‘He who?’ I asked. ‘The father?’
‘Christ Almighty, yes!’ She looked around, a little wildly. ‘Where are we? Where are we now?’
‘Couldn’t say,’ I admitted. ‘Somewhere in the swamp.’
She shook her head hard, trying to clear out the cobwebs. ‘OK, look, buddy. It seems like you’re too stupid to work for him, the father. So what’s your deal?’
‘I work for Florida Child Protective Services,’ I told her, somewhat weakly.
‘I don’t know what that is. But listen to me. You get me back to the … to that lodge. I gotta finish my purge. And God help us all if somehow the father of my kid finds us here.’
The Jeep slowed to a crawl. ‘Let’s be very clear,’ I said, really trying to collect the old wits. ‘There you are in the hospital. You wake up after having the baby, and you panic because you’re afraid that the baby’s father will come and take it away from you. That’s why you stole the kid and beat it out of the nice clean room and over to Lou Yahola’s?’
‘Yes, genius,’ she barked. ‘Why else would I leave the hospital in my condition?’
‘To get dope,’ I said bluntly.
That slowed her down a little bit. ‘Fair enough,’ she said softly. ‘But that’s not what I did.’
‘So, when you left the baby at Lou Yahola’s,’ I went on, ‘where did you go?’
‘I went looking for Mister Redhawk,’ she said. ‘I mean, I can’t drag the kid around in the cold, and I can’t go back to the hospital to talk to Maggie because someone might see me there. So I went to the place downtown, near Yudda’s, you know, that new building with all the fake art deco details?’
‘Art deco?’ I asked. ‘You know art deco?’
‘Yes,’ she snapped back, exasperated. ‘Do you know the place or not?’
‘I know the place.’
‘I thought that’s where Mister Redhawk had a condo. I mean, I’ve seen him go in there a lot. Only, he wasn’t there. I asked the doorman and the concierge, but they didn’t know who he was. So I went to Yudda’s and sat in the corner and ordered a burger, man was I hungry.’
‘And?’ I encouraged.
‘And, after a while, Philip showed up. You know Philip?’
‘We’re practically intimate,’ I told her. ‘How did he know you were there?’
‘No idea,’ she said. ‘How does he know half the stuff he knows?’
‘All right,’ I said, deciding to let that go. ‘So Philip came, and?’
‘And he gathered me up and got me out of there,’ she said, ‘because, unfortunately, that art deco condo building, he told me, is where the father of my baby has a place. So we went back to Lou Yahola’s, only, when we got there, there was blood in the hallway, and everybody was gone. Do you have any idea how crazy that made me? I thought I was going to have a heart attack because somebody took my baby!’
I tried not to have the shivers when she told me this. I tried to stay calm. I tried to get back to the facts of the story.
‘So,’ I managed to say. ‘So.’
‘I was so nuts at that point that Philip had to put me in the back of some slinky limo and give me a joint. He promised to find the baby. I gather that you got her from Lou, shot Lou for his trouble, and took my kid back to the one place where she shouldn’t have been: the goddamn hospital!’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am responsible for that.’
‘So, Mister Redhawk had to get over there, get with his sister, fake more records, and liberate my child – again – while I was passed out in the back of a stretch. The next thing I know, or I vaguely remember, I’m in a sweat lodge with John Horse and my baby. I was nice and warm and everything was fine. Until some idiot showed up and jerked me out of the only place on the planet where I’m safe!’
‘Yes,’ I repeated. ‘I am responsible for that.’
‘Well cut it out, goddamn it!’ she fumed. ‘You don’t think I got troubles enough?’
‘I am beginning to see that you do,’ I confessed. ‘And I also, maybe for the first time, am beginning to understand what’s going on here. A little. You have, however inadvertently, and angrily, answered a lot of my questions about this entire affair, and now I wish to know more. For example – and I think this may be the crux of the proverbial biscuit – who is the father of your child? That seems to be a primary problem.’
‘You’re actually asking me questions?’ She seemed outraged. ‘You think that’s the problem? We’re lost in the swamp, the sun’s going down, my kid is just about the size of an alligator appetizer, and you want to ask me questions? Get me back to the lodge, let me get back to my stuff, and then maybe I’ll tell you something, or maybe somebody will hit you in the head long enough and hard enough for you to understand that you’re the problem!’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t think that’s fair. I genuinely believed that I was doing the right thing going after you and the kid. A: It’s my job. B: Maggie told me to do it, because, apparently, she didn’t know why you left the hospital. C: It’s the law, and D: Lou tried to shoot me and dosed me with Seconal. Oh, and by the way, E: Some mook named McReedy is out to kill me.’
‘Stop!’ she screamed. ‘Stop, for God’s sake. Stop with the letters and don’t bring up McReedy. He’s after me too, and I’d rather not mention his name. That guy is one scary mother.’
‘Apparently.’ I resisted the obvious temptation to ask her why McReedy was after her because I could see that she was upset.
‘So how in the hell do you think you’re going to keep all three of us from dying before sunrise?’ she wanted to know.
‘I’ll tell you,’ I said, getting out of the Jeep. ‘Take it from me; it’s a lot easier to get caught than it is to hide out. And I believe that I can employ a bit of an Indian cliché, here.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she whined.
‘Smoke signals.’
With that I cast my eye about and quickly found appropriate underbrush. I plunked it all down about six or eight feet from the Jeep, and stacked it up log cabin style. This I learned from Pan-Pan Washington who, as a tyke, was a Boy Scout. I made much sport of him on account of this when we were together, because his chosen profession had so much to do with altering boosted wheels, but he often regaled me with stories of camping out in the Berkshires and eating a treat they called s’mores, which was a nauseating concoction of graham crackers and marshmallows and Hershey bars which I wouldn’t have touched on a bet. Still, I was, at that moment, grateful to Pan-Pan because I knew how to start a fire in the woods. And let’s face it, how else would a person like me know such a thing?
So I stacked.
But Lynette would not let it go.
‘What are you doing?’ she whined. ‘That’s wet wood. You’ll never get it started, no matter how many matches you have.’
‘In point of fact, I don’t have any matches,’ I told her, still stacking. ‘Do you?’
‘You don’t have matches? How the hell are you going to start …’
‘Just keep hollering like that,’ I interrupted her, ‘and I won’t need to. They’ll hear your voice and come running.’
‘Bite me,’ she grumbled. ‘So how do you think you’re starting this fire with wet wood? Spontaneous combustion?’
‘Once again,’ I said, ‘if you know how to do that, it would come in really handy about now, but if you don’t, please shut up while I concentrate, OK?’
‘I gotta see this.’ She shook her head. ‘I gotta see your nineteenth nervous breakdown. I mean, how many more things could you possibly get wrong?’
‘Oh, I have a pretty mean record when it comes to getting the wrong thing.’ I stood up and examined my stack. ‘There.’
‘There?’
‘There is step one. Now, step two is a little tricky.’ I took off my tie.
‘You’re getting undressed? What, are you going to do a fire dance?’
‘You wouldn’t by any chance have any Hebrew heritage in you, would you?’ I
asked her.
‘No,’ she said, momentarily taken aback. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason, except you should know that you are a noodge,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m only removing my tie. Everything else stays intact.’
I slipped off said tie, stepped to the gas plug on the Jeep, unscrewed it, and slipped it down the chute. I was somewhat relieved that there was still a fair amount of gas there, so I doused my tie. Then I removed it and arranged it nicely around my log cabin stack.
‘Now comes the tricky part,’ I told her, ripping a piece of gas-soaked tie away from the rest. ‘I have to turn off the Jeep for a second, which is not the best thing to do, because you never can tell if it will start up again.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she asked me.
I did not answer with words; I showed her what I was talking about. I came back to the Jeep and found the two wires I used to start the Jeep in the first place. I took a deep breath, and then turned off the on/off switch. The engine sputtered, and then was silent. I took two wires underneath the steering column and pulled them apart. There was a little snap, and it startled Lynette, which made the baby nervous and it began to cry.
‘Yeah,’ I muttered, ‘you keep yelling and let the piker squall like that, the Seminoles will find us in no time.’
‘You’re going to blow us all up!’ said Lynette, scrambling to get out of the Jeep.
The baby was screaming its head off at this point, and Lynette was in a panic to get away, and I was trying to concentrate so that I would not, in fact, blow us all up.
I held the gasoline tie scrap between my ring finger and pinky finger, and then I took hold of both wires with my thumbs and first fingers, and smacked a spark.
Nothing else happened because I was nervous and holding the tie too far away from the spark. I momentarily wished I was more religious and better inclined to pray.
I moved the tie shard right next to the bare wires, held my breath, and tried again.
Flash! The tie ignited.
It was already burning my fingers, but I managed to zip right over to the log cabin and drop the flaming cloth on to the rest of the tie, which caught with a whooshing sound.
In under three seconds some of the wood was smoking. I put my slightly singed fingers in my mouth, and they even tasted a little burnt.
But the wood was catching fire.
I gathered up more and waited until the stack was going pretty good, then added to the flame. In a couple of minutes there was a very nice fire, and lots of wet wood smoke.
I turned to Lynette, who was standing by the Jeep. The baby was quieting down, and Lynette was shaking her head.
‘What?’ I said. ‘I get no credit?’
‘You want a medal?’ she retorted, renewing my suspicions about her heritage. ‘Even a broken clock is right twice a day.’
She got back into the Jeep and began nursing the tyke. I discretely turned my back, stared at the fire, and then upward at the column of smoke it was making, which was thick and black, forty feet high and climbing.
After a minute or two, I moseyed back over to the Jeep.
‘I don’t like to disturb mother and baby,’ I announced, ‘but I’m going to have to start the Jeep again and then lay on the horn. It’s the icing on the rescue cake, you understand.’
Lynette only nodded, and I could see that the wind was out of her sails. She was getting sleepy. And the sun was just about gone.
So, I started up the Jeep and revved the engine a bit.
‘OK,’ I said as gently as possible, ‘are you ready? It’s going to be very irritating.’
‘OK,’ she said and started petting her baby’s head.
I laid on the horn. Lynette jumped again. The kid started in to wailing like before, except only louder, if such a thing was possible.
Then I started pumping the horn in the only code I knew. Here, also, I benefited from Pan-Pan’s scouting days. He taught me a little Morse code, and I began to bang out the old S.O.S. It didn’t really matter to me if John Horse or Philip or anyone knew the code. Someone, I figured, was bound to hear the noise and wonder what the hell was going on.
The sun disappeared really quickly. There was still a little light left in the sky, but also the fire was beginning to wane. I could feel Lynette getting nervous, and, to tell the truth, she might have been getting some of that from me. She looked at me and, for the first time, she looked her age. She was a scared little kid with a scared little baby. I tried to think of something to say that would make her feel better, but nothing came to me, because I frankly did not give us much of a chance.
And then night, as it will, descended.
TWENTY-FIVE
I couldn’t say how long it took, because time was different in a swamp, but maybe a half an hour after the sun went down, I decided to take a break from the honking. I was a little concerned that the battery would run down, and I was certain we were about out of gas. I considered maybe shutting off the engine, but the thought of sitting there in the dark and quiet was very disconcerting.
Then, I heard something in the darkness over to the right of the Jeep, maybe four hundred yards away. I really started wishing, then, that I had taken a gun off the goons at the lodge, because I imagined some god-awful swamp thing slithering up out of the ooze toward us. But when I listened closer, I heard something more rhythmic. Like, a train. But I knew it couldn’t be a train. Then I heard something even odder. I heard Benny Goodman. I heard him playing ‘Memories of You.’
Swear to God.
I was just about to turn to Lynette and ask her if I was dreaming when, out of the darkness just down the road, I saw flashlights bobbing up and down. And right after that I saw four guys on horses carrying those flashlights.
Benny Goodman was not, in fact, on one of the horses. Not in person anyway. Philip had an old-style transistor radio slung over a part of his saddle and the radio was playing the tune.
John Horse was beside him on a fat chestnut pony. The two young kids that I had clocked at the lodge were in the parade too. And everybody had a gun.
‘Oh, thank God,’ Lynette sighed.
I turned to her. ‘Know much about General Custer?’ I asked her, because I thought she might find the question amusing.
‘What do you mean we, white man?’ she mumbled, using the punch line from a different joke.
By that time, John Horse and Philip were nearly up to the side of the Jeep.
‘Nice smoke signals,’ John Horse said. ‘And Morse Code on top of that. You really wanted us to find you.’
‘I did,’ I confirmed.
‘Confusing,’ he said right back, ‘in light of your escape from Philip’s house and the kidnapping of these two children. Are you all right, Lynette?’
‘I am now,’ she sniffed.
The baby had settled down nicely at that point.
John Horse turned his attention back to me. ‘Did you think someone from Fry’s Bay would hear you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d hear me. I wanted you to hear me.’
‘Again, confusing.’
‘Not really,’ I said calmly. ‘I’ve come to realize that, until very recently, I’ve been working for the wrong side.’
‘Is that so?’ he asked me.
‘It is so.’
‘Whose side are you on now?’
‘Your side,’ I said. I glanced at one of the goons from the lodge. ‘His side.’ Then I said to the kid, ‘I’m very sorry that I wonked you in the head.’
The kid took it in stride. ‘I just didn’t expect it. You were lucky, but … I’m sorry that I called you grandpa.’
‘Tell me in words that I can believe,’ said John Horse, apparently impatient with my gentlemanly behavior, ‘why you’re on my side all of a sudden.’
‘Lynette explained a few things to me,’ I said. ‘Turns out I did not rescue her from anything at all. In fact, I made things worse for her. You, on the other hand, were trying to help her. You wanted her off
the dope, you wanted to keep her safe, but, most of all and to the point, you tried to protect the baby. Which, after all, is my raisin tetra – as the French say. So, in conclusion, upon further examination of the facts, I’m on your side. Not to mention, P.S.: the other side has a guy trying to kill me. So.’
‘Just like that?’ John Horse said.
‘Just like that,’ I answered cautiously, ‘with a caveat.’
‘And what would that be?’
‘I have all kinds of respect for your native culture and everything,’ I said quickly, ‘but, look, John Horse, you don’t really impress me as the kind of person who truly endorses quaint fairytales when the fate of his entire people hangs in the balance.’
‘Meaning?’ he asked, but I could see a glimmer that he might be coming around to believing me.
‘This isn’t about some holy child come to save the Seminoles with a wave of his chubby little messiah hand,’ I said. ‘That crap’s for the rubes – of which I am not one. Do you understand me?’
For a moment things were still. I tried not to be overwhelmed by the surreal nature of the scene. I was sitting in a Jeep with a nearly naked girl wrapped in a blanket, and she was nursing a baby while we were in the middle of a swamp surrounded by Seminoles on horseback listening to Benny Goodman. Seriously, if it got any stranger, I’d have to consider just jumping in the swamp and getting it all over with right then and there.
Finally, John Horse cracked a smile. ‘OK, you’re right. All that was bullshit.’
The other men on horses started to laugh quite heartily and, it seemed, a little at my expense.
Benny Goodman came to the end of his song and the announcer said, in a very soothing voice, ‘It’s exactly eight in the evening, and that was Benny Goodman’s touring combo, on WUSF-FM, listener supported radio. In just a second: Central Park West, Coltrane, of course, and featuring McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Steve Davis on the bass.’
‘Nice tunes,’ I said to Philip.
He was still laughing, but he managed to tell me, ‘I can’t always get this station, not out here, but they play jazz most every night, so it’s worth a try. Nice.’
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