The Kid reached into the cardboard box and picked up the iguana and suddenly it came to life and twisted its body around as if it were a snake and bit the Kid on the meat of his hand between his thumb and forefinger, clamping onto it like pliers and refusing to let go even when the Kid as if he’d been scalded shook his hand in the air trying to get rid of it. He yowled in pain and kept flipping his hand to shake off the lizard but it clung by its dry-boned mouth to the soft lump of skin and muscle, not chewing or biting hard enough to break through the flesh but clipped precisely to it by rows of small inward-slanting serrated teeth so that it could not be removed without tearing the flesh.
Get it off me! Ma, get it off!
She yanked on the iguana but it wouldn’t let go. She was afraid that if she pulled any harder she would rip away a chunk of her son’s hand which was already swelling around the creature’s beak. The Kid was bawling now. She decided to call 911. Fifteen minutes later the ambulance arrived and the EMT aides and the driver took one look at the iguana and the Kid’s hand and half-laughed and drove him and his mother to the emergency room way over at Cameron-Kelly Hospital on Northwest Fiftieth.
They waited for thirty or so minutes before a doctor could see them. By then the Kid had stopped crying. His hand had ballooned out like a baseball glove and had gone numb and he had gotten used to the sight of the iguana clamped onto him and because the bite didn’t hurt now it seemed almost affectionate, a kind of hard ongoing kiss, and he wasn’t afraid of the creature anymore. In the waiting room the eight or ten other people waiting for a doctor stared at the iguana, repelled by it, and felt sorry for the Kid even though most of them were in much worse shape than he with busted feet and cuts and concussions and mysterious pain from places deep inside their bodies, but all their attackers had long since fled or been arrested and here he was still under attack.
His mother sat beside him and stroked his head with her left hand and flipped through a People magazine with the other. Finally a nurse called his name and led him and his mother down a long tiled hall. The nurse carefully averted her eyes from the Kid and the iguana which creeped her out and walked fast in front of him and his mom so they had to trot to keep up.
In the treatment room the Kid sat on a paper-covered bench while the doctor examined his hand and the iguana attached to it. The doctor was a slender light brown Asian-looking man with a shiny bald head and a thick black mustache.
Well, my friend, this is a problem, yes, but a problem easily solved. If you don’t object to a little blood. Okay?
What? No! Don’t cut off my hand! Please, mister, don’t!
I would not think of doing such a terrible thing as that. No, I am going to cut off the little animal’s head. A very simple solution to your problem.
Don’t worry, honey, it’ll be over in a minute. God, I wish I’d thought of that before calling the ambulance. I could’ve done it at home myself with a kitchen knife. This is going to cost me a pretty penny. I don’t have insurance.
No-o-o! Please don’t kill it!
When the head has no body, when its spinal cord has been severed that is, the muscles that contract to control the mouth relax. You are very fortunate that the iguana is only a little baby. They grow to be very big, you know. Where I come from they are known to kill and eat dogs and even people sometimes. Especially babies. They like to eat babies. They are dragons. They are known to inject their prey with a poison that causes fatal internal bleeding. This one is only a baby itself and is not of the poisonous type anyhow. Which is very fortunate for you, eh?
Can’t you just like put him to sleep or something? Like with a needle?
You want your little friend to live and grow big and eat dogs and babies, eh?
Yes.
Does it have a name?
The Kid suddenly thought that if the iguana had a name the doctor might not be so eager to cut off its head. He said the iguana’s name was Iggy.
Hmmm. Iggy. Cute.
Yeah. I guess.
The doctor reflected a moment and walked to a cabinet and removed a glass vial from a drawer of vials. He doused a large square patch of gauze with chloroform and wrapped it around the face of the iguana and after a few seconds the body of the iguana went limp and its color changed from green to gray. Its mouth opened and released the Kid’s hand. The iguana plopped onto the tiled floor. Ignoring it the doctor examined the Kid’s hand, saw that there were no breaks in the skin other than a curved line of pinpricks on the top of his hand and another on the bottom between the thumb and forefinger. After applying antiseptic to the Kid’s hand the doctor dropped Iggy into a plastic HAZMAT bag and sent the foolish boy and his even more foolish mother and their sleeping baby dragon on their way.
CHAPTER THREE
WHILE HE WAITS FOR THE BLUE BUTANE flame of his camp stove to heat his supper the Kid stands beside his tent in the damp semidarkness beneath the Claybourne Causeway and contemplates the smooth blue waters of the wide Calusa Bay and the southern outflow of the thousand-mile-long Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. Bumper-to-bumper cars, trucks, buses, and intermittent motorcycles rumble overhead crossing between the mainland and the barrier islands on the eastern side of the Bay. It’s the end of a long late-summer day. Everyone’s headed home. Everyone’s home is in one place or the other, the mainland or the islands. There. Or over there. Definitely not here. Not here on the broad flat concrete peninsula that anchors the rusting steel piers that hold up the Causeway.
He pretends that he is alone down here. He turns away from the polyethylene lean-tos and tents and the salvaged plywood huts nearby and the men who live in them standing around like bored ghosts and he gazes out at the Bay, thinking not of where he is but of where he would like to be. This is how he has learned to endure being where he is without bawling like a little lost boy. Or worse: trying to escape from this place.
He peers out at the Bay. He tracks charter fishing boats and a few large white yachts and dozens of small private fishing and pleasure boats returning from open waters after a long day’s pleasure at sea and in some cases work. He would like to be aboard one of those boats. A pleasure boat or a charter fishing boat or a shrimper. Any one of them would do. That one. Or that one. Or that fifty-foot cabin cruiser shaped like an arrow. The flotilla passes through Kydd’s Cut from the open sea into Calusa Bay and plows steadily northward keeping downtown Calusa portside and the Great Barrier Isles off to starboard. Individual boats peel off and make their way to the thousands of marinas, dockyards, and piers scattered along the mainland and the islets and canals that filigree both the mainland side of the Bay and the Barriers, where the fleet finally disintegrates.
The official name for the twenty-mile linked chain of narrow flat mostly man-made islands between the Bay and the open sea is the Calusa Great Barrier Isles. Real estate developers, speculators, politicians, and hoteliers a hundred years ago invented the Calusa Great Barrier Isles by dredging muck and crushed limestone from the bottom of the shallow Bay and filling in the mosquito- and crocodile-infested mangrove swamps from Bougainvillea Shores twenty miles to the north all the way south to Kydd’s Cut, the deep-water channel that opens the international port of Calusa to the Atlantic Ocean. The Realtors, speculators, politicians, and hoteliers hauled ten thousand tons of white sand from beaches in another state hundreds of miles north of here and made with it a wide fine-grained sun-reflecting beach running along the ocean side of the islands from one end of the Barriers to the other. They connected the island chain to the mainland with bridges at each end and a four-lane causeway in the middle — the Archie B. Claybourne Causeway, named after the president of the corporation that financed the development — and laid down a grid of streets, carved out Venetian-style canals, planted palms, and built marinas, beachfront hotels, golf courses, and high-rise apartment buildings with ocean views.