Carl Hiaasen – Sick Puppy

“Governor, I’ll say it again: I’m too old for this shit.”

“You are, Jim. Now, go home to your bride.”

“I don’t want to read about you two in the paper. Please.”

Skink plucked off the trooper’s shades and bent them to fit his face. “Elusive and reclusive! That’s us.”

“Just take care. Please,” Jim Tile said.

As soon as he was gone, they drove straight for the interstate. Twilly drifted in and out of codeine heaven, never dreaming. Near Lake City the captain excitedly awakened him to point out a dead hog on the shoulder of the highway.

“We could live off that for two weeks!”

Twilly sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Why are you stopping?”

“Waste not, want not.”

“You love bacon that much, let me buy you a Benny’s franchise,” Twilly said. “But I’ll be damned if you’re stashing a four-hundred-pound pig corpse in my new station wagon. No offense, captain.”

In the back of the car, McGuinn whined and fidgeted.

“Probably gotta pee,” Skink concluded.

“Makes two of us,” Twilly said.

“No, makes three.”

They all got out and walked toward the fringe of the woods. The ex-governor glanced longingly over his shoulder, toward the road-kill hog. McGuinn sniffed at it briefly before loping off to explore a rabbit trail. Twilly decided to let him roam for a few minutes.

When they got back to the car, the captain asked Twilly how he felt.

“Stoned. Sore.” With a grunt, Twilly boosted himself onto the hood. “And lucky,” he added.

Skink rested one boot on the bumper. He peeled off the shower cap and rubbed a bronze knuckle back and forth across the stubble of his scalp. He said, “We’ve got some decisions to make, Master Spree.”

“My mother saved all the clippings from when you disappeared. Every time there was a new story, she’d read it to us over breakfast,” Twilly recalled. “Drove my father up a wall. My father sold beachfront.”

Skink whistled sarcastically. “The big leagues. More, more, more.”

“He said you must be some kind of Communist. He said anybody who was anti-development was anti-American.”

“So your daddy’s a patriot, huh? Life, liberty and the pursuit of real estate commissions.”

“My mother said you were just a man trying to save a place he loved.”

“And failing spectacularly.”

“A folk hero, she said.”

Skink seemed amused. “Your mother sounds like a romantic.” He refitted the shower cap snugly on his skull. “You were in, what, kindergarten? First grade? You can’t possibly remember back that far.”

“For years afterward she talked about you,” Twilly said, “maybe just to give my dad the needle. Or maybe because she was secretly on your side. She voted for you, that I know.”

“Jesus, stop right there—”

“I think you’d like her. My mother.”

Skink pried off the sunglasses and studied his own reflection in the shine off the car’s fender. With two fingers he repositioned the crimson eye, more or less aligning it with his real one. Then he set his gaze on Twilly Spree and said, “Son, I can’t tell you what to do with your life—hell, you’ve seen what I’ve done with mine. But I will tell you there’s probably no peace for people like you and me in this world. Somebody’s got to be angry or nothing gets fixed. That’s what we were put here for, to stay pissed off.”

Twilly said, “They made me take a class for it, captain. I was not cured.”

“A class?”

“Anger management. I’m perfectly serious.”

Skink hooted. “For Christ’s sake, what about greed management? Everybody in this state should get a course in that. You fail, they haul your sorry ass to the border and throw you out of Florida.”

“I blew up my uncle’s bank,” Twilly said.

“So what!” Skink exclaimed. “Nothing shameful about anger, boy. Sometimes it’s the only sane and logical and moral reaction. Jesus, you don’t take a class to make it go away! You take a drink or a goddamn bullet. Or you stand and fight the bastards.”

The ex-governor canted his chin to the sky and boomed:

“Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle

Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime;