Ladies' Night, Andrews, Kay [best time to read books .txt] 📗

If they noticed that the temperatures were in the high nineties, and the humidity at 2,000 percent, they didn’t remark upon it. Instead, they fanned themselves with the yellowing cardboard Jungle Jerry’s Fan Club fans they’d bought for $1.99 in the gift shop and inhaled the heady fragrance of frangipani and ginger lily.

The four paused in their leisurely tour to stare up at the gnarled crimson boughs of a particularly eye-catching tree. “What the heck is this?” asked the only man in the group, a spry seventy-six-year-old who was actually the youngster of the crowd.

Wyatt Keeler happened to be nearby, trimming dead branches from an oleander bush that seemed particularly stressed by the summer’s dry spell.

He was dressed as he always was at the park, in a khaki shirt bristling with epaulets and with flap pockets and embroidered Jungle Jerry patches, matching khaki cargo shorts, lace-up work boots, and, of course, his ever-present safari hat.

Wyatt walked up to the group and gave them a welcoming smile, flashing his dimples. Old ladies were crazy for the dimples. He gave the tree trunk a loving pat, as though it were a beloved family pet, which, to Wyatt, it essentially was.

“This is a gumbo-limbo tree,” he volunteered. “It’s one of the more unusual species we have in the park. It’s Latin name is Bursera simaruba, and it’s a native of tropical regions like Florida, of course, as well as Mexico, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Venezuela. Some people call it the ‘tourist tree,’ because the bark is red and peeling—like a lot of tourists we see down here in the wintertime.”

The Michiganders laughed at this and themselves by association.

“Interesting,” murmured one of the women, a sturdily built eighty-five-year-old widow in a pink sun visor.

Wyatt felt himself suddenly cheered by his own speech, and by the interested comments from these tourists.

The very oldest member of the group, a spindly legged ninety-year-old in a thin cotton housedress, stepped closer and peered at Wyatt’s Jungle Jerry’s name patch, which had faded into obscurity from years of laundering.

“You’re not Jungle Jerry,” she said sharply. “You’d be too young.”

“No ma’am. I’m Wyatt Keeler,” he offered her his hand. “Jungle Jerry was my grandfather. He bought this place in 1961, when it was still a commercial orange grove.”

One of the women did a little full-circle turn. “You don’t see a lot of orange trees here now.”

“That’s right,” Wyatt said. “My grandfather, Jerry Brennan, bought six hundred acres here on County Line Road, back in the day when this was considered way out in the boonies, and he thought he’d become the orange king of Manatee County. And he might have done it, too, except that this area experienced a record-breaking frost in 1963. Temperatures dipped into the low teens and stayed there for three days. My granddad didn’t know enough about citrus growing back then to know that he needed to fire up the smudge pots. He lost most of his orange trees in that freeze, and most of the family money, too.”

“Too bad,” the man muttered.

“Fortunately,” Wyatt went on, “he met my grandmother, Winnie, not long after that. And her family still had some money. Granddad’s family had once owned a little amusement park back home in Tulsa, and, since tourism was going great guns in Florida then, he decided maybe he could take the old orange grove and convert it into what he called a kiddie park.”

Wyatt gestured to a rusty jungle gym partially obscured by a hedge of orange-flowering shrubs. “He put in all kinds of rides and playground equipment, and because my grandmother Winnie loved flowers, the two of them also started planting new trees and shrubs as they took out the dead orange trees.”

“It’s lovely now,” the ninety-year-old said. “We used to bring our grandchildren here when we all came down every spring. Whatever happened to all your wild animals? I was just telling my friends, there used to be lions and a tiger, and do I remember a zebra?”

“Yes ma’am,” Wyatt said with a laugh. “We had all that and more. My granddad watched a lot of those old Tarzan movies in his younger days. He bought the animals from a traveling circus that had gone bust. A lot of circus outfits used to winter down in this area, you know. He’d always loved animals anyway. So he named himself Jungle Jerry, and he got a retired lion tamer to teach him a few tricks of the trade.”

“I thought I remembered a lion show,” the woman crowed. “So that was the real Jungle Jerry?”

“The one and only,” Wyatt said. “We had the big cats, plus Zoey, that was the zebra, and an elephant, and even a Florida black bear, right up until the late seventies. After my granddad retired, my dad took over, and he phased out most of the large animals.”

The woman in the sun visor glared at Wyatt. “They didn’t … kill them. Tell me they didn’t.”

“Not at all,” Wyatt assured her. “Those animals were like my grandfather’s own kids. Boo-Boo, he was the bear, he died of natural causes the same year granddad retired. Monty, the lion, and Tonga, that was the tiger, they retired to an exotic animal shelter in Ocala. Daphne, our elephant, was donated to the Lowry Park Zoo over in Tampa.”

The four tourists all seemed relieved. “I love all the tropical birds you have around here,” said the woman in the baggy shorts.

Wyatt put his fingers to his lips and gave a long, shrill whistle. They heard a flapping, and suddenly a huge gray parrot flew down from the top of a nearby poinciana tree and perched on Wyatt’s shoulder.

“Oh!” one of the women said, clapping her hands in glee.

The bird nuzzled Wyatt’s ear, then dipped its neck and poked her head into the right breast pocket for a treat.

“This is Cookie,” Wyatt said. “She’s an African gray, a total diva, and the star of the parrot show. I can’t take any credit for her, though. The birds