Everglades Assault

by Randy Wayne White

  “Does that mean you want a beer?”

  “Yes!”

  We stood toe to toe on the dock in the fresh morning heat. I noticed that she wore a delicate chain of Spanish gold around her neck—a memento of a treasure wreck her father, Hervey, and I had worked off the Marquesas. I looked down into her perfect face and felt an irresistible urge to kiss the face and never stop.

  Instead, I held out my arms at the same moment she held out hers, and I hugged her warmly.

  “Did I already say it was good to see you again, MacMorgan?”

  “Just once. It bears repeating.”

  “Good to see you.”

  “And you.”

  “I saw that face of yours in one of those movie magazines last month. You were holding hands with some famous actress or something. She looked fat.”

  “Did you come out here to fight?”

  She stepped back, her face suddenly serious. “No,” she said. “I wish it was that easy.”

  I didn’t like the look on her face. “What is it, April—it’s not your family, is it? There’s nothing wrong with Hervey?”

  “Healthwise, you mean? Oh no, nothing like that. But he did send me out here. Figured I could fetch you into town as fast as anyone—that, plus I made him let me come. There’s some of our folks up in the Everglades having trouble, Dusky. Bad trouble. And you know how our folks are. Trouble is a private matter. They aren’t ones to go whining to the law. Daddy figures this particular kind of trouble is going to take someone big and mean and ugly to fix right.”

  “And he suggested me, huh?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. Her wink was the same as that of the little girl who had stood shyly behind the tree long ago. “I think it was me who brought up your name first. . . .”

  2

  So I walked her up the steps to the porch and then into my stilthouse. The place was built years ago, before refrigeration came to the Florida Keys.

  In those back times, it was called a fishhouse—a stoutly constructed icebox built like a cabin to house a caretaker and the weekly catch of fish and lobster. One of the old-time fish companies would send a boat out to pick up the catch once a week—and bring more blocks of ice.

  I had bought it from a sour old man who had had a hand in its construction.

  He pretended he hated the place. He told me he was sick and tired of waking up alone every morning with only the wind birds and fish as neighbors.

  He told me he was anxious to move to one of those retirement villages so common in Florida; one of those mechanized, prepackaged settlements that try desperately to turn the deathwatch into a recreation.

  Sour as he was, I liked the old man. And I knew better than to believe that he really wanted to leave the little house built a mile out to sea.

  A month after we had closed the deal, he returned for the afternoon. He turned a dour eye on the “improvements” I had made: watercolor paintings on the wall by Wellington Ward and Gustave Ameier, a big brass double bed in the only sleeping room, brass oil lanterns for light, and a bookcase stacked with my small but good ship’s library.

  He had raved unconvincingly about the wonderful life he was living at Sunset Retirement Estates. Told me about the shuffleboard tournaments, the evening card parties and the afternoon arts-and-crafts classes.

  I hoped the happiness I tried to show for him was a lie better disguised than his own.

  Just before he left, he stopped before the ragged teeth of the bleached mako jaws he had allowed to remain hanging on the wall.

  “Big goddamn shark, that one was,” he had said.

  “Ten-, twelve-footer?”

  “Twelve-footer my ass, young fella. Fifteen and a half by my measure—and I’m the one that kilt the sombitch! Started cruisin’ aroun’ my house here every mornin’ a few years ago. Scared off all o’ my snappers and groupers that fed by the pilin’s. I’d watched them little fish so long that I’d kinda grown ta like ’em. Almost like pets.” Then he had turned a blazing suspicious eye on me. “Suppose you’ve been catchin’ and eatin’ them little fellas, huh?”

  “No. I like to watch them too. When I want fish to eat I go out in my boat. Sounds silly, but I know what you mean.”

  “Humph,” he had said—but he couldn’t disguise the relief he felt that I wasn’t pilfering his old friends for food or sport. “Anyway,” he continued, “that big bastard on the wall kept a-stealin’ my little fish. Took me a week to finally figure out how ta get ’im. Got twenty foot o’ junk cable down by the shrimp docks in Key West. Coupled that onto four hundred feet o’ half-inch anchor line. Tied that onta my boat and baited with a thirty-pound amberjack. When he finally hit, the battle lasted all night. Fourteen hours I chased and fought that shark, him draggin’ me all around under the stars. Sun was jest up when he finally turned white belly side. Came up gaspin’; that sweet urine smell of a shark about ta die. Funny, but after all that struggle and plannin’, and him killin’ my little fish, ya woulda expected me ta feel good about it all. But when you’re connected to a livin’ creature like that for so long—the two of us hung together by a rope all night long, both of us strugglin’ like our lives depended on it . . . well, I didn’t feel as good as you might think. I felt . . . I felt . . .”

  He had made an empty motion with his hands, and said nothing more about it.

  Two weeks later, I heard that the old man had died at Sunset Retirement Estates. It was a classic exit in a state geared toward vacations and old age: a heart attack during the last set of a shuffleboard game. The obituary made mention of his sole surviving heir: a mentally retarded son. It cleared up the final mystery—why he had sold me the stilthouse. Knowing he didn’t have long to live, he wanted to provide money for the son. So he had parted with the only thing he owned.

  I had my Key West CPA take care of the trust fund. A year or two before on a particularly nasty mission, I had become unexpectedly wealthy through a combination of good fortune and blind luck.

  Money means little to me. It supplies the few material things I want—and that’s all. I learned long ago that independence is available, to rich and poor alike. You just have to have the nerve to grab it.

  So I had the CPA make sure that the old man’s son would have the best of everything for as long as he lived.

  As the old man said, when you’re connected to any living creature for any length of time, you feel.

  Good or bad, you feel....

  So I walked the teenage beauty up to my stilthouse. She surveyed my living quarters expectantly—and seemed disappointed that everything was nice and neat; clothes hung, dishes washed.

  Anyone who’s been on a boat for long soon learns that neatness is the first rule of good seamanship.

  But women—even the independent ones, like this magnificent April Yarbrough—have trouble accepting the idea of a man’s living alone in an orderly fashion without female assistance.

  “Just finish your weekly cleaning, Dusky?”

  “I clean on a daily basis. It’s an old habit, April.”

  “Oh.” She swayed over to the little library and went through the books. There is no describing that inexorable feeling of want when you watch a truly beautiful woman move: the rotation of hips beneath thin bikini bottoms; the sleek flattening of breast as she stretches to reach; the ripe convexing and curvature of soft flesh of hips and thighs and stomach.

  “Did Hervey know you were going to wear that skimpy bathing suit out here to visit me?”

  She turned holding a book and flashed me a vampish grin. “I’m nineteen now, MacMorgan. Off to college and a grown woman. Daddy has nothin’ to say about what I wear.”

  “Then what would your boyfriend back at college say?”

  It was a blind shot. I didn’t know if she had a boyfriend or not. But in the moment I said it, I felt the slightest pinch of jealousy.

  It surprised me.

  “Boyfriend!” She actually looked a little guilty—and that’s when I knew that I was right. “How di
d you know . . .”

  As if suddenly aware that I had trapped her, she glared, considered throwing the book at me, then decided to grin instead. “Well, you’re right. In a way. He’s not a boyfriend. He’s a manfriend.” She wrinkled her nose impishly. “He’s a professor. He’s even older than you. And,” she added coyly, “he’s got a lot more books.”

  “Great,” I said. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”

  “Why, Dusky!” She laughed. “I do believe you’re jealous.”

  “Hah! That’s a laugh. I’m just wondering what Hervey and your mother think about your dating a guy old enough to be your—”

  “My father! And I always thought you were so broad-minded. Now look at you, MacMorgan. Prudish as an old maid.”

  “You keep wagging around here in that bikini and I’ll show you how prudish I am.”

  She put down the book, the grin gone. A new, softer light in her eyes had replaced it. “I’d like that,” she said. “I’d like that very much.”

  “April, I thought you came out here to tell me about some problem your family was having up in the Everglades. . . .”

  She came steadily toward me, as if she had just accepted my invitation to slow dance. I found myself taking her in my arms, holding her tightly in a warm embrace; an embrace laced with more affection than passion.

  And then her sun-colored face was turned toward mine; the high soft cheeks and full lips and golden eyes and raven hair, and I bowed gently to kiss her forehead. But she moved just enough so that I found her lips instead.

  It was a delicate kiss; gentle, experimental. And then her lips dampened, and her body seemed to swell, and suddenly I was kissing her deeply; feeling her body pressing to the curve of mine; feeling the heat or her near-bare breasts and hips against my body.

  “Oh, Dusky, I’ve wanted you to kiss me like this for such a long, long time. . . .”

  “And I’ve wanted to. . . .”

  The top of the bikini tied with a bow. The material came undone and fell away with a tug. Her breasts were wide and firm and coned; nipples taut and erect. She pressed them hard against my face, her hands tangling my blond hair in ecstasy.

  “Please, Dusky, please . . . right here, right now . . . my first time. Please . . . oh, God . . . please. . . .”

  So I lifted her and placed her gently on the floor; lips tracing the length of her body, some distant part of my brain wondering absently if it was right or wrong; if the two of us would regret it; wondering, always wondering—and always questioning the wisdom of the first encounter with that final intimacy.

  But I didn’t have time to question long.

  She was trying feverishly to slide my shorts down over my legs. I was very much occupied with something else.

  And that’s when I heard, for the first time, the gas putter of a boat outside.

  We had both been so involved that we didn’t realize that we had a visitor until almost too late.

  With an oath normally considered very unladylike, April jumped to her feet, grabbed the bikini top, and ran deerlike into my bedroom.

  I stood and tried to adjust my gym shorts—and quickly realized that only a pair of heavy khakis would make me even close to presentable.

  I grabbed a pair off the hook and slid them on, hopping one-legged toward the door.

  I got them zipped up just as my old friend—and April’s father—stuck his bearded face against the screen door.

  “Hervey! I wasn’t exactly expecting you.”

  He gave me a wry look. “So I gather, ya old lecher.”

  “Now wait a minute, Hervey . . .”

  He came through the door chuckling, a big chew of Red Man wide in his cheek. “You don’t have to explain nothin’ to me, Dusky. Naw, not a word about it. I’d rather have you courtin’ that wild girl o’ mine than some bookish boy-man up ta the state university.”

  He walked across the room still chuckling and plopped down in a chair. He looked at me and winked. “Knew that youngun come out here with romance on her mind, and I got ta wonderin’ if she’d remember the business I sent her on.”

  “Daddy, are you followin’ me? Because if you are, I’ll be tempted to rap you on top the head with somethin’ the size of a ball bat!”

  April stood in the bedroom doorway, glowering. Her face was red and flushed with kissing, and her fists were doubled statuelike on her hips.

  And there was something else, too—something that Hervey noticed the same time I did. In April’s haste, she had put her bikini top on inside out, so that the label was easily seen.

  Hervey looked at me, eyes wide, owlish. For a second, I thought he was going to swallow his chewing tobacco. Instead, he whoofed and howled in an explosion of laughter, slapping at his chest.

  And then I found myself laughing, too; roaring at that endless human comedy in which we all, from time to time, play the clown.

  April looked at us both as if we had gone stark raving mad.

  “What in the world is wrong with you two men?”

  I kept pointing at her, laughing helplessly. Finally, I managed to get the words out: “Your top . . . look at your top!”

  She studied it momentarily, and then her eyes described wonderment, then shock. Refusing to be intimidated now, she sniffed with the air of royalty, actually stuck her tongue out at me, then sauntered back to the bedroom to correct her error.

  We had finally gotten ourselves back under control by the time she returned. Hervey kept wiping at the water in his eyes.

  “Are you men done making fools of yourselves now?” she said haughtily as she crossed the room and, without hesitation, sat down on the arm of my chair beside me.

  “God,” said Hervey, “she does have cheek. You got to give the woman that. Gets it from her mother’s side, not mine.”

  “I don’t know, Hervey—you’ve never lacked for brassiness. And I’ve known you for . . . how long?”

  “Longer than I care to think about, Dusky. Makes me feel old.” And then to April, he said, “Darling, I wasn’t following you. You know me better than that. Just wanted to make sure Dusky understood the problem our folks got.”

  No longer mad, but still offended at her father’s sudden intrusion, April gave the ceiling a queenly look and said, “Well, Daddy, if you think you can explain things better than me, just go on right ahead. But I’ve got better things to do than sit around while you men spit tobacco and drink beer and jabber.”

  She stood up airily, patted my hand quickly, and walked out the door, only to duck back in with that vampish expression. “And I’ll talk to you later!”

  “You can bet on it,” I said.

  Her raven hip-length hair swung behind her as she descended the steps and roared off in her little skiff.

  “Got a will of iron, that girl,” I said after she had left.

  Hervey eyed me sagely. “I got a feeling you’re going to be finding out just how strong-willed she is.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “I’d be a fool not to expect a girl as healthy as that not to like men. And I’d be a bigger fool to object to her wanting to see somebody I like and respect.”

  “I appreciate that, Hervey.”

  “Well, you may not appreciate it so much when I’m done asking you for this favor.”

  “So ask.”

  “It might take some time.”

  I motioned around the room. “Ever since I moved out here I’ve had an open calendar.”

  He nodded, working the Red Man in his cheek. He eyed the brass spittoon beside my chair, and I slid it across the floor to him. He expectorated expertly, and the cuspidor actually rang, just like in the cartoons.

  “I’ve got some family that lives back in the Everglades.”

  “You’ve mentioned them.”

  “On my mama’s side. That’s the Indian side of the family. That’s where April gets her looks. Four hundred years ago she’da been a damn Indian princess, the way she looks.”

  “Or an Indian chief—the way sh
e acts.”

  He chuckled. “Ain’t that the damn truth.”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “Give it some time. We’ll see.”

  He worked at the tobacco some more. Hervey Yarbrough is one of my closest, more trusted friends. He comes from sailing-captain stock, born and raised in Key West. He’s squat and bulky, all muscle and thick black beard. The slightest movement of index finger triggers a flexing of cords in forearms that suggests a lifetime spent hauling lobster pots and shrimp nets. And what he doesn’t know about the water and reefs around the Florida Keys isn’t worth knowing.

  But there’s another side to Hervey, too. With the strength is an underlying sensitivity; one of those people who make the old saying about still waters seem very true indeed. He doesn’t say much, but when he’s in the mood he can be sharp or funny as hell; one of those rare men with the talent for original insight.

  So I gave him time to speak his piece. I knew how the story would come: the barest basics first followed by tangents and possibilities which might be suggestive.

  I sat back in my chair and caught the foil package of Red Man when he tossed it, and we took turns shooting at the brass cuspidor as he talked.

  Hervey said, “This family of mine in the Everglades—they’re neither Seminole nor Miccosukee.”

  “I thought those were the only two tribes in Florida.”

  “That’s what the books and everyone else will tell you. But it ain’t quite true. You see, the Seminoles aren’t but a combination of several different tribes that escaped into Florida in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. Came here when the Yamassee were driven out of Carolina, and after the Creek wars and after Andrew Jackson drove the Cherokee out of their farms and schools and made them go west.”

  “Sounds like you’ve read up on it.”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, I’m Indian on my mama’s side. If you want to find out who you are, you got to find out where you’re from.”

  “So your mother’s people are from Georgia and Carolina?”