Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4)

by James W. Hall

  Peeing as he went, he shuffled down the narrow hallway to the reptile-amphibian room. Worked for a while with the doorknob till the door came open. He went inside.

  The snake cages had doors made of Peg-Board. A few hundred holes for the snake to see out, while the orangutan was unable to see in. He explored the room, pushing on the legs of the cages, testing their balance. Then climbing on top of one and reaching up for the water pipes that ran along the ceiling.

  He hung from a water pipe, then hand over hand he crossed the length of the room. He let himself go, dropping down on the Peg-Board lid of the albino python's cage. A diamondback in the cage beside it struck at the lid of his cage, then thumped it again and again.

  The orangutan paused, bent over, and studied the rattler's cage. Then he hopped back onto the floor and brought his eye close to a small hole in the Peg-Board. The diamondback struck at the ape's eye, and the orangutan jumped back.

  He stood in the middle of the room for a minute and looked at the cages. There were hissing noises, rattles, more thumps.

  The orangutan turned and went to the door, opened it wide. Then he moved back to the cages and one by one he tipped them over. He stood for a moment looking at the snakes coiling out of the debris, then he shuffled back down the narrow hallway.

  Again he climbed onto the overturned desk. He stared up at the water lines running along the ceiling. He jumped up and gripped them both, cold and hot. He squealed and immediately let go. He landed on the desk, and cheeped to himself, rubbing at his burned hand. Two hurt hands now. One with several broken fingers, now this one with a bad burn.

  As he rubbed his blistered hand against his stomach, he watched an albino cobra glide down the hallway.

  CHAPTER 19

  Wednesday morning Allison waited till Harry left for the office before rising from bed. In the kitchen she made coffee, rinsed the huge pile of dishes Harry had stacked in the sink, put them in the dishwasher, wiped down all the counters, swept the floor, straightened, carried out three sacks of garbage. It took her just over an hour to undo weeks of accumulated neglect. She went back upstairs, showered, dressed in the first outfit she laid hands on: faded blue jeans, a green-and-red checked shirt, white Keds.

  By noon she was driving her red Jeep Cherokee west out Coral Way. She cut north to Tamiami Trail, and by the time she was entering the eastern fringes of the Everglades, she had to roll up her windows, turn on the air.

  A clear hot morning, the moderating effects of the cool front had vanished already, and now the sticky subtropical flow had returned. There was some cumulus build-up in the west, the tops of the clouds blowing off to the south, mare's tails, indicating a shift in the winds of the upper atmosphere. Like the winds shifting in her.

  Everything seemed symbolic today, full of portent, all of it exceedingly clear, a perfect match for her inner landscape. No doubt, no confusion anymore. All decisions made, a calm finality. Just a few last details to settle, a few more hours to pass. Methodical, focused.

  Thirty miles west of the city limits, Allison pulled off on an unmarked side road beside Joe Tiger's Authentic Miccosukee Indian Village, followed the road south as it turned to gravel, went further south till it became a tricky blend of sand and muck, and began to head west.

  Surprisingly, the ten-foot chain-link gates were still closed and locked, no tire tracks in the soft sand of her drive. Over a month since she'd been out there and not a single forced entry. That was an all-time record. Usually on the weekends the three-wheelers came in swarms. They'd crowbar open the lock, race around her ten acres, jumping some small hammocks, chew up the mucky ground on the western edge of the property. They must go home covered in black mud. Indian kids, not malicious, never vandalized anything, never broke into the house, or tried to make off with her fax or copiers. The worst you could say about them, they didn't have much respect for fences.

  Allison let herself in, looked around. It was a nothing house. Not the least bit of charm. Her father had built the place in the twenties, when Miami was still a town of only a few dozen paved streets. The structure was just a wooden box divided into four rooms, with an asbestos shingle roof, oak floor. The windows were barred to keep out the vandals, the glass full of hairline cracks. In Allison's family it had been nicknamed the Shack.

  All through her childhood, her father had brought the male members of the Ravenel family and favored male guests out there for legendary weekends of hunting and whiskey and good Christian debauchery. The Ravenel girls were never invited, for, as Allison was told many times, there were no ladylike activities in such a place, no badminton, croquet, and it would certainly put a crimp in the men's frolic to have womenfolk around. Bunch of females complaining about the cigar smoke, the bugs, the dirty jokes, the energetic passing of gas.

  As a teenager Allison had yearned to visit the Shack, glimpsing it only in an occasional snapshot, then later in a couple of those twitchy super-8 movies, the men with cigar stubs in the corners of their mouths, dirty and unshaven, holding up strings of fish, a gator, snake, an infrequent deer. Once or twice a panther. Shirtless bucks liquored up, apparently talking filthy into the soundless camera, smiling, laughing.

  To Allison's absolute amazement and to the shock of all her male cousins, her father, Julius, bequeathed the Shack to her. Apparently he'd glimpsed something in Allison she'd only half sensed herself.

  Shortly after the will reading she'd gone out there, escorted by her gloomy uncle Dan. Allison still remembered the reverential excitement she'd felt on the drive out, the flutter in her breast as they crossed the last hundred yards, swung around the final muddy turn. And there it was.

  Allison was aghast. The place was a dump. Worse than a dump. Four walls and a leaky roof, bars on the windows, the glass broken out. A ratty yard full of metal trash, hubcaps, beer cans, fifty-gallon barrels discarded here and there. The insides stank of rot and dead animals, mildew and fermenting beer. The toilet was stained and terminally clogged, the appliances coated with yellow grease, the walls defaced with the coarse hieroglyphics of manhood.

  Deeply let down, she drove away that day with the intention of never returning. And for twenty years she did not. Dutifully she paid the meager property taxes each year, and even hired a lawyer once to fight a Department of Interior attempt to absorb the land into Everglades National Park. But it wasn't until the idea began to flower in her to organize a group to fight the illegal trade of animals that Allison thought again of the Shack as a place she might inhabit.

  It soon became her refuge. In some ways more her home than the house in the Gables where she'd raised her family. Indeed, Allison had come to see the Shack as her singular heritage, all she had received from her own family, all she could pass on. The only true thing she owned.

  First she'd won permission to tap into her friend Joe Tiger's electricity, his water line. Then over the seven years that she'd been using it as the headquarters for the Wildlife Protection League, she'd cleaned and repaired and gradually softened the feel of the place. She'd committed feminine sacrilege upon it. Hung curtains, laid out rugs, painted the rough cement walls in beiges and yellows, filled it with garage-sale chairs and lamps, a lumpy double bed. A rolltop desk, several long folding tables where each month she collated and stapled together her newsletter, bundled them up for the post office. One newsletter for each of her fifteen thousand dues-paying members.

  It was ten to two by the time Allison entered the Shack. She went to the broom closet and pulled out a wad of dust rags, the broom, dustpan. Continuing her fit of compulsive cleaning, Allison dusted and swept the living room, wiped down cobwebs. She threw open the windows, chancing mosquitoes so she could get the dank air moving again. She shifted the box of mail out of her way once, then another time. She took a dozen pages from the fax machine, and without a look she set them neatly on her desk.

  In the bathroom and kitchen she wiped down the counters and shelves and finally she was left with the small room on the west corner she'd designa
ted as her bedroom. With her broom in her hand she halted in the doorway of the room, looked back at the rest of the house, but could invent no more work to distract her.

  On the chest of drawers in the bedroom was her complete collection of family photographs. She had realized for some time that she would have to look at them again, see Winslow in her prom dress, various bikinis, her tennis clothes. The tragic trajectory of her daughter's history.

  Mustering her nerve, Allison sat for a few minutes on the edge of her bed. She drank a can of iced tea that had been in the fridge for months, wiped the sweat from her face. Finally she got up, took the framed photos off the bureau, carried them to the bed and lay down with them.

  Although she'd planned for this moment, measured out some last reserve of strength, knowing she would have to confront the photos, still she wept. Wept for herself this time, for failing to find a way to lure either of her daughters out to the Shack, to interest them in this place that had given her such peace and inspiration. Wept for her total isolation from Harry and from Sean, for the string of choices she'd made that led inexorably to Winslow's death.

  When she'd pulled herself together again, she walked back into the living room, gazed around at the familiar objects she'd collected over the last decade. Aimlessly, she read one of the faxes, a submission from one of her members. It was a newspaper article from a Texas paper about a Mexican zoo owner's shopping list for illegal animals. The list had been intercepted on its way to a Thai animal dealer by a woman who worked as a secretary in the zoo. The zoo owner wanted one white tiger, one pygmy hippo, one Asian elephant, an orangutan, and a gorilla, among a list of twenty other endangered animals. He was willing to pay what he called "the very top dollar."

  On a normal afternoon Allison would have fumed for an hour after reading such a piece, then she would've put the zoo man's wish list on the front page of her next newsletter and started a letter-writing campaign to the board of directors of his zoo, to the Mexican agricultural department, to expose this cretin to whatever public scorn she could whip up.

  But today she simply set the letter aside.

  All the busywork was done, the room alphabetized and orderly again, and Allison eased down in a rocker near the front window and let its rhythm lull her for a while. As she rocked, she found herself hearing again those bullying taunts, those bastards yelling out her name in the Borneo rain forest and again on Monday night at Parrot Jungle. She could recall the exact sounds of their voices, their accents, intonations. Still feel the faint tug of recognition, almost certain they were voices she had heard before.

  But she could not place them. And now it no longer mattered. She was finished with all of it, even felt revolted at the memory of that other Allison Farleigh, the one who would have plunged in, investigated, hunted, pursued and pursued. The Allison whose relentless obsessions had driven her so far from her own family, had stubbed out the last ember of passion between Harry and her. No, that woman had died in the jungles of Borneo with her dead daughter cradled in her arms.

  Allison rose, and found in the refrigerator, tucked behind a six-pack of diet Cokes, a single Budweiser. She opened it and took it out to the front porch. She dropped into one of the teak Adirondack chairs, sipped the cold beer and watched the sun mire itself in the saw grass and palmetto. Watched its blood seep into the slick of water that covered the earth in every direction. Watched the leisurely arcs of red-tailed hawks and the skittering of swallows. Dark silhouettes of other birds raced past, black cutouts against that savage red sky.

  Over and again she had heard how this land paled in comparison to its earlier incarnation. She should have seen it thirty years ago, forty. Dozens of species had disappeared during her lifetime. They were surely disappearing tonight as she swilled her beer. It was only a fraction as lush as it had once been, with only a vague, pathetic resemblance to its early days.

  All that might be true, but still it was a wild and gorgeous place, nearly as prehistoric as Borneo. Creatures owned it. Men were still strangers here. They blundered about, and only with the greatest difficulty could they penetrate the maze of saw grass and hammock. It was still so pristine that every human incursion, no matter how brief, fouled the place. Left the contaminated footprints, the stink of civilization behind.

  Of course, Allison was as guilty as any of them, bringing her fax, her phone, into the center of this world, taking advantage of her father's pioneer status, the succession of leases to remain here. But it was a guilt she could abide. In some ways it was even a guilt she had relished, for she was living out her father's unspoken wish for her. To carry on the Ravenel way, yield to the pull of the wild, come out into the dark core of the swamp, breathe its sulfurous fumes, take strength from its strength.

  Sooner or later, whenever she came out here, she recalled her father. Speculated again on what prompted him to pass the place to her. Thinking sometimes that he must have believed Allison would bring a different outlook here, a needed change. That she would not feel compelled to engage in raucous sport, to hunt and kill, to try to dominate the land. Perhaps he saw in her a willingness to give this house and land a feminine tilt, a milder, quieter reverence than any of the male Ravenels were capable of.

  She hoped that was his reason. That he had decided she alone might know best how to live in this wild place in accordance with its simple cadences, its silence, its rapture. That Allison just might be the one to discover the secrets that she suspected he himself had discovered here, the lovely scents and colors, the sweet angles of light, those calm, hushed pleasures that because he was a man he could never openly admit to.

  When it was completely dark and the mosquitoes began to attack her ankles and sing in her ears, Allison Farleigh went back inside, shut the windows, switched on a couple of lights. She listened to an owl in the pine outside the living room window, heard thunder rumbling in the west.

  She went to the kitchen, took the flashlight out of a drawer beside the refrigerator, and limped outside to the storage shed. There she found the two five-gallon cans of gasoline, one of them full, the other only half. Fuel for her Honda generator, which she used almost weekly during the summer when the thunderstorms regularly knocked out her power. She hauled the cans one at a time back to the house, set them side by side on the porch.

  She was focused now, seeing it all with vivid clarity. Not in some desperate frenzy, not trying to speed through this to keep from wavering. She simply went about her work with a steady cadence as though she had unconsciously rehearsed this ritual for years, smoothing out every detail, the precise mechanics of this night.

  Out on the porch she walked down the stairs, out into the dark. With great care, she poured the gasoline in a wavering path around the entire base of the house, stopping several times to splash the walls. Then back at the front door, she doused the porch with an extra portion, ran a trail of gasoline around her chair. She slung the empty cans into the yard.

  After a moment staring into the darkness, listening to the warble of frogs, the night birds trilling, she sat down, reached into the pocket of her jeans and took out the Zippo. She opened it, hearing the precise click of its latch, the sweet metallic ring it made when it closed, like a tiny guillotine slashing shut.

  She opened it again, snapped it closed. Just as Julius had done, her father fidgeting with his lighter while he chewed his big Cuban cigars into submission.

  Allison opened the lid again, and this time she poised her thumb hard against the roughened wheel.

  CHAPTER 20

  Allison held the Zippo motionless and watched a cluster of shredded clouds coast past the three-quarter moon. A gray light clung to the distant oaks like a mist of static electricity. Two hundred yards away in the marshy lowlands, the perfect sheen of the Glades was fractured by saw grass and palmetto into a thousand jagged mirrors, each replaying a piece of the action in the sky. Countless moons and clouds skated helter-skelter across the land.

  She listened to a quiet rumble growing in the darkness. F
or a hazy moment she thought it was her own body she was hearing, the thud and rush of her blood. But slowly, as Allison peered into the dark, the noise rose and clarified until she could tell it was a straining engine, the snarl of a car's transmission laboring along the treacherous, sandy road.

  The headlights made sudden silhouettes of the cypress and oaks as the car rounded the sweeping left turn and bumped along the rutted entrance road. Brightness flooded through the cabbage palms and sabals, passed briefly across her cabin.

  Standing up, she snapped the Zippo shut and set it on the wicker table. She moved out to the edge of the porch, listened to the crunch of tires across her gravel drive. Strained to see through the gloom.

  The driver shut off his lights and engine simultaneously and one of the rear doors swung open. A man's shadow emerged from the car. The first time anyone had ever come calling. For she'd made a point of keeping the Shack's location a secret, using a Miami postal box for her mailing address, keeping phone and fax unlisted. Given the people she harassed, it was only prudent to shield herself behind a layer or two of camouflage. Harry had been to the Shack with her father a few times before Julius died, but he'd never visited Allison there. After all these years she doubted he even remembered the way.

  Whoever was standing out in the dark just now had ignored the half dozen NO TRESPASSING signs posted along the entrance road, and without anyone's permission had unlatched her gate, driven past the hand-lettered PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO ENTRY sign.

  The large man hesitated in the shadows, then he moved cautiously past the soft gleam of the car's grille. She made a quick step to the door, eased halfway inside, a hand reaching up for the Remington, when the man swung around, turned his back on the cabin and took a long look at the expanse of darkness, lifted his hand, brushed aside his hair. And simply from that casual act, the language of his gesture, she knew it was Thorn.