Skinny Dip - Страница 49

"I'll be back later in the week," he promised.

She looked up at him warmly. "Do you pray, Earl?"

"Not in a while," he admitted. Thirty years at least.

"That's all right."

"Well, I better go now."

"Every time my faith is shaken, I look up into the big blue sky and see God's work practically everywhere. Just imagine a bird that flies all the way from Manitoba to Key West. Every single winter!"

Tool found himself turning toward the TV screen. A large flock of snowy pelicans was taking flight, rising in a flurry from the rippled surface of a marsh. With a little imagination it looked like a long sugar-white beach breaking to pieces and blowing away in the wind.

"I'd like to see that someday," Tool said.

Soon Maureen's hand slipped from his, and Tool knew from the heaviness of her breathing that she'd fallen asleep. He watched the bird program until it was over, then switched off the television. As he was leaving the convalescent center, the Hispanic nurse got in step beside him and asked if he was really Maureen's nephew.

"I don't see much resemblance," the nurse remarked.

"That's 'cause I'm adopted," Tool said.

"Really. And back in the Netherlands you're a physician?"

"No, a doctor," he said pointedly.

"Ah."

Sneaky little bitch, Tool thought, squeezing himself into the Grand Marquis. Thought she could trick me!

Fifteen miles away, in the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, a man with one eye was skinning a dead otter. The man was tall and his hands were large and his skin was as brown as an English saddle. He wore dungarees, military boots, an opaque shower cap and a threadbare T-shirt with a lewd lapping tongue silk-screened on the front. His beard was a spray of braided silvery tendrils, the tips of which were green and mossy with dried duckweed. The man looked ancient and mildly demented, although he moved with the fluid confidence of an athlete or a soldier, both of which he once was.

The otter had been killed a few hours earlier by a poacher who hadn't realized until too late that he himself was being stalked. The man with one eye had easily disarmed the outlaw, stripped off his clothes, bound his wrists and ankles with saw grass, then staked him on a hemp leash to an alligator nest.

Ricca Spillman had witnessed it all.

She was floating in a state of suspended awareness. Even after two days she wasn't certain if the one-eyed man was real; if he was, however, he had saved her life.

The man informed Ricca that they would eat the dead otter because that was better than leaving it to the buzzards. When she inquired about the fate of the poacher, the one-eyed man said, "If the gator doesn't get him, I suppose I'll cut him loose. All depends on his manners."

"What about me?"

The man made no response, the blade flashing in his hand as he deftly peeled the flesh of the otter away from the damp thick fur. When he was done, he said, "Tell me again about your boyfriend."

Ricca repeated the story of Chaz Perrone while the man prepared a small fire. The otter meat smelled funky, but Ricca was so famished that she forced it down. The man devoured everything else in the fry pan, crunching noisily into the marrow of the animal's bones. Afterward he kicked dirt over the flames, wiped his palms on the seat of his dungarees and lifted Ricca into his arms.

"How's the leg?" he asked, and began trudging through the scrub.

"Much better today. Where are we going, Captain?"

That was how the man in the shower cap had asked to be addressed.

"There's another camp not far." He carried Ricca as lightly as if she were pillow fluff.

She said, "How soon can I go home?"

"You have a pleasing voice. It makes me want to sleep in your arms."

"Will you take me home? Please?"

"Sorry," the man replied, "but I can't go near the highway. Please don't ask-the traffic sets me off."

The next camp was a small clearing in a stand of palmettos. He set Ricca on the ground, lit another fire and heated a pot of coffee. From a canvas duffel marked U.S. postal service he took out a volume of poetry.

"Oliver Goldsmith," he said.

Ricca raised her eyebrows quizzically. The man opened the book to a dog-eared page and placed it on her lap. "Read that aloud, please."

"The whole thing?"

"Just the first stanza."

Ricca, whose interest in poetry had peaked with "Green Eggs and Ham," read it first to herself:

When lovely woman stoops to folly,

And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can soothe her melancholy?

What an can wash her guilt away?

When she recited it out loud, the man in the shower cap smiled patiently.

"You don't much care for the poem. I can tell," he said.

"What 'guilt' is he talking about? I don't feel guilty, I feel pissed off!"

"Understandable. The sonofabitch shot you."

"And he lied, too. About everything!"

The man took the volume of poetry from her hands and returned it to the duffel.

Ricca said, "I'm dying to get even with the bastard. Will you help me?"

The man popped the glass eye from its socket and cleaned it with the dingy tail of his T-shirt. He had heard the gunshots from half a mile away; slogged through the saw grass and muck and high water, half walking, half swimming. By the time he'd gotten there the shooter was already gone, a pair of red taillights shrinking down the levee. Ricca had desperately submerged herself in a clump of lily pads. The man with one eye had located her by following the intermittent gasps that she made when extending her lips and nose to the surface. Shaking and bleeding from a wound in the leg, she had nonetheless tried to fight him off, reasonably assuming from his appearance that he was some kind of dangerous swamp pervert.

"I'm sorry, but I can't help you. I'm going through a rough personal spell," he told her now.

"What do you mean?"

"For starters, I'm hearing the same weird duet all day and all night in my head-'Midnight Rambler' as performed by Eydie Gorme and Cat Stevens. I'm sure they're perfectly nice folks, but frankly I'm ready to shove a sawed-off down my throat. One blessed hour of silence," the man said wistfully, "would be welcome."

Ricca said nothing. The sight of his hollow eye socket, dank as a cave, was creeping her out.

"On top of that, I'm hallucinating almost constantly," he went on. "I'm assuming, for example, that in reality you bear no resemblance to Lady Bird Johnson."

"Who? "Ricca asked.

"The wife of our thirty-sixth president. He was the fellow who sent me to Vietnam," the man explained. "To me, you look exactly like Mrs. Johnson, which I know must sound preposterous. You're a much younger woman, with cinnamon freckles and curly hair, yet when I look at you, all I see is Lady Bird."

"Know what you need? A doctor."

The one-eyed man grinned, and it struck Ricca that he must have been extraordinarily handsome before he went bonkers. Even now, she felt an unnerving stir of attraction.

He said, "It's entirely possible that I'm dying."

"Noway, Captain."

"There were times in my life when I would have jumped at the opportunity," he allowed, "to hunt down your shiftless boyfriend and haul him out here for a private party. I'm not talking mundane revenge, either, but a textbook exercise in predation. Please understand, there's a primordial formula for survival on this planet, and men like your Chad-"

"Chaz," Ricca said.

"-tend to perform poorly without dry socks, dental floss and air conditioning. Even that wretched low-life poacher whom I hog-tied this morning is better equipped for this world than-Chaz, is it?" The man clawed at his ears. "That god-awful singing, it will not stop."

"I can't hear a thing."

"Last week it was David Lee Roth and Sophie Tucker. The panfish in these canals must be loaded with mercury." He leaned over and stared hard for several moments into the flames. "You say your beau works out here in the 'glades?"

"That's right. He tests farm water for pollution."

"Too bad we've never crossed paths, he and I." The man chuckled to himself as he worked the glass orb back into its socket. "I can carry you as far as the dike. From there a friend of mine'll drive you into town."

"Then what?" Ricca asked.

"Me, I'm heading west." He handed her a cup of coffee. "The other day I got so damn hungry, I ate a pygmy rattler. Normally I leave reptiles alone, but a mighty powerful urge took hold. Anyhow, I go to grab the little sucker, and suddenly there's the face of Dr. Henry Kissinger staring up at me, flicking that little forked tongue of his! Fucking Kissinger!"

Ricca Spillman had never heard of him, either, but she politely asked, "So what'd you do?"

"I chewed off his head, of course," the man said, "and fried his scaly ass in canola oil. Point is, I'm navigating a rocky patch in my private life-I positively can't be anywhere near the highway, or crowds, or humanity in general. I wish to God I could help you, but I'm taking a pass."

Ricca said, "That's okay. I'll figure something out." She wondered if the rattlesnake story was intended as some sort of mystical lesson.

As if reading her mind, the man said, "Go with your gut, darling. Simple as that."

"I'll work on it."

After dousing the fire, the burly hermit scooped her up and splashed out across the marsh. It was an hour's hike under a blistering sun, yet he wasn't even breathing hard when they reached the levee. A mud-splattered Jeep was parked on the road. Waiting behind the wheel sat a younger man wearing a knit watch cap and dark shades. He looked restless and intense.