Shadow Men

by Jonathon King

  I kept myself on a constant flow of caffeine from my oversized thermos, and went over the search possibilities or impossibilities that I was asking Brown to undertake. I’d gone to an army/navy supply store two days ago. In the back of the truck I had a high-end metal detector similar to the kind used by anthropological investigators and emergency rescue teams; a new generation handheld GPS; an expandable trenching tool with a knife-sharp spade and a chisel-head pickax. I also brought a variety of evidence bags— optimistic—as well as Billy’s digital camera and a new satellite cell phone with a different number and carrier from any of the others.

  By the time I hit Route 29 I had to flip my mirror up to keep the rising sun from blinding me. The top few feet of the sawgrass had gone a fiery orange in the early rays, and for a mile I watched a trio of swallow-tailed kites swooping down into the grass. The sharp forks of their black tails and pointed wings showed hard against the clear sky, and one came up with a wriggling snake in its beak, the ribbon of flesh outlined against the birds pure-white belly. I made the exit and turned south and rode along a canal that drained the water and gave high ground to the tiny communities of Jerome and Copeland. I passed the old road prison where convicts were held after long days of clearing the roadsides of overgrowth with their bush-axes and machetes while guards stood by with their rifles at port arms. Would even a desperate man try to run out here?

  Farther south the road hit a blinking-light intersection at the Tamiami Trail and then continued all the way into Chokoloskee. When I pulled into the shell-lot of Dawkins’s dock, both of his boats were gone. Nate Brown was sitting out on the end of the wood- plank dock. I knew he was dangling a hand-line into the water, just as I knew he had heard me and marked my arrival. I parked out of the way of the forklift’s worn path and walked out to meet him.

  “Anything biting?”

  “They’s always somethin’ bitin’, Mr. Freeman.”

  He looked up at me and then back into the water, waiting. The early sun was dancing off the surface, the southeast wind rippling up the surface. I sat down next to the old Gladesman and unfolded one of Billy’s computer-generated maps.

  “This is what we figure, or what we think is possible so far,” I started. Brown first looked down at the map and then up at me.

  “Anythin’ is possible, son.”

  I nodded and began.

  “Let’s assume that Mayes and his sons go to work for Noren somewhere about here,” I said, putting my finger on the map. “The letter indicates they’re some distance out of Everglades City. It’s early summer and you know the heat and mosquitoes are just starting to get unbearable, making the crew more miserable by the day.

  “We know through some reports and writings in local newspapers that the dredge is making about two miles of road a month when things are going well. We figure these X’s here coincide with Mayes’s letter of June third, when the two workers slipped out at night to make their way back and his son heard the gunshots.”

  Brown touched the spot with the rough tips of his fingers. It was a delicate gesture that made me pause and look up at the side of his face, wondering what he was dunking.

  “These trees here an’ the elevation mark means they’s high ground, right?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Curlew Hammock,” he said. “An’ then this one here’s got to be Marquez Ridge.”

  His fingers slid over to the spot where the three X’s were marked.

  “Where’d y’all get this here map?”

  Now he was looking directly into my face but his own was blank.

  “William Jefferson,” I said. “John William’s grandson.”

  He did not let any recognition or surprise show, but he did not take his eyes off mine, waiting, expecting more. I told him about using his information on the grandson’s cleric possibilities to run down a list and then about the discovery and evasiveness of the reverend up in Placid City. I told him William Jefferson’s recounting of his grandfather, his strange silence and the perception at least by the reverend, and obviously his own mother, that John William had an evil aura about him.

  “They ain’t nothin’ you’re tellin’ that don’t fit,” Brown finally said. “I recall the boy being awful close to his religion. The girl brought him to that and a lot of folks thought of it as savin’ him from what his grandfather done.”

  Nate waited again, not saying more, just looking out on the water, maybe remembering a small boy running a bit too scared into the trees of the island, talking a little less than any other kid, and turning away when adults and then other children began whispering his grandfather’s name.

  “So that’s where you got these here coordinates and such?” he said.

  I told him about the crate and its contents. His face only changed when I mentioned the rifle, the infamous gun that outshot his own father and gave the community a solid tiling to tie all the rumors to.

  “You think John William Jefferson was capable of killing these men for three hundred dollars?” I finally asked him.

  “Men out here in them days done a lot of things for that kind of money,” Brown said, and I knew that included him. In my encounter with the old Gladesman three years ago, Billy had run what background there was on him and found that he had done time in prison on a manslaughter charge. In the late sixties an Everglades National Park ranger had been chasing Brown through the islands, trying to arrest him for poaching gators. Snaking his boat through the dizzying waterways just as he had done with the helicopter, Brown had led the pursuing ranger into a submerged sandbar. The government boat slammed into the unforgiving sand. The ranger pitched forward out of the cockpit and broke his neck. Brown turned himself in three days later when word spread that he was being sought for killing the man.

  “I s’pose I know why ya’ll asked me to help you, Mr. Freeman. If you’re askin’ if these here X’s are the graves of them boys and their father, they is only one way to know,” he said, standing up and rewinding the fishing line around his palm. “So let’s go.”’

  Brown’s boat was cleated at the dock and this time he had his homemade Glades skiff tied off on the back. I loaded my supplies and then locked up my truck. Within minutes we were moving north, the skiff slapping behind us on the end of a line. We headed into the sun, its early brightness burning white-hot. Brown pulled his billed cap low, shading his eyes so they were difficult to read, and I thought of the similar description of John William. They were men who worked and lived in water-reflected sunlight all their lives. They chose to exist in a desolate place where sociability was not a part of their everyday existence. The reasons they came may have been different, but why they stayed was not: they didn’t like anyone else’s rules or some other leader’s vision or expectation. Eighty years of that independent blood had not yet been washed out by the generations.

  “Yonder is where my daddy run a still in the twenties,” Brown said, interrupting the drone of the motor and the slap of water against the hull. “Him and a half-dozen others had their fixin’s on the smaller shell mounds. First they was in by Loop Road. Then the law started crackin’ ’em an’ they had to come further out. Daddy and them weren’t too acceptin’ of others comin’ into their territory.”

  I’d learned to let Brown talk on the few occasions that he cared to. He was making his own point, under his own logic.

  “Same thing happened to the gator hunters. You could take a dozen gators in a three-night trip. Sell the hides for a dollar fifty apiece for the six- to eight-footers.

  “Then in ’47, Harry Truman hisself come down and they drew up the boundaries for the Park and one day the best gator-huntin’ spots was now illegal, and to hell with you if you and your daddy before you been livin’ off that for forty years.”

  While he talked I unfolded Billy’s map and tried to gauge our progress. But even with the detailed, satellite-aided photos, the myriad water trails and green islands were an impossible puzzle. I was lost when we suddenly came around a bend onto open
water that was Chevalier Bay.

  “They call it progress, Nate,” I said, my tone flat and nonjudgmental.

  “I know what they call it, son,” he said. “That don’t mean I got to like it.”

  The morning heat was building. A high sheet of cirrus cloud was not going to offer any respite from the blurred sun. The air was beginning to thicken with that warm, moist layer that rises up from the Glades like an invisible steam. It was as if the earth herself was sweating, and it carried the not unpleasant odor of both wet and drying plants and soil and living things. As we approached the northern boundary of the bay, I checked the map again and saw no obvious place to go. But Brown kept a steady course to a spot in the mangrove wall that only he could see. It wasn’t until we were thirty feet from the green barrier that he pulled back on the throttle and I picked up the eight-foot-wide opening that he’d been heading for all along. We slid through the tunnel of mangroves for thirty minutes, the motor tilted up, the propellers burbling through the dark water. When we got to a broad opening to the outside again, Brown stopped the boat before moving out into the sun. I was checking the coordinates with the handheld GPS. If I was matching them up correctly, we were not too far, maybe two miles, south of the point where John William had marked the three X’s on his crude map. Brown cut the engine and stood upright and silent, listening. He seemed to be holding his breath. I could hear nothing.

  “Airboat,” he said, not looking back me. “This ain’t no place airboats usually come.”

  I waited for an explanation, which also didn’t come.

  “Check that skiff line if you would, Mr. Freeman. We gon’ try to put some speed to ’er.”

  I went back and tightened down the cleated line; then Brown restarted the motor, moved out onto the wide channel and inched up the throttles. Each second he seemed to get a better feel for the depth and the rhythm of the curves and put more gas to it. I stood up and tried to check above the grass line, looking for the distinctive rounded cage of an airboat engine and the usually high-riding driver. The contraptions are designed to let the operator sit above the sawgrass so he can watch the landscape and curves of the canals instead of just guessing and navigating by pure instinct as Brown was doing. It also makes them more visible. I could see nothing behind and only another dark hammock of trees ahead in the distance. We were carving through the water trail now like a slalom skier, and Brown backed off the throttles only on the tightest turns—the skiff behind us was swinging on the rope and actually fishtailed into the grass several times. A small gator, maybe a four- footer, raised its head in the middle of the canal as we came roaring up. Brown never flinched or slowed and the gator flicked its tail and dived deep just before the bow clipped him. Our destination was clearly the hammock, so I concentrated on the horizon behind us. After a few minutes I turned and was surprised at how fast we’d moved up on it.

  “Git your stuff, Freeman, ’cause we gon’ grab up the skiff and hightail it north as soon as she stops. Hear?” Brown steered one long curve around a jutting piece of semi-land and then plowed headlong into the greenness, pulling the same slide and crash he’d done when the helicopter had followed us.

  This time I was prepared and rode the lurch. I was out into the knee-deep water as soon as he cut the motor. I snatched up the skiff line and then he was beside me, both of us dragging the flat-bottom boat across the shallows. We were deep in the cover of tree shadow when I finally picked up the sound of a burring airplane engine, the noise growing from the direction we’d come. We stayed shoulder to shoulder. It was easier moving through the dense undergrowth this time. We were following a low path, almost like a riverbed with only inches of water in it. Maybe when the rains fell, the path actually ran like a river, because it seemed to cut directly south to north across the elongated hammock.

  “Them boys cain’t bring that airboat through here an’ it’s gon’ take ’em plenty of time to go all the way round to git to the other side,” Brown said, his breathing under control despite the exertion of pulling the skiff and stomping through the roots and muck of the path.

  “How do you know they’re following us?” I said, dodging a dripping curtain of air-plant roots that hung gray and mossy like the wet hair of an old woman.

  “’Cause they ain’t no reason they should be. I heard ’em forty- some minutes back there, keepin’ enough distance to stay back, not fast enough to catch us. They’re just trackin’.”

  We were both watching the route ahead. The canopy above was much less dense than on my river and light sliced through in sheets and created oddly spaced planes of shadow. It was difficult to see where the end of the path might be. Brown kept pulling, and each time I thought of slacking I reminded myself that the guy was at least twice my age, and the embarrassment of it pushed me on. At times the skiff would hang up on a slab of drier ground or get hooked on a stump and the load would yank at our arms and Brown would look back, judge the angle, and lean his meager weight into it. I would copy him until we freed it. After a half hour without slowing, I picked up the glow of open sunlight walling up a hundred yards to the north. Brown stopped and I thought he’d heard something, because he was staring to one side of the trail. But his eyes were focused into the trees. I tried to match his angle but could see only an odd stand of ancient gnarled pine, with one limb that seemed to have been broken crossing through the crotch of another. The knot where they met looked like it had grown together over the years.

  “What?” I said, but the sound of my voice seemed only to snap him out of his trance. He shook me off and kept moving. Soon the creek bed began to fill with deeper water, and after several more minutes we were at the edge of open water again. The old man looked east and west. Nothing. Farther to the north another hammock sprouted up a quarter-mile away.

  “You want to find out how bad they want you?” Brown said to me, his head cocked slightly to the side. I could tell he was listening both for the airboat engine and for my answer.

  After a few seconds I said, “I want to know who they are.”

  He tightened up the slack on the line and moved out into the sunlight.

  “Let’s push on over to Curlew Hammock yonder then, and take ’er easy gettin’ there,” he said, nodding to the patch of green to the north.

  When we got into enough water to float the skiff, both of us stepped up and in. Brown took up the long pole and pushed off, working the wooden staff hand over hand, shoving off the muck bottom and then efficiently recovering the length of the pole. Even on the grass-covered shallows he seemed to slide the boat gracefully over thirty yards of water with a single stroke. I kept cutting my eyes east to west, waiting to spot the airboat coming around either side of the hammock we were leaving behind. Brown kept his attention forward.

  When we came within fifty yards of the smaller lump of trees that he’d called Curlew Hammock, Brown stopped poling and for the first time checked behind us. We were still out in the open.

  “Need ’em to see us so’s they’ll follow us in,” he said.

  “You want them to know where we are?”

  “They know where we are, son. They always knowed.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  Brown was looking west when he narrowed his eyes. I caught the bobbing figure in the distance an instant later. Above the grass the dark shape seemed to rise and fall erratically, like a black bird at first. As we watched, it grew in size and the jerking turned into a more fluid movement. A man’s torso soon took shape against the backdrop of the sky and then the gridwork of the circle-shaped engine cage became visible. I could barely hear the low, harmonic burring of the machine, but it too was growing. Brown waited a full five minutes and then started poling again toward the small hammock. He pushed us at a slower speed than before. When we were finally up against the edge of the hammock, Brown shipped the pole and jumped out.

  “Got to hope they’ll follow us in,” Brown said. “Bring in your supplies so’s they’ll figure we’re workin’ it.”

&
nbsp; I shouldered one pack and Brown took the satchel with the metal detector and we worked our way through the low grass and muck to the tree line of the hammock and stood in the shade of a clump of cabbage palms and looked back. Now I could see the body of the driver, sitting up on the raised driver’s seat. Below him I could make out the heads of two other men who must have been crouched on the deck, down a bit out of the wind, their billed caps pulled hard on their brows.

  “They seen us,” Brown said. “Let’s go.”

  The old man seemed to have a destination in mind. He moved efficiently in under the trees and about forty yards later stopped and surveyed the layout.

  “Hold up there, son,” he said, and I watched him walk off to the north, stepping into a pile of brush and shuffling his feet around, then moving off to a downed poisonwood trunk and stopping to deliberately scrape his boot sole against the mottled bark. He moved on another twenty feet and took off the satchel I’d given him and laid it carefully at the base of a tall pine in full view. Then he returned.

  “If they is half-dumb, they’ll move that way an’ you can take a look at ’em from back here,” Brown said to me. I turned in a circle, not seeing a way to hide.

  “Down there in the gator hole,” Brown said, pointing to a low, half-exposed depression filled with mud and standing pools of water. He stepped down into the pit and showed me how the gators had burrowed down below the roots of the trees and swept out a shallow cave. It was dark in the shadows and I could not see the back wall.