Whidden said, “You’ll get your money. Comes in slower in the landscape business. Slow but sure.”
“Landscape business,” Daniels said, disgusted. “Whole fuckin state of Florida is in the landscape business.”
He gazed balefully at his own flask, turned it in his hand. When he spoke again, he tried halfheartedly to patch their mood. “Speakin about tough customers and pussy puts me in mind of one of Andy’s cousins. Tried that stuff myself one time, didn’t get nowhere! As Mud Braman’s daddy used to say, ‘That darn ol’ critter, she’s so tight, her pussy gets to squeakin when she walks!’ ”
“Speck?”
“Told me he heard it! Sound just like a mouse!”
“Speck? We all know you don’t mean no harm, but don’t go givin my cousin a bad name!”
“Well, she would of give me a bad name, Andy, and I didn’t need it. I already had one!”
“Still takin care of the ladies pretty good, I see,” Whidden said, to smooth things.
“Ain’t been no complaints, not lately.” Conspiratorial, Speck spoke from behind his hand. “Don’t know too much about ladies, now, but I had me a certified piece of ass, I don’t believe it was more than maybe four-five years ago. Ol’ Diddley here stuck to my leg like a wet leaf for two weeks after, that’s how whipped he was.” Cocking his head, Speck scanned their faces avidly for signs of outrage. “Schoolteacher, y’know. Skinny damn thing! I was pickin the bones out of my prick all winter!”
Speck accepted a tin plate of food and poked at it suspiciously with his tin fork, then brought it up close under his nose, green eyes watching them over the plate.
“Our kind of people likes good fish to eat, ain’t that right, Andy? Won’t eat shark nor manatee, and ain’t all of ’em will eat a sea turtle. Won’t eat conch neither—call that nigger food. Course over to Key West and the Bahamas, they eat conch and glad to get it. That’s how come we call ’em Conchs, I reckon.”
He sniffed his plate again, then shrugged and started eating, but his eyes kept moving and he ate quickly, tossing scraps and spitting bones over his shoulder. Once again his mood was changing for he ate and talked ever faster and more angrily, eyes snapping, mouth opening and closing on white food, pausing only for a gasp of moonshine. “Hell, there’s more fish on this plate than I seen all week. In this damned sorry day and age, a man can’t hardly get enough to feed his cat. Never seen fishin poor as this since the Red Tide. Them fish is fed up with the Park, the same as I am.
“What’s happenin to our local fishery is just a crime, and it’s bein committed in broad open daylight! You know why? Because the law’s behind it. Some of us fellers might be moonshiners today, and poachers and gunrunners, too—how come? We started out to be hunters and fishermen like our daddies, ain’t that right?
“Fifty years ago when Robert Harden first come to Lost Man’s River, sea trout and snook and mullet was so thick a man could dance on ’em, it was a pure astonishment to the heart and eye. The fishin was somethin wonderful, and the trappin and huntin, too. But now the wilderness is bein hammered and the wildlife with it, and before them people are done messin with our water, the fish all around this coast will be gone, too!”
He set down his plate to roll a cigarette. He inhaled raggedly, blew it out, gauging their expressions through the smoke, coughing, nearly out of breath, yet talking rapidly, gathering intensity and rage as he went along.
SPECK DANIELS
Before Parks come in, a man might land a half million pounds of fish each year along this coast. Today he would be doin good to land one tenth of that amount, and tomorrow is going to be worse. Because Parks is diggin all them ditches and canals, lettin the fresh water out and the salt water in, and they will end up ruinin the spawnin grounds of one of the great fisheries of the whole world! And they are doin that to drain the land east of the boundaries for the big farmers, same as Flood Control already done north of the Park. They are destroyin the rightful property of the common people. Give ’em two dollars an acre, take it or don’t, for a century’s worth of clearin and improvement. Parks burnt their fish houses, hundred-foot dock and all—that hurt, you know, to see all that hard work wasted.
I never knew the U.S. Gov’ment would tell us barefaced lies like that, did you? If them damn bureaucrats and politicians can get away with it, they’ll steal you blind. Two-faced lyin bastards, right up to the president, tell the stupid-ass damn public any ol’ fool thing that might keep their asses covered till the next election! Here I grew up thinkin—wasn’t we taught this back in school?—that the U.S.A. was the greatest country in the world! It purely hurts me to speak bad about my country! But the truth’s the truth, at least it used to be.