The Man Who Ivented Florida (19 page)

Joseph liked the saw grass. Clear to the horizon, it didn't stop the wind. But the wind made designs in the grass, drifting pale streaks and swirls on yellow fields that spread away to cypress hummocks in the distance: dark domes of shade in so much sunlight that it hurt the eyes. Joseph had missed the saw grass.

"Good Buster, nice Buster. How you like this, Buster?" Joseph kept talking to the horse, getting acquainted. "See that slough there? I kilt a deer there once. See that little creek there? Used to be a prime place for otters. Goddamn, Buster, you got to canter the whole way? I'm an old man—couldn't you walk a bit?"

But no, the horse had a sweet quartering gait, bouncing along as if the earth were a trampoline, smooth as a rocking chair. Unless they came to a fence, then the horse wanted to go; wanted to open the throttle, and Joseph had to lean back on the reins to hold him. "Them ain't no breakaway fences like the horse show's, Buster; them's the real McCoys. You're in the real world now."

Finally, though, Joseph decided to call the horse's bluff; let him go just to see what would happen and, God almighty, that horse went from a dead stop to a full run in about two strides—or so Joseph would tell Tucker later—headed straight for a five-strand barbed-wire fence. The next thing Joseph knew, he was airborne, arching over the fence with Buster beneath him.

"Lordy, Buster, you must got wings!"

After that, no fence stood in their way or altered their route. Buster didn't know a thing about cattle—Joseph had tried to work him a little on the way out, using a couple of Tuck's half-wild Brahma crossbreds. The horse had shied, fighting him the whole way, stopping only to lift his tail and splat a load. Buster didn't give a damn for cattle. But he could jump.

Joseph considered riding clear to his old chikee shack, but it was way back in, about ten miles off the Trail, along a natural lane of high ground that drifted in and out of the saw grass—Pay-hay-okee, his grandfather had called the region. Joseph had headed that way automatically, not really considering the distance, but when he got to the weed-choked ridge, he turned the horse abruptly. There were all kinds of trails and byways in the Glades—people didn't know about them anymore, but they were there. Joseph had been traveling them since childhood, so why should he waste his time on this one? He'd been up that trail plenty of times before. Besides, the idea of seeing his old chikee put a hollow feeling in his stomach, a strange ache he couldn't define.

It made him wonder about things. How the hell had he ended up like that, sick and filthy, in the hands of government strangers? People who put him beneath those stiff white sheets, talking and joking as if he wasn't there, giving him the same thorough attention they might give a sick dog.

"That chikee hut ain't my home no more, Buster. Why the hell you want to see it?"

He touched his boots to the horse and headed south. The Tamiami Trail, black as electrical conduit, cut through the saw grass and disappeared east and west. The water ditch on the north side of the road, created by the floating dredge that had made the roadbed, was littered with Styrofoam cups and beer cans. Joseph had to hunt to find a good place to cross to the highway. He took his time, waiting out traffic.

"I'm gonna tell you right now, Buster—watch out for cement trucks. Them bastards get paid by the load and don't give a shit for fine livestock."

The horse didn't seem to be listening. Probably looking for something to jump.

"Even you can't jump one of them things. They got a great big tank on the back that turns round and round."

The rain caught them on the Trail, a thunder burst of water and green sky, so he took shelter beneath the tin porch roof at Jimmy Tiger's Souvenirs. Jimmy Tiger and his family were Miccosukees; lived there, putting on alligator-wrestling shows and giving air-boat rides for the tourists. There were little Indian stops like that all along the Trail. Rubber tomahawks and birchbark toy canoes made in China.

Looking out through the rain, hearing it drum the roof above him, Joseph wondered what Chinamen thought of Indians. Sitting there in China sewing little pieces of birchbark together, putting rubber hatchet heads on painted sticks.

"Probably think we're little tiny midgets that eat plastic eggs." Talking to the horse, even though he knew Jimmy Tiger's grand-kids were staring at him from the windows of their palmetto-roofed home. Jimmy Tiger, who was a young man when Joseph was a boy, was probably in there looking, too. But it wasn't polite to make eye contact—they weren't like white people. Joseph knew that, even though they treated him as if he were white, the Miccosukee and Seminole both. Always there to help if he really needed help, but keeping their distance, too, letting him know he wasn't a part of the tribe. Not that he blamed them, the way his grandfather had acted, always so uppity. Great-grandson of Chekika, the Indian who raided an island in the Keys, killed all the whites, and escaped up through the Ten Thousand Islands into the Glades. Known to the soldiers who hunted him as a Spanish Indian, though the Glades Indians knew better. Chekika wasn't Spanish. He wasn't Miccosukee or Seminole, either. He was the last, or one of the last, of the mound builders, the Calusa, physically huge and wild in a fight.

A little drunk or a lot drunk, his grandfather liked to say, "Our fathers was trading with the Mayas, building shell temples when them ones calls themselves Seminoles was running buck-ass-naked through the woods, howling at the moon."

Which didn't make him a favorite of the Jimmy Tiger clan, or the Buffalo Tiger clan, or the Joe Dan Bowlegs clan, or any of the others. Him being a snob like that. Which Joseph had recognized, even as a boy, but he still didn't like the way they'd treated his grandfather, or his mother, either—she was a Cuban Indian—and it had stuck with Joseph. They didn't accept him, he wouldn't accept them. He didn't mind being an outcast, though it bothered him sometimes to be treated like a white by the Indians and like an Indian by the whites. Except for Tuck, who treated all people the same—as if nobody had much sense but him. He was good to be around because of that. Joseph could relax around Tuck.

"Hear me, rider!" A voice was calling to him from the window, shouting because of the rain. Joseph glanced around just long enough to see that it was old Jimmy Tiger, long gray hair, wearing a bright rag-patch shirt.

Turned toward the window but staring at the ground, Joseph heard the old man say, "You have the look of Joseph, the grandson of Chekika's Son. That you, Joe?"

"Me, Jimmy."

"Chee han tha mo!"

Automatically, Joseph replied,
"Cha mo,"
talking in the old tongue. Didn't even have to think about it.

"You not dead? Someone's lied to me!" The happiness in old Jimmy's voice seemed genuine, and Joseph was touched by it.

"Not dead yet."

"We've got fish. Fish and beans. You can wait the rain inside."

Joseph had been invited into Miccosukee homes before, but this time there was no grudging formality about it. Jimmy had probably run out of men his age to talk to. "I promised to get back. Sure would like to another time."

"I was thinking of your grandfather, and there you were on a black horse when I looked out the window!"

Joseph turned to pat Buster on the neck and got another quick look at Jimmy Tiger—the man's eyes were cloudy blue-white. Blind now, or nearly so. How the hell did he know the horse was black? Joseph did not speak.

"I heard the frog eaters took you to the government place."

Which was the old way of speaking of whites—because they ate frogs, which no Indian would eat unless he was on the trail and starving.

"Heard you musta died there, because your shack was empty. That was some nice calendar you had. Pretty women!"

"Didn't die," Joseph replied. The rain had slowed, and Joseph let the horse have his head. From the gravel parking lot, near the sign that read JIMMY TIGER'S FAMOUS REPTILE SHOW, he heard the old man's voice call to him: "Only the young have time for old differences! Good to see you, Joe!"

Joseph waved as Buster took him away in a smooth canter, heading to Mango the back way, across the pasture, where they jumped the gate, hoping Tuck was watching. But Tuck wasn't on the porch, where he usually was at that hour, a bottle of beer in his hand, spitting Red Man, looking at the smooth bay after the daily storm had sailed through, watching night come. And there was a blue Chevy pickup in the yard, the bed carrying buckets and a pair of rubber boots—Joseph could see in from the vantage point of the horse—and he knew it was Marion Ford's truck.

"See there, Buster? Tuck's got company. Nope, his mullet boat's gone, so he's out on the water someplace. Let's us go get a drink."

He turned the horse south toward the mangroves, then got off and walked him along the muddy trail. Then he stopped, squinting through the gloom. He said to the horse, "Somebody's just come through here. See the muddy water in the footprints?"

He walked for a while longer, then said, "It ain't Tuck. Tuck always wears boots." He stopped and looked once more. "It ain't Marion. He'd a stopped and looked at that big spider hanging in its web. At least, that's the way he always used to be. This person didn't stop, just walked on past."

They came out of the mangrove swamp and made their way through palmetto scrub, watching for snakes, and then the trees closed in above them as they headed up the mound, where Joseph slowed and whispered. "See, Buster? Just like I thought." Meaning the long-haired man, Tomlinson, sitting cross-legged on the ground beside the artesian well.

Tomlinson
said, "That's weird, I knew it would be you," hardly moving his head to look, staring straight ahead, kind of glassy-eyed. Hippie-looking, with yellow hair down to his shoulders, a dark little beard that touched his chest, the way his chin was pulled in. Wearing some kind of baggy clothes, but hard to see what exactly because the light had faded. Sitting there, Tomlinson said, "For sure, this is one of those karmic deals, you and me meeting by chance on an Indian mound. The way the sky's been so strange lately. It's all a sign—I've got an eye for this kind of thing. You get to know me, you'll see."

Joseph took Buster's reins and threw a clove hitch around a gumbo-limbo limb, feeling his own butt bones creak, his back hurting him and his feet a little numb, too. All that riding. Thinking, Why'd the hippie have to be here? I wanted it to be just me and Buster.

He knelt by the spring—the ground was mushy around it— stirred the water with his hands, and took a drink, hearing Tomlinson say, "Mr. Gatrell wasn't home. So I just came on out here, hoping you wouldn't mind. Doc's back at his lab working. He let me borrow the truck."

Joseph thought, Oh, but didn't speak. Letting the hippie do all the talking, just as he had the other night.

"When you brought me out here before, I didn't have a chance to get a feel for the place. You know what I'm saying? Certain places have a feel? I wanted to zero in on it. Get a fix on the vibes." Tomlinson seemed to shake himself, coming out of his trance or whatever it was that made his eyes glassy. He rolled his head around on his shoulders, stretching, but stayed on the ground, looking now at Joseph. "And it is heavy. A very heavy feel to this mound. Like the air's thick; vibrations zapping all around. A power place, that's what the Indians call a spot like this—hey, but wait a minute, I'm telling you your business, man. Sorry."

Power place,
like something his grandfather had once said. Joseph thought, These hippie people, they always talk so strange. Like years before, back in the sixties, he guessed, there had been a lot of them, hitchhiking on all the roads or driving rusty minibuses, always stopping him to ask odd questions. Was he on a vision quest? Did he know the Way of the Circle? Did he sell pe-yote buttons? Would he like to join them in a sweat lodge? But some of those hippie girls were pretty. Lively, too, if he could get them out of the sweatbox before the heat had drained all the energy from them.

Tomlinson said, "I've been sitting here trying to open all the receivers and I finally locked in. It was intense. There're a lot of souls here. I sat for about an hour, then opened my eyes. You know what I saw?"

Joseph looked around and up into the tree canopy. He could see a few faint stars glimmering, nothing else. A little bit of the bay. "Maybe you saw Tuck? He's gone in his boat,"

"Hoo-hoo—perfect, man!" Tomlinson was chuckling. "Reality of the moment. Cut through all the bullshit, yeah. The perfect Zen reply. 'Tell me of the void,' the student asks. 'Shut up and let me eat my rice,' the master replies. You are a very wise man, Joseph."

Mentioning rice put a picture in Joseph's mind of the Chinamen
^w
ho made Indian souvenirs. But then he thought, That's nice of the hippie, calling me wise, and he sat down on the ground as Tomlinson continued. "But I've had a little touch of enlightenment sitting here. Seriously, man. I know, I know, it's small potatoes probably to the training you've been through. The visions. The spiritual journeys. You can see a lot further than I can. Hell, the old indigenous ways, you probably lived them. What are you, about seventy-something?"

" 'Bout," Joseph replied. "But I don't see so good anymore. You get old, your eyes start getting bad." Let the hippie think him wise if he wanted, but Joseph wasn't going to lie about his eyesight.

"Wonderful!" Tomlinson was chuckling again. "Shift the metaphor and let humility shine through. Don't tell me that Eastern spirituality and the spirituality of Native Americans don't come from the same tree. Asia is the source of both, remember! Nonlinear spark of being. Oneness, man. Spontaneity of life. You hear what I'm saying?"

"Sure. It's just my eyes. I still hear good."

"Exactly.
Nailed it right in the heart." Tomlinson was running his fingers through his hair, his enthusiasm showing. "I knew you were enlightened. The moment I saw you, I sensed it, felt it. But I'd like you to listen to something, man." His tone became sober, respectful. "I flashed on something here, a whole big scene. The molecules are probably a few hundred years old, but they're still floating around. You know, like light and sound never stop? They just keep right on happening after they can't be seen or heard? But this enlightened thing I experienced grabbed ahold. Put them right back in order, and I could see it all like it was on a movie screen. No, better than that. Like it was in three-D, all around me in stereo sound."