The Man Who Ivented Florida (8 page)

You telling me to go ahead and die, Grandpa?

Nope. Tellin' you to get in the damn car. You already dead.

Joseph sat up with a start, breathing heavily in the darkness. He'd had a dream . . . then he couldn't quite remember what had happened in the dream. Something about dying, and there had been a lot of white light. There was a nice car in the dream, too. But then Joseph remembered he planned to escape that night, and he didn't think about the dream anymore. He swung out of bed.

He got down on his hands and knees and found the bottle of water Tuck had given him, and he emptied it with a long drink.

Tastes good, he thought. Sulphury, like a bay smells.

He also found his deerskin boats and black roper's hat. He put them on, feeling the soft leather, grinning at the weight of his old hat. But that was all he had to wear. They'd taken his clothes, and now he wished he'd asked that nice aide, Marjorie, for clothes rather than snuff and chocolate. Should have asked her to bring a pair of her gentleman friend's golfing trousers and one of those sweaters with baggy arms like Arnold Palmer wore. That woulda been nice, but it was too late now. And he couldn't hitchhike to Mango wearing a damn gown that flopped open and showed his butt.

Joseph stood in the darkness, thinking. Then suddenly it came to him. He knew where to find clothes. Well, sort of. The orderlies had locked him in the rest home's big storage locker once, and he knew just where to go. He slid out into the hall, looking this way and that, moving quietly through the shadows. He could hear lone voices coming from some of the rooms, crazy babbling. Could hear the television turned up loud downstairs, which meant the fat nurse was probably sitting there eating candy. Could also hear the
bong-bong
that meant someone had pressed their call button, wanting help from the orderlies. Which was bad. Joseph swung around and saw the light flashing over the door of his own room— that damn little bright-eyed bastard trying to get him in trouble again. He considered going back; maybe wrap the IV tube around the little jerk's throat. But no, he didn't have time. He had to hurry.

Joseph shuffled along, almost running. The storage room was behind the double doors at the end of the hall, and he pulled them open. Inside were boxes of all sorts of stuff, Christmas decorations and mops and a box of donated Halloween costumes, kept for the party they had each year so the television people could take pictures and prove how happy everybody at the rest home was. Joseph started opening boxes, throwing Christmas stockings and plastic pumpkins onto the floor. There was a suit in there somewhere. He'd seen it—a gray suit. Then he found the jacket and tried to pull it on over his shoulders, but it was way too small. Couldn't even get it over his arms. He found a dress, a red one with frills, big as a tent.

I'd hitchhike back to Mango buck-naked first.

He threw the dress on the floor with the suit coat. He kept pawing through the box, holding costumes up to his chest, then tossing them over his shoulder.

People get to this place, the crummy food must make 'em shrink.

He held a black costume up, almost threw it into the heap, but then reconsidered. It was bigger than the rest, so he ripped off his gown and tried it on.

"Hum . . ." Looking down at himself: black costume with a black hood and white bars across the chest and a single white band down the front of each leg.

White stork costume maybel No-o-o . . .

Joseph thought for a moment. Nope, it was a skeleton costume. That's what he was wearing, a skeleton suit, only his boots and calves stuck way out of it, and so did his wrists. But that didn't matter. He liked the way it felt, nice and soft, plus black was a good color for him. Set off his eyes—a woman had told him that once.

Joseph put his hat on and turned to the door . . . then stopped, listening: footsteps coming down the hall, squeaking along on the linoleum. Quickly, Joseph flipped off the lights and stepped back against the wall just as the storage room doors were pulled open. One of the orderlies stood there, looking right at Joseph, it seemed, blinking into the darkness. The thick orderly with the chubby face and the tattoo on his wrist. The one who'd whacked him with surgical tubing that time, then tied him up. Joseph pulled his fists to his sides and was just about to leap on the man when the orderly turned on his heels and let the doors swing shut, calling out, "The Injun ain't in here, Hank!"

Joseph relaxed and waited. Amazing. How could the orderly have missed him? It was a good omen—Joseph knew that. A very good sign for a pursuer to look right at him but not see him.

Joseph crouched a little, listening. He could hear the rubber-shoe noises of the two orderlies going room to room. When he could no longer hear them, he peeked his head out and took a look. All clear, so he shuffled past the elevator to the stairs and clomped on down. The fire door at the first floor had no window, so he had to crack it open to look, and there sat the fat nurse and the two orderlies, backs to him, watching television. That quick, they'd given up the search. Maybe a dozen old people beyond the staff, sitting at tables playing cards. An old woman yelling, "Play me a spade, goddamn it! Either bid or get off the can!" Her thin voice rising over the noise of the television.

So how was he going to get past them? He thought about maybe pulling the upstairs fire alarm, sneaking out in the panic. But no, that'd bring the police, and he didn't want the cops after him. He was thinking about it, standing there in the stairwell, when, unexpectedly, the doorknob was pulled from his hand, the door was yanked wide open, and an old man tottered past him without saying a word.

Joseph didn't hesitate. He stood in plain view of the whole room, and there was no other option. He tipped his hat to the orderlies and the nurse, as if he was going for an evening stroll, then walked right out through the front doors.

The nurse and the orderlies never budged. Never said a word.

It was almost as if he were invisible.

As
Joseph moved along the night streets, he began to assemble a plan in his head. It was about thirty miles to Mango, where Tuck lived—thirty miles of busy streets and fast traffic. And the orderlies might come looking for him, once their TV show was over. Which meant he couldn't stay out in the open; couldn't risk hitchhiking because, if they caught him, they might put him jail. A boat was the best way to go, run right down the coast and cut in through the Ten Thousand Islands. But he didn't have a boat. Didn't have a dime to call Tuck, either. Or maybe it cost more now. It'd been a long time since Joseph had used a pay phone.

I could steal a car. . . .

That was an idea. Joseph was not a thief by nature, but if some one left their keys in their car, they deserved to be reminded that it was a dangerous world. But that would mean the police. And Joseph didn't like or trust the police. It was a natural distrust, one built up over long years of living just outside the law. As Tuck was fond of saying, "A cop and an undertaker got a lot in common. Neither one of them buggers wants to talk to a man when things is going smooth."

No, Joseph decided, he would not steal a car. But if he found some coins on the floor of an unlocked car, that was another story. Then he could call Tuck and get a ride. Until then, he'd have to walk. Find a way to head south and stay out of sight in case the orderlies came cruising for him.

Joseph hurried away from the rest home, keeping the three-story concrete hulk at his back. He walked past car lots and Burger Kings, then turned into the first residential section he came to. But damn, there was traffic here, too—Florida had become one big car lot. Then he saw a car coming that looked official—had lights on top—so he began to cut across back portions of lawn, ducking under clotheslines and skirting bright windows. For the first time, he began to relax. He traveled quietly, enjoying his new freedom and the scent of the October night. He hummed a little tune, too—a tune he remembered as an old Indian song, the birth song, perhaps, but that was actually the big band hit "Tangerine."

"Tangerine makes a lady da-dum. Tangerine da-dah-de-dum . . ."

As he walked, he was constantly testing himself, exploring joints and appendages for the various discomforts he had suffered. But there were none. Well, the pain wasn't as bad, anyway. That water . . . Tuck had been right about that vitamin water. Joseph had known the man for fifty years, and it was the first time Tuck had ever been right about anything.

For once, one of my grandfather's stories has come true. . . .

Thinking that, believing it, produced an odd feeling in Joseph—a strange, floating sense of intoxication, as if he were outside his body, looking down from above. Made him dizzy—that's how strong the feeling was—and he stopped in the shadows of a ficus tree to gather himself.

This is just great. My body's gotten better, but my mind's turned soft. What the hell's going on here!

He stood in the shadows, hoping the feeling would pass.

People who did not know Joseph well considered him a simple man of few needs and fewer thoughts. In truth, he was as intelligent as he was sensitive, and, like most sensitive people, harbored an innate mistrust of his own intellect. Added to this burden was a lifetime of wrestling with his own Indian heritage. His grandfather—called Chekika's Son—had been the great-grandson of Chekika, the giant Indian who had been shot, then hung, accused of killing settlers in the Florida Keys. Chekika, his grandfather had told Joseph many times, was the last of west Florida's native race. In him flowed the blood of the warrior Calusa, a sea people who had built high shell mounds that could still be found on the islands; built them long before the straggler Seminole and Mic-cosukee had wandered onto the peninsula.

Growing up in the Everglades, Joseph's grandfather had told him the Calusa stories; shared the Calusa legends as if they were great truths: On the full moon of the autumnal equinox, owls could speak as humans do; that the souls of brave men soared like eagles, seeking revenge long after they had died; that there was a great plan, a great order to the earth, and that their people, the ancient ones, would one day regain the coast they had once ruled.

But, one by one, as he grew older, Joseph saw the legends collapse beneath the weight of his own worldliness. He realized, in time, his grandfather was just another Indian drunk destined to die in an Immokalee flophouse, an empty wine bottle at his side. He learned that most people, no matter what color, stopped fighting long before their last heartbeat. Finally, he came to understand that the land called Florida would be inherited by those who cared least about it: the concrete merchants and tourists and out-of-state rich people. His loss of faith had long been an emptiness in him, but Joseph was also well grounded in the vagaries of existence: Life was scary enough to make a sled dog shiver, and a man had to get along as best he could.

But now one of the legends had come true: the story of the living water—a spring once sought by the Indian sick to heal themselves. Did he really believe that?
Yes . . . no!. . . maybe.

Tuck was a con man; about that, there was no doubt. So why, Joseph wondered, did his own mind feel so much clearer after drinking the water? Why did his body feel so much better? He stood in the shadows, leaning against the tree, considering. Before him were expensive ranch-style homes, concrete and stucco, with neat lawns and palm trees potted on little cement islands. In the eastern sky, clouds throbbed with eerie light, as if a bright wind was trapped within, probing for escape. Ghostly looking shapes up there in the night sky, so strange and unfamiliar that a disconcerting sense of doom flitted through Joseph's mind . . . which was when he remembered the dream he'd had.

You telling me to go ahead and die, Grandpa!

Nope. Tellin' you to get in the damn car. You already dead.

It all came back to him, the whole strange dream. Not a happy realization, either, because Joseph knew the dream for what it was.

Damn death dreams. Always come when a man's got other stuff to worry about.

Yes, no doubt about it. He had had a death dream.

"Some joke, Grandpa!"

Joseph sagged against the tree. He was going to die. Dreams like that didn't beat around the bush. Came right out and said what they meant. Hey . . . wait a minute. Joseph straightened as a new thought entered his head. In his mind, he tallied the feelings he had experienced in the last hour: unexpected freedom, absence of pain, soaring intoxication. Plus, that orderly had looked right at him without seeing him, as if he were invisible. Same with the fat nurse. Didn't even notice him.

Maybe I'm already dead!

"Oh shit," Joseph whispered.

Maybe he hadn't left the rest home, after all. Maybe this was all just a hallucination. Maybe, just maybe, he really had died and now his spirit was soaring.

Joseph bounced up and down on the ground a little.
Don't feel like I'm soaring.

He thought about one of the few movies he had ever seen. In that film, a man got hit by a car. When he awoke, he was standing in line to board a train. His name was on the passenger list, but the man couldn't remember why he was there. But he found out. That man was on his way to heaven! Then another thought struck Joseph: If a train took you to heaven, maybe you had to walk to hell.

Quickly, he pinched himself.
Ouch.
It hurt, but was that proof?

No. Hadn't the man in that movie kicked over a trash can and hurt his foot? Maybe they let you keep all your physical feelings— except the sinful ones, of course.

There, that was an idea.

Joseph made a cursory check through his brain for dirty thoughts.

Nope, they were still there.

That did it; told him all he needed to know. He wasn't bound for heaven; he was on a one-way trip to hell.

Just about exactly what you deserve, you dirty man. . . .

The back door of the house near which he stood opened, startling him. He heard a voice say, "You stay in the yard now, Dracula!"