09-Twelve Mile Limit by Randy Wayne White

him in the hospital, kill him, whatever, but you’re the one with the career—not the Professor here.”
    I lowered my hand slowly, looking at Ransom, who was already talking, her voice easy to hear because the bar had gone so very quiet. “The way it happen, my brother, this pretty gentleman, he start a conversation with me. Very nice at first, then he say he give me two, three hundred dollars, whatever I want, if I come to their hotel and make his friends feel very good tonight. Told me his two friends, they’d never had them a black girl. It so good he wanted them to know what it like.
    “I told ’em he and his friends, all three of them, they probably used to trading blow jobs with each other. Or maybe little boys—” Several people at the bar laughed at that. “So why they want to bother a nice colored woman like me?” She was shaking her head, smiling, giving them a dose of her contempt before she added, “That’s when this pretty gentleman, he grab me.”
    I turned once again to the actor, some inner awareness reminding me that I’d had too much to drink, that I needed to be careful, cognitive, keep things cool, so I said, “You’re right, mister. You need to apologize to her. Now. Then we go our separate ways.”
    He thought about it, staring at me with his tough-guy eyes, nodding, creating drama because he knew how to do it, and then threw his head back and laughed. “Okay, Professor! I’ll blink first!” He stood, took Ransom’s hand, bowed at the waist, and kissed the back of her hand regally. “Lovely lady, I was wrong to say what I did. I hope you’ll accept my apology.”
    Then he stood there as if maybe expecting to hear some polite applause, but there wasn’t any. Everyone around the crowded bar was staring at him, mostly locals, their expressions saying he was a jerk, maybe they were a little embarrassed for the famous man, too.
    Which got to him. I could see it in his expression. So he had to get the last word, contrive a dominant gesture, so he leaned and put his index finger near my nose—payback time—and said loudly, “And you, my friend, you don’t know how very, very lucky you are that I’m in a good mood tonight.”
    Looking into his eyes, I let the words hang there for a moment before I answered softly, “Just for the record—I am not your friend.” I waited for something to happen, and, when it didn’t, I shrugged and turned away.
    I thought that was the end of it.
    It wasn’t.
    Because then Gunnar Camphill focused on Jeth’s T-shirt. It was a T-shirt that had quickly become popular with Florida’s sports fishermen. On the back is a silk-screened cartoon of a dead manatee lashed to a spit, roasting over a fire. Beneath the cartoon are the words: Any Questions?
    The irony of the T-shirt—and the situation—is that Florida’s sports fishermen have, for years, been among the state’s most vocal and powerful environmental advocates. Now they were being labeled “antienvironmentalist” by groups pushing to get fishing boats off the water. The long and careful defense required to disprove broad, buckshot accusations, such as “racist” or “communist,” is incapacitating—exactly the reason such charges are so commonly made and why they are so effective.
    Thus the popularity of this angry T-shirt.
    “What the fuck is that?” said Camphill, pointing.
    Jeth looked down, looked up, and said, “Yeah, what about it?”
    Camphill made a blowing nose with his lips—was this guy really so stupid? “You’re kidding. You really don’t know why I’m here? SAM—the Save All Manatees group—flew me in for the conference on Captiva. They’ve got about a half million members, and I’m their national spokesman, which is why, Gilligan, you either need to strip that T-shirt off right now or get the hell out of this bar.”

7
    If Matt, the owner, hadn’t intervened, it would have started right there. Jeth was ready to go at him, and as for myself, this guy, Camphill, his behavior really was noxious, and I was drunk enough to