On the River Styx (16 page)

Burkett, who had his own small boat at home near the Potomac, was rather proud of his knowledge of boats and fishing. It seemed absurd to pay good money to sit in this hard skiff and be poled around in these godforsaken mangroves hauling in ladyfish and snappers when what he had come for was the robalo, or “snook.” “He has his heart set on a
snook
,” Alice had informed their friends in Washington, where he was a lawyer for the Interior Department. When Alice said that she understood why tourists might go elsewhere, he retorted crossly that they were fishermen, not tourists. To this, in the face of the gloomy discomfort of the guide, she hollered, “Fisher Woman! Snook!” (pronouncing it
snewk
in the local accent, yanking her rod back to set the hook, and battling the fierce snook to a standstill with eyes closed in a reckless parody of her own sexual abandon, to get him to laugh at himself, which at last he did).

At least the town was an inexpensive place that they could talk about entertainingly when they got home. An old-time Indian trading post from the days of commerce in otter pelts and egret plumes, this small fishing settlement at the far end of an eight-mile canal road was the “last frontier town” at the edge of “the last wilderness” of the Ten Thousand Islands. Here was a stronghold of the vanishing snook, and here hard-bitten shrimp and mullet fishermen—according to well-informed colleagues over at the Justice Department—grew rich on night runs of marijuana through this shallow-water archipelago, where patrol boats came to grief when they tried to follow, where new pickup trucks and limousines left for Miami from weathered cottages
on the cracked and grassy streets of an old Gulf Coast town that lacked a decent restaurant, much less a movie house. The Burketts had seen no sign of limousines, but it was certainly true about the movie house. As for the fried food in the motel café, Alice said, it had been freshly reheated every day since the Civil War. In the evenings, owing to mosquito plagues, they could not walk the quiet streets under the palms. Instead they confronted a black-and-white TV in a dim, bare room that stank of disinfectant. Days and nights alike were hot and humid, and the nearest beach, a patch of sand among the mangrove roots, three miles away by boat down the main channel, was beaten hard by the gray and windy water of the Gulf.

At each new evidence that they had erred, Alice would gaze at him in wonder. Why didn’t her loving husband get her out of here? He didn’t stay merely out of stubbornness; he had some idea about getting to know these people. But these people had no wish to be known. That he kept trying, she supposed, had something to do with self-respect, with persevering to avoid some obscure defeat. Anyway, she did not expect him to explain to her what he scarcely understood himself. His first snook would justify the trip, and he had to admit he was sort of curious about the rumored drug trade, which might account for the suspicion with which they had been received.

Alice said that he was paranoid, these lovable folks were just standoffish with strangers. Like most Americans—she informed him—he couldn’t tolerate feeling unwelcome: “You cracker bastards gonna love us whether ya like us or not!” Alice declared, shaking her first at the silent community outside their cabin.

For all her clowning, Alice shared his own uneasiness.
She sat there hunched up on her seat, having an eager, frightened time. With the dour black man looming over them—like a hanged man in the wind, said Alice—she rarely spoke, except for occasional mild exclamations about the confetti of white egrets on the green walls, or the sentinel herons that stood far out on the shallow water, waiting for—what? The coasting rays, small barracuda, the pale crabs turning up their claws as the boat passed—everything out on the white flats seemed to watch and wait.

She had a horror of the bottom life, the myriad amorphous things acting out silent destinies and violent ends in shrouds of underwater dust, and could scarcely bring herself to look over the side. At home she loved her bird feeders and garden. So much impenetrable growth, so many gaunt huge bleak-eyed birds, oppressed her. The sonatas of Europe on her tape recorder protected her from the great New World silence.

As for the boatman, he was inclined to silence even when spoken to. Most fishing guides were easygoing guys, and the best of them made the client feel like a real fishing partner. But Dickie’s discolored eyes were evasive, unamused; most of the time he whistled tunelessly under his breath. (“When he’s
really
uneasy,” Alice said, “he sounds like a tea kettle.”) They assumed that this had something to do with being a black man in a backwater town bypassed in the fight for civil rights. The black people lived in their own community several miles up the canal road toward the state highway, and were unwelcome in Seminole after dark, as Burkett discovered on the evening of their arrival when he tried to locate a fishing guide for the next day. He made no attempt to conceal his surprise, which was instantly perceived as disapproval. “Jest seem to be the way them
folks prefers it,” he was warned by “Judge” Jim Whidden, the owner of the Calusa Motel and unelected leader of the town. “Ain’t no
law
about it, mister. Maybe they ain’t exactly
integrated,
but they ain’t discriminated, neither, not the way you people think.”

Asked the next day about the black community, the guide glowered and grinned at the same time and did not answer, pretending that the white man had made a joke. Annoyed by his wife’s warning poke, Burkett persisted. His feeling was that, as a representative of the U.S. government, he should probably report the matter to his colleagues over at Justice. But it turned out that the guide was proud of his own status as Whidden’s servant. In fact, he slept in the “Whidden Buildin” on nights when he helped out in the café. “All de res’ of ’em haves to go home. Guess dass de way dat cullud folks prefers it, jes’ like Judge Jim say.” Burkett had hoped that Dickie would relax once he understood that their concern about the situation was sincere, that they had marched in the civil rights demonstrations in the sixties, and that any confidence he might make to them was safe. Instead, their friendliness intensified his fear of them. He seemed more skittish every day.

Because none of the mangrove islets had dry land, they went ashore at midday on one of the spoil banks of white marl and fossil shell along the channel to the open Gulf used by the fishing boats and a few private craft. Here Alice could stretch her legs a little, and go behind a bush. But the dry marl was baked hard, there was no place for her to sunbathe, and with Dickie nearby, sighing with hunger, they felt obliged to share both food and conversation.

One day Burkett brought along their bottle of rum, to make the trip slightly more festive. Because it was awkward
to exclude the guide, he ignored his wife’s raised eyebrows and offered Dickie a drink, well mixed with tonic. Dickie looked startled, but he did not turn it down. He even smiled after a pleasant interlude, asking Alice if he might listen through her earphones. Clearly she had mixed feelings about this, but she handed them over cheerfully enough, and Dickie enjoyed a little Mozart. He asked how much the tape player cost, and when she said uncomfortably, “Oh, a couple hundred dollars,” he gave in to an impending fit of nervous laughter. “You bes’ tip me
good
, ah gone get
me
one!” Exhilarated by the first social occasion they had enjoyed since they had arrived, Burkett included Dickie in a second round, which Alice refused to share.

Dickie put down his empty glass, sighed, shook his head, and smiled. “You folks wants somethin in dis ol’ town, you jes’ ask Dickie,” he said, excited. “I de number-one cullud around here, de number-one.” Still smiling, he glanced from one to the other. Then—neither forthright nor furtive—his long hand slipped slowly as a snake into the basket and removed a sandwich. Having gone this far, he lost his nerve, and dared not eat in front of them. He cocked his head toward the rumble of a boat motor behind the islands, and on this pretext, swaying and laughing, moved away to do something with the skiff.

Burkett was always aroused by rum and the smell of sunburn cream; he wanted to touch his wife. But Alice was intent on Dickie. Against the water shine that haloed his dark head, they could see the silhouette of earphones, as if he were tuned in to outer space.

She shifted, restless, under his hand. “Listen, I love your idealism, and your curiosity and good intentions. I do. How else could I have married a damn bureaucrat?” She took his
hand to soften what was coming. “But I think what you’re doing with Dickie is stupid as hell.” She waved away his protest. “You just don’t have to come on so hard as his white fishing buddy. I think you should stick to catching that weird snewk.”

The wall of islands parted to release a broad white boat. High in the bow, with a deckhouse and a long low work deck, she threw a deep wake that struck the spoil banks of white shell on either side of the narrow channel. The wave carried outward, slapping noisily into the mangroves.

Burkett watched the boat through binoculars. He grinned when he saw someone with binoculars observing him through the deckhouse window. The unused nets had a new linen color, and unlike other shrimp boats they had seen, this one seemed to ride too high out of the water. Burkett waved to a pale man in a black T-shirt who came out on deck. The man did not wave back, and Burkett jumped to grab the rum bottle and basket as the boat’s wake surged high onto the spoil bank, washing down again with a brittle tinkling of old shells.

“Sonofabitch! No shrimps in
that
boat!” he cried out to the guide.

Refloating the skiff, Dickie stared off in the wrong direction.

“You see that?” Burkett demanded of his wife, who raised her eyebrows, gazing after the departing boat as if she had missed something. “See how clean she looks? That shrimper never carried
shrimps
, I’ll tell you that!”

“You don’t know that. You just want to believe it because you’re my square darling and you’re a little drunk and it would make your vacation more exciting for some reason.”

“Goddamnit, Alice, they run enough dope through this place to turn on the whole state—” He checked his outburst, seeing Dickie standing there holding the skiff. Angry, he said, “Goddamnit, Dickie, tell her what that boat is
really
used for!”

The black man was silent for a moment.

“Shrimp boat, suh.”

“How come she rides so high out of the water? Pretty light cargo, wouldn’t you say? And how come she’s heading out so late in the day?”

“New boat, suh. Jes’ checkin her out, what dey calls shakedown.” Dickie steadied the skiff as they got in. “Shrimps comes to de surface in de night. Fish dem at night.”

Burkett winked at his drinking companion, but Dickie’s face had closed again, and his wife’s face was closed, too. He resented her superior attitude, but he also knew he had behaved stupidly, and he got into the skiff in a foul humor. In the afternoon sun, the rum had given him a headache. He prodded a mangrove snapper with a sneakered toe. The gray fish lay stiff on the skiff floorboards, mouth stretched painfully.

The tide was low when they got back, and the dogs, old people, and children, moving out of the shadows of a giant banyan, stared straight down at the sun-parched foreigners with the red knees and comic hats. Every day this small convocation included old dock fishermen in tractor caps wearing bright white T-shirts under nylon shirts despite hot weather, and a washed-out child with one hand on a smaller brother and the other jammed between her legs.

Rum-and-sun-struck, Burkett rose, spreading his hands for balance. The folks laughed. “Give you a hand, Dickie?” he said.

“Nosuh.” Dickie braced the skiff and waited, averting his gaze from them as if ashamed. He seemed to efface himself against the bulkhead. The onlookers murmured when Burkett, helping his wife onto the dock, had to push her buttocks from below, exposing the painful red line between thigh and hip (“Beach or no beach,” she had said, “I’m not going home without a tan!”) and again when she clambered a little way on hands and knees before rising and turning, waiting for Dickie to hand up their gear. “Ahs got ’em,” Dickie said ungraciously. He had not offered to take their things the day before, and later they attributed his newfound manners to the presence of Judge Jim Whidden. Arms folded on his rolling chest, Judge Jim observed them from an overturned boat under the banyan.

Whidden rose and tipped a pearl-gray hat. He was a fat man but not soft, with a strong face hard-packed in lard, and a twitch of humor.

“You folks make out all right?”

“No snook yet,” Burkett said. “Nice snappers, though.”

“Why, that’s fine, Lawyer, that’s fine. We’ll fry ’em up for you this evenin.” Judge Jim beamed from one to the other. “Dickie take care of you good?” The man’s big voice carried easily to Dickie and the onlookers, and Burkett started down the dock, unable to focus or dispel his irritation and anxious to remove himself from the whole scene.

“Oh, Dickie was fine!” Alice was saying, with the haunted look she always wore when she had to pee.

Judge Jim caught Burkett’s elbow as he went past. “I told him take care of you folks good when you first come here. Ain’t a nigger in town knows them holes like Dickie there.” He gave Burkett a confiding wink. “Or Nigra, neither.” To the onlookers, he said heartily, “Got to take care of our tourists good, y’know, bein as how we ain’t got hardly
any!” He patted Burkett’s shoulder, setting him free, in sign that this afternoon’s jokes and hospitality were at an end.

Whidden’s tossed chins commanded Dickie to get these people’s stuff up to their cabin. Burkett thanked Dickie, who hurried past them. Aware of being watched, they walked up the street to the cabin on the white sand yard behind the “Whidden Building,” two stories of worn white clapboard that housed post office, the Judge’s office, and the kitchen, bar, and restaurant of the Calusa Motel.

At the door of their cottage they were welcomed by the yard man, who presented them with the baskets left by Dickie. As far as the Burketts could determine, this small black Johnny in red sneakers had the only friendly face in town. “We gone fix dem snappuhs
nice
fo’ you! Dass right! In de ol’-time way.”