Skink--No Surrender (8 page)

Skink was pretending not to listen as I worked my way out of the conversation. After the call was over, I shrugged and said, “Hey, she’s just a friend.”

“I’ve had a few of those.” He scratched at his beard. “How’s your mother holding up?”

I opened my laptop and read her email aloud. It was part-mom, part-lawyer:

Dear Richard
,

I intended to say all this in a phone call, but sometimes it’s easier to sort my thoughts when I put them in writing
.

You understand why I’m not enthusiastic about this impulsive trip of yours. We’re all worried about your cousin, but my job is to worry about you. I spoke at length with the mysterious “Mr. Tile,” and in confidence he gave me the history of the gentleman with whom you’re traveling. He said that this person, despite his age, was physically capable of protecting you from any harm, and that he wouldn’t hesitate to give up his own life in your defense, if necessary
.

It would be untrue to say that I wasn’t comforted by Mr. Tile’s assurances. I did a little research of my own, which confirmed the basic biographical details about this “Skink” individual. However, I also came across accounts of certain incidents that I can only pray have been exaggerated by legend. If even half the stories are true, he clearly isn’t the most stable of companions. Please, please be careful
.

Mr. Tile has promised to stay in contact, but I’m still very apprehensive about this road trip you’ve embarked upon. Personally, I don’t believe Malley can be found if she doesn’t wish to be, or that she necessarily needs to be “rescued.” Her phone calls home have been fairly breezy and lighthearted, according to Dan and Sandy. Based on past experiences, I’m betting she’ll be back in Loggerhead Beach as soon as she gets bored with this latest escapade
.

Obviously you believe she might be in danger, and if that’s true, then you could be in danger, too. Again I’m asking you to back off and let the authorities handle this. There’s nothing you and “Skink” can do that couldn’t be done more safely by experienced law-enforcement officers. Honestly, it’s only because of Mr. Tile that I haven’t called the police myself and put out an Amber Alert for you!

At times like this I find myself wondering what your father would do if he were here. As you know, he was always the “free spirit” in our family. He used to tell me it was healthy to let you boys cut loose and take a few chances, but I suspect that even he would be alarmed by what you’re doing
.

Please come home, honey
.

Love always
,                   
Mom
                              

I shut the computer and looked at the governor to see if he was offended by my mother’s suggestion that he might be a psycho.

All he said was: “You’re a lucky young man.”

“I know.”

“You want to go home, that’s cool.”

“It’s not like I want to. But—”

“Something happens to you, she’ll be shattered.”

“That’s why I quit surfing after Dad died,” I said. “My brothers—they’re just insane on the water. No fear. Mom can’t even watch.”

“You’re the one she depends on to always be there. The steady son, right?”

“Something like that.”

Outside, the rain had let up. The Malibu’s windshield wipers squeaked on the glass. One of Skink’s songs was playing on the sound system.
Help me, Rhonda. Help, help me, Rhonda
.

He said, “There’s an airport in Bay County. Have her call and line up a flight to Orlando. I’d put you on a Greyhound bus, but you might wind up sitting next to somebody who looks worse than me.”

“Why can’t I just ride back with you in the car?”

“Because I’m not going back.”

“Oh.” At first I didn’t catch on.

“I’m going to find your cousin,” he said.

And that was that. With or without my help, the old man aimed to track down Malley and take her away from the Talbo Chock impostor.

A few hours later, as the sun disappeared through a frill of fluffy pink clouds, we stood along Massalina Bayou in downtown Panama City. The Tarpon Dock drawbridge
was rising for a shrimp boat coming in from the Gulf. Above its stern swirled a confetti of gulls and terns, crying hungrily. The boat captain sounded his horn.

My shoulders were shaking, I was so amped. “This must be it! The bridge she called me from!”

The shrimper was eyeing us from the cockpit as his boat rumbled past. Skink pulled off his shower cap and shoved it inside a pocket. The gash on his scalp was purple from iodine, and I could see a cross-hatching of black threads. He must have pulled the car over and stitched himself up while I was asleep.

“So, what’d you tell your mom?” he asked.

“I told her I trusted you.”

The governor smiled. “Does that mean you don’t want a ride to the airport?”

“No airport,” I said.

“Outstanding.” He unknotted his snake-rattle necklace and presented it to me.

I wish I still had it.

EIGHT

Scientists search for ivory-billed woodpeckers with the same fanatic determination that some people hunt for Bigfoots.

The difference is that those woodpeckers were real. They lived in old hardwood forests throughout the southeastern United States until after the Civil War, when the timber industry moved in and started chopping down millions of trees. Eventually the birds had no more bark beetles to eat, no old dead trunks for pecking out their nest holes. Once it became known that ivorybills were disappearing, they were stalked and shot by hunters who sold the bodies to museums, so that they could be stuffed and put on display like dinosaurs. Pitiful but true.

The woodpecker was crazy beautiful—tall and long-beaked, with pale yellow eyes and bluish-black feathers. Bright white streaks ran down each side of its neck, spreading to the wings. The bird’s most striking feature was a sharp crest on the back of its head—black for females, bright red for males. The ivorybill’s appearance was so dramatic that it was nicknamed the “Lord God Bird,”
because “Lord God!” is what people supposedly exclaimed when they first saw one.

There hasn’t been a one hundred percent documented encounter with the species in something like eighty years. Random sightings are reported, but, like Bigfoot, not a single ivorybill has been positively located and identified. What people often see (and get excited about) is really a pileated woodpecker, which also has a vivid red crest. That bird is smaller, though, with brownish feathers and a shorter beak. It also has less white on the wing markings.

I know all this from doing my science fair project, which won an honorable mention at school. I wouldn’t call myself an ivorybill expert, but I did a ton of research. Because ivorybills vanished so long ago, no color photographs of the birds exist. Malley helped me draw a likeness on my poster board. To be accurate, we studied century-old illustrations and also a painting of three ivorybills by John James Audubon, the famous nature artist who spent lots of time in Florida.

Unfortunately, Audubon usually shot the species he wanted to paint, in order to examine them up close. This was back in the 1820s, when there were still plenty of ivorybills around, but I bet today he’d trade that painting for a glimpse of a live one. The last known population was wiped out in the 1930s when a Chicago lumber company clear-cut an ancient Louisiana forest. Lots of folks, even some politicians, pleaded with the loggers not to saw down those trees, but the company refused to stop.

And with that, the ivory-billed woodpecker became a ghost. In Florida the legend lives on in the deep woods along the Choctawhatchee River, which winds down into the Panhandle from southern Alabama. Malley also worked with me on my habitat map. That’s how she was able to get on the phone and tell me where she was without alerting the fake Talbo Chock. All she had to say was that she’d heard an ivorybill. Only a bird geek like me would put two and two together.

Not so long ago, researchers from two big-time universities published a study listing fourteen reliable sightings of the ivorybill in the Choctawhatchee basin, as well as three hundred recordings of distinct calls and bark drumming known to be made by the elusive woodpecker. However, after several years of trying, no scientist or civilian has been able to produce clear photographic evidence of a living specimen along that river—or anywhere else in the United States.

A famous video that supposedly shows an ivorybill flying in an Arkansas swamp was rejected by top ornithologists, who said the bird was most likely a pileated woodpecker. I included a YouTube clip of that video in my science fair project, which was interactive. People could touch a button and hear a recording that compared the different hammering patterns of the pileated and the ivory-billed. I re-created the sounds myself by tapping a hollow bamboo reed against a dead palm tree.

It would be awesome if someone actually discovered
a live ivorybill, but that hasn’t happened. The bird is officially classified as extinct, and that’s what I concluded in my project. They’re all gone.

“Don’t be so sure,” the governor said.

“Now you sound like my stepfather. He totally believes in Sasquatches.”

“I saw one of those woodpeckers with my own eye.”

“Right,” I said.

“April 17, 2009. Tomorrow I’ll show you where.”

Choctawhatchee Bay, where the river empties, is only a short drive from Panama City, but Skink decided to wait until morning to begin our search for Malley. He said snooping around after dark was too risky. In the daylight hours we could pose as grandfather and grandson on a lazy summer road trip.

“Don’t you have, like, a regular hat?” I asked.

He smoothed the wrinkles from his shower cap and sourly jabbed a stick into the embers of the fire. We were camping in piney scrub near a place called Ebro. The governor was frying two dozen oysters he’d bought at a fish house and shucked with a combat knife. I’d never been brave enough to eat an oyster, but I agreed to try one because my other option was boiled roadkill. Skink had scavenged a dead raccoon on Highway 98. It had been struck by a vehicle with extremely large tires, and the furry ringed tail was the only way you could tell what kind of mammal it was.

The oysters actually were tasty, and I ended up eating
more than the governor did. After we finished, he gathered up the empty shells and went off to bury them. That’s when my mother called.

“Where are you?” she asked. “I’ve got a road map of Florida in front of me.”

“I can’t tell you, but we’re definitely getting close to Malley.”

“Hold on. Did you really just say you can’t tell me?”

“I promised him I wouldn’t give out too much information.”

“By ‘him,’ you mean Mr. Tyree. Has he legally adopted you now? Because, if not, I’m still the one responsible for your health and well-being!”

“Okay, Mom. Okay.” I told her we were camping in the Panhandle. She asked for the name of the nearest city, and I said we were somewhere west of Tallahassee.

“Oh, that’s a tremendous help, Richard. You might as well have said east of Mobile.”

“Mom, everything’s fine. We had fresh oysters for dinner, okay? It’s not like I’m suffering. He’s got bug spray, blankets, soap, even a snakebite kit.”

Dumb mistake on my part, mentioning the snakebite kit.

“Oh, great. So you’re in a wild swamp,” my mother sighed, “with moccasins and rattlers.”

“We are
not
in a swamp. You gotta chill, please?”

“Has he done anything crazy yet? Tell the truth.”

“He cussed at some litterbug on the highway,” I said.
“That’s not crazy—you do the same thing.” Except my mother has never poured beer into another driver’s gas tank, no matter what stupid thing he’s done.

Trent got on the line to say how disappointed he was in me for lying about going camping with Blake. I apologized for getting him into trouble with Mom.

He said, “Best thing you could do, bro, is beam yourself home ASAP.”

“Not just yet.”

“Let the cops find Malley. What are you—like, mister secret agent bounty hunter?”

The difference was that bounty hunters chase down people to get the reward money; I was tracking my cousin because I was worried about her.

“Trent, can I please talk to Mom again?”

There was a muffled exchange of the phone, then my mother’s tense voice: “Richard, if you do find Malley, I want your word that you and Mr. Tyree won’t do anything reckless. Just hang back and call the police, all right? Don’t try to be heroes.”

“Of course,” I said, knowing the governor was out of my control. He couldn’t wait to have a “chat” with the fake Talbo.

“Also,” Mom added, “you’ve got exactly seventy-two hours.”

“Why? Then what?”

“Then I’ll be notifying the authorities.”

“But what about Mr. Tile—”

“I’ll be telling him the same thing,” she said. “Three days from now I expect to see your smiling, unharmed face in this house. If you’re not back by then, I’m basically calling out the cavalry.”

“Mom, come on!”

“That’s the deal, Richard. Now, may I speak to Governor Tyree, or Skink, or whatever he’s calling himself?”

“Uh, he stepped away.”

“Stepped away? To where? Don’t tell me he left you alone out there—”

“Later, Mom.”

The reason I clicked off in such a hurry was that I heard a truck honking and a high-pitched scrape of brakes out on the road, not far from our campfire. Using the flashlight app, I picked my way through the woods, not even trying to be quiet.

By the time I reached the road, the truck was out of sight. Shards of oyster shells littered the pavement. I called out for the governor, sweeping my little flashlight back and forth. The glow fell upon a boot, an exceptionally large boot, standing empty on the gravel shoulder. I saw that the toe of the boot had been crushed, practically flattened. A grimy, torn sock lay crumpled nearby.

When I yelled again, my voice cracked.