Willie Vasquez-Washington, however, wasn’t so comfortable among the walnut gun cabinets and the stuffed animal heads, which unblinkingly stared down at him from their stations high on the log walls. Like the governor, Willie Vasquez-Washington also felt as if he’d taken a step backward to another time—a time when a person of his color would not have been welcome at the Wilderness Veldt Plantation unless he wore burgundy doublets and waistcoats, and carried trays of Apalachicola oysters (as efficient young Ramon was doing now). Nor was Willie Vasquez-Washington especially enthralled by the company at the lodge. He had yet to succumb to the famous charms of Dick Artemus, while Palmer Stoat was, well, Palmer Stoat—solicitous, amiably transparent and as interesting as cold grits. Willie Vasquez-Washington was no more favorably impressed by Robert Clapley, the cocky young developer of Shearwater, who had greeted him with a conspicuously firm handshake and a growl: “So you’re the guy who’s trying to fuck me out of a new bridge.”
It was Willie Vasquez-Washington’s fervent wish that the political deal could be settled that night, over dinner and drinks, so he would be spared the next day’s rhinoceros hunt. Half-drunk white men with high-powered firearms made him extremely nervous. And while Willie Vasquez-Washington was not, in any sense of the term, a nature freak, he had no particular desire to watch some poor animal get shot by the likes of Clapley.
So Willie Vasquez-Washington attempted on several occasions to draw the governor aside, in order to state his simple proposal: A new high school in exchange for a yea vote on the Toad Island bridge appropriation. But Dick Artemus was caught up in the frothy mood of the pre-hunt festivities, and he was unwilling to tear himself away from the hearth. Nor was Palmer Stoat a helpful intermediary; whenever Willie Vasquez-Washington approached him, the man’s face was so crammed with food that his response was indecipherable. In the soft cast of the firelight, Stoat’s damp bloated countenance resembled that of an immense albino blowfish. What meager table manners he had maintained while sober deteriorated vividly under the double-barreled effects of Remy Martin and babyback ribs. The ripe spray erupting from Stoat’s churning mouth presented not only an unsavory visual spectacle but also (Willie Vasquez-Washington suspected) a health hazard. The prudent move was to back off, safely out of range.
At 1:00 a.m., Willie Vasquez-Washington gave up. He headed upstairs to bed just as Stoat and Clapley broke into besotted song:
“You can’t always do who you want,
No, you can’t always do who you want… ”
They stopped at a shop with a Confederate flag nailed to the door, on U.S. 301 between Starke and Waldo. Twilly Spree purchased a Remington 30.06 with a scope and a box of bullets. Clinton Tyree got Zeiss night-scope binoculars and a secondhand army Colt.45, for use at close range. A five-hundred-dollar cash “donation” toward the new Moose Lodge served to expedite the paperwork and inspire a suddenly genial clerk to overlook the brief waiting period normally required for handgun purchases in Florida.
Skink and Twilly stopped for dog food, camo garb and other supplies in the town of Mclntosh, seventeen miles outside Ocala. At a diner there, a shy ponderous waitress named Beverly blossomed before their very eyes into a svelte southern version of Rosie O’Donnell—a transformation hastened by a hundred-dollar tip and the gift of a one-of-a-kind Chihuahua-hide vest, which Skink good-naturedly took off and presented to her on the spot. Beverly pulled up a chair and offered numerous scandalous anecdotes about what went on at the Wilderness Veldt Plantation and, more importantly, flawless directions to it. By nightfall Twilly and Skink were comfortably encamped on the north end of the spread, having conquered the barbed ten-foot fence with a bolt cutter. The ex-governor built a small fire ring in a concealed palmetto thicket, while Twilly took McGuinn to scout the area. The dog was like a dervish on the leash, pulling so hard in so many different directions that it nearly dislocated Twilly’s acutely tender right shoulder. By the time they returned to the campsite, Skink had dinner cooking over the flames—for Twilly, a rib-eye steak and two baked potatoes; for himself, braised rabbit, alligator tail and fried water moccasin, all plucked, freshly smote, off a bountiful two-mile stretch of pavement south of Micanopy.