Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,14

east. The question threw me and I looked out in search of a boat or a plane or anything that might contain a man.

“There. On that mound.”

I looked again and in the low light could make out the hump and curled tail of a good-size alligator taking in the last warmth of the day. Sherry then quietly whistled the opening stanzas of a television cartoon from both our childhoods I recognized as Wally Gator, “the swingin’est alligator in the swamp. See ya later, Wally Gator.”

“You do have a memory, girl,” I said.

“For frivolity.”

“No. Not always.”

“Then sit with me here, Max, and we’ll get serious,” she said, and in her voice was more than just an invitation for sitting.

While the sky turned shades of pink and then deepened to orange and finally a purple shade of plush velvet, we sat and ate and let the wine leak into our abused backs and sun-soaked heads and when the air finally started to chill I got out the sleeping bags and covered Sherry’s legs with the flannel side.

“Very gentlemanly, Max,” she said. But when I crouched to kiss her she hooked her wrist around the back of my neck and she, the flannel-lined bag, and I slid slowly to the deck.

“Well, I guess I don’t have to be quite so gentlemanly,” I said and rolled over on top of her. Even in the darkness I could see the flicker of green in her eyes. And tucked in a depression next to her collarbone, the sparkle of the necklace she always wore, the two jewels, an opal and a diamond, joined together. I knew it was a present from her husband. I had ignored the reminder in the past, and despite the way it picked up the light this night, I ignored it again.

We made love under the stars, a canopy of glitter that out here in darkness spread incomparably from horizon to horizon with no city lights or building corners or even high tree lines to obscure it. The sight was so stunning and rare I was fooled that first night: when I looked down into Sherry’s eyes I thought that glorious look on her face was my doing. Then, on a whim of suspicion I looked up behind my shoulder and beheld the real reason for her radiance.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “The real stars in your eyes.”

She laughed, caught, at least partially, by the truth.

“Oh, all right,” she said, reaching up and pulling my face down to the crook of her shoulder and neck where she could still see the sky past my head. “Tomorrow night, we can switch places.”

FIVE

“Shut the fuck up, Wayne.”

“Oh, you got a better idea? We’re sittin’ here with no smoke, no cash, and no chance of scoring any more deals. What? What else we got, dawg?”

Christ, thought Buck, tipping the sweating bottle of Budweiser up and taking a long slow drink off the beer. Even out here these guys are picking up somebody else’s bullshit lingo, watching some MTV shit or listening to the hip-hop radio crap out of Miami.

Dog. Hell, he could still hear his daddy’s voice saying if you had a good dog and some shotgun shells you could eat forever out in the Glades for free. But that didn’t last, did it? Didn’t even last for the old man, did it?

“You tell him, Buck. Tell him he’s full of shit,” said Marcus, the younger one.

Buck took another pull off the beer and the two watched him, each waiting for a yea or nay from the man. He took his time at it.

“Wayne might have hisself an idea,” Buck finally said. “He ain’t thought it out yet, but there might be some possibilities there.”

Wayne sat back in his wooden, straight-backed chair, balancing on the back legs, smirk on his face that made him look even more like a cartoon balloon with his features drawn on with a marker, his face all pudgy and white and hairless with his baseball cap turned backward so it yanked his eyebrows up and out of shape. Marcus kept his eyes down toward the tabletop.

There’s your dog, son, Buck thought, slapped on his snout and chastised like some mutt.

“We’re gonna have to get somethin’ goin’ soon unless you boys want to go on up the road and get a job at the Wendy’s,” Buck said.

“Shit. Ain’t doin’ nothin’ at no Wendy’s but a ten up,” Wayne said. The reference to an armed stick-up raised Marcus’s head, floating on a