Everglades Assault Read online

  I went running up to the porch. She let me take the shotgun, then buried her face in her hands, crying.

  “Eisa—is Eisa okay?”

  “Yes, thank God. But that . . . that thing came back tonight. Oh, it was so awful. I was in bed but I wasn’t asleep, and I heard this heavy breathing and I looked up, and . . . and, oh my God . . .”

  She broke into uncontrollable sobs.

  Hervey came wheezing into the clearing as I tried to comfort her. I told him what had happened.

  “Where’s Granddad?” he asked.

  “In his chickee, I suppose. He didn’t even come out when I shot.”

  “Did you hit it?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was all like a bad dream. It was just standing there, looking at me. I grabbed the gun, and then it started to run away. I went to Eisa’s room to make sure she was okay. That’s all I could think about—that it had gotten Eisa. But she was still sleeping, and I ran outside and it was just going through the trees toward the cypress head. I pulled both triggers, and then I screamed for you. I don’t know if I hit it or not.”

  “Granddad,” Hervey said. “Let’s make sure he’s okay.”

  The two of us went running toward the chickee. There was an oil lamp burning inside. Panther James sat on the dirt floor, naked but for his weathered hat and the multicolored shirt.

  He looked up when we came in. “I can’t find my pants,” he said.

  “That thing was back, Granddad.”

  The old man looked at the broken watch. “Right on time,” he said. “I’ve got to find those damn pants.”

  “You stay here, Granddad. Dusky and I are going to go after it.”

  “Won’t do any good,” he said flatly. “It wants Eisa, but maybe it’ll take me. I’ll go find it and speak with it. But I don’t think it will take me without pants.”

  “Just give us tonight to try, Granddad. If we don’t get it tonight, I’ll find your pants and you can go after it.”

  Panther James looked up at me suddenly. “Ah, the blond man,” he said. “The pains I felt from the shovels in my stomach stopped tonight. Should I thank you for that?”

  “No. Thank Hervey and that dog of his. I don’t think they’ll be back to bother your mound.”

  “That’s good to hear,” he said. “I’ll be going there very soon and I would hate to end up in a museum.”

  “Come on, Granddad. You’re too mean to die.”

  “Hah! That’s what you think. I had a dream tonight. That’s why I have to hurry. I want to get this thing about the land settled. We must get this settled, and little Eisa must mate with one of the Johnny Egret grandsons when she is of an age so that our people might go on for a while longer. . . .” His voice trailed off, and he looked at me again. His brown eyes had a milky tinge to them lanced with some inexorable understanding. “I’ll trade you this fine watch for your pants,” he said.

  I smiled. “Maybe tomorrow, Mr. James.”

  “You just stay here, Granddad. We’ll be right back. I’ve got something I need to prove to you.”

  We hustled back outside. Myrtle was waiting for us. Hervey still had the revolver he had taken from one of the mound robbers.

  “Have you reloaded that shotgun?”

  She nodded.

  “Which way did that thing go?”

  She pointed. “Just be careful, Hervey. I . . . really don’t think that it’s a man dressed up in a suit. The dogs always bark when strangers come. But when that thing is here, they just run. They run and hide. . . .”

  We found the tracks by the creek bed at the edge of the clearing.

  The mound robber had indicated that the track he had found was three feet long.

  He was wrong. But not by much.

  The tracks by the creek were the footprints of some gigantic barefooted man. Maybe twenty-five or thirty inches long. They were sunken deeply into the sand.

  Hervey traced their outline with his flashlight. They were an awesome sight. I felt the strobing of body current move down my spine.

  “Damn,” whispered Hervey. “They’re surefire deep enough.”

  “Look at your own tracks, though,” I argued. “The sand’s soft here. Your tracks are just as deep.”

  While Hervey held the light, I put my own foot in the swamp creature’s track. And then I took a natural stride. It put me just short of the next track.

  “If this thing’s tall enough to touch the ceiling in Myrtle’s house, he must have awful long arms—because his legs aren’t any longer than mine. Plus, he was running. See the way the tracks sort of slide forward? He was running flat-footed.”

  The Chesapeake had found the tracks, too. He trotted between them, tail arched, nose testing the air.

  “Go find! Gator! Go find!”

  The dog took off on a run, and we followed behind.

  He led us across the creek, through the edge of a cypress head, and then back to the road.

  It was faster going on the road, and we fell farther and farther behind. Every now and then we’d stop to catch our breath and to check the trail. The huge footprints confirmed that the dog was on the right track.

  We ran for about ten minutes before the Chesapeake started barking in the distance. It was an eerie sound, that rumbling whuff filtering through the swamp and the darkness.

  “He’s on to him,” Hervey said excitedly. “He don’t start barking until he can see what he’s after!”

  We increased our pace.

  Hervey was right. The dog had caught up to the creature, all right.

  As we got closer we could hear the savage growling. And we could hear someone yelling—a man yelling. His words were lost in the depths of the swamp, but it was clear that he was yelling for help.

  And then we heard more voices.

  And then a gunshot, followed by the wild yipping of the retriever.

  Hervey stopped cold. “Oh no—they shot him. They shot my dog!”

  He didn’t have any trouble keeping up with me now. We sprinted along the dirt road, side by side. Suddenly the yipping stopped, followed by an ominous silence.

  We came around a bend to see the red back-up lights of a car. There were dim shapes in the car, too dark to recognize. The car peeled around in the sand. The sweep of headlights gave us a panorama of cypress swamp: silver trees draped with moss, wild orchids in full bloom.

  And something else.

  The dark outline of a dog lay still in the middle of the road.

  It was the Chesapeake.

  At first I thought someone was shooting at us. I dropped belly first into the sand.

  And then I realized that it was Hervey. He had been just behind me. He held the small-caliber revolver in both hands, firing all six rounds toward the car.

  But at that distance, I knew there was little chance of any of the slugs finding the mark.

  The car roared off, spewing sand and dust.

  Hervey was silent for a long moment. “The bastards,” he said softly. And he walked toward the fallen dog.

  The Chesapeake rested side down in the sand as if asleep. Hervey kneeled and stroked the dog’s head, then studied the blood on his hand.

  “Shot him in the head,” he said in a voice I had never heard before.

  While it was true the dog and I had been anything but close, I had still admired him. And I found myself kneeling beside Hervey, hand stroking the dog’s side.

  And that’s when I noticed something. “Hey—hey, Hervey! He’s still breathing!”

  “What? Damn!” Hervey put his ear down against the dog. “He is breathing. And his heart’s just pounding away strong as ever.”

  I took the flashlight and studied the dog’s wound. There was a line of bare flesh clear across the top of the dog’s head. I fingered it gently.

  “The bullet never went in. Must’ve just knocked him out or something.”

  And then there was something else I noticed. I pulled the dog’s jaws open and removed a chunk of material. The mat
erial was coated with synthetic hair on one side and had a soft liner on the other.

  The dog stirred when I removed it. He whined softly, then got shakily to his feet. When he saw Hervey, he managed to wag his tail a couple of times and give him a quick lick in the face. In a few more minutes he was walking and sniffing the ground again.

  Hervey, the big stoic bear, was like a little kid with a long-lost friend. He followed after him and actually cooed.

  When he was finished with endearments, sure that the dog would be able to make it back to camp where we could treat his wound, I handed the material to Hervey.

  “Here’s our swamp monster,” I said.

  Hervey studied it with disgust, almost tossed it away, then thought better. “We’ll show this to my granddad,” he said. “And once we get him feeling better about what’s really going on we’ll hunt those bastards down. It shouldn’t take long now that we know who they are.”

  “We do.”

  He looked at me oddly. “You mean you didn’t recognize them?”

  “Hell, I couldn’t see their faces. It was too dark.”

  “The car,” he said. “You didn’t recognize the car? It was a big blue Cadillac. Had one hubcap missing from the left rear wheel. Remember those jerks back in Flamingo? It was the same car they drove away in!”

  We took our time walking back to camp. Hervey kept a close check on Gator. Every time the dog stopped to lap swamp water, we stopped with him.

  Hervey was in a better mood now, almost a party mood. We considered reasons why the boss man and his peons might want Panther James to abandon his Indian land. He seemed sure we would be able to stop them now. He even suggested that we contact a friend of mine at the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department and get the law in to take care of them.

  “I’m just afraid, Dusky, that if I got my hands on those bastards again,” he explained, “that I wouldn’t stop until they were dead. And I’m too handsome to spend the next forty years playing one-on-one with ratshit up in Raiford.”

  I laughed at that.

  I was feeling better, too—but for one thing. I finally had to mention it to Hervey.

  “Something about all this bothers me,” I said.

  He eyed me sharply. “Yeah?”

  “I think you know what it is. The guy playing the part of the Swamp Ape—Myrtle’s dogs never barked at him. She said they ran scared. But scared or not, they should have barked at a stranger.”

  He nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.” He thought for a moment. “There are about twelve people in the Johnny Egret clan. Two families. They’re close with Myrtle and all—but not so close that they visit every day. The dogs would know them, but not well enough not to bark.”

  “And that leaves Myrtle’s husband.”

  “I hate to say it, but you’re right. Billy Cougar. I only met him once. Came up for the wedding about seven years ago. He’s never been able to hold a job. Like Myrtle says, he drinks heavy. But that still don’t explain why he would turn against his own people.”

  I shrugged. “All we can do is watch him. From the looks of things, your dog got a piece of whoever it was in that gorilla costume. May have damaged him. If he comes back tonight with a dog bite, we’re going to have to tell Myrtle.”

  “You mean I’m going to have to tell Myrtle,” he said wryly.

  So we were both feeling better—assured that there was some light at the end of the tunnel; some solution, however painful, to this thing which had been vexing Hervey’s family.

  I should have known then.

  All the little alarms should have gone off.

  Because it’s one of life’s sour tricks to make things seem easiest just when they are about to go from bad to worse.

  MacMorgan’s Law: When everything is coming up roses, get ready to order some bandages—because the roses always come with thorns.

  So I should have guessed. But I didn’t.

  Instead, we made our way back to camp, chortling and joking and trading theories about why our businessmen adversaries had contrived such a bizarre plot.

  Even Gator was walking better. And he even managed a snarl when one of the cur dogs came trotting up to greet us.

  Hervey had the swath of costume hair in his hand. He was anxious to show his granddad. He was anxious to prove that the old man’s dreams had been all wrong, and that they were going to keep the land, and their race would go on, and everyone was going to live happily ever after.

  He went through the door into the chickee first.

  At first, I couldn’t understand why he stopped so suddenly.

  I peered over his head and saw: Panther James had found his pants. He was stretched out on the dirt floor as if asleep. In the weak oil-lamp glow, the colors of his rag shirt blended into soft bands of blue and green and gold. He had knocked over the lone wooden chair when he fell. His old western hat had rolled across the floor.

  There is something unmistakable about the look of death. The muscles slacken and the skin turns to paste. But more than that, the face—never so relaxed as in death—seems to return to the gentler contours of youth.

  Panther James looked younger than before. The great hawk nose, the abrupt Indian cheeks, the firm chin were those of the long-gone youth who had hunted the swamps and fished the streams.

  And even in death, he had the final proof of his wisdom: His dreams had not lied.

  Mechanically, Hervey bent over his grandfather and checked the pulse as if hoping for the same miraculous recovery his dog had made.

  But it was useless.

  “He’s gone,” he said simply.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I expected tears, or at least moistening of eyes. But it did not come. “He was a fine man,” Hervey said. “He taught me the woods. I used to wish I could be Indian, too. But it’s more than just blood. . . .”

  He looked down at the old vehicle which had once held Panther James. He sniffed once, wiped his nose. “I just decided we ain’t going to call the law in on this, Dusky.”

  “I can see that.”

  “He died still believing that some swamp creature was going to take Eisa because he had somehow failed the land. He could have died in peace. Instead, they made it so he died with a lot of things unfinished; a lot of questions unanswered. I’m going to make them pay for that, Dusky. I feel like I’ve got to. Do you think that’s silly?”

  “If it’s silly, you’ve got company,” I said. “Tomorrow, while you take care of the funeral arrangements, I’ll go to work. I’ll start tracking them. . . .”

  14

  The afternoon after Panther James died, they buried him on the far edge of the mound near the ring of silver cypress trees which held the pond he had fished as a boy.

  Myrtle James Cougar had accepted the news of her father’s death more stoically than I had anticipated. But late that night, while Hervey slept, I heard her sobbing through the plank walls of the shack.

  The next morning, red-eyed, she busied herself with contacting the women of the Johnny Egret clan, who would prepare the death feast while the Egret men went with Hervey and me to dig the grave and ready the mound.

  There were three of them—a man who seemed a little younger than Panther James, and his two sons, who were both well into their forties. Upon first meeting them, I found myself looking for fresh cuts on arms or face—signs of dog bite.

  But there was none.

  They were a stoic threesome, but friendly enough. They found the way I beat the bushes looking for snakes quite funny.

  It made me think of the way Panther James had laughed at my friend Grafton McKinney.

  While Johnny Egret supervised, we filled in the trenches dug by the graverobbers and picked up all the beer cans and cigarette wrappers. After the old man had surveyed the site and agreed the job was finished, they set about finding a proper place to bury Panther James.

  I stayed in the background and listened to them talk. Hervey and Johnny Egret finally settled on a shady place at the f
ar edge of the mound near the cypress head. They agreed that when the graverobbers inevitably returned, they would probably start at the middle of the mound—as they all do.

  You could tell it was an unpleasant subject to the older man. To him, the trenches and the litter were all symbols that he too would probably fall victim to the artifact hunter’s shovel. Just as his sons would. And probably their children.

  It was not easy work busting through the roots to softer ground where Panther James would be placed. And when we were halfway done, Hervey looked up at me and wiped his forehead with a sweaty hand.

  “Some lemonade would be good, wouldn’t it?” I said.

  He looked perplexed. “Lemonade?”

  I nodded. “You know—lemonade.” The other men were listening, and I couldn’t say what I really meant. Myrtle’s husband hadn’t returned home that night. And I didn’t want him to get back and leave again before we had a chance to get a look at him. “Up at the house,” I said. “Why don’t you walk back there and get the lemonade?”

  Suddenly understanding, he shook his head quickly. “Oh, the lemonade. Tell you what, Dusky, since this is family business, why don’t you walk back and get it? You’ve worked harder than any three men. So take a break.”

  As I walked away, the Chesapeake thumped his tail at me. He rested in the shade with his bandaged head. He looked more ridiculous than fearsome.

  “Watch out for snakes,” one of Johnny Egret’s sons yelled over his shoulder.

  They all laughed.

  The women were in the yard preparing a long table with food. Even Myrtle wore traditional dress now: ankle-length skirts sewn of colorful cloth, shawls over their shoulders, layers and layers of beads that seemed to elongate their necks.

  Only Eisa wore jeans and T-shirt. She played in the shade with two raven-haired boys about her own age. The boys were showing off for her, each trying to top the other. One did handstands. The other did somersaults. Eisa clapped her hands gleefully.

  In the hands of those three children rested the future of this ancient and little-known band of Indians—the Tequesta.

  Myrtle smiled when she saw me, and slipped away from the other women at my signal.

  “You look like you’ve been working hard,” she said. The change to traditional Indian dress complimented her. It brought out the earth colors of her skin and accented her crow-black hair.