“All right, all right—thank you,” Twilly said sarcastically. “Thank you very much for jumping on my broken ribs. I’d forgotten how good that feels.”
He sneezed again, the pain causing his eyes to well.
Skink said, “I’ve got an idea. Pull off at the next exit.”
At a gas station they vacuumed the dog hair out of the station wagon—enough of it, Skink observed, for a whole new Labrador. Twilly’s sneezing was cured. They headed southbound on the Florida Turnpike, which recently had been renamed (for reasons no one could adequately explain) after Ronald Reagan.
“Name a rest stop after him. That would make sense,” Skink groused. “But the whole turnpike? Christ, he was still making cowboy movies when the damn thing was built.”
Twilly said he didn’t care if they dedicated the road to Kathie Lee Gifford, as long as they raised the toll to one hundred dollars per car.
“Not nearly high enough. Make it half a grand,” Skink decreed. “Twice as much for Winnebagos.”
Traffic was, as usual, rotten. Twilly felt a familiar downward skid in his mood.
“Where you headed now?” he asked the captain.
“Back to Crocodile Lakes, I suppose. My current residence is a cozy but well-ventilated NASCAR Dodge. You?”
“Everglades City.”
Skink canted an eyebrow. “What for?”
“Strategic positioning,” Twilly said. “Or maybe just to catch some redfish. Who knows.”
“Oh man.”
“Hey, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask: All these years, you never thought about leaving?”
“Every single day, son.”
“Where to?” Twilly said.
“Bahamas. Turks and Caicos. Find some fly-speck island too small for a Club Med. Once I bought a ticket to the Grenadines and got all the way to Miami International—”
“But you couldn’t get on the plane.”
“No, I could not. It felt like I was sneaking out the back door on a dying friend.”
Twilly said, “I know.”
Skink hung his head out the car and roared like a gut-shot bear. “Damn Florida,” he said.
For ten miles they rode in silence. Then Twilly felt the heat of that gaze—and from the corner of an eye he saw the buzzard beaks, twirling counterclockwise on the tails of the burnished braids.
Skink said, “Son, I can’t tell you how to handle the pain, or where to find a season of peace—or even one night’s worth. I just hope you have better luck at it than I did.”
“Governor, I hope I do half as well.”
With a tired smile, Skink said, “Then I’ve got only one piece of advice: If she’s crazy enough to write you, be sure to write back.”
“Gee. I’ll try to force myself. By the way, how’d it go with your brother?”
“You’ve been so good not to ask.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been a hundred miles,” Twilly said, “so I’m asking now.”
“It went fine. We had a good talk.” And, in a way, they had. Skink dug out Jim Tile’s mirrored sunglasses and pinched them to the bridge of his nose. “You taking the Trail across?”
Twilly nodded. “I thought I would. Nice straight shot.”
“And an awful pretty drive. Drop me at Krome Avenue, I’ll hitch to the Keys.”
“Like hell. I want to see this alleged race car.” Twilly reached for the stereo. “Is Neil Young OK with you?”
“Neil Young would be superb.”
So they flew past the exit for the Tamiami Trail and remained on the Ronald Reagan Turnpike. It was the tail of rush hour and the traffic was still clotted; frenzied. The unspoken question bubbling like nitroglycerin inside the Buick Roadmaster was whether they could make it through Miami, whether they could actually get out of the godforsaken city before somebody did something that simply couldn’t be overlooked…
And somehow they did get out, navigating onward through the turgid hellhole of west Kendall toward Snapper Creek, Cutler Ridge, Homestead—until finally the highway delivered them, more or less sane, to Florida City. They glowered at the blighted dreck of mini-marts and fast-food pits until escaping on Card Sound Road, bounded only by scrub and wetlands, and aiming the prow of the Buick toward North Key Largo; both men breathing easier, Twilly humming and Skink even tapping his boots to the music, when—