“I can see that,” he said grimly.

The address was 543 Curlew, and the residence was definitely a double-wide. Some wacko had painted psychedelic parrots and monkeys all over the front.

Eugenie Fonda said, “Tell me it’s a joke.”

Shreave felt prickly and light-headed.

“Boyd, are you processing all this?”

“I don’t know what’s going on. I swear to God,” he said.

Then the door of the trailer swung open.

Before his ill-fated employment at the airboat concession, Sammy Tigertail had briefly tried wrestling alligators. Nobody had understood why. It wasn’t a popular job, most Seminole gator wrestlers having retired as soon as the gambling remissions started to flow.

Through newspaper advertisements the tribe had recruited a collection of rough young white guys to perform the alligator shows, a breach of cultural authenticity that didn’t seem to bother the tourists. Sammy Tigertail took his training from a former Harley-Davidson mechanic who, by virtue of three missing toes, went by the nickname of “Nubs.” He had lost the digits in a hatchet fight, but naturally he told audiences that a bull gator had gobbled them. For Sammy Tigertail’s orientation, Nubs demonstrated a few rudimentary pinning maneuvers and counseled him not to eat catfish on performance days, because “them goddamn devil lizards can smell it on your breath.”

Sammy Tigertail’s first match went so well that he jokingly asked who’d dosed the alligator-an eight-footer displaying the ferocity of a beanbag chair. Sammy Tigertail was loose and cocky for the next performance, which featured an even more docile specimen, or so the young Seminole had been told.

Statistically, professional gator wrestling is only slightly more dangerous than hanging wallpaper. The low casualty rate is due less to the agility of the handlers than to the habituated tolerance of the reptiles. Having learned that the reward is a ripe dead chicken, the alligators patiently allow themselves to be dragged around a sand pit and subjected to a sequence of silly indignities. Obviously the success of these stunts relies on a certain critical level of lethargy in the animals. A freshly captured alligator is not the ideal wrestling opponent; unschooled and irritable, even a scrawny one is capable of inflicting grave and potentially crippling injuries.

For the second (and, ultimately, final) show of Sammy Tigertail’s career, the redneck wrestlers thought it would be humorous to sneak a ringer into the gator pit. The chosen candidate was seven feet long and weighed roughly 110 pounds. More crucially, it had no show-business experience, having been snared from a golf-course lagoon the previous evening. Unaware, Sammy Tigertail let out an improvised war cry and leapt with gusto upon the beast, which erupted in writhing, hissing fury. The crowd thought it was fantastic.

Clawed, thrashed and tail-whipped, Sammy Tigertail somehow steered clear of the saurian’s teeth. As they flopped around in the dirt, the Indian managed to lock both arms around the flailing head of his foe, at which point they rolled together into the concrete pond. The depth was barely four feet, but Sammy Tigertail knew that alligators had drowned persons in shallower water. He was also aware that the primitive creature in his grip was capable of holding its breath for hours. That fact, plus the realization that the pond itself was probably septic with gator shit, impelled Sammy Tigertail to break his clinch and kick frantically for the surface.

As he sloshed alone out of the bile-colored water, the audience rose and applauded. The Seminole took a shy bow while the announcer explained over the PA system that the defeated leviathan would remain submerged until it stopped sulking. Forty-five minutes later the alligator indeed rose to the surface and floated belly-up, a pose that suggested a far more serious condition than wounded pride. The rattlesnake-milking demonstration was immediately halted and Sammy Tigertail was summoned back to the wrestling pit. There, to a withering chorus of boos and the tickety-tick of digital cameras, he glumly hauled the scaly corpse from the pond.

A necropsy revealed that Sammy Tigertail had accidentally snapped the alligator’s neck during their underwater tussle, a mishap that would cost the tribe hefty fines from state and federal authorities. Among the voluminous regulations governing the captivity and display of Alligator mississippiensis, none is viewed more seriously than the prohibition against harming the species. No wrestler in the history of the Seminole reservation had ever snuffed an alligator during a paid performance, and Sammy Tigertail’s plea for leniency fell on deaf ears. He was banished for life from the gator pit, the incident serving to reinforce the tribal view that he was cursed by his mixed blood.

Sammy Tigertail chose not to share the dead alligator story with Gillian when he declined her request for a wrestling lesson.

She said, “Aw, come on. I taught you how to play the guitar.”

In fact, she’d shown him the chords to one song, “Tequila Sunrise.” It had been a favorite of his late father.

Sammy Tigertail was grateful, up to a point. “You think all Seminoles wrestle gators? That’s insulting,” he said. “It’s like saying all black men can dunk a basketball.”

The topic had arisen because they’d spotted either an alligator or a crocodile swimming across the pass near the island.

“Don’t tell me you never tried,” Gillian said.

“There’s a trick to it,” Sammy Tigertail replied quietly.

“Show me.”

“I said no.”

“Pretend I’m the gator.” Gillian stretched flat on her belly, arms pressed against her sides, on the floor of the cistern. “Now, you sneak up and jump on me.”

“Some other time.”

“Don’t be such a pussy. Come on.”

She was wearing pastel flip-flops, mesh panties and a white bikini top, which had become her official island ensemble. Sammy Tigertail found it extremely distracting. He wasn’t sure whether Gillian was trying to torment him, or whether she was merely oblivious to his feelings.

“I’m really beat,” the Indian said. All morning he’d been chopping paths through the gnarled cactus plants, which at least had proven to be juicy and pleasantly edible.

“Please?” Gillian said. “Just pretend.”

The Seminole aligned himself on top of her, bracing his elbows to lever some of his weight off her backside. She was warmer than an alligator and, in the absence of a corrugated hide, much softer.

Gillian laughed under the strain and said, “Now what?”

He slipped one hand under her chin and firmly placed his other hand on the crown of her head, effectively clamping her mouth closed.

“The trick,” he explained, “is to pin ’em without pissing ’em off.”

Gillian grunted and began to wriggle. Sammy Tigertail abruptly rolled off. He hoped she wouldn’t comment about him getting hard, but of course she did.

“It’s about time. I was beginning to worry about you,” she remarked as she sat up.

“This isn’t a game. It’s a serious deal.” Sammy Tigertail thought: Uncle Tommy’s right. These girls are bad medicine.

“I totally can’t believe you haven’t tried to bone me yet,” Gillian said. “It took Ethan, like, three and a half minutes the first time we went out. Not to do it, but to try-that’s how long from when we got in the car ’til he jammed my hand down his jeans.”

Sammy Tigertail said, “I’m not as smooth as Ethan.”

“I wouldn’t even jerk him off, okay?”

“Listen.” He stood up and tugged Gillian off the floor. “Hear that?”

It was another low-flying plane.

“Go outside and start waving,” he told her.

“Kiss my butt,” she said.

“What’re you trying to prove?” The Indian seized her by the shoulders. “There’s not a drop of freshwater on this island-no soap, no ice, no electricity. You’re gonna be livin’ on bird eggs and fish, which you said makes you barf. So go on home, okay? Go back to Tallahassee and lose Ethan and start over.”