Olivia Rodríguez Garcia did not say good-bye. She was too busy staring out the window, no doubt wondering how to spin this one at USGS headquarters.
Three P.M. found me at Miles Guffey’s house, racing up the driveway to avoid the afternoon downpour but getting soaked to the skin anyway. My hair instantly lay plastered to my forehead. Both the bad and the good news was that I couldn’t park closer to the door because both Waltrine Sweet’s and Miles Guffey’s cars were there ahead of me.
Gaining the entryway, I pressed the doorbell. Nobody answered. Deciding that my so-called colleagues must be around back somewhere where they couldn’t hear the bell, and that they were damned well going to receive me whether they wanted to or not, I dashed around the side of the house, trying to stay underneath the eaves. For my trouble, I got further soaked as rainwater sluiced off the roof, along the palm fronds, and down my collar.
I was thwarted in my circumnavigation of the house by a tall wrought-iron fence, but from the gate I could see Miles and Waltrine out by the dock, loading gear onto the boat.
Strange time for a boat ride
, I decided. Pamela’s pet schnauzer cocked an ear inquisitively my way and began to yap ferociously. Miles looked up from his task, smiled uncertainly, then came and opened the gate. “C’mon, hurry!” he said, as if I were in a mood to dawdle. “It’s raining puddles!”
We sprinted to the dock and jumped in underneath the
cover of the upper decking. Miles led me around to the back of the saloon and in through a set of double doors and handed me a towel.
“Hi,” I said miscellaneously.
“What brings y’all to the
Dingo
?” Miles asked.
“The what?”
“This little pile of pleasure be the trawler
Sea Dingo
. My wife’s parents gave it to us. They’re Aussies that made their money selling Land Rovers, so this is the
Sea Dingo,
get it? I guess you’d a’ had to been there. I get y’all a drink?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I won’t be staying long.”
Waltrine was stuffing junk food into the lockers, somewhat crushing a king-sized bag of Nacho Cheesier Doritos in the process. She moved on to cramming a chest freezer full of steaks. It looked like they were packing for a long voyage.
The
Sea Dingo
was a cabin cruiser, at least forty feet long, plenty beamy, had a full galley with freezer, fridge, microwave, sinks, range, and ovens, and down a half-flight of stairs I could see a tight hallway leading off to two bunk rooms and two separate bathrooms, or should I say, “heads.” Up a half-flight of steps, I saw the wheel and an array of radios, radar, and sonar equipment. Catching me ogling the layout, Miles said, “There’s even a washer and dryer. Central air. Pretty cushy, huh.”
“Where are you off to?” I inquired, taking the direct approach.
Miles stretched ever so casually. “Oh, just a little pleasure cruise, eh, Waltrine?”
“Sure, boss.” She bent back to her stowage. She was now cramming fresh greens and salsa into the refrigeration unit.
I said, “I’m going to be blunt. I came down here to maybe work on your project and now you’re taking off somewhere. Funny thing is you didn’t mention to me earlier today that you had plans to go anywhere. So I gotta ask:
Does this have anything to do with those sediment samples I brought in this morning?”
Miles looked at Waltrine and Waltrine looked at Miles. “Not so far as I know,” he said. “You know sumpin’ I don’t, Waltrine?”
“No, boss.”
Yeah, and Mickey Mouse is ambassador to Portugal
. “Well, then, where you off to?”
Miles gave me one of his goofy grins. “Oh, just going gunk-holin’ is all.” He broke into a cackling laugh. “Y’all can get on with Olivia Rodréíguez about the project, get y’se’f set up with some nice samples to run. We’ll be back in a week or so, I imagine.”
“Or not.” Waltrine spoke with her head inside the refrigerator. “We didn’t get no funding, so we figgered to just go piss up a rope,” she said.
Miles’ laughter ripped up into near-hysteric giggles. “They’s called ‘lines’ on a boat, darlin’. Go piss up a
line
. And the maps is charts, rhymes with farts.” He took a sip of his drink.
I studied the two of them. Their spirits were somewhere between high and dangerously giddy, and at the same time, weirdly somber. Here they were, the two remaining principal investigators of a project in which the third principal investigator had been last seen flying over the rail of a cruise liner at the urging of someone with muscle.
Uh-huh, this was just a little old pleasure cruise alright
. I said, “Well, it sure is a nice boat. Mind if I look around?”
“Help y’se’f,” Miles replied.
I stepped upstairs into the pilothouse. The place was a mess of loose charts and equipment, with electrical lines snaking all over the place. Miles Guffey was, plain and simply, such a slob that if there was something in there that was going to tell me anything about the purpose or destination of this voyage, it could be staring me in the face and I would likely miss it. But, being a geologist, and thereby by birthright a map junkie, my eye was drawn to the chart desk. There, on top of a disarrayed stack of books, the
remains of a rather ancient-looking ham sandwich and a hand puppet designed to look like a giant cockroach, sat a book of charts that was open to a familiar-looking bit of geography. I stepped up closer. Sure enough, it was the Berry Islands. I turned and walked back down the steps. I had seen all I needed to see.
Back at Nancy’s, I found Faye in the guesthouse, packing her bags.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked.
“
We
are going to the Everglades,” she said. “Just as we planned. I am not going to wait here for Tom. He has my cell number, and he can phone me if he condescends to do so.”
“You look tired, Faye, and God knows I am. Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”
“No.” She handed me a sealed envelope. “This is for you. Tom said to give it to you only if things went completely wrong, but I figure this qualifies.”
I turned the envelope over and read the address. It was my name, written in Jack’s handwriting.
It had stopped raining for the moment, so I moved outside onto the pool deck to share the moment with the chameleons and the dripping palms. I settled into a bench, oblivious to its wetness, and tore open the envelope. It contained a folded piece of lined paper and a second envelope. I unfolded the single sheet of paper and began to read.
It was dated two days before, the day I had found him so distraught and disheveled in the guesthouse. “My darling Em,” it began.
I’m sorry I have to take off like this again without getting a chance to say hello, not to mention good-bye. But Tom says you’re seeing some man at the USGS about dust. I’m truly sorry how things went. I had such plans for us, such hopes. But if you’re reading this, things didn’t go well for me. I have an important
request. Would you please go down to the Everglades, to the address below, and look for a woman named Winifred Egret. She’s looking after someone for me. Everything’s taken care of financially, and this someone is in good hands, but I wanted you to meet her one day, because she’s essential to me and so are you. I hope it’s no imposition. Give Winifred and her people the enclosed letter, and she’ll know it’s okay to let you in. I love you, Em, more than you could possibly know. You’re the one I was always looking for, rest assured of that. There have been others along the path, but you were the destination. How ironic that dust should get in the way of our building our common ground together.
It was signed, simply, “Jack,” and gave an address that was more like a set of directions. It started out, “Alligator Alley (I-75) to Route 833, turn north.” The inner envelope was sealed. On it he had written, “Winifred Egret.”
I sat for quite a while, trying to take in this one additional fragment of the man I had fallen in love with. Like everything else I had learned about him in recent days, it was incomplete, something thrown together in a hurry instead of being taken slowly and allowed to mature unhindered. But I was beginning to suspect such romantic, glancing communications were the key to Jack Sampler, and that his was a life strung between long-range wishes and the exigencies of the moment.
At length, I got up and walked back to the guesthouse, back to Faye. I moved slowly, as though through a long and drugged sleep. “Okay,” I told her. “I guess we’re going to the Everglades.”
As Faye drove us south over the high vault of the Skyway Bridge, crossing Tampa Bay from the southern tip of the St. Petersburg peninsula, I found myself scanning the wide expanse of glinting water, casting idly about for the
Sea Dingo
. I couldn’t see it. I had been in Florida less than four days, but the place was so flat that already anything that raised me up and wasn’t an elevator got my attention. From the acrobatic center of the span, built high enough to accommodate the largest of ships in full sail, boats as small as
Sea Dingo
appeared like tiny toys, indistinguishable from one another. The landward sky was a symphony of clouds, layer upon layer of shapes and sizes, but the scene was lost on me, except to note, quite clinically, that the sky over the Gulf of Mexico was surprisingly clear.
That gives Miles clear passage,
I decided.
I no longer cared where Miles Guffey was going. My world was shattered. His cruise seemed to be happening somewhere else, in a separate reality. I did not speak until hours later, when we swept south of Fort Myers, and Faye started asking what I wanted for dinner.
“Nothing,” I said.
“We’re a pair.”
“Mm.” My mind was on Faye’s cell phone, which was riding on a charging jack on the dashboard to keep it topped up. Reception had been excellent so far, absolute flatness
being a virtue with such things. But Tom had not called. I had tried him a couple of times, but had gotten no answer.
Faye said, “I’m going to head on down the Tamiami Trail to Everglade City. There are some little bed-and-breakfast inns there, and we can see if the stone crab is in season. Tomorrow we’ll rent a canoe and paddle out into the Ten Thousand Islands. They’re mangrove shoals. Some are shell middens built up by the Indians that used to live here. Caloosas, I think. Or whoever was here before the Seminoles. Then the next day, we can drive down to Flamingo and look across at the keys. And then—”
“What’s out there in the dark?” I asked.
“Swamp,” said Faye. “A thousand themes and variations on wild plants growing right out of water. It’s beautiful, once you get to know it, and get over how dangerous it is for a human. If you walked out there, you’d be panther meat, if the mosquitoes didn’t drain your blood first, and the first nick you get is an infection that could kill you. A person gets disoriented in the tangle of vegetation. When the lightning sets it on fire, it burns with a rage, because the white man has drained the swamp enough to expose the peat. And yet the white man in all his wisdom has bladed roads all through this darkness and sold it to every sap up there in snow country that has a dream of easy living. Go figure.”
“So there’s a bunch of snowbirds out there? Why don’t we see their lights?”
“They never moved there. There’s no way to live there, not really, not unless the damned developers get a whole lot more aggressive. No, there’s nothing there but the damned roads. So, on to Everglades City.”
Darkness. It was whispering to me, calling me into its heart. I said, “Jack’s letter said something about Alligator Alley. That’s part of this Interstate highway, right?” I opened a map and put my finger on it. “Yeah. Right here. It crosses the Everglades north of the … what is this … Tamiami Trail. I want to go there.”
“Oh, so you’re going to share Jack’s letter with me, then?”
“He wants me to go look someone up for him.”
“Who?”
“Winifred somebody.”
Faye tossed her hands in the air, something she could easily do on such long, straight stretches of road. “Sure, sure. Why not? Get to know the locals; that always works for me. What the fuck. Alligator Alley it is.”
After another twenty minutes, the road curved eastward. You notice these things when you’re in a place that’s so flat that the roads don’t even have to dodge the slightest hills. The edge of the road lay in pitch-dark shadow.
Faye said, “We don’t want to go into that ditch.”
“What ditch?”
“Down here, there’s always a ditch beside the road. And we don’t want to go into it.”
“I’ll bite. Why not?”
“Because there are alligators in it.”
“Oh. Good. Now you tell me.”
“Down here ditch means water, and water means alligators. They go together like gin and tonic and a little bitty twist of lime, which I would be guzzling right now if I was not carrying an underage passenger.” She patted her tummy. “Just you and me, kid.”
“Tom’s going to be fine, Faye. He’s a big boy. He knows how to look after himself.”
“Screw Tom. More important, Em, where are we going to stay tonight?”
“I don’t know. Some motel, right?”
“There are no motels here. Not out here in the middle. Alligator Alley goes straight east to Fort Lauderdale, but there’s nothing but swamp in between.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, there are alligators.”
“Always it’s alligators.”
“But no poodles.”
“No poodles?”
“The alligators make canapeés out of them.”
“Charming.”
“Pick their reptilian teeth with the shin bones.”
“Faye …”
“Where was this place Jack wanted you to go?”
I opened the letter. “We turn north on 833.”
“Find it on the map.”
I did. “It looks like it leads north toward a place called Clewiston. But then, why would he have us come all this way south first? We could have saved time by going east from Fort Myers on Route 80.”
“There’s nothing else in between?”
“Just swamp. And a couple roads. Wait, here’s a place called Devil’s Garden. That sounds charming. But still, it’s closer to Route 80.”
“What did you say the person’s name was?”
“Winifred Egret. Must be some kind of hippie that made herself a new name.”
Faye’s eyes widened. “Egret is a Seminole name. Take the wheel a second,” Faye said. “Give me that map.” She took it and turned on the overhead map light. “Holy shit!” she said. “There is too something else in there. Your Jack is directing us to the Big Cypress Indian Reservation.”
We drove onward for a little over an hour, during which time we saw only dark sky, dark highway, and a solid, dark curtain of foliage to either side of it. Finally, we cut north on Route 833. I still could not see a damned thing to either side of the road except vegetative darkness and the cloudy night sky crowding low overhead. Faye drove onward until she came to a crossing with a smaller road. She pulled over, unsure of where we were. “Is this our turn?” she inquired.
No one was in sight. The crossroads was marked only by a couple of sign boards and a building that announced itself as the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum. The structure was large and architecturally refined, not what I would have expected to find that far from any sign of a metropolitan
area. I stared at it as if it had just landed from space. The lights were out.
The car idled.
I pressed the button to lower the window on my side. The night was reasonably cool, no more than seventy degrees. A pungent scent of decaying leaves slid in on the humid air. I heard an animal call, deep and aggressive. I hoped it was a frog. A mosquito whined.
Faye said, “Well, what do you think,
companñera
?”
“I
think
this is the turn … .”
“Not good enough. It’s dark and I’m tired.” Faye nodded at one of the signs. “Billie Swamp Safari, two point four miles, give or take a stop to kick a stray reptile off the tarmac. I’ve heard of that place. We can stay at a chickee.”
“What’s a chickee?”
“Thatched hut. Seminole house. Open air, plenty of mosquitoes this time of year.”
“Oh. Great.”
“You didn’t want to go to Everglade City. But hey, we’re a coupla crackers in a Mercedes out for a lark. We’ll just roll in and catch some winks and phone what’s-her-name in the morning.”
“He didn’t give a phone number.” If we had been in Wyoming, being out in the middle of nowhere would have seemed normal. I would have suggested we just pull off the road out of sight and sleep in the car. But here there were strange noises, and more darkness than I was quite used to dealing with.
“Well, you wanted an adventure. We’re sure Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole this time.”
Faye put the car into gear and turned left. We drove our two-point-how-many miles through more darkness. Eventually we came to a great, big sign that read BILLIE SWAMP SAFARI and had a painting of a man in patchwork Seminole attire pointing to our right. We turned that direction and drove down an even narrower road that gave way quickly to gravel. It was pitch dark, and if Faye had told me then that this was all her idea of a joke, that we were actually
on a disused trail going nowhere, I would have believed her. Suddenly we burst into a clearing where there were cars parked along a row of thatched huts, and big signs galore indicating that this was the place. One said GIFT SHOP. This hut was closed, but there were lights behind it, so we parked the car and got out. We could hear two things: mosquitoes, and human voices beyond the huts, so we headed double-time down a pathway between two huts and found ourselves in front of a restaurant called the Swamp Water Cafeé.
“What the hey,” said Faye. “Let’s see if we can get us a bite of key lime pie or something.”
“Always eating,” I said, for something to say.
“Eating for two,” she replied, ducking quickly inside before the whining mosquitoes picked her up and carried her away.
Inside, we found a setup that looked very much like any other wayside restaurant of the Formica tabletop variety. A young, very blond woman cheerily asked us how she could help us, and Faye said we’d like pie and a place to stay for the night.
“Okay,” she said. “Anything to drink with that?”
I was feeling kind of frowsy, so I said, “Coffee, please. Milk for my friend. She’s eating for two.”
The waitress smiled. “When you due?”
Faye lowered herself into a chair. “About two months.”
“Last little trip beforehand?”
“You got it.”
“Well, y’all kick back and let us do the cookin’. Your order will be right up.”
That all seemed very positive and homey, so I began to relax a notch.
The waitress made a beeline to a middle-aged man in khakis who was sitting at another table drinking something hot, spoke to him a moment, then disappeared into the kitchen. The man picked up his cup and wandered over toward us, taking his time. “Hello,” he said, crinkling a sleepy smile up around his blue eyes. “My name’s Bill. I
hear you ladies want a place to stay tonight.”
“That’s right,” said Faye. “I hear you have chickees to rent.”
“That’s right. You have a reservation?”
Faye shook her head.
My heart sank. I began to wish I had taken Faye’s suggestion of a nice, cozy bed-and-breakfast in Everglade City.
Bill did not look perturbed. “How long you expecting to stay?”
“Just overnight,” I said quickly.
“No problem then. We’re pretty well booked up on the weekends, but we can certainly accommodate you tonight. Do you want the nighttime package?”
“Sure,” said Faye.
I glanced at her. She gave me a quick smile and a shrug of her shoulders. She wanted an adventure, and she was going to find it come hell or high water, the latter of which was only too easy to locate in a swamp.
“Okay,” said Bill. “You ladies enjoy your pie, and I’ll get you your Seminole storyteller.” He got up and wandered out of the cafeé. The door was just closing as the waitress brought our pies and drinks.
It was about then that I began to notice something funny about the Swamp Water Cafeé: None of the people working there were Indians. I asked the waitress, “Are we really on the Seminole reservation?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, where are …” I trailed off, embarrassed at my brashness.
“All the Indians?” she inquired.
“Yeah.”
She pulled up a chair and sat down. “Oh, they don’t work here.”
“Oh, so they’re over in the gift shop?”
“No, not really.”
“The office?”
“Sometimes.”
“Oh.”
She laughed. “Folks are always confused by this. Thing is, the Indians don’t have to work. They get a couple thousand apiece every month from the casinos. So why work?”
“Why indeed.”
Faye asked, “What do they do?”
The waitress made a “who knows?” gesture. “Drink. Drive fast cars. Naw, I’m exaggerating. They just live their lives like the rest of us. They run the tribe, do their cultural things, but why wait tables or make beds if they don’t have to? They’re good employers, pay well.”