Bone Valley (4 page)

“Olivia,” Miguel said.

If it had been just Angus, I’d have sent him on his way and fussed later at Olivia. But Miguel made it a different matter, and I stepped back and invited them in, curious as to what they might want.

“We’re going for a hike on the Antheus property, thought you might want to come with us. So you can see what it is we do,” Miguel said.

“It’s a pretty warm afternoon for hiking,” Angus said. “I’d understand, you didn’t want to go.”

Jimmie came out of the kitchen with a handful of French fries. “What you boys doing here?” he asked, sounding a little fatherly for my tastes.

“Where’s Antheus?” I asked.

“It’s out in the Four Corners area of east Manatee County, where Manatee, Hillsborough, Desoto, and Hardee Counties all touch. Acres of prime woodlands, wetlands, and Florida hammocks,” Miguel said.

“What is it, a new park?” I asked, innocently enough, not knowing what a can of worms that was going to be.

“Don’t you read the newspaper?” Angus asked.

“It’s the proposed site for a new phosphate mine, first phase of mining is planned for Hardee County. Eventually, if the company gets its way, it will mine in Manatee.”

“Oh, that. Yes, Olivia has”—ranted, cursed, and yelled were the appropriate words, but I was in sociable mode and wordsmithed this a bit—“mentioned that to me. By Horse Creek. And, yes, Angus, I do read the newspaper.”

Headlines count as reading, right? “So, y’all are going hiking on the Antheus property?” I flipped my hair, widened my eyes, and smiled at Miguel so he would pay attention to me, not my lack of radical environmental politics. “Hiking? By invitation?”

Angus and Miguel both laughed.

Oh, okay, a trespassing hike was at hand. Oddly enough that made it more enticing. Not as enticing as Miguel made it, of course, but there’s nothing like a little breaking of the law in the courtship ritual to get my blood going. Someday I might pay a psychiatrist to explain that, but for now I was just going to go with it.

I aimed a slow, sensual smile at Miguel, bypassing entirely both Angus and Jimmie. Then I thought about all the bugs, plus my piddling but still necessary work back at the office, and I started an internal debate.

“If you’re gonna go, I reckon I’ll go too,” Jimmie said. “You needs somebody to look out fer you.”

“Oh, we’ll look out for her,” Miguel said, matching my smile and making my sap rise.

“Besides, Jimmie, you promised to cut the grass. Remember?” I added.

“Maybe you best not run off with these two,” Jimmie said. “I don’t reckon you should go.”

Okay, that settled it. When a man tells me to do something, I usually don’t—obedience to the male voice not being one of my character traits—oh, except for Jackson. Everyone obeys him. I bet he could tell God what to do.

“So, this will be fun,” I said, and winked at Miguel. “Five minutes to get ready, and I’ll be right with you.”

While Jimmie sputtered, I dashed into the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash up, dabbed tinted sunscreen on my face, fluffed my hair, dotted citronella, a natural bug-repellent alternative to DEET that usually works, at my pulse points, reddened my lips with something from the health food store that used berry juice and beeswax instead of chemicals, and then dashed into the bedroom. Hiking, let’s see, I thought, aiming for practical, yet alluring. Skip the shorts and sandals, as hiking in wild Florida involves a lot of things that bite, cut, snarl, snag, and itch. Even though it was a warm spring, I went for jeans, a man’s long-sleeved, white cotton shirt, hiking boots, swept my hair back in a ponytail, and squinted into the mirror. Okay, a good look for a sixteen-year-old, but I wasn’t sure about me. But my five minutes were over and I still had to clean up from lunch, and I sprinted out to the kitchen.

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 right 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.