Just as I said that, and I was picturing this doll outside by the water, she sauntered over to me and said, ‘We’re going down into the water. Come with me.’
‘It’s a little cold for a skinny dip,’ I told her.
‘Skinny dip?’ the old man said.
‘You’ll be fine,’ the girl said and took my hand. Her hand was warm.
She pulled me to the water’s edge. I went in. It wasn’t so bad. The water wasn’t too cold, and it was a lot clearer than I had expected. We sank to the bottom, and it was like we weren’t in the water at all anymore. We were in a beautiful house made out of all the things I’d seen in the swamp: cypress stalagmites and pine trees and tall grass. There were other people there, too. Water people.
The doll holding my hand said, very sweetly, ‘Have a seat.’
She pointed to a giant water turtle.
I said, ‘I’m pretty tired. I’d rather lie down.’
‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘Good. There’s the bed.’
She pointed to a giant yellow snake of some kind, but it looked like a pretty inviting place to take a nap, on the back of a friendly snake. The snake wasn’t creepy at all. It seemed very nice.
One of the other water people, an old man – or maybe it was the old man in the chair right in front of me in the concrete house, I couldn’t tell which – he said to me, ‘Did you kill someone?’
‘No,’ I said right away. ‘Kill someone? What are you asking me?’
‘You didn’t kill anyone?’ he asked me again.
And before I could answer a second time, I realized that I am crying. This got me pretty scared, because I couldn’t remember the last time I had cried.
‘Why are you crying?’ the beautiful doll asked me.
‘I don’t know,’ I told her.
‘You know,’ the old geezer said.
I was silent for a moment, but then I admitted it. ‘Yes. I know.’
And like that, I was back in Brooklyn, and it was three years earlier.
TWENTY
I was on the corner of 53rd and 12th, and it was way after midnight. It was only a few days after I’d found myself on a slab in the morgue, so I wasn’t thinking too clearly. Also I had just come from Gravesend Park and was filled with artificial vim and vigor, even though it was around ten blocks from the park to where I was standing now.
It was a nice night. No one on the streets, and I experienced the kind of satisfaction I always had late at night in my neighborhood. It was quiet, for a change, and it was lit by a big yellow moon, and everything in the world seemed to be asleep.
I was thinking of calling it a night myself when, what did I see? Not half a block away there was a 1967 Ford Mustang Fastback, red on red, with silver wheel wells – it was glowing like coal in a fireplace.
I looked around to see if maybe someone was playing a joke on me. No one parked a car like that on the streets around there. Not with a guy like me around. I mean, I had a reputation.
Still, all was quiet, so I took a few casual steps in the direction of this delectable treat. Nothing happened. So I took a few more steps. By and by, I was standing next to the driver’s side door. I pulled out my handy rod and hook toolkit and, in seconds, I was sitting behind the wheel of a very nice automobile.
In those days I could hotwire any vehicle in less than ten seconds. That one took about seven. The car fired up. I eased the wheel to the left and glided into the street. I turned on the lights, like it was my own car, and proceeded at a very reasonable pace toward the end of the block.
All of a sudden from behind me I heard the kind of shouting and yelling that people did when someone had been murdered. I glanced in the rearview and saw two citizens running after me. I floored the accelerator, and the Mustang took off like a rocket.
I flashed through three stop signs before I turned left on to some street or other where the lighting wasn’t so good.
It was then that I heard a noise from the back seat that scared the hell out of me; a sort of inhuman shriek.
I stopped the car in the middle of the street and turned around, and there, on a soft pallet, buckled in with two seat belts, was a little kid who couldn’t have been much more than a year old. And it began to wail up a storm.
I didn’t know what to do.
I panicked.
I left the car right there in the road and I took off. I beat it out of the neighborhood, running like a maniac, and I ended up in Prospect Park by the lake, where I crashed hard. I couldn’t help it. I bedded down under a convenient tree and started hoping that I’d been dreaming.
It was a day or two later before I heard the news in the neighborhood. Some dame, cheating on her rich husband with a deli clerk, had left her fourteen-month-old kid in the Mustang that the aforementioned husband bought her for a present. She was kissing the sandwich maker goodnight when she heard her car start up. She and her paramour raced down the stairs just in time to see the car take off. They hollered up a storm because there was a baby in the car. They chased the car. They didn’t catch it.
But the end of this story, it wasn’t good.
Later that night, or early the next morning, the cops found the car and the kid. The car was fine, the baby was asleep, and all was well in that regard.
Here’s the bad part—the really bad part.
The mother, the owner of the Mustang, she chased the car like a bat out of hell, and she was screaming and crying, and then something terrible happened. She felt a cramp in her chest, and she fell down. Her boyfriend caught up with her. She was having a heart attack. The boyfriend started crying because he didn’t know what else to do. And in the time it took for him to decide that maybe he should call an ambulance, the girl died. Just like that.
So I heard this story, and I didn’t know what to do. I thought about turning myself in. I thought about visiting the baby in the hospital. I thought about a lot of things. What I actually did was go to Temple for the first time since I was a kid.
And it turned out that I didn’t have to do thing one about my guilt or my sleeplessness, because the cops had already put two and two together and were waiting for me when I came home from Temple. As I said, I have a reputation. I didn’t try to run. I just put out my hands and they took me into custody in handcuffs.
That was how I found myself in the back of a police car three years ago. That was when I heard the cops talking. One was saying that the charge would be involuntary manslaughter and the other one said that it would be felony theft added to the manslaughter charge, also reckless endangerment and child kidnapping and boom – I’m looking at twenty years. Minimum.
Then came the kicker.
I heard the first cop say, a little softer, that the rich husband was so mad about the fact that his wife had been cheating on him with a deli clerk that he was washing his hands of the whole mess. He was giving up the baby for adoption. The kid was in foster care. Meanwhile, there were also charges against the sandwich maker. I didn’t know what they were, but it was a very bad situation all around.
I pondered this for several blocks.
I couldn’t stand the idea that there was a little kid up for adoption who ought to have lived the life of Riley with a rich father and a carefree mother. Of course, I also didn’t care for the possibility of a twenty-year stretch.
So I did what I thought was right. I slipped out of the handcuffs, got out of the cop car, and ran as fast as I could.
All the way to Florida.
I established myself as a private investigator in the State of Florida and got a license because I gave my real first name, not my nickname, and I spelled my last name a little differently. That was easy to explain. I just had to say the words ‘Ellis Island’ and everything was clear. No one crosschecked it with any other police files, so I was in the clear.
The thing was, I had become a PI solely in order to find out what had happened to the kid that was an orphan because of me – and I did. The kid got adopted by a very nice professional couple in Yon
kers. The father was in advertising and the mother was a dental hygienist.
Then I started actually taking cases as a PI so that I could make a little money. First, I had to eat, and second, I wanted to send a little something every month to the kid anonymously. I did this through a series of beards and a shylock or three, and ended up with an untraceable bank account that only the kid could access. This went on for a few years and, surprisingly, I got pretty good at the job.
Then the State of Florida got federal money on account of the congressional passage of Public Law 93-247, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. I finagled a job on the team almost instantly. I said it was because I needed the moolah. But maybe Dr Freud would have an alternate explanation.
‘I mean,’ I said out loud, ‘I’m not an idiot.’
And it was at that point I realized that I was saying all of this out loud to the doll under the water in the lake. I was sitting on a turtle’s back and all of the water people were staring at me. I had apparently been talking up quite a storm. The beautiful naked doll was crying.
‘You certainly do like to talk,’ the old man said.
I was a little embarrassed. ‘Do you want me to shut up?’
‘No,’ the doll said.
‘If you want to go back to the surface now,’ the old man told me, ‘you may.’
I looked around. ‘OK. Yeah. I think I’d like to. But it’s nice down here.’
‘You can’t stay here,’ the girl said sweetly. ‘You have to go back, to save children.’
‘I know,’ I told her. ‘I’ll go.’
TWENTY-ONE
The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes. I was outside and the sun was coming up. I was soaking wet. I had two or three blankets over me, and there was a nice big roaring fire close by. I looked up. I was right at the edge of a lake, and the old geezer, John Horse, was sitting beside me, staring out at the water.
I groaned.
‘There he is,’ the old guy said very jovially.
‘What … the hell … was that?’ I squeaked out. My voice sounded very squeaky to me.
‘That, my friend, was your Indian bar mitzvah.’ He thought that was a very, very funny thing to say and laughed until he started coughing.
I sat up, but it wasn’t easy.
I did notice that the day was very beautiful. The fact that I was alive at all was a little surprising to me, and the water and the sunrise and the roaring fire, it all worked hard to make me feel better than I could remember feeling in several years. For that, I had no explanation.
‘Are you hungry,’ John Horse asked me.
‘Did you just say the words my friend to me a second ago?’ I asked him.
‘Yes.’
‘So. We’re not on the fence anymore.’
‘I’m not,’ he said plainly. ‘I don’t know how you feel.’
I yawned and stretched. ‘I’m surprised to say that I feel, all in all, tip top.’
He nodded. ‘Sometimes the medicine works like that. I’m glad.’
‘Medicine?’ I swallowed, which was also a little difficult. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how much that was not like medicine.’
He nodded. ‘I think it’s a matter of how we use the word medicine.’
‘OK.’ I looked back behind me and I saw the camp, or the gathering of concrete houses, or whatever they called the place where John Horse lived. It was about a hundred yards away. ‘How did I get out here?’
‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘I took the medicine too, remember.’
‘I had the weirdest dreams.’
‘They weren’t dreams,’ he said, but he wouldn’t look at me when he said it. And he wasn’t smiling.
‘Have it your way,’ I said, ‘but I went underwater in that lake there, with a beautiful naked woman. I met her family and sat on a turtle. That kind of thing, it doesn’t happen to me very often, you know.’
‘It didn’t happen to you either. It wasn’t a dream, and it didn’t happen.’
‘I almost went to sleep on a snake.’ I shivered at the thought.
‘You also told the water people why you’re in Florida.’
‘Yeah,’ I said slowly. ‘I remember that.’
‘You’re in exile from your home. I know what that’s like. I was forced to go to Oklahoma, once, when I was a teenager. I was made to go to school there. Oklahoma is a terrible place.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I admitted. ‘And also I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I’ve been told that guilt is something your people have more than my people,’ he said, ‘but we’ve got it too. I understand.’
‘My people?’ I asked, a little riled. ‘What is it with that crap? I just had to explain to another person the way I’m about to explain to you: I’m not a Caucasian. I’m not the white man. My people were slaves to Pharaoh before your people even existed! My people invented the Ten Commandments, for God’s sake!’
‘But you didn’t invent guilt,’ he said, smiling. ‘That was my point.’
‘Oh.’ I nodded. ‘OK, then.’
‘You don’t want to talk about your past,’ he said. ‘I understand that too. Maybe you’re hungry, though.’
‘I am,’ I told him. ‘I’m famished.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ he said, standing up. ‘You threw up six or seven times last night.’
‘That’s why you got me out here and tossed me into the lake?’
‘I didn’t bring you out here,’ he said.
He moved to the fire and took something out of it. ‘You need to let this cool a little, but it’s good.’
He tossed an ear of corn, still in the husk, on to the blankets covering my legs. I could tell it was hot, but through the blankets it felt kind of good. Warming.
He got another ear in his hand and he was peeling back the husk very carefully. I could see the steam rising off the white kernels, and I could smell how sweet it was. He got all the husk back and used it as a sort of handle, waving the ear around in the cold morning air. After a while he took his first bite. I could hear the pop and crunch. Suddenly I was so hungry I felt like eating the whole thing, husk and all.
So I did exactly what he did: peel, wave, bite.
‘God in Heaven,’ I sighed once I swallowed. ‘This is the best tasting thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.’
He nodded, still chewing, ‘It’s good.’
We ate in silence for a minute and I was praying there was more corn. Just as I finished my last bite, I saw him toss his decimated corncob into the lake and go to the fire. He pulled out two more.
I couldn’t say how many pieces of corn we ate, but it was a lot. The sun was a little higher, and I was drying out nicely by the fire.
He sat down beside me and we stared into the lake. ‘So. Are you mad at me?’ he asked. ‘Or are we friends?’
I looked at him sideways. ‘Friends? I don’t know.’
‘All right,’ he allowed, ‘you can think about it for a while. You had a hard night.’
‘If you say so,’ I told him. ‘I have no idea what went on. You gave me some kind of strange tea, I spill my guts both literally and figuratively – I don’t know what to make of it. Can you blame me for not knowing how I feel about you?’
‘Would it help if we went to see Lynette and her baby?’ he asked. ‘You can see that we’re helping them. Might make you feel better. Might help you to decide how you feel.’
I tossed my final corncob into the lake. ‘It might. But I think you’re going to have to help me get to my feet. I’m still pretty zonked.’
I was assured that it would be a short drive from where the old guy lived to the hut where they were keeping Lynette and child. I was still a little wet and, despite the sun, the day seemed cold. The Jeep that Philip was driving did not have a top. Or heat. Luckily the old guy let me take the blankets with me, so I wasn’t too freezing. I was sitting in the backseat by myself, and Philip and John Horse were up front.
I didn’t p
ay much attention to my surroundings because I used the short drive to get my mind in the right place. I couldn’t figure why these Seminole people had kidnapped Lynette and baby. I didn’t understand why Sharon’s father, the unbelievably rich Pascal Henderson, would send McReedy to kill me. What was the connection between those two circumstances, I had to ask myself? What, I wondered, was I missing? Whatever it was, it was a big piece of a very odd puzzle. Unfortunately, I was beginning to feel the effects of the morning after the night before, and my brain had fuzz on it.
‘You should just sit back and relax,’ John Horse told me, like he could read my mind. ‘You’ll feel better when you see that the girl and her child are doing well. And then I’ll answer your questions. I’m sure you have questions.’
‘OK,’ I agreed and settled back.
Not three minutes later we came through a dense patch of forest into a clearing. There was only one building in the clearing, and it was a whole lot more like what I had been expecting from an Indian village. It was a kind of dome, maybe a hundred square feet, covered over with brush and twigs and fan palm. There was a hole in the top, and smoke was coming out of it. There was an opening in front covered by blankets, which were very much like the ones I had covering me. On either side of that opening there were two men, Seminoles obviously, both sitting down on folding chairs. They both had on denim jackets and jeans and construction work boots. They weren’t wearing hats. And they both had rifles.
The Jeep slowed down. One of the riflemen waved. Philip waved back.
‘Come on,’ John Horse said gently. ‘You can keep the blankets around you if you’re cold. It’s all right.’
I hauled myself out of the back of the Jeep, still wrapped in the blankets, and I managed not to look too stupid. The riflemen stood up. One of them said something softly, and John Horse smiled. Close up, I could see that both guards were fairly young, not much older than the teenaged toughs who tried to menace me at Pete’s. Wet and wrapped in blankets, I began to feel a little old.
John Horse went into the thing and Philip indicated that I should follow, so I did. Then Philip came in after me.
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