Miami Gundown

by Michael Zimmer

  I started to tell him that he was wrong, that the wound wasn’t all that bad and that he’d likely pull through once we got some bandages on it, but then changed my mind. Although it may sound cruel, I’m glad I didn’t lie to him that night, his last on earth.

  “Your uncle’s still out there,” I said. “I reckon he’ll take you home, if that’s where you want to be buried.”

  Dave laughed softly, nearly choking when the sound hung up in his throat. Then he closed his eyes and turned his head away. Thinking he was going to say something else, I waited for him to go on. It took a moment to realize he’d already passed on.

  “Sweet Lord,” Casey repeated, sitting back on his calves. “What just happened here, Boone?”

  “I reckon a man died,” I replied, feeling kind of cut adrift myself as I stared down at the waxen figure before me.

  “Davey!”

  Casey and I both flinched. That was old Jacob Klee himself—I would have recognized that dull, bass bellow anywhere—and he wasn’t very far away, either. Scrambling to our feet, I slid the shooting bag over my shoulder, then quickly buckled the gun belt around my waist. Casey handed me the Sharps.

  “Davey, god dammit, where are you?” the old man thundered.

  “We’d better scoot,” Casey said in my ear. “You know that old goat ain’t coming in here alone.”

  I nodded agreement. “Go on. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Boone.”

  “He’s over here!” I shouted, and Casey jumped as if he’d just sat down on a prickly pear pad.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Hold on,” I whispered.

  “Where?” Jacob demanded.

  “Next to the slough, about twenty yards east of that dead cypress tree. Follow the shore. You can’t miss him.”

  Well, we were backing off even as I spoke, and as soon as I was done, we spirited out of there as fast and quiet as we could. We hadn’t quite made it all the way back to the Thumb when I heard the roar of a man’s voice, filled with rage and raw anguish. It lasted just a few seconds, before fading off like a wolf’s howl, but I shivered as if caught in a cool draft.

  “Damn you, McCallister!” that old man ranted. “Damn you to hell. You’ll pay for this. I’ll make you bleed, boy. I’ll make all of you bleed, until there’s no more McCallister blood left to spill. Do you hear me? Do you hear what I’m promising you? On the Good Book, boy. I’m swearing it on the Lord’s own words.”

  “That old bastard is as crazy as a limpkin,” Casey whispered.

  “He’s sure mad right now.”

  Jacob’s threats went on like that for quite a while, long enough for me and Casey to make our way back to the Thumb’s entrance, where the others were waiting with their guns handy. In time the words began to grow fainter, and I realized Klee was retreating toward the hammock. There was no lessening of the bitter rage that infused his words, though; it stained the night like bile from a punctured gut and affected everyone there that night, even though the threats were directed only at me. At least in the beginning. In time they would grow to include all of us, but no matter how twisted the story became, I was always the ringleader, always the core of evil that hatched the dirty deed.

  Eventually the old man’s words faded out altogether, and we began to stir uncertainly. Coming up beside me, Ardell Hawes said: “He’s hurting pretty bad right now, Boone, but he’ll cool off.”

  “Sure,” I replied, and I won’t deny the shakiness of my words. “He’ll cool off.”

  But I didn’t believe it. Not even then. I don’t think any of us did.

  Excerpted from:

  Scrub Cattle and Cracker Horses:

  A Brief Description of the Florida Frontier

  by

  Anne Nichols

  Host Publishing, 1979

  Distant horizons and dusty cattle trails evoke images of the American West in the minds of many, but those scenes might just as easily apply to Florida during that state’s raucous frontier era. In a land of mouse-ear hats, space travel, and thriving citrus orchards, it’s difficult to imagine an era of hard-riding cowboys, range-war lynchings, rowdy cow towns, and six-gun justice, but Florida’s unique history supplies all of that and quite a lot more.

  * * * * *

  Florida’s “scrub” cattle share a common heritage with the longhorns of Texas and California fame, as all of these herds were initially brought to the New World aboard Spanish galleons . . .

  The first recorded history of cattle in Florida came with Ponce De Leon’s efforts to colonize the Charlotte Harbor area in 1521. . . . [After] an attack by the Calusa Indians, De Leon’s expedition fled to Cuba, leaving behind several head of Andalusian cattle. These animals eventually joined with herds from other failed attempts to settle the peninsula and gradually evolved into the Florida longhorn of today.

  Organized cattle ranching began in 1565 . . . [and] by the latter half of the nineteenth century, Florida was the nation’s leading exporter of beef, shipping large numbers of scrub cows to markets in the Caribbean. . . . The state currently ranks in the top fifteen for cattle production. [Ed. Note: In 2006, Florida ranked twelth in the number of cattle owned, combining beef and dairy breeds.]

  * * * * *

  Traits [of scrub cattle] include a smaller body, with most females and steers averaging between four hundred and six hundred pounds, although mature bulls can reach eight hundred pounds or more. Unlike their distant Texas cousins, the horns of Florida’s scrub cattle are shorter, probably due to the state’s denser foliage. Considered “wiry” by most standards . . . colors range from white to black, but a brindled tan or sorrel seems to be most common. . . .

  * * * * *

  Open range continued in Florida until the instigation of a fever tick [Texas fever] eradication program in the early 1920s, nearly forty years after most Western ranges were closed by barbed wire.

  Session Two

  It was two more days of hard travel from where Dave Klee was killed by an alligator to a stand of sand pines some miles east of Punta Rassa, where I intended to hold the herd until a deal could be arranged with Ashworth. We were so near the coast by then that I could smell the briny scent of the Gulf, wafting inland on a westerly breeze, and hear the harsh cries of shore birds as they circled overhead.

  Loping my marshtackie up alongside Jim’s gray mule, I used the handle of my bullwhip to point out a broad clearing amid the pines a couple of hundred yards to the south. “We’ll hole up in there for hear the night, but don’t light any fires,” I told him. “How much food do we have in our packs?”

  “That don’t need fire fixin’? We got cold grits and a little of that side pork we could eat raw, I s’pose.”

  I couldn’t help wincing at the older man’s suggestion. I’ve eaten raw meat, including bacon, more than once, but it was never anything I enjoyed. “Hand out the grits, but keep the pork hidden,” I said. “It won’t kill anyone to go to bed hungry.”

  “They ain’t gonna like not havin’ a fire to gather ’round after dark.”

  “They’ll live,” I predicted, then wheeled my ’tackie around the front of the herd to where Dick Langley was riding right point that day.

  Except for Jim, whose experience I wanted up front on the left, between the herd and the deeper swamps to the south, I tried to regularly rotate the crew through the various positions of a cattle drive. Swing riders flanked the herd and kept it moving in a straight line; drag riders brought up the rear, swallowing dust and cursing the boss, which was me on that trip, although I’ve ridden drag enough to understand their bellyaching. But it was the point riders whose job was most vital. They were the ones who kept the herd on course, making sure it didn’t veer off or become bogged down in deep jungle or quicksand. That’s why I always kept Jim up front and made sure the others knew they were to follow his advice if Casey or I wasn’t around. Jim couldn’t give orders, of course. None of the hands would have accepted that from a slave, but I think every
one there realized that the old Negro had more range experience than all the rest of us combined.

  Riding alongside Dick, I nodded toward the tall pines. “We’ll bed ’em down in there.”

  Dick nodded his OK. “They ought to be wore down enough by now not to scatter.”

  He was probably right—we’d been pushing pretty hard the last few days, eager to get the herd into Punta Rassa and complete our transaction—but I wasn’t going to tempt fate by taking any unnecessary chances. Not this close to the end of the drive.

  “They might be, but keep a tight guard on them, anyway,” I said. “We’re close enough to Fort Myers now that I swear I can smell Yankee.”

  Chuckling, Dick said: “Likely you just stepped in some cow shit this morning. Nothing scraping off the bottom of your boots wouldn’t fix.”

  “That’s a possibility, too,” I acknowledged, forcing a grin I didn’t really feel. Reining off to the side, I studied the northwestern horizon while waiting for Casey to come up. Fort Myers, and the little community that had sprung up around it, was too far away to be seen from where we were, but I was concerned that the dust churned up by our herd—or too many sharp, popping cracks from a cow hunter’s whip—could reach the eyes or ears of someone from the fort. Especially if that person was outside the post, away from the usual noises of the village and garrison.

  Casey had already spotted Jim and Dick bending the herd toward the clearing, and although I suspect he’d likely guessed my intentions, he asked anyway: “That where you plan to squat for the night?”

  “Figured we would. It’s solid ground, and the grass is good. I’ll ride into Punta Rassa after dark and hunt up Ashworth. If everything’s all right, we’ll run the herd in at first light tomorrow. With a little luck, we’ll be back in the scrub before those damned Yankees at Fort Myers start blowing their morning bugles.”

  “You going in alone?”

  “Yeah . . . why? Do you want to come along?”

  “No, not me, but you ought to take Punch. Have a doctor look at that arm of his.”

  Punch was Artie Davis, Casey’s cousin, who’d caught a round of buckshot in our little skirmish with Jacob Klee and his boys back at the Thumb. We’d started calling him Punch that same night, after Casey kidded him about being punched in the arm with a chunk of lead. The name had stuck, but no one was joking about it any more. The flesh around the wound was starting to look red and angry, and I decided Casey’s idea to take Punch into town with me was a good one, even though I doubted we’d find a doctor. I’m not certain Punta Rassa ever had its own physician, but I knew it hadn’t since the war’s beginning. Any man with even a rudimentary knowledge of medicine had long since been conscripted into the military.

  “I’ll do that,” I told Casey. “Let’s get the herd settled first. Pass the word that I don’t want anyone using their whips any more than they have to until we’ve put some more distance between us and Fort Myers. I’ve already told Jim not to build a fire.”

  He glanced my way curiously. “You feeling edgy, Boone?”

  “I’m not going to breathe easy until we’re all back in the scrub,” I admitted.

  Casey nodded soberly, then loped after a red steer that was trying to slip away from the herd. I pulled off to one side, keeping a worried eye on the thick dust the herd was churning into the sky. Although a stiff breeze off the Gulf was keeping the clouds low among the tops of the palm trees, I couldn’t help a certain amount of apprehension, as close as we were to Myers.

  The cattle were tired and didn’t cause any problems as they slowly fanned out among the trees and began to graze. The grass was about as good as any we’d seen since leaving the Flatiron, bright green from the moisture of the Big Cypress and knee-high to a tall horse. The herd would do well there and likely settle down to chew their cuds as soon as darkness fell. If something didn’t come along to spook them overnight, they’d probably still be bedded down when the sun came up the next day.

  We gathered on the north side of the herd after sundown to wolf down a supper of cold grits and some strips of raw cabbage palm Ardell had brought along in his packs. Poor fixings by most accounts, but not too bad if you’re hungry, and we were all about half starved. You’ll find most teenage boys can put away a heap of food at mealtime, and, save for Jim, we were no exception.

  We washed our meal down with water from our canteens, and you might be surprised to learn that I probably used a canteen as much in Florida as I did running cattle up the trails from Texas. I’ll not deny there is a lot more water per acre in the Peninsula State, but that didn’t mean much to a cow hunter stuck out in the middle of a flat, dusty plain, an hour’s ride from the nearest creek.

  With dusk turning thick as gumbo around us, I told Punch to grab our rifles and follow me. He didn’t waste time asking foolish questions, but just hauled his modified Joslyn and my Sharps from one of the packs and met me at the edge of the pines.

  There’s a reason there weren’t any settlements—nor many cabins, for that matter—south of the Caloosahatchee in 1864. It was because in those days, all of that land east and south of Punta Rassa was nothing but a woolly tangle of black-water marshes, sloughs, mangrove hammocks, and outright swamps—tentacles from the Big Cypress pushing up into the belly of the state’s cattle ranges.

  Still, you could find your way through even that morass if you were smart enough to let your horse do most of the navigating. It was dangerous, though. Twice we had to rein around hissing ’gators we couldn’t see in the ink-like darkness, and once the nearly overwhelming, cucumber-like smell of a water moccasin became so powerful I thought my horse was going to start pitching—not the reaction you’re looking for in that kind of an environment. Yet we eventually made it, breaking free of the scrub several hours before midnight to circle the nearly empty cattle pens east of town.

  Keeping our rifles unslung, we made our way cautiously down Punta Rassa’s broad, sandy thoroughfare. We rode light in our saddles and kept a wary eye on the line of stores fronting the town’s single street. We were watching mostly for signs of Federal presence—U.S.-branded horses at the hitching rails or blue-clad troopers strolling the boardwalk—but save for a solitary ’coon hound rumped down in the dirt next to the livery, the place seemed as deserted as a bone orchard. In fact, several of the businesses were boarded up as if in anticipation of a hurricane, and the buggy posts were all bare.

  “Where’d everybody go?” Punch asked uneasily. Although Punta Rassa was relatively new as a cattle town, with the Union’s blockade at Tampa Bay, it had become a major shipping point for a number of Caribbean ports. Early on, the town had been as rowdy as Dodge City or Abilene would be at their worst, but I guess Punch hadn’t been there in a while, what with most of our cattle going north since the war’s beginning.

  “I reckon everybody’s either off fighting Yankees or hiding from them in the swamps,” I replied distractedly, drawing rein before a false-fronted building near the far end of the street. In the dim starlight I could just make out the faded lettering painted across the fake second story: Müller’s Mercantile. Then below that: Groceries and Dry Goods, and finally, in smaller script: Werner Müller, Prop. Although the windows were dark, I thought the place looked occupied.

  “This way,” I said to Punch, guiding my mount down a dark alley between the store and the rough-hewn log walls of a boarded-over shipping office. There was an empty corral behind the mercantile, and we tied our horses there. I glanced furtively over my shoulder before knocking at the rear door. I’d known old Werner Müller since I was knee-high to a water bug, but damned if I didn’t feel like a skulking thief that night. It made me mad, to tell you the truth, and still does when I think about how we had to live in our own country during the Yankee invasion.

  We waited on Müller’s rear stoop for several minutes, until I sensed someone staring at us through a small but judiciously placed gap in the curtains. Stepping back where I could be better seen, I loudly whispered: “Mister Müller, i
t’s Boone McCallister . . . Jeff McCallister’s son.”

  I heard a low voice from behind the darkened panes, uttering what sounded like my name, then the mouse-like scratching of a key turning in its lock. The knob rattled loosely, the door squeaked inward, and an aged voice emerged from the shadows within. “Come in, come in, young ones, before the bluebellies see you.”

  We quickly stepped inside, and Müller hastened to close the door. I heard the muffled thud of the bolt sliding into its socket, but couldn’t see a thing in the darkness.

  “A man any more cannot be too careful,” Müller explained a little breathlessly. “You boys wait here, while I go to find a lamp to light.”

  Punch and I stood, silent and tense, as the whisper of the old man’s bare feet retreated over the hardwood floor. A few seconds later, I heard the smack of steel on flint, and a couple of heartbeats after that, a warm glow flowed into the room where we stood. I gave Punch a nudge with my elbow, and we entered a tiny parlor to find Werner Müller waiting for us next to a pewter floor lamp with a decoratively fringed green shade. He was holding a small handgun tight against his leg, almost hidden within the folds of his nightshirt.

  “Alone, are you, Boone?” he asked, eyeing Punch suspiciously. “Your father, he is not also here?”

  Müller was the son of German immigrants who had come to Florida just after the turn of the century. Although he claimed to barely remember the scenes of his youth, his speech remained heavily influenced by his Deutsch ancestry. Words like “there” or “father” came out closer to “der” and “fadder.” Some people had difficulty understanding him. I usually didn’t.

  “There’s just the two of us, Mister Müller,” I said, “but we’ve got a herd stowed in some pines east of here.”

  “A herd! Cattle you have brought again to Punta Rassa?”

  I nodded, briefly debating whether or not to tell him about W.B. Ashworth’s offer. I finally decided against it, but soon wished I hadn’t. It might have been helpful to have the elderly Dutchman’s opinion on what had been going on around Punta Rassa since the Yankee reoccupation of Fort Myers.