Tourist Season (17 page)

12

Brian Keyes shivered on the deck of a speeding airboat and watched dawn bleed across the pale Everglades sky. High on the driver’s platform sat Tommy Tigertail, his black hair dancing in spikes.

Keyes lifted his head with a groan, but the Indian couldn’t hear him over the din of the engine. Tommy wore a serene look as he steered deftly through the sedge.

If Skip Wiley was the ebullient nerve of
Las Noches de Diciembre,
Tommy Tigertail was the soul. He was a man of unusual temperament—taciturn, sometimes brooding, yet outwardly gracious, even warm. He was quiet not because he was shy or queer, as Jesus Bernal would whisper; Tommy was quiet because he was watchful. Never relax, never look away, never trust a white soul—the expensive lessons of history. Tommy Tigertail did not carry the pain of his ancestors for strangers to see; he carried it in his heart and dreams, which haunted him. He was tormented by the nightmare of his great-great-grandfather, Chief Tiger Tail, dying in the dank misery of a New Orleans prison barrack. Tiger Tail, who had never quit like Coacoochee, or been duped into capture like the eloquent Osceola; Tiger Tail, who had spurned the Army’s demand to abandon godforsaken Florida with its fever and mosquitoes and rebuild the Seminole nation in Arkansas, of all places. Arkansas! Tiger Tail, who from the beginning had sensed the white man’s mendacity and fought back brilliantly until the end, when there were virtually no warriors left. Tiger Tail, who had been captured in the battle at Palatka and shipped to a dungeon on the Mississippi, where he soon died, tubercular, homesick, and broken.

Growing up, Tommy Tigertail had memorized the broken treaties—Camp Moultrie, Payne’s Landing, Fort Gibson, and the rest. These were the devices that had swept from paradise all but three hundred unconquerable Seminoles, among them Tommy’s great-grandfather, then a teenager, who had hidden and fought and never touched a quill to a U.S. treaty.

Viceroy Wilson had read up on the Seminoles, who impressed him as some of the craftiest motherfuckers ever to raise a rifle. The more he read, the more Wilson was persuaded that Tommy’s people had just as much fury to burn as American blacks. Viceroy Wilson was waiting for the day when the Indian’s hatred percolated into raw violence or sinister magic, but so far Tommy Tigertail had kept it under rein. Moderation and manners served him well. He weaved as effortlessly through the white man’s labyrinth of high finance as he did through the knotted trails of the Big Cypress. It was Tommy Tigertail who had turned the inane bingo fetish of Florida’s senior citizens into a Seminole bonanza: soon after gambling was ruled to be legal on the Indian reservations, Tommy converted some old airplane hangars into the world’s biggest bingo halls. Ingeniously he tailored them for the various South Florida markets: Yiddish bingo, Cuban bingo, Brooklyn bingo, and redneck bingo. The tribe got rich, and Tommy Tigertail became a tycoon without even trying. It was bingo money that bankrolled
Las Noches,
but Tommy didn’t seem to care how it was spent. He said little, and carried out Skip Wiley’s extravagant orders with dispassionate obedience. Around the midnight campfires it was Wiley who did the fulminating, who put the anger and the passion into words, but it was Tommy Tigertail whose spirit seemed to dominate; it was in Tommy’s burnt-wood eyes that Skip Wiley found a pure purpose for his crusade.

As his airboat sliced through the morning mist, Tommy Tigertail thought for the hundredth time: It is too bad Great-great-grandfather didn’t have one of these babies. They’d never have caught him.

“Slow down!” Brian Keyes croaked, teeth clicking.

Tommy Tigertail glanced down at his prisoner.

Keyes mouthed the words: “Help me.”

The Indian cut the engine, and the airboat coasted to a stop. The silence seemed sudden and immense.

Tommy hopped off his perch and bent over Keyes.

“I’m bleeding to death,” Keyes said, fingering his sticky shirt.

“No,” Tommy Tigertail said. “I dressed the wound myself. And gave you medicine.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Button snakeroot and willow shavings.” Tommy lifted Keyes’s shirt and studied the knife wound. Gently he put his hand on Keyes’s belly. “You’re very cold,” he said. “We’ll wait a few minutes then.” He opened a moleskin canteen and tipped it to Keyes’s mouth. The liquid was hot and smoky-tasting, stronger than any coffee known to man.

“Black tea,” explained Tommy Tigertail, “to stop the madness.”

“Too late for that,” Keyes said with a sigh.

The Seminole wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, denims, and western boots—the same damn boots from Wiley’s cabin. Tommy Tigertail looked like no other Florida millionaire Brian Keyes had ever met.

The Indian surveyed the swamp. “We are four miles from the road.” He climbed into the driver’s seat and pointed toward the sunrise.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “a herd of white-tailed deer lived here. Three bucks, many does. The fawns you seldom saw. In the winter, when the water disappeared, I could always find the deer grazing on the edge of this basin. When I was fifteen it was time to kill one, and I did.”

Keyes sat up, bolstered by the strange tea. Under different circumstances Tommy’s version of
Bambi
would have touched him, but Keyes could scarcely listen. He was preoccupied with the selfish notion that he should be taken to a hospital as soon as possible.

Tommy Tigertail said: “Three years ago the deer died. Five white men in a half-track ran them into the high water and killed them with shotguns. The fawns, too. I watched from this spot.” The Indian described the slaughter with no outward emotion, as if it were something he’d been expecting his whole life. It gave Keyes a fresh chill.

The Seminole said, “You were wondering what I’m doing with Mr. Wiley. You didn’t ask, but you wondered just the same. So this is my answer: your friend Mr. Wiley says there’s a chance to put things right, to make those who don’t belong here go away forever.”

“But it’s a fantasy,” Keyes said.

Tommy Tigertail smiled handsomely, his caramel face brightening. “Of course it’s a fantasy. Of course it is!” He laughed softly, a laugh full of irony. “Ask anybody,” Tommy said. “Florida is the place where fantasies come true. Now, lie down, Mr. Keyes, and we will go.”

With that the Indian cranked the propeller and the two of them were drowned in noise. The airboat rocketed out of the sawgrass, and the wind shocked Brian Keyes to the spine. He huddled down, cheek to the cool aluminum deck, and counted out the miles in his pounding head.

Shortly after noon on the ninth of December, the head nurse of the emergency room at Flagler Memorial Hospital was notified by a policeman that “a school bus with serious injuries” was on its way to the hospital.

Assuming the worst, which is the only sane way to function in Miami, the nurse immediately declared a Code Orange and scrambled every available surgeon, anesthesiologist, scrub nurse, and lab tech in the hospital. The other patients—miscellaneous gunshot victims, drug overdoses, and screeching teenagers in labor—were shuffled out of the way and told to manage as best they could. Flagler Memorial braced for full-scale carnage and catastrophe.

In no time the E. R. filled with TV crews, newspaper reporters, photographers, and personal-injury lawyers. After about an hour of waiting, everyone got cranky and wanted to know what was the damn story with this busload of mangled orphans. Where were the choppers? And the ambulances? Where the hell were the grieving parents?

The head nurse was getting baleful glares from the orthopedic surgeons (“It’s Sunday, for Chrissakes!”) when the bus finally clattered up to the emergency-room door.

It was not a school bus, though once it might have been. And in fairness to the cop who radioed it in, the bus had the right colors, yellow and black; the yellow being paint and the black being rust.

The driver, a phlegmatic fellow with a Budweiser in one hand, seemed extremely surprised to be met by bright lights and Minicams and an army of tense-looking people dressed in white. Drunk as he was, the driver could sense their collective disappointment.

For the bus was not packed with seriously injured children, but perfectly healthy migrant workers—Jamaicans, Haitians, Dominicans, and Mexicans, all sweaty and dusty and peeved that their day in the tomato fields had been cut short.

“I don’t understand,” the nurse said, scanning the dark faces. “Where’s the emergency?”

“There’s your fuckin’ emergency,” the bus driver said, waving a stubby arm. “Up top.”

The nurse stood on the tips of her white shoes and saw what the driver was talking about: a young man strapped to the rack on top of the bus. He looked damp and half-conscious, his clothes soaked with blood. For some reason a briefcase had been placed under his lolling head.

“Hmph!” said the nurse, turning to face the throng. “Relax, everybody.”

A pair of orderlies clambered atop the bus and untied Brian Keyes. As they placed him on a stretcher and carried him into the hospital, the emergency room emptied with a groan. Only one reporter hung around to ask questions, and that was Ricky Bloodworth.

Nobody bothered to retrieve the briefcase from the top of the migrant bus. Miraculously it remained there, unsecured, almost halfway back to Immokalee, until the bus accidentally struck an opossum crossing Route 41. The jolt launched the briefcase—containing all Skip Wiley’s vital evidence—off the roof of the bus into the Tamiami Canal, where it sank unopened into a gator hole.

Al Garcia was in a bellicose mood. He hated the night shift if he couldn’t be out on the streets, and he couldn’t be on the streets if he was running the motor pool. The motor pool was a terrible place for a detective; there was nothing to investigate. The highlight of the evening was when one of the K-9 guys drove in with chunks of dead cat all over the backseat of the squad car. The cop said the cat had gone crazy and attacked his K-9 German shepherd and the dog didn’t have a choice but to fight back—it was just a terrible thing to see. Garcia said sure, pal, and wrote it up anyway, musing over the sick possibilities.

Al Garcia did not want his career to end this way, in a stale little office on a parking lot full of police cars.

He was still furious about the two goons from I.A.D. who had foraged through his house, hunting for a typewriter that wasn’t there. They’d each carried Xerox copies of the
El Fuego
letters to compare with anything they found. But all they’d discovered was a bunch of hand-scrawled hate letters Garcia had once written to Lee Iacocca, the president of Chrysler Motors. For some reason almost every cop car in America is made by Chrysler, and Al Garcia calculated that he’d spent at least forty thousand hours of his life riding in Chrysler-made automobiles: Furies, Le-Barons, Diplomats, Monacos, Darts, you-name-it. Al Garcia was an expert on Chryslers, and he hated the damn things. Hated the steering, hated the shocks, hated the brakes, hated the radios. Garcia especially hated the seats. He had hemorrhoids the size of bell peppers and it was all Lee lacocca’s fault. So Garcia had dashed off a few appropriate missives, which he wisely never sent. Typically the letters would begin: “Dear Shit-for-Brains.” For some reason the guys from I.A.D. found this fascinating. They sealed the letters in a plastic bag and exchanged congratulatory whispers. Garcia gave them the finger on their way out the door.

He didn’t really expect to see the I.A.D. boys again anytime soon, so he was mildly surprised when one of the assholes appeared that night at the motor pool. Garcia remembered that his name was Lieutenant Bozeman. He was very young to be a lieutenant, and much too sharply dressed to be a good cop.

“I hope you need a car,” Garcia said. “You like cats?”

Bozeman helped himself to a seat. He took a notebook from his coat.

“Just a few questions, sergeant, if you don’t mind.”

“I
do
mind, dipshit. I’m very busy right now, in case you didn’t notice. I got six marked units waiting to have the tires rotated, I got a rear bumper missing off a paddy wagon, and the transmission just dropped out of an undercover car in the middle of the Rickenbacker Causeway. Much as I’d love to help you, I got no time.”

Bozeman said, “Harold Keefe thinks you wrote the
Fuego
letters.”

“Why would I do a stupid thing like that?”

“To make him look bad.”

“Hal doesn’t need my help.”

Bozeman scribbled something in the notebook.

“Weren’t you passed over for a promotion last year?”

“Yeah,” Garcia said. “Failed the swimsuit competition. So what?”

Scribble, scribble. The scratch of the pen jangled Garcia’s nerves.

“You don’t like Detective Keefe very much, do you, Garcia?”

“I love Detective Keefe,” Garcia said. He leaned over and beckoned Bozeman with a fat brown finger. “I love Hal very much,” Garcia whispered. “In fact, I
want
him.”

“That’s not funny,” Bozeman said stiffly.

“You’re right, it’s very sad. See, Hal doesn’t want me … what did you say your first name was?”

“I didn’t.”

Bozeman started jotting again. Garcia firmly took him by the wrist. “I like you, too, lieutenant.”

“Stop it!”

“Please don’t be shy. Are you married?”