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the town and sucked out all its life.
    Bits of track left over from when Everglades had an extensive streetcar system were still embedded in the street, and when the tar melted from the heat, which was almost every day, they glittered silver and rusty red.
    Several of the buildings had given up the ghost entirely and collapsed into piles of crumbling wood and sawdust. The remnants hadn't even been carried away.
    The rot had even crept into the people's spirit. Everglades had once been a haven for thieves, chiselers, and runaway convicts who flocked there as fast as they could saw off their chains. Everglades had welcomed every two-bit swindler with open arms. It was a town that needed people to run it. With temperatures of well over a hundred degrees in the shade and thick clouds of hungry mosquitoes, it couldn't afford to inquire too closely into anyone's past.
    When Rye was a boy and things were just beginning to get bad, he and his friends used to hide under the windows at Albert's. They'd listen enraptured to stories about the heyday of Everglades, when fortunes were made overnight and lost just as quickly, when chicanery was a way of life and murder and rape every-night occurrences. The past seemed so colorful that the boys often wondered among themselves if there could be anything in the future to compare to it.
    Rye pressed a button on the panel in front of him and rolled down the window. The damp swamp air flowed into the car and rumpled his hair. He took a deep breath. The air still smelled like rotten fish and old garbage, he thought. It was the swamp rot, all those millions and millions of dead plants and animals fermenting in the heat. The whole town, the whole damn swamp, was resting on a graveyard.
    Rye glanced over at Maurice and John, who slept open-mouthed, their heads jerking with the movement of the car. He resented their ability to sleep, and was tempted to wake them up. But he resisted the temptation and stared back out the window. He was glad to be back, though he couldn't imagine why. It was a lousy tinhorn town, and he'd never been happy there.
    Up ahead he spotted the Rod and Gun, once the most elegant hotel in town. Now the sprawling two-story wood building with its marina, putting green, and tennis court, its vine-covered porches, its grandiose curved driveway, leaned into the ground, offering itself up to the termites.
    Rye pressed the intercom: "Rodriguez?"
    "Yes, sir."
    "That's the hotel ahead."
    "That?"
    "You heard me."
    "Yes, sir, but it looks deserted."
    "It isn't. Give a blast on the car horn."
    Leaning on the car horn with one hand, Rodriguez swung the oversized car up the driveway and under the decaying portico. Maurice and John leaped up and looked around, startled. Theirs was the only reaction. The Rod and Gun remained quiet, snoozing in the early-morning sun.
    "Anyone at home?" Rye yelled out the window.
    Rodriguez gave another long blast on the horn. Finally, a three-hundred-pound redhead, with an American flag in his lapel and a grin that stretched across his face like a wound, rushed out. Archie Marris pulled on his musty blue serge jacket and screamed, "All right, all right, I hear you."
    "Marris!" yelled Rye with delight. "Son of a bitch, if it ain't Archie Marris!" He jumped out of the car and clapped Marris in a big bear hug. The stunned Marris submitted meekly. It took close to a minute before he was able to put two and two together and come up with Rye Whitman. It wasn't that Rye looked all that different, though of course he had aged. It was the clothes, the car. The only place Marris had ever seen people like that was in Life magazine. It seemed impossible he might know one of them.
    "Jesus Christ," he drawled with awe. "Jesus Christ, will ya look at him."
    "Not bad for a boy from the boonies, huh?" Rye was delighted at the effect he was making. He had thought about coming home rich many times when things were bad. He couldn't imagine why it had taken him so long to do