“There are no motels here. Not out here in the middle. Alligator Alley goes straight east to Fort Lauderdale, but there’s nothing but swamp in between.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, there are alligators.”
“Always it’s alligators.”
“But no poodles.”
“No poodles?”
“The alligators make canapeés out of them.”
“Charming.”
“Pick their reptilian teeth with the shin bones.”
“Faye …”
“Where was this place Jack wanted you to go?”
I opened the letter. “We turn north on 833.”
“Find it on the map.”
I did. “It looks like it leads north toward a place called Clewiston. But then, why would he have us come all this way south first? We could have saved time by going east from Fort Myers on Route 80.”
“There’s nothing else in between?”
“Just swamp. And a couple roads. Wait, here’s a place called Devil’s Garden. That sounds charming. But still, it’s closer to Route 80.”
“What did you say the person’s name was?”
“Winifred Egret. Must be some kind of hippie that made herself a new name.”
Faye’s eyes widened. “Egret is a Seminole name. Take the wheel a second,” Faye said. “Give me that map.” She took it and turned on the overhead map light. “Holy shit!” she said. “There is too something else in there. Your Jack is directing us to the Big Cypress Indian Reservation.”
We drove onward for a little over an hour, during which time we saw only dark sky, dark highway, and a solid, dark curtain of foliage to either side of it. Finally, we cut north on Route 833. I still could not see a damned thing to either side of the road except vegetative darkness and the cloudy night sky crowding low overhead. Faye drove onward until she came to a crossing with a smaller road. She pulled over, unsure of where we were. “Is this our turn?” she inquired.
No one was in sight. The crossroads was marked only by a couple of sign boards and a building that announced itself as the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum. The structure was large and architecturally refined, not what I would have expected to find that far from any sign of a metropolitan area. I stared at it as if it had just landed from space. The lights were out.
The car idled.
I pressed the button to lower the window on my side. The night was reasonably cool, no more than seventy degrees. A pungent scent of decaying leaves slid in on the humid air. I heard an animal call, deep and aggressive. I hoped it was a frog. A mosquito whined.
Faye said, “Well, what do you think, companñera?”
“I think this is the turn … .”
“Not good enough. It’s dark and I’m tired.” Faye nodded at one of the signs. “Billie Swamp Safari, two point four miles, give or take a stop to kick a stray reptile off the tarmac. I’ve heard of that place. We can stay at a chickee.”
“What’s a chickee?”
“Thatched hut. Seminole house. Open air, plenty of mosquitoes this time of year.”
“Oh. Great.”
“You didn’t want to go to Everglade City. But hey, we’re a coupla crackers in a Mercedes out for a lark. We’ll just roll in and catch some winks and phone what’s-her-name in the morning.”
“He didn’t give a phone number.” If we had been in Wyoming, being out in the middle of nowhere would have seemed normal. I would have suggested we just pull off the road out of sight and sleep in the car. But here there were strange noises, and more darkness than I was quite used to dealing with.
“Well, you wanted an adventure. We’re sure Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole this time.”
Faye put the car into gear and turned left. We drove our two-point-how-many miles through more darkness. Eventually we came to a great, big sign that read BILLIE SWAMP SAFARI and had a painting of a man in patchwork Seminole attire pointing to our right. We turned that direction and drove down an even narrower road that gave way quickly to gravel. It was pitch dark, and if Faye had told me then that this was all her idea of a joke, that we were actually on a disused trail going nowhere, I would have believed her. Suddenly we burst into a clearing where there were cars parked along a row of thatched huts, and big signs galore indicating that this was the place. One said GIFT SHOP. This hut was closed, but there were lights behind it, so we parked the car and got out. We could hear two things: mosquitoes, and human voices beyond the huts, so we headed double-time down a pathway between two huts and found ourselves in front of a restaurant called the Swamp Water Cafeé.
“What the hey,” said Faye. “Let’s see if we can get us a bite of key lime pie or something.”
“Always eating,” I said, for something to say.
“Eating for two,” she replied, ducking quickly inside before the whining mosquitoes picked her up and carried her away.
Inside, we found a setup that looked very much like any other wayside restaurant of the Formica tabletop variety. A young, very blond woman cheerily asked us how she could help us, and Faye said we’d like pie and a place to stay for the night.
“Okay,” she said. “Anything to drink with that?”
I was feeling kind of frowsy, so I said, “Coffee, please. Milk for my friend. She’s eating for two.”
The waitress smiled. “When you due?”
Faye lowered herself into a chair. “About two months.”
“Last little trip beforehand?”
“You got it.”
“Well, y’all kick back and let us do the cookin’. Your order will be right up.”
That all seemed very positive and homey, so I began to relax a notch.
The waitress made a beeline to a middle-aged man in khakis who was sitting at another table drinking something hot, spoke to him a moment, then disappeared into the kitchen. The man picked up his cup and wandered over toward us, taking his time. “Hello,” he said, crinkling a sleepy smile up around his blue eyes. “My name’s Bill. I hear you ladies want a place to stay tonight.”
“That’s right,” said Faye. “I hear you have chickees to rent.”
“That’s right. You have a reservation?”
Faye shook her head.
My heart sank. I began to wish I had taken Faye’s suggestion of a nice, cozy bed-and-breakfast in Everglade City.
Bill did not look perturbed. “How long you expecting to stay?”
“Just overnight,” I said quickly.
“No problem then. We’re pretty well booked up on the weekends, but we can certainly accommodate you tonight. Do you want the nighttime package?”
“Sure,” said Faye.
I glanced at her. She gave me a quick smile and a shrug of her shoulders. She wanted an adventure, and she was going to find it come hell or high water, the latter of which was only too easy to locate in a swamp.
“Okay,” said Bill. “You ladies enjoy your pie, and I’ll get you your Seminole storyteller.” He got up and wandered out of the cafeé. The door was just closing as the waitress brought our pies and drinks.
It was about then that I began to notice something funny about the Swamp Water Cafeé: None of the people working there were Indians. I asked the waitress, “Are we really on the Seminole reservation?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, where are …” I trailed off, embarrassed at my brashness.
“All the Indians?” she inquired.
“Yeah.”
She pulled up a chair and sat down. “Oh, they don’t work here.”
“Oh, so they’re over in the gift shop?”
“No, not really.”
“The office?”
“Sometimes.”
“Oh.”
She laughed. “Folks are always confused by this. Thing is, the Indians don’t have to work. They get a couple thousand apiece every month from the casinos. So why work?”
“Why indeed.”
Faye asked, “What do they do?”
The waitress made a “who kno
ws?” gesture. “Drink. Drive fast cars. Naw, I’m exaggerating. They just live their lives like the rest of us. They run the tribe, do their cultural things, but why wait tables or make beds if they don’t have to? They’re good employers, pay well.”
The door crashed open and another blue-eyed man in khakis came in, but this one was younger than the first and swaggered shamelessly as he moved toward us. “Hi, ladies,” he said, helping himself to the fourth chair at the table. “I’m Black Hawk. I’ll be your storyteller tonight.”
I about gagged on my pie.
Faye leaned onto her elbows and grinned serenely. “Fly me, big fellah.”
Black Hawk looked somewhat disconcerted, but he recovered quickly. “Okay, well, I’m a friend of the Seminole. I went away and did my service for my country and now I’m back. Seminoles are very private people. But they trust me, and have told me a few of their stories.” He bunched up his arms and leaned onto the table, his big, well-muscled shoulders heaving up like summits on a mountain range. I guess we were supposed to be impressed. “Okay. Well, so what do you know about Seminole storytelling?”
“Nothing,” Faye said. “We got lost out there on Alligator Alley and we thought we’d drop in for some pie.”
Black Hawk glanced at the door as if planning his escape.
I felt like escaping myself. Since getting in the car that afternoon, life had felt like it was slowing down, everything grinding to a crunch even as we sped along the highway, as if the scale of our surroundings dwarfed the passage of time. My muscles felt like they were moving in thick glue. I said, “Don’t mind her. We were just out looking for a man who got thrown off a cruise ship, and we took a wrong turn at St. Petersburg.”
Black Hawk glanced back and forth between us. He wrinkled his brow importantly. “I just got out of the marines, myself. We ride on Navy ships. We don’t have all that cushy life the cruise ships have. I don’t trust them anyway. They’re all registered in Panama or Libya, and where do they get all that money? They buy whole islands out there in the Bahamas and take all those tourists out there and run them ashore and turn them on little spits until they’re brown. Here in the Everglades we have natural history. We have gators and lots of birds, other animals. Raccoon. Possum. I grew up nearby, been coming out here since I was in high school.”
I said, “Tell me that again about the cruise ships.”
“The part about the Libyan registration?”
“Yes … but also the part about the private islands.”
“Oh, they have these private islands. Cays, we call them. There’s thousands of islands in the Bahamian banks, and these guys buy up whole little islands so they can run their cruise ships in there, and the paying passengers think it’s all a big deal.”
“And you could hide all kinds of operations in that sort of place.”
Black Hawk looked at me out of the corner of one eye, like a cow who’s certain it’s about to get hit with a prod. “Hey, I don’t know what you’re into, but …”
Just then a third man in khakis came into the restaurant and hurried up to the table. This one was short and swarthy. “I’m Gator,” he said. “Your swamp-buggy tour is ready and waiting for you. Come on, Black Hawk, give the ladies a break. You’ll make them late with all your nonsense.” He gave us a merry wink and waved us toward the door.
“Are you a Seminole?” Faye asked.
I was ready to kick her. Maybe I should have.
Gator said, “No, I’m Cuban.”
“Oye,” I said.
“Sí,” he said, giving me a look of appraisal. “This way, please.”
We were met at the door by the first man, Bill. “Let me show them where they’ll be sleeping,” he told Gator, “Then they’re all yours.”
Bill led us out past a low wall that enclosed a shallow pool. Inside, I saw some long, dark shapes. “What are those?” I asked.
“Alligators,” said Gator. “I ought to know.” He held out his arms, twisting them this way and that under the fluorescent light that illuminated the pool, showing us some nasty scars. “This one’s from the first time I got bit, before I knew better than to yank it free. This is the second. See? Just bite holes here. No rips. Healed lots faster.”
Bill said, “Quit scarin’ them, Gator.”
I found myself hustling along to keep up with Bill. The path grew darker and darker, the light from the distant spotlights near the restaurant a waning memory. Our only light now came from an electric lantern Bill was carrying. A couple hundred yards down the path, with the unseen mosquitoes zeroing in on us in a symphony of whines, he pulled briskly up by one in a string of huts about ten feet on a side. Like all the other huts, it had a steep-pitched roof thatched with densely packed palm fronds. These smaller huts had undressed log frames enclosed by some sort of siding. Bill set the lantern down and quickly opened a combination padlock and showed us in. I was quickly getting the idea that when there were mosquitoes about, folks didn’t tarry much.
Inside the hut, we found two primitive cots made up with army blankets and a drapery of mosquito netting. Bill showed us how to light a kerosene lantern that rested on a low, rough-cut table. The light danced drowsily about the space, faintly illuminating the inside of the thatching. Outside, I could hear the odd twittering of night birds and some deep, more guttural animal calls, a kind of booming. Inside, I could hear mosquitoes. One landed, stung. I slapped it.
Bill said, “I hope you don’t mind that this chickee is haunted.”
Faye said, “All the comforts of home.”
“You ladies have any insect repellant with you?” Gator asked.
Faye laughed ironically.
Gator produced a tube and passed it to her. She passed it to me.
I said, “Faye’s being very particular about her pregnancy.”
“It’s natural stuff,” Gator said encouragingly.
Faye mashed a mosquito on her arm and swung out her hand to retrieve the repellant all in one motion. “Forgot about this little detail,” she muttered, swatting her other arm, then her neck. “Welcome to the Everglades, Em.”
I was so tired I wanted to just fall over onto a bed and sleep, but Faye wanted to experience the full night package, whatever that was. So swamp buggying we did go.
The buggy turned out to be a giant platform with rows of benches and four balloon tires on each side. Gator helped Faye up onto a loading dock from which she could climb the last steps up onto the thing. We settled ourselves in the second bench and Gator fired up the engine. On the only other occupied bench were yet another man in khakis and the waitress from the cafeé, all cuddled up as if they were parked in a convertible above the city lights. Gator said, “This here’s Emilio, and you already met Glenda.”
Faye said, “You all have a sort of military air to you around here.”
I looked at her. I couldn’t tell if she was joking about the khakis, or if she was serious. Fatigue seemed to press me into the seat.
Emilio said, “We all been in the marines. Bill was in the marines, so he knows he’s got good men if he hires one of us. Right, Glenda?” He gave her a macho one-armed squeeze and a kiss to her forehead. She tittered.
The big buggy rocked and swayed as Gator maneuvered it about the parking lot and headed out into the darkness, breaking the relative tranquility of the night with the rumble of the engine and the sweeping play of the headlights. The guy who was now bussing the waitress sat up and switched on a spotlight and began to pan it across the darkness; it picked out a high-wire fence and a big automatic gate that was just opening. I saw water and the dense crush of vegetation. We splashed into the water and continued, the buggy rolling ponderously and the spotlight dodging this way and that.
“There’s one,” said the waitress.
The man with the spotlight riveted it on a small deer. The thing looked attentive, but not concerned. It chewed. We stared.
“What is it?” I asked, ready to totally swoon over the rare Everglades deer, or whatever it was.
“Fallow deer, from India,” Emilio said.
Gator turned off the headlights and Emilio switched off the spotlight and handed Faye what looked like a strange-looking pair of binoculars. She put them to my eyes and gasped. “Night-vision goggles,” she said. “This is wonderful! Oh, my God! It’s … fantastic!”
It was a long time before I could get the goggles away from her, but when I put them to my own eyes, I popped into a world of electric-green wraiths. The goggles gathered light like a fiend, and anything that reflected any light was intensified. A deer lifted its head and looked at me, a tracery of monochromatic green. It shifted and walked away, its silent movement stolen from the darkness by the miracle of technology. The stars were bright, and the atmosphere all around was charged with false lights that looked like fireflies. It intensified my growing suspicion that I was dreaming this whole experience.
We drove on with the headlights off, wallowing over the irregular bottom of the swamp, which at this location proved to be a lacework of stagnant streams winding through stands of palms and cypress. In the next five minutes we snagged ten massive spiders and their webs from as many overhanging trees, listened to the waitress scream, and saw five different species of deer exotic to North America, each a different pattern of electric green in the night-vision goggles. “What’s the gig with the exotic deer?” I whispered to Faye.
Faye snorted. “I offered you a nice B-and-B in Everglades City. A canoe ride. A land of sunshine. But no, we follow your nose into the darkness. Into something downright strange.”
“Chief Billie wanted a wild game park,” Gator informed us. “He went down to Texas and went shooting on a friend’s game park, and thought it would be nice to have one here, too. Except the tourists complained. So now instead of shooting, he has us take people out for swamp tours. In the daytime, you’ll get your fan-boat ride and a reptile show, too.”
Faye said, “Bring on them alligators.”
I wondered why life had thrown me into a swamp full of lunatics while my lover was off chasing terrorists.
“So what brings you ladies down our way?” Gator asked.
“The spirit of adventure,” Faye said sweetly.
Killer Dust Page 23
