Lost Man's River (99 page)

Speck accepted a tin plate of food and poked at it suspiciously with his tin fork, then brought it up close under his nose, green eyes watching them over the plate.

“Our kind of people likes good fish to eat, ain't that right, Andy? Won't eat shark nor manatee, and ain't all of 'em will eat a sea turtle. Won't eat conch neither—call that nigger food. Course over to Key West and the Bahamas, they eat conch and glad to get it. That's how come we call 'em Conchs, I reckon.”

He sniffed his plate again, then shrugged and started eating, but his eyes kept moving and he ate quickly, tossing scraps and spitting bones over his
shoulder. Once again his mood was changing for he ate and talked ever faster and more angrily, eyes snapping, mouth opening and closing on white food, pausing only for a gasp of moonshine. “Hell, there's more fish on this plate than I seen all week. In this damned sorry day and age, a man can't hardly get enough to feed his cat. Never seen fishin poor as this since the Red Tide. Them fish is fed up with the Park, the same as I am.

“What's happenin to our local fishery is just a crime, and it's bein committed in broad open daylight! You know why? Because the law's behind it. Some of us fellers might be moonshiners today, and poachers and gunrunners, too—how come? We started out to be hunters and fishermen like our daddies, ain't that right?

“Fifty years ago when Robert Harden first come to Lost Man's River, sea trout and snook and mullet was so thick a man could dance on 'em, it was a pure astonishment to the heart and eye. The fishin was somethin wonderful, and the trappin and huntin, too. But now the wilderness is bein hammered and the wildlife with it, and before them people are done messin with our water, the fish all around this coast will be gone, too!”

He set down his plate to roll a cigarette. He inhaled raggedly, blew it out, gauging their expressions through the smoke, coughing, nearly out of breath, yet talking rapidly, gathering intensity and rage as he went along.

Before Parks come in, a man might land a half million pounds of fish each year along this coast. Today he would be doin good to land one tenth of that amount, and tomorrow is going to be worse. Because Parks is diggin all them ditches and canals, lettin the fresh water out and the salt water in, and they will end up ruinin the spawnin grounds of one of the great fisheries of the whole world! And they are doin that to drain the land east of the boundaries for the big farmers, same as Flood Control already done north of the Park. They are destroyin the rightful property of the common people. Give 'em two dollars an acre, take it or don't, for a century's worth of clearin and improvement. Parks burnt their fish houses, hundred-foot dock and all—that hurt, you know, to see all that hard work wasted.

I never knew the U.S. Gov'ment would tell us barefaced lies like that, did you? If them damn bureaucrats and politicians can get away with it, they'll steal you blind. Two-faced lyin bastards, right up to the president, tell the stupid-ass damn public any ol' fool thing that might keep their asses covered till the next election! Here I grew up thinkin—wasn't we taught this back in school?—that the U.S.A. was the greatest country in the world! It purely
hurts
me to speak bad about my country! But the truth's the truth, at least it used to be.

Hell, boys, I ain't
talkin
to my country, not no more! A man can't trust a single word that ain't writ down in black and white, signed, sealed, and hand-delivered, and even then it don't mean diddley-shit. If you ain't some kind of a big corporation that helps to grease their skids, get 'em elected, they'll weasel around and break their promises, they'll screw you every time. I finally realized how them Injuns must of felt about all them broken treaties, bein lied to and stole off of and cheated for two hundred years! Well, you know somethin? All us old-time pioneers are disappearin down that Injun road!

Weren't that the way you was brought up? To trust the Gov'ment? Hellamighty, they ain't done
nothin
for us common people, not around the Glades! Too busy throwin the taxpayers' money at developers and farm corporations like United Sugar that wanted Okeechobee diked and the Glades drained and the Kissimmee River funneled away through concrete sewage pipes so's rich men can get richer every day growin cane and citrus on the public land. Same way all over the damn country! Well, some of us don't aim to sit and take it!

Since Parks come in, they been playin right along with Flood Control and the growers and developers that's behind it. That good water overflowin Okeechobee don't come south no more, and this part of the Glades here in the Park is starved for water. Pretty soon all this wild country over here will be lay in dead under the sun, no more use than a old gator carcass with the flat stripped off the belly and guts fallin out. Might still look like a live gator from a little ways off, till the stink hits you, and you hear the flies. Well, this wild Florida that was our home country and got took away from us is goin to wind up as dead and stinkin as that gator! Might look like Florida to tourists drivin past, but they better not stop or look too close!

Man like me never got much education, never needed it. Never knowed no other way than huntin and fishin, usin a boat. We done that all the year around. Then the Big Cypress and the north Glades started dyin, to where they ain't hardly nothin left to hunt. Don't see no game from one year to the next! Finally we said to hell with it and went over to huntin in the Park. Got to take what's left before the gator holes dry up and the last life dies away for want of water.

Goin to sleep nights, starin straight up at the stars, I pine away for the Glades the way they was. I know in my mind it would all come back if them sonsabitches would just leave this place alone. You take that bad storm last September—that one them lyin bastards claimed done so much damage to
the Watson Place! Come in after midnight, hit Florida Bay, lashin along at 150 miles an hour, pulled all the water off them flats, mile after mile, dead dry as far out as the eye could see. When them seas come back, they was fourteen foot above mean high water! Struck Flamingo at daybreak and broke most of the trees, all the way up and down that low flat coast, carried milky marl inland ten miles, all the way to the Nine-Mile Bend! Left long drift lines of dead fish and birds when the tide went out again—miles and miles of dead-lookin gray swamp and not so much as a buzzard in the sky. That country laid there so still and ghosty that any stranger comin through, he'd say, It's finished. This Glades country is deader'n a dead man's dick.

Well, the greenery and the birds, too, is startin to come back, and it ain't a year yet! Had to learn all over again what our granddaddies been tellin us since Nap Broward started messin with the Glades when we was boys. This big ol' swamp got nothin in the world to fear from hurricanes, not in the long run. Only thing it got to fear is two-legged idiots screwin with the water, and doin it legal with the help of politician-lawyers. Destroy the whole damn Everglades for profit, then turn around and call a man a criminal who is huntin gators in his own home country, same as his daddy and granddaddy done before him! That seem right to you? You call that justice?

Them corporations and the lawyers and the politicians on their payroll—the bigger they are, the more the Gov'ment rigs the laws for 'em so they don't pay taxes! Grab the whole pot for their sel ves! Big Sugar and them others, hell, they're already so fat they don't know what to do with all their profits, but even so they will still move in on every square mile of the Glades they can lay their hands on! Same thing everywhere! Call themselves “big businessmen”—fuckin stupid hogs is all they are! Never raise their snouts out of the trough for long enough to see what their hoggishness is doin to our great country!

Know how they get away with it? They get away with it because they own the government, state government and federal both. Them so-called elected people, they're just overhead! Now what the hell kind of a democracy is that? All them bought-and-paid-for politicians ever done was sell the people out, then holler about progress and democracy and wave the American flag over their dirty dealins! Get us into their damn wars so they can make more money for the arms industries and oil and chemicals that paid to get these chickenshits elected!

Them businessmen and their lawyer-politicians who work our federal government like some old whore—
them
kind are the real criminals in this country! If we go to talkin about betrayin America, them powerful sonsabitches at the top are the worst traitors in the whole history of the U.S.A.!
That whole gang deserves to be took out and shot, or at least have their ears cut off so's the common man could see 'em comin!

You know who pays for all them profits with their lives? Same ones that always pays—the little fellers! All us pathetical damn fools that don't know how to do nothin about it! Fools like Crockett Junior Daniels who are dumb enough to sign right up to go and fight their wars for 'em! Go get their heads blowed off or arms blowed off for a tin medal, while these fat boys stay home livin high off of the hog!

Before Junior went overseas, he'd talk real serious about fightin for freedom and democracy. Frown a little, y'know, squint off into the future like he seen in the movies, let on kind of quiet and modest how he aimed to serve his country. And I said, “No, boy, that ain't what you are doin, cause this
ain't
your country! It's
their
damn country, right up to the White House! Them greedy sonsabitches owns it
all
!”

Panting for his breath like a thirsty dog, Daniels glared about him, fire-eyed with drink. His weathered face was dark with blood to the point of stroke, and no one spoke as he wound himself down, snarling and muttering. All were astonished by the passion in this man who had never been suspected of unselfish feelings or even the smallest deference to the common good.

Speck glared into the fire while he wiped his mouth and otherwise composed himself, too unraveled to focus. When he spoke again, his tone was low and bitter, and his green-eyed head hunched down between his shoulders like the head of a swamp panther, sinking all but imperceptibly into the undergrowth. “I'm still fightin 'em and always will.” Speck's voice was hoarse. “I always stood up to their law—home law, school law, church law, state and federal. I only got the one life, same as you, and I never liked nobody tellin me what I must do with it, specially when ever'thin they're tellin is plain lies and bullshit.”

Speck Daniels looked them over, as if daring them to dispute what he had said. When they awaited him, respecting his strong feelings, his dark aggrieved expression gave way to sly amusement. He winked at them conspiratorially, as if all his grief and fury over the ruination of the Everglades and the despoliation of America and even the maiming of his son had been no more than cynical performance.

Hearing him laugh—more like a bark—the blind man burst out, “Goddammit to hell!” and Harden growled and turned away, disgusted. Lucius watched coldly as the gator poacher, to burlesque things further, attacked his food with loud and sloppy chewing. Peering gleefully from beneath his heavy brows, he ate ferociously, and because he was grinning, pieces of fish
protruded and fell from both sides of his mouth. In inspired perversity—to spite his listeners, making their awe of his populist eloquence seem idiotic—the man was mocking them. Yet even his mockery was ambiguous, since plainly he believed what he had said, and was only jeering at it—and at himself, and at them, too—because he saw sincerity, even his own, as foolish weakness.

Belching, Speck picked his teeth with a fish spine, in no hurry. Tossing the bone away, he spoke again, so softly now that he was almost whispering. “Old feller asts me the other day, says, ‘Speck? Don't you pine for our old life? Don't you wish them days was back the way they was?' And I told him, ‘Yessir, Lee Roy, I sure do.' Said, ‘If I had my life to do again, I would live it right here where I'm at, live off this land same way I always done, huntin and fishin, and lawbreakin, too.' I told him, ‘Lee Roy, I ain't
never
goin to be drove out! Goin to live off this Glades country till I die! U.S. Gov'ment wants to run me out, they'll have to come in after me, and they better come in shootin, cause I aim to be.' ”