Florida Heatwave (37 page)

Charles winked and turned to move off to the east, taking large, awkward strides. Lance responded to the wink with a quizzical look of his own. He’d never seen Charlie wink before.

Within twenty minutes, Charles could no longer see them. The airboat was out of sight. But he swore he could still hear them chattering, something about being contestants on a thing called
Survivor: Samoa.

He kept moving, with some difficulty, he admitted. With each step he was both pulling one foot out of the muck, and then stretching to plunge it back into the swamp. But at this point he wasn’t considering the effort.

This ain’t Samoa, it’s the Everglades folks, he thought. And there will only be one survivor on this day. When he figured he’d made at least thirty yards, he looked to find purchase on a thick mat of built-up vegetation and silt in the eddy of a flow of water. He got one foot on top and then stood up on it, gaining maybe two feet in elevation. He checked what there was of the horizon to see; the unbroken blue sky and the green-brown tops of the sawgrass. Nothing more, or less, than nature itself. He reached into a chest-high pocket of his vest and withdrew an old television remote that had cluttered a drawer in his kitchen for years. It had not been much of a task for the son and grandson of blasting experts to rig it as an electronic igniter to the package of black powder he’d attached to the gas tanks of the airboat. Hell, his dad had shown him how to do it with the garage door opener years ago. It was a matter of setting the right frequency. Punch a button. Create a spark.

He raised the remote as high in the air as possible to give it a clear signal. He did not waver. Did not hesitate. “Fire in the hole,” he whispered. And then he mashed the MUTE button.

The explosion shivered the air. Charles did not feel the same rumble of the ground and vibration in his legs that he had always felt when his dad and granddad blew holes in the limestone. But the air quivered and the sound, the BALLLLOOOM and the rush of unnatural wind whumped against him in a most satisfying way. He closed his eyes then and breathed deeply. As the echo of the blast faded, the silence rushed in. The quiet was total, earth stopping, ear molding, and to him, nearly orgasmic.

“Oh,” he whispered and nothing more. He let the lack of sound wash over him, cleanse him, anoint him. It was bliss. Not the death of his wife. Not the death of her friends. But the quiet. The aftermath of the explosion had muted everything; the buzz of insects, movement of birds, disturbance of the water, even the wind seemed to have stopped as the concussion created some kind of vacuum.

He did not know how long he kept his eyes closed. A minute? Ten? Finally he let his lids part and then let his eyes focus on the horizon. A funnel of black smoke rose in the distance; a curled, fat finger pointing up into the sky. That would surely be spotted by someone, he thought. There were other people out here; fishermen, birders, other airboaters, even several private planes above that used the open space and lack of air traffic to practice low-level flying and stunts. Someone would see the plume and investigate. Still he stood for some minutes, reveling, not in what he had done, but in what he had created. But even his quiet euphoria could not levitate him. He soon became aware that he was sinking, his weight finally overpowering the loose purchase of sawgrass and detritus. The soak of the water moved up to his knees. He watched the smoke plume begin to dissipate and knew he needed to go, needed to move fast to the berm that he’d carefully calculated to be a mile away.

He could make a mile. Hell, he walked more than that every day to and from his Tri-Rail commuter train stop to the office. No, he’d never actually walked the Glades, but who did? It wasn’t necessary. Even the native Seminole Indians used their dugout canoes to travel the watery landscape. But a mile was just a mile. Five thousand two hundred eighty feet. He’d best get moving. He was now the only survivor of a tragic airboat accident in which the heat of an overused engine had somehow ignited some dry stalks that got caught up in the blade cage of the engine and then in turn ignited the fuel tanks. A terrible explosion had occurred and he had been blown some distance and had miraculously escaped the full impact and had then made his way to civilization. He’d rehearsed the story. He stepped down into the water. It was the temperature of a warm bath. Soothing really. He took out the compass from his pocket, got an eastward bearing and started moving, step by step, foot pulled up and then replunged. Foot pulled up and replunged.

Within the first half hour he’d begun counting backwards. It was a goal, he told himself, a concentration exercise, it would occupy his mind, keep him focused. Four thousand eight hundred and seventy-four. Damn it was hot. He’d considered ahead of time that the moisture and the shade of the tall sawgrass and being down low would mean a natural shade and relative coolness. But he had been wrong. At the count of four thousand eight hundred he stopped to take a drink from the water bottle he’d taken from the boat. He recalled that stupid look on his wife’s face. Be back in an hour. He now shook his head, a bead of sweat flew. When had he learned to be such a liar? He took another swing of the water. Half the bottle left. He checked the compass and started east again.

The sounds of birds came back. The flutter of wings through air, but he was too far down in the grass to see anything in flight. In between steps he would hesitate and picked up the buzz of insects. It had started innocuously, but had risen to a steady hum. He was also beginning to notice the sound of the ripple from his own wake as he sloshed along. Three thousand seven hundred and forty-eight. He thought he heard a crackle of grass, the sound coming from behind him. Gator? Doubtful. Alligators are not stalkers. They wait, unmoving, for their prey to cross within snapping distance. They’re opportunistic creatures, not outwardly aggressive until they strike. Surprise is their thing. He wiped the sweat from his face with a sleeve and peered back. Green-brown walls, murky and dark water, blue channel of sky above. His slogging through the grass had left a distinctive path. That was good for his story, he thought. But good for following too. A cloud of mosquitoes suddenly fogged around his head and he waved them away. Best if he kept moving.

Two thousand six hundred and forty. That’s halfway. Right? He was an accountant. Of course it was right. Numbers were his thing. He went for the water bottle again, forgetting that he’d already emptied it one hundred steps ago, had tossed it high and to the right, over the stalks, well off the path.

Throw them off if they were following. Following? Where had he gotten that idea? Don’t lose focus, Charles, he thought. Don’t let the heat get to you. He kept moving but stopped twenty steps farther. He thought he’d heard something; a dull, rhythmic sound. Was someone talking behind him? Someone’s deep voice? A male voice? Lance? And why would he stop talking whenever Charles stopped? He went to wipe his face again, but his forehead and cheeks were dry. What was that rule about sweat? It was a sign of dehydration. Or was the lack of it the sign? Damn it was hot, and close, and now that whumping and the crackling and the buzzing were starting to get to him. “Fucking noise,” he whispered, and the words sounded foreign to him, the voice not even his. He hardly ever swore.

Shit. If only he could get up into the air. It was suffocating down here. It was a steam bath sucking the energy and the moisture out of his body and clear focus out of his head. He had a vision of fat men sitting in towels. He thought at one point he saw steam rising off the dark water. Again, something rustled behind him. He snapped his head around. Was that Susan’s new safari shirt? It was teal, wasn’t it? He crouched lower, his chin actually touching the water. It was cooler, right? Isn’t that what they tell you to do in a fire, go low to the ground because the smoke will rise? He peered again past the last few stalks of sawgrass that he had trampled. Was Susan stalking him?

Fuck. How did she survive that blast? “No way. Yes way,” he whispered, or tried, the words coming dry and strange to his mouth.

It was an old teenage comeback. No way! Yes way! He opened his mouth and let the Glades water spill ever so slightly over his bottom lip down into his throat. God he was thirsty. The water was brackish, the odor of mold and wet, rotting straw. He threw up, the yellowish spume spreading out before him. Another path to dehydration he was beyond recognizing. He needed to stand but could not gather the strength. He was bent at the waist, arms submerged in the water, heels of his hands on his knees. He was fighting the pull of gravity, straining simply to keep from pitching forward. Again the wump, wump, wump. He turned his head back to the path. Was Susan coming? He hoped she was coming. His head hung now, forehead dipped in water, gravity winning. But before he pitched forward and let the water wash into his lungs, he uttered four last desperate words: “Susan. Talk to me.”

Western Palm Beach County
—Four people airboating in the Everglades west of Atlantic Park Road on Tuesday were found dead after an apparent explosion, said a county sheriff’s spokesman.

Investigating the report of a fire about a mile from the L-16 canal berm, a sheriff’s helicopter at about 2 PM flew over the site of a charred airboat that had been destroyed by fire. A county airboat operated by the sheriff’s office was also dispatched and officers arrived at the scene to find three badly burned bodies within the twisted and blackened wreckage.

“It appears that a privately operated airboat somehow caught fire and ignited the fuel tanks,” said Palm Beach County Sheriff’s spokesman Ron Torre. “The resulting explosion nearly incinerated all three victims.”

Torre said that investigators also noted a newly beaten path leading away from the fire sight and when they tracked the path a fourth body was found.

“The fourth victim appeared to have survived the fire and was going for help,” Torre said. “But the Glades are extremely difficult to traverse in high water and in the direct sun, the heat, and humidity, the grasses can often reach over one hundred and twenty degrees.”

Torre said the fourth victim had apparently been overwhelmed by heat stroke and exhaustion. Identification of all four victims was being withheld pending

notification of kin.

According to an eyewitness who was among several people at the dock when officers brought the bodies ashore, all three of the burn victims had their mouths open and appeared to be frozen in the act of speaking.

Asked to verify that report, spokesman Torre said: “I certainly can’t speak to that. No comment.”

BY MICHAEL LISTER

She never takes off her watch
—not even when we make love.

She’ll be completely naked—no earrings, makeup, or pubic hair—but she’ll have that damn watch on. It’s one of the things I like about her. One of many.

It has a small brownish leather strap and an oval face that glints in the dashboard lights as she leans up from the passenger seat to search for a better song.

We’re on a dark, rural road in North Florida, so there’s not a lot of stations to choose from—one rock, two country, two top forty, one religious, an NPR playing classical at the moment, and a ninety-eight-point-something with an irritating DJ who doles out sappy sentimental bullshit between a truly awful selection of soft pop love songs.

She looks at her watch, though the light to do so comes from the greenish glow of the car clock.

She has narrow wrists and large, long-fingered hands that I love to watch—even when all she’s doing is checking the time.

Her delicate wrist and thin watchband both bear a slight dusting of dune sand from where we made love on the warm beach beneath a single star to the rhythmic returns of the tides, the infinite green Gulf a nearly unseen mass of undulating blackness.

The lovemaking in the sand fortress of the dunes had been our second dessert of the evening. The first, a white chocolate key lime tart, followed a Greek-style open-hearth charbroiled red snapper that we shared with a bottle of Mantazas Creek chardonnay.

We were celebrating—still are.

Depending on who you ask, it’s either our tenth anniversary or close to it. I mark it from the moment I saw her—that magical fall afternoon in the old creaky wooden-floor bookstore. She marks it from the first time we made love. Either way, we’ve been each other’s for a decade—or nearly a decade.

The night is dark and hot. We’re driving home on a straight, flat, empty rural highway that stretches out in seemingly endless lonely miles in either direction, framed by rows and rows of silent planted pines.

She passes on a love song that’s too soft, too elevatory, and a rock song that’s too hard, too head-bangy, and is about to zip on by the religious station, but stops when she recognizes the poem or passage that’s being read.

—To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven, the hoarse, preachery voice intones.

—I love this, she says.

—A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.

—You don’t really think there’s a time to kill, do you? I ask.

—Just listen. It’s beautiful.

—A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance, the radio preacher continues.

—Isn’t it nice? she asks.

That’s my Ansley. Poetic. Literate. Lyrical.

Her watch, the one she never takes off—even when we make love—is not just any watch, but one she searched extensively for. She’d seen plenty of clocks with the phrase
ultima forsan
on them, but never a watch. And so her search began.

I have no idea where she found it, but I never doubted she would.

And I never asked her what it meant. I looked it up myself.

Ultima forsan
is a Latin phrase that means
perhaps the last.
It’s a reminder that it’s later than we think, that any moment may be our last. Death is always at hand. Unseen. Unbidden. Unalterable.