Red looked around. "Now what? We blow a tire?"
"Sit tight." Tool pushed himself out of the truck.
"Hey! Get back here," Red hollered. He hopped out and chased after him. "Where the hell you think you're goin'? I ain't got time tonight for this nonsense!"
Tool did not alter his pace. Red got up beside him and began calling him every name he could think of.
"You hush," Tool said, raising a brick-size hand. He stooped to study the small white cross, and removed a spray of shriveled lilies.
"Not now, son. You come back some other day and fetch it, but not tonight," Red admonished him. "Not on my time."
"It'll just take a second."
"You gone deaf? Deaf and dumb?"
The name on the homemade cross was visible in the wash from the truck's headlights:
Pablo Humberto Duarte
Loving Husband, Father, Son, and Brother
B. Sept. 3, 1959. D.March 21, 2003
Now He Rides with God Almighty
Remember: Seat Belts Save Lives!
"Just some damn beaner," Red Hammernut grumped. "Probably got trashed and drove hisself into the canal."
"You don't know that," said Tool.
"Just lookit the name. Pah-blow Humm-bear-toe-tell me that ain't a beaner name."
Tool sat on his haunches, elbows propped on his knees.
"Well, hurry it up, then," Red said crossly. "Pull the damn thing outta the ground and let's go. I need a drink and a steam."
Tool didn't budge. Red glowered at him.
"What the fuck, son?"
"I just been workin' the 'rithmetic in my head. This old boy was 'bout the same age as me," Tool said, "give or take."
"The beaner?"
"Mr. Doo-arty here. However you say it."
"Mercy." Red thinking: Lord, please don't let this moron go soft on me.
Tool gestured at the wooden cross. "Least he was a 'husband, father, son, brother'-I ain't none a those things, Red. I got no wife and no family… one lousy cousin, he's up at Starke for robbin' a goddamn laundry-mat."
That was the end of Red Hammernut's patience. In his judgment there was no good reason for a man of his stature to be standing on the side of State Road 441 on a Saturday night while some hairy half-wit with a bullet up his butt cheeks suddenly gets a middle-life crisis, all because some dead Meskin forgot to buckle his damn seat belt.
Without a thought, Red slapped Earl Edward O'Toole across the top of the head. It was a poor decision, conveying what Tool regarded as an intolerable lack of respect.
"Listen here, you doped-up dickhead of a gorilla," Red said. "There's half a million bucks of my money sittin' like a big hot buzzard turd in the back of that pickup, out in the wide-open spaces, where any damn crackhead in basketball shoes can rip it off and be gone in five seconds. Now, I don't honestly know what's got into you, son, but I'm gonna count to ten and you're gonna yank that stupid fuckin' cross outta the ground and we're gonna get the hell outta Dodge. You understand me?"
Tool didn't move, even to wipe Red's spittle off his overalls.
"One…" Red huffed, "two… three… four…"
He had no earthly notion of what to do if the sulking fool refused to obey. Slap him again?
To Red's immeasurable relief, Tool rose slowly and said, "You the boss."
He placed his huge hands around the shaft of the white cross and worked it slowly out of the dirt, so as not to split the pine.
Red said, "It's about damn time. Now hurry up, let's go."
"Not you, chief."
"What?" It was amazing, Red mused, how all the nuts and bolts of one's existence could rattle loose with one bump. "What did you say?" he demanded again, somewhat heedlessly.
Earl Edward O'Toole positioned himself between Red and the truck, his broad frame blocking the headlights. Red felt small and, for the first time, fearful. He was chilled by the sound of Tool's breathing, slow and easy compared to his own.
With a desolate curiosity Red peered upward at the towering shadow. "What now, you dumb ape?"
"Hold still," Tool advised.
Samuel Johnson Hammernut could see the huge man raise both arms high, and for a moment he could see the cross of Pablo Duarte silhouetted against the pearly clouds, and after that he couldn't see anything at all.
The murder of the Everglades, as perpetrated by Red Hammernut and others, is insidiously subtle and undramatic. Unlike more telegenic forms of pollution, the fertilizers pouring by the ton from the sugarcane fields and vegetable farms of southern Florida do not produce stinking tides of dead fish or gruesome panoramas of rotting animal corpses. Instead, the phosphates and other agricultural contaminants work invisibly to destroy a mat of algae known as periphyton, the slimy brown muck that underlies the river of grass and is its most essential nutrient. As the periphyton begins to die, the small fish that feed and nest there move away. Next to go are the egrets and herons, the bluegills and largemouth bass, and so on up the food chain. Soon the saw grass prairies wither and starve, replaced by waves of cattails and other aquatic plants that thrive on the torrent of phosphorus, yet provide miserable habitat for native birds and wildlife.
A primary objective of the government's Everglades restoration project was to reduce the steady deluge of man-made fertilizers. Grudging cooperation came from sugar barons and corporate farmers who could no longer rely on favored politicians to keep the EPA and other regulators off their backs. And while filtration marshes designed to strain out some of the pollutants had shown early promise, the Everglades was still dying at the rate of two acres per day when Charles Regis Perrone made his lonely, woeful trek through Loxahatchee.
He cursed the pungent mire that sucked the socks off his feet, the whips of saw grass that shredded his undershirt and boxers, the clots of lilies and leafy bladderwort that impeded his flight. The sprouts of newly blossomed cattails announced the presence of fertilizer in the water, but that wasn't the source of Chaz's trepidation. He knew that phosphorus was not toxic in the nasty bacterial style of, say, fecal sewage. He also understood that the lower levels recorded at Loxahatchee were more hospitable to native life than the felonious amounts found in the waters contiguous to Red Hammernut's fields.
Still, Chaz Perrone crossed the breeze-swept marsh with a puckering fear that he was being stalked-by Red and his shotgun-toting goon; by voracious disease-bearing insects; by needle-fanged cotton-mouth moccasins, blood-slurping leeches and deer ticks; by hydropho-bic bobcats and inbred panthers; by the gators whose husky mating calls fractured the brittle silence…
Chaz saw no irony in his own plight, having always regarded himself as more of a bystander than a villain in the poisoning of the wilderness. Blaming the demise of the Everglades on science whores such as himself seemed as silly to Chaz as blaming lung cancer on the medical doctors employed by tobacco companies, who for generations had insisted that cigarettes were harmless. The truth was that people were determined to smoke, regardless of what any pinhead researchers had to say. Likewise, cities and farms were bound to dispose of their liquefied crap in the cheapest, most efficient way-flushing it into public waters-regardless of the environmental hazards.
You can't buck human nature, Chaz had reasoned, so you might as well go with the flow, so to speak.
After taking the job as Red Hammernut's undercover biostitute, he had familiarized himself with Everglades ecology only enough to converse with colleagues and not reveal himself as an ignorant fraud. From his crash course he recalled that the ripe muck through which he now trudged was important in some nebulous way to the ecology, and that the other scientists jokingly referred to it as "monkey puke"-a description for which Chaz held newfound appreciation.