Nature Girl

by Carl Hiaasen

  Fry squirmed and said, “Better hurry.”

  Eugenie Fonda snatched up the camera case and took off. She laughed when she heard him call out: “Wait! Are you sure you don’t want your pearl?”

  Priceless, she thought. One in a million.

  Shortly before sunrise, the U.S. Coast Guard station in Fort Myers Beach had received a call from Fort Worth, Texas. A woman who gave her name as Lily Shreave reported that a cousin named Dealey had contacted her by cellular phone to say he was stranded without provisions on an unknown island near the town of Everglades City. The woman said her cousin was a well-known nature photographer working on a documentary about orphaned pelicans. She said he suffered from a rare condition known as aphenphosmphobia, of which the petty officer taking the report had never heard and didn’t even attempt to spell. Ms. Shreave went on to say that her cousin was in dire need of his anti-aphenphosmphobia medication, which he’d forgotten on the front seat of a rental car parked at his motel.

  When the petty officer inquired how Mr. Dealey had come to be marooned, his cousin said he’d blacked out in a small boat while photographing a rookery. She said the battery in her cousin’s phone had gone dead during his call, so she had no other information to help pinpoint the location. She provided a thorough description of the missing man—fifty-seven years old, brown eyes, balding, five ten, 215 pounds. Ms. Shreave also said he was wearing a slate-gray Brooks Brothers suit. When the Coast Guard officer remarked that such attire seemed strange for a field trip to the Ten Thousand Islands, Ms. Shreave explained that her cousin, like many artistic types, was an eccentric.

  At 0700 hours, an HH60 Jayhawk helicopter carrying a search-and-rescue crew lifted off and headed south along the coast, passing directly over Naples, Marco Island and then Cape Romano Shoals. The chopper angled slightly toward the mainland and dropped altitude before looping around the fishing village of Chokoloskee. The pilot then banked westward to place the rising sun behind the spotters who would be searching the green tapestry of mangroves and hammocks for Mr. Dealey. It was a limpid morning, and visibility was superb.

  Lily Shreave was rolling up her yoga mat when a Coast Guard ensign called with good news. Her “cousin” had been pulled alive from a creek near an uninhabited island called Dismal Key, a few nautical miles outside the boundary of Everglades National Park. Also rescued were two women, who gave their names as Gillian St. Croix and Jean Leigh Hill and stated their respective occupations as a TV weather personality and a freelance videographer.

  Ms. Shreave said she had no idea who they were.

  Twenty-two

  As soon as Boyd Shreave heard the helicopter, he began scrambling up the old poinciana. Without Honey’s assistance he couldn’t reach the top, but he got high enough to consider it a lifetime achievement.

  As a boy, Shreave had avoided tree play, impaired as he was by flabby musculature and a loathing for exertion. Now, wedged snugly into a crook of three branches, he felt like he belonged in an episode of Survivor, his favorite TV reality show. Every season a crop of youthful competitors was deposited on some remote tropical location and put through a delightfully pointless series of physical challenges resulting in the elimination of the weak and unreliable. While the program usually featured one or two contestants who were as desultory and unathletic as Shreave himself, he never rooted for them. It was the sunburned babes in their frayed cutoffs and ill-fitting halters whom he avidly tuned in to watch.

  From the tree, Shreave flagged his arms and hollered for help. The crew of the hovering helicopter never glanced his way, and Shreave realized that he needed to go higher. However, he was intimidated by the prospect of scaling to a more visible position above the canopy—the breezy conditions, the slipperiness of the branches and his own lack of agility argued for caution.

  From a pocket of his windbreaker he extracted what he falsely believed to be a portable marine radio, which along with two granola bars he’d pilfered from Honey’s belongings after she was snatched by the club-handed lunatic. Shreave started pressing buttons on the compact gadget and barking, “Mayday! Mayday!”

  There was no response from the Coast Guard pilot or any other human, and for good reason. Except for its LED screen, the instrument in Shreave’s possession was electronically dissimilar to a radio in all significant respects. Most crucial was the absence of either an audio receiver or a transmitter.

  “SOS! SOS!” he persisted. “Help!”

  The device was in fact a mobile GPS unit, as technologically impenetrable to Shreave as the Taser gun he’d found beneath Honey’s bed. Commonly carried by boaters, campers and hunters, a GPS enables users to precisely track and then retrace their movements anywhere on the planet. Satellites record intermediate points in longitude and latitude in the instrument’s memory, which displays the information in a mapping format so elementary that even a drooling moron can read it.

  Not Boyd Shreave. The singular result of his frantic button pushing was to engage the satellite signal and successfully identify his location as approximately 81°33' west of the prime meridian and 25°53' north of the equator. However, the flashing numerals were a meaningless jumble to Shreave.

  “Mayday! SOS! Nine one one!” he screamed at the mute GPS as he watched the orange-and-white helicopter repositioning above the creek. From his bushy perch, Shreave couldn’t see what the Coast Guard spotters saw, so he was unable to appreciate their gallantry and resourcefulness. A routine search mission for an ailing middle-aged photographer had been complicated by the unexpected appearance of not one but two extremely attractive female evacuees.

  The first woman had dived nearly naked into the chilly water to assist the wayward photographer as he clung to a small overturned vessel. Minutes later the second woman had emerged in a yellow kayak from the mangroves, waving what appeared to be a festively colored undergarment at the chopper. Swiftly the crew members took action to expand the retrieval operation, proceeding with an unbreakable focus and esprit de corps that reduced to zero the chances of them noticing a lone pale figure halfway up a distant tree and obscured by heavy foliage.

  Bitterness engulfed Boyd Shreave as three times an empty basket unspooled from a cable in the belly of the aircraft, and three times the basket ascended holding a blanketed human form. Shreave was too far away to see who was being rescued; he knew only that it wasn’t he. When the helicopter buzzed away, he thought: Screwed again.

  A silken quiet fell briefly over the island, but soon the seabirds began to pipe and the trees began to stir. From his lonely roost, Shreave watched a zebra-striped butterfly alight on a nearby poinciana leaf. With a sour cackle he hurled the GPS at it.

  He missed by three feet, and the butterfly flitted away.

  In the four years following her divorce, Honey Santana had gone out with five men. Only three of them got a second date, and only two of them got to see her bedroom.

  The first was Dale Rozelle, who had advertised himself as a professional bowler from Boca Grande. He was thin and handsome and eleven years younger than Perry Skinner. During sex he slapped his own ass and grunted like a constipated hog, which distracted Honey and on at least two occasions awakened Fry down the hall. Honey might have overlooked the barnyard sound effects had Dale Rozelle distinguished himself in other ways, but he had not. An Internet troll by Fry revealed that Dale Rozelle was lying not only about his bowling career but also about his lifetime membership in the Sierra Club, a fictitious credential that he’d correctly surmised would boost his standing with Honey. Disgusted by her own gullibility, she had (against Fry’s counsel) stormed into the bowling alley on Mixed-League Night and confronted the duplicitous shithead in the ninth frame of his last game. The one-sided encounter had ended with Honey dropping a sixteen-pound Brunswick on Dale Rozelle’s left instep. Eventually he agreed not to prosecute, but only after Perry Skinner had promised to pay the medical bills.

  The other man with whom Honey had slept was Fry’s orthodontist, Dr. Tyler Teehorn, whose wife had sold th
eir Volvo sedan and run off to Montserrat with her husband’s star hygienist. It had happened on the same day that Tyler Teehorn was fitting Fry for a retainer, and the man was a mess. That night Honey had dropped her son at Skinner’s house, driven back to Naples and dragged Tyler Teehorn out to Ruby Tuesday’s for a drink. Never had she seen anyone so bereft, and in a moment of rum-soaked pity she’d invited him to go home with her. The sex, while slightly better than Honey had anticipated, was quite obviously the most spectacular in Dr. Tyler Teehorn’s sheltered experience. No sooner had he pulled on his socks than he proclaimed his eternal love for Honey. Not wishing to be the second woman—or possibly the third, considering how hard it was to find a top-flight hygienist—to break Tyler Teehorn’s heart in a twelve-hour span, Honey had murmured an endearment that she’d hoped was adequately tender yet vague. For the next four weeks the man had clung to her like a mollusk. In contrast to Dale Rozelle, Dr. Teehorn’s integrity and devotion were unassailable. Unfortunately, he was a suffocating bore. Ignorant of politics, world affairs and even sports, his personality sparked only when he steered the conversation to the topic of teeth. Honey had finally dumped him during a candlelit dinner when he’d offered to fix her overbite for free.

  “Wake up!” she heard Louis Piejack say, yet she didn’t move. She intended to fake unconsciousness as long as possible. In addition to fracturing her jaw, the gumbo-limbo bludgeon had knocked all the songs out of her head. Inexplicably, the void had filled with that dispiritingly detailed recap of her post-divorce sex life. It made her long for a dual blast of Ethel Merman and the Foo Fighters.

  “Giddup right now!” Piejack snapped.

  The toe of a shoe poked Honey in the ribs, and a fog of fish stink confirmed that Piejack was looming over her. She hoped that her face was so pulped that he would lose interest in raping her.

  “C’mon, goddammit, I didn’t hit you that hard,” he said.

  She noticed a new sound—not a tune, but rather a single distant note, rising in volume. Soon it grew to a sustained chord, complete with percussion. Honey was relieved that Piejack could hear it, too.

  “What the hell?” he cried with alarm.

  Honey recognized the noise and smiled. She peeked up just in time to see an orange-and-white shape streak overhead. Impulsively she tried to shout, but only a bubble of blood came out; the left side of her face was numb, and her tongue felt like she’d been licking broken glass.

  “You be still!” Louis Piejack was ducking and bobbing as he watched for the return of the Coast Guard helicopter. His level of alertness was impressive, considering the gorilla dosage of Vicodin that he’d consumed.

  “Don’t get no ideas,” he warned her.

  Honey was brimming with ideas. Unfortunately, she was also tied to a tree. It had happened while she was knocked out, when the dexterously challenged Piejack had had time to work.

  “Long as we stay still, they won’t never see us,” he said confidently. He hunkered beside her and, with his misassembled hand, stroked her thigh. When he lasciviously wiggled a blackened pinkie, she swatted it away.

  Piejack chuckled. “You’ll feel better soon, angel. When we’re snug at home.”

  Honey knew that he was too weak to carry her; otherwise they’d already be on his boat, speeding back to the mainland. Slowly she sat up, testing the rope that he’d secured to her wrists and then looped around her neck. The fit was tight enough to limit her options—and to make her slightly sorry for having pretended to tie up Boyd Shreave.

  “Damn, I’m thirsty,” Piejack said.

  Honey was parched, too. Her throat felt like she’d been gargling sawdust.

  She heard the chopper hovering nearby yet she couldn’t see it through the trees. Maybe it’s me they’re looking for, she thought, although she couldn’t imagine why. Fry wasn’t expecting her home until the following day, so he had no reason to call out the Coast Guard.

  Unless…

  Honey stiffened.

  …unless it was her ex-husband who’d summoned a search helicopter, which he wouldn’t do unless there was an emergency back in town.

  Like something awful had happened to Fry.

  Honey Santana lunged to her feet, nearly garroting herself. Piejack brought her down with one sharp yank.

  “What’s your problem, woman?” he said.

  Frantically she scanned the sky. A vision became fixed in her mind of Fry motionless on a stretcher in a speeding ambulance. The boy’s head was bandaged and his father was sitting beside him, stroking his hair. The image was so vivid that Honey thought she could hear the ambulance siren above the high drone of the helicopter.

  Then the chopper flew away and the vision faded. Honey was overtaken by a desire to murder Louis Piejack on the spot, and she would have tried had she not been bound by the neck.

  He stood up shakily and said, “Let’s get a move on, ’fore that whirlybird comes back.”

  Honey watched with a bent fascination as Piejack struggled to untie the rope from the tree, no easy task for a man with a set of jumbled fingers. After several frustrating attempts he decided to attack the knot with his teeth, freeing both hands to hoist the gumbo branch as a sobering reminder for Honey to behave.

  Once the rope was loose, he managed to rehitch the free end around his chest. Wordlessly he headed into the woods, leading Honey like a pack mule. They walked for half an hour, following a dense and unfamiliar shoreline until they broke into a large clearing. At one end was an untidy campsite with a small fire pit that was piled with ashes. Piejack tethered Honey to another tree while he rifled the gear belonging to the campers, who were nowhere to be seen. He found an uncapped jug of water, which he guzzled without so much as a glance toward Honey, who was too proud to ask for a drink.

  Louis Piejack tossed the empty water bottle and resumed foraging. He kicked something hard that was wrapped in a blanket, and it made a noise like a cat caught in bedsprings. Piejack kicked open the bundle and revealed a dazzling electric guitar, which he gathered into his foully stained lap.

  Honey felt vindicated. Boyd Shreave had scoffed at her when she said she’d heard guitar music.

  “Can you play one a these?” Piejack asked.

  “Sure.” She was trying not to move her jaws.

  “I’m a piano man myself.” Piejack began tweaking the strings with his infected nubs. “This baby’s worth some cash, ya think?”

  “Go easy, Louis.” Honey was disgusted to see him smearing his rancid bandages across the beautiful finish on the Gibson.

  “Will you do a song for me?”

  “I guess so. If you untie this rope,” Honey said. She couldn’t play a lick, but it was worth a shot.

  Piejack hunched over to work one-handedly on the loops of the knot. As the moist stubble of his whiskers rubbed against her skin, Honey suppressed the urge to chomp a gaping hole in his neck.

  Once her wrists were freed, he gave her the guitar. It was a magnificent thing to hold. With a sleeve she cleaned Piejack’s grease marks off the polished wood.

  He said, “Now do me a love song, angel.”

  “All right, Louis.”

  Strumming lightly, she began to sing:

  Got a noose rope around my throat and a fractured face,

  From a man who swears he loves me true.

  He might break my bones, but he’ll never break my heart

  ’Cause that only belongs to you….

  Piejack wrested the instrument from Honey. “I don’t care for that fuckin’ number.”

  “But there’s twelve more verses,” she said innocently. “It’s called ‘The Trapped on an Island with a Revolting Pervert Blues.’ You never heard it before? Fiona Apple does a killer cover.”

  Piejack flung the Gibson into the fire pit and said, “You ain’t one bit funny.”

  Honey touched the side of her face. She had a bruise the size of a pomegranate where he’d clobbered her with the branch.

  “Louis, may I have a Vicodin?”

  “
I only got the one left—and it’s for me.”

  “Always the gentleman,” she said.

  “We get home, you can have all you want. So quit yer bitchin’.”

  “Where’s this boat of yours, anyway?”

  “Ain’t far now,” he said, although he didn’t sound certain. “Gimme your hands,” he rasped, and fumbled at her neck for the loose end of the rope.

  Honey spotted a bluish glint on the other side of the campsite—a pipe-like object on the ground beneath a bay tree. Piejack caught her staring past him, and he wheeled to see what had grabbed her attention.

  “Jackpot!” he chortled.

  “What is it?”

  “Jackpot! Jackpot!” Piejack wobbled excitedly across the clearing and scooped up his sawed-off shotgun. Waving it high for Honey to see, he cried, “I thought I’d lost ’er for good, but look here!”

  “Wooooo-hooo,” said Honey. She felt like weeping.

  Perry Skinner and Sammy Tigertail had split up to search for Fry. Given his limited wilderness instincts and chronic bad luck, the Indian didn’t expect to find the boy. Yet there he was, in a splash of sunshine, sitting on a Dolphins helmet near a stand of green buttonwoods.

  Fry appeared startled by the arrival of the stranger, though he tried to look brave. Sammy Tigertail introduced himself and said, “Your father’s lookin’ all over creation for you.” He offered some water, but the kid declined.

  “Where is he? My dad.”

  The Indian checked his watch. “We’re supposed to meet up in twenty minutes on the other side of the island.”

  Fry said, “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t know you from the man in the moon.”

  “Your father does. I saved his life once—me and my uncle.”

  The boy eyed him. “When he rolled his truck?”

  Sammy Tigertail said, “Yep. That night on the Trail.”

  “You’re one of the Big Cypress Seminoles?”