Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

  Jimmie and Miguel were busily putting up food and wiping counters and Angus was stuffing dishes into the dishwasher. Okay, I’d have to redo all that, using some serious cleaning stuff. As I shooed them all out of the kitchen, Jimmie said, “Didn’t I tell you boys she’d go and do it over? Didn’t I?”

  “Can’t you just leave it till later?” Angus said, who was not staying shooed and was peering back into the kitchen.

  “Son, you don’t know this gal, do you?” Jimmie said.

  “Shoo,” I said, and waved my hands at Angus until he left again. Like a whirling-dervish imitator of the all-natural version of Mr. Clean, I sprayed, wiped, cleaned, mopped, cleared, and disinfected, as fast as I could using borax and something natural from the Granary that contained orange-peel oil and claimed it killed germs as good as the high-tech chemical stuff. Still, breaking my Clorox habit was hard. I left the kitchen, smiled at Miguel, and then, as if invisible hooks were pulling me, I scampered back into the kitchen for a quick spray-and-wipe with Clorox while I held my breath. When I was done, definitely so were any germs, but now my kitchen smelled like Clorox and not oranges, so I had to do the orange-peel spray again.

  “Damnation, you’re not cleaning up after slaughtered hogs in here,” Angus said, again hovering in the doorway.

  “I sure was hoping you’d gotten over this,” Jimmie said from beside Angus. “Reckon you ought to see that doctor again?”

  “All ready,” I said, ignoring them both, and detouring toward the laundry room and tossing the cleaning cloths in the hamper on the way toward Miguel.

  Now I was primed for a hike in the hammocks with Miguel.

  Oh, and, drat, with Angus too. He reminded me he was going to be there by saying, “Aren’t you gonna be hot in that?” Oh, and this from a man in cowboy boots.

  “Better hot than sunburned and bug bit,” I said. “Besides, I am pretty heat tolerant.” Yeah, all those folks who migrate down from Michigan complain about how hot the Gulf Coast is, but they don’t know what hot is. Hot is the dog days of late summer in Bugfest, Georgia, my hometown, where 105 degrees with 90 percent humidity, coupled with a generous facial coating of gnats, was the norm.

  “Yeah, me too,” Angus said, “heat tolerant, I mean.” He smiled at me, and I had the odd feeling I was winning him over, though I wasn’t trying to do so. I glanced at Miguel to gauge my approval rating in his eyes, but he was looking out my front window.

  As we darted out the door, Jimmie gave me a stern, disapproving look, and I mentally dared him to say anything.

  “You don’t mind riding in the middle, do you? Might be a bit tight,” Miguel asked as I took in his small, red pickup. No, tight was good, I thought, and hoped he liked the scent of citronella.

  We crowded into the truck and roared away. When we were well into Manatee County, Miguel pulled off the interstate at Moccasin Wallow Road, dropped down to Duette Road, and then turned onto an unnamed road with pavement apparently left over from the FDR era. We crossed a bridge, over a tea brown river framed by water and live oaks, and Miguel said, “That’s the east fork of the Manatee River.”

  After bumping along, Miguel finally stopped the truck by a gate across a little driveway, but kept the engine running. Behind the gate and fence, a dense hammock of slash and loblolly pines, saw palmettos, cabbage palms, and live oaks stretched before us, dappled with shades of green and yellow in the afternoon sunlight.

  “This is one of the last remaining big wildernesses in the area, outside of the park system,” Miguel said. “The mining company owns about ten thousand acres all together, three thousand of it in Manatee County, in this tract. Wetlands from forks off the Manatee River and Horse Creek run through it. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  It was. We all made little noises of appreciation.

  “You know what it’ll look like if they get to mine it?” Angus asked.

  Yes, thank you, I’d managed to get outside of the Sarasota city limits in my lifetime, and I’d driven through the nearby moonscaped phosphate-mined areas in other counties. Reclamation claims aside, this pretty little subtropical forest would never be the same once the phosphate miners were done digging the ore from beneath the surface. I sighed, sadly, and said, “It’ll be ruined.”

  “Well, it ain’t over yet,” Angus said. “They don’t have their permits. You wait and see.” And he grinned, lifting the moroseness that crept into the truck cab as we thought about the potential destruction of the land in front of us.

  “Let’s hide the truck and take a walk,” Miguel said, and drove the pickup off the road until a clump of trees more or less hid it, that is, if you weren’t looking right at it. He grabbed a sack from the back of the truck, and I thought, Oh, good, a picnic.

  As we walked along the fence, I counted nine “No Trespassing/Violators Will Be Prosecuted” signs before Miguel held the barbed wire apart for me and I scampered through the opening in the fence, with Angus on my tail.

  Though a perfectly good trail presented itself to us, Miguel led us away from it, and some thrashing was involved as we stumbled through the thick undergrowth. A wild blackberry bush, with its clinging thorns, attacked me, and I was glad I’d worn the long jeans, though I wished I’d been a little more liberal with the citronella. We went through a sandy patch of scrub before we passed into a low-lying area, with ancient-looking cypress trees guarding a wetland scattered with the white petals of wild lilies and sedge.

  Angus brought us to an abrupt stop to point out a jack-in-the-pulpit, a green and maroon flower, saying, “You can eat the corm, a bit pungent raw, but good boiled.”

  None of us seemed inclined to pluck it for a snack, so Miguel took the lead, and had us traipsing back toward a drier wooded area. As small, flying things lit and bit, I watched Miguel’s butt to keep my mind off Lyme disease and West Nile.

  In short order, but not before I’d begun to sweat in a totally nonsexy way, we came to a creek with a slow current of brown water. “The famous Horse Creek, I presume,” I said.

  “Yep, but it’s the west fork of it. Most of the existing mining on Horse Creek is on the main branch in Hardee County. Now they want to start mining on this part of it.”

  Miguel opened the sack and pulled out a stick thing with something round and oddly shaped at the end of it, and then still another stick thing with the same thing on the end, and then a Baggie of what looked and smelled like big-cat poop.

  It suddenly occurred to me that Jimmie’s fatherly advice might have been well offered. I mean, come on, I was miles from other people, I had no weapons, I was with two men I hadn’t known before yesterday, and they had poop in a bag and weird stick things.

  It did not seem to bode well for me. I started backing up, aiming for at least a head start.

  “Cat paws,” Miguel said, and dangled the stick thing near me. “Take it,” he offered.

  I snatched it, thinking, Weapon.

  Oh, yeah, like I was Wonder Woman and could fend off two men in their prime with a stick that had a cat paw on the end of it. For good measure, I kept backing up.

  “Where’re you going?” Angus asked.

  To hell, eventually, if you believe the preacher in my brother Delvon’s Pentecostal church. But my plan was to postpone the trip for a few more decades, and I was certainly in no mood today to be cast in that direction by loco boys with evil plans. I was contemplating running backward when I saw Miguel pull two more stick things out of the sack.

  “All four paws. Anatomically correct. Made from plaster casts of real tracks.” Miguel grinned like a little kid with new Christmas toys.

  The grin reassured me for a moment. But then he held up the Baggie. “Panther poop. Fresh. Totally authentic.”

  I jumped when Angus touched my arm. “Look at the end of that. Look at that paw. Ain’t that a beauty?” he said.

  “What the hell are you two up to?” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as spooked as I felt.

  “Panther tracks by the creek. Panther scat in just the rig
ht places. A phone call to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife folks, and you know what you’ve got?” Angus asked.

  Yeah, crazy people with poop fetishes thrashing in the woods, I thought, but then, I actually thought about it. And stopped backing up.

  “Evidence of a protected species,” I said. And, a popular endangered species at that. The rare and elusive Florida panther, the darling of the armchair environmentalists, the poster child of the nearly extinct. A Florida panther needed a wide territorial range to hunt, breed, and survive, and to protect the drastically dwindling number of panthers, that range was protected under state and federal law. That much even I knew. What my loco boys were doing was setting up a rallying point for those who were trying to save the panther by saving its habitat.

  “You’ve got a way to stop the mine,” I said. Between the state and fed regs that would protect the habitat and the influx of the save-the-panther crowd, those mining permits were, if not doomed, then at least on hold for a long time. And Olivia had managed, despite my inattention, to teach me this much: In the fight to save habitat, a long delay of the inevitable destruction was usually your only victory.

  “Yep,” Angus said and grinned at me like he was the proud father and I was the mentally handicapped two-year-old who finally said my first word. “Once we show there’s an endangered Florida panther on this property, feds and other folks will come out of the woodwork to stop those permits.”

  I looked at the end of the stick I held. It did indeed look like a model of a big cat’s paw. Cool, I thought, wait until I tell my brother Delvon, who had once lived in the woods and had run an unadvertised U-pick marijuana and opium farm until the Georgia Bureau of Investigations put him out of business. Delvon loved wild things, being one himself, and he loved the big cats. Also, he especially loved screwing with Official Big Boys.

  “You remember, another panther was sighted here, a few months ago. When the fish and wildlife people confirmed it, those mining permits the Antheus people were pushing for came to a halt,” Miguel said. “For a while, anyway.”

  I heard the sadness in his voice, and tried to remember. There’d been something I’d read in the newspaper about a panther and a mine site, but I only vaguely recalled it. Seems like I’d been in trial that week. When I’m in trial, nothing except that case sticks in my brain. But I didn’t think the story had a happy ending.

  “Sons of bitches killed it,” Angus said, his voice low and angry.

  “They killed it?” I said, in disbelief. Who kills a Florida panther? They are almost all gone anyway. “Who would kill it?”

  “Think about it,” Miguel said. “Who had the most to gain?”

  “Antheus? Somebody from the mining company killed it?”

  “Left the body by that gate, where we stopped. Right outside the gate, on the public easement. A female panther. Gut shot, and left to die. Fish and Wildlife investigated, but never could prove who killed it.”

  Suddenly I hated people.

  “Fish and Wildlife folks still coming out here, looking around, thinking they might find a mate,” Angus said. “But nobody’s found any evidence of a second panther. Yet.”

  “So, that’s why we’re here. We’re going to introduce the world to this new panther.” Miguel held up the Baggie of cat poop. “Little panther scat, plus a set of tracks down to the creek, should leave a convincing trail.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said, and grinned like I meant it.

  While Angus showed off how much he knew about Florida panthers by telling us how far to space the tracks, and all such stuff as that, Miguel and I walked side by side, me with the left paws, and him with the right, and we made a clear track of the panther along the edge of Horse Creek, then down into the water, as if the big cat was drinking, then back to the high grasses, where Miguel left the scat, I scratched sand over most of it, and then Angus neatly followed our trail, brushing out all our footprints with a palmetto frond.

  We hooped and hollered a bit, danced in the thick undergrowth where we wouldn’t leave prints, and Miguel pulled a camera out of the sack, snapped a couple shots of the scat and a long view of the panther’s tracks, and then we boogied out of there, happy as kids who’d put a scarlet king snake in the teacher’s desk.

  Back in the truck, I took both Miguel’s and Angus’s hand for a second, and said, “Thank you for including me.”

  They nodded and we crawled into the cab of the pickup and started back toward pavement.

  Okay, I was glad to have been along on this Screw the Big Boys trip, and I couldn’t wait to tell Delvon what we’d done, but I got to puzzling. “Why’d you take me?” I asked.

  “We wanted to test your dedication to the Cause,” Miguel said.

  What cause? I thought, but then Miguel took a curve a bit too fast and I slid into him, thigh to thigh, and my brain just stopped working.

  Yeah, okay, I was kind of engaged to Philip, even if I wasn’t talking to him right now, and I needed to get a grip on this lusting-after-Miguel thing. Pushing my leg away from physically touching Miguel, I promised myself not to act upon that lust until I resolved things with Philip, one way or the other.

  Philip the steady, Philip the smart, Philip who brings wine and roses—I started listing his positive traits. For starters, he’d never have led me across a barbed-wire fence, through the no-trespassing signs, on a cat-track-and-scat spree.

  But that was as much a negative as a plus for Philip, I realized, and leaned down to scratch a bug bite.

  Angus scratched at something on his leg at the same time and pushed against me, and when I pulled away, I bumped back up against Miguel. Yeah, okay, it wasn’t my fault the front seat was so small, so I went with the flow and let my thigh sit there bouncing against Miguel’s and setting off electrical charges as the little red truck lurched down the road.

  Angus broke my reverie. “Hey, Mike, let’s go by and check on Lenora. We’re in the neighborhood.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Miguel said, then smiled at me. “It’ll be another education for Lilly.”

  Not sure I wanted to learn anything else today from my fake-the-panther clients, I glanced at my watch. I wondered when my next chance at getting some bottled water was going to be. A Save the Forest trail mix bar wouldn’t hurt either.

  Apparently catching me looking at my watch, Miguel the considerate asked, “Lilly, is it all right with you if we take a side trip?”

  “Does she have a refrigerator with bottled water?”

  “Yep,” Angus said.

  Miguel turned on a dirt road, then bumped along until he cut left on a branch that I would have considered a primitive trail not meant for motorized vehicles. Bump, lurch, rub went my thigh against Miguel. Definitely foreplay potential.

  “You ought to see these roads after a good rain, hardly passable at all. The Manatee River is just right over there, behind those water oaks,” Angus said, pointing to a stand of oaks to the left of the truck, and once more breaking my sexual reverie.

  Okay, the cosmic forces had assigned Angus the role of keeping me from getting in too over my head with Miguel. I should be grateful. No, Philip the almost forgotten should be grateful.

  On that disrupted note, Miguel drove through a tunnel of loblolly pines and live oaks, and turned left toward the hidden river, into a wide opening. When he stopped the truck, I looked about. I couldn’t see the river, but I could smell its wet-moss and primordial scent. In front of me, I saw a collection of Florida-cracker outbuildings, a barn with a rusted tin roof, and a dog-trot house, well past its prime. By, say, like a lifetime. A boxy Volvo was parked under a tree, and, given its dings and bangs, I figured it for an old one.

  Lots of plastic animal cages, a pump, a metal watering trough, piles of stuff, and more piles of stuff. My can’t-stand-piles-of-stuff inner alarm went off—big time. On the other hand, I felt like I had just been transported back to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s time and place. The dog-trot house with its central hallway and tin roof had a
certain charm.

  As Miguel and Angus jumped out of their respective sides of the truck, I followed, watching closely where my feet landed. When I looked up, a woman was standing in the doorway of the old house. She was wearing a blue scarf around her head, turban style, and had the taut yellow skin of someone seriously ill. Then I realized there was no hair showing beneath the turban. Her lips were drawn and narrow, deep lines and purple shadows surrounded her eyes, and her thinness had passed fashionable about ten pounds back.

  “Angus, Miguel, you boys are a sight for sore eyes. Come on in and help me feed the baby birds.” Her voice was light, chipper.

  “Lenora, we’d like to introduce you to our friend Lilly. She’s our lawyer.” Miguel offered a hand to Lenora and she took it, squeezed it, and smiled.

  But Angus barreled past me, straight into Lenora, and he hugged her until I worried he would crack a rib.

  “Lilly, delighted,” she said, when Angus finally let her go. “If you are their lawyer, you must be smart and dedicated. Do you like birds?”

  Nodding, I held my ground and didn’t move toward her. I was still nervous about all the piles of stuff, and, okay, a little nervous about her. I don’t always know how to act around sick people; crazy people, yes, but there I’ve had plenty of experience.

  Nervous or not, the next thing I knew I was inside the dog-trot cabin, listening to a raucous chorus of feed-me-feed-me chirps and shoving dampened chunks of puppy chow mix down the throats of baby birds, while Lenora coached me. “Easy, easy. Just a little bit at a time. They’ve got tiny throats.”

  Well, okay, at least I didn’t have to regurgitate worms.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Miguel and Angus were working a row of cages, feeding the baby birds with a rhythm that suggested knowledge and comfort with the routine.