Authors: Chris Jordan
Leo Fish says not to worry. Fine. What I’m experiencing isn’t so much worry as paralytic fear. Clinging to the little seat, mouth tightly closed so the bugs can’t get in (more advice from our improbable guide) muscles so tense they’ve petrified, I can’t even scream.
First impression of Mr. Fish, he’s not exactly a people person. He listens to Shane’s pitch—help us find my daughter by finding Ricky Lang—nods his unenthusiastic assent, and then gravely tells us that chances are we’re already too late.
“I can find him for you,” he says with a shrug. “But I can’t fix what might already be done. Just so’s you know that from the get-go.”
Shane apparently decides that the best thing is to be affable. Ignore the morbid, misanthropic streak and engage the man in conversation. The window of opportunity being the trek between the motel and the Hunt Club dock, where Ponytail has obligingly loaned his airboat to Leo Fish. On foot, because Fish makes it clear he “can’t abide a car,” meaning he won’t ride inside a vehicle. Too soon to say whether that means he’s claustrophobic or just plain weird.
“We understand that Ricky was married to your sister,” Shane begins.
“Yup. My half sister Louisa Mae. My daddy took up with a Seminole woman in his old age, and little Louisa Mae was the result. Beautiful child. Beautiful woman, too. Ricky never seen fit to marry her, being as she wasn’t Nakosha, but they made ‘em some babies. Two lovely girls and the cutest little boy you ever did see.”
“I understand they died in a fire.”
“Died in a fire, yup, all of ‘em.”
“And Ricky blames the tribe?”
The question stops Leo Fish in his tracks—he has the look of a man who’s taken a surprise punch to the gut. “He tell you that?”
“No, sir. Got it from the FBI, who got it from his girlfriend.”
“So that’s what he told his girlfriend? The tribe did it?”
“Apparently.”
Leo Fish grunts, spits copiously. He stares down at his naked feet, as if trying to decide who to kick. “That’s a damn lie. Tribe ain’t had nothin’ to do with it. Ricky Lang set fire to that house himself. Killed Louisa and the kids, whether he meant to or not. It’s on him, all that death.”
Now it’s Randall Shane who looks stunned. “Lang killed his own children?”
Fish responds with a curt nod and says, “He’d had this fancy new house built on the reservation, and then he and Louisa Mae got to fighting—might have been over this girlfriend you mentioned. Upshot is, she refused to let Ricky into his own house, and that’s when he said he’d sooner burn it down then let her live there. Louisa Mae, she’s a feisty one,
she called the tribal police, but they refused to intervene ‘cause Ricky was the big man.”
“So he burned the house down with them in it?”
“Not exactly. Man always had a crazy temper. What happen, he come out one night when they were all in bed, woke ‘em up, and forced ‘em all out of the house. Standing there in their pajamas, the three kids, and Louisa Mae cursing him for the devil. Then he sets the place afire with gasoline, to prove he can do what he likes with his own house. After he throws the match and sees the fire spreading, he takes off in his boat, in case the tribal police showed up after all. Leaves the kids weeping but alive. What he didn’t figure on, after he was gone, little Troy ran back inside to get his new puppy, they had it in one of those puppy crates for training purposes, and Louisa and the two girls ran after him. The roof came down and they all perished.”
“He was never prosecuted?”
Fish tugs at his straw cowboy hat, as if intending to screw it onto his head. “You got to understand about Ricky Lang. He made that tribe. They was just a collection of nobodies, not Seminole, not Miccosukee, not white neither, until Ricky got ‘er done.”
According to Fish, the Nakosha are really more of an extended family than a tribe. Cousins within cousins, most of them called some variation of Lang, after a Methodist missionary who had been absorbed into the family at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to fathering fourteen children with three successive Indian wives, the Reverend Robert Lang had initiated the long and arduous process of seeking tribal recognition. Robert Lang had argued that unlike the Seminole, his adopted tribe were descended from a distinct band of the original Calusa who had been living on this land
when the conquistadors first splashed into the great swamp, looking for El Dorado, or the Fountain of Youth or, failing that, to copulate with the native women. Lang’s bureaucratic battle had been carried on by successive generations, and had not been resolved until ten years ago, when the tribe had been granted dominion over a hundred square miles of boggy, mosquito-infested swampland, most of which was submerged during the rainy season, and therefore of minimal interest to developers. Ricky Lang was instrumental in transforming the Nakosha bingo license into a giant casino complex, vastly enriching the tribe.
“Man was always smart, had big ideas to help his people, but he had to be the top dog, no matter what. Got away with it, too, until his crazy temper ended up killing his own children,” Fish tells us. “Tribal council finally decided they didn’t have enough to prosecute—or more likely didn’t have the stomach for it—so they deprived him of his office, took back his land, and banished him. Which, the way they think of it, is worse than the death penalty. From what I heard, Ricky thinks so, too.”
The news that my daughter’s kidnapper was responsible for the deaths of his own small children hits me like a body blow. It explains his delusional beliefs—communing with dead children—and his spiral into ever-increasing violence, but it surely does not bode well for Kelly’s survival. The man gets away with arson and manslaughter at the very least, and is then haunted into a killing madness. A psychiatrist might theorize that Ricky Lang wanted to punish Edwin Manning for the way he doted upon his own son. Or maybe he really did believe that Manning could force the tribe to take him back. Whatever his motives, however twisted by grief and guilt, it’s obvious that in Ricky Lang’s world a stranger’s child doesn’t count for much.
Never give up, Shane says. I’m trying to hold on to that as we rocket through the swampy wilderness, bumping and banging as Leo Fish punches the airboat over slick shallows, mere puddles, gunning the five-hundred-horsepower engine until it screams. The engine and the raging propellers are contained in a wire cage directly behind the raised seat where Fish sits like a mad king clinging to a throne, both hands on the rudder stick.
Shane in the seat beside him, grinning into the wind, no doubt with bugs in his teeth. Bringing up the rear, the small square boat Fish is towing. It flails around in the black wake, twitching and jumping like a thing alive.
The wild run seems like it lasts forever—fear slows the clock—but when Fish finally kills the engine and glides up on a piece of dry grassland, forty minutes have passed.
“Not bad,” he announces, hopping down from his throne. “Covered near twenty hard miles in less than an hour.”
“We’re here?” I ask, stomach in knots and ears ringing. No idea where “here” might be, barely able to distinguish land from sky.
Fish looks at me, shakes his head. “We’re still a ways from where we’re headed, missy. This as far as the airboat can take us.”
Missy? I’m not sure if that’s a term of endearment or one of contempt. Not that it matters. Teaching Leo Fish how to act civilized is not my problem. He could drag me along by my hair, caveman style, if it leads us to Kelly.
What he’s dragging, however, is not me but the little square-sided boat.
“What we call a pan,” he informs us, loading rifles, ammo, a push-pole, and fresh-water jugs into the little boat. “Every waterman got to have his pan.”
Fish puts a rope over his shoulder and marches forward, pulling the boat over the damp grass.
“I could help,” Shane offers.
“Not much, you couldn’t,” Fish says. “You follow along as best you can.”
Take that, Mr. Big FBI Man. Shane rolls his eyes but does as instructed, shortening his stride so that he’s pacing me rather than the reverse. The ground beneath us is damp under the grass and my running shoes are instantly soaked. Mosquitoes seem not the least repelled by the bug spray Fish provided, although in truth the dive-bomber buzzing in my ears is even more maddening than the actual bite. The only thing that keeps me from slapping at them compulsively is a notion that I’d have to slap myself unconscious to escape.
“You always lived out here?” Shane wants to know as we trudge along.
“Happened sort of gradual,” Fish says over his shoulder. “Always hunted and fished, everybody did. For some years I did some guiding, living off the tin canners.”
“Tin canners?”
“What we call the tourists. All that guidin’ finally decided me away from town, you might say. Now I’m so used to bein’ outside that I’d rather not be inside.”
He stops, eases his small boat or “pan” into a little creek. The water so black I’d have easily mistaken it for solid ground.
“Best you come aboard first, missy,” he says, offering a gnarled hand.
“We can’t all fit in that little thing,” I point out.
Fish laughs, which startles me. Hadn’t thought of him as the laughing type, but it’s actually quite a good laugh, makes him sound human. “Missy, I’ve had as many as a dozen
sizeable gators on board. Most every one of them outweighed you.”
“What about Shane?”
“Him? Oh he’s a bigg’un, but he ain’t no more than three gators’ worth.”
There are no seats, so I have to sit on the floor or the deck or whatever they call it, instantly dampening my butt. Thinking if Kelly and I manage to survive this, I’ll celebrate by taking a long hot shower. Hours long. We’ll wrap ourselves in soft robes and lounge about in air-conditioned, bug-free rooms, eating fancy hors d’oeuvres and watching TV until our brains dissolve into mush.
Pure fantasy, but it helps me keep going. Helps keep me from screaming.
Shane clambers aboard, all arms and legs, and is instructed to crouch in the middle, to keep the boat balanced. My knees end up against his back. Once Three Gator Shane is in position, Fish jumps sprightly on board and shoves us away from hard ground, using his pole.
He remains standing, relaxed and perfectly balanced as he deftly works the pole, pushing us through the water. Looking up, a few dim stars illuminate his gaunt face. He’s smiling to himself, really smiling, and it finally dawns on me that despite his gruff way of talking, Leo Fish is actually having a good time. He gets a kick out of leading ignorant strangers through the world he knows so well. He’s not so much a people hater as a solitary man, and not without his own brand of dry humor.
“You mentioned alligators,” I say, trying to sound casual as I cling to the sides of the little boat. “Any around here, by any chance?”
Fish looks down at me and grins. “There might be one or two,” he says. “Best keep your hands inside the pan.”
Some folks hate a hospital type situation. Detective Sydell isn’t one of them. His job often takes him to one E.R. or another, and he always has pretty much the same reaction: amazement that there are so many good people dedicated to helping those in trouble. Granted they’re getting paid, and sometimes they’re grumpy or incompetent, but the overall thrust of the deal is about helping.
Plus he likes nurses. Okay, Roof likes anything in skirts, but in his opinion, nurses are top of the heap. For instance there’s a leggy E.R. nurse here in Naples who sets his old heart to beating double time. Come to raising his blood pressure, she’s better than push-ups. He’s looking around—gal by the name of Suzy Queenan—but Suzie Q. isn’t around. Probably not on duty at this godforsaken hour of the night.
Oh well, maybe next time. Roof gets right down to it, approaches the desk and asks for the duty police officer by name. That same duty officer, as he well knows, already having gone off shift.
“Got a call from Officer Morris Kendall, alerting me to the presence of a certain person. By that I mean patient. Young fella from my home town, his ailing momma wants me to check to see that he’s okay.”
A few moments later he’s ambling along, directed to a curtained area in the far corner of the E.R.
“I’ll be damned if it ain’t Roy Whittle himself,” Roof says, grinning around the curtain. “What you doin’ in here, Roy? Gettin’ some shut-eye? Sucking’ up on the free morphine?”
Roy, heavily bandaged about the throat, stares at him with dull eyes. The detective is joking about morphine, but evidently the young man has been dosed with some sort of painkiller, seems to have numbed him out considerable.
“Can I help you, Officer?” a pretty little Latino LPN wants to know.
Roof introduces himself, tips his uniform hat. “This young scamp is my cousin Roy. Second cousin is more like it, but you know how it is in Glade City. Heck, a man’s lucky if he ain’t his own grandpa, ain’t that right, Roy?”
The nurse smiles nervously—rural inhabitants having a certain reputation in the big city of Naples—says to call if he needs anything, and then hurries away, as if afraid of what his next friendly joke might be.
Roof approaches the hospital bed, lowering his voice a few decibels, and generally cutting the crap. “Here’s the thing, Roy. You show up with a piece of steel wire in your throat, dropped off by your dopey brother, that attracts my interest. Officer on duty tells me the wire they pulled outta your throat looks like it mighta sorta maybe come off a five-gallon bucket. That make sense to you, getting accidently stabbed by a bucket?”
Roy closes his eyes, doesn’t even bother shaking his head. Looks to Roof like he’s got way more problems weighing on him than a throat wound, however painful that might be.
“Thing of it is, folks have been inquiring about you, son. Official kind of folks. Could you be involved in some way with Ricky Lang? Was you at that old airstrip when a body got burned, and an airplane, too? Questions like that. I been telling ‘em you’re a good man, Roy, because I believe that to be true, more or less. Tonight it’s considerable less. Person driven to protect himself with a bucket handle, that might be because alls he’s got is a bucket. That make sense to you? A bucket like you might provide a person was he to be kept prisoner, and not have access to a proper toilet. That what happened, Roy? You went to fetch the man, or maybe it was the girl, whoever it was managed to stick you with a piece
of wire? Huh? Because they tell me you’re lucky to be alive. Missed your carotid artery by a whisker.”