Native Tongue

by Carl Hiaasen

  “Don’t sound so surprised.” She asked him how his day had gone, and he told her about the stolen voles.

  Nina said, “See? And you thought you were going to be bored.”

  “I am bored. Most of the time.”

  “Joe, It’s never going to be like the old days.” He wasn’t in the mood to hear it. He said, “How’s it going with you?”

  “Slow,” Nina said. “Beverly went home early. It’s just me and Miriam.”

  “Any creeps call in?” Of course creeps had called—who else would bother?

  “The usual jack-off artists,” Nina reported. “They’re harmless, Joe, don’t worry. I just give a straight read, no moans or groans, and still they get off in about thirty seconds. I had one guy fall asleep afterwards. Snoring like a baby.”

  Sometimes she talked about her job as if it were a social service, like UNICEF or Meals on Wheels.

  “When will you be home?” Winder asked.

  The usual, Nina said, meaning four in the morning. “Want me to wake you up?”

  “Sure.” She had loads of energy, this girl. Winder needed somebody with energy, to help him use up his own. One of the drawbacks of his high-paying bullshit PR job was that it took absolutely nothing out of him, except his pride.

  Hurriedly Nina said, “Joe, I got another call waiting.”

  “Make it short and sweet.”

  “I’ll deal with you later, sailor boy.”

  And then she hung up.

  * * *

  Winder couldn’t sleep, so he put a Warren Zevon tape in the stereo and made himself a runny cheese omelet. He ate in the living room, near the speakers, and sat on a box because there were no chairs in the apartment. The box was filled with old newspaper clippings, his own, as well as plaques and certificates from various journalism awards that he had received over the years. The only important journalism award that wasn’t in the box was the single one that impressed anybody—the Pulitzer Prize, which Joe Winder had never won.

  When he was first interviewed for the publicity-writing job at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, Joe Winder had been asked if he’d ever gotten a Pulitzer. When he answered no, Charles Chelsea had threatened to put him on the polygraph machine.

  “I never won,” Winder insisted. “You can look it up.”

  And Charles Chelsea did. A Pulitzer on the wall would have disqualified Joe Winder from the PR job just as surely as flunking a urinalysis for drugs.

  “We’re not in the market for aggressive, hard-bitten news-hounds,” Chelsea had warned him. “We’re looking for writers with a pleasing, easygoing style. We’re looking for a certain attitude.”

  “I’m flexible,” Joe Winder had said. “Especially my attitude.”

  Chelsea had grilled him about the other journalism awards, then about the length of his hair, then about the thin pink scar along his jawline.

  Eyeing Winder’s face at close range, the publicity man had said, “You look like a bar fighter. Did you get that scar in a fight?”

  “Car accident,” Joe Winder had lied, figuring what the hell, Chelsea must’ve known the truth. One phone call to the newspaper, and any number of people would’ve been happy to drop the dime.

  But Chelsea never said another word about the scar, never gave a hint that he’d even picked up the rumor. It was Joe Winder’s journalism achievements that seemed to disturb the publicity man, although these concerns were ultimately outweighed by the discovery that Winder had been born and raised in Florida. The Publicity Department at the Amazing Kingdom was desperate for native talent, somebody who understood the mentality of tourists and crackers alike.

  The Disney stint hadn’t hurt Joe Winder’s chances, either; he had worked among the enemy, and learned many of their professional secrets. So Charles Chelsea had set aside his doubts and hired him.

  That was two weeks ago. It was still too early for Winder to compare the new job with the one at Disney World. Certainly Disney was slicker and more efficient than the Amazing Kingdom, but it was also more regimented and impersonal. The Disney bureaucracy, and its reach, was awesome. In retrospect Joe Winder wasn’t sure how he had lasted as long as he did, six months, before he was caught having sex on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and fired for not wearing his ID card. Winder felt especially bad that the young woman with whom he’d been dallying, a promising understudy to Cinderella, had also been dismissed over the incident; she for leaving Main Street during Mickey’s Birthday Parade.

  During the job interview at the Amazing Kingdom, Charles Chelsea had told him: “You work for us, you’d better keep it in your pants, understand?”

  “I’ve got a girlfriend now,” Joe Winder had said.

  “Don’t think you won’t be tempted around here.”

  Winder hadn’t been tempted once, until today. Now he was thinking about Carrie Lanier, the fearless beauty inside a seven-foot raccoon suit.

  This is what happens when you turn thirty-seven, Winder thought; the libido goes blind with fever. What else could explain his attraction to Nina? Or her attraction to him?

  Being a newspaper reporter had left Joe Winder no time for such reckless attachments. Being a flack left him all the time in the world. Now that he was forbidden to write about trouble, he seemed determined to experience it.

  He finished his omelet and opened a beer and slumped down on the floor, between the stereo speakers. Something had been nagging at him all afternoon, ever since the insufferable Chelsea had drafted him to help with the robbery crisis. In the push toward his deadline, it was clear to Joe Winder that none of his writing skills had eroded—his speed at the keyboard, his facile vocabulary, his smooth sense of pacing and transition. Yet something from the old days was missing.

  Curiosity. The most essential and feral of reporters’ instincts, the urge to pursue. It was dead. Or dying.

  Two strangers had invaded a family theme park in broad daylight and kidnapped a couple of obscure rodents from an animal exhibit. Winder had thoroughly and competently reported the incident, but had made no effort to explore the fascinating possibilities. Having established the what, he had simply ignored the why.

  Even by South Florida standards the crime was perverse, and the old Joe Winder would have reveled energetically in its mysteries. The new Joe Winder had merely typed up his thousand words, and gone home.

  Just as he was supposed to do.

  So this is how it feels, he thought. This is how it feels to sell out. On the stereo, Warren Zevon was singing about going to the Louvre museum and throwing himself against the wall. To Joe Winder it sounded like a pretty good idea.

  He closed his eyes tightly and thought: Don’t tell me I’m getting used to this goddamn zombie job. Then he thought: Don’t tell me I’m getting drunk on one lousy beer.

  He crawled across the carpet to the phone, and tried to call Nina at the service. The woman named Miriam answered instead, and launched into a complicated fantasy involving trampolines and silver ankle bracelets. Miriam was struggling so valiantly in broken English (“Ooooh, bebee, chew make me comb so many time!”) that Joe Winder didn’t have the heart to interrupt.

  What the hell, it was only four bucks. He could certainly afford it.

  4

  On the morning of July 17, Danny Pogue awoke in a cold sweat, his T-shirt soaked from neck to navel. He kicked the covers off the bed and saw the lump of gauze around his foot. It wasn’t a dream. He limped to the window and from there he could see everything: the Olympic-sized swimming pool, the freshly painted tennis courts, the shady shuffleboard gazebo. Everywhere he looked there were old people with snowy heads and pale legs and fruit-colored Bermuda shorts. All the men wore socks with their sandals, and all the women wore golf visors and oversized sunglasses.

  “Mother of Christ,” said Danny Pogue. He hollered for his partner to come quick.

  Bud Schwartz ambled in, looking settled and well rested. He was spooning out half a grapefruit, cupped in the palm of one hand. “Do you believe this fucking place?
” he said to Danny Pogue. “What a gas.”

  “We gotta get out.”

  “How come?”

  “Just look.” Danny Pogue pointed out the window.

  “So now you got a problem with senior citizens? What—they don’t have the right to have fun? Besides, there’s some young people that live here, too. I saw a couple of hot ones out by the swimming pool. Major titties.”

  “I don’t care,” mumbled Danny Pogue.

  “Hey,” Bud Schwartz said. “She shot your foot, not your weenie.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Long gone. You want some lunch? She loaded up at the Publix, you should see. Steaks, chops, beer—we’re set for a couple of weeks, easy.”

  Danny Pogue hopped back to the bed and peeled off the damp shirt. He spotted a brand-new pair of crutches propped in the corner. He said, “Bud, I’m gonna split. Seriously, I’m taking off.”

  “I can give you ten thousand reasons not to.”

  “Speaking of which.”

  “She’s bringing a grand for each of us, just like she promised,” said Bud Schwartz. “Good faith money is what she called it.”

  “Invisible is what I call it.”

  “Hey, lighten the fuck up. She’s an old lady, Danny. Old ladies never lie.” Bud Schwartz lobbed the grapefruit skin into some kind of designer wastebasket. “What’s wrong with you, man? This is like a vacation, all expenses paid. Look at this freaking condo—two bedrooms, two bathrooms. Microwave in the kitchen, Cinemax on the cable. Say what you will, the old geezer knows how to live.”

  “Who is she?” Danny Pogue asked.

  “Who cares?”

  “I care. She shot me.”

  Bud Schwartz said, “Just some crazy, rich old broad. Don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s not you that got shot.”

  “She won’t do it again, Danny. She got it out of her system.” Bud Schwartz wiped his hands on the butt of his jeans to get the grapefruit juice off. He said, “She was pissed, that’s all. On account of us losing the rats.”

  Danny Pogue said, “Well, screw that deal. I’m leaving.” He made a move for the crutches but faltered, hot and dizzy. Molly McNamara had fed him some pain pills late last night; that much he remembered.

  “I don’t know where you think you’re going,” said Bud Schwartz. “The truck’s history.”

  “I’ll hitch,” said Danny Pogue woozily.

  “Look in the mirror. Your own mother wouldn’t pick you up. The Hell’s Fucking Angels wouldn’t pick you up.”

  “Somebody’ll stop,” Danny Pogue said. “Especially with me on them crutches.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Maybe even some girls.” Danny Pogue eased himself back on the pillow. He took deep breaths and tried to blink away the haze in his brain.

  “Have another codeine,” said Bud Schwartz. “Here, she got a whole bottle.” He went to the kitchen and came back with a cold Busch.

  Danny Pogue swallowed two more pills and slurped at the beer can noisily. He closed his eyes and said, “She ain’t never gonna pay us, Bud.”

  “Sure she is,” said his partner. “She’s loaded, just look at this place. You should see the size of the TV.”

  “We better get away while we can.”

  “Go back to sleep,” said Bud Schwartz. “I’ll be down at the pool.”

  * * *

  The Mothers of Wilderness met every other Tuesday at a public library in Cutler Ridge. This week the main item on the agenda was the proposed bulldozing of seventy-three acres of mangroves to make room for the back nine of a championship golf course on the shore of North Key Largo. The Mothers of Wilderness strenuously opposed the project, and had begun to map a political strategy to obstruct it. They pursued such crusades with unflagging optimism, despite the fact that they had never succeeded in stopping a single development. Not one. The builders ignored them. Zoning boards ignored them. County commissioners listened politely, nodded intently, then ignored them, too. Of all the environmental groups fighting to preserve what little remained of Florida, the Mothers of Wilderness was regarded as the most radical and shrill and intractable. It was also, unfortunately, the smallest of the groups and thus the easiest to brush off.

  Still, the members were nothing if not committed. Molly McNamara steadfastly had refused all offers to merge her organization with the Audubon Society or the Sierra Club or the Friends of the Everglades. She wanted no part of coalitions because coalitions compromised. She enjoyed being alone on the fringe, enjoyed being the loose cannon that establishment environmentalists feared. The fact that the Mothers of Wilderness was politically impotent did not diminish Molly McNamara’s passion, though occasionally it ate at her pride.

  She ran the meetings with brusque efficiency, presiding over a membership that tended to be retired and liberal and well-to-do. For its size, the Mothers of Wilderness was exceedingly well financed; Molly knew this was why the other environmental groups wooed her, in hopes of a merger. The Mothers had bucks.

  They had hired a hotshot Miami land-use lawyer to fight the golf course project, which was called Falcon Trace. The lawyer, whose name was Spacci, stood up at the meeting to update the Mothers on the progress of the lawsuit, which, typically, was about to be thrown out of court. The case was being heard in Monroe County—specifically, Key West—where many of the judges were linked by conspiracy or simple inbreeding to the crookedest politicians. Moreover, the zoning lawyer admitted he was having a terrible time ascertaining the true owners of the Falcon Trace property; he had gotten as far as a blind trust in Dallas, then stalled.

  Molly McNamara thanked Spacci for his report and made a motion to authorize another twenty thousand dollars for legal fees and investigative expenses. It passed unanimously.

  After the meeting, Molly took the lawyer aside and said, “Next time I want to see some results. I want the names of these bastards.”

  “What about the lawsuit?”

  “File a new one,” Molly said. “You ever considered going federal?”

  “How?” asked Spacci. “On what grounds?”

  Pinching his elbow, Molly led him to an easel behind the rostrum. Propped on the easel was an aerial map of North Key Largo. Molly pointed and said, “See? There’s where they want the golf course. And right here is a national wildlife refuge. That’s your federal jurisdiction, Counselor.”

  The lawyer plucked a gold pen from his breast pocket and did some pointing of his own. “And right here, Ms. McNamara, is a two-thousand-acre amusement park that draws three million tourists every year. We’d be hard pressed to argue that one lousy golf course would be more disruptive to the habitat than what’s already there—a major vacation resort.”

  Molly snapped, “You’re the damn attorney. Think of something.”

  Bitterly she remembered the years she had fought the Kingsbury project; the Mothers of Wilderness had been the only group that had never given up. Audubon and the others had realized immediately that protest was futile; the prospect of a major theme park to compete with Disney World carried an orgasmic musk to local chambers of commerce. The most powerful of powerful civic leaders clung to the myth that Mickey Mouse was responsible for killing the family tourist trade in South Florida, strangling the peninsula so that all southbound station wagons stopped in Orlando. What did Miami have to offer as competition? Porpoises that could pitch a baseball with their blowholes? Wisecracking parrots on unicycles? Enjoyable diversions, but scarcely in the same high-tech league with Disney. The Mouse’s sprawling self-contained empire sucked tourists’ pockets inside out; they came, they spent until there was nothing left to spend; then they went home happy. To lifelong Floridians it was a dream concept: fleecing a snowbird in such a way that he came back for more. Astounding! So when Francis X. Kingsbury unveiled his impressive miniature replica of the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills—the Wet Willy water flume, the Magic Mansion, Orky the Killer Whale, Jungle Jerry, and so on—roars of exultation were heard from Palm Beach to
Big Pine. The only cry of dismay came from the Mothers of Wilderness, who were (as usual) ignored.

  “No golf course,” Molly told Spacci the lawyer, “and no more chickenshit excuses from you.” She sent him away with the wave of a blue-veined hand.

  After the rank and file had gone home, Molly gathered the board of directors in the back of the library. Five women and two men, all nearly as gray as Molly, they sat in molded plastic chairs and sipped herbal tea while Molly told them what had happened.

  It was a bizarre and impossible scheme, but no one asked Molly why she had done it. They knew why. In a fussy tone, one of the Mothers said: “This time you went too far.”

  “It’s under control,” Molly insisted.

  “Except for the voles. They’re not under control.”

  Another Mother asked: “Any chance of finding them?”

  “You never know,” said Molly.

  “Horseshit,” said the first Mother. “They’re gone for good. Dead, alive, it doesn’t matter if we can’t locate the damn things.”

  Molly said, “Please. Keep your voice down.”

  The second Mother: “What about these two men? Where are they now?”

  “My condo,” Molly replied. “Up at Eagle Ridge.”

  “Lord have mercy.”

  “That’s enough,” said Molly sharply. “I said it’s under control, and it’s under control.”

  A silence fell over the small group. No one wished to challenge her authority, but this time things had really gotten out of hand. This time there was a chance they could all go to jail. “I’ll have some more tea,” the first Mother said finally, “and then I’d love to hear your new plan. You do have one?”

  “Of course I do,” said Molly McNamara. “For heaven’s sake.”

  When Joe Winder got to work, Charles Chelsea was waiting in yet another blue oxford shirt. He was sitting on the edge of Winder’s desk in a pose of casual superiority. A newspaper was freshly folded under one arm. “Fine job on the press release,” Chelsea said. “I changed a word or two, but otherwise it went out just like you wrote it.”