CAME INTO HIS FAMILY’S Capehart housing unit and found John-John sprawled across a chair reading an omnibus volume of John Collier short stories. The boy acknowledged him with a nod but went quickly back to his book. Nobody else was at home.
Anna was attending Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, and Jeannette, since mid-April, had been living on Long Island with the family of her editor at the Vireo Press. She was doing full-scale revisions on a manuscript that had been assembled in February, a collection of semiserious book columns she had written for the Herald-Plainsman and then for a small syndicate with outlets in both the Sunbelt and the Rocky Mountain region. Her purpose now was to polish, update, and citify these columns so that they would appeal to Eastern urbanites as well as the easygoing, down-home sophisticates who had comprised their first audience. Hugo had wanted Jeannette to do this work at home, but when her editor invited her to New York for consultations on the necessary changes, he had not been able to bring himself to forbid the trip. Anyway, he had never had that kind of power.
“Come on Johnny, let’s take a little vacation this weekend. You up to goin’ for a ride?”
“A vacation? Where?”
“Through the pine woods of northern Flo-REE-dah. Maybe over to Silver Springs, too. We’ll go for a cruise on a glass-bottom boat and watch the pretty mermaids in the ballet.”
John put down his book and grimaced.
“We’re goin’, hijo mío. I’m tired of all this jackass creative bachin’ we been doin’ and ready for somethin’ new, okay?” Supper, if he bothered to fix it, would be either hot dogs or frozen TV dinners. “Go pack some stuff, Johnny. Twenty minutes, okay?”
The boy grudgingly obeyed. Hugo, in his own room, threw several items into an overnight bag and changed into sports clothes. He found the meerschaum pipe that Pete Grier, four years ago, had given him as a going-away present just prior to his departure for an unaccompanied tour of duty on Guam. That tour, with Jeannette and the kids remaining in Cheyenne, had marked a critical watershed in the Monegals’ married life, their first protracted separation. There were lots of bad memories about his part in the bombardment of Cambodia, too, including playing father confessor to a young navigator who had accidentally obliterated a friendly village by failing to throw a switch locked on the village’s targeting beacon. The kid’s B-52 had “boxed” the place with bombs. . . . It was a good pipe, though, well broken-in and comforting.
* * *
An hour away from Eglin, driving east, they saw the first of the garish billboards advertising Ritki’s Gift & Souvenir Emporium. The signs were spaced at mile intervals, amid the exotic vegetable architecture of kudzu, and each one promised the out-of-state vacationer a variety of marvels. Papaya juice. Porcelain figurines. Fudge divinity. And a free “animal ranch.”
When the complex itself hove into view (a pair of single-story, whitewashed buildings with tile roofs and heavy Spanish beamwork), Hugo swung off the highway into the gravel parking lot. Behind the larger of the two buildings was a bamboo stockade—a fortress projecting into the pines—and behind the stockade loomed a densely forested hill. Despite its being Friday evening, Hugo’s green-gold Dodge Dart was one of only about four cars in the immense parking area.
“You want some papaya juice, don’ you, Johnny?”
“No, sir. Not really.”
“Well, I do. Come on.” Hugo gestured the teenager out of the car with his pipe and led him toward a gangway beside the main building. A huge red arrow on the wall directed father and son to a turnstile, which squeaked as they pushed through. Inside the stockade a metal rack containing peanuts caught Hugo’s eyes, and he dropped a quarter into the coin box and handed John-John one of the small brown paper bags. “You can feed the animals, okay? Maybe cheer you up.”
They strolled between a pair of green metal rails describing a mazelike path through the compound. Gravel crunched underfoot, and the glassy twitterings of caged birds reverberated in the hush of the evening. Hugo halted John-John briefly before a wire-fronted cage in which a coyote lay, its tail immersed in its own water trough. Elsewhere peacocks strutted, a pair of llamas nibbled hay, rattlesnakes coiled in dirty glass display cases, a burro drowsed, and a slew of half- and three-quarter-grown alligators, like the victims of some bizarre massacre, lay sprawled atop one another in a scum-filled concrete basin.