Accustomed to the Dark

by Walter Satterthwait

  I waited. A mosquito bit me on the back of the hand. I waited some more. I noticed that there were no phone lines or electric lines going into the house.

  Which would maybe explain why Carpenter hadn’t called here before we left Clearwater.

  Ten minutes later, Carpenter came out onto the porch, his sunglasses in his hand. He was followed by a short, swarthy man wearing jeans and a khaki shirt.

  Carpenter waved the sunglasses at me, beckoning, and I got out of the truck. As I reached the porch, Carpenter said to me, “This is Eugene Samson. He’s going to lend us a canoe. Eugene, Joshua Croft.”

  I shook hands with Eugene Samson. Silently he bobbed his round head at me. He looked as though he were at least part Native American. “Thank you,” I said. It seemed like the thing to say to a man who was going to lend you a canoe. I turned to Carpenter. “How do you know we’ll need a canoe?”

  “They’re in there,” he said, nodding toward the forest. “Lucero and Martinez. They went in with a third man, two days ago. They were using an inflatable.”

  “Mr. Samson saw them?” I asked.

  “His cousin did. Down the line a bit.”

  “We’re lucky.”

  His smile twitched. “No way for them to get into the swamp, anywhere along here, without someone seeing them.” He nodded toward Samson. “This is their territory. They keep an eye out.”

  I nodded. “So there are three of them.”

  He shook his head. “The third man came back out yesterday.” His smile twitched again. “Too bad.”

  “You know him? The third man?”

  He nodded. “I know him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A Cuban. Another Marielito. Name’s Esteban.” Lightly, he stroked the white scar at his throat. “He gave me this.”

  I looked from Carpenter to Eugene, back to Carpenter. “So that’s it? We know they’re in there? It’s that simple?”

  Carpenter smiled that smile. “Simple? Couple hundred square miles of swamp?”

  “How long before the third guy came back? This Esteban?”

  “Just under twenty-four hours, Eugene says. And the inflatable was using a trolling motor. Electric. Not much faster than a canoe.”

  “So Lucero and Martinez can’t be more than twelve hours away.”

  His smile twitched. “Unless Esteban dropped them off, and they walked.”

  “Lot of walking room back in the swamp, is there?”

  “Some.” He nodded. “But likely you’re right. Likely they’re about twelve hours away. Thing is, we don’t know in which direction.”

  “You don’t have any ideas?”

  “One or two.” He looked at me appraisingly. “You ever been in a canoe before?”

  “Once. A long time ago.”

  He nodded, slipped on the sunglasses. “Let’s get the gear down to the water.”

  We carried the packs around behind Eugene Samson’s shack. The swamp began back there, a small pond of black water, maybe thirty feet across, spotted here and there with flat green pads of lotus. At its northern end, a thin channel led off into the grasses.

  The canoe was aluminum, dull and dented but watertight. Samson swung it up alongside the shore and he helped us load it, everything but the shotgun and the gunbelts. When we finished, Carpenter handed me my belt and I strapped it on.

  Carpenter strapped on his own, then picked up the shotgun. “What’s it carrying?” he asked me.

  “Double ought.”

  He nodded. “I don’t like loaded shotguns in a boat.” He worked the pump, jacking out the shells until the action stayed open. He gathered up the shells, stuffed them into the big pockets of his field pants. He lay the gun in the canoe, beside the packs.

  “Be right back,” he said, and went off toward the truck. I looked at Samson. He stared back at me, impassive.

  When Carpenter returned, he was wearing an olive drab field cap and he was carrying a pair of knee pads, the kind that skateboarders use. He handed them to me.

  He said, “Canoe’s a lot more stable when you kneel to paddle. These’ll help.”

  “You brought them along?” I asked him.

  “Thought we might need them.”

  I strapped on the knee pads.

  “Where’s your hat?” he asked me.

  “In the pack.”

  “Get it out. And the repellent.”

  I squatted down beside the canoe, opened the pack, found the hat and the repellent. I put on the hat, squirted some repellent into my hand, slapped it over my exposed skin. I tucked the bottle into the other shirt pocket.

  “Okay,” Carpenter said. He handed me a paddle. “You’re sitting forward. Go ahead.” He held onto the frame of the canoe as I stepped carefully aboard, left foot, right foot. When I eased down onto the thwart, the canoe wobbled. Anxious ripples fanned out across the water.

  “Kneel,” Carpenter told me.

  I knelt.

  The prow of the canoe swung away from the shore, toward the center of the pool, and then suddenly the boat was drifting forward. I turned around. Carpenter was kneeling behind me, beyond the backpacks.

  On the shore, Eugene Samson stood and watched us. Impassively.

  I looked at my watch. One o’clock.

  27

  CARPENTER HAD BEEN right about the hat. Without it, I would’ve fried my brains. The sunlight poured down from that washed-out blue sky and streamed out along the dark surface of the still water like molten metal, yellow and dazzling, and it pressed with physical force against my head and shoulders and arms. Despite the sunscreen, my hands began to go red.

  I didn’t have much to do. Carpenter told me, early on, not to paddle until he said so. Not to talk, either.

  So I knelt there quietly as the canoe slid along.

  We sat low in the water, below the tops of the grasses. Sometimes the channel became so narrow and winding that all I could see was grass, a forest of it, left and right and straight ahead. Carpenter used his paddle to push us and I used mine to fan aside the brittle stalks as they came in. They fanned back at me and then rustled and rasped along the frame of the boat. Now and then, in front of us, something plopped into the water, startled and startling. Now and then, off to the side, something chittered and fluttered.

  Sometimes the channel suddenly opened onto a small quiet lake, and a single crane, or a pair of them, flapped big astonished wings and climbed up into the sunlight. Carpenter didn’t like the open water, and he kept the canoe close to the wall of grass. Occasionally a fish jumped out there, a flash of silver, a gurgling splash, rings of ripples slowly widening. Once a large dark snake swam away from the boat, its head above water, its graceful body slowly whipping back and forth beneath the surface. “Cottonmouth,” said Carpenter.

  Snakes didn’t bother me. We had snakes in New Mexico. What we didn’t have were alligators, and periodically, in the back of my mind, it was alligators I saw, the long bodies lying motionless in the water, the bulbous snouts, the empty patient eyes. But on that first day I saw them only in the back of my mind.

  There was land from time to time, low islands of tall cedar, the knobby trunks pale and spectral, like the spines of skeletons. When we came to an island, Carpenter would steer the canoe toward the bank and then paddle more slowly alongside it as he searched for signs. The thin strip of shade was welcome, but he never found any signs.

  He had been right, too, about the insect repellent. Mosquitos whined at my ear, tiny eager buzz saws, but they never settled on my flesh. And he had been right about the knee pads. If I hadn’t been wearing them, I would’ve been in agony as soon as we left Samson’s. But after a couple of hours, the pressure began to get troublesome. I spent the next hour shifting my weight, as gently and as quietly as I could.

  At four-thirty we came to still another island, this one tiny, only a small cluster of gray cedars soaring upward. Carpenter aimed the canoe toward the bank and then, at the last moment, swung it smoothly to the left. The right side smac
ked gently against the ground.

  I looked back at him.

  “Wait’ll I get out,” he said. He rose as easily from the kneeling position as he might’ve risen from a sofa. He stepped lightly from the boat to the shore, then stepped toward me. Squatting, he gripped the canoe’s side with his left hand and offered me his right. I pushed myself up onto the thwart, took his hand, and clambered from the boat. I did it neither easily nor lightly.

  “You see something?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Time for a break.”

  He would get no argument from me. I put my hands against my hips and bent my torso backward, stretching the stiffened muscles.

  There was a rope at the boat’s stern, long enough to reach the trunk of the nearest cedar. Carpenter tied it there, made it fast. Stepping back to the canoe, he squatted down beside it, opened his pack, burrowed around for a while. He came up with a canteen and a plastic bag of gorp.

  He stood, tossed me the canteen. His aim was still good.

  I unscrewed the cap, drank. The water was warm, but it was wet.

  Carpenter sat down, leaning his back against one of the cedar trunks, straightening out his long legs, crossing them at the ankles. I walked over and handed him the canteen. He offered me the bag of gorp.

  I opened it, poured myself a handful, gave it back to Carpenter. I sat down about four feet away, against another cedar. The ground was damp.

  Carpenter took a swallow from the canteen. “How’re the knees?” he asked me.

  “They’ve been better.”

  He nodded. “You get used to it,” he said. He screwed back the canteen’s cap, set the canteen upright beside him on the soft ground. He took off his sunglasses, lay them in his lap, rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

  “What do we do,” I said, “when we run out of water?” I flipped some gorp into my mouth. Raisins, nuts, bits of chocolate.

  His smile came and went. He nodded toward the dark channel. “What’s that?”

  “Polluted.”

  “There’s iodine in the first aid kit. And some salt tablets. How’s your bladder?”

  “Distended.”

  He smiled. “Pick a spot.”

  “In a minute. When did it happen? With Esteban?”

  He frowned, and for a moment I thought he was going to fob me off with another curt answer. But maybe the silence of the swamp had relaxed him. Or maybe he’d grown to admire the way I caught everything he tossed.

  He peeled off his fatigue cap, lowered his head, ran his hand forward over the damp white hair, raised his head again. “In eighty-one,” he said. “I was working a camp over in Broward County. Training some Cubans. Esteban was one of them. We had an argument. He came at me later, while I was asleep. I woke up in time.” He smiled his twitchy smile, and then scratched at the scar on his throat. “But I was a little slow.”

  “What kind of training?”

  “Paramilitary.”

  “Anti-Castro Cubans?”

  He nodded and then looked up into the branches of the cedars. “We’ve got a few hours of light left.” He turned back to me. “Camp here or go on?”

  “Go on.”

  He nodded. “There’s a place, couple of miles away. They could be there.”

  We glided through the silence. I had only Carpenter’s word for it that this part of the swamp wasn’t the same part we’d covered earlier. I could see where the sunlight angled into the trees and through the grasses, so I knew where the west lay. At any given moment I knew which direction we were taking. But it all looked the same—narrow channels through the grasses, pools and ponds and lakes, sometimes a hummock of land, sometimes an island.

  About an hour after we started off again, I found out why Carpenter didn’t like the open water. We were sliding along the edge of a small lake when suddenly the canoe picked up speed. I glanced back.

  “Paddle!” he rasped, and pointed his oar toward a small opening in the grass.

  I paddled, and a moment later we slipped into the opening.

  Another powerful thrust from Carpenter and we rounded a bend in the channel. I glanced back again.

  “Airboat,” he said. “Probably a ranger.”

  I heard it then, a distant muffled moan, growing louder. The volume increased until it became a roar, sounding like the airplane engine it was. It passed us by on the far side of the thin wall of grass. The grass swayed and shivered, the canoe bobbed gently. Slowly, the roar faded.

  “What’s he looking for?” I asked Carpenter.

  “Poachers, probably.” He smiled. “You want to explain the shotgun?”

  “Nope.”

  He nodded. “We’ll give him a few minutes,” he said.

  An hour later, when the sky had grown darker overhead and the slant of the sunlight had become almost horizontal, Carpenter slowed the canoe. We were in a narrow channel, nothing but grass in every direction.

  I turned around. “What?”

  Far off, a bird made a whooping sound that wavered up and down the scale, then died off.

  “We’re almost there,” Carpenter said. He lay his paddle inboard, leaned forward, lifted the shotgun and the box of deer slugs. He set the box on the top of his pack, reached into his pocket, pulled out a shot shell. He slipped the shell into the action of the gun, then opened the box, removed a slug, and slipped that in. He kept loading the weapon, alternating shotshells and slugs.

  “How are you with a shotgun?” he asked me.

  “Not great.”

  “You mind if I carry it?”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “Get that pistol ready.”

  I pulled out the Beretta, worked the slide, pushed the safety.

  He lay the shotgun across his pack and he picked up the paddle. “No talking.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we were peering through a veil of grass, across a stretch of water, at another cypress island. It was no more than twenty-five yards long. At its east end, beneath the trees, stood a ramshackle shanty of weathered planking. The tar paper of the roof lay in uneven strips down along the walls, and the walls themselves had warped, leaving gaps through which the fading light was visible.

  We watched the small building for a few minutes, silently, but it was obvious the place was empty.

  Carpenter paddled the canoe toward shore. We got out and took a look at the shack. Its south side was open, facing the water. No one had used it for years.

  “What is it?” I asked Carpenter.

  “Poacher’s shack.” He glanced around. “Let’s make camp.”

  “What were they poaching?”

  “Alligators.”

  “And we’re going to camp here?”

  He waved his hand around the clearing. “You see any alligators?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t worry. They feel the same way about you that you feel about them.”

  I doubted that.

  The graphite poles for the tent were shock-corded, and it took Carpenter only five minutes to have the thing up and ready. It was a dome tent, big enough for three people. He unlaced his boots, took them off, and climbed inside it. I passed in the air mattresses and the sleeping bags. When he came back outside, he put his boots back on and from his pack he took a roll of toilet paper and a black entrenching tool—a small shovel. I hadn’t seen the roll of paper or the tool before—he must’ve slipped them in there while I was asleep.

  About twenty feet from the tent, he dug a small hole in the damp earth and stuck the entrenching tool into the pile of dirt, left it there with the roll of paper. “Toilet,” he said to me as he returned to the tent. “You know how to use it?”

  “I can probably figure it out.”

  He nodded.

  He lit the small Optimus stove, scooped water from the swamp, boiled it. He clipped the tops off two of the freeze-dried meals—macaroni and cheese for him, beef Stroganoff for me—then poured boiling water into the pouches and let them sit for a while.

  We ate out of the
pouches, using aluminum spoons. The Stroganoff was edible. Barely.

  Afterward, Carpenter cleaned up, shoving the empty pouches into a grocery store plastic bag.

  We sat again with our backs to a pair of cedars. The mosquitos had gotten hungrier, but the repellent was still holding them off.

  “Any other possibilities?” I asked him. “Places they could be hiding?”

  “One or two,” he said. “A couple more, if they’d been portaging.”

  “They haven’t been?”

  “No signs of it. From what Eugene says, that inflatable’s a fair-sized boat. Three men and all their gear. If they’d carried it out, I’d have seen something.”

  “Maybe they’ve got another boat.”

  “No way they could arrange that. Not unless they brought it in.”

  “Maybe they did. Another inflatable.”

  He looked at me.

  “Couldn’t weigh all that much,” I said. “One guy could probably carry it.”

  He took off his cap, lowered his head, ran his hands forward along his hair. He looked up. “I’m an idiot,” he said.

  “They could’ve done that?” I asked him.

  “They could’ve done that,” he said. He nodded. “And if they did, I think I know where. We’ll go back in the morning.”

  I turned in first, leaving Carpenter at his cedar trunk, staring off into the night, or off into his own memories.

  I didn’t expect to sleep well, but I was tired, my muscles sore, my hands sunburned, and I was out even before Carpenter came into the tent.

  I awoke at dawn. Carpenter was still asleep. I climbed out of the tent, used the toilet, walked down to the shore. Looked out along the sea of grass, silent and still in the gray of morning. Looked down at the murky pool of water before me. And I saw, lying out there as though it had been waiting for me all night, twenty feet away in the flat unmoving water, the alligator.

  I had been imagining alligators so often that for a moment I thought I imagined this one. But it was real. I could make out, clearly, only the snout and the round dark eyes. I couldn’t determine exactly how large the animal was, but the snout looked big and so did the eyes. Maybe seven feet long, maybe eight, maybe longer.