Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones (16 page)

Baker pointed toward a stretch of land near the hammock. "There ought to be two feet of water right there. There ought to be plenty of vegetation for the deer, tiny fish for the wading birds, and water holes for the gators to lay their eggs. But look at it."

"Dry as my granny's rye toast," I said.

Jimmy Tiger leaned down from his perch above us. "They're taking all the water for the farms and the cities. Then, in the rainy season, they flood us."

Tiger gunned the engine, and we took off again down the channel in the east Glades, through patches of green water lettuce and lilies. To my untrained eye, there seemed to be plenty of flora and fauna as we sped over the shallow water, crunching through yellow sawgrass. But then, I didn't know what it was like a century ago. We roared past hardwood hammocks with live oak and royal palm trees, scattering half a dozen egrets into the air. A predatory osprey flew overhead, searching for lunch, reminding me that I was hungry. A turtle swam slowly by, and two black snakes gracefully slithered through the water. Earlier, on wetter ground near the Shark Valley Slough, I had spotted the unique pink feathers of a roseate spoonbill carrying twigs in its spoon-shaped beak and, not far away, a black-and-white wood stork.

When I pointed out all the birds, Baker gave me a bitter laugh. "Not long before you were born, Jake, there was an area called Rookery Branch west of here that was packed with white ibis, tricolored herons, and snowy egrets. Between half a million and a million of them in a strand of trees a hundred yards wide and three quarters of mile long. Can you even imagine the sound they made?"

"Yeah, and the birdshit, too," I said.

"Their songs could be heard for miles," Baker continued.

It made me think of the banyan trees near the public tennis courts on Florida Avenue in the Grove. Two dozen green parrots roost there in the winter, chirping their hearts out. "What happened?" I asked.

"The Army Corps of Engineers built the canal south of Tamiami Trail. The water turned brackish. No more birds, no more music."

I am not an environmental nut, believing in moderation in all things except consumption of Dutch beer. I am more pained by an inner-city child without a home than a heron without a nest. I don't understand people who treat a man sleeping in a cardboard box as if he were invisible but race across the street to curse at a woman wearing a fur. Sorry, but I care more about people than minks, which I always considered uptown rats.

At the same time, I am opposed to fat-cat business-industrial types, such as a certain rotund, cigar-smoking radio host who calls people like Baker "environmental Nazis." There is a balancing to be done between the needs of a growing populace and the preservation of the wild. If I had to choose between Baker and those who would pave the wetlands, drill for oil on the reefs, and ravage the forests, count me with the tree huggers.

Harrison Baker had already given me a history lesson. The Everglades, that wide, slow river flowing from Lake Okeechobee on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, has been strait-jacketed by fifteen hundred miles of canals and levees, two-hundred water control structures, and eighteen pumping stations. A man-made plumbing system tries to accommodate the water needs of farmers, industries, and ten million people in the southern half of the state. The environment comes last. The Glades is half its original size, and the number of endangered species grows each year.

"South Florida is an environmental disaster," Baker told me. "We've got one-tenth the wading birds we had at the turn of the century. We've cut the flow of fresh water through the Glades, so Florida Bay is dying. Algae has killed the shoalgrass and turtle grass and turned the water brown. The mullet, trout, and tarpon have been devastated. The Glades is polluted with mercury and phosphorus and pesticides. Beaches are eroding, mangroves are fouled with garbage, reefs are dying, and every week new developments are started, moving west from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach right into what's left of the wetlands."

"What about water?" I asked him. "Fresh water?"

"Ah," he said, a sad smile crinkling his eyes. "Water is the real story. Water is where it'll all come home to roost. We're bleeding ourselves dry, and no one seems to care."

Tiger skidded the airboat to a stop next to a squat metal building on stilts. Here in the wilderness, it looked so out of place it could have been from Mars. "Water control station," he said, pointing at the invader. "Another feeble attempt by man to control nature. We always muck it up!"

Tiger let the engine idle, and Baker looked toward the horizon. "Give me a weather report, Jake."

I followed his gaze. A thick thunderhead was boiling up in the west. "It's going to rain," I said.

"Damn right!" Baker replied, laughing. "The rainy season is starting. That's the delicious irony. Two hundred years ago, pirates didn't even come ashore to get fresh water. It bubbled up in the middle of Biscayne Bay—that's how high the water table was. So what's the problem now? It doesn't rain any less. Hell, we had ninety inches in 1994! We get sixty to seventy inches most years, and we're running out of water. Why?"

"The canals," I said, having been a good student earlier in the day.

"Right. We shoot most of the water to the ocean. Whoosh!" He made a flowing motion with a hand. "We get too much in the summer and not enough in the winter, and once they chopped up the Glades, which was a natural storage area, the aquifer couldn't get enough. We don't have melting snows or giant mountain lakes. Our rain barrel is a limestone-and-sand sponge underground which stores water for us. But statewide, we've lost half the wetlands, over three million acres, and every year they lay more asphalt and build more malls, and every year the water level drops and the saltwater intrusion moves in farther from the sea."

We passed a nearly dry mangrove creek, where wading birds stomped through the shallow water looking for tiny fish. Above us the sky was darkening, and in the distance lightning flashed.

"So why not just knock down the damn things and go back to the way it was?" I asked.

That brought another laugh. "I'd love it!" Baker turned around to face Jimmy Tiger. "How 'bout you, Jimmy?"

"Sure. Drown all the white men."

"It surely would," Baker said, "at least the short ones. On Jake, here, the water would only be up to his chin." He turned back to me. "They could restore the Glades by letting the natural ebb and flow of the water take over. Of course, everything west of I-95 would be flooded up and down the coast. The sad truth is, man wasn't intended to live in South Florida, at least not in the millions. Maybe a few thousand of Jimmy Tiger's people could do it, living in the slough with the natural floods and droughts. But not the rest of us."

"So what's the solution?" I said.

"We could start with conservation. We use about two hundred gallons of water per person per day. In Europe, the average is closer to sixty gallons."

"But we like big cars and long showers and green grass."

"Sure, it's our God-given right," he said with a rueful smile. "Well, God's got a surprise for us. One day we'll run out of water."

"What can be done?"

"The federal government has promised to restore some of the Glades. The Army Corps of Engineers is going to divert water back into the Shark River Slough, which will flow into the national park."

"That's good," I said. "You should be happy about it."

"I am, but you city folk shouldn't be. Farmers, either. It means less water for you. There won't be enough to go around. We could be like some of the Caribbean islands—just turn off the water until it rains. Can you imagine that? Folks come down to their three-hundred-dollar-a-day hotels and can't take a shower or brush their teeth. No new sewer hookups, no lawn watering, rationing of water to maybe one fourth of what each family uses now. Most farmers will lose everything, though it's their own damn fault. Jake, have you ever seen one of those irrigation guns up on a tower, shooting water in a big circle like some kind of fountain?"

"Yeah. Guy Bernhardt's farm must have dozens of them."

"Bernhardt! That son of a bitch is worse than his father. He's the biggest water abuser in South Dade. Each of those guns shoots a thousand gallons of water a minute, and they lose half to evaporation and just plain misplacement. We try to get them to use the new drip technology and retain moisture with mulch, but water's been cheap and plentiful so long, they won't do it. They get permits from the Water Management District to pump a certain amount, but it's all free. 'It's my land, and it's my water.' That's what Bernhardt and his kind say. And the district is powerless to stop them. There are no meters, no inspectors to prevent overpumping. It's all an honor system, but men like Guy Bernhardt have no honor. He's a pig who's . . ." He searched for a phrase.

"Bleeding us dry," I said.

"Exactly. But the day of reckoning is coming. Jake, I'll bet you that before the millennium, we'll have full-fledged water wars down here."

"Water wars? That sounds like something from a B-western."

"Nope. It's already happened over in Tampa-St. Pete. Some law-abiding folks from Hillsborough and Pasco counties were tired of having their lakes and wetlands sucked dry just so the people of St. Petersburg could grow impatiens in the winter."

"What happened?" I asked.

"They became vigilantes, blew up a pipeline running from a well field down to Pinellas County."

That reminded me of Guy Bernhardt's story about his neighbors. "I don't get it," I said, and not for the first time in my life. "If there's a war, where are the battle lines drawn?"

"Simple, Jake. It's between those who control water and those who don't. In the past, land was money and power. Today, or in the very near future, it'll be water. Damn few people realize it, but our whole world has changed. Everything is water, and water is everything."

I was gnawing my third ear of corn when Roberto Condom showed up and sat down across from me at the picnic table outside the ribs joint on South Dixie Highway. It was dusk and still rush hour, a steamy heat rising from the pavement. Plumes of carbon monoxide mixed with the tang of smoking ribs as traffic clogged the north-south road, horns bleating.

I offered to buy Roberto a pork sandwich or a slab of ribs, but he declined, shooting nervous glances from side to side and whispering anxiously, "I can't get busted, Jake. You gotta know that. You, of all people, gotta know that."

"I need you, Roberto. You have to trust me. I did get you out on bond."

"Yeah, well, if I'm busted—"

"I know. I know. I'll handle the case for free."

"Hell with that! I'll flip on you. You're gonna need your own lawyer."

At the next table, a truck driver with tattooed forearms shot us a look. I slathered my ribs platter with barbecue sauce—heavy on the vinegar with a touch of cayenne—slopping some onto the fries.

I decided to play the guilt card. "They always talk about a lawyer's loyalty to a client. What about the other way around?"

''
Chíngate!
'' Roberto Condom said.

"I guess playing the guilt card only works with someone who has the capacity to feel guilty."

"Fuck you," he told me, in case I hadn't gotten it the first time.

I was wearing an old Oakland Raiders jersey, one of the black ones, turned inside out so the silver numbers wouldn't glow in the moonlight. It belonged to a left-handed quarterback who had left it behind at my house following a Super Bowl to which neither of us had been invited. My recollection is hazy, but I seem to recall the QB leaving the party with a blonde who had started the evening as my date, leaving me with his jersey and several empty tequila bottles. And you wonder why I hate quarterbacks.

Roberto Condom was wearing an army camouflage outfit, his pant legs neatly bloused into paratrooper boots, his face greased with eye black. A bit overdone, I thought, but with his Latino good looks, he could have been a recruiting poster for the Panamanian Defense Force.

We were crawling on our bellies through a muddy field fragrant with the scent of ripe mangoes. I had left the Olds at the ribs joint, and Roberto had driven us to the edge of the Bernhardt farm in a Ford Taurus with Manatee County plates.

"You rented a car?" I had asked him.

"No, I borrowed it."

"What?"

"I'm a valet parker at Flanigan's Quarterdeck Saloon, so I just—"

"Flanigan's doesn't have valet parking," I said.

"How many tourists you think know that? I stand there at the front door, a guy gets out of his car, I rush over and take his keys."

"Doesn't he want a receipt?"

"I give him a used trifecta ticket from jai alai, he gives me his new Taurus."

A three-quarter moon was rising in the east, darting in and out of a thin layer of scudding clouds. We continued moving along in what the marines call the high crawl, weight on the forearms and legs, knees behind the butt to keep close to the ground without belly slithering. A swarm of tiny gnats the locals call no-see-ums buzzed around my ears and invaded my nostrils. The night was moist with the fecund bouquet of growing things. We crept past a fragrant bush of white ginger, what Granny calls the butterfly lily. I remember its scent on a lei worn by Lila Summers in Maui. Not far away was a wild blooming jasmine, the fragrance heavy and overpowering.

"
Cristo!
Smells like a funeral parlor out here," Roberto muttered.

The earth itself gave up the fertile aroma of freshly plowed soil, and the night was alive with the sound of feeding birds and singing crickets.

Suddenly, I caught the scent of a woman.

Or of perfume.

Eerily like Chanel No. 5.