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Outside Magazine, August 2004
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Code Orange

By Bob Shacochis

OK, THEN. YOU KNOW IT AND I KNOW IT and Hiaasen knows it, too—the other half of fishing is lying out your ass, so take that into account as I tell you the rest of the story. . . .

The water in front of us slices upward in a mighty rooster tail of spray as a speedboat pivots into a turn atop our schooling bones. The blinding sheet rains back down upon us, laden with soggy Burger King trash tossed out by the infidel at the helm and the flame-haired floozy in the Band-Aid bikini sitting next to him.

"Earth-bashing googan motherslapper," Hiaasen seethes. He drops the engine and we're in hot pursuit. It dawns on me that this chase is eerily familiar—like, doesn't Hiaasen's 2000 novel Sick Puppy open this way, sort of, with a guy in a Range Rover throwing burger trash out his window and being stalked by an enraged citizen, or am I remembering that right?

Suddenly the speedboat decelerates, and Hiaasen and I are both sickened by what we see: The boat is trying to run down a cormorant. The bird flies for a stretch and then dives, and each time it does, the driver guns after it in a dogged attempt to kill it.

"This is breaking my heart," Hiaasen says, boiling. He shouts for me to trade places with him while he rigs a spinning rod with a large plastic minnow, a hefty deep-sea plug bristling with multiple sets of treble hooks. I'm thinking, Now what? when Hiaasen braces himself in the bow, flips the bail on the spinning reel, raises the rod into the air with both hands, and, with a bloodcurdling rebel yell, deadeye-casts that plug with cruise-missile accuracy, the lure arcing brightly through the noonday sky straight onto the shoulder strap of the speedboat driver's life vest. With a wrathful yank, Hiaasen sets the hook and the dirtbag comes flying backwards out of his seat, cannonballing into the water.
"HIAASEN IS A MAN TO THE DIATRIBE BORN. "LOOK WHAT WE'VE DONE TO THE PLANET," HE SAYS., "LOOK WHAT WE'VE DONE TO THE PLACE WHERE WE LIVE. SOMEBODY HAS TO LEARN A LESSON FROM THIS."

Whoa—wasn't it Joey Perrone, the heroine of Skinny Dip, who dispatched a creep with a similar display of spinning-rod justice, using "a large plastic minnow, a hefty deep-sea plug bristling with multiple sets of treble hooks"? I shift into neutral and let the skiff glide toward the sputtering fool, but I can't take my eyes off the babe in the boat—buxom, yessir, and hair the color of a house on fire, with tattoos of twin cobras gliding down her belly toward what appears to be the best real estate in Florida.

"Who's the dame?" I ask Hiaasen.

"Chiqui Liqui," he says soberly. "My muse." She's working undercover, he explains.

For a moment I think I recognize the slob in the water. "Hey," I say, "isn't that Johnnie Byrd?" The neocon Byrd, speaker of the House in the Florida legislature, infamous for shoving a self-aggrandizing agenda down the taxpayers' throats, a guy who exists to make Hiaasen cross-eyed with fury.

"Nah," snarls Hiaasen. "Byrd is a lot greasier and more stupid-looking than this guy."

"So what are we gonna do with him?"

"He's not a keeper," he says, biting off the line, and we resign ourselves to the fact that bad guys seldom get what they deserve.

The plot twist might have ended there, the slob hauling his sorry ass into the stalled speedboat and motoring back to his toxic life of pettiness and cruelty, but the bay fills suddenly with the dazzle of baitfish, swirling in the water like cosmic fire. It's like SeaWorld out there, scores of porpoises slashing through the bait, the air teeming with bottle-nosed dolphins as if they're popping out of toasters. A pod cuts away to playfully nudge our wide-eyed malefactor, but then they're poking him and soon have his pants off.

I know that the phenomenon we're witnessing is the governing metaphor in all of Hiaasen's fiction, that he believes in an unforgiving form of lightning-bolt-direct natural justice—like the villain in 1991's Native Tongue, who gets sodomized to death by a bottle-nose. I also know that what's about to happen here is, to Hiaasen, poetry at the highest level. But, my God, aren't we letting things go too far? Is this really going to look good on our karmic résumés? Are we going to be able to laugh about this tomorrow, Carl?

Carl?


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Contributing editor Bob Shacochis wrote about Kathmandu for Outside's 20th anniversary, in October 1997.
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