Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County (7 page)

First the real estate development, now an airline? What next? I said a quick prayer that the ultimate goal was not like the plans rumored for Orlando, where someone widely suspected to be Walt Disney was said to be buying up huge tracts of land. Walt Disney himself was thought to be waiting for the right time to make a big announcement about his “Florida Project.”

I finally found my voice. “Jackie,” I croaked out the words, “do you think this has anything to do with that project planned by Walt Disney?”

“Sure,” Jackie said. “I think old Mr. Toomb is positioning himself to ride on Walt Disney's coattails.”

“What about Darryl?”

“Oh, I think Darryl is an opportunist just like Mr. Toomb. I asked Ted if he knew anything and he says Darryl's money is coming from New Jersey. Some suburb in New Jersey—I think it's called Basking-something. Basking Ridge, I think. Anyway, Darryl's investors may be trying to capitalize on Disney too, same as Mr. Toomb is.”

“But we're
so far south
of Orlando,” I said. “Heck, that's almost two hundred miles north of here!”

“Doesn't matter,” Jackie replied. “That's the way investors think. Florida is ‘hot' right now. Everything's on the table. That's what Ted says.”

I could see it all now. Naples would be connected to the outside world in a way it had never been. “Won't they have to improve our airport?” I said, thinking that would take some time. All we had now was a little cement runway good enough for the Civil Air Patrol to take off and land. Just a few private planes, that's all. A commercial airline would change everything.

“Oh, they're already doing that,” Jackie said. “Judd said something to me about it the other day, but I wasn't really paying attention.”

This was bigger than I had even imagined, and beyond anything I could prevent. I might as well try to part the Red Sea. What was the point in confronting Darryl? But a funny thing had happened to Jackie. Now that I was tuckered out, she was full of that unstoppable Jackie energy.

“Well, we can't stop Walt Disney, and there's not much we can do about Mr. Toomb,” she said. “But I don't think we should raise the white flag to Darryl—not without a fight, anyway.”

D
ang
, thought Dolores Simpson, the former Bunny Ann McIntyre.
Why was it taking that little gal, Dora Witherspoon, so long to meet up with her ex-husband and talk some sense into the man? When was she going to come back here and tell me what in tarnation is going on?

Dolores was not accustomed to feeling impatient. Living in her fishing shack all these years meant she had none of the stresses and deadlines of ordinary life. There's no reason to be in a hurry when you have nowhere to go. The fish would bite, or they wouldn't. The night heron sat stoically on her messy ol' nest. Five minutes could have passed, or five years.

“Hey,” she called, “how many eggs you got there, anyway? Three? Four?”

The small heron stared back. Sometimes, she'd shake her head just like a person but today she wasn't going to be bothered.

“I wonder when yer ol' eggs are going to hatch,” Dolores said half to herself. “I hate to break it to you,” she added, calling over to the bird, “but in case no one told you, your little night
heron chicks are going to be ugly as a toad's hindquarters. Now, don't take it real personal; that's just the way it is. If this is your first nest of eggs, I don't want you to be surprised, that's all. But Lawd knows there ain't nothing uglier in this world than a night heron chick.”

The bird stretched its neck and let out a sharp squawk.

“Oh, you didn't like that, huh? Well, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you. Just teasin' you, is all.”

Dolores swallowed a mouthful of porch-brewed tea from an old canning jar. Beside her on the step was a basket overflowing with swamp reeds. Marylou, a Seminole Indian, had taught her how to make baskets years before. It was a miracle, watching Marylou turn reeds into a work of art—a usable work of art that the tourists would buy. Marylou had died a long time ago—ten years? fifteen?—and ever since, Dolores didn't have the heart to make baskets. But with all this mess going on with new development, something made her start again. Maybe it was the easy rhythm of weaving the reeds. Worst thing in the world, waiting for news. And maybe even harder when you're all by yourself, 'cept for a night heron to keep you company.

She remembered how quickly Marylou's hands moved when she was making a basket. Why, she could make one in a few hours, depending on the pattern. Of course, Marylou had been making baskets from the time she was four years old, maybe even younger.

She worked for about an hour, then rested. Was she getting lazy, or was it just old age comin' down the pike?
Hard living catches up to a person real fast,
Dolores thought.
You think you're doing purty darn good, next thing you know you look like somethin' that washed in with the tide.
When she'd gone into town and sent that telegram to little Dora Witherspoon, she'd been shocked at
her own reflection in the big plate glass window at the five and dime.
Who the heck is that?
For a second she thought someone was sneaking up behind her but it was time—just time—that had caught up with her.

Well, one good thing about getting older was that the men didn't bother her anymore. Whenever that thought passed through her mind, she got religion. “Thank you, Jesus!” she'd say aloud. She didn't miss men—at least, the bad behavior of men—one bit.

Funny thing was, her nearest human neighbors were men. Billy and Marco were brothers of undetermined pedigree who shared a pickup truck and several bad habits. Because of their antics, usually fueled by moonshine, the area was called Gun Rack Village by the uppity types who ran Naples nearby.

There was a fellow who never spoke a word and wore clothes like Tarzan. Dolores kept her distance from him, especially once she'd learned that Billy and Marco called him Sing Sing, after the prison up north from which he'd got loose and swum across a big river—the Hudson, maybe.

More recently, an older man had set up camp near a huge clump of mangrove trees. He told Dolores, when she'd encountered him on the river one day, that he'd had enough of the modern world and intended to live and die right there. She'd agreed to bury him if she came across his body.

And then there was Weird Sam. He lived in an old trawler that had washed up the river in one of the bigger storms and had stuck fast between two cypress trees. No one knew the details, but according to the grapevine, Weird Sam was from a well-off family that had him put in an institution. At some point he either escaped or was let out; regardless, his family wouldn't have anything to do with him. So he lived back in the swamps with a
cat named Fish, a dog named Freedom, and a parrot called Mrs. Roosevelt. He did not entertain visitors.

But he did reach out to Dolores when his cat stepped on something sharp and got a deep cut in its paw. He showed up crying with the parrot on his shoulder, the dog by his side, and the injured kitty in his arms. For some reason he thought Dolores could help him, and she did. He held the cat tightly while she poured some moonshine down its throat—just enough to make it woozy—and then stitched up the poor little paw. The cat was right as rain in no time, and Weird Sam started to consider Dolores a friend, or something close to it.

Scattered among the ragtag white residents were Seminole Indians, though how many there were, and exactly where they were, Dolores did not know, even after living on the river all those years. Dolores had only known Marylou, who had taught her how to weave baskets.

Further south on the river was the small village of colored folks. There was one spot on the river where they were known to gather on a Sunday once or twice a year. The first time Dolores had seen them there, she thought she was seeing haints. She hid behind a small grove of mangroves and watched as Negro women, dressed in white robes, walked single file toward a natural clearing by the river. What was most startling to Dolores was the women's absolute silence. They paused while a group of small boys dashed ahead, poking sticks into reeds and banging drums up and down the water's edge. No doubt they were scaring off gators and snakes. Not until Dolores saw two preachers wade out into the water, with one holding a Bible high in the air so it wouldn't get wet, did she realize this was a baptism ceremony. The women were dunked under the water one at a time and came up spluttering. There was much hugging and joyful
weeping as each newly baptized woman joined the others on the sand. Only after they were all baptized did they begin to sing. Their voices were lush and glorious as they sang their praise music in perfect harmony, accompanied by the ' Glade's own peculiar sound, a constant, low droning that seemed to come from deep within the earth.

Dolores didn't have any deep love for the Negro race, but witnessing their ceremony seemed to soften her a little around the edges. It was hard to stay angry and brittle in the presence of such joy and beauty.

She was raised with the firm belief that was hard to shake, though, that white folks without a bank account or an education had it just as hard in life as Negroes. She did not see any advantage in being white if you were, as she was, at the bottom of the pile.

Yet Dolores had to admire the gumption of this particular group; they weren't any different from her in one respect: All they wanted was to be left alone. They'd refused to move to McDonald's Quarters. The Negro “renegades,” as they were sometimes called, included Priscilla Harmon—before the miracle of her going off to college—and her grandma. Robbie-Lee had mentioned once that Priscilla's grandma worked in the fields for one of the families that grew sugarcane and watermelons. Most of those colored children did not go to school, but Priscilla had taught herself to read and write by studying an old Sears catalog and an illustrated Bible, according to Robbie-Lee. The girl was so smart that the teachers at the Negro high school enlisted the help of the town's librarian to find her new and challenging books to read. This was how Priscilla came to know about Jackie's book club, which met at the library. She had just finished high school and was working as a maid for mean old Mrs. Burnside.
Then she let everyone down by getting pregnant, a disaster that Dolores understood only too well. White girls who were poor like Dolores were in the same boat as colored girls. All it took was one mistake and that was the end of your dreams, assuming you had any in the first place. Meanwhile, white girls who came from money simply disappeared for a while, came back home, and were allowed to act like nothing had happened. They'd been taken out of state—“gone to Georgia” was the phrase—to bide their time at a maternity home, and their babies given away to a well-to-do Protestant couple, or sometimes kinfolk.

As for the young man or boy who helped create the heartbreaking situation, he usually got off scot-free. Once in a while, some irate daddy would insist on a shotgun wedding—marry my daughter or else. But the better off the family, the more likely they were to try to hide the girl's mistake.

Much as Dolores disliked Jackie Hart, there was a small part of her that admired her for figuring out a way to help Priscilla. But Dolores felt something else, too: a flash of envy. No one had helped her, back in her time of need and confusion.

Now she found herself in trouble again—a different set of circumstances, of course, and yet familiar in the way it made her feel. Once again, she was treated as a person who didn't matter, who had no say. Once again, the world wanted to take what she had and give her nothing in return. She was forty-seven years old and all used up; some of it was her own fault, some wasn't. Regardless, all she really wanted was peace. Was that so much to ask?

This is why she had to fight to protect the river. For herself and her way of life, yes, but it was more than that. This place—the 'Glades—felt eternal. In its own way, it was sacred, like the Grand Canyon, or that place in California with the giant trees.

Unfortunately, since the 'Glades featured gators, snakes, bugs, and poisonous plants, folks didn't always recognize its beauty. Outsiders seemed to think it was a wasteland. If that was where your people were from, you got used to strangers acting like you crawled up out of the swamp yourself. You felt cursed being born there.

Only once had she heard anyone say anything nice about the 'Glades, and it had stuck with her. Her family was not churchgoers. But once, curious as a cat, she'd sneaked over and hid in the bushes near the tent revival at the Colored Adventist Church, just to have a listen. At the end of the service, the preacher gave thanks “for the 'Glades and the life that sprang from it.” This got her attention. “We sometimes don't appreciate this here swamp,” he'd said, “and we be skeert at some of the things that live in it and around it. It ain't an easy place to live. But thank you, Lord. The swamp be worthy because you designed it, Lord. You put the swamp here at the same time you hung the sun in the sky, and for this we are grateful, Lord.”

She memorized those words and they came to her often over the years. This was not a wasteland. Far from it. She would fight for the little night heron, the mangrove trees, the flowing water, and the wild grasses. Surely, the river had a right to survive.

H
ere, read this while I drive,” Jackie instructed, and I was only too happy to oblige since her driving style, which never seemed to include both hands on the wheel, often made me wish I'd stayed at home in the company of my turtles.

Judd had drawn his map on the back of a piece of paper he must've torn from a school notebook. On one side was a to-do list that included “Mow Miss Turnipseed's lawn,” “Ask Dad: bike tire,” “Fishing worms,” and “iron uniform.” The latter, I supposed, referring to the Civil Air Patrol outfit that made teenagers look like miniature grown-ups.