The breeze had gone light in the lee of the Keys, and Staggerlee ghosted toward the skiff. Doom panned his binocs 360 degrees. A big Hatteras Sportfisherman with pudgy white tourists sitting on the transom headed for the pass, outbound. A drift boat like the one Bert had sunk in Bird Cut was also making for the pass from the west. Not another boat was in sight. But how many were out of sight?
Sailboats are slow, even the fastest of them, which Staggerlee was not. It was taking a maddeningly long time to reach the skiff. And where the hell was Ozzie? Bert leaned down and turned on the engine. “Let’s get the jib down so we can see what we’re doing.”
Marvis released the halyard and Doom pulled the limp sail down on deck. From the bow pulpit he trained his binoculars on the gently bobbing skiff. Nothing moved aboard. Was he sailing into a setup? Doom looked carefully from one little islet to the next. He saw nothing but a pair of great blue herons pecking fingerlings in the shallows, so he turned his gaze back to the skiff.
Staggerlee was drawing close now, and still the skiff seemed empty, yet the fishing rod hanging over the stern suggested otherwise. Doom climbed to the top rail of the bow pulpit and got his first glimpse of Ozzie—a set of bunioned toes wearing green rubber thongs. Doom’s initial thought had Ozzie sunbathing, but on a rational level Doom knew that that notion was ridiculous. No one lay flat on the skillet bottom of an aluminum boat to take the Florida sun.
Staggerlee passed the skiff close aboard the port side. The bell buoy clanged on starboard. From his elevated stance, Doom watched Ozzie’s face pass below, but the sight took a while to fix itself in Doom’s mind, by which time the skiff had slipped aft to the cockpit. Bert and Marvis were hanging over the side to see. Doom watched their jaws fall slack and their eyes go round.
Ozzie’s face was purple and bloated. His tongue protruded, swollen to the size of a rotten peach. The fishing line ran from the rod tip in a bight back to Ozzie’s neck, around which the wire leader was wrapped a dozen times and knotted. At the end of the wire hung a two-inch-long lure shaped and painted like a bait fish. This was deeply imbedded by the treble hooks in Ozzie’s left cheek. Doris’s boat leaked. Ozzie lay on his back in four inches of water, arms and legs sloshing indolently. The bloat of his face had eradicated his features. Blood had flowed from his ears, but it had dried brown and crusty. His black eyes, protruding like a pug’s, stared straight up.
Doom nearly fell fleeing aft when Bert shoved the throttle forward. The main jibed over accidentally, but nobody noticed. Doom flopped on the cockpit seat and trembled. No one spoke. The leaky death boat was already a hundred yards astern, fading. Think, Doom told himself, panic later. Then the main jibed back and everybody jumped as if at a gunshot. Think. Was there anything to connect Doom to Ozzie?
Doris! No doubt Ozzie had told her he was off to get his goods from that stand-up imbecile Doom Loomis. “We’ve got to get out of here as quickly as possible,” he said. No shit?
Bert was already trying to shove the throttle through the stop. Doom would have preferred it if this narrowing channel to which they had committed themselves had had some name other than No Hope.
Mangroves closed in around them as the channel narrowed even further. Two boats Staggerlee’s size could barely pass beam to beam without scratching their topsides. And what if somebody had noticed Staggerlee as she passed close to the skiff and then ran like hell? “Is there a way out of this channel without going back past Ozzie?”
“I know a place we might be able to bounce across if we wait for the tide.” Now Bert was articulating like a Shakespearean soliloquist.
“Then what?”
“When?”
“After we bounce across.”
“Then we can join the main channel, head south to Cormorant Key, and out to sea that way.”
Doom took Ozzie’s gas can below and cut it open with his father’s rigging knife. Poor, stupid Ozzie. “Discretion, that’s the ticket.” Feeling like a grave robber, Doom tore the wrapping paper off Ozzie’s goods. The paper was decorated with yellow smile faces. Inside was a shoe box bulging at the corners. Doom sawed off the tape.
The box was packed full of banded thousand-dollar bills. Even their smell was overwhelming. Doom counted a dozen stacks before he stopped and held them up in the companionway for Bert and Marvis to see, but their eyes were glazed over.
Arms folded, the Annes were waiting angrily when Staggerlee returned to the dock. They knew they had been stood up intentionally, but they did not reprimand Doom. They had intended to, but they refrained when they recognized that something was badly wrong. Their anger turned to curiosity, watching Marvis and Bert, glum, distracted looks on their faces, scurry off without a hello or good-bye.
“We went for a sailing lesson,” Doom lied lamely.
“We can’t go on like this,” said Anne.
“I know it.”
“It’s not productive.”
“It’s counterproductive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“A waste of time.”
“Why don’t you tell us what’s going on?”
“We don’t make any judgments.”
“Would you like to meet Rosalind? We’re going diving tomorrow.”
That was a start.
SENNACHERIB BROADNAX
Big Al’s only surviving son, Sennacherib, whom everyone called Snack, sat in a palmetto-frond duck blind and lit another spliff, but it did him little good, blurring things. He hadn’t seen a merganser in days. It was about 105 degrees in the duck blind, way the fuck and gone west of Dragoon’s Hammock, and he was feeling crazy. His old man was “disappointed” in him again after another arrest, his fifth in as many years, for speeding, reckless endangerment, and possession of a controlled substance, to wit, the best domestic doodah the arresting officers had ever ingested. This time they nabbed him up in Corkscrew County, so Sheriff Plotner couldn’t put in the fix for the old man, and anyway Snack almost hoped he’d have to do some time. Of course, no Broadnax would ever land on the chain gang spearing Dixie cups and stiff condoms along the berm, but Snack would have felt safer in the Corkscrew County slammer than he did at home.
The old man was trying to kill him. Hadn’t Big Al called him a terminal disappointment? Terminal. Hadn’t Big Al sent Snack to “check out” Tamarind Financial at the Snowy Egret?
“What do you mean, check it out?” It all seemed suspiciously vague to Snack. And his father had been up to something fishy for several months now. The evidence was clear.
“What do you think I mean! I mean check it out. I wouldn’t bother you, son, I know you have important things to do, such as riding your motorcycle like a common nigger, and, hell, I’d do it myself—except I’m in a fucking wheelchair! I raised you, you ingrate mutt! What did your slut of a mother do? She did rat shit! I raised you, and this is the thanks I get—”
Snack had barely parked his bike before the entire Tamarind place blew to smithereens. If he hadn’t been stuck in Yankee traffic on Route One, he might well have been inside—checking it out—when the joint went up. Had that been Big Al’s intent right along? Maybe not primarily, maybe he just tried to kill two birds with one bomb. Wasn’t he always talking about cutting overhead?
Sennacherib’s brother Claudius had always been a severely troubled individual, with his dark moods and morbid dreams. Once, in this very duck blind, just ten years earlier, when Snack was sixteen, Claudius had said he suffered from what his shrink called a pre-Oedipal fear of infanticide. That had sounded to Snack like the load of Yankee guru bullshit you’d hear in Zoo York City. But then he got to thinking about it, about his own childhood fears.
He recalled most vividly those evenings—it always seemed to be hurricane season, raining—when his father would light yellow candles and gather Claudius and Sennacherib before him on the hook rug to tell them stories about their dead grandfather, Colonel A.C. Broadnax. Snack didn’t remember the gist of the stories, but he remembered his ensuing dreams. In them, the colon
el stood thirty feet tall, white-bearded and severe, like one of those prophets from Bible study, or like John Brown, whose body lies a-molderin’ in the grave. He waved a huge sword in circles above his head and swore oaths at Nature herself as if he had the power to smite her if she pissed him off.
“He’s watching us right now, from heaven,” Big Al would tell his sons. “He sees everything you do, and when you do bad, the colonel gets mad and wants to smote you.” Snack and Claudius had had an older brother who died before adolescence. Maybe his own grandfather had smoted him. Maybe that’s what Claudius’s shrink meant by fear of infanticide.
Snack missed his brother, and it didn’t help to think that Claudius had killed himself by holding his breath on ascent, as Rosalind believed. Sometimes of a clear sky Snack would burst right out sobbing. That’s what he was doing up in Corkscrew County—120 on his 850 Norton Commander, sobbing.
He and Claudius had built this duck blind back in junior high, and even now, sitting in it, he felt like sobbing, but instead he decided to straighten up, have a shower, and visit Rosalind. She always liked it when people had feelings and talked openly about them. Snack believed that if he had had a woman like Rosalind, he sure as shit wouldn’t have killed himself, no matter what had happened when he was a kid.
INDIGENOUS CREATURES
Rosalind Rock lived in rustic isolation. Her unpainted stucco ranch house sat atop cinder-block stilts in the pine-and-hammock forest far to the west of Small Hope Bay, beyond the sweep of low-slung pastel subdivisions with heavy security at the gates, beyond the last of the malls and the sun-baked golf-course condos, each hole named after an indigenous water bird. Here on the limestone ridge, elevation six feet, the works of man petered out not from lack of technology or potential profit but because the forest was protected within the boundaries of Dragoon’s Hammock State Park. Rosalind told Doom that her grandmother lived out in the Hammock in isolation even more rustic than Rosalind’s. Her grandmother’s name was Lisa Up-the-Grove.
They had made two dives that morning in shallow water, and Doom loved it. “You might be a natural,” Rosalind had told him.
“Could we go out and see the Gulf Stream now?” Doom asked. The sea was glass-flat, alluring in the sun.
Deep diving this soon in the curriculum was risky practice, seldom done, but she said yes. This Doom was strange. Strange men were not unknown to Rosalind. She recognized her attraction to the weird, troubled, damaged, and homeless. Yet she loved the wonder in Doom’s eyes after his first dive in the ocean and again, later, when he told her about the barracuda beneath his dock. Of course, maybe he only seemed nice, his gentle manner a different feather on the same old lure, and he’d prove to be another crazy in search of vulnerable women to damage.
Rosalind had anchored in ninety feet of water over the seaward edge of Hens and Chickens Reef. While the Annes shot from the bow, Doom and Rosalind suited up and climbed over the transom onto the boarding platform, where Rosalind stood studying the current. Here the water was as clear as an Adirondack winter night. The Gulf Stream, the blue god.
“Nervous?”
“Yes.”
“Frightened?”
“No.”
“Would you like to have lunch at my place after?”
“Did you say Lisa Up-the-Grove?”
“She’s mostly Seminole. She lives a few miles from me.” Rosalind came from a long (for Florida) line of misfits, refugees, rustics, and Indians who wanted nothing so much as to be left alone, which, of course, they weren’t.
Rosalind’s great-grandfather Caleb Rock deserted the Union Army after the carnage of First Manassas. Sensing that his commanding officers were ready to do it again, Caleb lit out for the wilderness. His first stop was Meridian Passage Bay, not far from the Marls, where Ozzie Mertz would be murdered 127 years later. Caleb lived off the land and the water. Having been before the war a cooper’s apprentice from Braintree, Massachusetts, Caleb had no wilderness survival skill, but such was the fecundity of the place that none was required. He’d settled on a protein factory. Fish, each in their season, literally clogged the bays and backwaters. They could be scooped up by hand. Game of all kinds nearly committed suicide in Caleb’s cooking pot.
In time Caleb himself turned feral. He made everything he needed. Clothes were no problem, since much of the year he went naked, blackening his body with charcoal to repel insects. At first he avoided his fellows for fear of being recognized as a deserter, but years passed, and he stopped worrying. Still, from habit, he shunned white settlements. His beard grew to nipple length.
However, Christmas Eves, passing, made him sad and lonely out in the glades, sloughs, and mangrove islands. At last he scraped the mildew off his black wool suit, plugged the moth holes, and sailed to Hopeful Town on Cormorant Key to share the season with Christians. There he met Rose Up-the-Grove, a non-Christian. She returned with him to Meridian Passage Bay, where she gave birth to a daughter, who died before she could be named, and to a son, Mobley, who lived.
Mobley Rock loved the Florida wilderness as much as his mother and father did, but by the time of his majority, south Florida was changing fast. Visionaries had stepped in, declared war on the wilderness. Initially, they had planned to drain the entire Everglades to make vast riches from agriculture, but that didn’t work for lack of technical know-how and soil nitrates, so the visionaries tempered their ambitions and just drained off the edges to make vast riches in real estate.
Mobley married Lisa, Rosalind’s grandmother, another member of the loosely related Up-the-Grove family, and settled on the family homestead. One day developers visited the Rocks to tell them they were in violation and had to move on. The developers waved legal paper to prove it. Mobley demurred. The developers made rash threats. When the developers’ bodies were found moldering in the slough, Mobley and Lisa lit out for Lostman’s River in the still-unexplored Ten Thousand Islands.
There the Rocks tried this and that to get by. Lisa trapped and planted, and Mobley ran rum up from Cuba. But now change rushed in. The land boom was raging. Throckmorton’s railroad, pressing southward, ran all the way to Jupiter, then to Miami. Someone was building a luxury hotel on the beach at Omnium Key. Visionaries drained tract after tract, scraped off the vegetation, laid out towns which they named after indigenous waterfowl, built structures, roads, and only then set about drawing the suckers down.
Florida was settled backward, first the towns, then the residents. Nobody thought about civics, sewerage, schools, medical facilities, or courts, let alone parks and libraries. That same year, 1925, Mobley disappeared on a run from Havana. Neither his boat nor his body was ever found, and he never knew that Lisa was pregnant with Rosalind’s father.
Rosalind’s story stopped abruptly there. She fell silent, concentrating on her driving.
“You didn’t have a happy childhood?” Doom asked.
“Does anyone? Did you?”
“No.”
“I was thinking about my father. He split when I was a little girl. Lisa raised me. My father died a while back. We had just started writing.”
“What about your mother?”
“She split, too.”
“With your father?”
“No.”
“Is she alive?”
“No.”
“I see.”
“What do you see?”
“Just history. I think history’s important. For instance, my father was a crook.”
“All his life?”
“Except when he was at sea.”
“Where they goin’?” wondered Binx, following a discreet two hundred yards behind Rosalind’s truck. “We’re already out here west of Jesus. Maybe I better twist one.”
Ridly didn’t care where they were going or whether they ever came back. This was a grotty gig at best, following some gink off to get laid, a man of Ridly’s unfettered potential. “Maybe I should take up golf. A lot of business gets done on the links.” He passed the bulging spliff back to B
inx. “Man with a five handicap’d shoot right to the top, teaching the fat cats how to follow through.”
“My brother Glen took up golf once. ’Course, he was handicapped to begin with.”
Ridly had heard that the water hazards in south Florida were dense with alligators. Fat cats probably made the underlings fetch their miscues. Fuck golf, decided Ridly.
“Look,” said Binx, “they’re turning off.”
“Then turn off.”
“Cops.” Binx was looking in the rearview mirror.
Ridly spun in his seat to see. Sure enough. “Keep going, don’t turn.”
Binx and Ridly kept going, Binx watching the cop in the mirror. “He stopped. The cop stopped at the turnoff. What’s he doin’?”
Rosalind turned south off the paved road onto twin ruts through the woods. Sharp limestone outcroppings poked up through the humus. Bark like alligator hide, the pines climbed a hundred feet or more into unobstructed sunlight. Their boles were fire-blackened. Out here fire was as essential to the ecology as water. Doom tried not to look at Rosalind’s breasts bouncing in the potholes. Her pocked “driveway” was three miles long. Doom’s eye muscles hurt when it was done.
She parked her Jeep in the house clearing, and when she alighted, three blond Labs bounded out of a moon-vine patch to circle her, yelping with joy. Animals appeared from all directions. Rangy, feral cats trotted from the palmettos to entwine their flanks around Rosalind’s naked legs, something Doom would have loved to do. Twin goats came from under the house, and a short donkey followed the cats out of the palmettos. A raccoon with three legs peered down from a slash-pine branch, and something with a strange ringed tail crept along a higher branch.
“What’s that?”
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