Carl Hiaasen – Native Tongue

“It’s better than nothing,” Joe Winder said when he got back to the trailer. “Low fidelity is better than no fidelity.”

While he reassembled the components, Carrie Lanier explored the box of cassettes. Every now and then she would smile or go “Hmmm” in an amused tone.

Finally Winder looked up from the nest of colored wires and said, “You don’t like my music?”

“I like it just fine,” she said. “I’m learning a lot about you. We’ve got The Kinks. Seeger live at Cobo Hall. Mick and the boys.”

“Living in the past, I know.”

“Oh, baloney.” She began to stack the tapes alphabetically on a shelf made from raw plywood and cinder blocks.

“Do you have a typewriter?” he asked.

“In the closet,” Carrie said. “Are you going to start writing again?”

“I wouldn’t call it writing.”

She got out the typewriter, an old Olivetti manual, and made a place for it on the dinette. “This is a good idea,” she said to Joe Winder. “You’ll feel much better. No more shooting at heavy machinery.”

He reminded her that he hadn’t actually pulled the trigger on the bulldozers. Then he said, “I stopped writing a long time ago. Stopped being a journalist, anyway.”

“But you didn’t burn out, you sold out.”

“Thanks,” Winder said, “for the reminder.”

It was his fault for staggering down memory lane in the first place. Two nights earlier, Carrie had quizzed him about the newspaper business, wanted to know what kind of stories he’d written. So he’d told her about the ones that had stuck with him. The murder trial of a thirteen-year-old boy who’d shot his little sister because she had borrowed his Aerosmith album without asking. The marijuana-smuggling ring led by a fugitive former justice of the Florida Supreme Court. The bribery scandal in which dim-witted Dade County building inspectors were caught soliciting Lotto tickets as payoffs. The construction of a $47 million superhighway by a Mafia contractor whose formula for high-grade asphalt included human body parts.

Joe Winder did not mention the story that had ended his career. He offered nothing about his father. When Carrie Lanier had asked why he’d left the newspaper for public relations, he simply said, “Because of the money.” She had seemed only mildly interested in his short time as a Disney World flack, but was impressed by the reckless sexual behavior that had gotten him fired. She said it was a healthy sign that he had not become a corporate drone, that the spark of rebellion still glowed in his soul. “Maybe in my pants,” Winder said, “not in my soul.”

Carrie repeated what she had told him the first night: “You could always go back to being a reporter.”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“So what is it you want to type—love letters? Maybe a confession?” Mischievously she tapped the keys of the Olivetti; two at a time, as if she were playing “Chopsticks.”

The trailer was getting smaller and smaller. Joe Winder felt the heat lick at his eardrums. He said, “There’s a reason you’ve hidden that gun.”

“Because it’s not your style.” Carrie slapped the carriage and made the typewriter ring. “God gave you a talent for expression, a gift with the language.”

Winder moaned desolately. “Have you ever read a single word I’ve written?”

“No,” she admitted.

“So my alleged talent for expression, this gift—”

“I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt,” she said. The fact is, I don’t trust you with a firearm. Now come help me open the wine.”

Every evening at nine sharp, visitors to the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills gathered on both sides of Kingsbury Lane, the park’s main thoroughfare, to buy overpriced junk food and await the rollicking pageant that was the climax of the day’s festivities. All the characters in the Kingdom were expected to participate, from the gunslingers to the porpoise trainers to the elves. Sometimes a real marching band would accompany the procession, but in the slow months of summer the music was usually canned, piped in through the garbage chutes. Ten brightly colored floats comprised the heart of the parade, although mechanical problems frequently reduced the number of entries by half. These were organized in a story line based loosely on the settlement of Florida, going back to the days of the Spaniards. The plundering, genocide, defoliation and gang rape that typified the peninsula’s past had been toned down for the sake of Francis X. Kingsbury’s younger, more impressionable customers; also, it would have been difficult to find a musical score suitable to accompany a mass disemboweling of French Huguenots.

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