Authors: Jonathon King
“We learned early to constantly be attuned to the call of ‘fire in the hole.’ Yet, some oblivious crewman was at work too near when the blast ripped his arm away from his body. Despite our efforts to retrieve him and the crew doctor’s attempts, the blood ran from the poor man until he expired.”
Mayes wrote that the man’s wrapped corpse was loaded onto the cart that delivered the very dynamite that killed him and sent on the trip back to Everglades City. It was by this same means that Mayes had been able to surreptitiously send out his letters. Early on he “befriended the elderly Negro who regularly delivered the tons of explosives to the camp. I ascertained immediately his admiration for my father’s pocket watch and though it was a heavy price to pay, my darling, he has promised that in exchange he will deliver my letters to the post office at Everglades City and we will so value the knowledge that you receive our love and news of our well being.”
I got up from the table, poured the last of the coffee and stepped outside onto the small landing at the top of the stairs. Up through the trees I could see a quarter moon pinned to the sky like a pewter brooch, a film of cloud giving it a dull, unfocused shine. The backlit leaves were black, and below the treeline it was darker still. It had taken some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness out here after a lifetime in the city, where one is never without some source of electric glow. But now I can pick up the glint of pale moonlight caught by the water below, make out varied shades of darkness, or distinguish a solid tree trunk from a thick stand of common fern. I have stood listening to the unique hum of night insects and the occasional movement of predators. At night I have paddled out into the endless acres of sawgrass and marsh of the flooded Everglades, where it is not unlike a trip to sea except that the thick heat is inescapable and the clouds of mosquitoes intolerable. In the 1920s, without the respite of cool, clean lodging or even a drop of cold water to drink, working in such conditions would quickly have grown exhausting. Was it enough to cause a mutiny of laborers like the Mayeses, despite their desperate need of work? Mayes’s final letter raised too many possibilities and questions.
My Dearest Eleanor,
I do not wish to unduly alarm you my darling, but our situation here has become increasingly troubling. For now the boys and I are still in good health despite the hardships that I have written of earlier. Both Robert and Steven have in fact been my inspiration in all this, watching them outwork most of this crew and holding their deserved complaints for my ears only. Still, I sense both a fear in them and a rising anger. They are looking to me for answers and I too believe it has come time for drastic measures.
By my own rude calculation we are now the furthest point into the swamp from civilization at either end of this planned roadway. Our supply depot at Everglades City must now be thirty miles behind us. It is an impossible trek on foot for a man without supplies in the God forsaken heat and the constant natural dangers that abound. Still, three more men in the crew left late last night after the foreman again refused them any aid in abandoning their work and their so-called legal contract.
Steven has told me that the three had stolen fresh water bags and when he felt them raise the mosquito netting and heard them leave, he woke us and we lay listening for more than an hour. Then we heard Mr. Jefferson’s rifle, three separate reports, echoing from some distance to the west. The sound put the fear of God in us and we prayed quietly together. This morning when one of the crew asked Mr. Jefferson if he were out gator hunting again in the night the silent man only nodded his head under the brim of his hat and climbed back up to his lookout perch. Like the few discouraged but brave workmen who have left on their own previously, we know that we will not see the three from last night again and we pray that they returned safely to civilization and their families.
I dream my darling wife, that these letters have reached your hand. We have been ten weeks now in this hell called the Everglades and we also dream that the wages that await us when our time here is done will give us all a way to the future. Our way is through perseverance, but I do not know how much more strength we have.
Love from us all,
Cyrus
I went back inside the shack, turned out the lamp and peeled off my shirt. In the dark I lay in the bottom bunk, listening to the living Glades noises outside, staring into the blackness of the mattress above me and finding only my own visions of the glistening white yawn of poisonous snakes and the smell of sun-baked flesh.
T
he stinging odor in my nose woke me. Or the rising sound of someone calling my name. When I came partially awake I could hear “Mr. Freeman! Mr. Freeman!” being shouted from a distance, a panic building behind the words. When my eyes finally cleared, the sight of white smoke curling and thickening in the ceiling made the panic my own. My house was on fire. I rolled out of bed onto one knee and caught a lungful of the acrid smell and coughed it back out. A weak light was making it through the windows, along with the shouting and the sound of a man splashing.
“Freeman!”
I crawled to the door, staying low, but glanced up in all four directions in search of flames. I pushed the door open and a wave of fresh air hit my face, which caused my mouth to involuntarily gasp open and my eyes to tear. Down in the canal, the park ranger was waist-deep in water. He was balancing a fire extinguisher on his shoulder with one hand and using the other to pull and stroke himself forward.
“Freeman! Are you OK?”
I stood with help from the handrail and nodded. My lungs were stinging with each breath but the oxygen was clearing them. The ranger made the dock and hoisted himself up and started up the stairs.
“You all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.” The second word was clearer than the first.
“The fire’s on the backside, north corner,” he said, pushing my door open wide with his dripping boot. “Maybe we can knock it down from the window ledges.”
He pulled the pin on his boat extinguisher and then bent low and started in. I took as deep a breath as I could and followed. The ranger crab-walked across the room to the north window and I broke for the kitchen counter, where my own extinguisher was stored.
The ranger had already figured out the inside latch system by the time I got to the east window. We pulled open the hinged mosquito screens and pushed our heads out. The flames were crawling up the sides of the shack in an odd wave of blue and orange. They licked up over the edge of the roof but there were no eaves in the design to stop them and let them gain heat. This was a good thing. I saw a billow of white chemical spray fan out from around the corner, then stepped one leg through the window and straddled the casement. I pulled the pin on my canister and let loose a shot of spray, aiming down at the base of the flames. The fire retreated but then stubbornly reignited. It looked as though the tall piling itself was on fire. I leaned farther out to get a better angle and squeezed off another blast.
It may have been ten minutes, maybe thirty. The ranger’s extinguisher ran dry before mine, but we had doused all the live flame we could see. When my can was empty, he helped me back in through the window and we both stumbled out the door and down the stairs. The wash of fresh air set us both coughing again, and when we reached the dock at the bottom the ranger sat with his feet in the water and retched between his knees. I lay down on the opposite side and cupped the river water in my hands and splashed it up into my face and eyes. It was several minutes before either of us could speak.
“You OK, Freeman?”
“OK,” I said, realizing I had long forgotten the ranger’s name.
“Griggs,” he said. “Dan Griggs.”
“Thanks, Griggs.”
The eastern sky was lightening, though the sun was still too low to break through the tree canopy. In time we both sat up, leaning our backs into opposite posts at the end of the dock. I finally took a solid look at the guy. He was a good ten years younger than me, lean with sandy blond hair and skin too fair for his job in the Florida sun. His ranger uniform was soaked up to a dark line across his chest. His leather boots were oozing mud. He was still wearing his belt with a knife scabbard and a flashlight holder.
“You swim out here at dawn often?”
He grinned and shook his head without looking up.
“I’m usually on dawn patrol out on the main river,” he said. “I’ve seen white smoke rising from your stovepipe before, but when I saw it was black, I knew something was wrong and motored up here.”
“Couldn’t get the Whaler in,” I stated.
“Had to tie her up and wade in. But I could see the flames even from deep water.”
“Guess I picked a bad morning to sleep in.”
Griggs still hadn’t looked up into my face.
“I figured you were here ’cause I could see that your canoe was gone from the landing.”
“I appreciate you looking after me,” I said. “The whole place might have gone up if you hadn’t been here.”
This time Griggs did look over at me. The irony was not lost on him. Several months ago it was Griggs who had to serve papers from the state informing me that the Attorney General’s Office was attempting to break the ninety-nine-year lease that Billy held on the old research shack. Until then I’d been left alone and had even befriended the old, longtime ranger whom Griggs had replaced. But there had been a messy business. Blood had been spilled in these waters through a violence that didn’t belong in this place. Many people blamed me, and it was a point of view I couldn’t argue with. That was when the state began trying to toss me out. Billy had been fighting the eviction at my request, and he had kept them tied up in legal maneuvering ever since.
“I don’t suppose you noticed any lightning while you were on dawn patrol?” I asked, finally making it to my feet and looking up under the base supports of the shack.
“Nope. And I’m sure you can rule out faulty wiring.” He too had gotten to his feet. “But unless you reached out and doused the back wall with kerosene and lit the match yourself, I’d say you got an enemy.”
The ranger was pointing to a small slick of rainbow-colored water that seemed to float independently on the surface of my channel. Some sort of petroleum-based accelerant had spread into the water.
“Whoever they are, they don’t know much about Dade County pine,” he said. “It’d take a whole lot more heat than that to do anything more than just scorch that tough old wood.”
While Griggs used my canoe to retrieve a camera from his Whaler, I went back inside. There had been no interior damage, and the smoke had mostly cleared, rising up through the ceiling cupola as the design had intended. Still, the place reeked of burnt oil and wood. I closed the screen frames and changed my clothes. I found my cell phone and started to call Billy, but put it off. I would need to stay at his place until the shack aired out, but the conversation I anticipated was better off held out of earshot of anyone else. I grabbed my still unpacked travel bag and rejoined Griggs below.
In the canoe we took a circle around the base of the shack. The back wall and northeast support pillar were blackened, but there was no apparent structural damage. We pushed up next to the pillar, where I used a knife to dig out a scarred piece of wood and put it into a plastic bag. Griggs had been right about the arsonist’s ignorance of the pine’s resistance, unless his intent was to be more psychologically than physically destructive. Maybe someone was more interested in scaring me out than burning me up.
When we finished gawking, we returned to the ranger’s boat and tied a line to the canoe for towing. Griggs motored slowly down the narrow upper river, the sound of his engine sending most of the river animals I would normally see this early in the day into hiding. But just as he cleared the canopy and pushed the throttle up, I caught a glimpse of the long lazy wings of a blue heron, its yellow, sticklike legs not yet folded from its takeoff. I watched it keep time with us, then circle back toward the west and finally disappear into the distance.
I
waited until I was on the road in my truck before calling Billy on my cell.
“Jesus, Max,” was his response when I filled him in on the morning’s events. “Are you going to file a report?”
“What? And have cops crawling all over my stuff?” I knew the kinds of useless messes cops made. I’d made them myself.
“Besides, what good would it do? It’s not like you’re going to find footprints out there. And contrary to popular belief, the bad guys really don’t leave torn pieces of their shirts on
the
thornbushes that often.”
“So what you’re saying is, you’ll investigate on your own.”
“Yeah, if waiting to see what happens next is investigating.”
“Good. Then you’ve got two cases to work. You’re pretty busy for a new businessman.”
Several months ago, after sliding into two different sheriff’s cases and pissing off the local law enforcement brass, I’d caved in to some not too subtle suggestions and applied for a Florida private investigator’s license. My years on the Philadelphia force hadn’t hurt, and even the street shooting didn’t stop them from granting me a concealed weapons permit. Of course I was one of more than 300,000 such Florida residents so permitted, and how many lobotomies were included in that select group was anyone’s guess. It also hadn’t hurt to have a detective with the Broward Sheriff’s Office vouch for me. She was, in fact, my next call as soon as I got off with Billy.
“So you’re heading over to my place?” Billy asked.
“Not right now, but if that’s an offer, I’d like to reserve it until the shack smoke clears, as they say.”
“My place is your place, Max. Diane and I will be out at the Kravis Center for the philharmonic, but make yourself at home.”
Diane McIntyre was another attorney, and one of the few women I’d met in South Florida who had enough class and moxie to keep up with Billy on several levels.
“By the way, I’ve set up another appointment with Mr. Mayes in my office on Thursday, and I’d like you to sit in.”
“He’s here?”
“He graduated from Emory and is considering an acceptance to the seminary at Luther Rice. I get the distinct feeling he’s trying to clear this thing, Max, before he moves on.”
“All right, Thursday. I’m heading out to southwest Dade now.”
“Nate Brown?” Billy asked, guessing my moves, sometimes before I even made them. Nate Brown was an Everglades legend. He’d been born and raised in the swamp and if he was still alive, no one knew the stories or the topography of that vast place better than he. If men had died while the Tamiami Trail was being built, Brown would at least have heard the rumors and tales of their passing around the late-night campfires or early-morning fishing swaps.
“An excellent idea, tapping Brown if you can,” Billy said. “I can’t give the same approval to a trip to Loop Road, if that’s where you’re going. Should I have a cold compress and an auto-glass repairman standing by?”
My last trip to the sanctuary of the Everglades’ denizens had not been altogether friendly.
“I’m going to be careful this time,” I said. The other end of the connection stayed silent, but Billy’s wry smile was in it.
“What?” I said. But the phone had softly clicked off.
Before I made the turn to the southbound ramp of I-95, I pulled over and made another call.
“You have reached the desk of Detective Sherry Richards of the Metropolitan Investigations Unit. I am either on the phone or…” I waited for the damned beep.
“Detective. I am presently on dry land and if at all possible would like to meet with you on that matter we discussed last Tuesday,” I said. One never knew these days about who had access to office phone mail, especially at a cop shop.
“I am occupied on another case this afternoon, but could meet you at our usual drop off point at 1930 hours. Call my cell if this is acceptable. Aloha.”
I punched off the cell and wrinkled my forehead. “Aloha”? Where the hell did I get that? I pulled out onto the interstate, and any thoughts of misplaced levity quickly disappeared. In the few years I’d lived in South Florida I had never experienced I-95 when part of it was not under construction. And despite the constant presence of orange cones, disappearing lanes, ramp signs with burlap slung over them and the inevitable group of yellow-vested construction workers, I also have never experienced traffic doing less than sixty-five in a fifty-five-mile-per-hour zone. I eased into a spot in the middle lane and tried simply to keep pace.
An hour or so later I was in Miami; got off on Eighth Street heading west. The Spanish signage for everything from food markets to computer stores, dry cleaners to haircutters, restaurants to movie theaters, had lost its novelty for me. Miami-Dade County is now 54 percent Hispanic. Those who have danced to the luscious and lively beat of Afro-Cuban music in the street concerts or tasted a homemade
salteña
outside the American Airlines Arena, have no argument with multiculturalism. To think that Cuban- or South American-influenced politics is any more corrupt or two-faced than many homegrown administrations is to forget the good old boy history of Miami. I grew up in the days of Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia. To borrow from the NRA slogan, the linguistics and the melanin content of the skin don’t devalue people; people devalue people.
I kept driving west through the typical Florida one-story commercial district, through the miles of three- and four-story apartment complexes, and finally through the construction zone of yet another expanding development of “town homes for luxurious country living starting in the low $90s to $120s.” Then, in the span of a quarter mile, the road narrowed to a two-way macadam, and I rolled over the first of several water-control dams, through which man now decided how much flow was let loose into the lower Glades and on to Florida Bay. Eighth Street had turned into the Tamiami Trail. The vegetation crawled onto the side of the road and I could see the canal water on the north side, the ditch that the Moneghan dredge had originally dug. Beyond the ditch were acres and acres of land, some open and filled only with low sedge grasses and the occasional outcrop of cabbage palms, some grown thick with strangler fig and pond apple trees. The sun was directly overhead, and even though the temperature had climbed into the eighties, I rolled down the window and stuck my elbow out. Out of the city the air again felt worthy of letting in. Another thirty miles and I began looking for the turn to Loop Road.
Back in the early 1900s, an optimistic developer had laid out Loop Road as a hub of the future that would equal Coral Gables to the east. When the Trail project faltered during WWI, the long loop into the deeper Glades fell to whomever might use it. For the next few decades it became a jump-off point for illegal whiskey runners, gator poachers, small-time criminals or just societal dropouts looking to hide. The city to the east was where governments and laws were made. Out here in the wide-open Glades, those conventions were ignored.
Partway down the loop, I turned into the white-shelled parking lot of the Frontier Hotel. There were two old, mud-spattered four- by-four trucks pulled up near the entrance and a sun-faded Toyota sedan off to the side. Business was slow and it made me optimistic. My last trip here had included an ugly encounter with some young locals. It wasn’t, and had never been, a place for outsiders. I pulled up next to the other trucks, rolled up the window and locked the doors before heading in.
Inside the entryway I had to stop and let my eyes adjust to the sudden dimness. I remembered the cramped “lobby,” which gave up registering guests many decades ago, and I followed one of those long, rolled-out, industrial-strength carpet runners into the adjacent barroom. It was even darker in here. There was not a single window to the outside, and the electric sidelights glowed a dull yellow. Somewhere in the back a window air conditioner rumbled. A handsome mahogany bar ran the length of one wall, and two elderly men sat on stools at one end studying a cribbage board. I sat at the middle and watched the woman bartender ignore me at first, then cut her eyes my way too many times, like she was trying to remember an old one-night stand. Finally she moved my way, shuffling a wet bar rag from hand to hand.
“Can I get cha?” she said. She may have been the same woman from my last visit, but her hair color had been changed to a hue of red not known to nature. She was wearing a tight cotton pullover that formfitted her breasts and didn’t make it down to the waistband of her jeans. Her other nod to contemporary fashion was a silver belly button ring, through which was looped a matching chain that circled her waist. The rolled skin of her flabby stomach was too soft and too pale for the look.
“Nate Brown,” I said in answer to her question.
She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head just so.
“Thought I recognized you,” she said. “You was in here just the other day. Gave them Brooker boys a ass-whippin’.”
While she talked she reached down into the stainless cooler of ice, pulled out a longneck bottle of beer and opened it.
“Mr. Brown said you was all right.”
“It was a couple of years ago,” I said.
“Yeah?” she said, putting the cold bottle in front of me.
The two men at the end of the bar had turned their attention to us. I met their
eyes
and they both carefully, almost imperceptibly, nodded their respect, maybe to a man who Mr. Brown had said was all right or maybe to someone who could ass-whip the Brooker boys. They returned to their cards. I took a drink from the bottle.
“Have you seen Mr. Brown lately?” I asked the bartender. “I’m trying to get a message to him.”
She straightened her look this time, being careful.
“Maybe,” she said. “The other day.”
Nate Brown had some kind of native status in the Glades. His ancestors were some of the first white people to settle here. No one seemed to know how old he was, but a logical guess put him in his mid-eighties. Still, I had personally been pole-ferried by him in a Glades skiff over a dozen miles or more of canals and water routes into the heart of the swamp. I had seen him appear from nowhere and then disappear into the emptiness of four thousand acres of sawgrass without so much as a compass.
“If I leave you a phone number, could you get it to Mr. Brown along with a message that Max Freeman needs to see him?” I said to the woman.
“Maybe,” she said, glancing down to the cribbage players.
I took a bar napkin off a stack, used my own pen to write down my cell number and handed it to her.
“I appreciate it,” I said, finishing the beer and putting a twenty- dollar bill next to it. As I turned to leave I gave the eleven-foot gator skin mounted on one wall a cursory look, but below it I noticed a pair of framed black-and-white photographs. I bent closer and could make out a group shot of a dozen men, standing stiff and posed before the raised iron neck of an ancient dredge that had the word
NOREN
painted on one side. The photo paper was dulled with age, but I could make out the thin figures of the men, dressed in dungarees and long-sleeved shirts. Some sported thick, handlebar mustaches; some showed dark hair pasted across their foreheads. There were old ink scratchings at the bottom of the picture, but the letters were indecipherable.
“Are these the old road builders?” I said.
“Don’t know,” the bartender said. “Them pictures been up there before that gator probably.”
“Anybody out here have family in the photos?”
She looked at me oddly.
“They’s just a bunch of old-timers,” she said. “Nobody knows ’em.”