Everglades Assault (8 page)

“Just as long as that bear of yours doesn't bite me.”

“You'd think you'd show some gratitude—him out there guarding your boat and all.”

“I'm grateful. Very grateful. Even I am afraid to board.”

After we had showered, we visited the little ground-floor bar. It was dark and cool inside away from the bugs and September heat. Some mid-fifties music was being piped in from speakers on the wall, and a dozen or so tourist types sat at the tables with their drinks, talking softly.

Hervey wore fresh jeans and shirt. With his hair slicked back and his Gulf Stream tan he looked like someone who had just washed and gone to town after fifteen hours on a John Deere tractor.

“I bet I ain't been in a bar in ten years,” he said as we took a table.

“You haven't missed much,” I said.

“Seems like a nice place, though. Doesn't seem to attract the rowdy types.”

“I guess I'd agree with that.”

I should know better by now. To look at me, you wouldn't think I was the superstitious type.

But I am. I admit it. It comes from spending a boyhood with circus people. Along with professional baseball players, they're the most superstitious people in the world.

I should have known that the moment I agreed that the bar seemed quiet and benign my luck would change and something—or someone—would prove me wrong.

And something did.

Our waitress was a pretty blonde who looked as if she might have been a cheerleader and president of her class fifteen years and a husband or two ago. She had the look of worn beauty: still striking at first glance, but then you noticed the lines forming at the eyes and forehead, and her ample breasts seemed to owe a great debt to Playtex.

She wore a clean white uniform, bra and panties visible beneath. She looked tired, and her smile suggested a certain vulnerability and the knowledge that life is sometimes not all it's cracked up to be. The plastic tag on her uniform said her name was Stella.

She wiped our table with a bar cloth, added napkins and a basket of chips. Hervey ordered gin with tonic, and a twist of lime. I ordered the draft beer.

So we sat in the comfortable coolness of the bar, made small talk, and watched Stella as she went to get our drinks. As my eyes adjusted, the blank faces at the tables near us became people. It's an old habit of mine—and maybe a bad habit. I see strangers, study their dress, their mannerisms, then try to pigeonhole them.

I don't like to be categorized, and I shouldn't do it to others. But I do.

At the nearest table were a man and woman—both somewhere in their fifties. There was a bookish air about the two of them, and their clothes looked as if they had been ordered from the L.L. Bean field catalogue. They drank white wine and didn't say much to each other. Yet there was an obvious affection there, like old friends content with their silence. I decided they were a modern rarity—a happily married couple who had probably come to Flamingo for the bird-watching. The happy older couples fill me with a certain reassurance. Their contentment bespeaks order and reason. I decided they were the type I'd like to have charter my boat. When the man felt me studying them, he looked up briefly, nodded and smiled.

I smiled back.

At another table were three beefy business types who were working their way toward a deliberate drunk. Theirs seemed to be a harmless vacation: leave the wife and kids at home for a few days while they fished and drank and acted silly in the Everglades.

I watched and listened to them for a few minutes, and decided that they were all pretty good guys taking a well-deserved break.

The other table did not fare so well in the MacMorgan Rating Game.

There were four men at the long table. They all wore safari suits of various shades and design. The obvious patriarch of the group was a man in his late thirties who bragged long and loud about his big-game-fishing exploits in South America and the Bahamas. The other three men at the table listened anxiously, laughing at the right places, nodding enviously when the patriarch's story demanded it.

The man at the head of the table had black curly hair and a swarthy face. His massive hand clutched a whiskey tumbler, and his big shoulders and belly strained at the leisure suit. I decided he was probably the head of some corporation—real estate, probably—and these were his important drones, following him around on this fishing vacation to brownnose and make points, and generally bask in the light of their browbeating boss.

The drunker the guy got, the louder he talked.

“I'm telling you boys, fishing isn't a sport. It's a war,” he was saying. “Just like business—it's you against the fish. Get it? You against the
fish
!”

The three men laughed loudly.

Hervey and I exchanged looks and listened to him go on.

He said, “Course, you boys wouldn't know anything about fighting a really big fish. Those piddly little tarpon the guide got us into today weren't nothing compared to a big blue marlin or tuna. Nobody in this whole shithole knows what real fishing is really about. . . .”

He made a sweeping gesture with his arm that included everyone in the bar. For just a moment he caught my eyes—then quickly went on with his story, talking a little quieter now.

“Seems like a real nice guy,” Hervey said, his sarcasm thick.

“Zane Grey in a leisure suit.”

“Maybe we can get him to show us what real fishing is all about.”

“You mean, invite him aboard my boat?”

“Right,” said Hervey, his eyes twinkling. “Only you and me won't be there to meet him. Just that ugly old dog of mine.”

We both laughed.

As Stella, the waitress, brought us our second round of drinks, a man I knew well came through the door of the small bar.

He wore baggy pants and a long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the collar. He was in his early sixties. Everything about him was long and lean, poor but proper. Dressed as he was, he looked like a country preacher looking for lost souls.

“Grafton!”

He squinted through the darkness, found me, then gave me a slow shy smile.

“Why, hullo there, Dusky.”

I stood and took his hand. It was like shaking a leather bag of bones. I had met Graff McKinney years before when I was still a skiff guide, running that little boat seventy miles in a day searching for bonefish and permit and tarpon for my clients.

Even then, Graff had been running his squatty little cruiser out of Flamingo.

Occasionally we'd meet in that desolate expanse of Florida Bay midway between the Keys and Florida proper. It didn't take me long to realize that where you found Grafton's boat, the fish were not far away.

Still, I refused to follow him in those early lean days—not so much out of pride as out of courtesy. On the water, few things are ruder than following a fishing guide.

But one day, something happened to Graff's boat. That old clunker engine of his finally went
whoosh.
The fire wasn't bad at first—but it was spreading.

Luckily, I was close enough to see what was going on. I gathered his clients aboard my skiff, anchored, then swam over to help Graff fight the flames.

We saved the boat. And I had made a friend for life. After that, whenever Graff saw my skiff, he would unfailingly wave me over if he had found fish.

And I did the same for him.

So it was nice seeing this lean old man again; like a face from the past, it brought back some of the pleasant memories of my skiff guiding years.

“Tom Healy said you was around, Dusky.” He grinned then. “Went to your new boat, but there's some kind of dragon creature aboard that said you weren't aboard—and I wasn't welcome. Figured the bar here was the next likely spot.”

After I had made introductions, we all sat down again. Stella, the fading beauty, came over when she saw Graff and hugged him like a daughter.

“You keep threatening to come in here and dance with me, and now you've finally done it!”

Grafton chuckled, half embarrassed. “Miss Stella, I'm gonna have to leave the dancin' up to this blond fella here.”

She actually blushed a little. For the first time, I noticed her eyes: a fine Nordic blue, as if they had been created by a watercolor artist. “Well, that's fine with me,” she said, recovering. “Just so long as I get the next dance with you.”

When she had brought Graff the coffee he had ordered, Hervey filled him in on his problem. Graff never said a word throughout the whole story—just nodded his head from time to time and made grunting noises.

After a long thoughtful silence, he said finally, “I think I know your ma's people.”

Hervey looked surprised. “Yeah?”

“The Panther James clan? And the old man's just known as James?”

“Damn if you ain't right. They live so far back in the 'glades I didn't know there was another white man that knew 'em.”

Grafton McKinney just nodded. He said, “Back in the twenties, I worked some long hot months building the Tamiami Trail with your granddaddy, Panther James. Fine man. Bunked with him and worked shoulder to shoulder with him for nigh onto a month before he spoke the first word to me. And that was under kind of unusual circumstances. Ol' Baron Collier had us building that road out of muck and swamp, from Naples to Miami, straight across the Everglades.”

Grafton chuckled and continued, “Heck, there weren't nothin' out there but about a million snakes and gators, and so many skeeters you could swing a pint jar in front of your face and catch a quart of'em. Only the 'glades Indians, like your granddaddy, didn't seem to mind. In the afternoon that swamp became a hellhole, but we just worked on and on, a couple of hundred of us followin' that floating dredge in the sun.

“Now, the way ol' Panther James started talking to me was this: I'd gone off in the bushes to take a crap. Always had to stomp around first—to chase the snakes away, don't you see. I'd hung my shovel in a tree and every now and again I'd reach up and hold it for balance. And I was just about done—reached up one last time, but instead of grabbing the shovel I caught holt of a big old cotton-mouth moccasin by mistake. I'm here to tell you, son, I took off a-runnin', pants down and all. Your ol' granddaddy just thought that was funny as hell, he did. Damn near wet his pants laughin'. Then in perfect English, you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Only a white man would try to wipe himself with a snake.' How about that! For a whole month I thought he was deaf and dumb—and then to learn there weren't nothin' wrong with him but a damn weird sense of humor.”

“You became friends after that?”

Grafton McKinney sipped at his coffee thoughtfully. “I was closer than anybody else to him, but you still wouldn't call us friends. The Miccosukee Indians are a shy people, but I have plenty of friends among the Miccosukee. He was shyer yet—that's why I wasn't surprised when you said he thinks of himself as a Tequesta.”

“He never told you that?”

“Never said a word about it.”

“Dusky here says you know the 'glades as good as anybody around. You got anything to say about that swamp-monster business?”

The older man shrugged. “Some of the old blanket Indians mention it every now and again. I don't personally put much store in it. I've spent most of my life in them swamps, and I never seen hide nor hair of it.”

“So who do you think might be trying to chase the old man and his family off their property?”

“Damned if I know. This is the first I've heard about anything like that going on. But I can tell you this: The Indians in the 'glades are changing. And changing fast. Especially the Seminole. They're really starting to hit the tourist wagon. You ever been to that reservation up near Hollywood? The old Indians won't even hardly go there no more. Because it's Indian land, they can sell cigarettes tax-free there. Got big neon signs advertising 'em, and they got a fastmoney bingo parlor up there that seats over a thousand people. There's even some talk that they want to get Las Vegas-style gambling houses built—anything to separate the tourists from their money. Like I said, they figure because it's Indian land the state don't have no control over what goes on there.”

I said, “It doesn't sound like you approve, Grafton.”

He snorted. “Approve? Why should I? The damn developers around the state are killing the Everglades fast enough as it is. Draining and dredging and building—all the time sayin' pretty as you please that they ain't hurtin' a thing. And anybody with a peabrain
knows
they are. I just hate to see the 'glades die any faster than it already is. God knows, I don't blame the Indians. They have every right to be bitter—and to make a buck any way they can. It's just that I want those swamps to last at least until my own grandbabies are growed. I'd like to see 'em last forever, but the way things are goin' I guess that's just bein' selfish. . . .”

It was almost nine by the time Grafton left, and I knew we'd have to hurry if we wanted to order supper at the Flamingo Inn restaurant.

The four guys in the safari suits had been getting progressively drunker—and louder. And they had been giving Stella, the pretty, worn waitress, a hard time.

Hervey didn't seem to notice. He seemed caught up in what Grafton had told him about the inevitable death of the Everglades. I remembered the dreamy way he had described the cypress heads to me, and I could understand his concern.

Finally, I caught Stella's eye and called for our check. She seemed relieved to be pulled from the demands of the fish king and his brown-nose court.