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“I’m not.”
“Look at you. Having standards and all.” I shook my oversized gas station slush slop drink.
There was a smile on his face, but he looked troubled and far away for a split second. “Focus, pretty wolf. I don’t think we’re going to find what we’re looking for at a recently built winery.”
“I’ll mark it on the map as amaybe. Might have some old haunted chapel or something.”
“Don’t start campaigning for bad wine.”
“But I’m legal now.”
“You don’t even like wine.”
“Then there’s no chance I’ll be disappointed by that marsh-wine winery. And don’t act like you have some super-refined palette.” I shook the bag of chips at him.
Sterling defiantly grabbed the chips and upended them in his mouth. While driving.
“Ack, what are you doing!” I grabbed the steering wheel. Crumbs went everywhere.
He passed the chips back to me, quite smug. And covered in crumbs. He shook out his tee-shirt so an additional layer of crumbs coated the floor of his father’s truck.
I said, “It’s going to smell like a bait shop in here.”
“Then we’ll fit in with the locals.”
The first thingI realized about our trek from West Palm Beach (aside from the number of wineries out in the marsh) was it wasn’t as much of a trek as I’d expected. It only took us ninety minutes to end up in the northwest corner of our search grid, then head due south another hour. The northern route didn’t yield much, just a few bait shops attached to gas stations, and mostly those dealt in airbrushed tee-shirts and overalls. No local knick-knacks or oddities except a talking bass novelty piece covered in dust.
We headed south, then cut back east straight through the Everglades on a two-lane highway lined with wire mesh fence on both sides for long stretches. There wasnothing. Just two lanes in each direction cutting through a vastness of tropical green and dark, murky water unlike anything I hadeverseen. Absolutely nothing, for eighty miles. But I did see a couple of alligators sunning themselves in the shallows close to the road.
“You know,” I said. “I’m gonna guess that if there everhadbeen a bait shop out this way, it got eaten a while back.”
“This particular stretch of road was probably not the best use of our time.” He agreed, laughter on his voice, but something about him made me wonder what was really on his mind.
We ended up back in West Palm Beach in the early evening.
“Is something bothering you?” I asked him as we entered the condo. “Aside from the obvious, of course.”
“Aside from the obvious? No.”
I was used to Sterling being fully present. It was part of his intensity. It was part ofhim. And something nagged me that he was holding something just out of grip.
He peeled off his tee-shirt and chucked it on the floor. “Pretty wolf, I want you to be happy and safe and to have a life you enjoy.”
And the only chance of that happening in the short term was his survival in July. Other than that, everyone needed to accept the fact I was going to be a fucking wreck for at least a year.
“So I’m distracted trying to think if there’s any last thing I can do,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact, but his scent deeply troubled in a way that made me feel cold.
“You aren’t dead yet,” I said.
His tone chilled me when he said, “Perhaps that’s the problem.”
Gator Jerky
We headed out for day two after breakfast. Sterling had set his grim pondering aside for dinner the previous evening. He had prodded a few more times around the matter of Searle. I’d deflected, and somewhere between some good vodka and fried plantains with vanilla ice cream and followed by candle wax applications, things had improved.
Maybe the wolf just wasn’t getting roughed up enough in training.
I doubted Searle would ever have agreed to play with candle wax. Something told me he was a bit of a prude.
