Flush - Carl Hiaasen [1]
“Nobody thinks you’re a criminal.”
“Dusty Muleman sure does.”
“That’s because you sunk his boat,” I pointed out. “If you just paid to get it fixed, maybe then—”
“That’s a seventy-three-footer,” my dad cut in. “You’ve got to know what you’re doing to sink one of those pigs. You ought to go have a look.”
“Maybe later,” I said.
The deputy standing by the door made a grunting noise and held up five chubby fingers, which was the number of minutes left before he took my father back to the cell.
“Is your mom still ticked off at me?” Dad asked.
“What do you think?”
“I tried to explain it to her, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“Then maybe you can explain it to me,” I said. “I’m old enough to understand.”
Dad smiled. “I believe you are, Noah.”
My father was born and raised here in Florida, so he grew up on the water. His dad—my Grandpa Bobby—ran a charter boat out of Haulover Marina on Miami Beach. Grandpa Bobby passed away when I was little, so I honestly didn’t remember him. We’d heard different stories about what happened—one was that his appendix burst; another was that he got hurt real bad in a bar fight. All we knew for sure is that he took his fishing boat down to South America on some sort of job, and he never came back.
One day a man from the U.S. State Department showed up at our house and told my parents that Grandpa Bobby was dead and buried near some little village in Colombia. For some weird reason they couldn’t bring his body home for a funeral—I knew this because I’d seen the paperwork. My dad kept a file, and at least four or five times a year he would write to Washington, D.C., asking someone to please help get his father’s coffin back to Florida. This is, like, ten years later. Mom worked with my dad on the letters—she’s a legal secretary, and she gets straight to the point.
My mom and dad first met while they were standing in line to pay speeding tickets at the Dade County Courthouse, and they got married six weeks later. I know this for a fact because Mom put the speeding tickets in a scrapbook, along with their wedding pictures and stuff like that. The ticket my mother got was for driving 44 miles an hour in a 35-mile-per-hour zone. My father’s ticket was much worse—he was doing 93 on the turnpike. In the album Dad’s ticket looks sort of lumpy and wrinkled because he’d crumpled it into a ball when the state trooper handed it to him. My mother said she used a laundry iron to flatten it out before pasting it next to hers in the scrapbook.
About a year after they got married, my parents moved down to the Keys. I’m sure this was Dad’s idea, because he’d been coming here ever since he was a kid and he hated the big city. I was actually born in a 1989 Chevrolet Caprice on U.S. Highway One, my dad racing up the eighteen-mile stretch from Key Largo to the mainland. He was trying to get my mother to the hospital in Homestead. She was lying in the backseat of the car, and that’s where I was born. Mom did it all by herself—she didn’t tell my dad to pull over and stop because she didn’t want him interfering. They still argue about this. (She says he’s got a tendency to get overexcited, which is the understatement of the century.) He didn’t even realize I was born until they got to Florida City and I started bawling.
Abbey came along three years later. Dad talked my mom into naming her after one of his favorite writers, some weird old bird who’s buried out west in the middle of a desert.
Most of my friends aren’t crazy about their sisters, but Abbey’s all right. Maybe it’s not cool to say so, but the truth is the truth. She’s funny and tough and not nearly as irritating as most of the girls at school. Over the years Abbey and I developed a pretty good system: She keeps an eye on Mom, and I keep an eye on Dad. Sometimes, though, I need extra help.
“So, what’s the deal?” Abbey asked after I got back from the jail.
We were sitting at the kitchen table. For lunch Mom had fixed us the usual, ham-and-cheese sandwiches.
“He says he got carried away again,” I said.
Abbey raised