Cold Florida

by Phillip DePoy

  The inside was like a different world. It was very warm. There was a fire in the center, and it gave off a very cheery glow. The floor and the wall areas were covered with blankets. There was no furniture, as such, but a little tree stump served as a table. It smelled very nice, like lavender and rosemary and something else I couldn’t quite place – maybe cedar.

  And seated in front of the fire with a lovely look on her face was, I presumed, Lynette Baker. She was holding a sleeping baby. She was dressed in a loose blue flannel nightgown. She had her hair back in a bun, and her face was pink and calm.

  ‘Lynette,’ John Horse said very softly, ‘this is Foggy Moscowitz, the man who found your baby.’

  She smiled and shook her head.

  ‘She’s cleansing,’ John Horse said to me. ‘She’d rather not talk.’

  ‘OK by me,’ I said.

  ‘Have a seat,’ he told me.

  I sat down on the blankets on the opposite side of the fire from Lynette. She didn’t look up. She was staring at the baby.

  John Horse sat beside me. Philip was standing by the door.

  ‘Now,’ John Horse began, ‘let me see if I can answer your questions. You have questions. I’d have questions if I were in your shoes.’

  ‘I do,’ I admitted.

  ‘Go on, then.’

  I looked around. ‘Let’s start with the immediate. What is this place? It’s a lot more in keeping with the whole Indian gestalt than your concrete house, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  He smiled. ‘This is what some people call a sweat lodge. It’s a healing place.’

  ‘You have Lynette in here to get her off the junk,’ I said bluntly.

  He nodded. ‘The baby too. But that isn’t really your most pressing question.’

  ‘I’m warming up,’ I told him. ‘My most pressing question is that I’m very confused about why you have these two people here at all. I got a call from my boss last night – just as I was getting off work, I might add – that there was a missing baby. That’s our racket where I work; we take care of things like that. So I went to the hospital, and there was Maggie Redhawk, a fine person, and she was very concerned about the situation, as she should be. To make the story short, I found the kid, took it to the hospital, and then you stole the kid, Lynette disappeared, and my boss’s illegitimate father sent this McReedy character to shoot me. Not to mention that someone sent Mister Redhawk, whose first name I do not know, with Philip, whose last name I do not know, to protect me from the evil McReedy. And then Philip kidnapped me, and here we are.’

  John Horse nodded, staring into the fire. After a minute he said, without looking at me, but with a little too much amusement in his voice. ‘That’s not really a question.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘then let me be more specific. What the hell is going on?’

  He smiled, still not looking at me. ‘That’s not really more specific.’

  I shook my head. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I want a real question,’ he said unequivocally.

  I thought for a second, trying to get the fuzz off my brain from the previous night’s escapade. I glanced over at the baby, and there was the question: the baby.

  ‘What’s so important about this newborn?’ I said softly. ‘Why the hubbub about this kid?’

  ‘There,’ he said, very satisfied. ‘That’s the question I’d ask if I were you. Good. I’ll tell you that.’

  And then he was absolutely silent.

  The fire popped. The smoke went up. I watched it, looking up at the morning sky through the hole in the lodge. I smelled the rosemary, and it was very calming. After a minute, John Horse started to hum with his eyes closed. It wasn’t even a melody. It was more like a bee, a very low bee buzzing. The sound was making me sleepy all of a sudden, but I didn’t want to get sleepy, so I moved around.

  Suddenly John Horse stopped humming, opened his eyes, and said this: ‘The baby that Lynette Baker had is a water spirit. There hasn’t been one born to the Seminoles since the white man came to us. It’s a very good sign that we have one now, and probably means that better days are coming for the Seminole people, at least in this part of Florida. Because of this, we had to make sure that the baby was safe and healthy. Part of the wellbeing of any child is a loving mother, so we had to make sure that Lynette was healed. We had to bring them both here to make these things happen, because we had to cleanse them in the Seminole way. That’s my answer. The baby is very important to the future wellbeing of our people. It’s a water spirit.’

  I blinked. ‘A water spirit.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s why, last night, you visited the water people. That confirms something that I already knew, but some of the others wanted proof.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I tried not to sound irritated, but that didn’t work out.

  ‘You’re a part of this. Otherwise you would have just thrown up and gone to sleep last night. I knew you were an important part of this, but Mister Redhawk was uncertain. Now he knows.’

  I bit my upper lip. Just when I thought that everything was going to make sense, or at least that everything was going to be a little bit more comprehensible, I got this run-around.

  ‘Now Mister Redhawk knows that I’m a part of this Indian fairytale?’ That came out even worse than my previous question.

  John Horse did not seem the least disturbed. ‘You might have heard from someone, the real name of Fry’s Bay is Owv Hokte. It means Water Woman.’

  ‘I am familiar with that,’ I admitted, albeit hesitantly.

  ‘Once, all of this was a sacred land, a place where spirits and human beings lived together in harmony. But then a water spirit fell in love with a Seminole boy. She took on the form of a woman, and these two copulated. Their union produced a race of shadow spirits who came and filled the woods and trees and rocks and water and air all around us. They’re still here. They’re waiting.’

  ‘Waiting for what?’ I had to ask.

  ‘This.’ He glanced in Lynette’s direction. ‘Waiting for this child to be born.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Before I could ask my next of about a hundred questions, I suddenly felt Philip grab my arm, and I was whisked out of the teepee or whatever that thing was, and I found myself out in the open once again. John Horse followed close behind.

  ‘So, John Horse,’ I said, glancing at the silent young men with rifles in their hands, ‘you want me to believe this, what you just told me?’

  Once again, he was not insulted. He seemed to find the whole thing very amusing. He headed for the Jeep and motioned me to come with him.

  ‘Bye, Grandpa,’ one of the young Seminole guards whispered to me.

  John Horse didn’t hear that, or ignored it. He was already halfway to the Jeep. ‘So,’ I said, deliberately ignoring the kid, ‘this is it? You dragged me away from my nice warm fire and that delicious roasted corn just to show me Lynette and baby, and now you give me the bum’s rush?’

  ‘I had to show you that Lynette and her child were safe from harm. That’s what you were concerned about. You said that’s your job, and it is – for the moment.’

  ‘Look, John Horse,’ I said, climbing into the Jeep, ‘I think maybe I talked too much last night – a little too much about my personal life – while I was hopped up on Indian tea. I mean, that tea you gave me was a little too, what’s the word?’

  ‘Liberating?’ he suggested.

  The Jeep engine started up.

  ‘No,’ I told John Horse. ‘I mean I was a little too—’

  ‘Honest?’ he interrupted.

  ‘Stop,’ I told him, ‘I’m trying to collect my thoughts.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ he said.

  The Jeep made a U-turn and headed away from the lodge. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like we were going somewhere besides back to John Horse’s house.

  ‘You spoke the truth last night,’ John Horse said. ‘You don’t like that because you haven’t been c
ompletely honest with anyone about why you came to Florida. But I can tell you, from what I understand of your story, you’re doing the right thing.’

  ‘I’m not exactly certain what I said last night,’ I told him. ‘That stuff … I mean, I was talking out of my head for a while there.’

  ‘But you spoke the truth,’ he repeated. ‘And it seems to me that something picked you up and shook you around, and then set you down in Florida. Now, instead of being a car thief, you rescue children. That’s something, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I’m not comfortable discussing my past,’ I said sharply. ‘Could we change the subject, do you mind?’

  ‘Did you ever have turtle steak?’ he asked me instantly.

  I got a little whiplash from his sudden change of topic, but I also appreciated it. ‘No,’ I told him, ‘I never had turtle steak.’

  ‘I think you’re going to like it,’ he said.

  ‘It’s good,’ Philip chimed in. ‘I bread it in corn meal and fry it up.’

  ‘You have to tenderize it, of course,’ John Horse said, ‘and marinate it. But Philip’s way is very good.’

  ‘I beat the hell out of it with the butt of my pistol,’ he said, smiling, ‘and then I marinate it in oil and brine. It melts in your mouth.’

  John Horse only nodded. He was done talking.

  The rest of this Jeep ride passed without further conversation, so I had another opportunity to settle down and gander at the scenery. Once we left the clearing, the woods got plenty dense. Pine and cedar and underbrush were all around us, and the road was barely two wheel ruts in the ground. There were all kinds of animal noises, but the animals themselves were hiding. We were definitely not headed back to John Horse’s house. I got the impression, from the brief discussion of turtle steak, that we might have been going to Philip’s place.

  As we rounded a sudden turn in the road, we surprised a flock of birds and they took off flying like angels, white wings and all. They rose up in a kind of spiral, maybe fifty of them. And then they disappeared into the trees. The Jeep started to slow down. We were coming up to a house literally built into a grove of trees. It was the most unusual house I had ever seen.

  The sides of the house were almost touching the bare trees around it, and some of the overhead branches were bent way over to help out with roof duty. It looked like somebody had built a strange little bungalow and then these trees had grown up around it. The door was red, the windows had no curtains, and the roof was made of wooden shingles.

  ‘This is very unusual,’ I muttered, somewhat to myself.

  ‘This is my house,’ Philip said, and you could hear how proud he was.

  ‘I can say without fear of contradiction,’ I told him, ‘that I’ve never seen another house like this in the entire world.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, staring at it and smiling.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked.

  ‘Since I was a kid,’ he said. ‘My father built it. I’ve lived here almost all my life, and I still can’t believe how great it is.’

  ‘It’s pretty great,’ I agreed, ‘it’s like … nestled.’

  ‘It is,’ Philip agreed.

  ‘We’re going in here so that you can take a bath,’ John Horse said to me. ‘You stink. Your sweat smells like liquor and dead animals.’

  ‘That would be the brisket that I ate yesterday,’ I said, not the least offended, ‘and the martinis I had last night. I will admit that I do not recall the last time I had a shower.’

  ‘No shower, sorry,’ Philip said. ‘But I got a really nice bathtub.’

  ‘And then Philip will make you some fried turtle steaks,’ John Horse assured me.

  We all got out of the Jeep and headed for the little cabin in the woods. Picturesque as it was, it was also solid as a rock, watertight and heavy.

  Philip opened the door. It wasn’t locked. I followed him in. The inside was every bit as impressive as the outside. The ceilings were high, maybe twenty feet, and they were arched like a cathedral.

  ‘Man,’ I said, ‘this is really nice.’

  ‘Yes,’ Philip said, continuing on into his home.

  ‘And you say your father built this joint.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At least, what? Twenty years ago?’

  ‘Twenty-seven, in fact,’ Philip answered.

  ‘And these trees grew around it like this?’

  ‘Ah,’ Philip said, turning to face. ‘I think I see what you’re getting at. Am I worried that one day the house will bust apart as the trees grow?’

  ‘Bingo,’ I said.

  ‘Easy. My father and John Horse put a spell on these trees. They don’t grow anymore.’

  I glanced at John Horse. He avoided eye contact.

  The décor of the joint was simple, if completely strange. It was one big room. It looked like there was a small stream running through the house, parallel to the back wall. There was a very nice rock border. There was one window in one of the side walls. The wall opposite the window had a small stone fireplace. The floor looked like moss, and it was a little soft for my comfort. The walls were all wood. I couldn’t tell what the ceiling was. There was a large bed toward the back of the room, a bench and several chairs in the middle, arranged the way a sofa and club chairs would have been if it were a different kind of home. There was a chest of some sort by the bed.

  It wasn’t warm inside the place, there was no fire in the fireplace, but it wasn’t too bad. I was almost dry at that point anyway.

  ‘Where can I put these blankets?’ I asked.

  ‘Just drop them on the floor by the door, there,’ Philip answered.

  ‘You like this house,’ said John Horse.

  ‘I am most intrigued by the furniture,’ I told him. ‘Especially that bench, and the bed.’

  ‘Amish,’ Philip said proudly. ‘All of this furniture is made by the Amish. I like them, as a people. In general.’

  Once again I turned to John Horse for explanation. ‘The Amish?’ I said. ‘The guys from Pennsylvania that look like Hassids?’

  ‘In Sarasota,’ John Horse told me, ‘there is a little neighborhood they call Pinecraft. Plenty of Amish, some Mennonites stay there. This may be a new occurrence, I don’t know. But there they are.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I clearly did not believe him, though I could not understand why he’d lie about it. ‘The Amish in Florida?’

  ‘I was in Sarasota on business once,’ Philip said, as if that would explain everything. ‘That’s how I found them.’

  ‘Their ideas are very simple,’ John Horse said. ‘I like them too.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ I complained. ‘I … look, you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care about the Amish or the spell you put on a tree, or that goddamned tea you gave me last night. I only want to know one thing.’

  ‘Why are you here in Philip’s house?’ John Horse ventured.

  ‘Exactly!’ I said, a little too loudly. ‘Or I can make it even more general. Why am I here on Indian land at all? Why am I not asleep in my bed?’

  John Horse nodded very sagely. ‘I see. This is a complex question, of course, if you refer to your bed in Brooklyn. I think that answer is very complex.’

  ‘My bed in Fry’s Bay!’ I said impatiently.

  ‘Only a little less complicated,’ he told me.

  Meanwhile, Philip sat down on the Amish bench and offered his two cents. ‘If you were home in your bed in Fry’s Bay right now, you’d be dead. McReedy would have shot you in the head at least twice.’

  ‘Twice?’ I glared at Philip.

  ‘He’s very thorough.’

  ‘You brought me here to save me from McReedy?’ I asked, my words dripping with skepticism.

  ‘Yes,’ said John Horse. ‘Partly.’

  ‘Why do you care?’ I fired back.

  ‘Because you saved the child that is going to save us all,’ John Horse told me in no uncertain terms.

  ‘Oy, this again,’ I moaned.


  Philip smiled. ‘Did you actually just say the word oy?’

  ‘It comes out under duress,’ I admitted, and perhaps my voice was a bit shrill.

  John Horse nodded again, folding his arms. ‘Are you thirsty?’ he asked me.

  I thought for a second, swallowed, and answered, ‘Now that you mention it, I am a bit dry.’

  ‘It’s the tea,’ John Horse said.

  ‘I’m not drinking any more of your tea,’ I assured him.

  ‘I’ve got Coca-Cola!’ Philip jumped up and stepped over to the little stream running through the back of his home. He dipped a hand down into the water and came back with three bottles of Coke. With each one he used his thumb to flick off the top; no small feat. Although, his was no small thumb, so I was not completely amazed. He handed out the bottles and sat back down.

  As it turned out, the cola was nice and cold, and it went down pretty good.

  ‘You want to sit down?’ Philip asked me.

  I looked around at the Amish numbers, all wood and right angles, picked one out, and sat. Better than the ground. John Horse sat on the bench beside Philip, and we fell into a kind of comfortable silence for a second or two.

  Alas, I would not leave well enough alone. ‘How long do I have to stay here?’

  John Horse downed the rest of his Coke, set the bottle in his lap, and belched. Then he said, ‘Why don’t you just stay here as long as you like?’

  ‘OK, then,’ I fired back, ‘I’m about at the end of that period, the period where I like, and now I’m ready to go home.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ John Horse said, and he was laughing. ‘You’re not nearly ready to leave here. You haven’t finished telling me your story, you haven’t heard what I have to say, you don’t know what to do next, and you have to talk with Lynette again. All that? It could take days. Weeks.’

  ‘Now, look!’ I set my Coke down on the mossy floor. It immediately fell over. ‘I’m not staying here for weeks. I’m leaving right now.’

  ‘I hate to disagree,’ said John Horse, ‘but how do you think you’re going to leave? You can’t have Philip’s Jeep, and even if you could, you wouldn’t know where to drive it. You have no idea where you are. You’d be dead before sundown if you left right now.’