walked less than a mile before we spotted fresh flipper tracks leading from the edge of the surf to the dune line. There, an enormous barnacle-backed loggerhead had dug out a pit as wide as her shell. When I shined the light down the hole, we could see her eggs dropping softly.
The turtle didn’t snap at us or try to crawl away. She just blinked her big moist eyes and took short raspy breaths, a tired old momma with a job to do.
She’d been there before, and her female hatchlings that survived to adulthood would return to the very same beach, the very same time of the summer, to lay their own eggs. It is a ritual that’s only been going on for about a hundred million years. Incredible but true—loggerheads, greens and hawksbills were swimming the seas back when T. rex was roaming the forests.
Malley and I took photos of the mother turtle, but we didn’t post them on Instagram. Instead we called a state wildlife hotline and gave the location of the mound. Tomorrow there would be bright stakes hammered down, and a warning sign. With any luck, Dodge Olney was still locked up in jail.
We didn’t want to attract a crowd that might disturb the momma loggerhead, so we kept walking. Every so often we’d find a scattering of crispy egg fragments where other nestlings had hatched, a stampede of little hockey pucks toward the surf. Some of them had made it, and others had been gobbled by gulls or raccoons. That’s the natural food chain, but Malley and I still always root for the baby turtles.
At each marked nest I paused to aim my flashlight at the dig marks inside the bright pink ribbons. A few times I dropped to my knees because I thought I’d spotted something out of place, but I hadn’t.
During these odd stops of mine Malley never got impatient or even slightly sarcastic. It was something I’d been doing on our beach walks ever since we’d returned from the Choctawhatchee, something I’ll probably be doing the rest of life.
Looking for a soda straw sticking out of the sand.
