The stakeout had gone way past two p.m. and no one remotely resembling Patric Allain had shown up, but still Jessica and the others held out a desperate hope, she from inside the trophy shop and the rest from outside. Santiva and Mark held forth in the Florida Power and Light-turned- surveillance van at a remote point across and down from the trophy shop, Quincey from a nearby doorstep, where he played the role of a homeless man.
The trophy shop and its adjacent warehouse, in which fish of every size and shape and color hung in suspended animation from rafters, each in its own crucial stage of preservation, was quite unusual.
Jessica found Buckner’s shop reminiscent of the fictional Little Shop of Horrors. It was a graveyard for fish, large and small, but more than a graveyard, it resembled a cross between a biophysics lab-with its many chemicals and hydroponics agricultural experiment, with fish instead of vegetation hanging from a ceiling-and a dirty, noisy warehouse that might as easily have housed men shearing sheep as men mixing great vats of papier-mache, creating plaster casts and molds and gutting and skinning fish.
The warehouse section was stacked full with supplies in various cortiers and rooms-a labyrinth of rooms, actually-each given over to a certain stage in the reverent process of trophy mounting. The army of workmen committed to the process wore T-shirts, jeans and rubber boots. The shop out front was just that, a front for displays of blue and yellowfin, jack, marlin, grouper, shark and some of Buckner’s monstrosities, coming out of what he called his “pure creative side,” the cross-bred taxidermy of trophy creatures he’d termed Twisted Evolution. He proudly displayed the obnoxious results-a “gator-fish”-under a large sign of the same name: Twisted Evolution. Other items of every conceivable sort necessary to both his main trade and fishing-both big game and small-was sold in his shop, including bait and tackle of every size, shape and suggestion. It was all crowded in with Snickers bars, Lay’s potato chips, and Pepsi-Cola, which lay in the same cooler as the big-game bait.
In his attempt to impress Jessica, Buckner proudly announced that he owned stock in Pepsi-Cola, told her that it had risen recently to forty-six dollars a share and asked if she wouldn’t like a piece of that.
Since Jessica had to be on the inside and pretend familiarity with her “uncle” and her surroundings, she was more than happy to take Buck’s ear-grinning tour of his place which, as he put it, he’d “built up from scratch.”
“ The premises was once a used-boat dealership, long since defunct. Took the place off the Realtor’s hands for a song,” he boasted to Jessica now, as if meaning to propose marriage as soon as he demonstrated how he could get rid of his old lady and keep her. Jessica, in jeans and plaid shirt, her hair pulled back severely, a ponytail bobbing behind her head, was quickly getting a feel for, and a smell for, Buck’s Trophy Shop, as it was called.
Buckner had a number of men working for him, some obviously for day wages, and they had a routine which they never veered from, which Jessica assured them and Buck they should continue to the letter. But Buckner and the others were fascinated with her, acting as if they had never seen a woman in the place before, and perhaps they hadn’t, so she finally gave in, allowing them to show her every detail of the process of mounting the game fish, of which they were solemnly and worshipfully proud. Buck talked the whole time as each of his men in turn demonstrated one or more facets of the process. “You won’t find no damned plastic marlins here, darlin’,” he informed her. “We do it the old-fashioned way, but with state-of-the-art preservation techniques, mind you.”
“ Did a marlin for Paul Newman a ways back,” said Buck’s first assistant. “That was a gas.”
Buck raised his shoulders, “We got some of the world’s most famous big-game anglers coming to us, ‘cause they know we’re the best, and Stu here wants to tell you about Paul Newman! Anyhow, you see, here we do game fish trophies by the hollow-sculpture method.”
“ Meaning?” Jessica stared into one of the papier-mache vats, where an assistant mixed the materials with large wooden ladles, finally plunging his hands and forearms in up to the elbows and mixing the sticky white glue.
“ We use the actual skin of the actual fish. Most places nowadays use fiberglass or Teflon or goddamn graphite! ‘Magine that? Damn thing’s no longer a fish, no more fish than you or me.”
No more a fish than you or /, she thought, wanting to correct his grammar but realizing that to do so would be the grammatical equivalent of spitting into a hurricane wind-useless and messy.
“ Using the actual fish skin means we get the most authentic reproduction of size and shape,” added Stu, a thin, angular man with dark skin and an eagerness to please.
“ It costs more the right way,” explained Buck, “so most times we’re asked to create a reasonable facsimile. Hate to do it, but if you’re gonna use plastic-”
Stu, hearing this so often, finished for Buck, adding, “-at least get a trained skinner who can provide exact specifications!”
“ When we get a fish in, it’s first measured and weighed,” continued Buck. “Then we pose it-you know, in a lifelike position, say leaping or lunging.”
“ Next, plaster of paris is poured over it, to create the spit mold,” contributed Stu. “And after the material sets, it’s removed and the skinning process follows.”
“ We use as delicate surgical instruments as you, Dr. Coran,” Buck assured her. “It has to be done that way, if it’s to be done right.”
“ You use a scalpel, then?”
“ To assure no damage to the specimen, yes.”
“ Were any scalpels stolen from your place along with the chemicals the other night?”
“ Some instruments were taken, yes.”
Stu wanted to get back to the subject at hand, so he deftly stepped between them and continued, saying, “This point’s where I come in.” Stu was obviously proud of his handiwork. “The skin is next given several chemical baths, you know, to remove excess oils, organic matter, microbes.”
“ High-tech insect repellent,” muttered Buck as if to disparage Stu’s expertise.
Stu pretended no offense. “Once cured, the skin is fitted inside the mold, to return it to its original shape, you see.” He demonstrated with a blue marlin.
“ That’s when several layers of paper, glue and papier- mache are applied through an opening. Here. I’ll show you.” Buck lifted one of the molds at this crucial stage to show her the hole on the side that would be against the wall, not showing. “This forms the core, replaces the innards so that there’s no collapse after time. At this stage,” he added, “we say the fish is truly mounted. We don’t use the term stuffed. Stupid to refer to trophy mounting as stuffing, like you’d stuff a bear or a circus animal. As you see, we don’t stuff the damn things.”
“ The mount is then ready for the dehydration process, which can take up to three months, depending on size, of course,” Stu explained. “We’ll pass by the curing and drying room next.”
Jessica saw that the marine taxidermists kept a large inventory of molds on hand to provide a base for, as Buck explained it, “fish received only in the skin. It’s a great deal less expensive to forward a previously gutted fish on ice than one of full dead weight.”
Stu piped in, “But Buck won’t never guarantee perfection unless we can begin with the whole fish when it comes through the door.”
Having been in the business all his life, Buck had amassed so many molds that he could reproduce any fish size or species within a fraction of an inch of its life dimension.
They peeked into what Stu had called the curing and drying room, where bright heat lamps were turned on and focused toward the ceiling. Every available inch of ceiling space was occupied by the enormous trophy fish, many of which were swordfish, their proud swords spiked downward now from their carcasses, lifeless and hard and eyeless, their eyes having been removed at some earlier stage in the process.
The men working in the back of the factory, in white aprons pulled over sleeveless T-shirts and jeans, walked about in rubber boots or sneakers completely covered in globs of papier-mache like so much pizza flour and dough. They worked with great intensity and concentration and smiled at Jessica as she toured the place.
“ We boast a record of forms fitted to within a thirty- second of an inch of the original fish,” said Stu with pride. They moved on to another room. Here Jessica saw the finished work, she thought; but Buck cautioned her otherwise. “This is our primping room. Here’s where I come into play-not doing any of the heavy stuff no more.”
“ They look alive,” she said, staring. Here the fish had remarkably lifelike eyes that stared out at her.
“ I check for any final flaws here. Call it quality control. I correct any skin flaws and reinforce the fins. With the one exception of the glass eyes, everything you see here is from the original fish, ‘cept the mold over which his skin is stretched, of course… but the skin is the animals and basically that’s what we preserve here, the skin.”
