Acts of Nature mf-5

by Jonathon King

  "Doubt that," Wayne said.

  "That's why we switch the tags. Every time, boys."

  The two young ones nodded. Learning from the man.

  "So what'd ya git? Huh?" Marcus said, taking a quick inventory behind and around himself but wanting to hear it.

  "We might get a thousand out of it," Buck said dryly.

  "What? With this big screen? And that's a brand-new Bose with the multiple changer, dude. That's like nine hundred retail," Marcus whined.

  "What we do ain't retail, boy," Wayne said, deepening his voice to mock the phrase Buck always used on them. Both of them laughed and even Buck let a grin tickle the side of his mouth.

  "An' what's this?" Marcus then said, reaching out to pull at a piece of turquoise silk that was now sticking out of Wayne's side pocket. "This here somethin' valuable, Stubby?"

  Wayne looked down and slapped at his friend's hand, blood flushing his cheeks and then cutting his eyes to Buck, who'd glanced over and then lost the grin.

  "No, but this is," Wayne said, recovering and leaning forward to reach under the seat to pull out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black he'd found in the den while Buck was upstairs.

  "All right! Stubby. Lust and liquor, dude," Marcus said. "Crack that dog."

  Buck heard the childlike tone in their voices and probably could have found some of his old self in there if he'd had a mind to. Instead he kept driving along the Tamiami Trail toward the west coast home. Get back to where they belong. Safe. Fuckin' teenagers, he thought. Gonna get me killed.

  FOUR

  There is no specific way to know how old the river is that I live on. We know the larger cypresses that define the place have been growing for more than two centuries. The long, gauzy strands of Spanish moss and strangler fig that wrap themselves in those trees could be three to ten years. The bright green pond apples, each slightly larger than a golf ball, that hang on branches at the edge of our first bend are only from this season. The tea-colored water, opaque and sometimes sluggish, sometimes swift depending on the rain amounts in the Glades, is only today's.

  In the area near my shack the river runs through a shady tunnel of green. The cypress and water oak boughs mingle and meet and often form a roof above. When the water is high it floods out into the surrounding vegetation and the place looks more like a forest that is hip deep in dark water than a river. You have to watch the current closely, see where the strings of bubbles and the ripple of moving water are most obvious in order to stay midstream. My first several months here, when I was paddling hard and trying to burn the street images of Philadelphia out of my head physically, I must have looked like a madman bouncing off nature's walls as I tried to make my way from one end of the river to the other, careering off felled tree limbs and bumbling into dead ends of marsh and giant leather fern. In time I learned the route by memory and then started paddling it at night in the moonlight until I knew it by feel.

  Sherry used a strong paddle in the front, her back and shoulders flexing each time she reached out and grabbed at the next purchase of water and pulled it back, the strings of muscle in her triceps and forearms tight as cable. But she was still a novice. She steered the canoe like she was on the inner- city streets or in a pursuit chase, looking ahead to the next obvious turn in the river and then heading the bow in a direct, point-to-point line. I could tell her a dozen times to watch the current and just let the boat flow with the water, sometimes down the middle gut of the stream, sometimes in the deeper water running stronger near the edge. But it was like telling someone how to drive, a strong-willed someone. She had stopped glancing back at my suggestions and now simply ignored me. Her action had its intended effect. I shut up.

  Now, only at times would I quietly call out "turtles to the right" when I spotted a crop of yellow-bellies sunning themselves on a downed tree trunk or "snout on the left in the pool" when I saw a gator's arched eye sockets and nostrils floating on the mirror-flat surface of a pond of water off the main channel.

  Sherry was also becoming adept at spotting the herons that kept pace in front of us or the rare afternoon appearance of a river otter on a sand bank. She would simply extend an arm and point in the direction and then look back at me, smiling, to see if I was paying attention.

  After an hour of hard and fairly synchronized paddling, we slid out of the wooded part of the river and into the open. Here sawgrass started to dominate and before long we were at the mouth of the river-an open acreage of lowland bog and a feeder aqueduct that ran through a ten-foot-tall berm that served as a man-made border to the true Everglades. We got out and hauled the loaded canoe up the incline and then from the top looked out over the sea of water-soaked grassland.

  The sky was Carolina blue and cloudless. The sun was high and even without shade I still guessed the temperature was only in the midseventies. There was a slight breeze out of the west that smelled of damp soil and sweet green cattails. The sawgrass ran out to the western horizon like a ruffling Kansas wheat field. The texture would change and shimmer as acres of grass tops moved and danced with the shifting winds.

  Sherry had her profile in the breeze, her nose turned up and eyes wide.

  "It's really gorgeous, Max."

  "Yeah. Not a tiled roof or billboard till you hit Naples."

  She didn't turn to me or even indicate she'd heard my crack but I was watching her carefully, her eyes, the lack of tension in her shoulders. We had known each other as investigators working cases together and as lovers in the way that couples with a special chemistry enjoy. But she had never seen me in this environment, in a lonely place, in a place this natural. Over the past few years I'd taken this wild and open expanse as my home and as a sanctuary from the past. Would she be willing to adopt even a part of it? Would I be willing to give it up? You make those choices when you're on the edge of something, Max, I thought to myself. Maybe she was making them too.

  I checked the GPS even though I knew the direction to start off in. We took a few extra minutes to admire the view and then slid the boat down the backside and refloated it.

  Though I hadn't done any extensive planning for this week, and certainly none for this spur-of-the-moment trek to the Snows' Glades camp, I silently congratulated myself for near perfect weather. It was the end of the hurricane season, late October. We'd had some recent rainstorms that kept the water levels in the Glades fairly high. In fact late last week the far outer bands of a tropical storm that was probably the last of the season had pelted us pretty good and replenished the evaporation and runoff that constantly rules over this place. But the last I had checked that named storm was rolling well south of Key West and heading toward the Yucatan peninsula. Its passing had helped create the high pressure and the accompanying clear sky and low humidity that now blessed us. At seventy-five degrees I could paddle all day and in high water we could keep a nearly straight course on the GPS reading. For the first hour I kept us moving due south in the open channel alongside the berm. As we neared the Loxahatchee Recreation Area, we struck out west onto the sawgrass plain and into what author and conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas made famous as "the river of grass."

  We ran through about a quarter mile of six-foot-tall sawgrass and around some outcroppings of melaleuca until we came upon an obvious airboat trail. The flat-bottomed airboats cruise regularly across the close-in Glades. With their propeller airplane engines mounted on the back to provide the push, the boats can glide across the water and over even the thickest patches of grasses and small-diameter trees. Having slapped down the vegetation on the most frequently used trails, they have effectively created six-foot-wide waterways cutting through the grasslands. We took advantage. The open-water strips make canoeing a simpler task but beware if one of the wind machines catches you on its freeway at high speed. The safe part is that the raw, ripping sound of an airboat engine at full throttle can be heard a quarter mile away, which gives you plenty of time to ease your canoe off into the sawgrass to avoid being swamped or run over. Today, it was s
ilent.

  There is something of a physical hush in the tall grass here. I believe it is the heat, the slow simmer of the Florida sun trapped in the quiet water, and the smell of wet stalks and green lilies. On occasion the wind will pick up and there is a brushing sound just above our heads and then the call of an anhinga or wood stork passing on wings above.

  "What is it that you like so much about being out here, Max?"

  Sherry's voice was no louder than the bird calls above. I pondered the question for a few seconds.

  "I'm never in a hurry out here," I finally said. "All those years on the street, always in a hurry, even when you were doing nothing but surveillance, the anticipation made you feel like you were in a hurry. Maybe it was just my nerves."

  I took a long, hard pull on my paddle and looked up at Sherry as I followed through with the stroke. "Why? You don't like it?"

  She looked back with that grin that shows more in her eyes than it does on her lips.

  "It's way different from anywhere I've been," she said. "Maybe a little too innocent."

  "It does have that quality," I said, thinking of the term as a positive whereas I was sure she was still unsure of her own definition. We lapsed into silence again. If you took a deep breath down here, the must of growing grass and decaying humus was sweet and ancient. If you stood, just the altitude of a few feet changed the aroma like a lingering perfume that only interests you when the woman wearing it passes by but intrigues you as it drifts away.

  "I think Jimmy would have liked it out here too. He liked innocent. That's what got him killed."

  If it were possible to sound both wistful and bitter at the same time, Sherry had captured it. Her husband, also a cop, had been killed in the line of duty. He'd answered a robbery in progress at one of those convenience stores every cop hates and often call the Stop amp; Rob, letting the humor cover the anxiety. Jimmy had caught a glimpse of someone running from the store as his partner pulled the squad car up, and he bailed out of the unit and then chased the subject into a dead-end alley.

  "You really think that, Sherry?" I said. "He was a good cop from what I've heard. A holdup. A routine traffic stop. You know the statistics. It wasn't like he was cowboying."

  She took another two strokes before answering.

  "I'm not saying he wasn't careful, or that he was naive, really. But he had a certain trust in people, especially kids."

  When Jimmy had closed in on the runner trying to scale a ten-foot wall at the end of the alley, he realized it was just a kid, a skinny-armed eighth-grader wearing sneakers too big for his feet. He relaxed. His weapon was still holstered and he was giving the boy one of those "come here, kid" gestures, his fingers bent, palm up like he'd caught him sneaking candy from a bowl. That's when the child pulled a 9mm from his baggy shorts and fired a round into Sherry's husband's heart. Freak tragedy. Never should have happened. It's something you never forget if you're the loved one left behind. All that crap about closure and moving on doesn't remove the memory cells that live in a human brain. I'd seen Jimmy return in Sherry's eyes a few times since we'd been together and I was still at a loss for how to react. Maybe she was thinking of him, what she was missing. Maybe she was thinking of what it would be like to be with someone who was the opposite of him. So I stayed quiet. Let her enjoy it, or shake off the vision on her own. Some things we handle alone.

  I nodded when she looked back at me. The grin was back in her eyes and for the next hour we talked about our favorite bakeries, about Tuscany cannoli and key lime pie and why nobody in the country can make a Philly cheesesteak sandwich the way they do in the city because of the bread from Amoroso's. We were on to the delights of fresh stone crabs straight off the boat at the docks in Chokoloskee when we suddenly broke out of the high grass and slid out onto several acres of open water and the change caused Sherry to stop midsentence. On flat water the sunlight was pinging off the reflected blue of the sky and for a moment the scene was like a still life painting, the colors too perfect, the lack of movement too unreal. Sprigs of marsh grass spiked up from the sheet of glass before us and I actually watched the small ripple of wake from our bow move out for ten yards ahead of us until its offensive disruption was absorbed. For a full two minutes, neither of us spoke, maybe afraid to break the spell.

  "Humans don't belong here, Max," Sherry whispered from the bow and I let the statement stand until a breeze rose from the west and rustled the grass and nipped at the water and life moved back in. I knew that once you got over the immense feeling of the place you could focus down and see the scarlet skimmers working the water surface and if you closely inspected the sawgrass you'd find the apple snails working the stalks. Then up in the sky we watched the dark body of a low- flying snail kite swoop in from the south and utter a low grunt as she went into one of the grass outcroppings.

  "All we would do is fill it in and build suburbs on it," I said, and it may have been the last environmental statement I would make throughout the trip.

  Spotting an outcropping of tall grass that cast a slab of shade on the water, we paddled over and broke out some lunch. While we ate I tried to point out some of the vegetation and insects that lived here and we counted three alligators that showed themselves in the distance, exposing only their snouts and the humped orbs of their eyes as they cruised across some open water. They made no attempt to come our way, which seemed to ease Sherry's distress a bit. Then I made the mistake of bringing up the story of rangers from Everglades National Park who last month came upon the aftermath of a fight between a thirteen-foot-long Burmese python and a six-foot gator out here. The snake, probably released by some owner because it was getting too damn big, had tried to swallow the gator and ended up bursting open at its sides after it had the reptile midway down.

  Sherry stopped and put half of her sandwich down and stared at me.

  "Sorry," I said.

  She just shook her head and looked out in the direction of our last gator sighting and after a long silent treatment asked: "Didn't you say this boat is thirteen feet long?" By three in the afternoon I was sweating. We'd moved well west and the sun was high and there was no shade. Sherry had peeled off her long-sleeved shirt and was paddling in one of her simple runner's jerseys. She'd done her hair in a ponytail that was sticking out through the hole in the back of a baseball hat. I kept the broad-brimmed, plantation-style straw hat on and had gone bare-chested but still built a sheen of sweat on every exposed inch of skin.

  We were working toward a gathering of pigeon plum and strangler fig trees that had started off looking like low bushes an hour ago but had now grown to a thirty-foot-tall hammock. Jeff Snow used the outcropping as a landmark to take a clear shot north to his fishing camp. Although the sawgrass and other vegetation was always changing and shifting, this season the GPS setting from this small island ran through a fairly open-water trail due north to his place and would be easy canoeing. He had explained to me, as I now did to Sherry, that inside the thick hammock we now approached was a cabin that had been built by one of the early Gladesmen. The owner had brought in most of the trees as small saplings with the idea of someday providing himself with shade. He had been more prescient than he could have imagined. Now you could not even see the structure inside and the root systems had eventually trapped enough moving soil to establish a foundation and the seeds the first trees dropped had proliferated.

  "Snow says he's only seen an airboat slip into the place one time in all the trips he's taken out here. Usually folks are pretty friendly, swapping fish stories and helping each other out," I recounted to Sherry. "But he says he's never met anyone from the place."

  As we slid by some one hundred yards from the northern edge of the small island of old growth trees, the place looked deep green going almost black in the interior. An entrance stream actually looked cold to me and not in a way that beckoned one out of the heat. I kept paddling.

  "Shame to be out here and not take advantage of the view," Sherry said as we passed. I checked the readi
ng on the GPS and dipped an oar, catching a back current and spinning us north.

  "That's not going to be a problem at the Snows' place, I promise," I said, changing the mood. "We're about an hour and a half out."

  Maybe having a specific time to the journey's end challenged the athlete in her, but Sherry began to dig her paddle in earnest and I tried to keep pace. We made the fishing camp in sixty-eight minutes.

  Now here was Eden. The low buildings, three in all, were joined together by a dock, wide porch, and walkways. One building held a great room with a fold-out couch that made up into a full bed facing big windows and a freestanding fireplace. The kitchen was against one wall; the cooking and living spaces were separated by a standing island. The next building was a sort of bunkhouse for guests with bathrooms attached. The third was a small equipment shack for the generator and water storage and tools and such for on-site repairs. Most of the encampments out here were so constructed, Jeff told me, so that if a lightning strike or other accidental fire started, the flames would not automatically take out everything at once. This place had only been built in the last few years and the honey blond glow of the new wood in the late sun made it look warm, inviting, and almost magical sitting the midst of the low grasses and shimmering water.

  "Wow," Sherry said as we got close. I was pleased to have brought her on a venture that coaxed such pleasure from her twice in one day.

  We were about fifty yards out when we both saw the resident horned owl appear from his nesting spot under the bunkhouse eaves and soar out over the Glades with our interruption of his personal space.

  "Look. We chased the mousetrap away," Sherry said. She had not been pleased after spotting a mouse in my riverside shack but I had promised that there were no such mammals out here. Too wet. Too lacking in food source. The animals in the Glades, even on the isolated land islands, lived a curious existence out here where a totally different environment shaped them. During a visit to an island on the edge of the Glades in Florida Bay, a friend showed me the knee-high osprey nests that the legendary fishing birds had built in wide- open fields. "They don't build them in trees out there because there aren't any four- or two-legged carnivores to threaten them."