Native Tongue

by Carl Hiaasen

  “Shit,” he said, thinking of the bleak possibilities.

  “Don’t jump the gun,” said Danny Pogue, for once the optimist.

  They made it back to the condo in twenty-two minutes, parked the rental car and went upstairs. The door to Molly’s apartment was unlocked. Bud Schwartz knocked twice anyway. “It’s just us,” he announced lightly, “Butch and Sundance.”

  When he went in, he saw that the place had been torn apart. “Oh Jesus,” he said.

  Danny Pogue pushed him with the crutch. “I can’t fucking believe it,” he said. “Somebody hit the place.”

  “No,” said Bud Schwartz, “it’s more than that.”

  The sofas had been slit, chairs broken, mirrors shattered. A ceramic Siamese cat had been smashed face-first through the big-screen television. While Danny Pogue hopscotched through the rubble, Bud Schwartz went directly to the bedroom, which also had been ransacked and vandalized. He reached under the mattress and found the Kingsbury files exactly where he had left them. Whoever did the place hadn’t been looking very hard, if at all.

  A hoarse shout came from the kitchen.

  Bud Schwartz found Danny Pogue on his knees next to Molly McNamara. She lay on her back, with one leg folded crookedly under the other. Her housecoat, torn and stained with something dark, was bunched around her hips. Her face had been beaten to pulp; beads of blood glistened like holly berries in her snowy hair. Her eyes were closed and her lips were gray, but she was breathing—raspy, irregular gulps.

  Danny Pogue took Molly’s wrist. “God Almighty,” he said, voice quavering. “What—who do we call?”

  “Nobody.” Bud Schwartz shook his head ruefully. “Don’t you understand, we can’t call nobody.” He bent down and put his bandaged hand on Molly’s forehead. “Who the hell would do this to an old lady?”

  “I hope she don’t die.”

  “Me too,” said Bud Schwartz. “Honest to God, this ain’t right.”

  l7

  Joe Winder’s trousers were soaked from the thighs down. Nina took a long look and said, “You’ve been fishing.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the middle of the day.”

  “The fish are all gone,” Winder said dismally. “Ever since they bulldozed the place.”

  Nina sat cross-legged on the floor. She wore blue-jean shorts and a pink cotton halter; the same outfit she’d been wearing the day he’d met her, calling out numbers at the Seminole bingo hall. Joe Winder had gone there to meet an Indian named Sammy Deer, who purportedly was selling an airboat, but Sammy Deer had hopped over to Freeport for the weekend, leaving Joe Winder stuck with three hundred chain-smoking white women in the bingo hall. Halfway out the door, he’d heard Nina’s voice (“Q 34; Q, as in ‘quicksilver,’ 34!”), spun around and went back to see if she looked as lovely as she sounded, and she had. Nina informed him that she was part-timing as a bingo caller until the telephone gig came through, and he confided to her that he was buying an airboat so he could disappear into the Everglades at will. He changed his plans after their first date.

  Now, analyzing her body language, Joe Winder knew that he was in danger of losing Nina’s affections. A yellow legal pad was propped on her lap. She tapped on a bare knee with her felt-tipped pen, which she held as a drummer would.

  “What happened to your big meeting?” she said. “Why aren’t you at the Kingdom?”

  He pretended not to hear. He said, “They dumped a ton of fill in the cove. The bottom’s mucky and full of cut trees.” He removed his trousers and arranged them crookedly on a wire hanger. “All against the law, of course. Dumping in a marine sanctuary.”

  Nina said, “You got canned, is that it?”

  “A mutual parting of the ways, and not a particularly amicable one.” Joe Winder sat down beside her. He sensed a lecture coming on.

  “Put on some pants,” she said.

  “What’s the point?”

  Nina asked why his tongue was blue, and he told her the story of the bogus mango voles. She said she didn’t believe a word.

  “Charlie practically admitted everything.”

  “I don’t really care,” Nina said. She stopped drumming on her kneecap and turned away.

  “What is it?”

  “Look, I can’t afford to support you.” When she looked back at him, her eyes were moist and angry. “Things were going so well,” she said.

  Winder was stunned. Was she seriously worried about the money? “Nina, there’s a man dead. Don’t you understand? I can’t work for a murderer.”

  “Stop it!” She shook the legal pad in front of his nose. “You know what I’ve been working on? Extra scripts. The other girls like my stuff so much they offered to buy, like, two or three a week. Twenty-five bucks each, it could really add up.”

  “That’s great.” He was proud of her, that was the hell of it. She’d never believe that he could be proud of her.

  Pen in mouth, Nina said: “I wrote about an out-of-body experience. Like when you’re about to die and you can actually see yourself lying there—but then you get saved at the very last minute. Only my script was about making love, about floating out of yourself just as you’re about to come. Suspended in air, I looked down at the bed and saw myself shudder violently, my fingernails raking across your broad tan shoulders. I gave it to the new girl, Addie, and she tried it Friday night. One guy, she said, he called back eleven times.”

  “Is that a new record?”

  “It just so happens, yes. But the point is, I’m looking at a major opportunity. If I start selling enough scripts, maybe I can get off the phones. Just stay home and write—wouldn’t that be better?”

  “Sure would.” Winder put his arm around her. “You can still do that, honey. It would be great.”

  “Not with you sitting here every day. Playing your damn Warren Zevon.”

  “I’ll get another job.”

  “No, Joe, it’ll be the same old shit.” She pulled away and got up from the floor. “I can’t write when my life is in turmoil. I need a stabilizer. Peacefulness. Quiet.”

  Winder felt wounded. “For God’s sake, Nina, I know a little something about writing. This place is plenty quiet.”

  “There is tension,” she said grimly, “and don’t deny it.”

  “Writers thrive on domestic tension. Look at Poe, Hemingway—and Mailer in his younger days, you talk about tense.” He hoped Nina would appreciate being included on such an eminent roster, but she didn’t. Impatiently he said, “It isn’t exactly epic literature, anyway. It’s phone porn.”

  Her expression clouded. “Phone porn? Thanks, Joe.”

  “Well, Christ, that’s what it is.”

  Coldly she folded her arms and leaned against one of the tall speakers. “It’s still writing, and writing is hard work. If I’m going to make a go of it, I need some space. And some security.”

  “If you’re talking about groceries, don’t worry. I intend to pull my own weight.”

  Nina raised her hands in exasperation. “Where can you find another job that pays so much?”

  Joe Winder couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Why the sudden anxiety? The laying on of guilt? If he’d known he was in for a full-blown argument, he indeed would have put on some pants.

  Nina said, “It’s not just the money. I need someone reliable, someone who will be here for me.”

  “Have I ever let you down?”

  “No, but you will.”

  Winder didn’t say anything because she was absolutely correct; nothing in his immediate plans would please her.

  “I know you,” Nina added, in a sad voice. “You aren’t going to let go of this thing.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then I think we’re definitely heading in different directions. I think you’re going to end up in jail, or maybe dead.”

  “Have some faith,” Joe Winder said.

  “It’s not that easy.” Nina stalked to the closet, flung open the door and stared at the clutter. “Where’d
you put my suitcase?”

  In the mid-1970s, Florida elected a crusading young governor named Clinton Tyree, an ex-football star and Vietnam War veteran. At six feet six, he was the tallest chief executive in the history of the state. In all likelihood he was also the most honest. When a ravenous and politically connected land-development company attempted to bribe Clinton Tyree, he tape-recorded their offers, turned the evidence over to the FBI and volunteered to testify at the trial. By taking a public stand against such omnipotent forces, Clinton Tyree became something of a folk hero in the Sunshine State, and beyond. The faint scent of integrity attracted the national media, which roared into Florida and anointed the young governor a star of the new political vanguard.

  It was, unfortunately, a vanguard of one. Clinton Tyree spoke with a blistering candor that terrified his fellow politicians. While others reveled in Florida’s boom times, Clinton Tyree warned that the state was on the brink of an environmental cataclysm. The Everglades were drying up, the coral reefs were dying, Lake Okeechobee was choking on man-made poisons and the bluegills were loaded with mercury. While other officeholders touted Florida as a tropical dreamland, the governor called it a toxic dump with palm trees. On a popular call-in radio show, he asked visitors to stay away for a couple of years. He spoke not of managing the state’s breakneck growth, but of halting it altogether. This, he declared, was the only way to save the place.

  The day Clinton Tyree got his picture on the cover of a national newsmagazine, some of the most powerful special interests in Florida—bankers, builders, highway contractors, sugar barons, phosphate-mining executives—congealed in an informal conspiracy to thwart the new governor’s reforms by stepping around him, as if he were a small lump of dogshit on an otherwise luxuriant carpet.

  Bypassing Clinton Tyree was relatively easy to do; all it took was money. In a matter of months, everyone who could be compromised, intimidated or bought off was. The governor found himself isolated from even his own political party, which had no stake in his radical bluster because it was alienating all the big campaign contributors. Save Florida? Why? And from what? The support that Clinton Tyree enjoyed among voters didn’t help him one bit in the back rooms of Tallahassee; every bill he wanted passed got gutted, buried or rebuffed. The fact that he was popular with the media didn’t deter his enemies; it merely softened their strategy. Rather than attack the governor’s agenda, they did something worse—they ignored it. Only the most gentlemanly words were publicly spoken about young Clint, the handsome war hero, and about his idealism and courage to speak out. Any reporter who came to town could fill two or three notebooks with admiring quotes—so many (and so effusive) that someone new to the state might have assumed that Clinton Tyree had already died, which he had, in a way.

  On the morning the Florida Cabinet decided to shut down a coastal wildlife preserve and sell it dirt cheap to a powerful land-sales firm, the lone dissenting vote trudged from the Capitol Building in disgust and vanished from the political landscape in the back of a limousine.

  At first authorities presumed that the governor was the victim of a kidnapping or other foul play. A nationwide manhunt was suspended only after a notarized resignation letter was analyzed by the FBI and found to be authentic. It was true; the crazy bastard had up and quit.

  Journalists, authors and screenwriters flocked to Florida with hopes of securing exclusive rights to the renegade governor’s story, but none could find him. Consequently, nothing was written that even bordered on the truth.

  Which was this: Clinton Tyree now went by the name of Skink, and lived in those steamy clawing places where he was least likely to be bothered by human life-forms. For fifteen years the governor had been submerged in an expatriation that was deliberately remote and anonymous, if not entirely tranquil.

  Joe Winder wanted to talk about what happened in Tallahassee. “I read all the stories,” he said. “I went back and looked up the microfiche.”

  “Then you know all there is to know.” Skink was on his haunches, poking the embers with a stick. Winder refused to look at what was frying in the pan.

  He said, “All this time and they never found you.”

  “They quit searching,” Skink said. A hot ash caught in a wisp of his beard. He snuffed it with two fingers. “I don’t normally eat soft-shell turtle,” he allowed.

  “Me neither,” said Joe Winder.

  “The flavor makes up for the texture.”

  “I bet.” Winder knelt on the other side of the fire.

  Out of the blue Skink said, “Your old man wasn’t a bad guy, but he was in a bad business.”

  Winder heard himself agree. “He never understood what was so wrong about it. Or why I was so goddamn mad. He died not having a clue.”

  Skink lifted the turtle by the tail and stuck a fork in it. “Ten more minutes,” he said, “at least.”

  It wasn’t easy trying to talk with him this way, but Winder wouldn’t give up: “It’s been an interesting day. In the space of two hours I lost my job and my girlfriend.”

  “Christ, you sound like Dobie Gillis.”

  “The job was shit, I admit. But I was hoping Nina would stay strong. She’s one in a million.”

  “Love,” said Skink, “it’s just a kiss away.”

  Dejectedly, Winder thought: I’m wasting my time. The man couldn’t care less. “I came to ask about a plan,” Winder said. “I’ve been racking my brain.”

  “Come on, I want to show you something.” Skink rose slowly and stretched, and the blaze-orange rainsuit made a crackling noise. He pulled the shower cap tight on his skull and, in high steps, marched off through the trees. To the west, the sky boiled with fierce purple thunderheads.

  “Keep it moving,” Skink advised, over his shoulder.

  Joe Winder followed him to the same dumpsite where the corpse of Spearmint Breath had been hidden. When they walked past the junker Cadillac, Winder noted that the trunk was open, and empty. He didn’t ask about the body. He didn’t want to know.

  Skink led him through a hazardous obstacle course of discarded household junk—shells of refrigerators, ripped sofas, punctured mattresses, crippled Barcaloungers, rusty barbecue grills, disemboweled air conditioners—until they came to a very old Plymouth station wagon, an immense egg-colored barge with no wheels and no windshield. A yellow beach umbrella sprouted like a giant marigold from the dashboard, and offered minimal protection from blowing rain or the noonday sun. Skink got in the car and ordered Joe Winder to do the same.

  The Plymouth was full of books—hundreds of volumes arranged lovingly from the tailgate to the front. With considerable effort, Skink turned completely in the front seat; he propped his rear end on the warped steering wheel. “This is where I come to read,” he said. “Believe it or not, the dome light in this heap still works.”

  Joe Winder ran a finger along the spines of the books, and found himself smiling at the exhilarating variety of writers: Churchill, Hesse, Sandburg, Steinbeck, Camus, Paine, Wilde, Vonnegut, de Tocqueville, Salinger, García Márquez, even Harry Crews.

  “I put a new battery in this thing,” Skink was saying. “This time of year I’ve got to run the AC at least two, three hours a day. To stop the damn mildew.”

  “So there’s gas in this car?” Winder asked.

  “Sure.”

  “But no wheels.”

  Skink shrugged. “Where the hell would I be driving?”

  A cool stream of wind rushed through the open windshield, and overhead the yellow beach umbrella began to flap noisily. A fat drop of rain splatted on the hood, followed by another and another.

  “Damn,” said Skink. He put a shoulder to the door and launched himself out of the station wagon. “Hey, Flack, you coming or not?”

  The storm came hard and they sat through it, huddled like Sherpas. The campfire washed out, but the soft-shelled turtle was cooked to perfection. Skink chewed intently on its tail and blinked the raindrops from his good eye; the other one fogged up like a broken headl
ight. Water trickled down his bronze cheeks, drenching his beard. Lightning cracked so close they could smell it—Winder ducked, but Skink showed no reaction, even when thunder rattled the coffeepot.

  He adjusted the blaze weather suit to cover the electronic panther collar on his neck. “They say it’s waterproof, but I don’t know.”

  Winder could scarcely hear him over the drum of the rain against the trees. Lightning flashed again, and reflexively he shut his eyes.

  Skink raised his voice: “You know about that new golf resort?”

  “I saw where they’re putting it.”

  “No!” Skink was shouting now. “You know who’s behind it? That fucking Kingsbury!”

  The wind was getting worse, if that was possible. With his free hand, Skink wrung out the tendrils of his beard. “Goddammit, man, are you listening? It all ties together.”

  “What—with Koocher’s death?”

  “Everything—” Skink paused for another white sizzle of lightning. “Every damn thing.”

  It made sense to Winder. A scandal at the Amazing Kingdom wouldn’t only be bad for business, it might jeopardize Francis Kingsbury’s plans for developing Falcon Trace. If anyone revealed that he’d lied about the “endangered” voles, the feds might roll in and halt the whole show. The EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Interior—they could jerk Kingsbury around until he died of old age.

  “Look at the big picture,” Skink said. With a tin fork he cleaned out the insides of the turtle shell. The wind was dying quickly, and the rain was turning soft on the leaves. The clouds broke out west, revealing raspberry patches of summer sunset. The coolness disappeared and the air turned muggy again.

  Skink put down the fry pan and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his rainsuit. “It’s beautiful out here,” he remarked. “That squall felt damn good.”

  “It might be too late,” Joe Winder said. “Hell, they’ve started clearing the place.”

  “I know.” The muscles in Skink’s neck tightened. “They tore down an eagle nest the other day. Two little ones, dead. That’s the kind of bastards we’re talking about.”