Acts Of Nature Part 5

TWELVE.

Harmon and his wife had stayed all night in the den that he'd built, at considerable expense, just for this. But he did not gloat over his foresight. He held his wife's hand while they watched the breathless weather reporters correct themselves every thirty minutes and then unabashedly make yet another bold prediction of the hurricane's path and speed and level of ferocity. The storm had gained in strength in the Gulf and then had taken a completely unforeseen loop and then charged due east into the South Florida peninsula. The red- dotted depiction of her path looked like a comical ampersand on the television screen, but Harmon was too scared for levity. Simone came ash.o.r.e just south of Sanibel Island as a category three, and according to the supposed "hurricane hunter" aircraft, she maintained her b.i.t.c.hiness and speed right up until the Harmons' power went out and left them sitting in the dark, nothing but the familiar touch of their hands and the sound of the wind bringing its terrifying memories. Harmon a.s.sured his wife for yet another of the uncountable times of their safety. He'd designed this room himself. Placed it in the middle of their new home, no exterior walls, no windows. Those interior walls had been made with thickened steel studs and fibergla.s.s-covered wallboard. Then the ceiling of this room was sealed with a single, watertight sheet of fibergla.s.s. He'd inspected the entire roof of the house while it was being built for them, counting the double hurricane straps as they were nailed to each roof joist, not just every other joist as was the code. This was their bunker. Harmon took a lot of s.h.i.+t from the few neighbors he knew, just nodded when they called him paranoid. But he would never experience another Andrew. Never. He had seen how Andrew's winds had torn down the steel structure of the flight tower on the Homestead Air Force Base. Her winds had ripped away the corner bricks to expose four floors of rooms at the nearby Holiday Inn, sending the bedsheets and lampshades and luggage flying. Out in the Redlands' open fields, Harmon had personally seen a one-by-one-quarter-inch piece of wood lath the length of a child's yardstick that had been driven through the trunk of a coconut palm that was the thickness of a man's skull. When he told his friends those stories, they went quiet and stopped ribbing him. Even Squires stopped calling him a p.u.s.s.y and stayed away from talk of his partner's storm room.

Inside his bunker Harmon had gathered his books, most of them replacements, but a few from his collection that had been salvaged and restored after that 1992 storm. He'd begun his reading habit when he was in the military hospital in the Philippines and then later in Hawaii. He had been one of those early into the country of Vietnam, his group unnamed and barely accounted for. They were young, wire-strong Americans, most of them from the wilderness states with a talent for survival and abilities with firearms and blades that were used to killing large, warm-blooded animals. Tactical surveillance and a.s.sa.s.sination were their orders. Go in undetected, come out the same way. It was there that Harmon learned to fear no man. But they'd been sent into Cambodia, early. Made a designated kill. On the way out, maybe misled by a guide-turned- traitor, they found themselves in a dead-end gorge. The climb out was straight up. The Cambodian rebels, bent on revenge for the killing shot to one of their commanders, had seen the talent level of Harmon's group up close and needed an agent of death less vulnerable than themselves. So instead of confronting the Americans they set the narrow gorge on fire and let a strong and natural wind carry the consuming flame to the enemy. At one point the small six-man group, backed against the wall, had to decide to rush into the flame and kill what men they could or take a chance of climbing the wall with the flames following their track, stealing their air, a natural killing force unafraid and consuming. Against his judgment, Harmon was overruled and they climbed. The smell of his own burning flesh and those of his mates around him would never leave him. Only two, Harmon and an eighteen-year- old private, made it to the top. The private got them to their rendezvous spot. Both were flown by chopper to safety and Harmon, later, to the offsh.o.r.e hospital.

There he'd tried to escape into the fictional worlds of Vonnegut, Hammett, Spillane. But each time the nurses came to do the debriding, to scrub away yet another layer of his burned skin, reality opened its throat of raw pain and brought him back to the real world. The bunker in his South Florida home now held a hundred tomes of the history of the Vietnam War on one wall, all with their own perspectives, inclusions, conclusions. He had three first editions of The Things They Carried The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, which he had practically, or as he often thought, impractically, memorized. What good did it do him to be able to quote the line on page one hundred thirty- two? Other walls in the room held other wars, for comparison or maybe even rea.s.surance. The enemy is us, human beings, Harmon often said. We are all so much alike, so bent on superiority, all willing to kill or the for dominance or money or retribution or vengeance or some other reason. But nature cared nothing of such piddling motivations. Nature trampled anything in its path without choice or conscience, not like men. Harmon wasn't afraid of men. He was scared to h.e.l.l of nature. by Tim O'Brien, which he had practically, or as he often thought, impractically, memorized. What good did it do him to be able to quote the line on page one hundred thirty- two? Other walls in the room held other wars, for comparison or maybe even rea.s.surance. The enemy is us, human beings, Harmon often said. We are all so much alike, so bent on superiority, all willing to kill or the for dominance or money or retribution or vengeance or some other reason. But nature cared nothing of such piddling motivations. Nature trampled anything in its path without choice or conscience, not like men. Harmon wasn't afraid of men. He was scared to h.e.l.l of nature.

It was an hour before dawn when the worst of Simone hit and Harmon lay on the leather couch with his wife in their bunker, front to back, like trembling spoons in a darkened drawer.

"I'm glad the kids are at school."

Harmon only nodded a response to the first words his wife had said in an hour. They'd sent both of their kids to Notre Dame in Indiana. Landlocked. No hurricanes. No earthquakes. And G.o.d's own prejudicial eye watching out.

They waited for the wind scream to stop. Then they waited longer, until the numble went away, until silence. Harmon checked his watch: ten a.m. When he finally opened the bunker door, his house was intact. He used the big flashlight to move through the living room and kitchen, spraying the beam up into the high corners, looking for gaps, for water stain. When he got to the back door he opened it carefully, waiting for something to fall, a tree limb, a piece of roof tile, the sky itself.

Out on the patio he heard the stiff ruffle of leaves, mostly from the giant ficus tree that he could see had blown down and now straddled his fence. In the pale light he did a quick a.s.sessment: there were two additional sheets of screen ripped away from the pool enclosure. The turquoise blue water had turned dusty, the surface layered with dirt and leaves and twigs that had blown in through the openings and settled. But all the ironwork still stood. He looked up and off to the south and saw the raw hide of his neighbors' roof where it was missing a quarter of its half-barrel tiles, leaving the black shred of tar paper exposed. To the east there was an unfamiliar gap in the horizon and Harmon had to think for a moment. What was gone? What was missing? Then he realized the Martins' huge gumbo limbo tree, one hundred years old and seventy feet tall, had been pulled up and toppled, removed from sight.

"Is it safe?"

Harmon turned to see his wife, her shadowed figure just inside the doorway, her toes at the threshold, feet unwilling to move. After Andrew she had moved around the destruction of her home like a zombie, eyes wide and dry and uncomprehending. After three days she found their family sc.r.a.p- book, clippings of the kids' ball games, pictures of first days at school, birth announcements, all soaked and ripped and ruined. That's when she started to cry and Harmon talked her into going to her sister's in Michigan. He stayed to clean up and clean out a lifetime.

But this storm was not the heavyweight Andrew had been. When Harmon walked around his property to the front there were plenty of trees down. The streets were cluttered with debris: broken roof tiles, branches as thick as a man's wrists, and the crumpled metal and plastic framework of the solar panels that had once been mounted on the Connellys' rooftop. Across the street Donna Harper's van had been pushed off her driveway and it now sat at an angle in her side yard. Harmon looked down the street. The new neighbors with the tape on their windows were unscathed. They'd gained another degree of false confidence.

He was still standing in the street, watching folks venture out to do their own survey just as he was doing, when his wife came to the front door.

"Ed. It's the satellite phone," she called out.

Christ, he thought. What the h.e.l.l could they possibly want now?

THIRTEEN.

When he woke up, it had to be from the smell. Wet, turgid, soaked earth odor like a compost pit in the rain that had just been forked and turned. That dead fish smell of someone's catch that had lain in the bottom of the boat for three days while the fishermen went on a bender and then woke to a day when they were penniless again and had to get back to the job they both loved and despised. Buck had been there. And the morning after Hurricane Simone it smelled like he was back. He'd slept through the storm. Not because he was drunk and not that he hadn't tried to get drunk. His ability to sleep through anything had come from prison. The constant night sound of men snoring, coughing, spitting, and jerking off. The antiseptic flavors of Pine-Sol and industrial-strength cleanser wafting up your nose. Buck had spent years in a place so foreign from his home that his only escape had been in dreamless sleep and it was as if he'd trained himself to do it, to fall into a slumber where he heard nothing, felt nothing.

He had also lost his ability to get drunk in prison. He had tried the homemade s.h.i.+t that the inmates put together with sugar and fruit from the kitchen crews and then cooked up in some secret ceiling hidey hole where the heat could get to it and ferment the h.e.l.l out of it. But the taste wasn't worth the ugly high and he'd simply gone dry while he was inside. After his release he'd tried to drink himself into oblivion but no matter how much he consumed he couldn't get drunk. Nothing like a sober drinker. If you were into getting women drunk and willing, it was a breeze. You could match 'em drink for drink all night and still have a focus. You could play cards all night, get into bar fights, and still have the advantage of full reflexes and a clear, mean head.

The other thing he'd lost in prison was his tolerance for darkness. When he was young he'd hunted and gigged frogs and fished in the dark with the eyes of a cat. But there was no darkness in prison. No sunrise or sunset. Just the unnatural fight of electricity, glowing 24/7 and never breaking. Now he would never admit it, but he was afraid of the dark, refused to sleep without some light source nearby. The jobs they'd pulled in the suburbs at night made him clammy and nervous and he'd had to push himself through the fear. h.e.l.l, the boys thought he was crazy when he started doing the jobs in daylight, opening the garage doors and looting the places and driving away. But it turned out to be the slickest job they'd done and Buck had not had to deal with the dark.

Last night the boys had gone home to their mommas late, before the brunt of Hurricane Simone hit. Buck had dumped all the empty beer bottles and cleared the table. He hated to wake up to that reminder in the morning. So while the storm had rolled through Chokoloskee, his stilt home swaying and creaking and threatening to come apart or simply topple over, he pulled his blanket up under his chin, put the battery-powered lamp on the table beside him, and did not come awake until morning when he believed he was roused by the smell.

He started a fire in the woodstove and put on a pot of coffee first. Then he dressed in a pair of dungarees and his boots. Outside the light was soft, like the sun filtered through dirty gauze, and it made everything dull as if the world had been turned into an old black-and-white photo from the 1930s. Then something he saw caused him to tuck a map under his arm, pour two cups of coffee, and step outside. Trees were down, the mangroves on the eastern side flattened, but even after only a handful of hours they had already started to rise ever so slightly, like they always did after an a.s.sault. Several varieties of s.h.i.+ngles from rooftops and wood splinters from crab traps had caught the wind and tumbled through town. Now they all lay on the ground with a sheen of wet mud over them. Buck checked the watermark at the base of his steps. The tide and storm surge had come up to the second riser, about two feet, then receded back into the Gulf. There were a few dead mullet under his house, caught up in some rolled bales of chicken wire he'd stored there, like they'd been trapped on purpose. Part of the stink, he thought.

He walked lightly, picking his way, stepping over boards with the nail points exposed and around the low spots where coffee-colored mud hid their depth. He headed directly to old man Brown's one-hundred-year-old home and was relieved first to see that the ancient Dade County pine structure seemed untouched by the night's wind. Around the corner he heard the sound of someone coughing up a substantial quant.i.ty of phlegm and then spitting.

Nate Brown was in his side yard wearing a pair of dull yellow, knee-high rubber boots, a boatman's foul-weather gear, and a flopping rain hat. He had the heads of three dead chickens in between the fingers of his right fist, their necks stretched with the weight of their wet feathered bodies. The old man was bending at the edge of his wire fence and plunged his other hand into the mud and came up with yet another. He did not turn to look at Buck but had sensed his presence.

"G.o.dd.a.m.ned birds. Don't never learn they cain't run from no hurrican'," Brown said; his southern drawl gave any listener a sense he was pulling each word slowly and reluctandy from the past. "If'n they'd just stay inside the henhouse, they'd a been safe."

Buck watched the old man wedge the newly found head into his hand with the others.

"Pretty good blow last night," Buck finally said toward conversation, knowing he would get little in return. Brown looked up into the western sky like he was smelling the air in the aftermath as if to measure it.

"Seen worst," he finally said, and nothing more.

"Looks like you came through all right," Buck tried again, nodding back at Brown's house. This time there wasn't even a word in response. An answer would have been rhetorical and Nate Brown did not dabble in the rhetorical, especially with Buck. Brown had known Buck's father and his grandfather. They might have even been friends back in the day if such a thing had been admitted among the old early settlers of the southwest. But they were connected not so much by something as ephemeral as friends.h.i.+p as by blood and guts and a reliance on one another to stay alive in such a place at the turn of the century. Buck knew that while Brown had respected his father for keeping his mouth shut and going to prison for his part of the smuggling, the old man had no time for him. Even Buck knew he was not the man his father was. It did not stop him from trying to ingratiate himself.

"Sir, if I can interrupt. Could I offer you a coffee and get your advice on somethin'?"

Brown looked down at the dead fowl in his hand, the fist full of chicken heads as if asking their opinion, and then tilted his head toward the porch on his house. Neither man bothered knocking the mud off his boots as the storm had already deposited as much debris and wet dirt on the interior floor as it could hold. Buck thought they were heading into the old man's home, but Brown dropped the dead chickens at the doorway and then walked to the corner of the porch. With a few simple yanks of marine line to release the knots, he let loose the tie-downs to a small hand-hewn wooden table and a couple of straight-backed chairs he'd secured before the hurricane. He sc.r.a.ped the legs across the floorboards and settled in one of the chairs. Buck swallowed a rising humiliation at not being allowed into the house, but he knew it was the old man's way. He recalled the time when he was a boy and watched his father go into Nate Brown's home for late night meetings with other men. Once he had even crawled quietly to a corner window to listen, rewarded only by the slow, deep rumble of Nate Brown's voice but unintelligible words. There had been no way to see past the yellowish glow of a pulled paper window sash that night, and Buck could only imagine the men standing or sitting, circled around Brown like he was some Indian chieftain or voodoo shaman. It was only later he'd learned of the marijuana smuggling activities of his father and the others and tied them in with the strategy meetings. After Brown had done his time in the federal pen, he'd come back home and had made a visit to Buck's mother, to offer his condolences on the death of her husband. Buck remembered the quaking of his mother's entire body and the anger of her response: "You was supposed to be the one looked after them men, Nate Brown. You and your G.o.dd.a.m.n old Glades wisdom," she spat, and Buck remembered the old man's gray, unflinching eye going, for the first time he'd ever witnessed, to the floor.

"I'm sorry, Ms. Morris," he'd said. "But each man makes his own decisions dependin' on his nature, ma'am. That's just G.o.d's way."

"Fissst," Buck's mother hissed and he still recalled the recrimination in the unspoken expletive and how seeing it fly from his mother's mouth had scared him enough to step back.

"Don't you bring G.o.d into it none, Mr. Brown," she'd said. "If you was such a believer you'd remember that you was not supposed to lead them men into temptation."

Brown had continued to stare at the floor that day, and for a long time Buck thought the old man had been struck to stone by his mother's call on the Almighty. But Brown finally looked up and spoke: "I'm not a kingdom nor a power, Ms. Morris. I am just a man my ownself."

Despite his mother's recrimination at Brown and her admonishment to him to stay away, Buck not only continued to be obliging to the old man, he also took it upon himself to ask for his advice and guidance on things pertinent to the Glades and fis.h.i.+ng and hunting. And Brown was willing to give it in those instances. It was the line into what he called thievery that the old man would not cross and would turn his shoulder to Buck if he smelled it coming into a discussion.

But if Buck had even one of his father's traits it was his careful ways. He did not rush headlong into things. He did not like to react emotionally to threat or doubt or even opportunity. He was no knee-jerker. So he'd given thought to this newly hatched plan. He heard the same stories the boys had of the new generation of Glades camps filled with the things that others' money can buy. It could mean a big haul. It could mean enough cash from Bobby the Fence to get him off this rail to nowhere. Maybe he'd find a way to clear out of this place, find a better way up in central or north Florida. Some guy in prison had told stories of cattle ranges up in Hendry County. Maybe this was his ticket to another century.

But Buck also knew that any job had its dangers and a careful man tried to plan, and no one in this world knew more about the Glades than Nate. So he'd brought the map he'd made to get the old man's sense of the spots they'd marked, the areas they planned to visit.

Buck set the coffee down on the damp tabletop and pushed a cup to Mr. Brown's side and then unfolded the map.

"I've got a bit of an airboat trip planned here, sir, and thought I might get your take on some of these here spots you might recognize," he explained, sliding the chart to edge up against the mug he'd given Brown.

The old man raised the thick china cup to his lips, took a long draft even though the heat of the coffee still sent steam up and around his prominent nose, and men leaned out over the map. Despite his unknown age, Buck had never seen the man wear a pair of gla.s.ses. Brown set the mug down and then reached out and placed his fingertips on each X-crossed spot on the map like he was feeling the place, conjuring a memory.

"This 'un here is too far north for any good fis.h.i.+n'," he said. "It'll be wet now after this blow, but in dry times they ain't but a foot or two of water.

"Now this 'un might could get you a few smaller tarpon, maybe some snook. This other is 'bout the same."

Buck just nodded his head, watching the old man's brow, the deep furrows made by a lifetime of squinting into the reflected sun rays bouncing off open water.

"This 'un here is in an awful pretty spot up in Palm Beach County. Ain't much to fish 'cause the river over this way draws 'em all, but there's some gators in a old hole we used to take ever season near there. Big, nasty sumb.i.t.c.hes too, pardon the cussin', son."

"I've heard worse, sir," Buck said, like he was back in his teenage years and his father was alive and Brown was back in his seventies.

"Yep, I know," Brown said without looking up. "Prison'll learn you that."

They both sat in silence for a moment. Buck knew what the old man thought of him and his arrests. Even though prison was familiar to them both, Brown's and Buck's father's incarcerations had been considered a different breed.

"But you ain't goin' to these places to do no huntin' or fis.h.i.+n', are you, boy?"

It was an accusation, not a question and Buck hesitated in his response. He could try to make up a story, something with a taste of civilization that the old man might not be familiar with.

"No, sir," he finally said, eschewing a lie in the face of a man he begrudgingly revered. "It's a salvage operation."

Brown did not look up but Buck could see the lines of a sneer start at the bridge of his nose like he was beginning to smell something foul.

"You mean like when them boys found that there Caddy Escalade out of gas on the highway up to Naples and salvaged salvaged the wheels and electronics?" Brown said, this time looking up at Buck with a single eye. Buck was mildly surprised that the old man had heard of that incident with Wayne and Marcus. The fancy wheel rims had sold for a nice price. He avoided the old man's look, s.h.i.+fting his own back to the map. the wheels and electronics?" Brown said, this time looking up at Buck with a single eye. Buck was mildly surprised that the old man had heard of that incident with Wayne and Marcus. The fancy wheel rims had sold for a nice price. He avoided the old man's look, s.h.i.+fting his own back to the map.

"You know them boys is headin' for trouble. Don'tcha, son?"

Buck was not going to get into a philosophical debate with the old man.

For some men in Florida, trouble had been a natural way for a long time. He thought of the stories his own father had told of citizens in the early 1800s who often "salvaged" the broken holds of s.h.i.+ps carrying goods from New Orleans around the tip of the Florida Keys and up the east coast to New York on the tide of the Gulf Stream. When those s.h.i.+ps ran aground on the sharp- edged coral reefs, it was considered a Floridian holiday and pillaging was nearly a civic duty. Near the turn of the twentieth century, land owners selling useless deeds to Florida swampland created millionaires overnight who fled with the cash and left the losers behind. Nate Brown himself had poached gators out of his favorite hunting holes even though they were considered off limits after the federal government created the Everglades National Park in the 1940s and the practice was deemed illegal. Those men all used the excuse that what they did, they did to survive. Buck had heard that rationalization a thousand times coming in late-night conversation from the darkened bunks of men up in Avon Park Correctional.

"Maybe it's just trouble of a different nature," Buck finally said, but he was still not willing to meet the old man's eyes.

"No, son," Nate Brown replied, his voice holding a weak resignation that Buck had never heard before. "The nature's the same. Sometimes that's the part of people that don't never change."

Buck pushed his chair back, knowing the old man was finished. He stood and started to roll the chart, but Nate Brown's finger was still pressed down on one last X.

"Let me give you some advice, Buck. If that's what you come for," he said, using the young man's name for maybe the first time since his childhood. "Stay clear of this one here."

He was indicating the X farthest south on the map.

"They's stories on this one. One told is that an old-timer built here and must have died over the years because no one seen him for years. Word was someone in his family took it over but they somehow got spooked and left the place empty. Then new owners that put out the word of no trespa.s.sin' and meant it. I been out there myself and heard awful strange music comin' from the place when there wasn't a shred of light on the property.

"Steer clear, son." And with that the old man removed his finger and sat alone at the table while Buck gathered the map, and said his thanks.

"Yes, sir," he said and then turned back to retrace his steps to his own place.

"We're gonna hit those places now."

The boys just looked at each other with a mirror expression that said surprise, but what the h.e.l.l. They'd shown up midmorning after wandering around town in their boat boots, checking out the damage from the night. Buck was in one of those suspiciously dark moods of his. Wayne figured this was the way he must have been in prison and it was not a good idea to argue with him. Besides, when Buck wanted to roll, it usually turned out to be a h.e.l.l of a lot more interesting than sitting around this place. They could easily tell their mothers that they'd been hired to do some kind of rescue or salvage work and with the promise of money on their lips they'd be off the hook for any cleanup at their own homes.

"I already been over at Owen Chadwick's tour business shed and his airboat is intact and I have the key," Buck said while he turned his back on them and stuffed something into his black, zippered duffle. They were both in that sort of uncomprehending dumb-a.s.sed mode he'd seen a dozen times in their teenage faces when he grabbed up the bag and turned back to them.

"What? You two suddenly lost your comprehension of English overnight?

Again the boys stood quiet. They had learned that if they looked at each other for some kind of shared intelligence they'd get another dose of Buck's s.h.i.+t. So they stood mute.

"We got opportunity here, fellas. Those camps are either out there with their doors blown out for easy access to what's inside. Or they're in pristine shape while their owners are scurryin' around at their big-a.s.sed mansions in the city worryin' about how to get their air conditioning back on," Buck said.

"n.o.body's thinking about them camps after a hurricane, boys. We got a window of opportunity here and, fellas, we're gonna climb right on through."

He ordered them to grab up some bottled water and some food and "whatever tools you think you might need" and meet him over at Chadwick's boat shed. Then he slung the duffle over his shoulder and started down the outside staircase.

"And hurry your a.s.ses up," he called out to them as they went in opposite directions. "We're burnin' daylight."

Buck liked to quote from John Wayne movies and with these two he often dredged up lines from that one called The Cowboys The Cowboys about Wayne taking a bunch of young kids on a cattle drive because the Duke couldn't find any men to help him with the job. In the Old West Buck would have been a leader, a man admired. He figured that might have been why he never objected to the nickname that got stuck on him in high school. Buck. Just like in the 1800s. Now there was a century he knew he would have fit into. Maybe driving cattle up in Hendry County wasn't that different today. Maybe he hadn't been born too late. about Wayne taking a bunch of young kids on a cattle drive because the Duke couldn't find any men to help him with the job. In the Old West Buck would have been a leader, a man admired. He figured that might have been why he never objected to the nickname that got stuck on him in high school. Buck. Just like in the 1800s. Now there was a century he knew he would have fit into. Maybe driving cattle up in Hendry County wasn't that different today. Maybe he hadn't been born too late.

The boys must have heard the chug of the airboat engine turn over twice, three times while they were walking across the mud that used to be Marshall's Circle because when it finally caught and burst into a roar, they started running.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h will leave without us for sure," said Marcus, toting his quick packed duffle and a Lil' Oscar cooler filled with water bottles.

"Yeah? Where's he gonna go without us to do his lifting and totin'," said Wayne, who sounded c.o.c.ky, but didn't stop running either.

When they jogged up to Chadwick's place, Buck had the big airboat out on a new mud slick near the old mechanic's nearly submerged dock. It was there that he usually loaded in the tourists who had been lured by his AIRBOAT TOURS OF THE ANCIENT EVERGLADES AIRBOAT TOURS OF THE ANCIENT EVERGLADES sign posted out on the Tamiami Trail. Anybody who'd lived here for any of the last three or four decades could still pick up some business from folks pa.s.sing by from Naples on the west or Miami to the east who wanted a peek at the gators or bird flocks or just the open sawgra.s.s range of still-wild land. The boys could never see the attraction. Buck thought it was as bad as running carnival rides, catering to gawkers and thrill seekers who had little respect or appreciation for what they were seeing. But he'd still served as a subst.i.tute driver for Chadwick as long as he got paid in cash. sign posted out on the Tamiami Trail. Anybody who'd lived here for any of the last three or four decades could still pick up some business from folks pa.s.sing by from Naples on the west or Miami to the east who wanted a peek at the gators or bird flocks or just the open sawgra.s.s range of still-wild land. The boys could never see the attraction. Buck thought it was as bad as running carnival rides, catering to gawkers and thrill seekers who had little respect or appreciation for what they were seeing. But he'd still served as a subst.i.tute driver for Chadwick as long as he got paid in cash.

The boys stepped up onto the flat boat deck, built like a pontoon skiff in light aluminum but with an angled bow so it could slide up over a small bank or plow right over tall gra.s.ses and thin-stalked trees. Buck had loaded the big open deck with a line of red five-gallon gas cans, a cooler, and his duffle. The boys tossed their bags behind the raised seats and then climbed up behind Buck's pilot chair. The huge, wire- caged propeller was right behind them and the airplane engine roared when Buck pushed the throttle forward to keep the rpms high. He reached back to them to offer a plastic bottle of little yellow chunks of spongy material you could stuff into your ears to cut down the thrum of noise. He didn't say a word, even if they could have heard him. They both waved him off. This was nothing they hadn't dealt with in Cory Marshall's Honda Civic with the Bose CrossQuarter speakers that thumped out Da Trill and vibrated the whole car on a Sat.u.r.day night roll over to Naples. When Buck's head turned forward, Wayne pointed his finger forward and mouthed the words: "Let's flow, dude." Marcus read his lips and they both giggled like little kids.

FOURTEEN.

I knew that without my partner it was going to be a much harder pull, but I missed her more than I could calculate.

We were two hours into the trip back, twice the amount of time it had taken to make this leg to the Snows' camp from the thick hammock of pigeon plum and strangler fig trees where the hidden camp may have survived the blow better than ours. I was hoping that the place had been sheltered by the trees and might be a serviceable resting spot. Now, after plowing through miles of water that had become a cluttered soup of floating, rootless vegetation, hope had turned into a prayer. I was envisioning beyond logical expectation a dry room, potable water, canned food of some sort, maybe even a battery-powered radio-phone. In the last hour my fear had grown that the latter was going to be a necessity if Sherry was going to survive with her leg intact.

In the still, flat light, I was watching her eyes while I stroked with the makes.h.i.+ft paddle I'd fas.h.i.+oned from the wall plaque. At first she'd been hyperalert, her eyes dancing from left to right, checking, a.s.sessing, nervous like a kid riding in the jump seat and watching the landscape go by when she really wanted to be facing the destination instead of having her back to it. She would grimace with pain each time the canoe slid up with a jerk onto some flotsam that stopped us with its thickness. More than a dozen times already I'd had to climb out into waist-deep water and pull us through shallows, fearful of steering us around them too far and taking the chance of getting off the direct line of GPS coordinates. Each time I pulled from the front, my handhold next to Sherry's shoulder, my eye checking the pulse in her neck. Once refloated, I would get her to drink more water from the bottles, even when she argued, correctly, that we needed to conserve.

"You're the engine, Max," she said. "I'm just the pa.s.senger. If you run dry we're both sunk." I caught her repeating the same line an hour later, and Sherry rarely repeated herself. I started watching her eyes for signs of delirium. When they closed, for rest or out of exhaustion, I watched her lips to see if she was mumbling to herself. I kept talking to her, nothing complicated or even specific, just ramblings to keep her the slightest bit focused. Maybe to keep me focused too.

Now I was talking about springtime in Philadelphia, telling her about the blossoms on trees along East River Drive in Fairmont Park and how you could smell the aroma, even out in the middle of the Schuylkill River when you were rowing. While I talked I kept my eye on a marker, a clump of unusually high sawgra.s.s, that I'd set using the GPS. One leg at a time, I thought to myself. I talked about high school, the guys in the neighborhood and some of the girls, piling onto the Broad Street subway at the Snyder Avenue station and riding down to the Vet on a Sat.u.r.day night to see the Phillies play. We'd get Mitchey Cleary, whose older brother was a beer vendor, to slip us soda cups half full of Schmidts and then sit up in the cheap, seven-dollar seats and yell all night for Von Hayes to rap one out of the park to us in center field. I saw Sherry smile at that one, just a slight rise at the corners of her dry, cracked lips, maybe thinking about the beer. When I started going on about stopping off at Pat's at Wharton and Pa.s.syunk for cheesesteaks I realized I was punis.h.i.+ng even myself by bringing up food and drink and I stopped.

"We're gonna be there in a little bit, Sherry. How's the leg feel? Can you still move your toes?"

I was hoping for circulation and secretly worrying about infection, maybe even gangrene. The Glades is notorious for the waterborne bacteria and microbes that break down the vegetation and could have easily made it into her bloodstream through the open slash in her thigh and even onto the exposed bone before she was able to pull it back in.

"I'm OK," she said softly, her first words in over an hour though she still did not open her eyes when she said them.

"Tell me more about the spring, Max. Tell me about trees. The shade. Tell me you love me, Max.

I thought again of delirium. What was the treatment? s.h.i.+t. Had she answered my question?

"I love you, Sherry," I said. "We're going to be there in just a little bit."

It was raining again by the time I looked up from a more determined pace. I was stroking as deeply as I could, feathering out the rhythmic repet.i.tions, trying to block out everything but the reach, pull-through, kick out with as little interruption of momentum. I'd been repeating this motion for years paddling out on my river, even in darkness with only the light of the moon to guide me, up to the d.y.k.e flow and back, working the edges off whatever new rock was in my head. I could do it now, through exhaustion.

The drops of rain on my head mixed with the sweat and ran into my eyes and the sting finally made me look up. I wasn't sure how long I'd been cranking but in the distance I could finally see what might be the remains of the hammock. From half a mile out, the dark rise of trees made the little island look like it had been sheared in half. A couple of taller spikes formed odd-looking inverted Vs against the background of pale sky. I took a break, fed Sherry the last of the bottled water we had, and then drank myself from the bailing scoop I'd fas.h.i.+oned from the Snows' coffee can. I'd convinced myself that the rainwater would be pure enough to keep me hydrated and whatever else got mixed in with it from the bottom of the canoe would just have to be ignored. The bands of rain from the back end of the hurricane had followed us along the path but now the bottom of the boat was filling too fast for that to be the only source. My jury-rigged job with the duct tape was failing. The canoe was leaking. Glades soup was seeping in and trying to swamp us, but there wouldn't be a fix now. If the darkening mound out there in front of us wasn't the one we were looking for, or if the camp inside its sheltering trees was blown away, we were in deep trouble. I bailed while I rested and then reached out to touch Sherry's foot. No reaction. I got to my feet and with my hands on either side rail of the canoe I leaned forward. I could still see the pulse in her neck so I sat back in my seat, began paddling again, head down, the pace a step faster than before.