Growing up, Tommy Tigertail had memorized the broken treaties—Camp Moultrie, Payne’s Landing, Fort Gibson, and the rest. These were the devices that had swept from paradise all but three hundred unconquerable Seminoles, among them Tommy’s great-grandfather, then a teenager, who had hidden and fought and never touched a quill to a U.S. treaty.
Viceroy Wilson had read up on the Seminoles, who impressed him as some of the craftiest motherfuckers ever to raise a rifle. The more he read, the more Wilson was persuaded that Tommy’s people had just as much fury to burn as American blacks. Viceroy Wilson was waiting for the day when the Indian’s hatred percolated into raw violence or sinister magic, but so far Tommy Tigertail had kept it under rein. Moderation and manners served him well. He weaved as effortlessly through the white man’s labyrinth of high finance as he did through the knotted trails of the Big Cypress. It was Tommy Tigertail who had turned the inane bingo fetish of Florida’s senior citizens into a Seminole bonanza: soon after gambling was ruled to be legal on the Indian reservations, Tommy converted some old airplane hangars into the world’s biggest bingo halls. Ingeniously he tailored them for the various South Florida markets: Yiddish bingo, Cuban bingo, Brooklyn bingo, and redneck bingo. The tribe got rich, and Tommy Tigertail became a tycoon without even trying. It was bingo money that bankrolled Las Noches, but Tommy didn’t seem to care how it was spent. He said little, and carried out Skip Wiley’s extravagant orders with dispassionate obedience. Around the midnight campfires it was Wiley who did the fulminating, who put the anger and the passion into words, but it was Tommy Tigertail whose spirit seemed to dominate; it was in Tommy’s burnt-wood eyes that Skip Wiley found a pure purpose for his crusade.
As his airboat sliced through the morning mist, Tommy Tigertail thought for the hundredth time: It is too bad Great-great-grandfather didn’t have one of these babies. They’d never have caught him.
“Slow down!” Brian Keyes croaked, teeth clicking.
Tommy Tigertail glanced down at his prisoner.
Keyes mouthed the words: “Help me.”
The Indian cut the engine, and the airboat coasted to a stop. The silence seemed sudden and immense.
Tommy hopped off his perch and bent over Keyes.
“I’m bleeding to death,” Keyes said, fingering his sticky shirt.
“No,” Tommy Tigertail said. “I dressed the wound myself. And gave you medicine.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Button snakeroot and willow shavings.” Tommy lifted Keyes’s shirt and studied the knife wound. Gently he put his hand on Keyes’s belly. “You’re very cold,” he said. “We’ll wait a few minutes then.” He opened a moleskin canteen and tipped it to Keyes’s mouth. The liquid was hot and smoky-tasting, stronger than any coffee known to man.
“Black tea,” explained Tommy Tigertail, “to stop the madness.”
“Too late for that,” Keyes said with a sigh.
The Seminole wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, denims, and western boots—the same damn boots from Wiley’s cabin. Tommy Tigertail looked like no other Florida millionaire Brian Keyes had ever met.
The Indian surveyed the swamp. “We are four miles from the road.” He climbed into the driver’s seat and pointed toward the sunrise.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “a herd of white-tailed deer lived here. Three bucks, many does. The fawns you seldom saw. In the winter, when the water disappeared, I could always find the deer grazing on the edge of this basin. When I was fifteen it was time to kill one, and I did.”
Keyes sat up, bolstered by the strange tea. Under different circumstances Tommy’s version of Bambi would have touched him, but Keyes could scarcely listen. He was preoccupied with the selfish notion that he should be taken to a hospital as soon as possible.
Tommy Tigertail said: “Three years ago the deer died. Five white men in a half-track ran them into the high water and killed them with shotguns. The fawns, too. I watched from this spot.” The Indian described the slaughter with no outward emotion, as if it were something he’d been expecting his whole life. It gave Keyes a fresh chill.
The Seminole said, “You were wondering what I’m doing with Mr. Wiley. You didn’t ask, but you wondered just the same. So this is my answer: your friend Mr. Wiley says there’s a chance to put things right, to make those who don’t belong here go away forever.”