The Last Operation (The Remnants of War Series, Book 1) (21 page)

"Marjorie," he would say to her, "I could care less if some dirt bag breaks in my apartment one night. It's that much dog food I'll save. I'll watch the scumbag get eaten alive and laugh."

Marjorie didn't like the man. She thought he was crude and usually avoided him and never ventured near the fenced little courtyard where the pit bull was chained.

Early one morning as Marjorie went into her yard to take in the wash, her heart leaped and the pit of her stomach seemed to fall away in a wave of fear. Somehow, impossibly, the little boy had gotten into her neighbor's yard. He was just a few feet away from the thick body of the pit bull, well within reach of the animal's restraining chain.

Marjorie's heart roiled wildly as she took in the details in horror filled seconds. The studded collar around the powerful thick neck, the squat head with the bowl shaped jaws. Her heart stopped as the animal lunged at the small boy.

A scream tore out of Marjorie's throat as the dog reached the boy in less than one agonizing second. Still screaming, she tore into the gate and suddenly stopped. Her eyes open wide, she watched what she firmly believed was the first real miracle she would ever witness.

Deeno stood very still, both arms open wide. The big dog reached the boy and stopped, gently inserting the powerful head between the boy's small hands and arms. A long pink tongue darted out between the fangs and nuzzled the boy's face. Deeno giggled and closed his arms about the dog's head. Tail wagging and head rubbing on Deeno's chest, the dog sat, content. When Marjorie started to go in the yard, the dog looked up and moved toward her with a deep warning growl.

She retreated.

Every day the boy would spend an hour or two with the pit bull. Marjorie felt an undercurrent of something mystical, a uniqueness that she knew instinctively she could never truly understand. She began to notice other things: cats seemed to come directly to him—even the wild unapproachable strays. She saw how Deeno looked at the world with open curiosity. She began to understand that her grandson's mind worked in side steps to what everyone considered normal. While he lacked in what the doctors called "standard" intelligence, there were other traits, other intelligences functioning for Deeno on alternative planes.

Marjorie Drosso spoke to the social workers often. She visited the large white and red brick building where Deeno would live if institutionalized, and every second she hated the word and the idea it conveyed. She visited the facilities and it's sterile rooms: cafeterias with stainless steel furniture and bored matrons, playrooms with plastic toys. Everything everywhere seemed made up, cold and artificial. She walked out of the building and never looked back.

The next day she gave a lawyer a down payment to begin custodial proceedings. Ten months later, Marjorie Drosso became Deeno's legal guardian.

Eight years passed in a blink. As Deeno's twelfth birthday approached, the doctors told Marjorie Drosso she was dying. This was not news to her. She'd felt it in the reactions of her body, in the weight loss and the sudden unexplained pains. She had done all she could to safeguard her grandson. She was not rich, but still had managed to accumulate some money. Between the savings, the house, almost paid up now, and her life insurance policy, there would be a couple of hundred thousand going into Deeno's trust fund at her death. She'd spoken at length to her sister Loretta who lived on the outskirts of Everglades City. Loretta had agreed to become Deeno's custodian.

She didn't know about Duke and Loretta was careful never to talk about him, especially when she found out about the trust fund.

Loretta drove to Miami in Duke's second car, an ancient Rambler with more rust spots then fender paint, its rear bumper black from the clouds of oily smoke belching out of the tailpipe. She arrived the day Marjorie died. Loretta was surprised that the boy didn't go into crying fits. She was actually relieved since she didn't want to spend the next couple of days putting on a show of grief for the lawyers as she signed all the papers.

Deeno had cried each night, so heavily that his tear ducts hurt. At twelve his reading and writing skills were about that of a six year old and would never progress much beyond that level. All known tests and IQ monitoring systems would show him as handicapped, and in a sense it was true. But tests and systems do not always show everything. Deeno understood death instinctively the way he knew the animal world, deep within his heart and guts, in ways that never could be described. The loss of his Grammy hung about his life with unbearable sorrow. At night, silent tears rolled in a river down his cheeks. In the day, in the presence of all these strangers, Deeno's mind went elsewhere, to a place where the animals danced, where his beloved Grammy smiled radiantly and spirits of kindness whispered in his head.

Chapter 29

Late afternoon sunbeams shone in Loretta's face when she brought Deeno to his new world in Everglades City. The boy's eyes took in the small frame house at the edge of a sloping canal. The front of the house was overgrown with weeds, barely outlining a single path led to the door. What passed for the front yard was littered with papers, empty cans, bottles and old car parts. A twelve year old Ford with jacked up rear wheels sat in the driveway, the rear bumpers crowded with rebel flags and obscene stickers. A pickup truck missing fenders, engine and wheels sat on rusted jacks in front of the Ford.

Deeno saw all that but it meant nothing to him. He was fascinated by the surrounding wilderness, he'd never seen anything like it. A dim part of his mind seemed to accept that somehow, the wild land had called to him in his dreams. In the whispering night he had sensed its presence, its continuous call, over and over.

Deeno had come home to a place he'd never been to before.

When she walked in the house Loretta knew she had to be careful. Most of a six -pack was scattered in the dusty kitchen, the crushed cans displayed the distorted red head of a caricature dog that was the logo of Duke's favorite beer.

This was the time she had to walk gingerly—sober she could handle Duke. Very drunk, he was manageable as his eyelids drooped over alcoholic stupor. It was the in-between times, the five or six beer times, when the mean spirit would emerge, a lifetime of perceived slights, and he would slam her without warning. If she was lucky and sharp, she could see it coming or he would hit her open handed, occasionally he would blacken her eye or knock a tooth loose. She'd learned to live with it.

Duke stepped into the kitchen. Deeno had never seen a man that big. Six foot five, arms like telephone poles poking out from a ratty, stained sleeveless tee shirt stretched over a growing beer belly. Duke wiped his mouth, belched and looked steadily at Deeno before turning to his wife.

"What the hell is this Loretta? You didn't say the kid was fucked up. He's a retard."

"Duke, shush," she whispered, stepping in front of her husband. "Remember the trust fund."

"Oh yeah, shit yeah," said Duke. The concept of having money was somewhat alien to Duke since he rarely worked. But he did understand the idea of a new pick up truck and maybe a fishing boat.

In the days that followed, Deeno took to the wilderness of the Everglades like a healthy worm in rich loam. He roamed the forested spaces between the few houses on the dirt road that lined the canal where they lived. Each day brought a new discovery. The boy followed the red-shouldered hawks, cruising the low cypress and the marshlands, the webbed-handed otters with their slick oily furs, the opossums, the rats and the rabbits and the occasional tuft-eared wildcats with their tall hind legs all became the objects of his fascinations, his life and his eventual destiny.

It was just a few days later that Deeno met his neighbor.

The man's name was Donald Murtagh and everyone called him Ol'Donny. He'd lived in the Everglades his entire life except for a three year stint in the army where he saw combat in Korea. After Frozen-Chosin, where he'd seen men die of the brutal cold during the hellish battle for the Chosin Reservoir, he'd vowed never again to go anyplace where the temperature dipped so low that water would freeze. Ol'Donny firmly believed the only place you ever needed temperatures like that, was in your refrigerator.

Ol'Donny had married Clara Bongard when he returned from Korea. They had two sons. The first one died in a car wreck in Ocala when he was seventeen, the second was killed in that blasted Vietnam place. His wife had died before Ol'Donny turned seventy-two. She had never been the same since the boys died. Sometimes he felt that she hung on that long just because of him. Ol'Donny felt the weight of his years and his solitude like a mantle of cement around his shoulders. The memories of his dead family haunted him in the sighing of every breeze that passed through the surrounding wilderness.

He was fishing for his dinner in the plastic Coleman canoe he'd bought two years earlier, when he first saw the boy. Deeno stood on the bank of the canal, in the choked jungle between his house and Duke's. Ol'Donny held his breath as the canoe drifted slowly toward the boy on the bank of the canal and brought him a unique sight he'd never believed possible.

The boy stood on an oak log protruding from the water. His hand was out and holding some greenery. A brown deer nibbled delicately at the boy's hand, the ears rotating every which way as it looked out for predators. Ol'Donny didn't think such a thing could happen with the wild deers, until now. It's like one of them paintings from that Norman Rockefeller guy, or whatever that painter's name was, he thought.

It wasn't long before the boy started coming around to Ol'Donny's house. He enjoyed the boy's company and the simple, innocent conversations they shared. Deeno's visits soon became the highlight of the old man's day.

Ol'Donny felt guilty about asking Deeno those prying questions. The boy always answered easily, without guile, best as he knew. While he may have felt a twinge of guilt in prying, above all he was concerned. He worried for Deeno, living in that house with Loretta and Duke. He knew Duke too well.

Yes, Ol'Donny knew Duke very well. He knew the man was mean, not just mean, but kick-you-in-the-balls mean and nasty as a pissed off Tasmanian devil. Duke was the town bully and local bad character. His size alone tended to keep people at bay. He lived on occasional odd jobs, his wife's haphazard part time work, handouts and assorted petty larcenies.

But Deeno was content. His days were wonder-filled voyages navigating the great land-sea that is the Everglades while neither Loretta or Duke paid much attention to him. This was fine with Deeno as he was content with the outdoors and his new friend Ol'Donny Murtagh.

Ol'Donny looked like a cross between a trapper, a wiry old cowboy and a hermit. His leathery face, dried, creased and brown from all those years in the South Florida sunshine, seemed to split when the easy smile reached his features. He wore sloppy bush hats and ragged, but always clean, loose cotton jeans with whatever promotional tee shirt had been given away. But everyone knows that in the backcountry of the great swamp, still waters really do run deep. Ol'Donny Murtagh held a degree in engineering from the University of Miami, class of forty-four.

About the same time that Deeno landed with Duke and Loretta, and became fast friends with Ol'Donny, Richard Daniels was also looking for Donald Murtagh. It was late in the year that he'd returned from the operation in Mexico, and he had that new, fast seaplane. He had also received a great deal of cash for that covert operation, and developed contacts for some lucrative new operations: smuggling refugees into South Florida. He needed a base of operations and he needed help in building it. He found Ol'Donny Murtagh who proposed an ingenious solution. The problem was aerial views, Daniels needed a remote place to land his seaplane where the landscape could be altered and concealed.

Ol'Donny Murtagh would build three barges. Light and flat bottomed, the barges would contain framed camouflage nets designed to hold native vegetation and overflowing plants. From the air the barges would look like natural islands, the kind that abound in the Everglades by the thousands. Once constructed, the barges would be towed to a desolate, uncharted rectangular lagoon West of Lostman's Cay.

The barges would intersect and occupy the lagoon, changing it from a long watery expanse, suitable for landing a seaplane, to a group of unconnected small ponds. By a system of remote controlled generators, underwater tracks and hydraulic pulleys, the barges would swing aside, creating a long expanse of clear water.