by Jim Markson
They left, and then he left. Picked up a bottle on the way home and drank until he passed out.
The funeral at Arlington had been one of a dozen that day, each the saddest and most mournful day in the lives of the survivors standing around the multiple holes in the ground. Mike remembered that he had completed forms regarding the ceremony, but could not remember anything about them, including when or how he had filled them out. It all worked out in the end.
There was a full Catholic Mass in the Chapel at Fort Myers. He had declined the offer of a military escort band for the funeral procession, although he had gone along with someone’s suggestion for a drummer. From the chapel, they walked to the gravesite, his brother’s body placed on a caisson pulled by six large white horses, the drummer marking time the entire way. John had posthumously been given some type of medal and promoted to colonel as a result of events associated with his death. The increased rank meant his caisson was accompanied by a riderless horse, sword hanging from the saddle and boots placed backwards in the stirrups to signify that the rider had fallen. It struck Mike as appropriate.
There had been a bugler at the graveside, and his call of retreat had been the most woeful sound Mike ever heard. Tears ran down his face the entire time, but they flowed like rain when they approached him with the flag from John’s coffin. Surely, he thought, there must be someone else in this big world to whom they can hand that flag. Someone more deserving … someone who can make sense of it all; someone who had earned the sacrifice. But the bearer gave the flag to Mike, the only living relative at the funeral.
The report of the rifles closed the proceedings. Several of John’s military brothers had tried to convey messages of respect and admiration, but it was lost on Mike. The body of John Kelly was put into the hole to be covered with dirt.
X
The sun was coming up bright, but Mike Kelly was still damp from the prior evening. He lay in the bottom of his brother’s boat, his lower half still in the shade. While his view was limited by his position in the boat, he could hear the waves coming onto shore nearby, and the stability of the boat let him know that he was on dry land somewhere.
The woman sat on the front plank of the boat looking at him warily. She held one of his gallon jugs of water and was eating one of his granola bars. He remembered the cutoff jeans from the night before, but she was now wearing one of his shirts. She said nothing as they looked at each other. She was in her late 20s, maybe early 30s, and looked to be five foot five. She had short blonde hair and wore no shoes. She wasn’t heavy, but it was impossible to discern her figure under the billowing shirt she had poached from his gear bag. He guessed she was strong; she was apparently a pretty good swimmer.
He turned to his side and rested for a second before starting to push himself up. He sat on the aft plank of the boat with his back turned toward the woman, and looked around. The boat had been pulled up on a sand beach and he could see what he thought was the Gasparilla Cut several hundred yards to the north. There was no one else around and, under other circumstances, it would have been the start of a beautiful day. A pod of porpoises was feeding just off the beach to their north.
He rose slowly from the plank, letting his back unfold as he carefully stretched out his arms and stepped out on the port side of the boat. He walked around the back of the boat, noting that the rudder had been properly lifted from its mount before hitting ground, thus avoiding damage. He looked north again at what he presumed was the cut he had sailed through the prior evening, and then south at a long strip of apparently uninhabited beach. He bent over and then squatted, watching the fins of the porpoises rise as they took in air and then submerged to resume their fishing. He walked out to the beach and pissed into the waves.
He came back to the boat along the starboard side, amazed at the lack of any serious damage. The little boat was apparently indestructible. Coming around the bow and completing his circle, he looked at the water jug and stuck out his hand toward the woman. She handed him the jug. There was still a fifth of the contents left and he drank it all, throwing the empty plastic container into the front of the boat.
He looked again at the woman, and she looked at him, neither saying anything. She had a heavy bruise below her left eye and maybe some bruising around her neck. The outer part of her right thigh was bruised for almost the entire length, marked with the deep blue color that indicated significant trauma.
He nodded his head for her to get out of the boat, and she obliged. He started to pull the boat back down to the sea.
“Can you bring me over to the mainland?” she asked.
Without looking at her he nodded his head to the east and said, “It’s over that way. You’re a good swimmer. Or you can wait here and wave someone down; it won’t be long till some powerboater comes by.”
“Come on, chief, that’s gotta be a three-mile swim. I had a kinda hard night too … how ’bout cutting me some slack?”
He looked at her and looked north and south again. Nodding to the cut he had sailed through the prior evening, he said, “That way is backwards for me. I’m in a race and headed south. If we’re where I think we are, Sanibel Island is about ten to twelve miles south. I’m going on the outside of the island, and it will probably be a little rough. If you want, I’ll put you out there.”
She helped him push the boat out into the surf. He took up the oars and rowed several hundred yards out beyond the break before putting up the sail and heading south.
It was a good day for sailing. There was a stiff breeze from the west, and while the waves were bigger than those of the ICW, they were smoother and rolling in nature as compared with the chop of the shallower water. The water was saltier but free of the mangrove refuse and motorboat discharge. The color wasn’t the bluish-black of real ocean waters, but it was a deep green with a head of foam that let you know it was big and wild enough to do whatever it wanted. The boat seemed to relish its continued life, loving the change of pace, rolling up and down on the waves as the water went rushing by, sails tight and humming in the breeze.
“Thanks for picking me up last night,” the woman said thirty minutes after leaving the beach. Mike nodded his head in acknowledgment but kept his focus on where the boat was headed. He hadn’t really picked her up the prior evening, although he did have a vague recollection of trying to stop the boat and help. Way down deep inside, he was embarrassed by being drunk in front of other people, especially strangers. But he certainly hadn’t entertained the possibility of any company the prior evening and, well, basically he just didn’t give a shit anymore.
“Something big bumped my leg right before I saw you. Pretty sure I was about to be fish chow.”
He looked at her to see if she was bullshitting; she wasn’t. He looked her in the eye for the first time, and she looked directly back. Her eyes were not fearful, neither were they needful, nor wanting, nor misty, dreaming, tearful, or brooding. They were the eyes of life: focused, alert, responsive. They were the color of well-treated, but weathered, mahogany wood. Grains of a deep brown that was connected to everything on land, with a quality that exuded warmth and perceptiveness. Her teeth were white and, despite the swelling bruise, any smile that crossed her face would be genuine and powerful.
The trip passed without incident or further conversation and, three hours later, he headed into a small marina in what he guessed was the town of Sanibel. They pulled up at a small bait store and the woman tied the boat up to a dock post.
Mike threw the empty plastic milk jugs onto the dock, pulled his small personals bag out of the box under the center plank, and then hoisted himself out of the boat. He picked up the jugs and went to find a source of fresh water. When he got back the woman was gone, and he tossed the filled jugs into the boat. He entered the bait store and walked its full three aisles, putting some smoked fish wrapped up in tin foil and some more granola bars into a basket.
“Where’s the nearest liquor store?” he asked the clerk as he was paying for his purchase.<
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“No hablo,” the man responded without looking at Mike.
“Donde es el tienda de whiskey mas proxima?” Mike attempted wearily.
“No intiendo,” the man said, again without looking up.
“Listen motherfucker,” Mike said, his voice quickly rising, “you intiendo me just fine. I ain’t in any mood to put up with your shit. Look at me, and tell me where the closest liquor store is, or I might just do something you’ll regret.”
The man finally looked up, but somehow, he now had a gun in his hand as he said, “No, you are the fuckermother.”
The woman seemed to come from nowhere and inserted herself between the two, pushing Mike with her back toward the door. Once Mike was out the door, she returned to the clerk. “Lo siento mucho, por favor perdónanos. Mi hermano tiene una enfermedad psicológica. Pero puede usted por favor decirme donde está la tienda de liqour cercana es?” The clerk smiled at her fluency and advised the liquor store was two blocks down the street.
The woman came out and found Mike sitting with his legs hanging off the dock next to the boat. She sat beside him and told him where the liquor store was. He nodded his head in appreciation.
“Sorry about that, I just….” He didn’t finish the sentence, and she didn’t respond.
“Wouldn’t have figured you for a Spanish speaker,” he said. The woman just shrugged her shoulders. Mike wasn’t used to being on the talking side of a one-way conversation.
“You got someone coming to pick you up?” he asked.
The woman appeared to be thinking as she looked out at the Gulf. But it didn’t seem like she was thinking about the answer to the question, more like she was deciding if she was going to talk to him at all.
“No,” she finally said, looking at him directly. “I’m living up in Pensacola. I’ve gotta find a way to get up there pretty quickly. I’ve got something important to take care of.”
Mike instinctively went into active-listening mode. It was a skill that had served him well during his years in law enforcement. Most people talked a lot of shit, but there were some people, you had to really pay attention to what they were saying. They used their words carefully, and if you paid attention, they answered your questions and a lot more.
“I guess you weren’t just out for an evening swim last night, huh?” he said, realizing that she obviously had no money or other means of support in the pockets of the tight cutoff jeans. Momentarily escaping the confines of his own world, he wondered about the circumstances that led to her being swept out into the Gulf of Mexico.
She found amusement in the comment and smiled for the first time. “No,” she said. “It was practice. I’m going to attempt to backstroke all the way to Mexico next month.” Mike smiled.
“You said you were in a race … that EcoLoco thing?”
“Yeah,” Mike answered.
“Bad news, chief, you ain’t gonna make it by the deadline in that boat.”
“It’s not like that …” Mike responded. “it’s a challenge, not a race.”
“Yeah, well, we both know the race ain’t your challenge either, Detective.”
Mike was impressed, and that didn’t happen very often anymore. How the hell had she figured out he was a cop? he wondered. The comment put him on the defensive, and he tried to switch the conversation back to her.
“So you got a deadline of your own; you said you needed to get back to Pensacola quickly. What’s your race?”
“You don’t want to know,” she said as she looked back at the Gulf.
Mike stood up and took out his wallet. “The pin code is 2042 if you need to get some cash from an ATM,” he said as he handed her a credit card. She looked at the credit card and then at him, but didn’t reach out to take it.
“You can pay me back when you get your stuff squared away,” he said with his outstretched hand still offering the card. She was looking and thinking, but she wasn’t saying anything, and she sure wasn’t reaching to accept the card.
Putting the credit card back into the wallet, he gently tossed the wallet toward her, and she reflexively caught it. “Take the whole thing; it ain’t doing me any good.”
She looked at him and said nothing. She took out the credit card and tossed the wallet back to him. “I’m probably gonna be charging about seven grand over the next few days. I’ll pay you back in three weeks.” Mike just shrugged his shoulders and started to get into the boat.
She looked at the credit card and asked, “What department are you with, Mike Kelly?”
“Hillsborough,” he responded, starting to untie the line to the boat.
“Aren’t you forgetting your supplies at the liquor store?” she asked.
“I changed my mind,” he said as he pushed away from the dock and broke out the oars.
“My name is Erin,” she said as he started to row away.
“Good luck, Erin. I hope it works out for you.”
“See you in few days,” she said. Her words were deliberate, and he wondered what she meant. But he said nothing as he rowed out of the marina.
XI
Sanibel effectively marked the southern end of the Intercoastal Waterway. There were still forty miles of crowded Gulf coastline between Sanibel and Marco Island, the point at which mankind had, thus far, given up on its battle to subdue the wild expanse known as the Everglades. The 100 miles south of Marco Island were marked by a different kind of battle, as the freshwater Everglades mixed it up on a daily basis with the salty Gulf of Mexico. A brown, brackish wilderness with so many threats that focusing on any one in particular almost certainly doomed you to another.
Most recently, the Burmese python had moved to top billing among the denizens of this area. There were many stories about how these snakes had come to invade the everglades, but there was no dispute that, in the twenty years since they arrived, they had risen to a dominant position at the top of the food chain. While the longest python captured in the area had been measured at seventeen feet, there were many sightings, some photographed, of snakes longer than twenty. Amphibious snakes so large they could easily be spotted by airplanes hundreds of feet above. Afraid of nothing, they regularly feasted on deer and wild boar, strangling and suffocating their meals before swallowing them whole. They had been found with the carcasses of alligators, and even crocodiles, in their bellies. It was this silent swimming giant that challengers feared the most when they anchored up at night near the mangroves, alone in this Florida wilderness appropriately known as Ten Thousand Islands.
If you kept your distance from the swamp, however, staying in the greener waters of the Gulf, there was some measure of relief from nightmares of giant snakes sliding over your toe rail. But the python was not the only animal that could eat you in this part of the world. The American Crocodile liked both the green and brown shades of water. The paranoid might think the lack of publicity regarding the thriving crocodile population in this part of Florida was a conspiracy by the tourism industry, but the truth was that the area was so remote, hardly anyone even knew it existed. The average mature male crocodile was fifteen feet long, half again as big as Mike’s boat, and weighed in at 800 pounds. Much more aggressive than its better-known cousin the alligator, there were documented reports of it aggressively pursuing small boats and ramming kayakers. While legends of their speed on land were exaggerated, they were easily able to propel themselves in the water up to fifteen mph, three times as fast as any gold medalist human could swim. They could stay out in the ocean for a month and were known to swim hundreds of miles looking for new hunting grounds.
Much more ubiquitous than the crocodiles were bull sharks, which used the Ten Thousand Islands area as a nursery. Uniquely able to adapt to fresh water, the bulls lived their youthful days in the mangroves, feasting on mullet while protected from threats of deeper water. Eventually though, they grew to ten feet in length and were an apex predator all along the coast of Florida, regularly feeding on Blacktip and Lemon sharks. While other sharks, like the Tiger and
Great White, had a reputation for taking more human lives, it was thought that many attacks by bulls were improperly classified, as they took place in canals and rivers where most people simply didn’t think of ten-foot sharks when considering potential predators.
Of course, there were also giant rays, fifteen feet across, which, when resting on a shallow sand bar and spooked by a small boat, were known to propel themselves in the air, sending occupants akimbo without ever knowing what had hit them. Cottonmouth and Coral snakes might not be as big as the pythons, but a single bite would result in a gruesome, lonely death, far from the nearest hospital or any anti-venom. While black bears and panthers inhabited the Everglades, they typically ceded control of the tidal areas to other predators. With the relentless push of human development from out of Miami, however, their presence could not be ruled out.
While most thought of mosquitoes as irritating pests, they could become so thick in the tidal marshes that large animals died from the blood lost to their bites. There were poisonous plants whose sap had been used to coat arrowheads aimed by Native Americans at invading Spanish conquistadors. In the United States, the Manchineel tree grew only in Florida, and its fruit is known as “the little apple of death.” It is one of the most poisonous trees in the world and its toxins are still not fully understood. It oozes droplets of sap from its branches that cause severe blistering upon contact with skin, and even rainwater running off its leaves is toxic.
Of course, there were more immediate, if mundane, threats to survival. The heat of the Florida sun inevitably resulted in dehydration if not properly courted. The wetness and cool evening temperatures of March could easily lead to hypothermia for those whose senses were dulled by the constant demands of survival. A simple slip on a boat deck could crack a skull and, even if it didn’t, there was the omnipresent threat of falling overboard and drowning quickly or wasting away as you bobbed around the wetted wilderness. The infamous no-see-ums, or biting midges, were unavoidable even with the best insect repellant, and the red swelling bites left behind paled in comparison with the consequences of the sleep deprivation they induced.