Acts of Nature

Raiford. I got a real criminal enterprise going here, Buck thought, my own crew of Luca Brasi. “Don Corleone, I come to you on this da day of your daughter’s wedding…”
    He thought about the Godfather’s leg man, his eyes popping out of his head with a garrote around his neck. He could squeeze these punks. But then who’s gonna do the heavy lifting? He swung the airboat up to the partial dock and cut the engines, and the cessation of movement gained the attention of the boys, who, it was now obvious, were drunk as skunks. Buck reached between them and snagged the near-empty vodka bottle and flipped it over his shoulder into the water.
    “Find what you can find and let’s get out of here,” he said and the boys turned their faces away like eight-year-olds who got caught jerking off. Buck jumped down onto the deck and headed for the smashed outbuildings and leaving the useless pantry and kitchen wall to the boys.
    “Fuck him,” said Marcus, only loud enough for Wayne to hear. “Guy could ruin a good wet dream, know what I mean?”
    Wayne looked at him with a blank stare.
    “No, I guess you wouldn’t, Stumpy,” Marcus said and stepped away quickly, laughing, but also avoiding Wayne’s reach.
    “Ain’t nothing worth a shit in this mess anyway, ’less you’re looking for a nice fish trophy,” he said, bending to pick up a fiberglass bonefish that lay crippled with a broken tail on the floor, its long wooden mantel missing.
    Wayne poked around in the stuffing and swirl of ripped curtains and cracked debris, kicking at the piles with little interest and stumbling a bit from both the effect of the alcohol and the odd sense of still being on a boat. The missing walls caused the edges of the plank foundation to meld with the water and the open horizon and he was caught by the feeling he might step off the edge of the world if he wasn’t careful. He tried to focus on something close and thought it was way weird that the refrigerator and the kitchen wall were still standing. It was like old lady Morrison’s house when the wrecking crew came to scrape it off the plot where they built the new marina in Chokoloskee. They were kids and watched in fascination as the big-clawed backhoe chewed through the roof and pulled down the walls of a place they’d passed on their bikes a thousand times. No one their age had ever lived there, only the old woman whose husband had died years before. Then one day the ambulance came and they carted Ms. Morrison out on a stretcher and the place stood dark and empty for years. They might have gotten a glimpse inside when they went trick-or- treating or something as children, but when the place was laid bare by the machinery, they watched in fascination as the pink-papered walls and the porcelain sinks and even an old four-poster bed got scraped into a pile and then loaded into a dump truck. When the claw scooped up the toilet all the kids laughed but only for a second, then they rode on, down to the docks where they could fish and skip stones out onto the bay and do the dumbass things you did when you were young without a thought about your own house being scraped off the face of the earth by a storm or by a fucking backhoe.
    “Hey, dude! Check this out.”
    Wayne stepped over a window frame of shattered glass and then nearly stepped into a hole that had been busted through the floorboards. He joined Marcus and looked down into a pile of rags.
    “Blood, man,” Marcus said, pointing down at a crumpled sheet. They’d done enough hunting to recognize the dark, red-brown stain. Wayne picked up a corner, sniffed the copper smell of blood and dropped it.
    “Damn, dude. Don’t have to be some bloodhound,” Marcus said, pinching his face in disgust at first and then raising his eyebrows in that stupid grin. “Dawg.”
    “Somebody was here, man. And it wasn’t that long ago neither,” Wayne said. “Look at the empty water bottles and stuff.” He pointed at the trash around the sheet and then opened the refrigerator door, found it empty. He bent down, sat on his heels, and with a slat of broken siding began poking at the pile. “You better go tell Buck to come look at this.”
    After Marcus turned away Wayne reached down and hooked the corner of a Velcro strap he’d spotted and pulled out a blue fanny pack, the kind runners and maybe a few fishermen might use on a flats boat. He’d waited for Marcus to go so he’d have a chance to scope it out for himself. He zipped