Ladies' Night Andrews, Kay (great novels .txt) 📖

The Florida Department of Agriculture had placed the Brazilian pepper, a nonnative invasive “shrub,” on its hit list of noxious plants. It was definitely a pushy interloper—with its massive crown of branches, it shaded out anything else in its path, and it grew so rapidly he hadn’t noticed it had sprung up and taken over the old orchid-house area.

Though it was a typical summer day, with temperatures promising to rise to the nineties, he knew enough about the Brazilian pepper’s near-poisonous sap to take precautions, outfitting himself in long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, work gloves, and blue bandanna on his head. He set up the ladder next to the trunk, fastened a rope to the chain-saw handle, and began climbing into the canopy. When he’d gone as high as he could, he steadied himself against the main trunk, hauled the chain saw up from below, and fired it up.

The roar and the whine of the saw as it chewed its way through the brittle wood made a huge din, and the gas fumes filled his nostrils.

For two hours, Wyatt hacked away at the tree, dropping the limbs to the ground, steadily moving downward as he decimated the upper canopy.

Twenty feet aboveground, with a buzzing chain saw in hand, he was focused only on the tree, the chain saw, and avoiding falling out of the tree.

By noon, his clothes were sweat-soaked, his face was itchy from the pepper-tree fumes, and the tree itself was looking like a grotesque, defoliated skeleton. He considered going back to the house to shower, change clothes, and grab lunch but went back to work instead. The pepper tree, like Callie and Luke and their lawyer and Judge Stackpole, was his nemesis. And this one he intended to cut right down to the ground.

*   *   *

“Jesus, son!” Nelson recoiled at the sight of Wyatt when he came tramping into the house. “What the hell did you do to yourself?”

“To me? Nothing. It took me all day, but I cut down the pepper tree, sprayed the stump with the legal equivalent of napalm, then raked up every limb, leaf, and seedpod I could find and hauled it all off to the dump.”

Wyatt collapsed onto one of the wooden kitchen chairs. “I’m whipped. What’s for dinner?”

“Beanie-weenies, Tater Tots, cornbread, coleslaw. Doesn’t your face hurt?”

Wyatt stripped off his gloves and put a finger to his cheek, which, come to think of it, did feel kind of hot and swollen to the touch. The backs of his hands were covered in a nasty red rash, too.

“Guess I better hit the shower,” he said. “I might be having a slight reaction to the pepper-tree sap.”

“If that’s slight, I don’t want to know severe,” Nelson said.

The face of a monster stared back at Wyatt in the bathroom mirror. His entire face was mottled red and swollen, his nose a puffy red blob, his eyes rimmed in pink. Dime-sized welts ran down his neck and to the V of where his shirt collar had been open.

When he took off his shirt he saw that his chest was also streaked with angry crimson slashes. He unzipped his pants and stepped out of them, as well as his boxers, and looked down.

Holy shit! His crotch was covered in blisters. Everything was red and inflamed—and not in a good way. He turned on the shower full force and jumped in, letting the cool water sluice over his head and chest. He grabbed a bar of soap, lathered up, but the first touch of the soap to his chest felt like a splash of acid.

Wyatt dropped the soap and looked down again. Not good. How the hell had this happened? He’d been so careful, with the long pants and shirt, high socks, work boots, gloves. And then he remembered and would have smacked himself in the face if that face hadn’t felt like an open wound just then.

He’d had to pee. And who could unzip and do all the rest wearing work gloves? He must have gotten some of the sap on his hands, and then, well, his boys. Which were now itching like a son of a bitch.

He tried to think back to a college class he’d taken on noxious plants. They’d studied poison ivy, oak, sumac, and a few others, and, of course, over the years, working in landscaping and now running Jungle Jerry’s, he’d run into all of the above. But he couldn’t remember anything about the hazards of Brazilian pepper.

After gingerly toweling off the inflamed skin, he found a bottle of Calamine lotion in the medicine cabinet and slathered it all over himself. Within a few seconds, the thick pink goo had dried and started to cake and crack. And he itched, God how he itched.

Wrapped in nothing more than a towel, he carefully stepped over the clothes he’d just discarded. In his bedroom he donned the loosest pair of cotton shorts he could find and an old, threadbare cotton T-shirt.

Wyatt sat down at the kitchen table as his father was taking a pan of cornbread from the oven. “Does it feel as bad as it looks?” Nelson inquired, after he’d served his son a plate heaped high with food.

“Worse,” Wyatt said, pointing toward his crotch. “It’s … everywhere.”

“Ow,” Nelson grimaced and poured him a glass of iced tea. “I think we’ve got some Benadryl around here somewhere. That might help some.”

“Maybe after dinner,” Wyatt said. “I’ll fall asleep with my head in the plate if I take it now, and I’ve got some stuff I need to do tonight.”

They cleaned up the kitchen, and Nelson retired to his recliner to watch his nightly roundup; Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and the Rays game.

Wyatt sank onto the old sofa and tried not to think of his inflamed privates while he leafed through the paper, but he was so acutely uncomfortable he gave in shortly after eight and went looking for the bottle of Benadryl.

“Okay, Dad,” he said, poking his head out from the hallway. “I’m turning