3 A Brewski for the Old Man

by Phyllis Smallman

  He didn’t say anything which was the same as saying no. Tully’s first thought would never be to call the cops.

  “Uncle Ziggy never said anything about the tattooed man. It’s probably not them.”

  “Zig never got a real good look at the guy that hit him.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He didn’t say anything, just slouched along in that way of his.

  Irritated and wanting to dig at him, I said, “You should wear runners out here instead of cowboy boots. Cowboy boots are stupid for anything but riding.” “I’ll remember that when I come back.”

  I sprinted forward, grabbing his arm and jerking him around to face me. “Back?”

  “I’d like to get a closer look. My nose tells me those fellas are doing some poaching. Gators likely, good market for them right now.” That statement begged another question I didn’t want answered. Lots of things about my father I just didn’t want to know. I followed him back to the truck in silence.

  The sun was streaming down on my door handle so that when I reached out to open the door it burnt my hand. I jerked my hand away. “Shit.”

  Tully climbed in and pushed open my door from the inside. The cab was a furnace — the seats burnt through my shorts.

  “Let the cops handle it or the wardens. If they don’t get caught for what they did to Uncle Ziggy, they can get done for poaching.”

  “A fine, nothing more.”

  “At least something.” I could see by the hardness of his profile it wasn’t going to happen. Something in him demanded justice, wanted pain, the old eye-for-an-eye thing that went back to Adam and Eve. But there was nothing to keep me from calling the cops, was there?

  He started the truck and pulled away. “How do you know that some of the wardens aren’t in on it?” Tully asked. “A few of them might turn a blind eye for a cut of the proceeds.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I know so.” He grinned at me.

  “Man, you’re destroying my last belief in saints. I so don’t want to hear anything bad about them. If park wardens can be corrupted there’s no hope for the rest of us.”

  “Some wardens feel there’s too many gators since they stopped hunting back in the sixties. For the last two years this park has let out licenses to hunt gators. Two thousand dollars per license and a hundred licenses each year, plus you have to pay for the people you bring with you. A quarter of a million dollars a year, that’s how much this park makes off gators. The park also gets money from the meat and the hides. You get about eight bucks a pound for the meat and a mature gator can dress out at about seventy-five to a hundred pounds. Then there are the hides. The belly is the most expensive bit, twenty-five to thirty dollars a foot. All and all you can make about a thousand bucks a gator. That gives the park another thousand dollars a license, over three hundred thousand each season. It’s a rich man’s sport. Rich guys are willing to pay big bucks for the fun of killing a gator.”

  “It’s a crazy world,” I said and watched the wilderness slide by, deep green and tangled and jumbled together, a whole world outside the hard surfaces, lights and steel of my world. “Did you and Jimmy hunt gators?”

  “No, we never got the chance.” His voice was full of regret. Jimmy had been like a son to Tully, a kindred spirit, and they’d fished and hunted together all over the state.

  The truck rocked back and forth through potholes and rattled over a trestle bridge while I kept watch in the side mirror to make sure we weren’t being followed by the gator hunters.

  As we approached the little kiosk, I asked, “Are you going to report them for parking in a closed campsite?”

  Tully snorted with laughter. “Well, report them for poaching.”

  He shot me a look I remembered from childhood. “Are you going to call the cops and tell them where to find Ziggy’s guys?”

  “How do we know they’re the crew from Ohio?”

  “Let the cops go out there and check. If they aren’t the ones we say, ‘Oh, sorry.’”

  It so wasn’t going to happen. Well, not if Tully was going to do it but I could call Styles. How would Tully take to me going behind his back? And did I care?

  We drove back to Cypress Island mostly in silence, deep in our own thoughts. Tully was planning something that didn’t involve calling any authorities. Did I want to be involved? Not really. A good rule of thumb is, if Tully Jenkins is involved it’s bound to end badly. The man is just a natural born screw-up.

  The closer we got to town, the more I worried. As we rattled over the humpbacked bridge spanning the intra-coastal I asked the question I’d promised myself not to ask. “Are you going back there?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why?”

  He laid on the horn as a tourist in an Avis rental pulled out in front of him barely missing the front bumper of the truck, which was fine; but then the tourist slammed on his brakes. I braced myself against the dash. I asked again, “Why?”

  “Want to see if they’re from Ohio.” The tourist decided he was going the wrong way and made a U-turn, cutting off traffic coming towards us. More horns. “Going out there is a bad idea.”

  “Well, it won’t be my first.” He grinned like a kid planning a raid on the cookie jar. The man just had no good sense.

  “How? I mean are you just going to drive in there again? They won’t let you near their rigs. Maybe they’ve even packed up and moved by now.”

  “Been thinking about that and you’re right. Those boys aren’t going to hang around. They’ll be gone by tomorrow. Maybe gone already. But my bet is they’ll wait ’til tomorrow. They’ll want to pull their hooks and they’ll know how slow anything involving authorities is, even if we reported them today, ain’t likely to be anyone out there to talk to them until tomorrow. They’ll be gone by then so I’m goin’ back today.”

  “How?”

  “They’re camped on the river mouth emptying into the north lake — Soldaat Lake it’s called. That river, well little more than a stream really, broadens into swamp with no way to really get a boat through to the lake. But there’s another stream that you can get a canoe down to Soldaat Lake. My guess is those fellas are taking gators out on the lake. That’s where I’d take them.” He grinned at me. “You can pull an electric boat up into the mouth of the river and not be seen, but no one can paddle up the other way and surprise you. Don’t want company if you’re doing a little poaching.”

  I didn’t ask how he knew so much about poaching gators. Like in the army, my way of dealing with Tully’s alternative lifestyle was don’t ask, don’t tell. “So how are you going to get to the lake?”

  “From the north, off Jefferson Road, a little creek feeds into Soldaat Lake. Just a nice easy paddle away from where I park the truck. Take about an hour and twenty minutes down the lake to the outlet of the river those boys are camped on. No sweat, little girl, I’ll get into their neighborhood real easy, see if they’re from Ohio and see if they’ve set any gator hooks on the lake.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay,” I said, nodding my head. “I’m coming with you.”

  “What? No way! You almost wet yourself back there.”

  “You aren’t planning on confronting them, are you?”

  “No. Not planning that.” Somehow he didn’t sound all that convincing. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to look too closely at all the ways this could go wrong. Like I said, Tully Jenkins had a history of disasters. “I’m coming with you,” I told him.

  “Why do you wanna come?”

  It was a sensible question and one I hadn’t worked out an answer to. But primarily I was hoping I could save him from himself, dampen down the violence and stupidity. With me along he’d be more cautious; at least I hoped he would. I kept those thoughts to myself and said, “Why should you have all the fun?”

  He thought for a minute and nodded. In his crazy world it likely made sense.

  Paddling miles down a creek and sneak
ing up on some real bad guys just sounded like a barrelful. Hee haw! Bring it on.

  Tully dropped me off at the restaurant and I spent time on the phone replacing myself. If I didn’t get my ass back in there real soon I’d drive myself into bankruptcy or my employees would steal me into it, but that was tomorrow’s worry. My worry bag for today was already full. I quickly called Clay, whose phone was off, thank god — no way I wanted to explain how I was spending my evening, so I left a message saying everything was fine. Another message for Marley and I shot off to the apartment to get into my sneaking-up-on-people kit.

  C H A P T E R 3 3

  We turned onto Jefferson Road at the edge of the park, where civilization meets wilderness. Houses, weathered, unadorned and falling down, said life was hard. Strung out in a thin ragged line along the dirt road, the houses perched on concrete blocks in yards full of rusting cars and cast-off machinery. Squatting in a circle of bare dirt or struggling out of tall grasses, thick vines strangled both man-made and natural forms alike. Every yard seemed to have a lean, half-crazed brown dog that came out to yap at us through bared fangs as we rattled by.

  The land here was neither one thing nor another. Swamp turned into fields of tall grasses dotted with hammocks. Close to the back of the houses crouched dense woods of pine and oak, waiting for a single season of neglect to claim back the occupied land.

  When we got to the pull-off at the bridge, Tully cranked the old truck over to the very edge of the grass ditch. The engine coughed and died. “It’s late,” I said. “Not much light left.”

  Tully’s door squeaked open. “We got two hours of full light to get to the lake, and then we got nearly another hour ’til deep black. More than enough. Don’t worry, little girl.” Right then and there warning sirens started going crazy. When this man said, don’t worry, you sure as hell should.

  I wrapped the bottom of my jeans tight around my legs and pulled Clay’s dark socks up over them. No nasty little critters were going to get at my bare skin — no white flag of sock was going to betray my presence. I was way into this survival stuff.

  I pushed open my door. The truck was tilted towards the ditch and gravity pulled the door down the incline. Some of Tully’s paperwork slid off the floor into the grass. As I stepped down out of the truck my foot hit the manual, shooting it out from under me. I slid down into the ditch, landing on my ass in the muddy water at the bottom. I quickly jumped to my feet, dripping but upright in ankle-deep muck. Water oozed between my toes. The water stank and now so did I. On the road above me, high and dry, Tully laughed. I considered killing him — would have if I’d realized what was coming.

  I sunk my fingers into the tall grass and scrambled back up to the truck. My whole right side was wet, including the cell phone in the buttoned-down pocket of my black cargo pants. I took it out and pressed On. Nothing. “Shit.” Already this adventure was living up to my expectations. On a branch in the underbrush a dove cooed softly in sympathy.

  I wanted to tell Tully I’d changed my mind, tell him I was having second thoughts. Well, maybe even third and forth thoughts, but whatever the count I wasn’t real eager to get started on this misadventure.

  I wanted to tell him to call the cops and forget about it, but pride, that same old demon that would always make me cut off my nose to spite my face, kept me silent. I only hoped that Tully was wrong and they’d already gone. That was the only thing keeping me in this game. I was betting they weren’t as cool as Tully Jenkins, weren’t always ready to push things to the limit.

  Tully muscled the brown-and-green camouflage-painted canoe out of the bed of the pickup, so I held onto the truck bed to keep from sliding down the bank again and picked up my end of the canoe. Together we slid it down the embankment and into the narrow stream under the bridge. The water was pretty clear here, not the dark tannin brown water of the woods. Perhaps here the grasses filtered the water. Tully scrambled up the bank and handed me down a duffel bag, full and heavy. I didn’t ask what was in it, just stowed it in the canoe and waited for him. He went back to the cab of the truck and came back with the long sleeve of a rifle cover. Was this good news or something more to worry about?

  Tully pushed the canoe away from the grass bank and anchored it with his paddle.

  Keeping my weight low and holding the gunnels, I stepped into the canoe and settled in the bow. I took up the paddle. Ahead of us, a blue-grey heron lifted elegantly off the shore with slow even beats of its wings. Legs trailing behind, it flew ahead of us down the waterway, guiding the way to the entrance in the solid wall of deep jungle. I settled my hips and dampened down my misgivings. A nice little paddle with the old man, what could possibly go wrong? Yeah, right.

  We paddled towards the wilderness crouching in front of us, waiting and licking its chops in anticipation of devouring us. The land between the road and deep forest had once been worked but now it had been left to go back to nature. Cabbage palms, our state tree, grew in abundance along the edge of the stream, their trunks cross-hatched with dead branches offering fiber for nests, their fruit feeding the birds and hiding the rats and the snakes that fed on the birds.

  Somewhere farther down the road and beyond the palms on my left a dog barked, not loud or adamant but just to say it was there. A man’s voice told it to shut up while another voice, a woman’s voice, called for the man to come inside. Strange to hear people but not to see them through the dense foliage. I felt a little safer just knowing other people were close, wanted to call out to them and tell them I was among them and not to let me disappear into nothing. A door slammed somewhere in the distance along the thin line of dusty road.

  Within minutes of leaving the bridge we reached the narrow arch into the wild. The man-built world slid away with the water under our craft as we glided back in time into a primordial world, base and immediate. Only the water mattered, sleek and shining and spreading out in front of us, leading us on. The stream was broad here and shallow, the water now like a dark brown sauce, colored with the tannin of dead leaves. The air was strangely quiet, as if nature were holding her breath and waiting to see what these new invaders brought with them.

  The dip and stroke of the paddles eased my anxious heart, the rhythm relaxing and soothing. I said, “Tell me about the snakes,” hoping he’d lie. Dip and pull. “Which ones?” “Start with the ones likely to kill me.”

  More strokes as he counted the reptiles to himself. “Really, only six likely to do that.” He named them, “First the c-snakes:

  coral, copperhead, cottonmouth. Then there are the rattlers: pigmy and diamondback and the canebrake. Other than that, no worries.”

  My paddle stopped in midstroke. I plunked it across the gunnels, the crack sounding loud in the stillness. I leaned on my paddle and looked back at him. He was grinning at me and paddling on. Not a care in the world.

  “I hate snakes.”

  “Then you’re in the right place. The theory is, the fellow upfront stirs them up and the guy in back gets hit. ’Course, theory is well and good as long as someone tells the snake.” I glared at him. “Sometimes I don’t like you much.”

  He laughed softly as we ducked down under the overhanging branches of an oak leaning over the water and maneuvered around a fallen tree. We cut so close to the bank that the grasses combed the water from our paddles as we passed. Ahead of us an otter raised his head to look at us and then scurried, sliding and slipping, into the water and was gone.

  We settled into a silent rhythm until the water grew too shallow to pass through. Tully said, “Get out” in a quiet voice, barely above a whisper. Did he feel it too, the strange waiting, the feeling of expectancy, of being in another world? Or maybe he’d just slipped into his ’Nam jungle mode.

  I got out of the canoe, reaching down to grab the prow and drag it through the shallows, thinking of leeches and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. The mulch on the bottom sucked on my canvas sneakers, trying to vacuum them from my feet. In front of me a fish darted away, the fin on its
back breaking the surface of the shallow water. Above us the canopy thinned as we skirted the edge of a marshy area. Dragging the canoe through tall grass, the late-day sun warming our skin, we found the stream again on the other side and re-entered the forest, startling a white egret that cried and flew up from a branch.

  The waterway narrowed; the banks grew steeper. I sank into water up to my knees. “Okay,” Tully said and braced the canoe while I entered. As I did, I waggled each foot in the water, shaking off the muck and searching for hitchhikers. Leaning on the paddle across in front of me, eyes probing the underbrush along the banks for danger, I settled again.

  The canoe barely wobbled as Tully entered and we slid forward. Branches reached across the stream to each other, sheltering us from the last of the sun. It was cooler here. And darker. My senses came alive and I breathed deeply. The sweet smell of decay, rotting wood and leaves, mixed with the smell of the water. The stagnant, unmoving water of the swamp, the smell of death in our nostrils, the roots of a cypress tree jutting out like the arthritic knuckles of an old man’s hand, these were the things I fixed on. My eyes searched the trees, noting air plants and mosses and moving on, searching for danger or information I might need. I didn’t know what form danger might take; I only knew it was out there, waiting.

  Behind me Tully began to sing softly, “Oh mama, I can’t dance, the boys all got sticks in their pants. Oh mama, I can’t…” The canoe rocked gently as Tully moved forward and swatted at something on the back of my collar.

  “What?” I asked.”

  “Nothing, don’t worry.”

  Hell girl, nothing to worry about out here, just bad men, snakes and spiders and god knew what else. “I’m used to bars and things,” I explained and laid the paddle across my knees. I watched the water run off the end. “I know what to worry about there, crazies and drunks and druggies but there’s real scary stuff out here.”

  He laughed. “Don’t worry, got you covered, little girl.”

  I wished I could believe it.