Authors: Jonathon King
“Ain’t nothin’ bothers me more’n to have somebody follerin’ me,” Brown finally said.
He shifted his weight but could not stand up, and when I saw him slide one leg over the side to get out I copied him and went out the other side into the water and warm muck. It took us a few minutes of pushing and rocking to get the boat floated back out in deep water. We climbed back in, again soaked to the waist. I could see now that Brown had made a calculated turn into a passage that broke off the main river and looped around a small mangrove stand. From back out in the main channel the turn was nearly impossible to see. It had been a firsthand example of Browns legendary knowledge and ability to slip the park rangers and anti-drug agents who had tried to catch him poaching gators and off-loading marijuana trawlers from the Gulf to make deliveries inland. He’d done it for years. I was used to being the law, not running from it, and I knew if the chopper had been tracking us, it wasn’t the law doing it this time.
“Slick move, Nate,” I said, truly impressed.
He restarted the engine and turned us south onto what he called the Lopez River.
“Them boys in the helicopter got anything to do with what you’re lookin’ for?”
As he pushed up the throttle and we eased farther out into the channel, I told him about my discovery of the tracking devices on my truck.
“If any of this bothers you, you don’t owe me, Nate. I don’t want to get you involved in something you would rather stay out of.”
He did not answer at first. His
eyes,
hard-creased from years of squinting into the sun, stayed focused ahead.
“You ain’t,” he finally said.
W
e motored up Chokoloskee Bay and for the first time since leaving the loop, other boats came into sight. We passed some low-slung utility buildings, and as the ground elevation got higher, some warehouses and marinas. Tall, invasive Australian pines rose up in spots along the water where the shore had been dug out for dockage or access ramps, but it was essentially a low, flat land and I wondered about its ability to take a heavy storm out of the Gulf. The Calusa Indians had created most of the land that was high enough to be habitable in the Ten Thousand Islands. The indigenous tribe had, by hand, piled up acre after acre of shells. For hundreds of years the habitual toil had built the shell middens that were the foundation. Gradually, the dirt and detritus carried by the wind and tides and trapped by the shells became its soil. Seeds eventually took root, plants grew, and the Calusa farmed. A civilization thrived where before had only been water. No matter how many times I’d read about it and seen its proof, it was an accomplishment that was hard to conceive.
Brown cut back the engine and idled up to a series of docks set against a bulkhead. Two commercial fishing trawlers were tied up against the wall. Old and steel-hulled, with similar cabins built forward, they were each fifty feet long and had a large, motor-driven winch mounted on the stern deck. Brown eased up to the dock ladder and slipped the engine into neutral, and a young boy jogged up and caught a line the old man tossed him. Brown tipped his hat and the boy did the same; then he cleated the line and left without a word.
When the boat was tied off we climbed up onto the dock. On a broad crescent of land stood a bare, tire-worn lot that served the two fishing boats and that buzzed with activity. Two men were aboard each vessel and another worked with the boy on the small wharf. A sixth man was driving a forklift from a corrugated shack nearby, moving pallets loaded with wooden crab traps. When he set the pile next to the near boat, the men jumped to and began a brigade line, passing the big, awkward traps down to a hand in the open aft deck, who would then stack it forward. While they worked the pile, the fork driver went back for another.
They were all similarly dressed in high rubber boots, faded jeans and either T-shirts or flannel rolled up at the sleeves, and they paid no attention to us as we approached. That is, all but one on the deck of the near boat. He was a black man with skin so dark that at a distance, I thought he was wearing a black T-shirt under his yellow bib overalls. When we got closer I could see he was shirtless. He also seemed to be the only one speaking, giving directions and keeping the work moving. When we got close enough, he stopped moving, tilted the bill of his cap up and smiled.
“Afternoon, Mr. Nate,” he said, slipping off a thick canvas glove.
“Captain Dawkins,” Brown said, and reached out over the water to shake the big man’s hand. I noticed that the younger men had all stopped at the mention of Brown’s name. Even the crew at the next boat was staring. It was like Ted Williams had stopped in for a visit. I saw one man lean down to whisper in the boy’s ear and the kid’s eyes went big.
“This here’s the feller I was tellin’ you about,” Brown said, and I stepped forward.
“Max Freeman,” I said. When I took his hand I could see four distinct lines of raised scar that lay nearly parallel across his forearm. They were smooth and pink and wrapped like pale worms over his black and nearly hairless skin.
“Johnny Dawkins the third,” he said with a smoothness that let me know he always introduced himself that way.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Brown suddenly said. “I’m a walk up to the café for some coffee.”
I swallowed, and when he turned to go I swear the old coot winked at me.
“So, Mr. Nate says you wanted to talk about my grandfather,” Dawkins said, pulling my attention back, getting straight to it.
I lost a beat, now realizing who the old man had brought me to.
“Yes. I, uh, I’ve come across some letters written in the 1920s by the relative of a client. Mr. Brown said your grandfather might have had something to do with delivering them,” I said, not knowing how much Brown might have told him.
“Client, huh?” Dawkins said, pulling his glove back on. “But you ain’t a lawyer?”
He moved his eyes over me, my mud-caked boots, the white streaks of salt stain on my now-dried jeans.
“No, sir. Just a private investigator, looking for some truth.”
“Well, Mr. Freeman, I don’t mind talkin’ ’bout my granddaddy’s stories. And God above knows they’re true. But I’m down a man here an’ we got traps to load. So if y’all want to listen an’ work, we got an extra pair of gloves.”
The men in the other boat had already begun to move. The forklift operator gunned the engine. There was still a smile on Captain Dawkins’s face.
“OK,” I said. “Where do you want me?”
My height dictated that I catch and stack down on the boat deck with Dawkins. The boxlike stone crab traps were made of slatted wood and wire. In their bottoms was a two-inch-thick slab of poured cement to keep them down on the ocean floor. They weighed about forty pounds apiece. I learned quickly how to grip the top edge from the man passing the trap down and then use the weight of the box to swing it down and up and catch it with the other hand. While we worked the deck together, Dawkins told stories.
“My granddaddy was the first to come down here. He was a deck hand on a merchant ship that made the trip from New Orleans to Key West and then north up the Gulf Stream to the Eastern Shore and New York. His own daddy had done the same all the way back to the days of sails and schooners.
“He was a God-fearing man, Mr. Freeman, and loved to fish. God, my grandmother Emma May an’ fishin’, them was his priorities.”
Dawkins looked up at his crew and winked. We were falling into a rhythm now and even if they’d all heard it before, the story was like a nip of soothing whiskey on the brain while the muscles strained.
“It was here that he met my grandmother, right over at Smallwood’s Store, and she anchored him. They said he could unload mullet on these docks like a machine. He’d get done with a day’s work and go home, dig up the rows in the little garden they had out back and then spend the night hand-fixin’ catch nets.”
“And he had oxen?” I said, trying to lead the story without putting any spin on it.
Dawkins never wavered, just kept stacking and talking and I was grateful not to have to waste my own breath, which was in short supply.
“He got the oxen from some freight captain in 1918. Daddy said grandpa figured that captain had to have been drunk to agree to take the animal in the first place. He was supposed to ship it to Key West, but when he stopped here for a load of fish, the animal had already gone crazy tearin’ up the hold and he was beggin’ somebody to take it off his hands.
“Was a mean sumbitch and Daddy said nobody but Grandpa would dare go near it. He took and hand-built him a cart and then used ’em both to haul fish from the smaller boats from the docks up to the fish house.”
“So when the road crews came in to work the trail to Miami, your grandfather used that cart to haul dynamite for blasting?” I said. My arms and shoulders were aching, the lactic acid building up as I tried to keep pace with Dawkins. Each row of traps we stacked as high as the wheelhouse, and pressing the forty pounds up onto that six-foot top row was soon going to be impossible for me.
“They say there was plenty of work around Everglades City when the road crews were working. But Daddy used to say it was on and off, and the local folks didn’t take too kindly to outsiders coming in to a place they didn’t know or give a damn about.
“But Grandpa just wanted the work, and when they said they needed somebody to take the dynamite out there on the roadway to the dredge site, he took ’em up on it.
“Hell, most of the locals didn’t know dynamite ’cept to use a quarter stick to stun a school of fish once in awhile. An’ most of them company boys was scared to be out in the Glades at night. So Grandpa, he just loaded up the cart and he and the ox made the trip by themselves. Sometimes Daddy said it would take him days to get out and back when the rains turned the trail into nothin’ but slop mud.”
“And it was on these trips that your grandfather picked up mail?” I said.
Dawkins tossed up one more trap and whistled sharp and hard through his teeth.
“Y’all take a break now, fellas. Jordie, go on get us some water.”
The boy ran off and the men found places to sit in the shade. Dawkins picked up a small towel from the gunwale and mopped the sweat from his face and neck. I sat, exhausted, on one of the short rows of traps, trying to hide my heavy breathing.
“That was Ms. Emma’s story,” Dawkins said, letting his voice go softer as he sat against the gunwale. “Only Grandma would tell it.”
I said nothing and waited on him.
“When Grandpa hauled the dynamite out there, the foreman in Everglades City would have him deliver some kind of pouch to the job boss at the end of the line. Grandpa had never learned to read so he didn’t know what the stuff was, but he did take a look-see, men bein’ natural nosey, and they was only papers and documents and maps and such.
“Sometimes out at the dredge site, if it was late, he would stay overnight and he was allowed to eat with the workers. They was a raggedy bunch. Most of ’em down and out. Some runnin’ from the law, but that wasn’t unusual out here.
“Granddaddy wasn’t much for ungodly men, so when he met a fellow out there prayin’ before mealtime with his sons, they struck a friendship. He’s the one who would give granddaddy the letters, and as soon as he got back, he’d go an’ mail ’em out from the post office at Smallwood’s, kind of secret-like.”
When Dawkins took a pause, I interrupted, the possibility too close.
“Was the man’s name Mayes?” I asked. “Cyrus Mayes?”
“Granddaddy wasn’t much on names, Mr. Freeman. Like I said, he didn’t read.”
I sat for a beat, thinking about another identifying mark, some way to tie Cyrus Mayes with Dawkins.
“There was mention in one of the letters of a gold watch,” I said.
“He gave it back,” Dawkins said, and his tone was suddenly defiant and defensive at the same time. The captain’s tone stopped the young boy in his tracks as he was approaching with the water. Dawkins stood up and smiled at the boy and took the two spouted coolers from him.
“Thanks, Jordan.” He handed me one of coolers and I could feel the ice bumping inside it.
“Ms. Emma told the story of the day Grandpa come back from a trip to the road crew and set down to show her a big gold pocket watch. Said the man who had him deliverin’ the letters gave it to him in payment.
“Them were tough times, and it didn’t bother Ms. Emma till she opened the watch. Inside the place for a little picture was empty but there was an inscription. Grandpa couldn’t read it, but when Ms. Emma saw it was scripture and engraved to a man’s son, she told him he had to give it back lest the Lord take it as a sin.”
Dawkins took a long drink of his water. There was a look in his eyes and I waited until he had enjoyed the memory of his family.
“These were stories, you know?” he said. “Just stories of the old times told around the fire at night to us kids. Granddaddy tol’ ’em. My daddy tol’ ’em. I tell them to my own kids. They ain’t written down.”
Dawkins stood up and let loose his whistle and the crews got up again and moved to their positions. As the lift driver rolled up with another pallet, I pulled on my own gloves.
“Captain Dawkins. There was one name that did appear in these letters. He might have been a local, name of Jefferson. That mean anything to you?”
For the first time, a darkness clouded the big man’s face and he did not look at me when he spoke.
“I don’t mind tellin’ my family stories, Mr. Freeman, because they’re mine. But other folk’s families, those are their stories. If others are tellin’ ’em, it’s just rumor and I ain’t gonna hurt nobody with rumor.”
While we finished the stacking, Dawkins engaged us with the story of the day Al Capone came to Everglades City on a fishing trip and stayed at the Rod & Gun Club, and the embarrassment of the staff when they realized they’d put the famous mobster in the same room earlier occupied by President Truman. He chuckled and we all sweated and chuckled with him.
When the loading job was finally finished, the captain thanked me for my help and asked if I wouldn’t mind spending the next thirty-six hours with the crews as they went to sea and dropped the traps for the first true and legal night of stone crab season. I declined.
“Well then, you can come back next week when we start pullin ’em up,” he said, smiling again. “Then you’ll see the real work. And the payoff.”
“I’ll see the payoff at a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale,” I said.
“Then pray for a high price, Mr. Freeman, and maybe we’ll break even this year,” he said, and shook my hand.
As I walked away, the forklift driver was just pulling up with a load of frozen chicken parts and trash fish. Dawkins took up an ax, and the sound of his chopping blade faded behind me.
The captain had given me directions to the café. It was a fifteen- minute walk, and even though I’d taken only three or four steps at a time back and forth across Dawkins’s boat deck, my legs felt rubbery and my hamstrings tight from the two hours of work. My arms and shoulders ached like I’d rowed the fifty-footer to Key West and back. When I got to the café, Nate Brown was sitting out front on a pinewood patio in the shade. He’d already eaten and had his heels up on a small wooden keg with a huge bowl of ice cream in his lap. I sat down at a table near him without a word. Within a few seconds, a middle-aged woman came out with a large ceramic cup of hot coffee and when I smiled up at her she said, “Mr. Brown said ya’ll would be coming. Can I get you something to eat, sir?”
I ordered a fresh grouper sandwich and when she left I watched Nate working his bowl of vanilla like a careful child who’d been warned it would be his last if he wasn’t polite. From the cream- colored pile in his bowl the old man carved off a spoonful and then took only parts of it into his mouth at a time, sanding off the lump with his cracked lips three or four times before it was gone.