Skinny Dip

"Yessir," said Tool, with not as much empathy as his boss would have liked.

"Take them bull gators we heard tearin' it up out there tonight," Red went on. "They been around-what, a hundred trillion years? You think a little fertilizer's go

Tool fixed his gaze straight ahead. "But didn't all the other dinosaurs get extincted?"

"What?" Red Hammernut couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Son, whose side are you on? I don't know what the hell happened to the other damn dinosaurs, and who gives two shits anyhow?"

Tool said, "I shot me a li'l gator just the other day. Wasn't but a four-footer, but still."

"Still what?"

Red simmered all the way out of Loxahatchee. He started feeling better only when the truck finally hit dry pavement and he could see the sodium lights of Palm Beach County glowing to the east. "We're go

"If the dinosaurs don't get him first," said Tool, stone-faced.

"Son, you tryin' to bust my balls? Because I ain't in the mood, case you didn't notice."

"Yessir."

"Know what you could do tomorrow, Mr. O'Toole? You could take that twelve-gauge out to the range for target practice, so that maybe next time you'll be able to hit the side of a motherfuckin' barn."

Tool accepted the insult impassively, a silence that Red Hammer-nut misread as submission. He failed entirely to perceive the flimsiness of Tool's loyalty, or to sense the anger that had begun to simmer in the man's simple thinking.

"It's all 'cause of you he escaped!" Red fumed. "It's your damn fault and nobody else's!"

Tool gave a half shrug. "Try shootin' a shotgun with a slug in your armpit."

"Goddammit, just drive. Just get me home."

Closing his eyes, Red thought of the steaming Jacuzzi that awaited. He couldn't wait to scrub the sweat and sunscreen and dead bugs off his skin; sit down to a sixteen-ounce T-bone and a bottle of Jack Daniel's. He was jolted from this reverie when Tool braked the pickup to an abrupt halt on the grassy shoulder of the highway.

Red looked around. "Now what? We blow a tire?"

"Sit tight." Tool pushed himself out of the truck.

"Hey! Get back here," Red hollered. He hopped out and chased after him. "Where the hell you think you're goin'? I ain't got time tonight for this nonsense!"

Tool did not alter his pace. Red got up beside him and began calling him every name he could think of.

"You hush," Tool said, raising a brick-size hand. He stooped to study the small white cross, and removed a spray of shriveled lilies.

"Not now, son. You come back some other day and fetch it, but not tonight," Red admonished him. "Not on my time."

"It'll just take a second."

"You gone deaf? Deaf and dumb?"

The name on the homemade cross was visible in the wash from the truck's headlights:

Pablo Humberto Duarte

Loving Husband, Father, Son, and Brother

B. Sept. 3, 1959. D.March 21, 2003

Now He Rides with God Almighty

Remember: Seat Belts Save Lives!

"Just some damn beaner," Red Hammernut grumped. "Probably got trashed and drove hisself into the canal."

"You don't know that," said Tool.

"Just lookit the name. Pah-blow Humm-bear-toe-tell me that ain't a beaner name."

Tool sat on his haunches, elbows propped on his knees.

"Well, hurry it up, then," Red said crossly. "Pull the damn thing outta the ground and let's go. I need a drink and a steam."

Tool didn't budge. Red glowered at him.

"What the fuck, son?"

"I just been workin' the 'rithmetic in my head. This old boy was 'bout the same age as me," Tool said, "give or take."

"The beaner?"

"Mr. Doo-arty here. However you say it."

"Mercy." Red thinking: Lord, please don't let this moron go soft on me.

Tool gestured at the wooden cross. "Least he was a 'husband, father, son, brother'-I ain't none a those things, Red. I got no wife and no family… one lousy cousin, he's up at Starke for robbin' a goddamn laundry-mat."

That was the end of Red Hammernut's patience. In his judgment there was no good reason for a man of his stature to be standing on the side of State Road 441 on a Saturday night while some hairy half-wit with a bullet up his butt cheeks suddenly gets a middle-life crisis, all because some dead Meskin forgot to buckle his damn seat belt.

Without a thought, Red slapped Earl Edward O'Toole across the top of the head. It was a poor decision, conveying what Tool regarded as an intolerable lack of respect.

"Listen here, you doped-up dickhead of a gorilla," Red said. "There's half a million bucks of my money sittin' like a big hot buzzard turd in the back of that pickup, out in the wide-open spaces, where any damn crackhead in basketball shoes can rip it off and be gone in five seconds. Now, I don't honestly know what's got into you, son, but I'm go

Tool didn't move, even to wipe Red's spittle off his overalls.

"One…" Red huffed, "two… three… four…"

He had no earthly notion of what to do if the sulking fool refused to obey. Slap him again?

To Red's immeasurable relief, Tool rose slowly and said, "You the boss."

He placed his huge hands around the shaft of the white cross and worked it slowly out of the dirt, so as not to split the pine.

Red said, "It's about damn time. Now hurry up, let's go."

"Not you, chief."

"What?" It was amazing, Red mused, how all the nuts and bolts of one's existence could rattle loose with one bump. "What did you say?" he demanded again, somewhat heedlessly.

Earl Edward O'Toole positioned himself between Red and the truck, his broad frame blocking the headlights. Red felt small and, for the first time, fearful. He was chilled by the sound of Tool's breathing, slow and easy compared to his own.

With a desolate curiosity Red peered upward at the towering shadow. "What now, you dumb ape?"

"Hold still," Tool advised.

Samuel Johnson Hammernut could see the huge man raise both arms high, and for a moment he could see the cross of Pablo Duarte silhouetted against the pearly clouds, and after that he couldn't see anything at all.

The murder of the Everglades, as perpetrated by Red Hammernut and others, is insidiously subtle and undramatic. Unlike more telegenic forms of pollution, the fertilizers pouring by the ton from the sugarcane fields and vegetable farms of southern Florida do not produce stinking tides of dead fish or gruesome panoramas of rotting animal corpses. Instead, the phosphates and other agricultural contaminants work invisibly to destroy a mat of algae known as periphyton, the slimy brown muck that underlies the river of grass and is its most essential nutrient. As the periphyton begins to die, the small fish that feed and nest there move away. Next to go are the egrets and herons, the bluegills and largemouth bass, and so on up the food chain. Soon the saw grass prairies wither and starve, replaced by waves of cattails and other aquatic plants that thrive on the torrent of phosphorus, yet provide miserable habitat for native birds and wildlife.

A primary objective of the government's Everglades restoration project was to reduce the steady deluge of man-made fertilizers. Grudging cooperation came from sugar barons and corporate farmers who could no longer rely on favored politicians to keep the EPA and other regulators off their backs. And while filtration marshes designed to strain out some of the pollutants had shown early promise, the Everglades was still dying at the rate of two acres per day when Charles Regis Perrone made his lonely, woeful trek through Loxahatchee.