The Man Who Ivented Florida (25 page)

Herbott said, "We take his boat, I've already said that. Take his rowboat, use the mast and sail. He had it rolled up in there on the deck. I saw it. Or you could create a diversion while I've got the knife, and I could—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Murder him. Cut his throat." They'd been through this a hundred times. Every night, sitting in the pit with the mosquitoes clouding around them. Herbott talking about different ways to ambush the old man, saying just leave the rough stuff to him. Getting wilder and wilder, the way he talked. The heat, the bugs, the fear rendering what sensibilities the man had into a bedrock hatred that now scared even Fleet.

Herbott said, "You keep using that word, but I'm talking self-defense. It's not murder."

"What is he, eighty, maybe ninety years old? That's murder."

"You think what you want. But I've got enough connections in Tallahassee, they won't touch me."

Fleet had heard a lot about that, too—Herbott's connections. Out of college, Herbott had worked as a biologist for the state long enough to learn the system. Testified in suits against outlaw developers and provided input in the writing of some of the state's environmental-protection laws. But then Herbott had gone where the money was, set up his own consulting firm. That way, the outlaw developers could hire Herbott to circumvent the very laws he'd helped write. Environmental audits, water testing, permitting—his small company could take a development project from conception to ribbon cutting. Called himself an environmentalist, but what he was was a developer. Not that all developers were bad—it just irritated Fleet the way some of the new environmental consultant companies pretended to be one thing but in fact were something else.

"You're going to tell me about your buddy the governor again."

Herbott said, "That's right, a personal friend. I got permits for a condo project—almost all on wetlands—nobody else could push through. For his cousin. Why you think the state still hires me? For the tough projects, that's why. The Captain there puts a gun on me, nobody's going to say a word. No matter what I do."

"Just kill him. That'll solve everything."

"I'm getting a little goddamn tired of your attitude."

Chuck Fleet stood with a bundle of cane in his arms and yelled, "New load ready, Captain!" Then in a lower voice, he said to Her-bott, "We get his cane in and make his syrup, he's going to let us go. He salvaged our boats; we owe him. That's the way he sees it. If you talked less and worked harder, we could be done in a week. Maybe less."

Herbott took a wide swing with his machete, lopping the cane he was holding but also just missing Fleet's leg. Looking up at him, Herbott said, "Don't try to manipulate me! And when the time comes for me to take the old man down, don't you get in my way!"

The surveyor walked carefully away and dropped his armload of cane onto the bamboo sled. His heart was pounding; pounding from the work and the heat, but mostly from adrenaline, knowing how close Herbott had come with the knife. The man was nuts.

"Yew there! Tall'un." That's what the old man called him: Tall'un. Never used his name. He was Tall'un; Herbott was Short'un; Bambridge had been Fat'un before he'd gone to work inside and became the Cook.

"Captain?"

"Yew let Short'un take a turn on that there sled."

"Yes sir, Captain!"

"You can go to hell!" Herbott was suddenly standing, looking up toward the old man on the shell ridge. Holding the machete out like he meant to use it. "You can call me by my name, or you can drag the goddamn stuff yourself."

Fleet called out, "I'll pull it, Captain. I don't mind," as the old man got slowly to his feet, feeling around for his straw hat on the ground beside him, not taking his eyes off Herbott.

The old man said, "Mister man, you raise a knife to me on my island again, it'll be the last time," lifting the shotgun, pulling the two hammers back with his thumb but holding the barrel toward the ground. To Fleet's ears, the noise the hammers made,
ka-latch, ka-latch,
deepened the island's silence and turned the constant whine of mosquitoes into a long, steady scream.

Herbott's voice had a new unsteadiness: "You have no reason to call me ... by anything other than my name."

"Yew workin' for me, I'll call you what ah want!"

"But it's not. . . fair! It's not fair, and it's not right."

The barest twitch of expression came to the old man's face. A smile? "Life ain't fair—that why yew short, boy! But the way I works my crews, that's fair 'cause I don't let one man do all the draggin'. Now get yo'self pullin' that sled!"

Fleet didn't want to look at Herbott. Didn't want to see the anger drained from his face, replaced by fear. Didn't want the burden of seeing Herbott's humiliation. The man was dangerous enough without sharing that.

"No more your sass! Move!"

Behind him, Fleet heard the metal sound of a machete dropped onto shell, and Herbott brushed by, headed for the sled, whispering as he passed, "I am going to kill him. . . ."

Because
morning was his favorite time, Tucker Gatrell was up before everybody. All his life, it had been that way. Now he was up before Joseph—or so he thought. Tuck put coffee to fire and added a handful of chicory for body. Outside, birds made their tentative first twitterings from the hush of jasmine and poinciana, and in the autumnal darkness the wind was freshening from off the bay, smelling of open sea and far islands. When the coffee was ready, he carried his mug to the porch, propped his boots on the railing, scratched Gator's ears to make sure he was there, then settled himself in that quiet time to watch the landscape change.

In the east, there was no sun, but an orange corona boiled over the horizon, throwing shards of westwarding light. The sky was a fragile lemon-blue, translucent as a pearl, and clouds over the Gulf absorbed the light in towering peaks, fiery, like snow glaciers above a dark sea. Birds flying . . . Tuck could see their gray shapes closing. A formation of ibis—curlew, he thought of them—glided across the bay and were briefly illuminated, combusting into brilliant plumes that produced an ethereal white light. Then the birds banked into shadow, silent as falling stars, and were gone.

Tucker watched them, feeling a strange sense of loss and a curious ache, like nostalgia.

Used to be thousands of them birds. Millions. Me an' a lot of other dumb butts chewed up this land pretty good.

From the mangroves arose the catlike buzz of raccoons fighting—or mating. Across the road, tail-slapping their way across the bay, a carousel of bottlenosed dolphins—porpoise, Tuck called them—foraged the grass flats, exhaling moistly while a pileated woodpecker thudded like a drum on the dead palm that leaned toward the junk pile near the barn.

He paused to consider the junk pile. In the dusty light, the rusted fenders and coils of wire, the sections of wood and discarded fencing, the broken bottles and rotted pilings and the tilted fly bridge of the wooden boat became a single unit, all grown over with vines—a single strange shape, like a sculpture—or a monument.

Every screwup in my life ended up in that junk heap. Surprised it's not bigger than the barn by now. Bigger than all the islands. Makes me tired just lookin' at the gawldang thing. . . .

That's the way Tuck felt, tired. Not sleepy, just weary. All the running around he'd done in the last few weeks, all the planning, all the phone calls, all the reading, all the . . . thinking ...

Used to feel like I was flyin', like them curlew. Now it's like gravity's got a hook in my butt, cranking me toward the ground.

That was the problem: gravity. Tuck crossed one boot over another and sipped at his coffee, musing. Gravity wasn't just a problem; it was the biggest problem. Tuck gave it some thought:

Moment you come outta your mama's belly, gravity's right there and the fight starts. A baby spends a year wrestlin' with it before that baby can finally get up on his legs. After that, he just keeps gettin' stronger and stronger until he thinks the fights over, gravity can't do nothin' to him ever more—but it's a lie. Get old, and gravity starts draggin' your shoulders down. Then it stoops your back. Then your brain starts gettin' heavy, like lead, 'cause the damn stuff's always there tryin' to pull you back into the dirt. Gravity don't like a man walkin' upright.

The novelty of the thought pleased Tucker. He still had the ache in his stomach, that nostalgic feeling, but thinking about gravity helped focus the feeling, made it something he could deal with.

If a problem ain't been solved, it's 'cause nobody's give it enough thought.

Same thing he'd told Ike the time Eisenhower'd come down to fish, out of the Rod & Gun Club in Everglades.

Tuck had liked Ike. Liked him better than Truman, the little man with the hat and the goggles, though it seemed to interest people more when he told them about Truman.

Course, Harry fished with me more'n Ike, too. . . .

He caught himself—his mind was drifting----Which was nothing new, but it seemed to be getting worse and worse ever since he'd had what the doctor up to Fort Myers called a "little stroke."

"It's called old age," the doctor had said. "Do you understand what I mean by that?"

"You can kiss my ass," Tucker had replied with heat. "You understand what I mean by
that!"
Filled with anger—not at the doctor but at the damn circumstances. The feeling that his brain was a traitor, of having no control.

Now Tucker concentrated, forced his mind back to the topic and turned his full attention to gravity; thought about ways to neutralize it. Helium, that was an idea. Like the gas they put into balloons to make them float around—he'd seen how that worked at the fair in Miami.

Maybe take everybody when they were born and give them a squirt of it ... ? No . . . people would just burp it out, kids especially. Kids loved to fart and burp. So ... maybe put the helium in a sack, a plastic sack, and have doctors sew it in.

Tuck pictured all the sack makers and the helium makers getting rich. The doctors, too. Nope, he wasn't going to give away any more great ideas. He'd done that enough.

Problem is, I'm thinkin' about this the way everybody else thinks about it. . . .

There it was! The answer wasn't to neutralize gravity,- the answer was to get rid of it altogether. Go to the source!

But what the hell causes gravity . . . ?

Tuck didn't know. He could send Sally to the library, have her look it up. But he'd been doing enough of that lately. Some kind of magnet in the earth, it had to be something like that. Yep, he'd read that somewheres. Big ball of metal in the center of the earth, boiling metal or some damn stuff, that's what made a compass work. So all you had to do was drill down and pump the stuff out. Pump it . . . where? Pump it . . . into spaceships, yeah, and send them off. Only thing was, you wouldn't want to pump all the gravity out 'cause then people would just float away. Pump out just enough to make things easier, so a man didn't have to fight so hard when he got old.

If we could dig a roadbed across the Everglades, diggin' a deep hole and settin' up pumps ain't nothin'. And hell, the spaceship place is just over on the other coast. Ain't far at all. Cape Canaveral.

Tucker sat up a little and pushed his cowboy hat back, pleased with himself.

All a man has to do is think big and advertise, that's all. Don't know why I've been so worried about this water business goin' right....

He finished his coffee, then leaned to get at the foil pouch of Red Man in his back pocket as morning spread itself into gradated light, from dusk to pearl to pale green-blue.

"Don't that air smell sweet!" Talking aloud, though no one was around to hear but the dog.

It did smell good. To him, nothing smelled so good as a cattle ranch on the sea. All those nice smells mixed together: brackish-water bay, cow pasture, big wet jungle leaves, hay in the loft, the shady smell of a wooden porch, mangroves, horses.

There had been only a couple other places in the world where those odors could be found in combination. Central America . . . Cuba. Always on the coasts, always with jungle growing right up to the pastures. Tucker had loved Cuba. Had almost gotten married there to that little black-eyed girl, Mariaelana, that sweet child with the soft brown breasts and the small blue tattoo on her hand, a sea horse. The only person he'd ever met in his life who was so kind and good that he felt gentler just being with her.

His mind was drifting again. He knew it, but the thoughts and the smells were so pleasant that he just let it go, let the memories take him. . . .

Beside him, Gator lifted his big head and growled softly, looking toward the barn.

Tucker jumped slightly, startled. "I know what's wrong with you—you can't figure out why them damn chickens ain't been crowin' all morning."

The dog stood, looking at the barn, still growling . . . until Joseph exited through the open sliding doors, walking toward the porch.

To the dog, Tuck said, "Just ol' Joe. You ought to know by now them Injuns smell different!" Then in a louder voice, he said, "Thought you was still in the sack. Hell . . ." Studying the approaching figure. "You're soakin' wet. You been swimmin'?"

Joseph stopped at the steps and put his big hands on the railing. "Buster's got spots all over his butt!"

Tucker lowered his head, laughing. "That's what you're in such a sweat about?"

"No ... I been running. What about them spots? White ones— and his mane's cut off, too!"

"Some woman's husband chasing you, that's the only reason an old fart like you'd be running. Been thimblin' the neighbor ladies again."

Joseph stood there glaring, waiting for an answer. Finally, Tucker said, "Damn right I painted that horse up. Turned him into an Appaloosa and give him four white stockings, too. While you was sleepin' last night, I was out there working my tail off. But don't bother thankin' me—"

"Buster don't like it and I don't, neither. He looks like a ... like some circus clown owns him."

"Then that's good."

Joseph put a foot on the step, getting angry. "You got no right to mess with a man's horse. I liked him just the way he was."