Hoot

by Carl Hiaasen

The boy was straw-blond and wiry, and his skin was nut-brown from the sun. The expression on his face was intent and serious. He wore a faded Miami Heat basketball jersey and dirty khaki shorts, and here was the odd part: no shoes. The soles of his bare feet looked as black as barbecue coals.

HOOT begins with Roy, who is new to Florida, looking out the window of his school bus and seeing this mysterious, wild-looking kid running along -- and he’s not on his way to class. This is Roy’s first sighting of the boy known as Mullet Fingers, and it will change his life.

The man, who was as bald as a beach ball, introduced himself as Curly. Officer Delinko thought the bald man must have a good sense of humor to go by such a nickname, but he was wrong. Curly was cranky and unsmiling.

I think it’s important to give readers vivid physical descriptions when you introduce a character. Curly takes his security job very seriously, but I wanted him to have a comic presence in the book from the beginning. Also, you feel a little sorry for the guy, having no hair but “Curly” for a nickname.

Garrett was a D student, but he was popular in school because he goofed around in class and made farting noises whenever a teacher called him out. Garrett was the king of phony farts at Trace Middle. His most famous trick was farting out the first line of the Pledge of Allegiance during homeroom.

This would be every boy’s fantasy, farting out a song in homeroom. I never met anyone in school who could do it, but I would have paid all my lunch money to see it happen.

He just wanted to blend in quietly and not be noticed, like a bug on a riverbank.

Being the new kid in school at Roy’s age can be brutal, especially when the place you came from is so different from the place you moved to. Florida is a whole different universe compared to Montana. In fact, Florida is different universe compared to just about anywhere else. Roy just wanted to be stay invisible for a while, until he adjusted, but things happened that made it impossible.

While Officer Delinko had been dozing, somebody had sprayed all the windows of his squad car with black paint.

I always had a soft spot in my heart for Officer Delinko, who obviously wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. I thought Luke Wilson did a great job of playing the part in the movie. For the record, my friends and I never vandalized a police car.

His eyelids twitched from lack of sleep, and all day long he perspired like an Arkansas hog.

If we’re being honest, I’ve never spent any time around Arkansas hogs, but I’m pretty sure that, in the Southern heat, all hogs sweat like, well, hogs.

There, standing by the hole and peering curiously at one of the meatballs, was the smallest owl that he had ever seen.

The little burrowing owls depicted in HOOT are real birds. There were lots of them in the fields and old pastures near my house, when I was Roy’s age. Then the bulldozers came to clear the land for condos and apartments and shopping malls, and the owl burrows got buried. That experience is where the story in the book came from. It’s straight out of my childhood, except that the ending in the novel is different than what actually happened. Honestly, I like my version better.

All he had to do was settle the argument between his heart and his brain.

We’ve all had these moments of indecision, where our heart is telling us to do one thing but common sense is screaming, “Whoa! Hold on!”

A lone osprey hovered overhead, attracted by a glimmer of baitfish in the shallows. Upstream a school of baby tarpon rolled, also with lunch on their minds. Nearby a white heron posed regally on one leg, in the same tree where the boys had hung their shoes before swimming to the derelict boat.

I’ve always liked this passage not just because it’s kind of a Huck Finn moment, but also because it’s a snapshot of so many afternoons with my friends when we were kids. We were lucky enough to grow up on the eastern edge of the Everglades, but those places are now mostly paved with concrete. Fortunately, some parts of Florida haven’t yet been wrecked by overdevelopment, and the kids who live there can still ride their bikes to a creek where ospreys fly and tarpon are rolling. Those places are worth saving, and worth fighting for.

What he did was salute crisply, spin around, drop his pants, and bend over.

There’s an art to proper mooning. Some people can pull it off, and others can’t.

Now he understood what was going to happen to the little owls if he did his job properly, and it weighted him with an aching and unshakeable sorrow.

Again, Officer Delinko might not be a genius but he’s got a good heart. In every book, characters are eventually defined by the choices they make. I think that’s true in life, too. Sometimes you have to bend the rules to do the right thing.

Guess I’ll have to come back another day

I meet lots of readers who started with HOOT, my first book for young readers, and years later have graduated to my novels for “grown-ups.” The latest is SQUEEZE ME, which comes out on Aug. 25th, and it definitely isn’t for kids. But you always can hide it in your nightstand…. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50644565-squeeze-me