Everglades Assault by Randy Wayne White

bigger. I’m scared all the time—but I don’t know why or of what. I look in the mirror and I see the wrinkles growing on my face, and I just feel so damn . . . alone. ”
    â€œIf it makes you feel any better, everyone on earth feels like that from time to time. Presidents, waitresses, fishing guides—everyone.”
    She turned her face toward me, and I saw that she had begun to cry. “But Dusky, I feel like I’m going crazy. I feel like I’m losing . . . my mind. ”
    â€œMaybe you are.”
    â€œThanks!”
    â€œWhat I’m saying, Stella, is not to let it frighten you to the point where it does drive you crazy. When I’m scared of something, I’ve got a trick that always makes me feel a whole lot better.”
    â€œI bet.”
    â€œNo, I mean it. I think carefully about the thing that is scaring me. And then, very honestly and very methodically, I decide what the very worst thing that can happen really is. I don’t sugarcoat it; I don’t lie to myself—but even so, the ultimate reality of the fear is never as bad as the fear itself.”
    â€œSounds like great fun.”
    â€œIt’s not. But it works.”
    She was quiet for a long moment. And very still. Slowly, she turned her head to face me. There was a look of mild surprise in her blue eyes. “You know,” she said, “you’re right. It does work. Just for a moment, the briefest moment, I could see the very worst thing that could happen to me. It was real, and it wasn’t very nice—but the moment it seemed real, it was no longer frightening.” She smiled. “Are you sure you’re just a fishing guide?”
    â€œI’m sure—and sometimes I’m not even very good at that.”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œBut my fee for advice remains the same. One cold beer. In advance.”
    She wiped at her eyes and stood up. “God,” she said, “I must look a mess.”
    â€œAnd the other part of the fee is that you stop knocking yourself.”
    â€œBecause I’m very attractive, right?”
    â€œYou can bank on it.”
    Subtly, her face was changing. The confusion was gone, replaced by a look that was unmistakable. It was the soft-eyed, arched-thigh bedroom look. Somehow, through a combination of the fight and my dimestore psychoanalysis, I had slipped through her guard. I had made my way past the sterile perimeter of this stranger, Stella Catharine Cross, and was being offered the intimacy of her body in the same way she had offered me her fears.
    There were no words exchanged.
    No words were necessary.
    Between all men and all women there is an endless exchange of communication going on that is far more complex than our surface exchange of vowels and verbs and adjectives.
    We are so accustomed to it that we are rarely even aware it is going on.
    But it is.
    We never meet the eye of a stranger without the minimum question-and-answer session: “I might be interested; I’m definitely not interested; maybe, if things were different . . .”
    Those are the basic answers to the most basic of questions.
    And now, this lady was saying yes; saying yes not in an obvious way, but in a way unmistakable nonetheless.
    I watched her move to the kitchen to get my beer. I hadn’t been lying—she was attractive. Very attractive. Her face held its share of pain and wear, and her breasts were no longer the gravity-free breasts of the cheerleader. But, strangely, that seemed to make her all the more desirable.
    So why did I feel the urge to make my excuses and get the hell out of there?
    Maybe it was because I was thinking of the lovely April Yarbrough; or maybe it was because I don’t subscribe to the convenient Playboy philosophy that all sex is good sex—however desperate, however brief, however empty.
    Maybe hell. It was neither of those things, and I knew it.
    This lady, Stella Catharine Cross, was one of the injured