Nature Girl Read online

  Perry Skinner said he’d seen it happen before. He opened the passenger door of the truck and she climbed in.

  “You didn’t even ask about my ridiculous dress,” she said.

  “And you didn’t ask about my rubber boots.”

  Three weeks later they got married.

  Honey Santana was surprised to see Fry’s skateboard on the sidewalk when she parked in front of her ex-husband’s house. The screen door was half-open so she knocked lightly and let herself in. The two of them were in the kitchen, pretending to talk about something other than her. Honey wasn’t fooled.

  “Don’t you have homework?” she asked her son.

  “Just algebra. Quadratic equations—totally easy.”

  “Get a move on.”

  Fry looked to his father for a reprieve. Perry Skinner tossed him an apple and said, “See you at the track meet tomorrow.” Fry slung his book bag over one shoulder, shuffled out the door and skated away.

  Honey said, “Let me guess—he thinks I need to start back with the shrink.”

  “Be grateful you’ve got a kid that gives a shit,” Skinner said. “Want something to drink?”

  “I’m fine, Perry.”

  “How about an orange?”

  “No, I mean I’m fine. As in, not loony,” Honey said. “Fry worries too much, same as you.”

  Skinner went out on the porch and sat down in his rocking chair. Honey followed but remained standing.

  “He said you found some decent kayaks,” Skinner said.

  “I didn’t really come to talk about that.”

  “Or say thanks, either, I guess.”

  Honey was stung. “Knock it off,” she told him.

  “I’m dying to hear more about these ecotours. Where exactly do you plan to go?”

  “Back in the islands.” She waved her hand toward the river. “I’ve got the trip all charted out. Give me some credit, okay?”

  Skinner took out a joint and lighted it up.

  “Oh, that’s polite,” Honey said.

  Skinner ignored the bite in her tone. “You got your medicine, I got mine. By the way, Fry can stay with me for as long as he wants.”

  “What?”

  “He said you needed his room for those friends who’re coming into town.”

  “Oh. Right,” Honey said. “Thanks.”

  “See, that wasn’t so painful.”

  She let it slide. She was watching an osprey fly upriver with a fish wriggling in its talons. Her skull had filled up with two songs playing simultaneously. It sounded like “Bell Bottom Blues,” which she loved, and “Karma Chameleon,” which made her bowels cramp. Honey wilted under a churning wave of vertigo.

  “You okay?” Skinner got up and guided her into the rocker.

  She waited until the boom box in her brainpan went quiet. Then she said, “You heard what happened to Louis Piejack.”

  “Sure did.”

  “You hire those thugs to maul him?”

  Skinner smiled. “And why would I do that, Honey? To avenge your honor?”

  “Did you or didn’t you?”

  “Go get your purse. I want to check your prescription bottles.”

  “That’s real funny.”

  Skinner took a heavy drag off the joint. “Louis owed money to lots of people, including one old dude in Hialeah who I know for a fact has a wicked sense of humor and no appetite for excuses.”

  “So you’re saying it wasn’t you? You didn’t pay those guys to feed Louis’s fingers to the crabs?” Honey said.

  Skinner blew smoke up at the cedar beams. “You act disappointed.” He pinched the joint and dropped it into a breast pocket. “Makes you feel better, I probably would’ve done something worse if I’d been there when he touched you.”

  “Yeah, such as?”

  “Gutting him from his asshole to his nose with the dirtiest blade I could find.”

  Honey heard herself gulp. “You’re just saying that ’cause that’s what you think I want to hear. Don’t patronize me, Perry.”

  “Unbelievable,” he said quietly.

  She studied his expression for a trace of something more than the usual exasperation. He walked to the door of the porch and held it open.

  Honey rose from the rocker. “Promise me one thing,” she said. “Promise you won’t have anyone over while Fry’s here—that girl who sells propane to the RV parks, and whoever else you’re sleeping with these days. Not with Fry in the house, okay?”

  “I’ll try to restrain myself.”

  “Oh, and the dentist wants him to floss twice a day.”

  “For God’s sake, Honey.”

  “He’s a teenager. Somebody’s got to be the drill sergeant.”

  “Is he allowed to whack off once in a while?” Skinner asked.

  Honey jabbed him in the ribs on her way out. “Only after he’s done his algebra,” she said.

  Packing for Florida, Eugenie Fonda endeavored to convince herself that she truly wasn’t a desperate woman. Chronically restless maybe, but not hard up.

  She expected that the trip would cause Boyd Shreave to get so carried away that he would stamp a romantic interpretation upon every casual sigh and gesture. This was common with inexperienced philanderers. Eugenie was determined not to repeat the big mistake she’d made with Van Bonneville, which was to underestimate the besotting power of routine sex. Certain men could misread the most perfunctory hand job as a pledge of lifetime devotion. Although Boyd Shreave wasn’t the type to rush out and murder his wife, he was probably capable of other lust-crazed misbehavior.

  Eugenie was certain that she could control him. To that end, she packed four bikinis, in escalating degrees of skimpiness. She applied the same unsubtle strategy to her selection of travel panties and bras. Boyd was not a complex machine.

  While struggling to shut her suitcase, Eugenie Fonda caught a sideways glimpse of herself in the bedroom mirror. She shook off her robe and stood there for a minute of blunt self-appraisal. At the end she concluded that she looked pretty darn good—nice legs, premium tits and not a crease on her face; nothing that a light foundation couldn’t hide anyway.

  Undoubtedly she was the best thing that had ever happened to Boyd. He, unfortunately, was destined to be at most a very short paragraph in her future autobiography.

  Eugenie slumped on the edge of the bed. What am I doing? she wondered. Why am I hopping on a plane with this slacker?

  Of course he’d promised he would change. They all said that, and they never changed one little bit. Yet Eugenie always tried to persuade herself that the men she dated weren’t really dim, just deceptively shy; that deep in their souls glowed something precious and rare, which they were waiting for just the perfect moment to share.

  She straightened up and told herself to get a grip. It wasn’t like she was whoring on the streets; she was vacationing with a guy who wasn’t physically repulsive and whose companionship was not entirely unbearable. Life is a ride, so what the hell.

  From a hand-carved jewelry box she took the pearl stud that had been given to her by a man she’d met on a Denver talk show during her book tour. He was a famous self-help guru—blissfully married, of course—who by coincidence was also staying at the Brown Palace. At half past midnight he’d shown up at her suite toting a two-hundred-dollar bottle of cabernet, a girl-on-girl porn tape and an elephant’s dosage of Levitra, every last milligram of which he would ultimately require for a six-minute erection.

  Eugenie stuck out her tongue at the mirror and deftly inserted the glossy pearl.

  She understood that she must be heedful, and she must be firm. The trip to the Ten Thousand Islands meant something very different to her than it did to Boyd Shreave.

  He wanted to make a whole new man of himself.

  She just wanted to get out of Texas for a spell.

  Nine

  Fry was fast enough to run relays but he preferred the mile because it gave him time to think. When things were all right at home, Fry typically won by te
n or eleven seconds. When he was worrying about his mother, he usually came in dead last.

  One time he didn’t even finish the race. He was in second place with a quarter mile remaining when he heard sirens, at which point he veered off the track and sprinted nine blocks home to see if his mom was being arrested. That morning she had threatened to hunt down and emasculate the plumber who’d sold her a defective toilet fixture that had flooded the trailer. Knowing she didn’t believe in idle threats, Fry assumed from the sound of the police cars that she had carried out the revenge mutilation. Fortunately, it turned out to be a routine fender bender in the traffic circle. The errant plumber was alive and unlacerated, mopping the double-wide under Honey Santana’s glowering supervision.

  The day before the mystery couple was due to arrive, Fry returned from track practice and found his mother painting extravagantly on the outside wall panels of the trailer.

  “What’s with the parrot?” he asked.

  Honey said, “It’s a scarlet macaw, and don’t tell me there’s no macaws in the Everglades because I know that, okay? The store didn’t have any pink paint so I couldn’t do a flamingo.”

  Fry said, “Why not a spoonbill?”

  “Same difference.”

  “No, they’ve got more red in the feathers.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Audubon,” Honey said, “but I wanted something more—what’s the word?—iconic. Spoonbills are okay, but let’s face it, they look like ducks on stilts. Now, when you see a big regal macaw”—Honey was beaming at her florid masterpiece—“you think of a tropical rain forest.”

  She dunked her brush in the paint can and went back to work. Fry failed to curb himself from saying, “Mom, we don’t have rain forests here, either.”

  “Get busy on your homework, wiseass.”

  “Can I ask why you’re painting the place?”

  “So it won’t look like a mobile home,” Honey said. “Nothing fancy, a basic jungle motif—palms, vines, banana plants. I bought, like, four different shades of green.”

  Fry sat down on his backpack and contemplated the obvious futility of opening an eco-lodge in a trailer park. Based on what he saw, he didn’t have high hopes for his mother’s nature mural. She had bestowed upon her psychedelic macaw the lush eyelashes of a dairy cow and the dainty tongue of a fruit bat.

  He said, “Next you’ll be doing monkeys.”

  “Matter of fact, I am.” She spun around to face him. “Look, kiddo, this ain’t the frigging Smithsonian. This is a sales job, okay? Once we get the tourists into the kayaks and out in those islands”—she was pointing fervently with the paintbrush—“they’ll be so blown away by how gorgeous it is, the mural won’t matter. Instead of macaws and gibbons they get bald eagles and raccoons. Instead of a rain forest they get mangroves. So what.”

  Fry said, “You’re right, Mom.”

  “And you know what? If they don’t get it, then screw ’em. They should go back to the big city and commune with the pigeons and rats, ’cause that’s all the wildlife they deserve.”

  Fry regretted questioning the realism of her artwork. Once Honey Santana launched a project, extreme delicacy was required in commentary. To criticize even mildly was to risk agitating her or, worse, sparking a more fanciful initiative.

  “You have any more questions?” she asked sharply.

  “Yeah, one.” Fry stood up. “Got an extra paintbrush?”

  Boyd Shreave hurried to pack before his wife came home. He didn’t want her to see his Florida wardrobe, seven hundred dollars’ worth of Tommy Bahama boat shorts and flowered shirts that he’d charged to her MasterCard. They all fit neatly inside a new Orvis travel bag that he’d spotted at a high-end fishing shop downtown.

  He was finished by the time Lily walked in the front door. With evident skepticism she eyed the Orvis bag. “What’s the name of this place you’re going?”

  Falling back on Eugenie’s advice, he dredged up another dead president. “The Garfield Clinic,” he said.

  “Garfield, like that lazy cat in the comics?”

  “No, it’s the name of the doctor who discovered my disease.”

  “No offense, Boyd, but leprosy is a disease. The fear of being groped is a mental condition.”

  “Disorder,” he said stiffly.

  “What’s it called again?”

  Shreave paused long enough to nail the pronunciation. “Aphenphosmphobia—you can look it up. Dr. Millard Garfield was the one who first documented it.”

  His wife said, “Is that right.”

  “He died a few years ago.” Boyd Shreave hoped she would wait until tomorrow morning, after he was gone, to get on the Internet and check his story. “So they named the clinic after him,” he added.

  “Quite an honor,” Lily said dryly.

  Shreave didn’t waver. “I’m feeling worse every day. I sure hope they can help.”

  “And Relentless is picking up the tab?”

  “They said they’ve got an investment in me. They said I have a big future with the company.” It felt like he was working the phones, the lies were rolling so comfortably off his tongue.

  “So what exactly is the therapy for this kind of thing?” Lily asked. “You sit in a rubber room with a bunch of other nuts and practice fondling each other?”

  “That’s so funny.”

  “I’m serious, Boyd. I want to know if you’re ever going to get better.”

  “Why do you think I’m making the trip?” he said. “Garfield is like the Mayo Clinic for aphenphosmphobics.”

  “If you say so.” His wife headed for the kitchen. “I’m having a drink. Want one?”

  Boyd Shreave stood at the window and watched the neighbor’s tiny Jack Russell take a mastiff-sized dump on his lawn.

  Lily returned with two strawberry daiquiris and thrusted one at him. “Might as well get into the tropical spirit.”

  Shreave raised the glass and said, “To Dr. Garfield.”

  “Ha! To hell with that quack,” Lily said. “I bet I can cure you quicker.”

  Her mischievous tone caused Shreave to hack out a nervous chuckle. He had not forgotten the aborted bagel-shop blow job, or the attempted red-thong seduction on the couch.

  “Sit down,” she said, motioning toward a wingback chair. “Sit and enjoy.”

  “Lily, this isn’t a game.”

  “Oh relax. I promise not to lay a hand on you.”

  “You better not.”

  “I swear on Daddy’s grave.”

  What grave? Shreave thought. The man was cremated and scattered over a golf course designed by Fuzzy Zoeller.

  “Boyd, sit,” said his wife.

  He surrendered his daiquiri and sat.

  “Excellent. Now shut your eyes,” she instructed.

  “What for?”

  Lily put down the two glasses and said, “You want the cure, or not?”

  Shreave squeezed his eyelids closed, half-expecting her to latch onto his crotch. He decided to stage a fainting episode if that happened—complete with convulsions and flecks of spittle.

  “Clear your mind of every distraction, every random thought,” his wife said, “except for one. I want you to focus all your concentration and energy on this simple image until it fills your whole consciousness, until you can’t possibly think about anything else even when you try.”

  “Okay, Lily.” Shreave assumed that she was cribbing from Deepak Chopra or some other flake.

  She said, “Boyd, I want you to focus on the fact that I’m not wearing any panties.”

  That’s original, he thought.

  “Think about the tight jeans I’m wearing. Think about what you could see if you really tried,” Lily said, “but don’t you dare peek.”

  That’s what Boyd Shreave was tempted to do. Despite his determination to remain unaroused, he found himself imagining in all its velvet detail the very thing that his wife wanted him to imagine. How she loved tight pants! “Smuggling the yo-yo,” she called it.

  “What’s
the point of this?” he asked somewhat shrilly.

  “Hush.”

  He heard a zipping noise and then the unmistakable sliding of fabric on skin as she pulled off the jeans.

  “Come on, Lily, don’t.”

  “Just take a deep breath. Let yourself go.”

  “You don’t understand. This is an irrational fear that’s out of my control.” He was quoting from the unofficial aphenphosmphobia Web site. “Are you trying to humiliate me, or what?”

  “Boyd, open your eyes,” his wife said, “and look down.”

  He did.

  “Now, tell me you don’t want to be touched,” she said. “Tell me that’s not a happy, sociable cock.”

  It was hard to argue the point. As Boyd Shreave assessed the telltale tent pole in his pants, he began to reconsider his staunchly monogamous commitment to Eugenie Fonda. The sole reason he’d been deflecting Lily’s advances was to avoid the rigors and inconvenience of maintaining two sexual relationships simultaneously. However, Shreave’s domestic agenda recently had changed, as had his outlook. Tomorrow he was jetting off to start a thrilling new chapter of an otherwise drab and forgettable life; what possible harm could come from a quick good-bye fuck with his wife?

  “Boyd?” said Lily.

  He looked up and saw her stretch like a sleepy lioness on the Persian carpet. He noted approvingly that she’d been truthful about her lack of underwear. Her blouse and heels lay in a pile with the blue jeans.

  He said, “Okay. You win.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Shreave rose and briskly began to unbuckle his belt. Lily studied him curiously.

  “Go to town,” he said, dropping his pants.

  She sat up and drew her knees together, blocking her husband’s view of the shadowy treasure.

  By now he was nearly levitating with lust. “It’s okay, honest,” he said. “Grab all you want.”

  Lily’s brow furrowed unpromisingly. “That’s not how this therapy goes. The first stage is look but don’t touch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Like you said, Boyd, this is a very serious disorder. I’d never forgive myself if you had a coronary or something while I was sucking you off.”