The Man Who Ivented Florida Read Online Free PDF

give me ten minutes with my old partner Joe, I'll leave real quiet like. You don't, you can kiss that television of yours good-bye."
    The woman flinched, some of her anger returning. "I won't tolerate threats against our television set! It's our only recreation."
    Tuck was smiling. "Then you best not risk it. Ten minutes. Understand?"
    The television screen faced the ceiling. The actors with the sprayed hair were tangled in an embrace, whispering to each other. The nurse said, "You leave me alone till this show's over, I don't give a damn what you do." She glared at him once more, then didn't look at him again.

    *  *  *

    The rest home's second floor was a catacomb of narrow bed pens, and Tuck pushed open one door after another until he saw Joseph Egret. Joseph stood at the far end of the room, by the window. He wore a hospital gown that tied at the back; black hair hung to his shoulders,- his head and his hands shook with a slight pathological tremor as he held his fingertips to the glass, as if trying to reach through to the outside.
    Tucker stood at the doorway, looking in. Except for the window, the room was dark, and his eyes were having trouble adjusting. He was also trying to adjust to the room's odor. The stink hit him when he opened the door,- caused him to snort and cover his nose. The smell seemed to come from the beds, only one of which was occupied: A shrunken figure lay connected by tubes to a sack of clear liquid suspended from a stand. The smell was a potent mixture of urine and some other odor that, had Tuck been younger, he would have recognized as the malodor of age and dying. He was standing with his hand over his nose when a quivering voice said, "It's that damn Indian. The stink. He farts continually and smells like a wet dog." The figure in the bed was talking, an old man with tiny bright eyes.
    Tucker said, "Well, you don't smell like no box of Valentine candy yourself, buster," and pushed his way through the stench. He reached up to tap Joseph on the shoulder, saying, "Hey, you old fool—you gone deaf or something?"
    Joseph turned to face him for the first time, and Tucker had to step back a bit—that's how surprised he was at the way Joseph had changed . . . had changed more in a year than Tucker would have thought possible. The great wedge of a nose was the same; the same high Indian cheeks, too. But now Joseph's beamy shoulders swooped like folded wings, and the sharp, dark, humorous eyes Tuck remembered were a syrupy glaze. He didn't seem nearly so big, either. Once Joseph had been six and a half feet tall, weighed probably 250. What the hell had happened?
    "Gawldamn, Joe," Tucker said gently, not wanting to hurt his old friend's feelings, "these vultures stick a pin in you and let the air out? I've seen road kill looked healthier than you."
    Joseph looked down, blinking at him, as Tucker added quickly, "Course, I don't mean that in a bad way."
    There was no reason to get Joe mad; they'd been friends too long for that. Friends for more than fifty years, ever since they were teenagers, a few years after the completion of the Tamiami Trail, which crossed the Everglades and connected Miami with the west coast of Florida. In those days, he and Joe had developed a mutual bond that ensured honesty, affection, and scrupulous concern for the other—that bond being a massive white liquor still that either would have shot the other for. That still had produced forty gallons of liquor week in, week out, with little labor or upkeep on their part, and earned for them enough money to buy most of the villages on Florida's west coast. Had they wanted to buy villages. Which they didn't.
    It had taken the two of them the best chunk of a month in Havana to piss all that money away, but they had managed. And they had been secretly proud of the inventive methods required to do it.
    After government men destroyed the still, Tuck and Joseph had joined talents in a variety of enterprises over the years, which