Acts of Nature

NINETEEN

By the time they got to their next target, the boys were drunk.
They’d been sitting up behind Buck in the wind and noise of the airboat passing the Van Gogh vodka back and forth and giggling. Buck had his earplugs in and never bothered looking around. He was focused on the GPS coordinates and planning out in his head how he was going to unload the guns they’d stolen from the last place. It was a nice haul overall, but instead of maybe calling it a day and figuring they’d done well for themselves, Buck just kept pushing on, a little giddy himself over how well this idea was all coming out. They hadn’t seen another boater or even an airplane since they’d left the docks. It was like one of those neutron bombs had gone off, killing everything and leaving the world just for their picking. Hell, they had two or three thousand dollars worth of stuff on board already. The guns themselves should go for two if that greaser Bobby didn’t try to rip him off. Buck knew that the middleman had the advantage of knowing how much he hated dealing with firearms. F*cker would lowball him and Buck would end up taking less than he should just to get rid of the stuff. The guns made him nervous just thinking about them stacked below. But the tenseness wasn’t strong enough to throw him off his euphoria. Christ, if they picked up another score like the last one, maybe he’d be on his way to Hendry County in a couple of weeks.
When they’d gotten within a mile of the next fishing camp, Buck spotted the hard edges of a building out on the gray horizon and pointed to it with one hand, not knowing that his crew behind him was more interested in the vodka and its effect on their fuddled equilibrium than on his navigation. He wove his way through some low sawgrass and stayed out on the gaps of open water as best he could while maintaining a fairly straight trajectory toward the camp. As before, he started running a scenario through his head just in case they pulled up to some owner or even a local checking out the damages. Rescuers, he’d decided. We’re just out here looking to see if anyone needed help, was possibly stranded or hurt. Good Samaritans was what they were.
But as he steered closer, coming in now from the northwest, Buck could see that no cover story was going to be necessary. The hard angles he’d seen from a distance were now forming up to be one single wall, the only one that remained standing. The rest of the place was trashed. The neutron bomb. No survivors.
Buck pulled back the throttle and turned around, catching his assistants playing some kind of preteen thumb-wrestling game and smiling like a couple of idiots out at the forensics unit for the criminally insane at Raiford. I got a real criminal enterprise going here, Buck thought, my own crew of Luca Brasi. “Don Corleone, I come to you on this da day of your daughter’s wedding…”
He thought about the Godfather’s leg man, his eyes popping out of his head with a garrote around his neck. He could squeeze these punks. But then who’s gonna do the heavy lifting? He swung the airboat up to the partial dock and cut the engines, and the cessation of movement gained the attention of the boys, who, it was now obvious, were drunk as skunks. Buck reached between them and snagged the near-empty vodka bottle and flipped it over his shoulder into the water.
“Find what you can find and let’s get out of here,” he said and the boys turned their faces away like eight-year-olds who got caught jerking off. Buck jumped down onto the deck and headed for the smashed outbuildings and leaving the useless pantry and kitchen wall to the boys.
“F*ck him,” said Marcus, only loud enough for Wayne to hear. “Guy could ruin a good wet dream, know what I mean?”
Wayne looked at him with a blank stare.
“No, I guess you wouldn’t, Stumpy,” Marcus said and stepped away quickly, laughing, but also avoiding Wayne’s reach.
“Ain’t nothing worth a shit in this mess anyway, ’less you’re looking for a nice fish trophy,” he said, bending to pick up a fiberglass bonefish that lay crippled with a broken tail on the floor, its long wooden mantel missing.
Wayne poked around in the stuffing and swirl of ripped curtains and cracked debris, kicking at the piles with little interest and stumbling a bit from both the effect of the alcohol and the odd sense of still being on a boat. The missing walls caused the edges of the plank foundation to meld with the water and the open horizon and he was caught by the feeling he might step off the edge of the world if he wasn’t careful. He tried to focus on something close and thought it was way weird that the refrigerator and the kitchen wall were still standing. It was like old lady Morrison’s house when the wrecking crew came to scrape it off the plot where they built the new marina in Chokoloskee. They were kids and watched in fascination as the big-clawed backhoe chewed through the roof and pulled down the walls of a place they’d passed on their bikes a thousand times. No one their age had ever lived there, only the old woman whose husband had died years before. Then one day the ambulance came and they carted Ms. Morrison out on a stretcher and the place stood dark and empty for years. They might have gotten a glimpse inside when they went trick-or- treating or something as children, but when the place was laid bare by the machinery, they watched in fascination as the pink-papered walls and the porcelain sinks and even an old four-poster bed got scraped into a pile and then loaded into a dump truck. When the claw scooped up the toilet all the kids laughed but only for a second, then they rode on, down to the docks where they could fish and skip stones out onto the bay and do the dumbass things you did when you were young without a thought about your own house being scraped off the face of the earth by a storm or by a f*cking backhoe.
“Hey, dude! Check this out.”
Wayne stepped over a window frame of shattered glass and then nearly stepped into a hole that had been busted through the floorboards. He joined Marcus and looked down into a pile of rags.
“Blood, man,” Marcus said, pointing down at a crumpled sheet. They’d done enough hunting to recognize the dark, red-brown stain. Wayne picked up a corner, sniffed the copper smell of blood and dropped it.
“Damn, dude. Don’t have to be some bloodhound,” Marcus said, pinching his face in disgust at first and then raising his eyebrows in that stupid grin. “Dawg.”
“Somebody was here, man. And it wasn’t that long ago neither,” Wayne said. “Look at the empty water bottles and stuff.” He pointed at the trash around the sheet and then opened the refrigerator door, found it empty. He bent down, sat on his heels, and with a slat of broken siding began poking at the pile. “You better go tell Buck to come look at this.”
After Marcus turned away Wayne reached down and hooked the corner of a Velcro strap he’d spotted and pulled out a blue fanny pack, the kind runners and maybe a few fishermen might use on a flats boat. He’d waited for Marcus to go so he’d have a chance to scope it out for himself. He zipped open the pouch and inside rummaged through a wad of soggy tissue paper, a tube of lip balm, and a pair of slim sunglasses. He raised the open pack to his nose and drew in its odor. A woman’s. He liked the smell, and even the faintest aroma of perfume or body lotion, the thought of where it had been, aroused him. He breathed it again and opened his eyes and saw the glimmer of gold deep in the corner of the pouch. He reached in with his left hand and pinched it between his fingers and came out with the necklace. Even the dull sunlight picked up a facet in the stones and his eye picked up the spark. He untangled the gold chain and then draped the jewelry over his other hand, like he’d once seen a clerk in a store in Miami do. The two jewels, an opal and a diamond, lay against his palm, one reflecting, the other glowing, next to the folded skin flap where his thumb used to be. Wayne did not notice the juxtaposition of beauty and scar. He was caught instead by the thought of where those stones had last been lying, against white, smooth skin, perhaps nestled in a perfect cleavage. When he heard the steps of the others, he quickly palmed the necklace and shoved the fanny pack back under some debris.
“We were just going through stuff and found it laying there and figured, you know, you ought to see it,” Marcus was saying.
Buck leaned down and took up the bloodied sheet in his hand, unfolded it and held it by two corners, examining one rough edge. He too brought it to his nose and breathed.
“You’re right,” he said to Marcus, who nodded as if it was a foregone conclusion. “Somebody probably out here in the storm and got injured. Looks like they sopped up some blood and then went and tore some strips off this, maybe for a bandage.” He looked out on the site with a new eye.
“I found some gas cans under some other shit in the outbuilding. It’s high-test, which means airboat fuel.”
“How do you know it ain’t just regular boat motor gas?” Marcus said. “Or generator fuel.”
Buck gave him that “you ain’t been there” eye and said: “There’s a difference in the smell, boy.”
Wayne didn’t say anything, thinking only about the scent of a woman that was now in his hand.
“They must have packed up and took off for the city as soon as the ’cane stopped blowin’. They sure as hell ain’t comin’ back this way soon,” Buck said, again looking out on the horizon.
“Well, there isn’t anything worth a damn here anyway,” Marcus said. “Let’s go.”
It was supposed to come across as a confident, half-in- charge kind of statement but Wayne looked at his friend when he caught that uncertain quiver in his voice. They’d been on dozens of these escapades and Wayne could always tell when Marcus was getting nervous.
Buck had them help dig out the gas cans he found in what was once the generator shack of the camp. It took all three of them to lift the collapsed wall and kick away some broken studs to make enough room to remove them. Buck stepped into the space they’d made and passed out the cans to Marcus, who then ferried them over to Wayne in the boat. There were six cans in all and one had been punctured, half of its contents having leaked out onto the wood plank floor. Buck again thought of the lighter in his pocket but just whispered, “F*ck it.”
Over at the airboat Marcus handed up the last can.
“We find any more gas we could stay out here for a week,” Wayne said, digging at Marcus’s show of being nervous and tired of their expedition.
“Yeah, well, the master criminal there has only one location left on the GPS list so unless he can smell it, there’s only one camp left and we can go the hell home.”
Wayne just bent to lash the final can in, a grin on his face. Marcus was missing the way Buck had identified the gas and Wayne was getting a tiny dash of joy out of it. Marcus may have been hefting the cans across the decking, but Wayne was the one handling them and tying them in place. He had seen the waterproof marker on the bottom edge of each red plastic can that labeled each one: AB. That had to stand for AirBoat. Buck didn’t need a nose to tell that. But he sure as hell was good at puttin’ Marcus in his place.
“F*ck you grinnin’ at, Stumpy? You want to stay out here all week too?”
Wayne ignored him and when they were finally set, both of them climbed up into the seat behind Buck who was again checking the GPS and the list.
“OK, fellas, let’s make this next one a jackpot,” he said and turned the ignition, and the engine erupted with that sonic frapping sound. Wayne leaned forward to feel for another bottle under the seat, and when he straightened back up Marcus was staring at him with some kind of incredulous look on his face.
“What?” Wayne mouthed.
Marcus reached out toward Wayne’s neck but got his hand slapped away in response.
“What the f*ck is that?” Marcus mouthed, his words wiped out by the sound of the engine.
Wayne’s hand went without hesitation to the opal and diamond necklace that he had affixed around his own throat. The chain was a little small for him so the stones hung high and exposed above his T-shirt collar when he’d bent over. He looked directly into Marcus’s eyes with a seriousness that his friend recognized as a mood you did not cross with Wayne. “It’s mine.”
Marcus didn’t need to hear the words. He just showed his palms, rubbed them together and showed them again, just like the blackjack dealer does after shuffling the cards to prove to the players he has nothing up his sleeve.
“Whatever,” he mouthed back into those eyes.