worth of tests on the stuff before we could even identify it over at the old morgue. You remember that place, Jake?”
“ Sure. That’s before the county built you the Taj Mahal on Bob Hope Road.” It was true. Those unfortunate victims of shoot-outs and knife fights-most of whom had lived in squalor-spent a few posthumous days in a splendid brick building with the ambience of a decent hotel. “The nasal spray, Charlie. Did it kill the rival?”
“ Dei gratia, by the grace of God, no. The chemical in the nasal spray changed the properties of the beta- propiolactone. Stung like the devil but didn’t cause permanent damage. The assailant, it turns out, had suffered a mental breakdown, and was given a suspended sentence with intensive psychiatric therapy.”
“ I like that story, Doc,” Granny said. “For once, nobody got killed, and justice was done.”
“ He must have made it up,” I suggested.
Doc Riggs harrumphed at me, baited a hook for himself, and launched into a lengthy and graphic description of determining time of death by the extent of larvae growth in the corpse. The story seemed to make Granny hungry, because she grabbed a strand of Jamaican jerk chicken from a waterproof bag.
I didn’t spend as much time with Granny as I used to, and now I studied her a moment. She was a tough old bird in khaki shorts, an “Eat ‘em Raw” T-shirt from a Key West oyster bar, and a canvas hat. Her legs and bare feet were tanned the color of mahogany bark and were just as soft. As she listened to Doc Riggs spin his tales, Granny watched the water, squinting into the morning sun, occasionally giving me directions by pointing her fishing rod in a direction her instincts or her failing eyesight dictated. She let fly a cast, grimaced, and allowed the line to drift in the placid water. “You gotta lay the hay down where the goats can git it. Jake, you see the tails of any bonefish a- wiggling?”
“ Only thing I see are snails dancing across my eyelids,” I said.
“ Too much of Granny’s moonshine last night,” Doc Riggs told me, as if I didn’t know. “We’re all liable to be blind by tonight.”
Granny Lassiter wasn’t even my grandmother, but there was some relationship on my father’s side. Great- aunt or distant cousin or something. She raised me after my father, a Key West shrimper, was killed in a barroom brawl, and my mother ran off to Oklahoma with a roughneck. I called her Granny, and so did everybody else. Well, nearly everybody else. There was the sailor in the bar who called her Skunky, a reference to the white streak that creases her jet-black hair. He only called her that once, a whack across the ankle from a four-foot tarpon gaff ending the nickname then and there.
Charlie was going on about how posthumous stench attracts blowflies. It’s just like an engraved invitation to colonize a cadaver, I think he said. Granny was still chewing the jerk chicken, washing it down with beer from the cooler. I kept poling, watching for fish, occasionally looking at the towheaded kid Granny had brought along. She was always feeding stray cats and little boys.
“ How about you, son,” I asked. “You try any of Granny’s white lightning last night?”
“ I’m not your son,” the kid said, matter-of-factly and accurately.
“ And we’re both thankful for that,” I responded. I am generally able to hold my own in repartee with eleven-year-olds, though I don’t have much practice.
“ Kip drank his weight in Granny’s mango milk shakes,” Charlie said. “Gave him an orange mustache.”
Kip. That’s right. I’d heard Granny call out “Kippers” a couple of times, but I thought she was looking for some salted herring.
“ Mangifera indica, such a delectable fruit,” Charlie was saying. “Though it tastes like a cross between a peach and a pineapple, the mango actually is related to the cashew nut, and heaven help me, poison ivy. Isn’t that strange, the relationship between a sweet and a poison?”
“ Reminds me of the women Jake’s been sniffing around all these years,” Granny said. “Except for that one who became the lawyer, they were a bunch of Jezebels in miniskirts.”
“ Non semper ea sunt quae videntur,” Charlie said. “Things are not always what they seem.”
Charlie went on like that for a while, waxing philosophical about plants, animals, and the human condition. I watched the kid, who was still pouting.
“ Kip,” I called out in my let’s-be-pals voice, “how ‘bout some fishing? Want to chase the wily bonefish with a fly rod?”
“ I hate fishing,” the kid said.
“ Fair enough,” I responded. “How ‘bout a swim? I could toss you overboard and chum for sharks.”
“ Jake!” Granny warned me.
“ Just like Lifeboat,” Kip said, nonchalantly.
I stopped poling. “Huh?”
Kip looked at me with the air of superiority kids use when dealing with an adult who’s never learned their games. “The movie. After a shipwreck, there isn’t room for everyone. Some are thrown overboard so others can live.”
“ Sounds like plea bargaining in a case with multiple defendants,” I said.
“ It was filmed during World War Two,” Kip continued, “a parable for what was going on in Europe.”
“ A parable,” I repeated, impressed.
“ Yes, that means you can take it literally or-”
“ I know what it means, kid.”
“ Jake, don’t stifle Kippers,” Granny ordered, keeping her eyes on the water. “Movies are very important to him.”
I turned back to the precocious pouter. “I’ll bet you even know who directed this Lifeboat.”
The towheaded kid gave me another look of youthful disdain. “ Everybody knows Hitchcock was the director.”
Granny dropped a cast near some green floating gunk.
“‘ Bout all Kippers does is sit home watching movies on the cable. Makes me want to take the twelve-gauge and blast a hole in that damn satellite dish.” She turned and peered at me from under the canvas hat. “I was hoping maybe you could get the lad more interested in the outdoors.”
“ I could use him to pull weeds in my backyard,” I offered, generously.
Granny reeled in a stringy mess of seaweed and cleaned off her line. “That’s not what I had in mind. Maybe you could toss the football with him. I told Kippers you used to play for the Dolphins.”
“ I looked you up in my card book,” the kid said.
I grunted an acknowledgment. Little boys are always impressed by athletes, even second-stringers.
“ Your rookie card is only worth twenty-five cents.’’
“ You don’t say.’’
“ That’s the minimum,” he reminded me.
“ Sounds like a good investment,” Charlie chimed in, though nobody asked him to. Then Charlie launched into a soliloquy on the depressed international art market, mainly due to economic woes in Japan, when the kid interrupted him: “Most football movies are yucky.”
“ Yucky?” I asked him.
“ The Longest Yard was okay. I mean, Burt Reynolds was pretty good. He played at Florida State, you know…”
I knew.
“ Then he did Semi-Tough where he played a running back. Boy, what a stinker. In Everybody’s All-American, I thought Dennis Quaid’s legs were too skinny to be a real football player.” So did I.
“ Now, North Dallas Forty was pretty decent, though a little dark,” Kip said. He gave the appearance of furrowing his brow in serious contemplation, but with his long blond bangs, it was hard to tell. “I give it three stars.” The kid studied me a moment, shading his eyes from the sun. “You know, you look a little like Nick Nolte.”
“ Thanks.”
“ But he’s more handsome.”
My head was throbbing again. “Hey, Granny,” I called out. “Did you pack a real lunch, or do we have to start eating the passengers?”
“ Just like Soylent Green,” Kip said, showing off some more.
“ Granny, how do you turn off Siskel and Ebert here?”
