Everglades Assault Page 9

  It is a wild giant land of dark water, forbidding islands, and haunting beauty.

  I love it.

  And so did Hervey.

  He stood with me on the flybridge as we snaked our way through a tributary to the broadening Shark River, where the current boiled at glassy intersections. These were the tallest mangrove trees of all now—eighty feet high. The forest along the river was ornate with bromeliads and sea birds, and the only noise was the burble of Sniper’s engines and the wind in the high trees.

  “This used to be great country,” Hervey said. He wore the same jeans and western shirt, and there was a big chew of Red Man in his cheek.

  “Used to be?”

  “Florida, I mean. You get down in here and you see the way it used to be. Wild, pure—and not just because there ain’t any people around. Men used to live here—right on this river, as a matter of fact.”

  We were midway up the river, and I hadn’t seen a single scar of human habitation. “Where in the hell did they live here?”

  Hervey motioned toward the south bank. “There. All along here. My daddy brought me up here when I was a boy. Had a tannic-acid plant right down yonder. Built their houses on stilts. That’s my point. People lived here as short as forty years ago—and the Indians for a thousand years before them. But they didn’t hurt it none. It’s natural for man to live on this earth—but it ain’t natural for man to dig deep and dredge it up, change this and alter that just so they can go to their graves rich.”

  He spit and thought for a moment. “You see, these developers think—no, they damn well believe—that Florida ain’t nothin’ but a property. Something they can buy and sell and own. Well, that’s just plain bullshit. No matter what their deeds say or their lawyers tell ’em, they don’t own no land. They don’t own it no more than the Indians did, or we do—or the people a thousand years from now will. We’re just tenants. We’re renters with a lifetime lease. But they’ve taken Florida and acted like there ain’t gonna be no future. And the way they’ve treated this state, they might be right.”

  “I have a feeling you’re getting at something.”

  “You’re damn right I am.” He paused, working at his chew of tobacco. “You ever been to a development town near Fort Myers called Cape Coral?”

  “Flew over it once. About a million miles of deadend roads and canals, all in nice neat squares. And hardly any trees. From the air, it looks like a big scar.”

  “Right! And then there’s a place like it called Golden Gate, and a couple more just as bad on the east coast. Can’t you see? The developers keep pushing right on southward, toward the ’glades. They keep chopping away at Florida, gettin’ rich, measurin’ how successful they are by the amount of shit they can pile in their own backyard. And they ain’t gonna be satisfied until it’s all gone.” Hervey spit bitterly. “Take my Indian folks, where we’re going. Lived there happy as clams for as long as they can remember, and for as long as my granddaddy can remember. Now someone’s tryin’ to push them off. Tryin’ to ruin even that.”

  “You think developers want that land?”

  “Hell, I don’t know who wants it. It’s just that whole way of thinking that pisses me off. People thinkin’ the land is something to be bought or sold or stolen. My point is, it’s time to fight, damn it. It’s time to hunker down and not give in and fight to the last dyin’ breath. Because we just ain’t fightin’ for ourselves.”

  Hervey was so furious with the slow, sure destruction of the state in which he was born that his bearded face was crimson. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so worked up,” I said.

  He sniffed and looked away, suddenly embarrassed by the long speech he had just made. “I guess it’s because, livin’ in Key West, I got sort of blind to the trailer parks and the condominiums and that sort of shit. Got so I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to. But then, a man gets here on the Shark River, which is the way Florida used to be—and could still be, if the developers and the politicians had a brain in their damn heads—and it just sort of brings it all back. Makes me feel stupid, the way I forgot it so easy. And feelin’ stupid makes me mad.”

  “Mad enough to drink a beer?”

  He chuckled. “Maybe more than one. I’ll get ’em.”

  He had just turned to go below when I saw it.

  At first I thought it was a big palm tree floating in the water. But then I saw the movement of the dragon tail. And the blazing yellow eyes surfaced to watch us pass.

  “Jesus, Hervey—look at that!”

  He stopped and peered at it. “Goddamn! Look at the size of that gator—must be fifteen feet long!”

  I brought Sniper to idle, letting the current of the river drift us sideways so we could get a better look. “That’s no alligator, Hervey. Look at its nose. A gator’s nose is round—you know that better than I do. That thing has a pointed nose. It’s no gator, Hervey. Can’t be. It’s a saltwater crocodile.”

  “My lord,” Hervey said softly. “You’re right. I’ve read about them. But I never dreamed I’d ever get the chance to see one. They used to be pretty common when the Spaniards first came to Florida. But now they ain’t nowhere—”

  “—but here,” I finished.

  Hervey had been right in his estimation of the croc’s size. It swam full on the surface now. It was a full fifteen feet long, and its girth suggested its weight at a half ton. Or more. You could see its massive claws hanging limply beneath it in the clear dark water as it swam, its tail ruddering it slowly across the river.

  For the first time in my life, I wished that I owned a camera.

  “Can you imagine what woulda happened if we’d decided to stop here and go for a swim?” Hervey said. He still whispered—whispered not because he was afraid of frightening the croc, but because the size and grace and the pure malevolence of the dragoneyed giant demanded awe.

  “Had we gone in here? With the croc?”

  “Unless people feed a gator, he ain’t aggressive,” Hervey said. “Even the big ones will swim away from a man. But a croc—they’re somethin’ altogether different. Read about them African crocs. They’ll stalk a man. They’ll hunt him down. If we’d been unlucky enough to swim here, he’da probably taken at least one of us. Maybe both.”

  The croc paused, motionless in the current. All the way down the river we had been seeing small loggerhead turtles—small meaning thirty- or forty-pounders.

  Now he saw one, too.

  He submerged soundlessly, without a bit of wasted effort. The turtle was about twenty yards away, his leather-colored head and dull dry eyes studying the surface of the river. Our eyes followed the light wake of the croc as he made his way toward the sea turtle.

  “Watch this,” Hervey whispered.

  He didn’t have to nudge me. I was already watching, entranced. Television can’t touch the drama of the wilderness—especially when the drama includes something as rare and as huge as that saltwater crocodile.

  The loggerhead seemed satisfied that all was well on the Shark River this day; convinced that all was at peace.

  He was wrong.

  One second, the turtle’s head periscoped its way around the surface, and the next second, there was an explosion of water and blood, a brief frenzy upon the river as the croc’s head plunged out of the water with the turtle dwarfed within the massive jaws.

  And then all was tranquil again except for a light wake which washed against the shore.

  “My God almighty,” Hervey whistled.

  I found that I had been holding my breath. I exhaled and said nothing. I didn’t want the search for words to even ripple that image I held of the croc taking the loggerhead. I wanted to hang on to the reverence I felt for as long as I could.

  A long time later, when we were far away from the Shark River and with Graveyard Creek and Shark Point well behind us, Hervey finally spoke of it. We were in the Gulf now, riding a light sea in a light September wind, and the water spread away from us tranquil and blue and seemingly endle
ss.

  “You know,” he said suddenly, “the Indians might have seen that croc in a different light.”

  “Yeah? What do you mean?”

  “Like an omen. Something that unusual—they’d have to think about it as a symbol or something like that.”

  “And now you’re going to tell me what it means as an omen, right?”

  “Hell, I don’t know what they’d think it meant. You’d have to ask my granddaddy that.”

  “You think he’d say it was a good omen or a bad omen?”

  Hervey smiled. “Ask him tomorrow when you see him.” He paused and added, “But whatever kind of omen it is, that croc sure was something to see, wasn’t it?”

  “It was that.”

  “If it was all an omen, maybe the people trying to scare my folks off their land are the turtle.”

  “Or maybe they’re the crocodile. And we’re the turtle.”

  Hervey whistled softly. “Damn, I hope not.” He whistled again. “That croc scared me—and I’m damn near fearless. . . .”

  10

  Panther James and his small clan lived in the clearing of an oak hammock where moss hung from the trees and a blackwater stream moved toward the sawgrass expanse and cypress heads in the distance.

  It wasn’t what I had expected—not that I’m sure what I expected. Watch too many John Wayne movies and you get weird ideas about Indians.

  Their little settlement was a combination of the old, the new, and anything else that was comfortable.

  We had brought Sniper through the mangrove maze of Indian Key Pass in the Ten Thousand Islands to the old coastal town of Everglades City. Everglades City looks like a small New England village built, strangely, on that rare high ground between swamp and sea. The houses there are made of wood, neat and well cared for, and the roads are wide and empty, lined with the old glass-globed streetlights.

  We had an early supper at the Rod and Gun Club, a landmark of old Florida grace, then hunted up a rental car.

  “You sure your boat’s going to be okay here?” Hervey had asked. “I’d feel real bad if something happened to it while you were doing a favor for me.”

  “Do you know what the crime rate is in this little town?”

  “Next to nothing, I’d guess.”

  “Right. Besides, I’m going to moor her downriver. A friend of mine here named Bill Williams said I could use his dock. He’ll keep an eye on things. You call your folks?”

  “Can’t. No phone. My young aunt—Myrtle James Cougar’s her name—always calls me from the Indian school where she works. But they’ll have food waiting for us. You can bet on that. Granddaddy Panther James always knows when people are coming.”

  I eyed him for a moment to see if he was serious. “Do you believe that?”

  He grinned. “I’m part Indian myself, remember.”

  Our rental car was a red Ford that smelled of cigar. The lady at the desk didn’t like our not having a credit card. They want everyone to believe that plastic currency is a modern necessity—like fingerprints, a Social Security number, and a political affiliation. The retail hawks try to make you feel uncomfortable if you can’t—or won’t—produce a credit card upon demand. The commercials tell you they’re the key to financial freedom. In truth, they’re plastic rungs on the ladder into debt.

  So we paid her cash in advance, rolled down the windows, turned the air on high, and drove on out of Everglades City, past the old tram depot which has become the Captain’s Table motel and restaurant, and turned east on the Tamiami Trail.

  The trail is the two-lane asphalt strip which arrows through the Everglades connecting Naples, on the west coast of Florida, with Miami.

  It was the road which Grafton McKinney had told us about—the one which he had worked on with Panther James, Hervey’s grandfather.

  Driving across it a couple of hours before sunset, it was easy to imagine the way it had been. The trail is a desolate eighty miles of highway now. Back then, when it was only swamp and snakes, gators and mosquitoes, it must have been hell.

  At fifty-five miles an hour, we headed inland. Sawgrass stretched away from us on both sides of the road, where vultures fed on the highway carnage of bloated possums and armadillos. In the far distance were cypress heads, cool and inviting in the late-afternoon heat. The land was low and endless, and you could see the shadows of clouds passing over the sawgrass two miles away.

  The traffic was light—but fast. Cars barely paused to pass us.

  “Kinda bleak out here from the road,” Hervey said. He was driving, spitting out the window.

  He was right. Every few miles a rickety billboard would scream at you in multicolored letters: INDIAN CAMP AHEAD

  ALLIGATOR WRESTLING

  SOUVENIRS

  Or:AIRBOAT RIDES NEXT RIGHT

  SEE FLORIDA PANTHERS, RARE SNAKES

  And a few miles beyond the sign we would pass some dilapidated roadside Indian camp with a wooden fence and thatched roofs with television antennas protruding—or some rural Everglades concession with junked cars piled by the blackwater canal where the airboats were tethered with their huge airplane propellers.

  The hammocks of human inhabitation all seemed rather grim and desperate on their frail roadside footholds against the enormous background of the sawgrass.

  “You got to get back in to really see the Everglades,” Hervey said.

  “Any chance of our getting back in?”

  He grinned. “We’re going to stay with my granddaddy, ain’t we? You can’t get no further in than that.”

  That was almost an understatement.

  Just before the border of the Big Cypress National Park Reservation, Hervey signaled and slowed.

  “Where in the hell are you turning?”

  “On that road, of course.”

  “Road? I don’t see any road.”

  “You ain’t looking close enough.”

  Sure enough, just ahead was a little clearing in the sawgrass at the edge of a pretty circle of hatrack cypress. A narrow plank bridge crossed a stream and disappeared into the swamp.

  “That bridge doesn’t look like it would hold my weight—let alone the weight of a car.”

  Hervey shrugged. “Aunt Myrtle says she drives the pickup across it every day. But damn if I don’t think you’re right. That bridge does look a little old and poorly.”

  Hervey turned and idled the car onto the planking. You could feel it bow beneath the weight of the car. Once across, he exhaled softly.

  “Wouldn’t want to try that too often.”

  “And never on a full stomach. I think one more pound would have done us in.”

  The bridge exited onto a narrow dirt road that looked more like a wagon trail. White ibis flushed from the myrtle flats before us, and a swallow-tailed kite—looking like a combination of hawk and dove—was lovely and pale against the September sun.

  Gator, the big Chesapeake, sat in the backseat and whined with the appearance of every bird, anxious to be after it.

  After about twenty miles on the dirt path, the road branched at the perimeter of a cypress swamp where the trees were laden with moss. In the middle of the road, one of the biggest rattlesnakes I’ve ever seen took his time getting out of the way.

  “The Johnny Egret family lives off to the right there,” Hervey said. “Maybe we can pay them a visit tomorrow.”

  “Sounds good. How much farther?”

  “Not long.” Hervey smiled. “Too much farther and we’ll be back on the Shark River again.”

  The road began to curve, oak trees hanging down over the path, and we came around a bend to the camp of Hervey’s maternal relatives.

  A couple of small cur dogs came yapping out to meet us. In the middle of the oak hammock was a dirt clearing. An open pole house with a palmetto thatch roof—a chickee—was built in the center of the clearing. Smoke drifted from a hole in the thatching, and a large cast-iron pot simmered over the coals of a fire. To the left was another thatched chickee—but this one ha
d walls. An old school bus without tires rusted in the weeds behind the hut, and to the right was a neat plank house with a porch and screen doors. A Chevy pickup truck that looked as if it had seen as many years as miles was parked beside the shack in the shade.

  “Looks like Myrtle’s home,” Hervey said simply.

  As we got out of the car, a heavyset Indian woman of about thirty came out to meet us. She wore a simple blue pleated skirt, white blouse, and sandals. She wore her hair in a bun.

  “We were about to give up on you two!”

  “And how’s my youngest aunt?”

  She came up smiling and hugged Hervey, then held out her hand to me while we were introduced. I noticed a little girl with jet-black hair and eyes like an owl’s hiding behind a big oak.

  “That’s my daughter Eisa, Mr. MacMorgan. She’s a little shy of strangers. We don’t get many visitors out here. And lately the ones we do get aren’t very nice.”

  “Maybe we can help change that, Myrtle. And my name’s Dusky.”

  While Hervey and I got our sparse luggage out of the rental car, the Chesapeake didn’t waste any time letting the cur dogs know who was going to be in charge while he was around. He rolled the one lean cur foolish enough to challenge him, then lifted his leg and urinated on the fallen dog. After a few tense minutes of sniffing and growling, the other dogs decided it was safer to accept him. While the Chesapeake trotted off to explore the grounds, the three curs fell into line behind, wagging their tails, happy to have a leader.

  “Granddad Panther around?” Hervey asked.

  Myrtle nodded, suddenly uncomfortable. “He’s over in his chickee. But before you see him, Hervey, I’d like to talk to you. Are you hungry?”

  We weren’t, but we accepted supper anyway. We ate sitting on a pole platform in the kitchen hut. She served us a stew of feral pork and tomatoes in stoneware bowls, fry bread, and a thick drink made of corn she called sofki. I liked everything but the sofki, so I drank it as quickly as possible to save her any embarrassment.

  While she served us, she talked. She had a soft low voice edged with worry. There was a steadfast quality about her that put me in mind of April.