The Same River Twice

by Chris Offutt

  “You ain’t going there.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re in the Glades already.”

  I went outside to wait for Bucky. From the edge of town, the monotonous landscape of saw grass and sedge spread in every direction, devoid of humanity’s imprint. Above the low treeline was a pale gray sky. A mosquito bit me. Gradually and then in a rush I realized that the manner in which I’d been hired was unusual. As the humidity collided with my body and dampened my clothes, I wondered if coming to Florida in August was somewhat of an error. I had sixty dollars in my sock, enough to get somewhere else. I studied my map. With Lake Okeechobee as its eye, Florida looked like a turtle poking its head from the shell of America. From another angle, the state resembled a scarred and flaccid lingam, and I was headed for its tip. The wrinkled map was horribly familiar. If I left, I didn’t know where to go. I’d lived in or passed through most of the country already.

  A short, stocky man in a cowboy hat parked his truck at the curb.

  “God double damn,” he said. “Civilization! Are you Chris?”

  I nodded. He studied my swollen face.

  “Well, you don’t look too natural for a Naturalist.”

  Bucky handed me a can of mosquito repellent and we drove twenty miles along a narrow blacktop road that wound through clumps of mangrove and endless saw grass. He pointed out landmarks that were little more than bumps—Mahogany Hammock, Long Pine Key, a scenic overlook that was three feet high. Snakes lay in the road, drawing warmth from the tar. Huge birds flashed overhead.

  The road opened into the most pathetic outpost erected since Ponce de Leon’s first camp. Flamingo’s main building had two stories with an open breezeway overlooking the bay. Below that lay a dock. Strung along the coast was a succession of low ratty cabins, each having settled into the soft earth at a different pitch and yaw. Bucky sprayed himself with repellent, opened the truck, and ran to the nearest door.

  Though it was daylight, there was no one in sight and no cars in the lot. A pulley clanked on a naked flagpole. I had the feeling that reality had slipped: I’d been slaughtered on the interstate and this was a particularly malevolent form of afterlife. When I left the truck, a squad of mosquitoes found my neck and face. I ran to the mysterious door, jerked it open, and stumbled inside.

  “Jeezum Crow,” Bucky said. “Don’t let the swamp in.”

  He slammed the door and we spent the next couple of minutes killing mosquitoes. He gave me an official Naturalist shirt, the price of which would come out of my pay. He assigned me a room, and told me the employee dining hours. Room and board would also be deducted. I asked if we got paid in scrip, but he didn’t get the joke.

  “You missed supper,” Bucky said. “See Captain Jack after breakfast.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Who?”

  “Anybody.”

  “No tourists today. The employees stay mostly indoors.” He shook my hand. “Welcome to the swamp.”

  I got my pack and ran to my room, sustaining several bites while working the key. There was a dank bathroom, two double beds, and a sliding glass door that offered a ground-level view of the ocean a hundred yards away. Wet air stifled the room and mildew grew in the corners. I turned on the air conditioner, which pumped a weak stream of warm air.

  I unpacked and began to read the Florida book, rather than merely looking at the photographs as I had in Boston. Altitude was measured in inches. The fruit of the manchineel tree was water-soluble and so extremely toxic that taking shelter from rain beneath its boughs would poison you. I had voluntarily entered the most hostile environment known to man. Ponce de León had spent most of his time on the island of Bimini, and now I understood why.

  A consistent banging woke me at dawn. Bucky stepped inside wearing a bathrobe, cowboy hat, and boots.

  “Can you cook?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “Know anybody who can?”

  “I just got here.”

  “Right, right, the Naturalist. Forget breakfast, the cook quit. The boat’s broke down, so there’s no work for you today. Lucky bastard.”

  The Heron was a flat-bottomed scow with ten rows of benches beneath an awning. In the morning light that filtered through mist rising from the swamp, the boat looked as seaworthy as a brick. The hull showed a thick covering of algae and scum that clung like tattered lace to the wood. I’d traveled sixteen hundred miles to love my boat, planning to call it “she,” and found the crone of the triple goddess. The most one could say of the Heron was that she might not leak.

  A motorcycle honcho named Dirt concluded that to fix the motor, he’d have to pull it from the boat. I offered to help. We balanced the motor on the wide rail of the boat and began inching it onto the pier. Lateral pressure pushed the boat away from the dock. Dirt howled and I released the motor, which dropped into the dark green Florida Bay. Dirt spun to me, his face twitching at various spots. I backed away and he slammed his fist several times into the bridge.

  For the next three hours Dirt sat slumped in the stern, staring overboard at the place where the motor had sunk. Each time I moved from the bow, he looked at me with such rage that I returned to my post and fought mosquitoes. Finally Bucky arrived, grinning like a frog.

  “Fuck that motor,” he said to Dirt, “I’ve already got a new one on order. Be here in a week.”

  “You fuck the motor,” Dirt said. “1 loved that thing.”

  “Damn good motor, Dirt. Damn good. You hungry?”

  “Rafe come back?”

  “Got over his titty-fit in Miami and came running back to Slim.” Bucky looked at me. “They’re Latin homos.”

  When I didn’t answer, an expression of chagrin passed rapidly across his face. “Don’t mean to offend you if you’re one,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “Don’t matter either way. Slim’s worthless but Rafe used to cook in Havana. Got to take the hen to keep the drake.”

  After lunch, I learned that Flamingo had no beach. The land seemed neither to end nor the ocean begin, but at some imperceptible point one became the other in a fusion that shifted its boundary depending upon the tide. Mosquitoes hunted in great dark clouds. Tiny print on the can of repellent warned that the spray would corrode plastic, ruin varnish, and should not be ingested by humans. I limited its use to my clothes and sustained an average of a hundred and fifty bites per day. I soon developed something of an immunity.

  While waiting for the new motor, I met a few of my fellow workers. Rafe and Slim were part of Castro’s mass prison release of sociopaths and infidels. Slim told me that he loved Cuba for setting him free, and hated America for sending him to wash dishes in a swamp. Rafe pinned curlers to his hair, shaved his legs, and wore, as he said, “sensible flats” in the kitchen. His temper erupted three or four times a week.

  The Haitian prep cook was a gentle guy who smoked dope openly and was known simply as “the Haitian.” He constantly walked the shoreline searching for the Floridian’s dream—a lost bale of marijuana floating on the tide.

  The longest-term employee was a waiter named Grimmes, who always wore his white shirt and black pants. He’d spent so much time trotting to avoid the mosquitoes that he continued the habit indoors, I never heard Grimmes speak and neither had anyone else. He was the subject of much teasing by the only three single women in the swamp, all of whom were named Vickie. General consensus separated them as Vickie Uno, Vickie Dos, and Vickie Tres. One was the gigantic Ur-mother of the primordial swamp. Her breasts began at her throat, descending in a parabola that ended in a mysterious nether region beneath a loose dress. Her chief sidekick was less than five feet tall, and never stopped talking. She always wore the same jeans, with the top unsnapped. The third was older, seemed to be balding, and claimed to have been shot during a burglary.

  The three Vickies separated at night according to whim and men, living an extraordinary life for women of plain appearance. They were high priestesses with their pick
of consort. They ran in a pack with Rafe and Slim, generating an androgynous sexuality that rivaled the humidity in its permeation of the swamp. All of them smelled of salt, sex, and gin.

  Bucky’s lieutenant was a blond woman with the straight-wired brain of a reptile. Rose had a crude glass eye in her left socket, and limped on a prosthetic left leg. The Haitian was so terrified of her that if someone mentioned her name, he immediately made the sign of the cross, removed his belt, and ran it through the loops the opposite way.

  Before my arrival, I already had an enemy. Mossy had been the interim Naturalist before someone else could be conned into the job. He was very tall, thin from the waist down, and had six fingers on one hand. Mossy’s face and body embodied the myth of America, containing a gene of every immigrant who’d strayed across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, he also retained elements of the landbridge walkers during the Ice Age. A week before, he’d been crawling along a table in the dining room, following a rare insect he couldn’t identify. The rest of the employees calmly moved their plates for his passage. He suddenly recognized the bug, stood on the table, and lost the top of his scalp to the ceiling fan. By happenstance, I had called the following day and been hired. Mossy loathed me for having usurped his job.

  Several other staff members moved through the swamp in such a peripheral fashion that I never knew them. A steady stream of new employees trickled in daily. Some people lasted a full day, but most turned tail after a few hours. Two were followed and arrested by state police. Like rotgut and rainfall, I’d found my low spot.

  The breezeway was an open bridge that connected the main facility to a small park ranger’s office. Inside was a large, gridded map for charting the progress of storms from Africa to Florida. The ranger was from the Bronx. He devoted his hours to a tiny radio, trying to follow the Mets.

  Initially, life in Flamingo reminded me of a rooming house-inhabited by kooks and outcasts, dice that rolled off the table, wrinkles on the face of God. After a week of breathing the heavy air, I took a different view. We were de-evolved humans who’d chosen proximity to the foundations of our existence, living on neither land nor water, but in a foreign world of both. The transient existence prevented anyone from, getting too close. No one asked questions. The choice to live in a swamp implied a past that was somehow worse, therefore worth leaving. The Glades were America’s version of the French Foreign Legion, and the meager pay kept us all locked in harness.

  I soon lost weight from the steady fare of Cuban prison food. Starch was the mainstay, with canned vegetables boiled to limpness. Rafe’s primary concern was storing food that could withstand the humidity, since bread grew mold overnight. There were no dairy products for thirty miles. Breakfast was powdered eggs mixed with water and scrambled to a mortar the color of willow buds. I began eating fruit for every meal.

  At peak mosquito time I lounged in the ranger’s air-conditioned office, reading pamphlets about the swamp. He could never answer any of my questions. He didn’t like the swamp and he didn’t like me. I borrowed all his books and learned enough to fool any hapless tourist into believing I knew the area like a Seminole. Two weeks after my arrival, Dirt installed the new engine. My vacation was over. The last day before working the tour boat, I applied a thick layer of mud to my face and hands and entered the mangroves.

  I became lost immediately. Tree roots rose beyond my head, their branches forming a dim canopy. A myriad of insects swarmed over the mud, entering my ears, mouth, and nose. Water splashed mysteriously in all directions. Though I’d not taken a dozen steps, it was impossible to discern my trail. Panic doused me like kerosene. I wanted to run and to scream. My perceptions became so lucid that I could feel my sweat straining against the mud filling my pores. I saw nothing except the strange cellular familiarity of wet earth. My boot caught an underwater root and I fell. Mud washed from my face and the mosquitoes attacked. I scrambled to the nearest tree and began climbing, feet slipping on the branches, harsh leaves tearing my face. The tree was small but it merged with a large one and I was able to navigate above the water from tree to tree. A line of sunlight pierced the foliage. I moved closer, lost my foothold, and fell out of the swamp a few feet from where I’d entered.

  Two silhouetted figures were walking toward me, one short, one enormous.

  “There’s your Naturalist,” Bucky said. “Be double damned if he ain’t the seriousest yet.”

  I shaded my eyes and looked into the ancient face of Captain Jack.

  “Are you a serious-minded man?” he said.

  I nodded. He plucked a three-inch chameleon from my shoulder. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, he squeezed its belly until the tiny jaws gaped wide, like a clothespin. He lifted the lizard to his ear and released it. The chameleon clamped its mouth around the captain’s earlobe and wriggled its feet wildly in the air. I began to laugh.

  “He’ll do,” the captain said.

  Bucky frowned, both hands on his hips, shaking his head. It was the first and only time I saw him unable to produce his managerial grin.

  Captain Jack climbed lithely aboard the Heron and looked at me as if waiting. His hair was close-cropped, white as salt. His eyes were slits in a sun-creased face. With his chin slightly raised, hooked nose, and fence post posture, he had the air of a Roman statesman.

  “Ever been on a boat, kid?” he said.

  “No sir.”

  “You cast off and I’ll do the rest.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Were you in the service?”

  “No sir.”

  “Do you call all men ‘sir’?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “My father made me.”

  “Was he in the service?”

  “No sir.”

  He stared at me for nearly a minute. He was really looking, regarding in the older sense of its meaning. When he spoke, his voice was softer than before.

  “You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ ”

  I unhooked the lines and we moved away from the dock and into the bay. Flamingo’s rickety line of buildings looked twice as pathetic from the sea, vulnerable and lonely, as if they’d been beached by tide rather than built by man. We entered a channel and moved inland. The red mangroves leaked tannin that dyed the water the flat color of old blood. Captain Jack slowed the engine to a dull steady pulse. Our passage had curved until we were surrounded by the dark groves.

  “What happened to your ears?” I said.

  The tips of both were corrugated like sawteeth, red and ragged.

  “Healed-up cancer. You get it from the sun reflecting off the ocean.”

  I looked into the shadowy world of the shore. “We’re safe here, I guess.”

  “Yes,” he said. “This is one of the dark places on earth.”

  The somber landscape slid by. Above the engine’s laboring throb came the drone of millions of insects, eating and being eaten, living a life in a single season. Captain Jack stared far ahead, handling the Heron by intuition.

  “Watch that log, kid.”

  I followed his gaze forward, seeing only the endless gnarled mangroves and occasional knees of cypress. The boat’s wake spread behind us like a turkey’s tail fan. I expected to hear the sound of a log striking the bow, thumping the length of the boat and ruining the propeller.

  “Port side,” he said.

  Barely visible in the murky water, a log floated away from us, its knobby surface blending with the swamp. It bumped against a strip of muddy shore and continued to rise. Water drained away as a tapered snout climbed the bank, followed by two stubby legs, a long armored body, two more legs, and a scaled tail that dragged the mud. The alligator began walking parallel to the boat, head high as if proud. I felt both envy and awe. Three hundred million years had passed in the forty seconds I watched it move from water to land.

  “Small,” Captain Jack said. “Only runs to a six-purser.”

  We reached Coot Bay, a lagoon soaked in light where butterflies flitte
d among the branches. Our passage out seemed less foreboding. As we moved into the final turn that opened to the Gulf, an eagle attacked an osprey in the sky. The osprey dropped the fish it was carrying and the eagle snatched it in midair. Captain Jack called the eagle “an aerial rat.”

  For the next three weeks we traveled into the swamp twice a day. There was a sunset voyage into the Florida Bay, watching the sun fall behind the Gulf, staining the long strips of cloud pink and scarlet. Occasionally dolphins cavorted beside us, blowing funnels of water into the air. The plaintive cry of gulls faded into the dusk.

  I stood amidships with binoculars and a portable PA system, identifying birds, trees, the occasional manatee and alligator. My most enthusiastic lecture concerned hurricanes. They arrived an average of every seven years, and the last one of any real force had been in 1926. The Everglades was now severely congested, thick and stagnant. A hurricane acted as a giant cleaning machine, ridding the swamp of overgrowth, depositing new seeds and soil, blowing tropical birds from island to mainland. Nature required hurricanes. They were as necessary and valuable as forest fires in the Northwest.

  The ranger gave me a pad of graph paper for mapping the movement of storms. A station in Key West announced weather updates every hour, and Captain Jack lent me a radio. Of three tropical depressions, only one developed into a storm, but it petered out while crossing the Atlantic.

  When a tour was canceled due to weather, Captain Jack and I talked.* During forty years in the Coast Guard, he had killed three men, only one of whom he regretted. Smuggling was the chief crime. I asked if he knew Spanish and he claimed enough to communicate at sea.

  “Let’s hear it,” I said.

  “Cómo se llama? De dónde es? Todo es una mentira. Salga de la barca.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “What’s your name? Where are you from? It’s all a lie. Get out of the boat.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing, That’s all I ever needed.”

  The majority of our passengers were European tourists making their first American stop. The French complained that our bread was too soft, the British fretted about malaria, and the Germans hated our beer. One day thirty French people crowded our boat. We moved into the bay and I spotted a log floating along the bank. Following Captain Jack’s bilingual example, I spouted my best French: “A droit, a droit! Alligator a droit!”