Skink—No Surrender: Chapters 21–24

“What’s your guess, Richard—is this stuff ham or turkey?”
“Vinyl,” I said.

“Did my parents really put up a ten-thousand-dollar reward, or was that just hype for the billboards?”

I saw it, too, a bulky object bobbing in the current off the starboard side.

Ahead of us snaked a bobbing trail of marine debris, which confirmed my fears.
“The houseboat sank,” I told my cousin. “All this stuff broke loose when it went down.”

For example, a Danish scientist reported observing a species of fly frolicking in a bath of DDT, the horribly destructive poison that for a long time was the world’s favorite weapon against unwanted bugs.

I wondered to what degree his mother and father and grandparents and great-grandparents were as hardy and resourceful, or if he was simply a supreme freak of nature—one of those rare, random individuals who is blessed with all the strongest traits of his gene pool, and no fatal weaknesses.

A lone man standing motionless on the water, his ragged reflection encircled in the liquid halo of an eerie bluish-purple sheen.

Malley and I might have mistaken him for a holy apparition except for the camo pants and the golf club he wielded as a crutch—an antique nine-iron with a peeling leather grip.

My cousin, who seldom admits to being mystified, said: “Okay, that is insane.”

Deftly the governor hooked the toe of the nine-iron in our bow cleat to hold us in the current.

The slug had entered beneath his collarbone and exited beneath his left shoulder blade, miraculously missing all vital organs and crucial arteries.

To dishonor a fallen soldier like the late Corporal Chock by stealing his name is a loathsome act.

To dishonor a fallen soldier like the late Corporal Chock by stealing his name is a loathsome act. Mr. Chalmers didn’t exhibit the proper remorse, and I became provoked.

“The shooting was a lapse of vigilance on my part. I was distracted because the boat was sinking, but still, no excuses.”

“The shooting was a lapse of vigilance on my part. I was distracted because the boat was sinking, but still, no excuses.”

People say I did this, I did that. Dubious witnesses casting wild accusations, though in a few cases they happen to be true.

“No jury will believe a word that jerk says,” I asserted.

She’d made it through that ordeal the same way Skink had always prevailed, through sheer unstoppable will.

Moments later a gangly, wide-winged bird came veering from a gap in the creek, then rose and crossed the river, flapping furiously.

Ahead, Skink stooped like an old-time gold prospector as he followed the kidnapper’s meandering tracks.

Ahead, Skink stooped like an old-time gold prospector as he followed the kidnapper’s meandering tracks.

Skink had survived war and a multitude of other perilous adventures. My cousin had survived a kidnapping, and I’d survived the hunt to track her down.

His right hand, the catfish hand, had swollen so grotesquely that it might as well have been inflated by a bicycle pump.

“No, a swamp zombie with a spear is what you are!”
Tommy was nearly delirious from the infection, though you couldn’t blame him for not wanting to tangle again with Skink.

Tommy held out his unbloated arm, beckoning my cousin for a hug.

Malley and I sat wordlessly watching the governor’s bizarre fit, which we hoped would freak Tommy into a petrified state of surrender.

But maybe a self- induced collapse was his subconscious way of stopping himself from killing Tommy Chalmers with his bare hands.

The crusty old lunatic sat up coughing. “You ruined,” he said between hacks, “a perfectly good trance.”

Skink’s light spinning tackle wasn’t designed to crank in a hundred and seventy pounds of anything—fish, man, or beast—though I knew some extraordinary catches had been made by skilled anglers on flimsy tackle.

We could see the glinting hull of the capsized canoe clocking down the rain-swollen Choctawhatchee.

There was nothing to do except hang on and hope he swung into the calmness of an eddy.

The woodpecker was a full-grown male, regally tall and more vividly colored than the drawing we’d used for my science project.

At the helm was Nickel wearing his goofy NASCAR shades.

Mr. Tile’s cell went off, a plain default ringtone.

The press release also said that the suspect in Malley’s abduction had accidentally drowned before the authorities could apprehend him.

Mostly what Malley and I wonder about is whether Skink somehow knew what would happen to T.C., even before the gator appeared—whether it’s possible for a person to be so powerfully connected to nature that he develops an almost mystical kind of intuition.

It took every ounce of self- restraint not to tell them about Skink, who in my mind was the true hero of the rescue.

“What the heck’s a swamp zombie?” he said, all intrigued.

According to the newspaper, Talbo Chock’s mother and father were eager for the mysterious benefactor to come forward so they could properly thank him or her for the generous memorial.

There, an enormous barnacle-backed loggerhead had dug out a pit as wide as her shell.