Native Tongue

by Carl Hiaasen

  Police authorities reported today that the blue-tongued mango voles stolen this week from the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills are probably dead. According to the Florida Highway Patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the rare mammals—believed to be the last of the species—were killed while crossing a highway after being abandoned by the robbers who took them.

  Francis X. Kingsbury, founder and chairman of the Amazing Kingdom, expressed shock and sorrow at the news. “This is a tragedy for all of us at the park,” he said Wednesday. “We had come to love and admire Vance and Violet. They were as much a part of our family as Robbie Raccoon or Petey Possum.”

  Mr. Kingsbury, who had offered $1 million for the safe return of the missing animals, said he will use part of the money as a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the crime.

  A radical outlaw group calling itself the Wildlife Rescue Corps has claimed responsibility for the robbery at the popular amusement resort. Mr. Kingsbury said he was “shocked and dismayed that anyone claiming to support such a cause would commit crimes of violence—crimes that ultimately led not only to the animals’ deaths, but to the extinction of an entire species.”

  Charles Chelsea, vice president in charge of public relations, said that the blue-tongued mango voles were provided with the best possible care while in captivity at the Amazing Kingdom. Only last year, the Florida Audubon Society praised the Vole Project as “a shining example of private enterprise using its vast financial resources to save a small but precious resource of nature.”

  Next week, the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills will present a multi-media retrospective featuring slides and videotapes of the voles during their time at the park. Entitled “Vance and Violet: The Final Days,” the presentation will be shown three times daily at the Rare Animal Pavilion.

  Tickets will be $4 for adults, $2.75 for children and senior citizens.

  In the cafeteria, Charles Chelsea handed Joe Winder the fax and said, “Nice job, big guy.”

  Winder stopped on the last sentence. “You’re charging money? For a goddamn slide show?”

  “Joey, we’re running a business here. We’re not the National Geographic, okay? We’re not a charity.”

  “A rodent slide show.” Joe Winder wadded up the press release. “The amazing thing is not that you’d do it, because I’d think you’d charge tourists twenty bucks to watch the pelicans fuck, if they’d let you. The amazing thing is, people will actually come and pay.” He clapped his hands once, loudly. “I love this business, Charlie. Every day I learn something new.”

  Chelsea tightened his necktie. “Christ, here we go again. I try to pay you a compliment, and you twist it into some sort of cynical … commentary.”

  “Sorry,” said Winder. He could feel his sinuses filling up like a bathtub.

  “For your information,” said Chelsea, “I got people calling all the way from Alaska, wanting to buy Vance-and-Violet T-shirts.” Chelsea sighed, to show how disappointed he was in Joe Winder’s attitude. Then he said, with an edge of reluctance, “You did some nice writing on this piece, Joe. Got us all off the hook.”

  “Thanks, boss. And you’re right—it was a piece.”

  Chelsea sat down, eyeing the fast-food debris on Joe Winder’s tray. One of Uncle Ely’s Elves, sitting at the other end of the table, belched sonorously. Charles Chelsea pretended not to notice. He said, “Not to brag, Joey, but I think I did a pretty fair job with this ditty myself. Mr. X loved his quotes. He said I made him sound like a real human being.”

  With the tips of his fingers, Joe Winder began to rub both his temples in a ferocious circular motion.

  Chelsea asked, “Now what’s the matter?”

  “Headache.” Winder squinted as tightly as he could, to wring the pain out of his eyeballs. “Listen, I called Dr. Koocher’s house. He didn’t go home last night. His wife is scared out of her mind.”

  “Maybe he just got depressed and tied one on. Or maybe he’s got a girlfriend.”

  Joe Winder decided not to tell Chelsea that Koocher had tried to reach him. “His wife’s eight months pregnant, Charlie. She says he usually calls about nineteen times an hour, but she hasn’t heard a word since yesterday.”

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “Worry like hell,” said Winder. He stood up. “Also, I’d like your permission to talk to Pedro Luz. I think he’s hiding something.”

  Charles Chelsea said, “You can’t talk to him, Joe. He’s in the hospital.” He paused wearily and shook his head. “Don’t ask.”

  “Come on, Charlie.”

  “For rabies shots.”

  “I should’ve guessed,” Winder said. “My condolences to the dog.”

  “It wasn’t a dog,” Chelsea said. “Can’t this wait till tomorrow? Pedro’s in a lot of pain.”

  “No,” said Joe Winder, “that’s perfect.”

  Pedro Luz had been taken to the closest emergency room, which was Mariners’ Hospital down on Plantation Key. The nurse on duty remembered Pedro Luz very well, and directed Joe Winder to a private room on the second floor.

  He didn’t bother to knock, just eased the door open. The impressive bulk of Pedro Luz was propped up in bed, watching a Spanish-language soap opera on Channel 23. He was sucking on one end of the plastic IV tube, which he had yanked out of his arm.

  “That doesn’t go in your mouth,” Winder told him.

  “Yeah, well, I’m thirsty.”

  “You’re bleeding all over the place.”

  “What do you care?” said Pedro Luz. With a corner of the sheet he swabbed the blood from his arm. “You better get out of here. I mean right now.”

  Joe Winder pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down. Pedro Luz smelled like a fifty-five-gallon drum of rubbing alcohol. His luxuriant hair stood in oily black spikes, and his massive neck was covered with angry purple acne, a side effect of the fruit-and-steroid bodybuilding diet.

  “You like your job?” Winder asked him.

  “What do you mean—at the Kingdom? Sure, I guess.” The security man pulled the covers off his legs, so Joe Winder could see the bandages on his ferret-gnawed ankle. “Except for shit like this,” said Pedro Luz. “Otherwise, it’s an okay job most of the time.”

  Winder said, “So you really wouldn’t want to get fired.”

  “The hell are you talking about?”

  “For lying. I think you’re lying.”

  “What about?”

  Joe Winder said, “Don’t play dumb with me.” As if the guy had a choice. “Tell me why you sent a man to Koocher’s lab yesterday. I know you did, because he called me about it.”

  Pedro Luz got red in the cheeks. The cords in his neck stood out like a rutting bull’s. “I already told you,” he said. “I don’t have no report on that guy.”

  “He’s missing from the park.”

  “Then I’ll do up a report,” Pedro Luz said. He breathed deeply, as if trying to calm himself. “Soon as I get outta here, I’ll make a report.” He took the IV tube out of his mouth. “This stuff’s not so bad,” he said thoughtfully. “Tastes like sugar syrup.” He replaced the tube between his lips and sucked on it loudly.

  Joe Winder said, “You’re a moron.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Make that a submoron.”

  Pedro Luz shrugged. “I’d beat the piss out of you, if I didn’t feel so bad. They gave me about a million shots.” He leered woozily and opened his gown. “See, they broke two needles on my stomach.”

  Joe Winder couldn’t help but admire Pedro Luz’s physique. He could see the bright crimson spots where the hypodermics had bent against the muscle.

  “Least I won’t get the rabies,” said Pedro Luz, drawing merrily on the tube. “You oughta take off, before I start feeling better.”

  Winder stood up and slid the chair back to its corner. “Last chance, Hercules. Tell me why you sent a man to the lab yesterday.”

  “Or else what?” />
  “Or we play ‘This Is Your Life, Pedro Dipshit.’ I tell Kingsbury’s people all about your sterling employment record with the Miami Police Department. I might even give them a copy of the indictment. A spine-chilling saga, Pedro. Not for the meek and mild.”

  Pedro Luz removed the tube and wiped his lips on the sleeve of his gown. He looked genuinely puzzled. “But they know,” he said. “They know all about it.”

  “And they hired you anyway?”

  “’Course,” said Pedro Luz. “It was Kingsbury himself. He said every man deserves a second chance.”

  “I admire that philosophy,” Joe Winder said, “most of the time.”

  “Yeah, well, Mr. X took a personal liking to me. That’s why I’m not too worried about all your bullshit.”

  “Yes,” said Joe Winder, “I’m beginning to understand.”

  “Because you couldn’t get me fired no matter what,” said Pedro Luz. “And you know what else? Don’t never call me a moron again, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “I guess I don’t,” said Joe Winder. “Obviously.”

  7

  The ticket taker at the Wet Willy attraction was trying to control his temper. Firm, but friendly. That’s how you deal with difficult customers; that’s what they taught in ticket-taker training.

  The young man, who was new on the job, said, “I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t cut to the front of the line. These other people have been waiting for a long time.”

  “These other people,” the man said, “tell me, do they own this fucking joint?”

  The ticket taker did not recognize Francis X. Kingsbury, who wore thong sandals, baggy pastel swim trunks and no shirt. He also had a stopwatch hanging from a red lanyard around his neck.

  “Now, you don’t want me to call Security,” the ticket taker said.

  “Nothing but idiots,” Kingsbury muttered, pushing his pallid belly through the turnstile. He shuffled up two flights of stairs to the launching ramp, and dropped to all fours.

  The Wet Willy ride was one of the Amazing Kingdom’s most popular thrill attractions, and one of the cheapest to operate. A marvel of engineering simplicity, it was nothing but a long translucent latex tube. The inside was painted in outrageous psychedelic hues, and kept slippery with drain water diverted at no cost from nearby drinking fountains. The narrow tube descended from a height of approximately six stories, with riders plunging downhill at an average angle of twenty-seven exhilarating degrees.

  Francis X. Kingsbury was exceptionally proud of the Wet Willy because the whole contraption had been his idea, his concept. The design engineers at the Amazing Kingdom had wanted something to compete with Disney’s hugely successful Space Mountain ride. Kingsbury had collected all the press clippings about Space Mountain and used a bright yellow marker to emphasize his contempt for the project, particularly the development cost. “Seventeen million bucks,” he had scoffed, “for a frigging roller ride in the dark.”

  The engineers had earnestly presented several options for the Amazing Kingdom—Jungle Coaster, Moon Coaster, Alpine Death Coaster—but Kingsbury rejected each for the obvious reason that roller-coaster cars and roller-coaster tracks cost money. So did the electricity needed to run them.

  “Gravity!” Kingsbury had grumped. “The most under-used energy source on the planet.”

  “So you’re suggesting a slide,” ventured one of the engineers. “Maybe a water slide.”

  Kingsbury had shaken his head disdainfully. Slides look cheap, he’d complained, we’re not running a goddamn State Fair. A tube would be better, a sleek space-age tube.

  “Think condom,” he had advised the engineers. “A three-hundred-foot condom.”

  And so the Wet Willy was erected. Instantly it had become a sensation among tourists at the park, a fact that edified Kingsbury’s belief that the illusion of quality is more valuable than quality itself.

  Lately, though, ridership figures for the Wet Willy had shown a slight but troubling decline. Francis X. Kingsbury decided to investigate personally, without notifying the engineers, the ticket takers, the Security Department or anyone else at the park. He wanted to test his theory that the ride had become less popular because it had gotten slower. The stopwatch would tell the story.

  The way the Wet Willy was designed, a 110-pound teenager would be able to slide headlong from the ramp to the gelatin-filled landing sac in exactly 22.7 seconds. Marketing specialists had calibrated the time down to the decimal point—the ride needed to be long enough to make customers think they were getting their money’s worth, yet fast enough to seem dangerous and exciting.

  Francis X. Kingsbury weighed considerably more than 110 pounds as he crawled into the slippery chute. Ahead of him, he saw the wrinkled bare soles of a child disappear swiftly into the tube, as if flushed down a rubber commode. Kingsbury pressed the button on the stopwatch, eased to his belly and pushed off. He held his arms at his sides, like an otter going down a riverbank. In this case, an overweight otter in a ridiculous Jack Kemp hairpiece.

  Kingsbury grimaced as he swooshed downward, skimming on a thin plane of clammy water. He thought: This is supposed to be fun? The stopwatch felt cold and hard against his breastbone. The bright colors on the walls of the tube did little to lift his spirits; he noticed that some of the reds had faded to pink, and the blues were runny. Not only that, sections of the chute seemed irregular and saggy, as if the latex were giving way.

  He took his eyes off the fabric long enough to notice, with alarm, that he was gaining on the youngster who had entered the Wet Willy ahead of him. Suddenly Kingsbury was close enough to hear the child laughing, oblivious to the danger—no! Close enough to make out the grinning, bewhiskered visage of Petey Possum waving from the rump of the youngster’s swimming trunks.

  “Shit,” said Kingsbury. Feverishly he tried to brake, digging into the rubber with his toes and fingernails. It was no use: gravity ruled the Wet Willy.

  Kingsbury overtook the surprised child and they became one, hurtling down the slick pipe in a clumsy union of tangled torsos.

  “Hey!” the kid cried. “You’re smushing me!” It was a boy, maybe nine or ten, with bright red hair and freckles all over his neck. Francis X. Kingsbury now steered the kid as if he were a toboggan.

  They hit the gelatin sac at full speed and disengaged. The boy came out of the goo bawling, followed by Kingsbury, who was studying the dial of the stopwatch and frowning. He seemed not to notice the solemn group waiting outside the exit: the earnest young ticket taker, plus three uniformed security men. All were breathing heavily, as if they had run the whole way.

  The ticket taker pointed at Kingsbury and said, “That’s him. Except he wasn’t bald before.”

  The security men, all former crooked cops recruited by Pedro Luz, didn’t move. They recognized Mr. X right away.

  The ticket taker said, “Get him, why don’t you!”

  “Yeah,” said the red-haired tourist kid. “He hurt me.”

  “Mildew,” said Francis X. Kingsbury, still preoccupied. “Fucking mildew under my fingernails.” He looked up and, to no one in particular, said: “Call Maintenance and have them Lysol the Willy, A-S-A-P.”

  The tourist kid raised the pitch of his whining so that it was impossible to ignore. “That’s the man who tried to smush me. On my bottom!”

  “Give the little turd a free pass to the Wild Bill Hiccup,” said Francis X. Kingsbury. “And him,” pointing at the ticket taker, “throw his ass, I mean it, off the property.”

  The boy with the Petey Possum swimsuit ran off, sniffling melodramatically. As the security men surrounded the ticket taker, Kingsbury said, “What, like it takes three of you monkeys?”

  The men hesitated. All were reluctant to speak.

  “You,” Kingsbury said, nodding at the smallest of the guards. “Go back up and slide this goddamn tube. Yeah, you heard me. See if you can beat twenty-seven-point-two.”

  The security man nodded doubtfully. “All right, sir.
”

  “Yeah, and my hair,” said Kingsbury, “it’s up there somewhere. Grab it on the way down.”

  Bud Schwartz paused at the door and looked back. “It don’t seem right,” he said. “Maybe just the VCR.”

  “Forget it.” Danny Pogue was rocking on his crutches down by the elevator. “Where we gonna hide anything? Come on, Bud, let’s just go.”

  The elevator came and Danny Pogue clumped in. With one crutch he held the elevator door and waited for his partner. Bud Schwartz was trying to tear himself away from Molly McNamara’s fancy condo. “Look at all this shit we’re leaving behind,” he said longingly. “We could probably get five hundred easy for the Dolbys.”

  Danny Pogue leaned out of the elevator. “And how the fuck we supposed to carry ’em? Me with these toothpicks and you with one good arm. Would you get your ass moving, please, before the bitch comes back?”

  As they rode to the first floor, Danny Pogue said, “Besides, we got no car.”

  Bud Schwartz grunted sourly, wondering what became of the blue pickup. “I feel like she owes us.”

  “She does owe us. She owes us eight grand, to be exact. But we agreed it wasn’t worth waiting, right?”

  “I mean, owes us for this.” Bud Schwartz brandished a gauze-wrapped hand. “Shooting us, for no good reason.”

  “She’s a nut case. She don’t need a reason.” They got off the elevator and for once Danny Pogue led the way, swinging on his crutches.

  They could see the gatehouse at the main entrance, on the other side of the condominium complex. Rather than follow the sidewalks, they decided to shorten the trip by cutting across the grounds, which were sparsely landscaped and dimly lit. In the still of the evening, the high-rise community of Eagle Ridge was at rest, except for a noisy bridge tournament being held in the rec room. On the screened porches of ground-floor apartments, couples could be seen watering their plants or feeding their cats.

  As the two outsiders made their way across the darkened shuffleboard courts, Danny Pogue’s left crutch gave out and he went down with a cry.