The Same River Twice (21 page)

While waiting for the new motor, I met a few of my fellow workers. Rafe and Slim were part of Castro's mass prison release of sociopaths and infidels. Slim told me that he loved Cuba for setting him free, and hated America for sending him to wash dishes in a swamp. Rafe pinned curlers to his hair, shaved his legs, and wore, as he said, “sensible flats” in the kitchen. His temper erupted three or four times a week.

The Haitian prep cook was a gentle guy who smoked dope openly and was known simply as “the Haitian.” He constantly walked the shoreline searching for the Floridian's dream—a lost bale of marijuana floating on the tide.

The longest-term employee was a waiter named Grimmes, who always wore his white shirt and black pants. He'd spent so much time trotting to avoid the mosquitoes that he continued the habit indoors, I never heard Grimmes speak and neither had anyone else. He was the subject of much teasing by the only three single women in the swamp, all of whom were named Vickie. General consensus separated them as Vickie Uno, Vickie Dos, and Vickie Tres. One was the gigantic Ur-mother of the primordial swamp. Her breasts began at her throat, descending in a parabola that ended in a mysterious nether region beneath a loose dress. Her chief sidekick was less than five feet tall, and never stopped talking. She always wore the same jeans, with the top unsnapped. The third was older, seemed to be balding, and claimed to have been shot during a burglary.

The three Vickies separated at night according to whim and men, living an extraordinary life for women of plain appearance. They were high priestesses with their pick of consort. They ran in a pack with Rafe and Slim, generating an androgynous sexuality that rivaled the humidity in its permeation of the swamp. All of them smelled of salt, sex, and gin.

Bucky's lieutenant was a blond woman with the straight-wired brain of a reptile. Rose had a crude glass eye in her left socket, and limped on a prosthetic left leg. The Haitian was so terrified of her that if someone mentioned her name, he immediately made the sign of the cross, removed his belt, and ran it through the loops the opposite way.

Before my arrival, I already had an enemy. Mossy had been the interim Naturalist before someone else could be conned into the job. He was very tall, thin from the waist down, and had six fingers on one hand. Mossy's face and body embodied the myth of America, containing a gene of every immigrant who'd strayed across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, he also retained elements of the landbridge walkers during the Ice Age. A week before, he'd been crawling along a table in the dining room, following a rare insect he couldn't identify. The rest of the employees calmly moved their plates for his passage. He suddenly recognized the bug, stood on the table, and lost the top of his scalp to the ceiling fan. By happenstance, I had called the following day and been hired. Mossy loathed me for having usurped his job.

Several other staff members moved through the swamp in such a peripheral fashion that I never knew them. A steady stream of new employees trickled in daily. Some people lasted a full day, but most turned tail after a few hours. Two were followed and arrested by state police. Like rotgut and rainfall, I'd found my low spot.

The breezeway was an open bridge that connected the main facility to a small park ranger's office. Inside was a large, gridded map for charting the progress of storms from Africa to Florida. The ranger was from the Bronx. He devoted his hours to a tiny radio, trying to follow the Mets.

Initially, life in Flamingo reminded me of a rooming house-inhabited by kooks and outcasts, dice that rolled off the table, wrinkles on the face of God. After a week of breathing the heavy air, I took a different view. We were de-evolved humans who'd chosen proximity to the foundations of our existence, living on neither land nor water, but in a foreign world of both. The transient existence prevented anyone from, getting too close. No one asked questions. The choice to live in a swamp implied a past that was somehow worse, therefore worth leaving. The Glades were America's version of the French Foreign Legion, and the meager pay kept us all locked in harness.

I soon lost weight from the steady fare of Cuban prison food. Starch was the mainstay, with canned vegetables boiled to limpness. Rafe's primary concern was storing food that could withstand the humidity, since bread grew mold overnight. There were no dairy products for thirty miles. Breakfast was powdered eggs mixed with water and scrambled to a mortar the color of willow buds. I began eating fruit for every meal.

At peak mosquito time I lounged in the ranger's air-conditioned office, reading pamphlets about the swamp. He could never answer any of my questions. He didn't like the swamp and he didn't like me. I borrowed all his books and learned enough to fool any hapless tourist into believing I knew the area like a Seminole. Two weeks after my arrival, Dirt installed the new engine. My vacation was over. The last day before working the tour boat, I applied a thick layer of mud to my face and hands and entered the mangroves.

I became lost immediately. Tree roots rose beyond my head, their branches forming a dim canopy. A myriad of insects swarmed over the mud, entering my ears, mouth, and nose. Water splashed mysteriously in all directions. Though I'd not taken a dozen steps, it was impossible to discern my trail. Panic doused me like kerosene. I wanted to run and to scream. My perceptions became so lucid that I could feel my sweat straining against the mud filling my pores. I saw nothing except the strange cellular familiarity of wet earth. My boot caught an underwater root and I fell. Mud washed from my face and the mosquitoes attacked. I scrambled to the nearest tree and began climbing, feet slipping on the branches, harsh leaves tearing my face. The tree was small but it merged with a large one and I was able to navigate above the water from tree to tree. A line of sunlight pierced the foliage. I moved closer, lost my foothold, and fell out of the swamp a few feet from where I'd entered.

Two silhouetted figures were walking toward me, one short, one enormous.

“There's your Naturalist,” Bucky said. “Be double damned if he ain't the seriousest yet.”

I shaded my eyes and looked into the ancient face of Captain Jack.

“Are you a serious-minded man?” he said.

I nodded. He plucked a three-inch chameleon from my shoulder. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, he squeezed its belly until the tiny jaws gaped wide, like a clothespin. He lifted the lizard to his ear and released it. The chameleon clamped its mouth around the captain's earlobe and wriggled its feet wildly in the air. I began to laugh.

“He'll do,” the captain said.

Bucky frowned, both hands on his hips, shaking his head. It was the first and only time I saw him unable to produce his managerial grin.

Captain Jack climbed lithely aboard the
Heron
and looked at me as if waiting. His hair was close-cropped, white as salt. His eyes were slits in a sun-creased face. With his chin slightly raised, hooked nose, and fence post posture, he had the air of a Roman statesman.

“Ever been on a boat, kid?” he said.

“No sir.”

“You cast off and I'll do the rest.”

“Yes sir.”

“Were you in the service?”

“No sir.”

“Do you call all men ‘sir'?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why?”

“My father made me.”

“Was he in the service?”

“No sir.”

He stared at me for nearly a minute. He was really looking, regarding in the older sense of its meaning. When he spoke, his voice was softer than before.

“You don't have to call me ‘sir.' ”

I unhooked the lines and we moved away from the dock and into the bay. Flamingo's rickety line of buildings looked twice as pathetic from the sea, vulnerable and lonely, as if they'd been beached by tide rather than built by man. We entered a channel and moved inland. The red mangroves leaked tannin that dyed the water the flat color of old blood. Captain Jack slowed the engine to a dull steady pulse. Our passage had curved until we were surrounded by the dark groves.

“What happened to your ears?” I said.

The tips of both were corrugated like sawteeth, red and ragged.

“Healed-up cancer. You get it from the sun reflecting off the ocean.”

I looked into the shadowy world of the shore. “We're safe here, I guess.”

“Yes,” he said. “This is one of the dark places on earth.”

The somber landscape slid by. Above the engine's laboring throb came the drone of millions of insects, eating and being eaten, living a life in a single season. Captain Jack stared far ahead, handling the
Heron
by intuition.

“Watch that log, kid.”

I followed his gaze forward, seeing only the endless gnarled mangroves and occasional knees of cypress. The boat's wake spread behind us like a turkey's tail fan. I expected to hear the sound of a log striking the bow, thumping the length of the boat and ruining the propeller.

“Port side,” he said.

Barely visible in the murky water, a log floated away from us, its knobby surface blending with the swamp. It bumped against a strip of muddy shore and continued to rise. Water drained away as a tapered snout climbed the bank, followed by two stubby legs, a long armored body, two more legs, and a scaled tail that dragged the mud. The alligator began walking parallel to the boat, head high as if proud. I felt both envy and awe. Three hundred million years had passed in the forty seconds I watched it move from water to land.

“Small,” Captain Jack said. “Only runs to a six-purser.”

We reached Coot Bay, a lagoon soaked in light where butterflies flitted among the branches. Our passage out seemed less foreboding. As we moved into the final turn that opened to the Gulf, an eagle attacked an osprey in the sky. The osprey dropped the fish it was carrying and the eagle snatched it in midair. Captain Jack called the eagle “an aerial rat.”

For the next three weeks we traveled into the swamp twice a day. There was a sunset voyage into the Florida Bay, watching the sun fall behind the Gulf, staining the long strips of cloud pink and scarlet. Occasionally dolphins cavorted beside us, blowing funnels of water into the air. The plaintive cry of gulls faded into the dusk.

I stood amidships with binoculars and a portable PA system, identifying birds, trees, the occasional manatee and alligator. My most enthusiastic lecture concerned hurricanes. They arrived an average of every seven years, and the last one of any real force had been in 1926. The Everglades was now severely congested, thick and stagnant. A hurricane acted as a giant cleaning machine, ridding the swamp of overgrowth, depositing new seeds and soil, blowing tropical birds from island to mainland. Nature required hurricanes. They were as necessary and valuable as forest fires in the Northwest.

The ranger gave me a pad of graph paper for mapping the movement of storms. A station in Key West announced weather updates every hour, and Captain Jack lent me a radio. Of three tropical depressions, only one developed into a storm, but it petered out while crossing the Atlantic.

When a tour was canceled due to weather, Captain Jack and I talked.* During forty years in the Coast Guard, he had killed three men, only one of whom he regretted. Smuggling was the chief crime. I asked if he knew Spanish and he claimed enough to communicate at sea.

“Let's hear it,” I said.

“Cómo se llama? De dónde es? Todo es una mentira. Salga de la barca.”

“What's that mean?”

“What's your name? Where are you from? It's all a lie. Get out of the boat.”

“What else?”

“Nothing, That's all I ever needed.”

The majority of our passengers were European tourists making their first American stop. The French complained that our bread was too soft, the British fretted about malaria, and the Germans hated our beer. One day thirty French people crowded our boat. We moved into the bay and I spotted a log floating along the bank. Following Captain Jack's bilingual example, I spouted my best French:
“A droit, a droit!
Alligator
a droit!”

The entire gang reacted as if I'd announced the new Beaujolais was of a wonderful grape. They forced their way to the rail, taking pictures and grunting in polite tones. The boat tilted to starboard. A four-year-old boy leaned over the water, his body between the rails. Slowly his feet rose into the air and I watched his little legs slide overboard. Swift as thought, I vaulted the iron rail and hit the nasty water, my feet brushing the bottom. I grabbed the kid by the hair. Something struck my head and I lost him. Floating beside me lay the life preserver attached to a line. The boy was treading water easily, a better swimmer than his rescuer. I grabbed the life ring and beckoned to the kid, who stuck out his tongue and made a face. I splashed water in his eyes and took him by the throat.

Four men pulled the rope back to the boat. Captain Jack stood with one hand on the tiller and the other holding a pistol that I didn't know he carried. My head banged the hull. I pushed the kid up and he kicked me in the face. By the time I was hauled into the boat, my shirt was stained from a nosebleed. The boy was in his mother's arms.

Captain Jack maneuvered the
Heron
to the dock, where I tethered us to the continent. I thought about the boy who'd fallen off his horse in New York, and wondered if rescuing this kid had squared me with the cosmos. As the passengers disembarked, each one kissed me repeatedly on the cheeks. Captain Jack looked very sad.

“What were you going to do?” I said. “Shoot me if I didn't save him?”

“No,” he said. “For sharks.”

“What?”

“They get trapped in here when the tide goes out. They can't get past the reef. You jumped in shark water, kid. Damn foolish thing to do.”

I tried to sit and missed the bench.

“Get up, kid,” he said. “You're all right. My wife will be glad for supper company.”