He was, too: broad-shouldered man in his late twenties, black hat turned backward, biceps stretching the sleeves of his T-shirt. I watched him move slowly around the back of the little crowd, nonchalant, trying not to draw attention to himself.
Watching him from the corner of my eye, I began to move in his direction, still watching DeAntoni, too.
The German began to throw a fusillade of punches, swinging from the hips. DeAntoni got his arms up over his ears to absorb the first few blows, but, suddenly, he was no longer there to be hit. He ducked under the big man’s elbow, then used his open palms to clap the man’s ears, cymbal-like-a seemingly harmless slap that, in fact, was excruciating because both eardrums ruptured, judging from the blood that began to trickle down the man’s neck.
The German gave a throaty woof of pain and tried to turn, but couldn’t. From behind, DeAntoni had already laced an arm around the man’s throat, another up between his crotch. He lifted the German off the ground, and then dropped him-not hard-spine-first across his knee, and held him there, immobile, in one of the most dangerous of all submission holds.
To myself, I thought, They’re going to rush him now.
But the guards didn’t.
They wanted to. Adrenaline had taken over. But DeAntoni stopped them in their tracks, saying in a loud voice, “If you assholes take another step, I’ll snap his neck. You’ll take him home in a wheelchair. Kapeesh?”
After a micro-moment of silence, the guards still thinking about it, DeAntoni added, “Ask your big buddy what he wants you to do.”
The German, feeling the pressure on his spine, helpless, called to them, “Yah! Yah! No closer. We are done. We are done fighting! We take the golf cart and go, yah!”
I thought that was it. The end of it.
It wasn’t.
I’d lost track of the guard with the biceps. But he hadn’t lost track of me. I felt movement close to me; heard Tomlinson yell, “Doc! He’s behind you!” and I then felt a sickening blow just above my right ear. chapter sixteen
Biceps had hit me on the side of the head with a sap. It could have knocked me out, or killed me.
Instead, it sent me jackknifing to the ground, the backs of my eyes strobing with firework colors, cascading reds, greens, golds, my brain deafened by the boom of leather on bone. For an instant, I teetered on the brink of unconsciousness.
There is an ancient mammalian instinct which my forebrain inspected, then rejected: When overpowered by someone or something unknown, play dead. Remain motionless. Maybe it’ll go away. Opossums are more strongly coded, but that survival instinct remains within most vertebrates.
As if through a tube, I could hear Tomlinson’s voice saying, “Doc
… Doc… are you okay?” And to biceps: “You idiot! Why’d you hit him so damn hard!”
Then I was on my knees, eyes open, watching biceps swing the sap at Tomlinson who, to my surprise, parried the blow with a delicate, dancelike movement of his hands. I watched him deflect a second, then a third attack, using biceps’ own momentum to turn him away.
I remembered Tomlinson saying something about being a master of t’ai chi-but he was not sufficiently masterful, because biceps finally caught him with a solid blow to the shoulder that sent Tomlinson backpedaling into the little group of onlookers.
James, the cowboy local, caught him, and stepped toward biceps, fists up, ready to fight. But I was already in full stride, driving hard toward the man, making an odd guttural noise that did not seem to originate within me.
It was then that I experienced an internal transformation that I’ve experienced before. I’ve come to despise the transformation… and to fear it.
In the human brain is a tiny region called the amygdala, a section of cerebral matter so ancient that some scientists refer to it as our “lizard brain.” Its purpose is to ensure survival, and all the complicated emotions and behaviors that survival implies. It is here that our basest of instincts thrive: sex, fury, flight-the earliest markers of more than a hundred million years of adaptation and survival. It is here that our atavistic dread of snakes is passed from generation to generation. In this small, dark place lives the killer that is in us all.
The modern portion of our brain has built up around that lizard brain, like a walnut cloaking a seed. However, when sufficiently stimulated, there can be an electrical transfer of behavioral control from the modern, rational brain to the cave-dwelling primate that hides within.
That’s what happened to me now.
I felt a gathering, energized chill move through my body; my objective became so pure, so focused, that the progression of events unfolded before my eyes as if in slow motion. I could have been looking through a rifle scope-I could see nothing but the big-shouldered man with the biceps, yet I was aware of everything around me… everything but sound.
It was as if my auditory canal had been severed from my brain. There was no external volume. None. In lucid detail, I could see the people I shoved to the side, their mouths moving, but no words escaping, as I pursued biceps in a silence created by a surflike roaring in my own head. Nor was there any color. The world had been drained of pigment, leaving a portrait of blacks and grays.
Many animals, as we know, cannot distinguish color.
Yet my vision was acute, even with my glasses now hanging by fishing line around my neck. I could see biceps’ eyes squenched in surprise as I caught him from behind, then pivoted him toward me.
I could see his expression with such feral clarity that I knew what he was feeling without having to process my own patterns of induction and thought. He was surprised I was back on my feet… he was confident that I was hurt badly enough that he could put me down again without much effort. Then, as I grabbed him, controlling his hands, at first, then his arms, then his entire body, he began to feel consternation, then fear and panic… then he began to feel terror.
When the tissue around a man’s eyes stretches abnormally wide, it is a sort of ocular scream. Perhaps the brain is attempting to broaden peripheral vision, anticipating rescuers… or seeking an escape route to safe haven.
As I wrestled with him, everything I needed to know was available to me instantly; an instinct born within; an instinct exercised often enough throughout my life that it triggered reflex behavior that caused my body to act automatically, with a single objective.
I grabbed biceps by the ears, pulling him toward me as I lunged toward him. I head-butted him once, then twice. It knocked the hat off his head, and mashed his nose flat.
Then I was behind him, my hands and forearms creating a figure-four around his neck and chin, holding him there, waiting patiently, like a boa constrictor, for the perfect arm position that would give me maximum leverage. It’s a kind of dance, my body reading the movements of his body, and counteracting immediately, as my hands tightened their control with every small error he made.
His body was unpracticed. It made several mistakes in sequence. He tried to kick me. Missed. He began to thrash. I closed his windpipe until he was out of air and relented. The man was helpless… and he knew it.
That’s when I began to tighten the figure-four that my hands and arms had created around his throat and skull. Slowly, slowly, I began to transfer my body weight onto the man’s neck, applying most of the pressure to his delicate cervical vertebra, which is the stem of bone and fluid between a man’s skull and shoulders.
Now I was pivoting, muscles flexed, gradually increasing the weight and the pressure… hearing sound for the first time in many minutes as biceps began a meaningless, guttural bleating.
But I also heard a deeper, familiar voice calling into my ear: “Doc. Marion! Please, please… please. You’re going to kill him!”
It was Tomlinson’s voice, pleading.
There was another decipherable voice, too: DeAntoni talking to me, trying to pierce the shell of my fury, counsel ing me to back off, relax, it was over now.
I heard him say, “Let him go, Ford. Let him go. It’s not worth
jail. You’re taking it too far.”
Then I could feel DeAntoni’s hands on me, prying my fingers away from the man’s neck-but delicately, as if he were making a request.. . or dealing with a child.
“Easy. Nice and easy. He’s had enough. It’s over. ”
It was like being awakened from a nightmare. The tunnel that I’d inhabited broadened into a horizon beneath sky. In the same instant, color returned to the world; sound, as well, as I released biceps. Gave him a little push as I stepped away, feeling oddly groggy-sickened, perhaps, by too much adrenaline dumped into my system, way too fast.
I was aware of my own heavy breathing, and of biceps scrambling away from me, out of my reach, touching fingers to his ruined nose and bruised neck as the cowboy locals, and the Archangels, too, looked at me with troubled, anxious expressions. People who suffer seizures, I suspect, are familiar with the stares I received. Violent criminals, too.
DeAntoni had me by the arm now, leading me away, asking me how my head was, did I need a doctor? Then, in a lower voice, he said, “I want to give you some advice, Ford. No offense. You need to learn to control that temper of yours. If I hadn’t gotten to you when I did, you’d’ve killed that muscle-bound sonuvabitch. I really believe you would’ve.”
I stopped, turned toward DeAntoni; looked at the guards loading themselves onto the golf cart, getting into the van. Biceps was bleeding into a soggy, crimson towel that was pressed to his face, all of them apparently in a rush to return to the safety of Sawgrass.
Then I looked into Tomlinson’s sad, old eyes. He was shaking his head, staring at me-no disapproval there, just an expression of helplessness, hurt, worry. Then I turned back toward the door of Gator Bill’s bar.
I said to DeAntoni, “I need a drink.”
The names of some of the locals inside Gator Bill’s seemed oddly familiar.
It wouldn’t be long before I understood why.
James was James Tiger, the son of Josie Tiger, he told us. The attractive waitress with the Aztec face was his sister, Naomi Bloom. Behind the bar was Jenny Egret.
Egret?
That was definitely a surname familiar to Tomlinson and me.
Commonality of last names among ’Glades Indians isn’t unusual. Among the Seminole and Miccosukee, names such as Osceola, Johns, Tiger, Storm, Billie and Cypress are the equivalent of Smith, Jones, Johnson and Brown in the wider world.
But Egret? It was a name that I associated with only one man.
Tomlinson wasn’t shy about asking. To Jenny, the big woman, he said, “I don’t suppose you’re related to Joseph Egret. Used to be partners with this far-out old redneck cowhunter named Gatrell? He lived west of here, south of Naples, this little ranch on Mango Bay.”
Meaning my late uncle, Tucker Gatrell, and using the old-time Florida term, cowhunter for cowboy. Which Tucker and Joseph Egret certainly were. Cowhunters, poachers, whiskey-makers, womanizers, Everglades guides and, in later years, I’m fairly certain, they smuggled their share of marijuana, too. They boated it across the Gulf of Mexico from Colombia and Panama into southwest Florida, the remote Ten Thousand Islands, where not even a helicopter could follow them through the mangrove tunnels and swamp tributaries.
Joe and Tuck were born in the mangroves; grew up in the ’Glades. They knew the wild country better than any outsider could ever know it.
The three of us were sitting at the bar again. Bloodletting during battle usually creates galvanizing bonds, but our second reception at Gator Bill’s was only slightly warmer than the first. These were a reserved people, isolated not only geographically, but socially. With the exception of a few, there was racial isolation, too. The fact that we’d beaten off the Sawgrass security team proved that we, at least, had a common enemy. But it didn’t mean we were friends-or that we could be trusted.
So our conversation with them was polite, generic. It became slightly more comfortable after a pair of sheriff’s deputies arrived, asked us a few questions, then departed. But then Tomlinson mentioned Joseph Egret; asked the tall woman if she were related, and all the Indians in the room seemed to withdraw into a cocoon of their own creation. It was as if we, as strangers, had once again walked through the door for the first time. That’s the variety of hush that dominated.
Jenny made eye contact with James, then Naomi-an entire conversation going on among them in that brief silence-before she said to Tomlinson, “I’ve heard the name Joseph Egret. Ev’body in the ’Glades has. A great big man. Story goes, one time his horse took a stingray spine in the pad of his hoof. Joseph loved that horse so much, he put the animal over his shoulders and carried the horse back to the barn where he had the tools and the medicine. That’s how big’a man he was. Only he’s dead now.”
They way she said it-speaking by rote, slightly theatrical-she might have been talking about some long-gone legend. Daniel Boone. Paul Bunyan. Like she didn’t know the man at all, just making conversation. But then, in a different tone, she said, “Why’d you ask about those two? Joe Egret and Cap’n Gatrell?”
Embarrassed by the scene I’d created, the degrading loss of emotional control, I’d gone to the rest room, washed the blood off my face, my gray fishing shirt, and then sat quietly at the far end of the bar. Sat there with my head throbbing, letting DeAntoni and Tomlinson do all the talking, as I finished two quick rums with soda and lime.
Now, though, Tomlinson included me by pointing, telling them my name-an awkward gesture, because he was holding a bag of ice on the ugly red welt swelling just above his bicep. He said, “I’m asking because he’s Tucker’s nephew. They practically raised him as a kid, Joseph and Tuck both. They were like his father. That’s how I met them-through Doc.”
The woman, Jenny, turned to me. “You’re kin to Cap’n Gatrell, Dr. Ford?”
“Yes.”
“You’re Marion Ford.”
“That’s right. As a kid, I lived with Tuck for a while. Joseph and I were close. I considered him… a friend. A good man. One of the finest men I’ve known.”
Jenny had her own approach to the detection of bullshit. She began to ask me seemingly innocuous questions: “I was at Cap’n Gatrell’s ranch once, but that’s back when I was a little girl. Was there a horse barn there?”
Gradually, though, the questions became more obvious, then pointed. What was the name of Joseph Egret’s favorite horse? (Buster) On which Caribbean island did he and Tucker run a cattle ranch? (Cuba) Finally: Where did Joseph Egret die?
I told her, “The bad curve on the way into the village of Mango. I was there. He and his horse were hit by this idiot in a van. I was beside Joseph at the end. It wasn’t a pretty thing to see, and it’s not the way I choose to remember the man. So no more questions, okay? I stopped taking tests years ago.”
Jenny’s expression softened, broadened. Suddenly, I was no longer a stranger. She told me, “I thought I recognized you.”
She looked at Tomlinson. “Him, too-him with his hippy hair and his bony, bird legs. But there had to be three or four hundred ’Glades people the day of Joseph’s funeral, whites and Indians. Some famous rich people from up north came, too-his old hunting clients. And lots of women, all of them bawling. The day they buried Joseph.”
I said, “You were at the funeral? I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
“Yep. I was at Cap’n Gatrell’s place, the Big Sky Ranch, back there on the Indian mound. Watched them lower the body down in the old traditional way.” She pointed to Naomi, the waitress, and then to James Tiger. “Their daddy’s Josie Tiger, and their granddaddy’s James Tiger. James started the Famous Reptile Show and Airboat Rides right near Forty Mile Bend. Ev’body knows those big yellow signs with the gator on them. Old James, he played the wind drum at Joseph’s funeral. I bet you remember that. ”
I nodded. Yes, I remembered. Which is why, I finally realized, their names were familiar.
For the first time, I heard Naomi speak. “I went with Daddy to hear him play the drum. The day Joseph died, on his
way back to Mango-Joe, I’m talking about-he stopped at our camp. He was on that big horse of his. My sister, Maria, gave him a red handkerchief to wear in his hair, like an old-time warrior. And he gave her-”
She stopped; looked at her brother, James, smiling. Then she walked behind the bar, where she took an old, black beaver-skin cowboy hat from a hook and placed it on her head. “-he gave her his roper’s hat, which she gave to me for Christmas. I’ll never forget it. He looked so handsome sitting up there on his horse. Even for his age, Joseph was such a good-looking man. I wear his hat nearly every day.”
DeAntoni was saying, “See? I told you it was smart to bring you Florida boys along,” as Jenny told me, “Joseph had that magic with women. Didn’t matter what age, they all loved him, the way he looked, and his great big heart. My mama was the same. She was Rilla Mae Osceola. She and Joseph never married, but I still took Daddy’s name.”
I touched my hand to the back on my head-quite a lump swelling there. It took me a long moment to realize what she was saying. “You’re Joseph Egret’s daughter? I didn’t know he had any children.”
“You didn’t know Joseph fathered children?”
That got a laugh from the room. chapter seventeen
Naomi told me, “There was twenty-five, maybe thirty women we know of had children by Joseph. So now, one way or another, we’re all kin to him. Joseph Egret could’a populated a whole village with the sons and daughters he sired.”
James Tiger said, “Or a tribe. That’s the way we think of ourselves now. Pretty soon, it’s gonna be official. Egret Seminoles, that’s the name we voted to take. Only Joseph wouldn’t’a liked that, ’cause he always knew he weren’t really no Seminole.”
Tomlinson had been following along, nodding, understanding the implications of it all more quickly than I, because he said, astonished, “My God, I understand, now. Your own tribe. You’re filing to become designated as a tribe. Joseph’s offspring; his extended biological family. The Egret Seminoles. You really are petitioning the government?”
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