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.The Indian waved respectfully and headed upriver to check the spot where he’d submerged the corpse of Louis Piejack.It was the same deep hole in which eleven days earlier he had anchored Jeter Wilson, the luckless dead tourist.Recently, Wilson’s rented car had been recovered from the murky Tamiami Trail canal, which was now being searched by snake-wary police divers.Sammy Tigertail wasn’t in any hurry to come out of hiding.No evidence of Wilson or Piejack had surfaced in Lostmans, so the Indian returned to his campsite near Toms Bight and carefully hid the johnboat.The day before, a chopper had passed overhead half a dozen times—it wasn’t the Coast Guard or the Park Service, but nonetheless Sammy Tigertail was on edge.He knew somebody was looking for something, although he wouldn’t have guessed that it was Gillian St.Croix looking for him, and that she was paying for the helicopter charters with a tuition refund from Florida State University.No longer was she a fighting Seminole.Concealed by a clumsily woven canopy of palm fronds, Sammy Tigertail spent the daylight hours re-reading Rev.MacCauley’s journal and constructing a new guitar.From the shattered Gibson he had salvaged the neck, the tuning pegs and five strings; the body he was laboriously shaping with his Buck knife from a thick plank of teak that he’d gotten from a derelict sailboat.Sammy Tigertail was by no means an artisan yet it was satisfying work, and a task of which the inventive Calusas would have approved.A month’s worth of gasoline and provisions had been delivered by Sammy Tigertail’s half brother, Lee, whom Sammy had contacted with a cellular phone that he’d found in Piejack’s johnboat.It was Lee who had delivered the news about Wilson’s car, and he’d agreed it would be premature for Sammy to return to the reservation.During Lee’s visit they had selected future drop sites and a timetable.Aware that his half brother’s wilderness skills were not as advanced as those of a full-blooded Seminole, Lee had also provided a compass, a dive watch, a NOAA marine chart and a bag of flares.At night Sammy Tigertail was occasionally pestered in his sleep by the spirit of Wilson, who would complain sourly about sharing eternity at the bottom of a river with Louis Piejack.“I thought you’d like some company,” Sammy Tigertail said the first time the dead tourist appeared at the camp on Toms Bight.“The guy’s a total scumbag! Not even the damn crabs want a piece of him,” Wilson griped.He’d brought along Piejack’s ghost for dramatic impact, but the Indian was unswayed.The depraved fish peddler looked no worse in death than he had when he was alive; the river scavengers were avoiding him like a toxin.Wilson, meanwhile, was disappearing by the biteful.Sammy Tigertail said, “You told me you were lonely.”“Lonely, yeah—not desperate.The dude’s a major perv,” fumed the dead tourist.“I can’t believe you wasted a perfectly good guitar on this fuckwit!”His facial bones having been staved in by Perry Skinner’s lethal blow, Louis Piejack was unable to respond effectively in his own defense.It wouldn’t have mattered.“I wasn’t the one who killed him,” the Seminole said.“What happened to that guy you plugged?” Wilson inquired.“The porky one in the business suit.Hell, I’d rather hang out with him.”“He didn’t die,” Sammy Tigertail replied.“Always some excuse.”“Go away now.I’m tired.”“Fuck you, and good night,” said Wilson.The dream visitations always ended the same way—the expired white men clomping away with their anchors dragging, two sullen figures deliquescing in a funky blue vapor.Afterward Sammy Tigertail would awaken and lie still, studying the stars.His uncle said that whenever a Seminole soul passed on, the Milky Way brightened to illuminate the path to the spirit world.On some crystal nights Sammy Tigertail worried that when his time came, the Maker of Breath would look unfavorably upon his white childhood as Chad McQueen.He regarded the arrival of the hoary bald eagle as a powerful sign, and it remained near his camp as the days passed.Sometimes the old bird would drop a feather, which the Indian would retrieve and attach to a homemade turban of the style worn by his ancestors in the Wind Clan.Each morning he’d sneak from beneath the ragged palm canopy and scout the tree line to make sure that the great predator was still watching over him [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]