Razor Girl Read Online Free Page B

gays, African Americans, women and anyone else who might have been offended.
    Meanwhile, the show’s prime-time advertisers were under attack in the blogosphere, and by midday the ACLU had called for a boycott of all fishing flies tied with rooster feathers from the Nance farm. Word of the backlash sent the network vice president in charge of
Bayou Brethren
lunging for a pre-lunch Xanax. He couldn’t fathom why neither Buck nor his manager, Lane Coolman, would answer their cell phones.
    The whereabouts of the other Nance brothers—Clee Roy, Buddy and Junior—had been ascertained. They were chilling at the forty-acre Pensacola estate leased by the network and used as an outdoor set for the fractious family barbecue scenes that closed each episode. Down the road a stretch was the rooster farm, which the clan avoided except during taping days because of the stench. The writers had decided that Buck Nance’s brothers should refer to him as “Captain Cock” when quarreling on the show, and inevitably the sleeveless tee-shirt bearing that nickname became the top seller of all
Bayou Brethren
merchandise.
    Buck had been wearing one onstage at the Parched Pirate, but now the shirt was in a dumpster on Whitehead Street and the remains of his famous beard were in a bowl of ricey gunk at some restaurant he’d ducked into while fleeing the imaginary lynch mob. The puny kitchen scissors had left him with nappy bristles exposing a weak jawline that he hadn’t seen in years. His bare face looked pasty and shrunken, and in no way resembled the imposing Moses-like visage on his TV show.
    Which was good, in a way. Buck Nance feared that if he were recognized on the streets of Key West, he would be set upon and sodomized by militant homos, Negroes and other socialist-leaning minorities, a rioting of godless heathens.
    His survival plan was to blend with the common civilians until he could be safely extricated by Lane. The night was spent in a banyan tree listening to stray cats scrap and screw. Buck didn’t sleep a wink. At dawn he climbed down shivering and walked to Mallory Square, where he dozed off on a public bench. Soon he was jarred awake by the horn of an arriving cruise ship. The sun felt warm on his shoulders, promising a better day.
    Having lost his phone in the fray at the Parched Pirate, Buck entered a shop on Duval Street to purchase a disposable. There he learned that, despite the island’s laid-back reputation, shirtless men with fresh scrapes and bruises aren’t welcome in all establishments. He also discovered that his engraved sterling money clip had apparently fallen from his trousers when he scrambled up the banyan tree, meaning he had no cash or even credit cards, which he always tucked between the hundred-dollar bills.
    Somewhere on Simonton he shoplifted a random tee-shirt that bore a nonsense caption: WHERE IS BUM FARTO ? He darted into a bougainvillea-fringed courtyard to put on the shirt, and out of habit he tore off the sleeves. An artist sitting languidly before an easel offered Buck fifty bucks to pose nude, and Buck’s response was to punch a fist through the blank canvas and stomp off. The artist considered calling the police but decided on a nap instead.
    —
    Florida’s beaches erode pitilessly, the unstoppable rise of sea level presenting a nightmare scenario for waterfront hotels, coastal developers and real-estate agents. Once upon a time you could get away with selling submerged land to faraway rubes, but those days were over. Now buyers wanted to visit the property first, and not by paddleboard. Likewise, high-end vacationers to the Sunshine State derived no tropical enchantment from the sight of waves crashing through their hotel’s lobby.
    Climate change created a boom for a hurricane-spawned industry known as “beach renourishment,” a process by which thousands of tons of sand are dredged from the sea shallows and dumped onshore to replace the acreage washed away by nature. The