Strawman's Hammock

by Darryl Wimberley

  “Lou.”

  “I don’t have an appointment wrote down for us.”

  “No.” Barrett smiled. “I just thought it’d be a good idea to talk.”

  The deputy smirked. Lou cut him off with a glance, the cratered face briefly mobile.

  “Come on back,” he said.

  * * *

  Lou Sessions’s office was only marginally an improvement over the warren inhabited by his subordinates. A coffee maker was mounted on a pair of milk crates. Barrett could see a narrow door behind Lou’s chipped desk that he suspected led to a private restroom. The state flag of Florida competed with an FSU pennant on one corner of his desk. There was no indicator of national loyalty.

  Some office. Barrett glanced about.

  “It ain’t yours yet,” Lou growled from a lean-back roll-around repaired with duct tape.

  Barrett faced him squarely.

  “If I decide I want your job, Lou, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “No. Linton Loyd’ll be first to know.”

  “I’m not about to get in a pissing contest with you and Linton, Sheriff. Far as I’m concerned you are the authority in this county and it’s my job to listen to what you have to say.”

  Lou inclined his head to one side with that declaration.

  “Shit,” he said after a long moment. “You want some coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Just tryin’ to be polite.”

  “I know you are, Sheriff.”

  “Well, then. That be all?”

  “One thing. This problem with our out-of-state workers.”

  “You mean our Messicans.”

  “Well, Latin Americans, at least.”

  “Bullshit. Are you running for office?”

  “Thought we settled that,” Barrett replied stiffly.

  “Then call ’em what they are. They ain’t Cuban, they ain’t Puerto Rican. They’re Messicans. They come over the river in Texas, haul their ass here. You know that. I know that.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Plain talk, Bear. It’s easiest understood.”

  “Well, then, Lou, you got to let me be blunt.”

  “’Bout time.”

  “I’d like to look around some of the camps in the county. See if I can get to know some of these people. See if there’s anything we need to be concerned about.”

  “How you gonna talk to ’em? Sign language?”

  “Yo hablo español,” Barrett replied. “Poquito, anyway.”

  “I’ll be damn.”

  Barrett shrugged. “Spent some time in Texas is all.”

  “And you can parlay with these people?”

  “Not as well as Laura Anne. She speaks well. But if I can find ’em, I can get along. Well enough, I hope, to find out if they’re being blackmailed or extorted.”

  “They’re not gonna open up to you on that. They do, they’ll wind up with their throats slit or their trucks burned or their wives hauled off.”

  Barrett leaned forward.

  “You know that for a fact, Sheriff?”

  “Just imaginin’ is all.” Lou shrugged. “Hell, ain’t it what those people always do?”

  Barrett settled back.

  “Lou, did you ever consider making these newcomers your allies?”

  “Allies? How you figure?”

  Barrett frowned. “Haven’t you ever looked at these people as a potentially valuable set of eyes and ears? They’re working all over the county. They see everything. But nobody sees them. They’re invisible.”

  “Invisible?”

  “You know what I mean. I’ve seen men get out of their trucks and piss beside the road in full view of a family of Mexicans and not give a damn.”

  “No law says you cain’t piss on the road.”

  “You know my point, Lou. No one cares what these people see. Everyone assumes they won’t go to the law, that they’re so afraid of losing their jobs or being deported or whatever that they’re never going to be a witness to anything.”

  “So far they haven’t.”

  “Then it can’t hurt for me to talk to some of ’em, can it?”

  The duct-taped chair squeaked as Lou leaned back.

  “It was decent of you to come in here,” he finally said.

  “It’s your county, Sheriff. I’m just a visitor.”

  “You wasn’t always,” Lou rejoined, and the hostility that had just cooled flared again.

  Barrett set his jaw tight.

  Lou rocked in his chair a moment longer. Judging the effect. Finally: “You wanta look around the woods, Bear, look all you want. Be my guest. But there’s camps back there nobody’s seen. And I’ll be damned if I can spare a man to show you.”

  “I’ve got somebody, thank you.” Barrett rose from his hard chair.

  “Be nice if he was a officer of the court.” Lou found a toothpick on his desk.

  Barrett nodded.

  “He is.”

  * * *

  “Thought we’d go in by water.” Jarold Pearson’s squashed skull turreted side to side. “Most of the camps you’re gonna want to see are close to the coast. ’Sides, it’s more fun to take a boat.”

  They were in Jarold’s four-wheeler, or rather, the Commission’s, an olive-green Chevy Tahoe fixed with the agency’s seal, a V-8, and a boat hitch. Barrett expected to see an airboat trailered behind. The shallow waters near the coast from Deacon Beach to Dead Man’s Bay were extremely hazardous to normally hulled watercraft. An oyster mound or cypress knee could rip through any hull, and props were ruined daily. But you could take a Hartzel propeller and a Lycoming engine, mount it above a long, wide-bottomed hull, and skip over those obstacles at fifty bone-jarring miles an hour. You could sail over grass or marsh, too. However, since most drug runners and poachers used boats, Barrett had never been convinced that this was a significant advantage.

  On the other hand, Bear could cite some definite disadvantages for the airboat. The things were prohibitively expensive to operate and maintain. If taxpayers only knew. The airboat had a very limited range. And they were loud. Very loud.

  Reciprocating aircraft engines designed in the ’40s were not built with noise abatement in mind. Local fishermen hated them, and from the lawman’s perspective they were not well suited to any operation where a stealthy approach or reconnoiter was required. You just sure as hell were not going to sneak up on anybody with a six-foot prop and a hundred and eighty horses of aircraft engine.

  Which may have been the chief reason that Jarold Pearson preferred his own, customized alternative. Barrett was familiar with the newly painted bright-green craft that towed behind the warden’s Tahoe; the bird dog was a working boat designed especially for fishing mullet. Bird dogs were especially effective in shallow water, but were outlawed along with certain dimensions of gill nets when changes in state law made their operation illegal. Barrett had spent one afternoon of his life throwing nets off a bird dog. That was plenty.

  “The hell did you get that thing?” Barrett jerked a thumb rearward.

  Jarold smiled.

  “Confiscated. Fixed her up myself.”

  The boat had an unusual design. Fairly broad abeam, the hull only pulled six inches or so of water, even heavily loaded. There was no prop to stern, or even rudder. Instead, a waterwell mounted just forward of amidships served as transom for an outboard motor that would power and turn a prop just below the waterline. Those unique characteristics combined to produce a craft that was rugged, shallow drafting, and extremely maneuverable.

  “Turn on a dime?” Barrett inquired.

  “You bet.” Jarold smiled proudly. “And give you nine cents change. And then I made my own modification. I swapped out the old Mercury that came with the boat and put in a water jet.”

  Barrett immediately saw the advantages. With a water jet there was no prop to foul, no blade to become tangled in grass or bent on debris. Instead the engine used impellers to suck up ambient saltwater that was then hosed sternward at t
errific pressure. It was a simple system, reliable, easy to operate.

  And fast as hell.

  “I can make sixty miles an hour over six inches of water without pushing.” Jarold eyed his creation briefly in the rearview. “And I can turn three times inside any airboat at full throttle.”

  But the biggest advantage for law enforcers related to stealth. The jet engine was, in comparison to an airboat, baffled and quiet. You could actually approach a suspect without advertising your presence eight miles in advance.

  “Everybody out here’s got a gun,” Jarold remarked. “You sure as hell want to see him before he sees you.”

  Jarold’s observation reminded Barrett how the role of the game warden had changed over the years, how the stewards of forests and wetlands had extended their role to other areas of law enforcement. Even experienced outdoorsmen misconstrued the warden’s authority, greatly overestimating it in some cases, radically underestimating it in others.

  A game warden did not, for instance, and contrary to popular opinion, have greater authority to search and seize than other law enforcers. A warden had to have probable cause to look into a footlocker in the bed of a truck, or into the cabin of a boat, just as did a city cop or FBI agent. The difference was that courts routinely allowed game wardens much greater latitude in deciding what probable cause was than the latitude allowed a state trooper or city detective. After all, a warden could not reasonably be required to wait for a warrant before searching a man’s truck for deer shot out of season, or be forced to wait for a judge to say, yes, you can open Mr. Buchanan’s duffel bag to see if he’s bagged a dove or six more than his limit.

  A Florida highway patrolman could stop you for driving drunk as a hoot owl, but without a warrant or plain-sight evidence he couldn’t look to find the cocaine in your trunk. A game warden, in some circumstances, could.

  Barrett had stopped a ’68 Olds, on one occasion, near Jacksonville. The Olds fit the description of a vehicle recently involved in the shotgun homicide of a convenience store owner.

  But a general description of a car did not give Barrett the right to search the vehicle or its driver. Bear knew that. So did the driver. And the driver could have rolled on down the road but for a game warden who came easing onto the shoulder beside Barrett’s cruiser in an olive-green truck.

  “Morning, gentlemen. I been listenin’ to my radio,” the warden spoke up for the benefit of the trooper and local sheriff. “What we got here?”

  “Just a routine stop,” Barrett had replied. “Looks like he’s about ready to go.”

  “Well, I smell somethin’,” the warden declared, and nodded to the car’s backseat.

  “That a rod ’n reel, sir?”

  The driver stared straight ahead.

  “My brother’s.”

  The warden strolled back to the rear of the car. Bent deeply over the badly rusted trunk.

  “I smell fish in here. Gettin’ pretty ripe, seems like. You been fishin’, sir?”

  “No,” the driver denied it.

  “Got a fishing license, sir?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, there’s definitely something fishy, here. I think I better look.”

  “You son of a bitch,” the driver came boiling out of his car, but he couldn’t keep that warden from opening the trunk of that ’68 Olds.

  There it was, a shotgun and a bag filled with cash. The driver was eventually convicted of armed robbery and second-degree murder. The warden’s search was allowed, therefore the fruits of that search, however unrelated, were also allowed. Who, after all, could argue with a game warden’s sense of smell?

  Many folks, even experienced hunters, assumed that wardens could only enforce laws related to Fish & Game on lands that were hunted or fished. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jarold Pearson could enforce any state law on any private or state-controlled land.

  A warden was not a Barney Fife looking out for Bambi. He was a professional lawman working in a sophisticated system with the same responsibilites and duties as any trooper, sheriff, or agent from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. He was the perfect man to show Barrett Raines the camps and hideaways hiding the county’s newest and most persecuted population from the protection of the law.

  Bear and Jarold put in at the public boat ramp in Steinhatchee. There was no crystal strand along this beachhead. No sand, in fact, at all. You could not even see the Gulf, only great swathes of water that cut through the grass and zigzagged away from the slips of boats berthing near the ramp, aisles of water that trekked through antedeluvian carpets to some place where water and horizon met an uncertain boundary. The air was heavy here, a thick and fecund atmosphere conjured from decaying organic matter and saltwater heated over vast areas to settle in mists above ferns and conifers that crowded the ramp right up to the water’s edge.

  “Hard to believe we’re three weeks from Thanksgiving,” Jarold remarked.

  A breeze rose warmly. The grass undulated below flights of pelicans and cormorants.

  It was, truly, Barrett decided, a magical place.

  What would it take to spoil it? Already you could see the mix of old poverty and nouveau riche that peopled the area. Rusted-out washing machines and dilapidated trailers mixed company with the trophy homes of out-of-towners. A grid of streets formed the township proper. Those homes seemed to belong here, their corrugated roofs and screened porches not much changed from the homes of fishermen who had lived for generations on this enchanted littoral.

  A few businesses thrived, holding stubbornly onto strips of land up and down from where Barrett and Jarold launched their boat. Roy Buchanan, for one, still had his restaurant here, the only restaurant besides Ramona’s for miles up and down the coast. The hurricane in ’89 had destroyed his original business. Barrett could remember looking through the cracks in Roy’s first cypress floor to feed mullet or carp with crumbs from the biscuits that used to come with swamp cabbage and snapper.

  The place was sealed in, now, in the standard construction of studs and sheetrock and central air. Soon after the hurricane a man from Georgia came in to rebuild a pier and dockworks down the canal from Roy’s. A two-masted sloop rode the low tide near a dry dock newly built alongside. You could buy ice and bait and tackle in a half-dozen other places. Some entrepreneur even started a Blockbuster.

  “Cain’t be anybody local,” Jarold remarked and nudged the ignition.

  A boil of bubbles broke to stern. The bird dog swelled up from the water like the sudden rise of an elevator. Barrett grabbed a gunwale on instinct. He had never been totally at home on the water.

  “We’re fine,” Jarold reassured, taking a line to starboard of the nearest buoy and onto a lane of water warm as jade.

  “Never get tired of coming down here.” Barrett did not have to shout to be heard.

  “Well, the first place you’re gonna see,” Jarold replied with some pride, “is mine.”

  * * *

  Jarold followed the wavering coastline less than ten minutes before a tributary invisible to Barrett put him hard to port where a shanty rose on stilts not a hundred yards from the coast.

  “My little hideaway,” Jarold said proudly.

  It was just a box on stilts. Tin roof and screened-in windows.

  “I cook on propane.” Jarold cut the bird dog’s engine as he glided toward a crude pier buffered with a retreaded tire. “And shit in an outhouse. It’s primitive, but hey—it’s mine. Grab our water jug, would you?”

  Barrett picked up a canteen and stepped from the boat onto damp land. Jarold whipped a quick slipknot around a cypress stump.

  “Got my Jeep up front. From here we drive.”

  * * *

  Within minutes Barrett found himself in a vintage Willys Jeep following tracks fainter than deer signs that ran through bogs and lowlands to intersect tracts of pine trees set in identical rows stretching, apparently, forever.

  “How do you keep from getting lost in here?” Barrett ask
ed.

  “I still do, sometimes. What amazes me is how these newcomers find their way.”

  The first migrant camp they visited consisted of three families camped in a square shack insulated with newspaper. What Barrett wanted most was to gain the migrant workers’ confidence. Most folks south of the border were afraid of anyone in uniform, especially uniforms with sidearms. Barrett left his nine-millimeter in Jarold’s Jeep and made sure that he was seen to be unarmed. He took a long time to explain that the armed warden at his side was here to enforce laws related to fish and game.

  “(He’s not INS,)” Bear assured in Spanish the wizened elder, who stared suspiciously from the shade of a water oak. “(He is a constable in charge to make sure that hunters and fisherman do not break the law.)”

  “(We only fish for food,)” a younger man protested.

  “Sí, señor.” Barrett smiled warmly. “No es un problema. No problema.”

  A gaggle of children clung to their mothers’ skirts as the conversation jerked haltingly forward. Barrett realized quickly that his Spanish, while sufficient for polite conversation, was nowhere near fluent enough when he had to inquire about blackmail or extortion.

  “(How do you live?)” he tried that tack. “(How do you earn money?)”

  The elder man shrugged.

  “(We wait for El Toro,)” he said.

  “The Bull?” Barrett replied in English and saw that this much, at least, the older man understood.

  “(He is the jefe, señor.)”

  “Yanqui?”

  “No, no.” The old man shook his head. “(Mexicano. He finds us work.)”

  “(What kind of work?)”

  A self-deprecating shrug of the shoulders. Eyes that suddenly shift and lose contact.

  “(All kinds.)”

  “(All kinds. Yes. Like in the straw, señor? Does the Bull get you work baling straw?)”

  “(We just fish,)” a younger man broke in. “(We fish and we wait for work. That’s all.)”

  “(That’s fine.)” Barrett nodded. “Muy bien. (If you need help with anything—a doctor, maybe? For the children? You can call this number.)”

  Barrett gave the elder his card.

  “(My name is Bear,)” he said. And, still smiling, “(I am a good match for Señor Bull!)”