At times the water became so shallow that both of us would have to pole the boat forward. Other times Brown was able to use the electric motor tilt to raise the propeller blades until they were barely churning and spitting the water. When it deepened again he would lower them back and we would gain speed, and the breeze it created was a luxury.
Above, a bowl of blue sky covered us from horizon to horizon, and while the sun traveled across it, Brown told me the story of John Dawkins.
“He was the colored man that was in them letters,” he said. “The one that trucked the dynamite out there on the trail ’cause there weren’t another man alive out here could have done it.”
John Dawkins might have been from the Caribbean Islands or from New Orleans, but he and his family’s blackness made them unique. But there were few enough families living in the Glades in the early 1900s, and those who had made it their home and braved its harshness knew one another as community.
“My daddy and John Dawkins was friends ’cause they needed to be. Out here, the onliest way a man got judged was by his work, and Mr. Dawkins was judged high on that account,” Brown said.
Slope-shouldered and thick in the chest, with legs “like a full growth oak,” Dawkins never turned down a job for which he would be paid with money or trade and was often called when the strength of other men flagged.
“Onliest time the man wouldn’t work was on the Lord’s day, and Daddy said everbody knowed that. Said Mr. Dawkins had a contract with God.”
I waited for the story to continue as Brown pushed up the throttle in the now widening creek. The sawgrass fields were beginning to change.
“We’re comin’ on to Lost Man’s River,” he said as the stands of spidery-legged mangroves began to appear. With his own bearings set, he continued.
“I remember Daddy’s stories ’bout John Dawkins bein’ the man that hauled dynamite. He knowed the country as well as any and he had them oxen. I member ridin’ in that there cart with his kids and ours comin’ up with loads of mullet from the docks.”
“So this Mr. Dawkins has relatives who are still living?” I said, hoping he was finally getting to his point.
“He got a son still livin’.”
“And this son might have some recollection of his father transporting mail for Cyrus Mayes?”
“Don’t know,” Brown answered. “You gon’ have to ask him yourself.”
Now the river had widened and so had the sky. Brown pushed up the throttle and it was impossible to talk without shouting. We cleared a point of high mangroves and the water opened up onto Florida Bay. I settled back onto the gunwales and breathed in the stiff salt wind, while Brown remained standing, guiding the boat north through what was known as the Ten Thousand Islands region along Florida’s southwest coast. The name comes from the uncountable patches of mangroves. From the air or at a distance they look like thick, green lumps of land, but up close there is little if any dry soil around the mass of roots that support and feed the leaves. The semiprotected water that flows through the green islands is a perfect breeding ground for fish. But the area has no beaches, no hard sandy shores on which to build. It is not the stuff of Florida postcards. And the few people who have chosen to live here over the past century like it that way.
Farther north, Brown swung the boat into what he called the Chatham River and again began spinning his way through thin waterways and around piles of mangroves. Again there were times he would have to use the electric motor tilt to skirt over sandbars that were hidden to an untrained eye. The old Gladesman would look back on occasion; I thought it was to check his trailing wake until he called out to me.
“Them those enemies the gal at the hotel was warning you on?”
I instinctively looked back at the water behind us, but saw no sign of another boat. When I turned back to Brown he was pointing one finger to the sky. High behind us a helicopter hung in the sky. It kept a distance but swayed back and forth to keep its line of sight and our V-shaped wake in view. It was too far away for me to make out the number on its belly or tail.
“It ain’t the park service or the sheriff,” Brown yelled above the whine of the outboard.
“Some kind of tourist ride?” I said. He shook his head.
“I know ’em all.”
He pushed the throttle up another notch and seemed to take a line that cut much closer to the mangrove walls.
“It ain’t the DEA neither,” he said, and I’d heard enough of his reputation to believe he knew what he was saying. Brown jacked the engine to a higher pitch and I squatted down and got a firmer handhold on the rail. White water was cutting deep off the prop wash. The old man banked the boat into the next turn, sending our wake surging into the mangroves, and I watched the chopper slide into the same movement. At this speed the green walls beside us were blurring and I couldn’t make out the turns ahead. Suddenly Brown turned his head and yelled: “Hold on!”
I had just shifted my weight when he cut the wheel to the right and killed the engine. The instant silence might have been peaceful, but for the sleek glide that was sending us into a mass of mangrove. Brown leaned his weight hard into the starboard gunwale and said “Duck,” and the boat seemed to buck against its own wake then slide to the right onto a partial water path and plow into the outcrop. When she hit the thick roots the bow made a fingernails-on- chalkboard screech and I tumbled forward. Brown kept his feet.
I lay still for several seconds, not as stunned by the crash as by the change. One minute we’d been just short of flying across sunlit water in front of a screaming, full-bore outboard, and the next we were stock-still in a dark, silent cocoon of tangled leaves and roots.
“Y’all OK?” Brown said, still crouched on the balls of his feet.
“Yeah,” I said, sitting up and pushing my back against the console.
The old man looked up and specks of sunlight danced on his face.
“Let’s just see if they was trackin’ us or not.”
We waited without speaking. I watched a family of spiders shaken from the mangrove branches scurry across the deck. Any birds or nearby gators would be long gone, scared the hell away. It took a few minutes, and then I could hear the patterned woofing of the helicopter blades. The sound grew but I couldn’t see through the ceiling of green. The pilot had circled back but kept his altitude and never came close enough to stir the leaves with his downdraft. I swatted at a gang of mosquitoes on my face and checked my fingers for the smear of blood. We listened to the chopper circle and hover for maybe ten minutes, until it finally flew off to the northeast and did not return.
“Ain’t nothin’ bothers me more’n to have somebody follerin’ me,” Brown finally said.
He shifted his weight but could not stand up, and when I saw him slide one leg over the side to get out I copied him and went out the other side into the water and warm muck. It took us a few minutes of pushing and rocking to get the boat floated back out in deep water. We climbed back in, again soaked to the waist. I could see now that Brown had made a calculated turn into a passage that broke off the main river and looped around a small mangrove stand. From back out in the main channel the turn was nearly impossible to see. It had been a firsthand example of Browns legendary knowledge and ability to slip the park rangers and anti-drug agents who had tried to catch him poaching gators and off-loading marijuana trawlers from the Gulf to make deliveries inland. He’d done it for years. I was used to being the law, not running from it, and I knew if the chopper had been tracking us, it wasn’t the law doing it this time.
“Slick move, Nate,” I said, truly impressed.
He restarted the engine and turned us south onto what he called the Lopez River.
“Them boys in the helicopter got anything to do with what you’re lookin’ for?”
As he pushed up the throttle and we eased farther out into the channel, I told him about my discovery of the tracking devices on my truck.
“If any of this bothers you, you don’t owe me, Nate. I don
’t want to get you involved in something you would rather stay out of.”
He did not answer at first. His eyes, hard-creased from years of squinting into the sun, stayed focused ahead.
“You ain’t,” he finally said.
CHAPTER
11
We motored up Chokoloskee Bay and for the first time since leaving the loop, other boats came into sight. We passed some low-slung utility buildings, and as the ground elevation got higher, some warehouses and marinas. Tall, invasive Australian pines rose up in spots along the water where the shore had been dug out for dockage or access ramps, but it was essentially a low, flat land and I wondered about its ability to take a heavy storm out of the Gulf. The Calusa Indians had created most of the land that was high enough to be habitable in the Ten Thousand Islands. The indigenous tribe had, by hand, piled up acre after acre of shells. For hundreds of years the habitual toil had built the shell middens that were the foundation. Gradually, the dirt and detritus carried by the wind and tides and trapped by the shells became its soil. Seeds eventually took root, plants grew, and the Calusa farmed. A civilization thrived where before had only been water. No matter how many times I’d read about it and seen its proof, it was an accomplishment that was hard to conceive.
Brown cut back the engine and idled up to a series of docks set against a bulkhead. Two commercial fishing trawlers were tied up against the wall. Old and steel-hulled, with similar cabins built forward, they were each fifty feet long and had a large, motor-driven winch mounted on the stern deck. Brown eased up to the dock ladder and slipped the engine into neutral, and a young boy jogged up and caught a line the old man tossed him. Brown tipped his hat and the boy did the same; then he cleated the line and left without a word.
When the boat was tied off we climbed up onto the dock. On a broad crescent of land stood a bare, tire-worn lot that served the two fishing boats and that buzzed with activity. Two men were aboard each vessel and another worked with the boy on the small wharf. A sixth man was driving a forklift from a corrugated shack nearby, moving pallets loaded with wooden crab traps. When he set the pile next to the near boat, the men jumped to and began a brigade line, passing the big, awkward traps down to a hand in the open aft deck, who would then stack it forward. While they worked the pile, the fork driver went back for another.
They were all similarly dressed in high rubber boots, faded jeans and either T-shirts or flannel rolled up at the sleeves, and they paid no attention to us as we approached. That is, all but one on the deck of the near boat. He was a black man with skin so dark that at a distance, I thought he was wearing a black T-shirt under his yellow bib overalls. When we got closer I could see he was shirtless. He also seemed to be the only one speaking, giving directions and keeping the work moving. When we got close enough, he stopped moving, tilted the bill of his cap up and smiled.
“Afternoon, Mr. Nate,” he said, slipping off a thick canvas glove.
“Captain Dawkins,” Brown said, and reached out over the water to shake the big man’s hand. I noticed that the younger men had all stopped at the mention of Brown’s name. Even the crew at the next boat was staring. It was like Ted Williams had stopped in for a visit. I saw one man lean down to whisper in the boy’s ear and the kid’s eyes went big.
“This here’s the feller I was tellin’ you about,” Brown said, and I stepped forward.
“Max Freeman,” I said. When I took his hand I could see four distinct lines of raised scar that lay nearly parallel across his forearm. They were smooth and pink and wrapped like pale worms over his black and nearly hairless skin.
“Johnny Dawkins the third,” he said with a smoothness that let me know he always introduced himself that way.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Brown suddenly said. “I’m a walk up to the café for some coffee.”
I swallowed, and when he turned to go I swear the old coot winked at me.
“So, Mr. Nate says you wanted to talk about my grandfather,” Dawkins said, pulling my attention back, getting straight to it.
I lost a beat, now realizing who the old man had brought me to.
“Yes. I, uh, I’ve come across some letters written in the 1920s by the relative of a client. Mr. Brown said your grandfather might have had something to do with delivering them,” I said, not knowing how much Brown might have told him.
“Client, huh?” Dawkins said, pulling his glove back on. “But you ain’t a lawyer?”
He moved his eyes over me, my mud-caked boots, the white streaks of salt stain on my now-dried jeans.
“No, sir. Just a private investigator, looking for some truth.”
“Well, Mr. Freeman, I don’t mind talkin’ ’bout my granddaddy’s stories. And God above knows they’re true. But I’m down a man here an’ we got traps to load. So if y’all want to listen an’ work, we got an extra pair of gloves.”
The men in the other boat had already begun to move. The forklift operator gunned the engine. There was still a smile on Captain Dawkins’s face.
“OK,” I said. “Where do you want me?”
My height dictated that I catch and stack down on the boat deck with Dawkins. The boxlike stone crab traps were made of slatted wood and wire. In their bottoms was a two-inch-thick slab of poured cement to keep them down on the ocean floor. They weighed about forty pounds apiece. I learned quickly how to grip the top edge from the man passing the trap down and then use the weight of the box to swing it down and up and catch it with the other hand. While we worked the deck together, Dawkins told stories.
“My granddaddy was the first to come down here. He was a deck hand on a merchant ship that made the trip from New Orleans to Key West and then north up the Gulf Stream to the Eastern Shore and New York. His own daddy had done the same all the way back to the days of sails and schooners.
“He was a God-fearing man, Mr. Freeman, and loved to fish. God, my grandmother Emma May an’ fishin’, them was his priorities.”
Dawkins looked up at his crew and winked. We were falling into a rhythm now and even if they’d all heard it before, the story was like a nip of soothing whiskey on the brain while the muscles strained.
“It was here that he met my grandmother, right over at Smallwood’s Store, and she anchored him. They said he could unload mullet on these docks like a machine. He’d get done with a day’s work and go home, dig up the rows in the little garden they had out back and then spend the night hand-fixin’ catch nets.”
“And he had oxen?” I said, trying to lead the story without putting any spin on it.
Dawkins never wavered, just kept stacking and talking and I was grateful not to have to waste my own breath, which was in short supply.
“He got the oxen from some freight captain in 1918. Daddy said grandpa figured that captain had to have been drunk to agree to take the animal in the first place. He was supposed to ship it to Key West, but when he stopped here for a load of fish, the animal had already gone crazy tearin’ up the hold and he was beggin’ somebody to take it off his hands.
“Was a mean sumbitch and Daddy said nobody but Grandpa would dare go near it. He took and hand-built him a cart and then used ’em both to haul fish from the smaller boats from the docks up to the fish house.”
“So when the road crews came in to work the trail to Miami, your grandfather used that cart to haul dynamite for blasting?” I said. My arms and shoulders were aching, the lactic acid building up as I tried to keep pace with Dawkins. Each row of traps we stacked as high as the wheelhouse, and pressing the forty pounds up onto that six-foot top row was soon going to be impossible for me.
“They say there was plenty of work around Everglades City when the road crews were working. But Daddy used to say it was on and off, and the local folks didn’t take too kindly to outsiders coming in to a place they didn’t know or give a damn about.
“But Grandpa just wanted the work, and when they said they needed somebody to take the dynamite out there on the roadway to the dredge site, he took ’em up
on it.
“Hell, most of the locals didn’t know dynamite ’cept to use a quarter stick to stun a school of fish once in awhile. An’ most of them company boys was scared to be out in the Glades at night. So Grandpa, he just loaded up the cart and he and the ox made the trip by themselves. Sometimes Daddy said it would take him days to get out and back when the rains turned the trail into nothin’ but slop mud.”
“And it was on these trips that your grandfather picked up mail?” I said.
Dawkins tossed up one more trap and whistled sharp and hard through his teeth.
“Y’all take a break now, fellas. Jordie, go on get us some water.”
The boy ran off and the men found places to sit in the shade. Dawkins picked up a small towel from the gunwale and mopped the sweat from his face and neck. I sat, exhausted, on one of the short rows of traps, trying to hide my heavy breathing.
“That was Ms. Emma’s story,” Dawkins said, letting his voice go softer as he sat against the gunwale. “Only Grandma would tell it.”
I said nothing and waited on him.
“When Grandpa hauled the dynamite out there, the foreman in Everglades City would have him deliver some kind of pouch to the job boss at the end of the line. Grandpa had never learned to read so he didn’t know what the stuff was, but he did take a look-see, men bein’ natural nosey, and they was only papers and documents and maps and such.
“Sometimes out at the dredge site, if it was late, he would stay overnight and he was allowed to eat with the workers. They was a raggedy bunch. Most of ’em down and out. Some runnin’ from the law, but that wasn’t unusual out here.
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