Everglades Assault Page 3

  He smiled. “No. We’re Florida, through and through. When those other poor Indians came running rag-tag south, just trying to stay ahead of Jackson’s dogs, there were still a few remnants of the Florida tribes around. Way, way back in the old times there were the Calusas and the Ais, the Tequesta and the Timucua and some others. Spaniards kilt most of them—not with their guns or their swords, but with disease. The books will tell you they’re all extinct.”

  “But the books are wrong?”

  Hervey switched his chew from side to side thoughtfully. He said, “Well, it’s not something you could prove in court, but my mama’s people have their ways and their legends and their word histories, and their word history says they’re Tequesta. Probably the last living Tequesta on earth. Of course, they’re not pureblood—not anymore. Couldn’t be. Like my ma. She married my daddy, and her mama before her had some Spanish blood in her, so they say. All mixed up by now. But the thread is there. And they get real nasty when someone suggests they’re Seminole. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that they’re Tequesta and proud of it. You’ve seen the shell mounds down here in the Keys and around Cape Sable and Flamingo? They built those mounds probably before Christ was born. They’re the only true Floridians around.”

  “I can understand why they’d take some pride in that.”

  He chuckled. “They do. They damn sure do. Stubborn as hell, those folks. And it’s probably hurt them in some ways.”

  “How so?”

  “Well,” he said, “the fact they refuse to connect themselves with the Seminole or Miccosukee cuts their political clout right down to zero. Back in 1957 the Florida Indians voted to incorporate under the Indian Reorganization Act. Strength in numbers, you know. But there was only my mama’s folks and two other families who considered themselves Tequesta, and they wouldn’t have a thing to do with it. What that means is, they’re Indians on their Indian land, but they don’t get one ounce of government backing.”

  “That’s bad?”

  “Hell no, not normally. But up there in the Everglades, there have been some things going on that aren’t normal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, I got family up there tryin’ to make a living on two hundred acres of palmetto and cypress and swamp, and suddenly someone is trying to chase them out.”

  “But why?”

  “Damn if I know. That’s why I’m here talkin’ to you. But one thing’s for sure: Someone’s tryin’ to chase our folks out and steal their land. And we got to stop them. Stop them cold. . . .”

  3

  I recognized the look on the face of Hervey Yarbrough.

  It wasn’t a look I’d often seen—maybe only twice before.

  Once was a dozen years or so ago when some rich New York yacht rookie started giving him a hard time over a bilge-pump impeller he had bought at Hervey’s little marina. The goon from the Big Apple had stuck the impeller in ass backwards, and then had tried to blame Hervey for selling faulty hardware.

  Hervey took his verbal abuse for all of twenty minutes before he got that look in his eyes: a sort of burning, squinty look. He had turned to the New Yorker and said in his calmest drawl, “You want your money back? You say one more word, call me one more name, and I’m going to give you your money back—stuffed right down your throat.”

  Fool that he was, the New Yorker proceeded to say several more words.

  It was not a very pretty thing to watch. The New Yorker had probably never been in a fight that someone didn’t rush to break up—if he had ever been in a fight before at all.

  Hervey had gotten him down in the sand, hell-bent on ramming a five-dollar bill down the guy’s throat. The New Yorker kept craning his neck around, as if looking for someone to come and stop this madman. And every time he’d look up, Hervey would smack him flush on the ear. It didn’t take long, and by the time it was over the New Yorker was spitting bits and pieces of five-dollar bill, and it looked as if he had a package of grapes attached to the side of his head.

  So I knew that look. And I knew it meant trouble.

  Hervey was the kind of guy who could take a lot of pushing. But once you pushed him across the line, there was no going back. It was either fight or die.

  Someone in the Everglades had been pushing Hervey’s family. And when it comes to the Yarbroughs—and a lot of other native Key Westers—if you’ve pushed one, you’ve pushed them all.

  As April had told me earlier, they weren’t the kind to go crying to the law. Instead, he had come to me for help.

  And if there was ever anyone I owed a favor, it was Hervey Yarbrough. And his family. It seemed like a lifetime ago that I had taken my revenge on the drug pirates who had killed my family and best friend.

  Afterward, it was Hervey’s family who took me in, cared for me and hid me. So I owed him one. A big one.

  “What makes you think someone is trying to push your mother’s people off their land?” I asked.

  He paused, throat dry from talking. A quiet man, be wasn’t used to so much vocal strain. He rubbed at his neck meaningfully. “Don’t suppose you have any cold beer out here, Dusky?”

  I stood and went to the little gas refrigerator. I was down to a good weight, two-fifteen, and I had been swimming every day and doing my pull-ups. I was in good shape, eating the right food, mind and body in fine shape, so I grabbed a beer for myself too.

  “Tuborg okay?”

  “Since you made me rich by finding that treasure, it’s just about the only thing I drink. Fine beer.”

  “It is that.”

  I cracked open the two bottles of beer and handed him his. He took half of it in a swallow and wiped his mouth.

  “Nothing like that first taste of beer,” he said.

  “Nothing like it.”

  So he told me about his Indian relatives who lived deep in the Everglades and about the problems they were having.

  There had been three families in the area who considered themselves Tequesta. One of the families had gradually dissipated and then disappeared through marriage and old age.

  That left Hervey’s relatives and another family. The two of them acquired and divided the third family’s land—not as easy as it sounded.

  The fact that a small group of Indians lived in the Everglades who refused to be classified as Seminole or Miccosukee put the government in an awkward situation. Was the abandoned land private or public? Should it become part of the Big Cypress National Park Reservation system, or should it be divided among those remaining Indians who claimed to be Tequesta?

  To avoid any public notice or news media uproar, the government people suggested to the two families that they just divide the land and not say another word about it. The government workers—typically fearful for their jobs or of undue notice—didn’t want to set any unhappy precedents.

  So the whole thing was done quietly. In fact, according to Hervey, only the two families and the people involved with Indian Affairs knew about it.

  “So that gave them two hundred acres in the Everglades?”

  Hervey nodded. “Give or take a few acres. The other family there has about the same. Not all that much when you consider the size of the Everglades, but it’s beautiful land. Used to go there and stay in the summer when I was a boy. Cypress heads like you’ve never seen, and clear streams and bass as big as this. All sorts of gators and snakes and deer and bear. Great place for a boy. Almost turned me against living by the sea, it was such a fine place.”

  “I can’t imagine you living away from the water.”

  He shrugged. “That’s because you haven’t spent much time in the Everglades. You can’t see much from the Tamiami Trail or Alligator Alley. You got to get back in. Way in.” He sighed, remembering, and he looked at the tin roof of my stilthouse as he spoke. “You walk through those pine and myrtle plains for a while, and it’s hot and dry and sticky, and just thinking about it makes you thirsty. And then you see this cypress head in the distance, an
d it looks silver and dark and cool, like an island. And then you walk in through between the smallest hatrack cypress on their pyramid trunks and it’s like entering a church. The big cypress bends over you like a cathedral, letting in just these long beams of sunlight, and there’s a pond in the middle with white orchids growing on them silver trees, and there’s moss draping down and air plants, and you can see gators in the pond like old logs, and the water is so clear you can see the bass moving before they strike. Deer go to water there, and there’s turtles on the logs, and the big white egrets flap off through those beams of sunlight, and there’s always that freshwater coolness there.”

  “It does sound nice.”

  “It is. My mama being Tequesta and all, I could have settled there by rights.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, I didn’t. Sometimes when the tourists come driving down like maniacs to Key West with their campers and their mobile homes and their speedboats, talkin’ loud and actin’ like they own the place, I kind of regret it.”

  “Just sometimes?”

  He smiled. “Just sometimes.”

  I finished my beer and got us two more.

  “So who controls this land?” I asked. “State government or federal government?”

  “Neither,” he said. “That’s the unusual thing about it. It’s not reservation land, so the federal people have no say about it. It’s Indian land, so the state doesn’t have anything to do with it. You might say the Tequesta there are the only folks in all America who really own their own property.”

  “I can think of some reasons why someone might want to take it away.”

  “I can too,” he said.

  “So how are they trying to chase your folks off?”

  He paused for a moment, suddenly unsure. “Well,” he said finally, “whoever’s doing it is going about it in a pretty strange way.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s just that they’re not making it impossible to live there—just uncomfortable.”

  “If I’m going to help, Hervey, you’ve got to give me some specifics.”

  “I know, I know. It’s just that it’s going to sound kind of silly, some of the things.”

  “Most of my life, it seems like I’ve majored in silly.”

  He grinned. “Don’t we all?”

  “Gets to be habit-forming, I guess.”

  “God knows.” He wiped his face with a sunscarred hand. “Okay,” he said, “you asked for it: You ever hear of a creature called the Swamp Ape?”

  I tried to swallow my involuntary smile. Coming from Hervey, a model of the pragmatic and conservative, it did indeed sound silly.

  “You mean Florida’s version of the Abominable Snowman?”

  “You know damn well that’s what I mean. And, if you’re gonna sit there laughin’ at me, I ain’t goin’ to tell you about it.”

  “Sorry,” I said quickly. “It’s just that you sort of took me by surprise.”

  “Well, it took me by surprise, too. The folks I got living up there in the Everglades are my old granddaddy, an aunt that’s young enough to be my daughter, and her husband. Got some distant relatives moving in and out from time to time, but that’s the heart of the family.”

  “And this Swamp Ape is trying to chase them off?”

  “Damn it,” he said, “do you want me to tell the story or don’t you?”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ve never seen you uncomfortable with a story before. It’s a new side.”

  “Humph,” he said. “Okay, these folks of mine aren’t the superstitious type—except for Granddaddy, who kind of sticks to the old ways. That young aunt of mine has a college eduation, and she works with the Seminole kids on the reservation. Her husband works as a car mechanic when he’s not drinking himself to death.

  “Up there in the Everglades,” he continued, “the legend of the Swamp Ape goes back a lot farther than them books about Big Foot you’ve seen around. My granddaddy told me about it when I was a boy, just like his granddaddy told him. Used to scare the hell out of me.”

  “I didn’t know it was such an old legend.”

  “It is,” he said. “From what my granddaddy says, it goes clear back to the beginning and then some. I forget the Indian name for the thing, but it means ‘stink monster’ or something like that.”

  “Those people who . . . believe in it sometimes call it ‘Skunk Ape,’ don’t they?”

  “The people who believe in it do,” he said evenly—making it very clear that he didn’t believe in it. “According to my granddaddy’s legends, this Swamp Ape is more ghost than animal. No one can ever catch it, and you can’t hurt it by shooting it. He told me all people and animals are on this earth for a purpose, and the purpose of the Swamp Ape was to guard the spirits of the dead.”

  “The Indian dead, you mean.”

  “That far back in the ’glades, what other kind of dead is there? That’s why it used to scare me so when I was a boy. On my folks’ property, way back in, there’s a big burial mound. Made of pure sand. Not a shell or stick in it. I used to wonder how they could get such pure sand so far inland. After a bad storm you could go back to that mound and find bits of bone and pretty blue and gold chevron beads right on the surface, washed out by the rain.”

  “You used to hunt for that stuff?”

  “Yeah, but not for long. My granddaddy caught me one morning. I thought he was going to lick the hide off me. Instead he told me that the mound was sacred, and that anybody who messed with it would end up in bad trouble. And that’s when he told me about that swamp monster—the one who protects the dead.”

  “It seems to me that if there is such a creature, your grandfather, at least, would consider it to be on your family’s side.”

  Hervey nodded. “Normally, I guess—yeah. But like I said, that granddaddy of mine is a very old man. Somewhere in his nineties by now. And my young aunt’s husband is a no-account, and don’t give a damn about the land. What I’m getting at, Dusky, is some of those low-life artifact hunters have been sneaking onto their property and robbing that mound. You know the blue-collar creeps from Fort Myers or Naples, or Miami who sneak around on Indian property hunting for bones and pottery and beads to sell, or just so they can take them home and tell their friends that they’re archaeology experts or something.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I know the type. I’d rather spend a week with the summer flu than one afternoon with one of those jerks.”

  He grinned. “I’m glad we feel the same way about it.”

  “We do.”

  “Well, those bastards have been robbing the mound. Talked to my young aunt a week ago, and then again yesterday when she finally asked me to come up and help. Seems that a few days after they found the first signs of the treasure hunters, they woke up one morning to find these giant footprints outside their door. My granddaddy said there was no doubt what had made them. Said the Swamp Ape was looking for the men who had robbed the mound. Two days later they went into Naples for supplies, and they come back to find their house ransacked. Damn place just torn apart. High up on one of the ceiling beams, they found a muddy print.” Hervey paused dramatically, then added: “It was the print of a giant hand.”

  “Damn,” I said, “you don’t believe—”

  “Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “That’s not all. Granddaddy figured the Swamp Ape was blaming them for not protecting the mound better. But my aunt, with her college education, figured it was just a prank by some of her schoolkids.”

  “What changed her mind?”

  “Well,” Hervey said, “my little aunt has this daughter, Eisa. Eisa’s not but five or six years old. One day Eisa went out to play and she didn’t come back for almost eight hours. My aunt was frantic. Couldn’t get hold of her husband, and they have to go five miles to the nearest phone. Said she damn near went crazy with worry. But then that little Eisa just suddenly reappeared. Poor little thing didn’t want to talk about it at first. But then she began having nightmares
and Myrtle got the story out of her.”

  “She wasn’t just off playing?”

  Hervey shook his head solemnly. “Not hardly. Eisa told my aunt she had made a new friend. She said the new friend walked her clear across the Everglades. She said the friend was tall as a tree and covered with hair. She said her new friend never said the first word—just carried her off. My granddaddy says it’s the way of the legend. The Swamp Ape never speaks. . . .”

  4

  In the silence which followed, I watched my friend closely, trying to decipher exactly how he felt about the story he had just told me.

  But his face gave away nothing. His was a broad, sun-blackened face matted with beard. Unlike April, who looked much like an Indian, only Hervey’s stoicism suggested his heritage.

  “Hervey, you don’t really believe that, do you? You don’t really think some half-man, half-animal carried your niece off?”

  He snorted. “Do I look like one of those UFOLOVING loony tunes to you? Hell no, I don’t believe it. If I did, I’d just recommend my folks get the hell out of there while the gettin’s good. What I believe is, someone wants them off that property pretty bad—bad enough to play some pretty crazy games. They kidnap my niece for an afternoon. What does that prove? It proves that if they can take her for eight hours, they can take her for eight days. And if they can take her for eight days, it’s time enough to do anything they want with her. And that’s pretty scary.

  “But there’s more than that going on,” he continued. “Fire’s a pretty normal thing in the Everglades during the winter months. Especially since the developers around the ’glades started digging their canals so they could sell their puny little lots as waterfront property to the tourist folk. They’ve been draining the Everglades to death for eighty years, and they still don’t know no better. But by May the rains start putting the fires out, and by September, which it is now, the place is soaking and there should be no fires at all. But there’s been all sorts of fires around my folks’ place. Not natural fires, either. Someone’s been setting them.”

  “No swamp monster would do that, obviously.”