Everglades Assault

by Randy Wayne White

  “It’s a technique that’s always worked for me.”

  She smiled. “You’re just trying to be nice.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not. I’ve never read any of those sex manuals, or those magazine forums. Makes it a little too clinical for my taste. People study those things as if they’re trying to get ready for a majorleague tryout or something. When it comes to love, you just sort of follow your nose.”

  She wrinkled her nose impishly. “Hum,” she said. “That sounds nice.”

  I reached over and mussed her hair. “When your time comes, lady—whether it’s with me or someone else—I have a feeling you’ll do just fine.”

  “Just fine?”

  “Just great, maybe.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

  Even after helping me recover the treasure, the Yarbroughs had not changed their lifestyle.

  They still lived in the old Florida plank house with the tin roof down by the sea. Ragged chickens scratched in the lawn, and their big Chesapeake Bay retriever, Gator, slept in the shade of a giant oak. In West Virginia, the rural folks have junked cars in their yard. In coastal Florida, it’s junked boats. And the Yarbroughs had their share: old boats up on blocks; a big wooden Chris hauled out on ways for painting; chunks of engine parts and outboards rusting in the weeds.

  The mahogany Chesapeake thumped its tail lazily when he saw the family truck.

  But when he noticed me, his attitude changed. He jumped to his feet, roared a warning, then came trotting up stiff-legged, tail like a scythe. He punched me once in the leg with his nose, growled, then looked at April for orders. He had bright-yellow eyes, like a wolf.

  “It’s okay, dog. You remember Dusky.”

  The Chesapeake grudgingly admitted that he did, pulled away when I tried to scratch his ears, then sidled back and plopped down in the shade with a sigh.

  “I think he’s starting to like me,” I said.

  “Oh, he’ll never really like you—until you become part of the family,” April added cryptically.

  Hervey was in the house. He looked up when the screen door slapped shut. He had his gear packed in a khaki sea bag. As always, he had a big chew of Red Man in his cheek. He seemed almost embarrassed when we saw what he was doing.

  The cleaning oil and cloth were spread before him on the floor. He had the cleaning rod in his meaty right fist.

  “You never know,” he said in explanation. “Up there in the ’glades, Dusky, things can get real rough real quick.”

  On his lap was an old sawed-off twelve-gauge.

  There were two boxes of shells on the table beside him.

  5

  “Daddy, you don’t really think you’re going to have to use that, do you?” April looked half mad, half just plain scared.

  “Damn it, girl—this ain’t none of your concern. This is man business. You just go on along into the kitchen and fix us something to eat.”

  That was not the thing to say to someone like April. Now she was just mad.

  “Man business! Daddy, there’s no such thing as just plain ‘man business’ anymore! And if you want something to eat, fix it yourself!”

  “They teach you how to be uppity there at the state university?”

  “You’re damn right!”

  “You know I don’t like you swearing.”

  “And I don’t like you and Dusky going places where you might have to use a gun!”

  They glared at each other for a minute, then both broke into laughter.

  They were a match for each other: both stubborn and smart, with an underlying sensitivity.

  Like father, like daughter.

  “I’m taking this here shotgun,” he said.

  “And I’m not going to fix you anything to eat until you get back.”

  “It’s a deal,” he said. And they both laughed again.

  I helped Hervey pack his gear into the pickup. None of us liking farewell scenes, Hervey’s wife and April said good-bye to us at the door. April hugged her father, kissed him on the cheek—then surprised me with a kiss full on the lips.

  When she did it, her face flushed with a heretofore unseen shyness, and she disappeared quickly into her room.

  Hervey got behind the wheel of the pickup truck and pedaled it roaring to life. And just when we were about to pull out, he snapped his fingers.

  “Damn, almost forgot something.”

  “Yeah?”

  He looked at me. “What do you think about taking that big ugly dog of mine?”

  “Hervey, you know I love dogs—but I’m not wild about the prospect of walking out on my own boat some night and getting attacked by that Chesapeake of yours.”

  “Oh hell, he’s just mean around the house here. Friendly as a pup when you get him away.”

  “I’m not sure I believe that.”

  “Besides, he’s a good tracker. He’ll help us run down that Swamp Ape thing.”

  “Haven’t you read the books? Dogs are supposed to be scared to death of Abominable Snowmen.”

  Hervey picked at something on his hand. “He ain’t what you’d call a normal dog. Besides, you and me both know there’s no such thing. I’m telling you, Dusky, that dog’s a regular damn genius in the swamp. Remember? I found him in the swamp. He’d gone clear wild and was making his living eating small gators and God knows what else when I found him.”

  “Yeah, but we’re going to be spending a lot of time on the boat.”

  “Hell, he’s the best boat dog you ever saw! Just jumps overboard when he wants to crap, then swims to catch up when he’s done.”

  “You expect him to swim and catch up—”

  “Besides, it’ll make my family up there in the’glades feel better with him around. They got a couple of small cur dogs, but they just ain’t up to snuff. Be nice to leave him with ’em when we have to go someplace.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m convinced.”

  “Fine,” said Hervey. “I’ll just go and get him.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “What?”

  “Look in the mirror—or just turn around.”

  The big Chesapeake had already jumped into the back of the pickup. He sat on his haunches, his nose against the cab window. The yellow eyes glared at me—as if he knew which side of the discussion I had been on.

  “Ready to go, Gate?” Hervey yelled out the window.

  The dog plopped down on Hervey’s duffel bag and went to sleep.

  Florida Bay spread away from the oasis splotches of mangrove islands, vast and green and seemingly endless.

  Florida Bay is a tricky pocket of water. On a spring low tide, there are thousands of acres of exposed grass flats, all rivered with a complex network of deeper troughs that would take a lifetime to know well.

  It’s easier to follow Northwest Channel out of Key West, then cut a rum-line northeast for Nine-mile Bank where you can pick up the intercoastal waterway for Flamingo.

  So that’s what we did.

  I ran Sniper from the flybridge, fresh dip of Copenhagen between lip and gum, a cold ration of Tuborg in my hand.

  For as much as I am on the sea, the love of heading for open water aboard a boat you trust has never left me.

  Away from the cumulous buildup of a landmass, the sky opens clear and blue and flawless. The wind birds and the dolphin that run before the boat are your only company, and it somehow recharges your respect for them, knowing they live and hunt and reproduce upon the far reaches of water, where few men ever go.

  With nothing else to do, Hervey got one of the light-tackle Penns out. He rigged up a trolling leader, added a big silver spoon, and trailed the artificial seventy yards behind us as we cruised.

  The big lion of a dog slept comfortably at his feet.

  “Fish on!” Hervey yelled after a quiet twenty minutes.

  At the speed we were going, I knew it could only be one of a very few species: a king or cero mackerel, or a barracuda. Or maybe even some wild-eyed ambe
rjack.

  But it was a ’cuda—and a big one at that.

  I cut the throttle back and took some time to enjoy watching Hervey play the fish.

  People who only fish freshwater miss a lot. We have the jumping monsters—tarpon and billfish and snook—which come out of the water much like giant bass.

  But there are also the greyhounding pelagic fish which make long skipping jumps beyond belief.

  The big ’cuda made a veeing oblique run away from Sniper, then made a twenty-yard skip that had all the velocity of an arrow. Hervey tried to bring it up short, but the fish got the best of him and stripped off more line.

  “Case of beer that he’s more than four feet long!” Hervey yelled as he worked the fish.

  “You’re on,” I yelled back—not altogether sure that he wasn’t right.

  It took a sweating, back-creaking twenty minutes for him to get the barracuda alongside—and there was no doubt that it was well over four feet long. It gasped on its side looking for all the world like the blade of some ancient king’s sword: the chrome bulk of it blotched with black, its yellow cat eyes blazing, and its mouth a slash of stiletto teeth.

  “You want ’cuda for supper?” Hervey asked.

  “I don’t know. This far away from the reefs, he’s probably okay, don’t you think?”

  It wasn’t a matter of taste of which I was speaking. Barracuda is an excellent table fish. I was talking about the danger of eating a fish especially prone to ciguatera, a disease toxic to man. For many years it was commonly believed that fish like this great barracuda became poisonous because of their feeding habits around tropical reefs. The truth is, no one really knows why certain fish can cause the tingling numbness of lips and throat and, in severe cases, total paralysis. The old wives’ tales will tell you that small barracuda are safe to eat—but that’s not always true. Another story tells you to place a penny on the’cuda’s flesh overnight. If the penny turns green, the fish is poisonous. It’s a very strange disease. In the Caymans, they eat only the barracuda from the south side of the island, where it is highly prized table fare. Supposedly, only the barracuda on the north side of the island are poisonous.

  But like so many things about the sea, few “facts” are sure to be true.

  “Guess we just ought to let him go, huh?” Hervey said.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  But before he had a chance to snip the wire leader, the great fish gave an awesome slap of its tail and freed itself.

  I hadn’t noticed the dog. He had been watching the fish in the same way a cat eyes a bird.

  And when the leader gave way, the big Chesapeake didn’t hesitate. He jumped full-bodied directly onto the fish. He gave a loud roar, then dove under after it.

  But the ’cuda was way too fast for him. It disappeared torpedolike through the clear water.

  The dog wasn’t convinced. He dove again and again, eyes wide open, searching the bottom in water twelve feet deep.

  He looked and swam with the grace of a mammoth otter.

  “You’re right, Hervey. That’s no ordinary dog. He’s shark bait disguised by a fur coat.”

  “I’d rather let him take the chance than rob him of the pleasure,” Hervey answered sagely.

  “You mean he actually catches fish?”

  “He’s pure hell on small sharks in the shallows. And every now and again I’ll cut a fish loose, and he’ll jump in and catch it again.”

  “I think that ’cuda might have taught him a lesson had he caught it.”

  “You never know. He’s caught ’cuda before. Never one as big as that—but, like I said, you never know.”

  Finally convinced the fish was gone, the dog surfaced, blowing water through its nose. He barked once in frustration, scanned the horizon, then defecated with imperial concentration. He climbed back aboard on the dive platform, his yellow wolf eyes bloodshot with diving.

  “Mind if we get under way?” I asked the dog.

  He gave me a sour look, then collapsed by Hervey’s feet.

  “I think he’s ready,” Hervey said, chuckling.

  “How nice,” I said. “I’m honored.”

  I climbed back atop the flybridge and headed for Nine-mile Bank.

  The water was so clear, you could see the shoals of Bamboo Banks long before they became a hazard.

  In the turquoise distance, heat shimmered over the shallows, and the darkness of them looked like a gathering of gigantic creatures.

  On the swollen expanse of sea and sky, I felt very small indeed aboard Sniper.

  After a steady hour of running, I picked up the markers at Schooner Bank, and just off intercoastal marker 12 I saw the first thin landmass since we had left the Keys: Sandy Key and Carl Ross Key.

  Someone in a yellow bonefisher casted toward an oyster bar nearby. The mangrove islands were like trimmed hedges.

  “Just about there?” Hervey yelled up from below.

  It was a rhetorical question. He probably knew as well as I that Flamingo wasn’t far away. He had spent his boyhood exploring the offshore reefs and the shallows of Florida Bay.

  But it was his way to let the man running the boat serve as the source of all knowledge.

  “Not far,” I answered.

  Once safely away from the crescent expanse of banks, I brought Sniper around marker 4 below the white sweeping beach of Cape Sable and headed east.

  There were more mangrove islands now. They looked frail and desolate on the open sea. Pelicans and frigate birds roosted on the islands, and there was the harsh guano smell as we cruised past Murray and Oyster keys and the distant silhouettes of Johnson and Dildo keys.

  The little settlement of Flamingo at the very tip of Florida proper was, in early times, a fish ranch and charcoal center. The pioneers there made charcoal by cutting buttonwood, piling it in neat stacks, then burning it. The boats would come across Florida Bay from Key West with food and supplies, and return with a load of coal—or cane syrup, with which the Flamingo pioneers supplemented their income.

  No one seems really sure how the place got its name. Some seem to think that the big pink flamingos used to come there in large numbers from Cuba, going strangely northward out of their natural range. Others think early settlers there just mistook the pink roseate spoonbills for flamingos.

  As I said, no one really seems to know for sure.

  But in 1893, the first post office established the name—even though the rare flamingos you will see there now are probably escapees from the racetracks in Miami.

  I brought Sniper along through the dredged channel, raising the concrete buildings and palm trees before us.

  The people of Flamingo once lived at the water’s edge in wooden houses built on stilts. But that all ended when the national park system took the place over in 1947. Now Flamingo looks like vintage government national park issue: cement block motel, restaurant and marina, with American flags flying and plenty of khaki trash cans with plastic liners.

  I brought Sniper up to the fueling docks and shut her down while Hervey worked the lines.

  Because we had gotten a late start, the sun was closing toward dusk. There were a few tourist cars in the parking lot, and several small flats skiffs and charter boats were tethered to the fine government-quality docks. I looked for the boat of a friend of mine, and saw that it was there.

  Hervey came ambling up. He wore faded jeans and a button-up shirt that made him look more like a cowboy than a sailor. “This place has sure changed since I was here as a boy,” he said.

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  He shooed a covey of mosquitoes away from his face and smiled.

  “Bugs are just as bad, though. They’re the one thing no government on earth can chase away.”

  I looked off across the water toward Key West, where the freaks and street merchants would be gathering at Mallory Square for the sunset.

  “If we hustle, we can make it up to Whitewater Bay before dark,” I said. “We can anchor there, or just keep on g
oing toward Shark River. There’ll be some tricky water, running at night, but once back into the Gulf, we could be off Chokoloskee in a few hours.”

  Hervey put his hands on his hips and stretched as if his back hurt. “With me handling the spotlight all night, right?”

  “Right.”

  He grinned and spit an amber stream into the water. “You know, if we could cut straight through the ’glades here, my ma’s place ain’t but about twenty-five miles away. As it is, we got about eighty miles to go.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you much care for the idea of running all night.”

  “And the look on your face tells me you ain’t too crazy about it either.”

  “You’re right. So let’s get a room at the motel so we can grab a shower, have a drink and a hot supper at the restaurant, and head out early tomorrow.”

  “For an old married man like me, it’ll seem like a vacation.” He gave me a wink. “They tell me the waitresses here tend to be real pretty.”

  “And if one so much as smiled at you, you’d break a leg running away.”

  “Hah! I ain’t that old!”

  I let Hervey take care of the refueling while I tried to hunt up my old friend. Hervey was right. If—through some strange vehicular combination of canoe, swamp buggy, and airboat—we could head straight cross-country, our final destination was very close indeed.

  There aren’t many roads in south Florida, and only two good ones in the Everglades—and they both go east and west. So travel is not easy. Even in these times, it makes the few rural settlements there even more remote—and more than occasionally lawless.

  But however far apart they are, people who live in the Everglades are a community unto themselves. They know each other and take care of each other, and feel it almost a duty to pass on the bits and pieces of fact and gossip they have heard when they meet.

  And that’s why I wanted to find my Flamingo friend. If there was some shady business going on in the heart of the ’glades, he just might know about it.

  I stopped at the little concrete office of the houseboat concession. Outside at the cement quay, the thirty-six-foot houseboats were lined, neat and gleaming. Tom Healy, who runs the concession, sat in his cramped office doing paperwork. He looked up when I came in, hesitated, then smiled in recognition.