3 A Brewski for the Old Man (19 page)

He thought for a minute and nodded. In his crazy world it likely made sense.

Paddling miles down a creek and sneaking up on some real bad guys just sounded like a barrelful. Hee haw! Bring it on.

Tully dropped me off at the restaurant and I spent time on the phone replacing myself. If I didn’t get my ass back in there real soon I’d drive myself into bankruptcy or my employees would steal me into it, but that was tomorrow’s worry. My worry bag for today was already full. I quickly called Clay, whose phone was off, thank god — no way I wanted to explain how I was spending my evening, so I left a message saying everything was fine. Another message for Marley and I shot off to the apartment to get into my sneaking-up-on-people kit.

We turned onto Jefferson Road at the edge of the park, where civilization meets wilderness. Houses, weathered, unadorned and falling down, said life was hard. Strung out in a thin ragged line along the dirt road, the houses perched on concrete blocks in yards full of rusting cars and cast-off machinery. Squatting in a circle of bare dirt or struggling out of tall grasses, thick vines strangled both man-made and natural forms alike. Every yard seemed to have a lean, half-crazed brown dog that came out to yap at us through bared fangs as we rattled by.

The land here was neither one thing nor another. Swamp turned into fields of tall grasses dotted with hammocks. Close to the back of the houses crouched dense woods of pine and oak, waiting for a single season of neglect to claim back the occupied land.

When we got to the pull-off at the bridge, Tully cranked the old truck over to the very edge of the grass ditch. The engine coughed and died. “It’s late,” I said. “Not much light left.”

Tully’s door squeaked open. “We got two hours of full light to get to the lake, and then we got nearly another hour ’til deep black. More than enough. Don’t worry, little girl.” Right then and there warning sirens started going crazy. When this man said, don’t worry, you sure as hell should.

I wrapped the bottom of my jeans tight around my legs and pulled Clay’s dark socks up over them. No nasty little critters were going to get at my bare skin — no white flag of sock was going to betray my presence. I was way into this survival stuff.

I pushed open my door. The truck was tilted towards the ditch and gravity pulled the door down the incline. Some of Tully’s paperwork slid off the floor into the grass. As I stepped down out of the truck my foot hit the manual, shooting it out from under me. I slid down into the ditch, landing on my ass in the muddy water at the bottom. I quickly jumped to my feet, dripping but upright in ankle-deep muck. Water oozed between my toes. The water stank and now so did I. On the road above me, high and dry, Tully laughed. I considered killing him — would have if I’d realized what was coming.

I sunk my fingers into the tall grass and scrambled back up to the truck. My whole right side was wet, including the cell phone in the buttoned-down pocket of my black cargo pants. I took it out and pressed On. Nothing. “Shit.” Already this adventure was living up to my expectations. On a branch in the underbrush a dove cooed softly in sympathy.

I wanted to tell Tully I’d changed my mind, tell him I was having second thoughts. Well, maybe even third and forth thoughts, but whatever the count I wasn’t real eager to get started on this misadventure.

I wanted to tell him to call the cops and forget about it, but pride, that same old demon that would always make me cut off my nose to spite my face, kept me silent. I only hoped that Tully was wrong and they’d already gone. That was the only thing keeping me in this game. I was betting they weren’t as cool as Tully Jenkins, weren’t always ready to push things to the limit.

Tully muscled the brown-and-green camouflage-painted canoe out of the bed of the pickup, so I held onto the truck bed to keep from sliding down the bank again and picked up my end of the canoe. Together we slid it down the embankment and into the narrow stream under the bridge. The water was pretty clear here, not the dark tannin brown water of the woods. Perhaps here the grasses filtered the water. Tully scrambled up the bank and handed me down a duffel bag, full and heavy. I didn’t ask what was in it, just stowed it in the canoe and waited for him. He went back to the cab of the truck and came back with the long sleeve of a rifle cover. Was this good news or something more to worry about?

Tully pushed the canoe away from the grass bank and anchored it with his paddle.

Keeping my weight low and holding the gunnels, I stepped into the canoe and settled in the bow. I took up the paddle. Ahead of us, a blue-grey heron lifted elegantly off the shore with slow even beats of its wings. Legs trailing behind, it flew ahead of us down the waterway, guiding the way to the entrance in the solid wall of deep jungle. I settled my hips and dampened down my misgivings. A nice little paddle with the old man, what could possibly go wrong? Yeah, right.

We paddled towards the wilderness crouching in front of us, waiting and licking its chops in anticipation of devouring us. The land between the road and deep forest had once been worked but now it had been left to go back to nature. Cabbage palms, our state tree, grew in abundance along the edge of the stream, their trunks cross-hatched with dead branches offering fiber for nests, their fruit feeding the birds and hiding the rats and the snakes that fed on the birds.

Somewhere farther down the road and beyond the palms on my left a dog barked, not loud or adamant but just to say it was there. A man’s voice told it to shut up while another voice, a woman’s voice, called for the man to come inside. Strange to hear people but not to see them through the dense foliage. I felt a little safer just knowing other people were close, wanted to call out to them and tell them I was among them and not to let me disappear into nothing. A door slammed somewhere in the distance along the thin line of dusty road.

Within minutes of leaving the bridge we reached the narrow arch into the wild. The man-built world slid away with the water under our craft as we glided back in time into a primordial world, base and immediate. Only the water mattered, sleek and shining and spreading out in front of us, leading us on. The stream was broad here and shallow, the water now like a dark brown sauce, colored with the tannin of dead leaves. The air was strangely quiet, as if nature were holding her breath and waiting to see what these new invaders brought with them.

The dip and stroke of the paddles eased my anxious heart, the rhythm relaxing and soothing. I said, “Tell me about the snakes,” hoping he’d lie. Dip and pull. “Which ones?” “Start with the ones likely to kill me.”

More strokes as he counted the reptiles to himself. “Really, only six likely to do that.” He named them, “First the c-snakes:

coral, copperhead, cottonmouth. Then there are the rattlers: pigmy and diamondback and the canebrake. Other than that, no worries.”

My paddle stopped in midstroke. I plunked it across the gunnels, the crack sounding loud in the stillness. I leaned on my paddle and looked back at him. He was grinning at me and paddling on. Not a care in the world.

“I hate snakes.”

“Then you’re in the right place. The theory is, the fellow upfront stirs them up and the guy in back gets hit. ’Course, theory is well and good as long as someone tells the snake.” I glared at him. “Sometimes I don’t like you much.”

He laughed softly as we ducked down under the overhanging branches of an oak leaning over the water and maneuvered around a fallen tree. We cut so close to the bank that the grasses combed the water from our paddles as we passed. Ahead of us an otter raised his head to look at us and then scurried, sliding and slipping, into the water and was gone.

We settled into a silent rhythm until the water grew too shallow to pass through. Tully said, “Get out” in a quiet voice, barely above a whisper. Did he feel it too, the strange waiting, the feeling of expectancy, of being in another world? Or maybe he’d just slipped into his ’Nam jungle mode.

I got out of the canoe, reaching down to grab the prow and drag it through the shallows, thinking of leeches and Humphrey Bogart in
The African Queen
. The mulch on the bottom sucked on my canvas sneakers, trying to vacuum them from my feet. In front of me a fish darted away, the fin on its back breaking the surface of the shallow water. Above us the canopy thinned as we skirted the edge of a marshy area. Dragging the canoe through tall grass, the late-day sun warming our skin, we found the stream again on the other side and re-entered the forest, startling a white egret that cried and flew up from a branch.

The waterway narrowed; the banks grew steeper. I sank into water up to my knees. “Okay,” Tully said and braced the canoe while I entered. As I did, I waggled each foot in the water, shaking off the muck and searching for hitchhikers. Leaning on the paddle across in front of me, eyes probing the underbrush along the banks for danger, I settled again.

The canoe barely wobbled as Tully entered and we slid forward. Branches reached across the stream to each other, sheltering us from the last of the sun. It was cooler here. And darker. My senses came alive and I breathed deeply. The sweet smell of decay, rotting wood and leaves, mixed with the smell of the water. The stagnant, unmoving water of the swamp, the smell of death in our nostrils, the roots of a cypress tree jutting out like the arthritic knuckles of an old man’s hand, these were the things I fixed on. My eyes searched the trees, noting air plants and mosses and moving on, searching for danger or information I might need. I didn’t know what form danger might take; I only knew it was out there, waiting.

Behind me Tully began to sing softly, “Oh mama, I can’t dance, the boys all got sticks in their pants. Oh mama, I can’t…” The canoe rocked gently as Tully moved forward and swatted at something on the back of my collar.

“What?” I asked.”

“Nothing, don’t worry.”

Hell girl, nothing to worry about out here, just bad men, snakes and spiders and god knew what else. “I’m used to bars and things,” I explained and laid the paddle across my knees. I watched the water run off the end. “I know what to worry about there, crazies and drunks and druggies but there’s real scary stuff out here.”

He laughed. “Don’t worry, got you covered, little girl.”

I wished I could believe it.

“Look,” he said. “Gator.”

On the bank ahead of us was a ten-foot gator with his long, flattened snout pointing towards us. His armor-plated skin had spikes running along the edges from head to tail. “They feed at night…at dusk.” Tully spoke quietly. “He’s just about ready for dinner.” “Oh whoopee!”

“We’ll stay well away. That thing’s nothing but a seeing, smelling, eating machine.” Tully angled his paddle, steering us to the far shore away from the gator, but in a thirteen-foot-wide stream it offered little comfort. The gator saw us and rose up on his legs as we passed. The horizontal line of his mouth opened in the massive elongated head. I couldn’t take my eyes off him although my brain was saying paddle like hell.

“He looks like a huge set of pointed teeth with stubby legs.”

“Never ignore that tail,” Tully warned. “He can break your leg with one sweep.”

The gator’s jaw closed and he ambled awkwardly forward and then slipped silently into the water. Only the nostrils on the tip of its snout and the two hills of its eyes protruded from the water, watching us and coming silently towards us. Then it disappeared.

I paddled like some demented cartoon character on steroids.

“Easy, easy,” Tully warned.

Panting with exertion, I asked, “Where is it? Why doesn’t it come up?”

“It can stay under for hours.”

“You’re just full of good news…among other things.” A soft laugh. He wasn’t perturbed by any gator.

I was still pulling hard but searching the water on the backstroke for any tell-tale signs of the monster. We were another hundred yards along before I started to feel safe. Then I saw two more gators, smaller ones this time, sleeping on the shore. They might be small but all the same we were within a dozen feet of them. “At this moment I don’t feel poaching gators is a bad thing,” I whispered to Tully as we drifted by. I took a deep breath and looked back over my shoulder at them. “Their backs look green. The ones I’ve seen have always been black.”

“Duckweed,” was his cryptic reply. Was Tully feeling it too, feeling this strangeness of the other world, the fear of the unknown and the alarm of a victim?

It wasn’t just the dread of what was to come but the “what if” of imagination that was having a go at terrifying me. Nature was no longer benign and welcoming. Maybe it never had been and I’d just been too young and ignorant to know.

My heart rate settled but we weren’t through with the gators. Now the water teemed with ones about four inches long, and as I watched a long-nosed fish broke for the surface, its mouth closing over a wiggling gator fingerling, and the hunter became the hunted.

The lake surprised me. One minute we were in a narrow, choked watercourse and the next, as we pulled free of the reed beds along the edge of the water, we broke out onto a broad flat lake with a cloud of white ibis rising up around us to signal our arrival. Tully steered the craft hard to the right. “Their camp is about five minutes down. No more talking.”

A chill swept over me. I turned to look at him, wanting to ask to turn back. Out here only the men who beat Uncle Ziggy would be able to hear me scream.

A breeze came up on the lake, sending tiny waves dancing across the water in front of us and pushing against our hull, demanding more of us. I swiveled around to the bow and matched Tully’s strokes.

We heard them before we saw them. They were coming from behind us, between us and the stream that led back to safety, to civilization where I wanted to be again. “Jesus Christ, hold it still you ass,” one of them said.

I didn’t need to be told to dig harder. We shot by the opening to the stream where their camp was, pulling hard to put distance between us and the men. There was no cover. The reed beds here were thick but only grew about a foot above the water.

Within seconds a curse went up.

A bass voice yelled from behind us, “Hey, you there.” “Pull,” Tully said. I went hard. Another twenty feet and we cleared a small finger of ground snaking into the water. We passed it and veered right. “Out,” Tully said. “Lie down in the water. I did as I was told, looking up at the sky, my paddle clutched to my chest and breathing hard. I didn’t look to see what Tully was doing but I heard the sheath slide off his rifle.

“Where the hell did they go?” That was clear even with water covering my ears. There was a heavy clunk, a sound like a foot hitting against the side of an aluminum boat. “Let’s get rid of the gator and get out of here.”

“No way. We’ll drop you back at camp. You dress this out, Bob, and we’ll keep looking.” “Why do I get all the dirty jobs?”

“Lets look on down farther,” a new voice put in. There was no sound of the electric motor or any more voices. I stayed where I was, flat in the water along the edge of the bank while overhead an osprey hovered and watched. Would it see my eyes and think they were food? Would it dive down to peck them out? I should close my eyes, but no way could I take my eyes off him. Then I saw it fold its wings and dive. A hand touched me. I jerked up.

Tully had his finger to his lips. I nodded. Waves echoed out from me and I froze.

He made a patting downward motion with his hand. I took it to mean he wanted me to stay down close to the water. Then he beckoned for me to come. I rolled on my belly and started to crawl through the reeds after him, no longer worried about leeches. Tully pushed the canoe ahead of him. I wanted to raise my head enough to search for the men but didn’t. I was going strictly on instinct here, instinct and a thousand adventure movies. Mostly I was following my dad and trusting to his sixty years of survival.

We moved deeper into the reed bed in the shallow bay. Were we leaving behind a trail of broken reeds and stirred water to show our passage?

Here and there, where it was as much land as marsh, bushes were growing out of the reeds, offering us cover. We fled from one small refuge to the next, hovering behind them without moving, waiting until Tully decided it was time to move and then we went on to the next bit of protection, angling towards denser shelter, thicker than the last, but still I caught glimpses of the lake when I looked back. Tully leaned in close to me, his breath warm on my cheek. “They’re waiting for us to break cover.”

I stayed as still as I could, staring into the emerald green bush in front of me. Five minutes passed and then ten. A red-winged blackbird landed on the bush, startling me. Tully reached out a hand to my shoulder. More time passed before we heard them.