Tropical Depression (10 page)

"Not so funny if he's stubborn as you say and you can't persuade his ass."

"On this he'll persuade himself," said the senator with smiling confidence. "So we do business, Charlie? I get my fifty thousand?"

"One little Indian," Ponte said again. "Jesus, Bahney, either you're fuckin' me big time or you're almost makin' this too easy."

13

Some weeks later, at the beginning of February, Murray and Tommy, counterbalanced by a very large and enthusiastic woman from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, were bouncing along on the low gunwale of a very old skiff as it plied the shallow waters between Key West and the ancestral Matalatchee homeland, a place denoted on modern charts as nothing more than a nameless smear ringed by the tiny dots that indicated mangroves, but known to Tommy as Kilicumba, "the dry place in the wet."

The craft was piloted by an old acquaintance of Tommy's, an ageless, grizzled Cuban sponger and fisherman named Flaco, who carried in his head a full-color chart of the shoals and channels of the backcountry and who saw in the water things that no one else saw. Flaco didn't like to share his knowledge, which was, after all, his livelihood. This disinclination had given him a long-standing habit of silence, a way of peering narrow-eyed at the horizon as though there were nothing in the world to say.

But that didn't stop Murray from talking.

He looked around the woman from Washington, through the pellucid emerald water to the sandy bottom dotted here and there with tufts of turtle grass, and he said above the whine of the outboard, "Beautiful, beautiful. Water's so clear, you'd think it's a foot deep."

"It is a foot deep," Tommy said.

"Beefteen eenches," Flaco muttered grudgingly. He stared at the horizon, sinewy strands of flesh hanging from his unshaved chin.

Murray stared too, saw golden flats where egrets stood, azure fingers of deeper water where tides had scoured away the sand. In the distance, low and featureless mangrove islands seemed to float above the surface, to hover atop a silver vacancy as though nested in metallic wool. Murray saw those islands plain enough, but the island that he pictured was one that wasn't there. Tommy's island, he felt somehow sure, would be very different, would gleam with sugar-white beaches, undulate with arching palms. Freshets of cool water would come cascading over shining rocks, ripe mangoes and papayas would fall from shading trees onto soil so luxuriant that it would not bruise the fruit.

"Lotta bugs in the mangroves," Tommy said to the woman from Indian Affairs. "Good thing you're dressed for it."

Her name was Estelle Grau, and in fact all she needed was a neckerchief to be dressed like a perfect scoutmaster. She wore crisp creased khaki pants and matching long-sleeve shirt, orange boots laced up above the ankles, and a pith helmet with a chin strap. On her knee was a waterproof clipboard, and around her neck a Leica camera. "Field work," she said, in a happy husky voice. "It's what I like. Mosquitoes, I imagine."

"Mosquitoes mostly," Tommy said. "Six, eight kinds. Spiders, land and water. Scorpions, of course. Ants—red, green, black. Sometimes hornets, not always. A pretty iridescent fly the Indians call
wakita malti
."

"What a lovely name," said Estelle. "What's it mean?"

"Scratch till you bleed."

Murray looked down at his bare arms, at the hem of his Bermuda shorts halfway down his tender thighs, at his insteps pink and naked in his boat shoes. He noticed quite suddenly that even Tommy and Flaco were covered up.

"Snakes?" asked the woman down from Washington, in the calm tone of the naturalist.

"Some swimming rattlers," Tommy said. "A few coral snakes and cottonmouths. But not many. The alligators eat the rats, don't leave 'em much to feed on."

" 'Course," continued Tommy, "gator holes are pretty hard to see. Small, ya know, just like little puddles. Lotta times, leaves are floatin' on 'em, they look just like the ground. Hard to get your leg back sometimes."

Murray looked at his legs, imagined himself with only one. Morbidly, he turned the thought into an ad idea: Pegleg Pete, in which the lame but virile Bra King would command a galleonful of buxom pirates in lingerie ...

In the meantime, the little boat droned on, scudding through the muddy spots left by fleeing stingrays, past the channel-edges where patient barracuda waited motionless, invisible to everyone but Flaco.

At length they neared an island that was slightly larger than some they had passed, a shade taller than most perhaps, but basically looked like all the others. Tangled mangroves waded out along an indistinct shoreline. Cormorants perched on low branches and spread their pterodactyl wings to dry. There were no palms, no beach, no hint of fresh water; no crests of land poked out above the mat of shrubbery, and the closest thing to a harbor was a vague cove where current had made a dent in the vegetation.

Flaco now steered gingerly toward that notch in the shore, already trimming up his engine. Fifty feet from land he turned the motor off and lifted it. The little boat coasted slowly toward the island then gently ran aground with a scratch and a squeak. "Ees island of Indians many long time before," announced the boatman.

A cloud of mosquitoes came promptly forth to suck blood from the visitors.

Murray waved them from his face, took cautious breaths of overripe air that smelled like anchovies and sulfur, and revised his expectations subtly downward. Okay, so there were no freshets, no cascades, no mangoes. But, the Bra King told himself, Miami must have looked like this to early visitors, men of destiny who beheld the flat and soupy land and saw not a pestilential bog but a paradise needing just a little spiffing up, a coat of paint, some bug spray. Besides, this was a historic moment, a homecoming, a reclaiming. Murray remembered that he had brought along a disposable camera to record the occasion.

"Wait a second, wait," he said to Tommy, as Tommy was preparing to jump overboard and drag the skiff closer in to land. "Lemme get this picture."

Mosquitoes strafed him as he fished the cardboard camera from his shirt pocket. He fixed Tommy in the viewfinder, and he saw things he'd never seen before in the Indian's face. Emotion locked his jaw, his Adam's apple shuttled up and down in his thick and fibrous neck. He looked toward his tribal island, and his eyes pulsed with a wry but stalwart pride that wrestled with and triumphed over the worldly knowledge of how small, how meager was the thing that he was proud of.

Murray took the picture. Tommy deftly slid from the gunwale into ankle-deep water.

All of a sudden the Indian looked extremely short. He had disappeared up to the middle of his thighs.

The Bra King, horrified, watched his friend subside, become a lopped-off torso in the sunshine. "Oh my God, my God," he said. "He stepped in quicksand, it's all my fault."

Tommy was immobile as a fly in pancake batter, but not especially concerned. "It's not quicksand. It's Florida. It's muck. Gimme a hand, somebody."

Estelle Grau reached across. She offered a wrist and Tommy held on and kicked free, wiggling like a worm in close-packed dirt. Soaked but undaunted, he found a firmer footing and dragged the skiff along the sand and baby mangroves.

The others stepped ashore, though shore was merely relative. Hot water, instep deep, was trapped among the maze of roots and vines; the upward slope of the land was so slight as to be imperceptible. Flaco, armed with a machete, moved to the front of the group and began to hack a path through the unbroken foliage.

The visitors advanced slowly; mosquitoes and
wakita malti
had ample time to find them. Murray bent to rub his shin; his hand came away black with scrambled bugs and red with his own bright blood. Frogs croaked out a steely alarm. Something slunk by and gave a soggy rustling to the rotting leaves; there was a muted splash nearby as a bashful gator took refuge in a hidden hole.

By tiny increments the land grew higher, drier, mangroves became chest-high, head-high, and at last provided a canopy of shade. Murray was squashing a mosquito in his ear when once again the world abruptly brightened; he looked up from his welted feet to see that the bushwhacked path had given onto a clearing. Silver sunshine and perfect silence rained down on the open place. In the middle of it were two flat-topped pyramids made of seashells. The pyramids were about twenty feet long on each side; they ended in mesas maybe twelve feet square.

There was something eerie and arresting about the place, something chastening and ghostly, and for a moment no one spoke. Flaco let his machete hang at his side. Murray allowed the bugs to feast on him while he tried to puzzle out the meaning of Tommy's doleful and unflinching gaze. The Indian was staring at the blunt-topped monuments with what seemed a diffuse but nagging grief, the futile kinship a traveler feels when coming upon a graveyard full of strangers, or of ancestors who might as well be strangers.

The woman down from Washington broke the spell. "These are perfect middens," she announced. "Absolutely classic. The shape, the siting. Calusa-style, not Seminole."

For all her bulk and all the heaviness of her scoutmaster's boots, she suddenly seemed weightless. She floated toward the pyramids, produced a GPS receiver that pinpointed their latitude and longitude. From another pocket came a tape to measure the middens' exact dimensions. Notes were made, photographs taken, shell samples withdrawn for testing.

Tommy Tarpon crossed his arms and strolled the perimeter of the clearing like a king perusing his domain. Flaco absently hacked at things. Estelle Grau took compass readings, fiddled with her clipboard. Murray did an unavailing little dance to keep the insects guessing, stamping his feet and waving his arms. Finally he crushed a cluster of mosquitoes near his jugular, and said, "I hate to be a party pooper, but two more minutes, I need a transfusion."

"Almost done," said the woman down from Washington.

She analyzed; Tommy gazed. Then the Bra King led the way back to the skiff, skirting puddles that might have held gators, tromping through leaves that might have hidden snakes, breathing heavily, splashing muck, and smacking himself all over as he ran.

"So it wasn't what you expected?" Tommy said.

They were sitting on the tilted deck of his houseboat, thrown back in their plastic chairs like astronauts, drinking beer. Murray was caked in a pink lotion, he looked like he'd been dipped in Pepto-Bismol. The lotion was supposed to stop the itching but did not. "Well," he said. "Let's just say it doesn't look like a resort."

"No, it doesn't," Tommy said. He peered off toward the next marina, where the masts and rigging of the wealthy gleamed vermilion in the sinking sun.

"Those wha'd-she-call-'em, middens—what are they about?"

The Indian drank beer. "No one knows, exactly. Maybe religious. Maybe just trash heaps. Either way, a way of making high land, ya know, for storms."

Murray considered, tried to think of anything but his ravaged skin, exerted every ounce of discipline to keep himself from scratching. "You spend a lot of time out there?"

The question surprised Tommy, he looked at Murray sideways. "I'd never been there in my life until today."

Murray was confused. "I figured, when you were growing up—"

"I grew up in the Everglades," said Tommy. "On a reservation with the Seminoles. Course, my mother made sure I understood we weren't Seminoles. So I was, like, an outsider, twice. She told me about Kilicumba; we never went. I didn't even know which island it was. Flaco did."

The Bra King gave in and scratched his arm. He knew he shouldn't but for the moment it was heaven. He was going to ask Tommy why he'd never visited the island, but then he didn't need to ask, he knew.

"Ya know," he said instead, "I'm always hearing stories about Jewish guys who don't feel Jewish, or don't want to, don't want the burden of it. All of a sudden they go to Israel, they're
dragged
to Israel by their wife or something, and they have these, I dunno, these revelations. The tour guide takes 'em to the Wailing Wall, they figure big deal, next thing they're standing there sobbing. They're on a street in Haifa, bored stiff, they suddenly start singing Jewish songs, they get a yen for borscht. They come back home, join a
schul
, start sending pledges to the UJA. Go know."

"What's borscht?" asked the Indian.

"Cold beet soup."

"Sounds disgusting."

"Ya put sour cream in it," Murray said. "It gets pink, like this shit I got all over me."

"Y'ever been to Israel, Murray?"

"Me?" the Bra King said. "It's the last place inna world I'd go."

"That's how I felt about Kilicumba," Tommy offered.

"Besides," Murray said, "I'm inna
shmatta
business and I'm a neurotic hypochondriac—how much more Jewish I gotta feel?"

"What's a
shmatta
?" asked the Indian.

"
Shmatta
. Ya know, a rag. A garment."

They drank beer, and watched old wooden schooners ferry tourists out into the ocean for sunset.

"But what I was thinking," Murray said, "I was thinking about the power of a place... I was thinking, this afternoon, I was watching you, trying to imagine what you felt out there. I couldn't do it. So I figured, say it wasn't an Indian place, say it was a Jewish place—what would I feel? The truth—I have no idea. What Jewish would I think about? Hebrew school? Charlton Heston playing Moses? Then I thought, wait a second—if you're supposed to feel something, and all you can do is think about what it is you're supposed to feel—that's not right, something got, like, too thinned out along the way, left too far behind. Ya see what I'm saying?"

Tommy looked at his friend, the wild hair, the pinwheel eyes. "Murray, you still taking pills?"