Saving an Innocent Man

by Robert E B Wright

  Malcolm began losing control. He was flailing his arms, eyes closed, head down. He shuttled his legs and did a violent, painful dance in the grass. The tall blades shook against his half-naked torso.

  “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!” Malcolm was slapping at his face and body. He was rocking back and forth like a bear attacked by honeybees. And the swarm blackened. The swarm was now a dark cloud, a black aura, around his body. Malcolm took off running. He thrashed through the meat grinder leaves like a raging bull in the throes of death. He held his hands on each side of his face and stumbled blindly in one direction, then another. Small birds flitted from the sedge. Frogs leaped out of harm’s way.

  Malcolm fell on one knee with a crunch of dry grass but picked himself up immediately. The insects sounded like they were inside his head. They were driving him mad. He would do anything to get away from them. Anything.

  His back and shoulders were streaked with his own blood from long shallow cuts. His arms were covered in streams of red. His legs, protected somewhat by his heavy gray work pants, stabbed their way through the endless river of stropped blades. The mosquitoes were impossible to escape. The dark cloud enveloped Malcolm in a shroud of suffocating, stinging, sucking death.

  Malcolm was screaming.

  Screaming and running.

  Running and crashing and thrashing in all directions, the steak-knife weeds flattening where he fell.

  Suddenly, he stumbled into a small clearing, an isolated patch of three or four mangrove trees. The mangrove root system had, over the years, collected enough detritus to build up the land beneath it. Malcolm found himself in soft, black, ankle deep mud. He slipped and fell hard on his left side. The entire left side of his body from the tip of his left shoe to the top of his head, from his belly button around to his spine, looked like it had been dipped in dark chocolate. The mud globed in his hair. It covered his left eyelid. It clogged his left ear. Malcolm righted himself and sat in his mud bath, arms flying in all directions. But then he stopped. And he listened. Mosquitoes continued to buzz around his right ear, but not one buzzed in his mud-packed left ear. He extended both arms in front of him. And he looked. The mosquitoes continued to annihilate his right arm. But not one got through the mud to his left arm.

  “Son of a bitch!” he said, this time in happy amazement.

  Malcolm rolled over on his right side and slathered mud all over himself. It was the kind of scene a hog farmer lived with every day. Malcolm wasn’t sure what harm the black ooze would do to his cuts, but it seemed to take some of the sting out of the mosquito bites. There must be something to this mud bath stuff, he thought. After all, women all over the world spend millions on it. And right now it was worth millions to him.

  He waddled in the black muck. He kicked his legs in it. He tried to swim in it. He rolled around like a cantaloupe ball in chocolate fondue. He became giddy with the satisfaction of outsmarting sanity-sucking mosquitoes and he hooted and he hollered and he laughed like a crazy man.

  The huge black motionless blob sitting in the middle of the mud hole had two pink eyes. Malcolm had caught his breath, rested awhile and licked his wounds, in a manner of speaking. Now it was time to move on. He broke off two dead mangrove branches and kept them. He used these as a prow to push through the grassy blades. The mud would protect him from the mosquitoes, as well as the cutting edges of the grass. And when the mud dried and flaked off, he could scoop up more mud from below the river of grass and paste it on himself. As long as the mud lasted, and he lasted, maybe he could make it. When Malcolm stood up he looked like a black Goliath, a mastodon of men. The mud monster of the great swamp walked stiffly out of the pool of mud, as if he had a load in his pants. He pierced the wall of the saw grass slowly, like a resurrected mummy returning to his crypt. He walked like a man in a suit of armor. For indeed, he was.

  Eleven

  The leather sole of the shoe seemed to be speaking from the top of a wooden desk. “…claims she was raped on a pool table…” The shoes were on feet at the end of crossed legs, which came out of a beer belly covered by a blue shirt with the bottom button undone. The voice continued, “…one of them held a gun to her head while the others took turns.” Tom McGuire tossed the report on his desk. “I want you two to get into this case right away.”

  Craig Mulholland and Armando Diaz looked at each other like they couldn’t believe what they just heard. Mulholland jumped in. “Hey Tom, we uh…don’t mind working as hard as the next guy…”

  “Even harder,” Diaz added.

  Mulholland continued, “Yeah, even harder, but with the other cases we’re working on, plus tryin’ to track down this guy out in the Glades, plus this case you’re talking about now, we are going to be too busy to do a good job on any one of ‘em.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Tom responded flatly.

  “You’re taking us off the Glades case, aren’t you?” Diaz asked, incredulous.

  McGuire sat quietly.

  Mulholland leaned forward. “Tom, do not take us off this Glades case! Please!”

  “I’m not taking you off the case, but I am telling you to let it ride for a while, get your minds on other things, go back to it in a couple of months.”

  Mulholland and Diaz were relieved.

  “Look,” McGuire continued, “Galvo, the guy you were putting all your bets on, cashed out, OK. There’s nothing you can do about that. And this other one, you don’t even know his name,” McGuire started to count the facts off with his fingers: “This guy was very seriously injured in the plane crash. He’s out there in the middle of nowhere with the snakes and gators, and he’s probably been dead for days.” McGuire put his feet down. “Now look me in the face, without laughing, and tell me you want to go out there and look for him instead of doing something more productive around here.”

  “Tom, in a couple of months there won’t be anything left to go back to. Our leads will be stale and our informers will fly north for the summer…”

  “We’ve got too much invested, Tom,” Diaz said.

  “You’re on the losing end, boys. Cut your losses.”

  Mulholland leaned over and put both palms on McGuire’s desk, “Tom, I’m goin’ to tell you something.”

  “Hey, wait a second, good buddy,” Diaz put his hand on Mulholland’s shoulder. Mulholland shook it off.

  There was a knock on the door. McGuire was the only one to look up.

  “I’m goin’ to tell you something, Tom.”

  “Craig, hold on,” Diaz softly commanded.

  The knocking was harder this time.

  McGuire yelled at the door, “What is it?” Mildred leaned in through the door. “There’s a Lieutenant DiSantis from Chicago on the phone. He’s the same guy who called you a couple of days ago about the plane crash in the swamps.”

  Mulholland and Diaz looked at each other, then they turned to McGuire. Each had a raised eyebrow. McGuire gave them a look as if to say, “Hey, what do you want from me?” He took the call. “McGuire.”

  “Lieutenant McGuire, this is Lieutenant DiSantis, I spoke to you the day before yesterday about the drug plane.”

  “Yeah, of course, I remember. But we haven’t got much more than I told you before, Lieutenant. “

  McGuire held the receiver toward Mulholland and Diaz so they could hear DiSantis.

  “The one who died in the crash, have you verified his I.D. yet?”

  “We have.”

  “And it was Galvo, Michael Galvo?”

  “It was Galvo.”

  “How about the drugs or cash? Did you conclude your search?”

  “No. We found no drugs. We found no drug money. But if we find any, you’ll be one of the first to know about it.” McGuire rolled his eyes.

  Another pause from DiSantis. “How about the one that got away. Any better idea on him?”

  “Just what I told you the other day.”

  “Yeah, but that sounded crazy.”

  “Look, I r
ead it to you right from the report. You want to talk to the two Naples officers who were there, call them yourself.”

  In his office, DiSantis had swiveled around in his chair and was looking at a large map of Florida. “Lieutenant, where exactly did the plane crash? What were the coordinates?”

  “Listen, DiSantis, with all respect due to a fellow officer of my rank, if I told you about every little detail of this case, e-mailed you pictures of the crash site, mailed you all the reports that have been written, told you about all the evidence that has been gathered and all the leads we’ve followed-up on the past two years…” McGuire was sitting erect now, “…I would never have time to do my job…I mean, I don’t get calls like this every day.”

  Mulholland and Diaz were hanging on every word.

  “Lieutenant McGuire, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take too much of your time to pry into a case you’ve put so much into. It’s just that we’ve wanted to burn Galvo for a long time ourselves. And we have strong reason to believe that the other one could be someone we want even more.”

  McGuire’s eyes met the eyes of Diaz and Mulholland once again. “You say the one on the run is somebody you’re trying to get real bad?”

  “We think so. We’re almost sure of it.”

  Mulholland spoke in a loud whisper, “You see, Tom, the Chicago connection was the right connection.” Diaz sat there quietly cheering.

  “Well, we’ll do the best job we can, DiSantis. If he’s not dead, we’ll get him and we’ll let you know when we do.”

  “Listen, this case is important to me, McGuire. I’ve got a lot wrapped up in it myself.”

  “Well, I can assure you that we won’t screw up DiSantis.” McGuire then spoke with a phony southern accent. “Us good old boys down here in Miami can handle a complicated drug case. And just for the record, Detective Craig Mulholland and

  Armando Diaz are assigned to the case and responsible for the day-to-day.”

  DiSantis replied, “I’m sorry I gave you the impression I thought you couldn’t, Lieutenant.” DiSantis was loosening his tie. “I know I sound pushy but let me explain. I give speeches on drug enforcement at the high schools here in Chicago. I’m well known in town. I started walking a beat in the housing projects thirty-five years ago. I made it to Lieutenant because I don’t let up. This case is very important to me.”

  “That’s commendable, DiSantis. That’s better than I’ve done myself. But if you want to know more than what I’ve told you, you’ll have to come down here and do it yourself.”

  A slight pause.

  “Maybe I’ll do just that, Lieutenant.”

  As soon as McGuire hung up, Mulholland and Diaz were on their feet. “Tom you tried to throw cold water on us just when this guy in Chicago is heatin’ up,” Mulholland said.

  “He must have a lot of the answers we’ve been looking for on the Chicago side,” Diaz said.

  “Sounds like he might be coming down here,” McGuire said. “I don’t know if he’s serious, but it sounded that way. He’s obviously a very determined guy. Sounds like he means what he says.”

  “Can he do that, Tom?” Diaz asked.

  “Sure. If he’s chasing a suspected felon, and he had the right approvals, he can walk in here and ask all the questions he wants.”

  “He won’t get the approvals,” Mulholland declared.

  “A guy like that will, don’t kid yourself.”

  “He’d better not get in our way, Tom, we’re depending on you to keep him out of our hair.”

  “OK. I’ll give the rape case to Jackson and Lavendausky and I’ll give you two more days of the chopper. And this time, one of you can go out in the chopper to see for yourselves. But there is a limit to how long you two are going to traipse around in the woods looking for a dead man.”

  Twelve

  The panorama over the top of the twelve-foot grass was vast and flat. It looked like an enormous, soft brown meadow. The pattern of the grass was unbroken. Except for a hole that was moving incredibly slowly.

  Down in the hollow space of displaced grass, Malcolm bulldozed forward. The two pieces of mangrove branches he held in front of him, as a sort of wedge, worked pretty well. The only part of him that bled now were his knuckles. The mud all over his body was dried and crusty. Mosquitoes provided a noisy airborne escort, but Malcolm ignored them. Malcolm's pants were a mess of broken and ripped threads. His black leather workman type shoes had been waterlogged for days and the saw teeth of the grass were taking a toll on them.

  At water level, the sawgrass sent up young green shoots to join the brown, dried out adults above. Snails of every size were everywhere. Frogs hung and sprang like gymnasts from mast-to-mast. Gambusias, guppy-like fish an inch or two long, schooled through the submerged stems gobbling mosquito larvae. Submarine fleets of turtles paddled through the reeds, stopping every once-in-a-while to send up their periscope heads.

  As Malcolm sloshed monotonously through the water, he muttered to himself non-stop. "How did the Indians deal with the mosquitoes? The Indians didn't run around in mud suits all day and sleep in mud suits at night. How would they make babies? They must have known something the rest of us don't know.” All kinds of images flooded through his head. Malcolm stopped. He put the two sticks down and looked into the shallows, as he had done countless times before. He picked snails off the sawgrass and he ate them as if they were berries.

  __________________________________

  REMEMBER: Eating raw snails and raw frogs can kill you.

  Malcolm was lucky. You may not be.

  __________________________________

  As Malcolm reached for a snail, a frog hopped to the spot where his hand was going. Malcolm hesitated for a moment. Then his hand snapped up the frog in a flash. With the green-slime frog in his hands, Malcolm hesitated for a moment again, not knowing exactly what to do next. Then Malcolm grabbed the main body of the frog with one hand and grabbed its long legs with the other and simply pulled it apart at the hip joint.

  As Malcolm held the webbed foot, the dismembered frog leg was twitching, trying to hop without the rest of its body. Malcolm inserted the jerking leg in his mouth and pulled the bone between his teeth to scrap off all the meat. He did the same thing with the second leg and discarded the carcass.

  __________________________________

  Let me repeat: Eating raw snails and raw frogs can kill you.

  __________________________________

  "The frogs! The freakin' frogs! They're nude. Naked! No clothes! No mosquito repellant. And the mosquitoes don't land on them. Don't even fly around them. And the frogs don't wear mud suits! What do they know? What the hell do they know? I've got to talk to a frog. Or eat a lot more frogs. That's it. You are what you eat, right? That's it, you are what...."

  Babbling, Malcolm packed himself with fresh mud then picked up his mangrove sticks and pushed on.

  The sun had moved two hours higher in the sky. Malcolm's eyes scanned the blue. He had not seen, nor heard, the police helicopter that day. Perhaps they had called off their search.

  Malcolm then parted the curtain of grass with his sticks and there before him lay another meandering creek. He waded into it, anxious to wash off the caked mud. Malcolm disappeared, then bobbed to the surface and dog paddled across the deep creek. Toward the other side, he found footing on the bottom and stood there cooling off.

  Then something caught his eye. Something silver just beneath the surface. A small silverfish. It hung there as if tethered to the bottom. Malcolm licked his lips, kept his eyes on the fish and slowly prepared his right arm and hand to lunge for it. Malcolm's arm shot into the water. But just before he did, the fish raised the large dorsal fin on its back. Eight needle-sharp spines pierced Malcolm's fleshy hand. The bones were like nails and the pain was like an electric shock. Inhospitable bacteria instantly invaded Malcolm's bloodstream in uncountable millions. His eyes opened as wide as his hand, which he yanked out of the water. The fish was dangling from his ha
nds by its spines. He tried to shake it loose, but the spines had taken hold like a living, swimming cactus. Finally, it fell to the water and swam away.

  Malcolm grabbed his injured fist and comforted it against his chest. He appraised the red punctures across his palm.

  "Son of a bitch!"

  Malcolm flexed and unflexed his injured hand repeatedly. It was already becoming swollen and stiff. Malcolm couldn't stop muttering, "Son of a bitch!" as he made his way up the underwater contour. But a few holes in his hand was the least of his problems. Malcolm was starving to death. He had lost many pounds in only days.

  He couldn't exist on a diet of leaves, snails and frogs. But what else could he eat? There were no coconut or fruit trees here. He couldn't run fast, like a panther to catch his prey. He didn't have poisonous fangs and lightning fast reflexes to catch and immobilize small, quick animals. He couldn't swim fast to catch swimming fish. He couldn't fly in the air to spot them from above. He didn't even have protective coloration or natural camouflage that would allow him to lay-in-wait for a passing morsel. Malcolm had no fishing line, no knife, no gun, no nothing.

  He looked up at the brown wall of grass in front of him. He stood out like a sore thumb. Huge. Slow. Practically naked. Malcolm was the prey.

  And almost everything else, the predator.

  • • •

  Malcolm's hand was swollen so much he couldn't make a fist. It looked like a rubber glove with air blown into it. The redness around each puncture mark now radiated outward across his hand. It looked nasty. And the wound had the potential of bringing about a painful and horrible death because the reproductive cells of clostridium tetani had multiplied in the deep punctures. Tetanus toxin, a powerful nerve poison, was being produced in Malcolm's body.