“What the hell’re you doing?” he cried, then his head was roughly jerked backward until he could see the pitiless vermilion glow of Clinton Tyree’s dead eye.
“Hush now, Governor Dick.”
So Dick Artemus shut up and concentrated on bladder control, to preserve his dignity as well as the gubernatorial carpet. If Clinton Tyree did not intend to kill him, then what was he up to? Dick Artemus shivered when he felt his trousers being loosened and yanked down.
He thought: Aw Jesus, it’s just like Deliverance.
Involuntarily his anus puckered, and he found himself suddenly ambivalent about the possibility of being rescued mid-sodomy—the headlines might be more excruciating than the crime. The only governor of Florida to be boned by a former governor on the floor of the governor’s mansion! There’s one for the history books, Dick Artemus thought disconsolately, and more than just a damn footnote.
Even worse than the threat of public humiliation was the potential political fallout. Was Florida ready to reelect a defiled chief executive? Dick Artemus had his doubts. He remembered how the audience felt about the Ned Beatty character at the end of the movie—you were sorry for the guy, but no one was standing in line for his next canoe trip.
A calloused paw grabbed one of the governor’s buttocks and he girded for the worst. Then: an unexpected sensation, like a dry twig scratching up and down his flesh, or the lusty play of a woman’s fingernails—sharp, yet pleasing. Dick Artemus remained motionless and oddly becalmed. He wondered what the big freak was doing, straddling his cheeks and humming so quietly to himself.
The bizarre proceeding was disrupted when a door opened and a woman shouted Clinton Tyree’s name. Dick Artemus twisted his neck and saw Lisa June Peterson and Lt. Jim Tile each fastening themselves to one of the ex-governor’s arms, pulling him away—the madman grinning yet submissive—out of the dining room.
Dick Artemus lurched to his feet and tugged up his pants and smoothed his tousled hair. Not a word would be said about this—Lisa June and the trooper could be counted upon for that. No one would ever know! He hurried to the bedroom for a freshly pressed shirt and notified his driver he was ready. And in the car on the way to the Planters Club, Dick Artemus breezily reviewed the notes for his speech, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. It was only later, after leaving the dais to a round of polite applause, that Dick Artemus discovered what Clinton Tyree had done to him. The FDLE agent standing outside the men’s room heard a sob and flung open the door to see the governor of Florida with blood-flecked boxer shorts bunched at his ankles, his milk-white bum thrust toward the mirror. He was appraising himself woefully over one shoulder.
“Sir?” the agent said.
“Go away!” croaked Dick Artemus. “Out!”
But the agent already had seen it. And he could read it, too, even backward in the mirror:
The word shame in scabbing pink letters across the governor’s bare ass, where it had been meticulously etched with a buzzard beak.
Jim Tile said, “This time you’ve outdone yourself.”
“Jail?” Skink asked.
“Or the nuthouse.”
Lisa June Peterson said, “Are you kidding? Nobody’s going to jail. This never happened.”
They were heading to the hospital in Jim Tile’s patrol car. The trooper and Lisa June sat up front. McGuinn and the ex-governor were curled in two aromatic heaps—one black and one fluorescent orange—on the backseat, in the prisoner cage.
“Imagine if Governor Artemus orders Governor Tyree prosecuted,” Lisa June was saying. “Once the story leaks out, Lord, it’s front-page news all over the country—and not the kind you clip out for the family scrapbook, if you’re Dick Artemus.”
From the backseat: “What’s the big deal? He won’t scar.”
Jim Tile said, “I believe you’re missing the point.”
“Two weeks, his scrawny butt’ll be as good as new. What?”
Skink perked up. “Lisa June, are you giggling?”
“No.”
“Yes, you are!”
“Well, it was… ”
“Funny?” Skink prompted.
“Not what I expected to see, that’s all.” Lisa June Peterson tried to compose herself. “You on top of him. Him with his fanny showing… “