Acts of Nature

by Jonathon King

  It was an hour before dawn when the worst of Simone hit and Harmon lay on the leather couch with his wife in their bunker, front to back, like trembling spoons in a darkened drawer.

  “I’m glad the kids are at school.”

  Harmon only nodded a response to the first words his wife had said in an hour. They’d sent both of their kids to Notre Dame in Indiana. Landlocked. No hurricanes. No earthquakes. And God’s own prejudicial eye watching out.

  They waited for the wind scream to stop. Then they waited longer, until the numble went away, until silence. Harmon checked his watch: ten a.m. When he finally opened the bunker door, his house was intact. He used the big flashlight to move through the living room and kitchen, spraying the beam up into the high corners, looking for gaps, for water stain. When he got to the back door he opened it carefully, waiting for something to fall, a tree limb, a piece of roof tile, the sky itself.

  Out on the patio he heard the stiff ruffle of leaves, mostly from the giant ficus tree that he could see had blown down and now straddled his fence. In the pale light he did a quick assessment: there were two additional sheets of screen ripped away from the pool enclosure. The turquoise blue water had turned dusty, the surface layered with dirt and leaves and twigs that had blown in through the openings and settled. But all the ironwork still stood. He looked up and off to the south and saw the raw hide of his neighbors’ roof where it was missing a quarter of its half-barrel tiles, leaving the black shred of tar paper exposed. To the east there was an unfamiliar gap in the horizon and Harmon had to think for a moment. What was gone? What was missing? Then he realized the Martins’ huge gumbo limbo tree, one hundred years old and seventy feet tall, had been pulled up and toppled, removed from sight.

  “Is it safe?”

  Harmon turned to see his wife, her shadowed figure just inside the doorway, her toes at the threshold, feet unwilling to move. After Andrew she had moved around the destruction of her home like a zombie, eyes wide and dry and uncomprehending. After three days she found their family scrap- book, clippings of the kids’ ball games, pictures of first days at school, birth announcements, all soaked and ripped and ruined. That’s when she started to cry and Harmon talked her into going to her sister’s in Michigan. He stayed to clean up and clean out a lifetime.

  But this storm was not the heavyweight Andrew had been. When Harmon walked around his property to the front there were plenty of trees down. The streets were cluttered with debris: broken roof tiles, branches as thick as a man’s wrists, and the crumpled metal and plastic framework of the solar panels that had once been mounted on the Connellys’ rooftop. Across the street Donna Harper’s van had been pushed off her driveway and it now sat at an angle in her side yard. Harmon looked down the street. The new neighbors with the tape on their windows were unscathed. They’d gained another degree of false confidence.

  He was still standing in the street, watching folks venture out to do their own survey just as he was doing, when his wife came to the front door.

  “Ed. It’s the satellite phone,” she called out.

  Christ, he thought. What the hell could they possibly want now?

  THIRTEEN

  When he woke up, it had to be from the smell. Wet, turgid, soaked earth odor like a compost pit in the rain that had just been forked and turned. That dead fish smell of someone’s catch that had lain in the bottom of the boat for three days while the fishermen went on a bender and then woke to a day when they were penniless again and had to get back to the job they both loved and despised. Buck had been there. And the morning after Hurricane Simone it smelled like he was back. He’d slept through the storm. Not because he was drunk and not that he hadn’t tried to get drunk. His ability to sleep through anything had come from prison. The constant night sound of men snoring, coughing, spitting, and jerking off. The antiseptic flavors of Pine-Sol and industrial-strength cleanser wafting up your nose. Buck had spent years in a place so foreign from his home that his only escape had been in dreamless sleep and it was as if he’d trained himself to do it, to fall into a slumber where he heard nothing, felt nothing.

  He had also lost his ability to get drunk in prison. He had tried the homemade shit that the inmates put together with sugar and fruit from the kitchen crews and then cooked up in some secret ceiling hidey hole where the heat could get to it and ferment the hell out of it. But the taste wasn’t worth the ugly high and he’d simply gone dry while he was inside. After his release he’d tried to drink himself into oblivion but no matter how much he consumed he couldn’t get drunk. Nothing like a sober drinker. If you were into getting women drunk and willing, it was a breeze. You could match ’em drink for drink all night and still have a focus. You could play cards all night, get into bar fights, and still have the advantage of full reflexes and a clear, mean head.

  The other thing he’d lost in prison was his tolerance for darkness. When he was young he’d hunted and gigged frogs and fished in the dark with the eyes of a cat. But there was no darkness in prison. No sunrise or sunset. Just the unnatural fight of electricity, glowing 24/7 and never breaking. Now he would never admit it, but he was afraid of the dark, refused to sleep without some light source nearby. The jobs they’d pulled in the suburbs at night made him clammy and nervous and he’d had to push himself through the fear. Hell, the boys thought he was crazy when he started doing the jobs in daylight, opening the garage doors and looting the places and driving away. But it turned out to be the slickest job they’d done and Buck had not had to deal with the dark.

  Last night the boys had gone home to their mommas late, before the brunt of Hurricane Simone hit. Buck had dumped all the empty beer bottles and cleared the table. He hated to wake up to that reminder in the morning. So while the storm had rolled through Chokoloskee, his stilt home swaying and creaking and threatening to come apart or simply topple over, he pulled his blanket up under his chin, put the battery-powered lamp on the table beside him, and did not come awake until morning when he believed he was roused by the smell.

  He started a fire in the woodstove and put on a pot of coffee first. Then he dressed in a pair of dungarees and his boots. Outside the light was soft, like the sun filtered through dirty gauze, and it made everything dull as if the world had been turned into an old black-and-white photo from the 1930s. Then something he saw caused him to tuck a map under his arm, pour two cups of coffee, and step outside. Trees were down, the mangroves on the eastern side flattened, but even after only a handful of hours they had already started to rise ever so slightly, like they always did after an assault. Several varieties of shingles from rooftops and wood splinters from crab traps had caught the wind and tumbled through town. Now they all lay on the ground with a sheen of wet mud over them. Buck checked the watermark at the base of his steps. The tide and storm surge had come up to the second riser, about two feet, then receded back into the Gulf. There were a few dead mullet under his house, caught up in some rolled bales of chicken wire he’d stored there, like they’d been trapped on purpose. Part of the stink, he thought.

  He walked lightly, picking his way, stepping over boards with the nail points exposed and around the low spots where coffee-colored mud hid their depth. He headed directly to old man Brown’s one-hundred-year-old home and was relieved first to see that the ancient Dade County pine structure seemed untouched by the night’s wind. Around the corner he heard the sound of someone coughing up a substantial quantity of phlegm and then spitting.

  Nate Brown was in his side yard wearing a pair of dull yellow, knee-high rubber boots, a boatman’s foul-weather gear, and a flopping rain hat. He had the heads of three dead chickens in between the fingers of his right fist, their necks stretched with the weight of their wet feathered bodies. The old man was bending at the edge of his wire fence and plunged his other hand into the mud and came up with yet another. He did not turn to look at Buck but had sensed his presence.

  “Goddamned birds. Don’t never learn they cain’t run from no hurrican’,” Brown said
; his southern drawl gave any listener a sense he was pulling each word slowly and reluctandy from the past. “If’n they’d just stay inside the henhouse, they’d a been safe.”

  Buck watched the old man wedge the newly found head into his hand with the others.

  “Pretty good blow last night,” Buck finally said toward conversation, knowing he would get little in return. Brown looked up into the western sky like he was smelling the air in the aftermath as if to measure it.

  “Seen worst,” he finally said, and nothing more.

  “Looks like you came through all right,” Buck tried again, nodding back at Brown’s house. This time there wasn’t even a word in response. An answer would have been rhetorical and Nate Brown did not dabble in the rhetorical, especially with Buck. Brown had known Buck’s father and his grandfather. They might have even been friends back in the day if such a thing had been admitted among the old early settlers of the southwest. But they were connected not so much by something as ephemeral as friendship as by blood and guts and a reliance on one another to stay alive in such a place at the turn of the century. Buck knew that while Brown had respected his father for keeping his mouth shut and going to prison for his part of the smuggling, the old man had no time for him. Even Buck knew he was not the man his father was. It did not stop him from trying to ingratiate himself.

  “Sir, if I can interrupt. Could I offer you a coffee and get your advice on somethin’?”

  Brown looked down at the dead fowl in his hand, the fist full of chicken heads as if asking their opinion, and then tilted his head toward the porch on his house. Neither man bothered knocking the mud off his boots as the storm had already deposited as much debris and wet dirt on the interior floor as it could hold. Buck thought they were heading into the old man’s home, but Brown dropped the dead chickens at the doorway and then walked to the corner of the porch. With a few simple yanks of marine line to release the knots, he let loose the tie-downs to a small hand-hewn wooden table and a couple of straight-backed chairs he’d secured before the hurricane. He scraped the legs across the floorboards and settled in one of the chairs. Buck swallowed a rising humiliation at not being allowed into the house, but he knew it was the old man’s way. He recalled the time when he was a boy and watched his father go into Nate Brown’s home for late night meetings with other men. Once he had even crawled quietly to a corner window to listen, rewarded only by the slow, deep rumble of Nate Brown’s voice but unintelligible words. There had been no way to see past the yellowish glow of a pulled paper window sash that night, and Buck could only imagine the men standing or sitting, circled around Brown like he was some Indian chieftain or voodoo shaman. It was only later he’d learned of the marijuana smuggling activities of his father and the others and tied them in with the strategy meetings. After Brown had done his time in the federal pen, he’d come back home and had made a visit to Buck’s mother, to offer his condolences on the death of her husband. Buck remembered the quaking of his mother’s entire body and the anger of her response: “You was supposed to be the one looked after them men, Nate Brown. You and your goddamn old Glades wisdom,” she spat, and Buck remembered the old man’s gray, unflinching eye going, for the first time he’d ever witnessed, to the floor.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Morris,” he’d said. “But each man makes his own decisions dependin’ on his nature, ma’am. That’s just God’s way.”

  “Fissst,” Buck’s mother hissed and he still recalled the recrimination in the unspoken expletive and how seeing it fly from his mother’s mouth had scared him enough to step back.

  “Don’t you bring God into it none, Mr. Brown,” she’d said. “If you was such a believer you’d remember that you was not supposed to lead them men into temptation.”

  Brown had continued to stare at the floor that day, and for a long time Buck thought the old man had been struck to stone by his mother’s call on the Almighty. But Brown finally looked up and spoke: “I’m not a kingdom nor a power, Ms. Morris. I am just a man my ownself.”

  Despite his mother’s recrimination at Brown and her admonishment to him to stay away, Buck not only continued to be obliging to the old man, he also took it upon himself to ask for his advice and guidance on things pertinent to the Glades and fishing and hunting. And Brown was willing to give it in those instances. It was the line into what he called thievery that the old man would not cross and would turn his shoulder to Buck if he smelled it coming into a discussion.

  But if Buck had even one of his father’s traits it was his careful ways. He did not rush headlong into things. He did not like to react emotionally to threat or doubt or even opportunity. He was no knee-jerker. So he’d given thought to this newly hatched plan. He heard the same stories the boys had of the new generation of Glades camps filled with the things that others’ money can buy. It could mean a big haul. It could mean enough cash from Bobby the Fence to get him off this rail to nowhere. Maybe he’d find a way to clear out of this place, find a better way up in central or north Florida. Some guy in prison had told stories of cattle ranges up in Hendry County. Maybe this was his ticket to another century.

  But Buck also knew that any job had its dangers and a careful man tried to plan, and no one in this world knew more about the Glades than Nate. So he’d brought the map he’d made to get the old man’s sense of the spots they’d marked, the areas they planned to visit.

  Buck set the coffee down on the damp tabletop and pushed a cup to Mr. Brown’s side and then unfolded the map.

  “I’ve got a bit of an airboat trip planned here, sir, and thought I might get your take on some of these here spots you might recognize,” he explained, sliding the chart to edge up against the mug he’d given Brown.

  The old man raised the thick china cup to his lips, took a long draft even though the heat of the coffee still sent steam up and around his prominent nose, and men leaned out over the map. Despite his unknown age, Buck had never seen the man wear a pair of glasses. Brown set the mug down and then reached out and placed his fingertips on each X-crossed spot on the map like he was feeling the place, conjuring a memory.

  “This ’un here is too far north for any good fishin’,” he said. “It’ll be wet now after this blow, but in dry times they ain’t but a foot or two of water.

  “Now this ’un might could get you a few smaller tarpon, maybe some snook. This other is ’bout the same.”

  Buck just nodded his head, watching the old man’s brow, the deep furrows made by a lifetime of squinting into the reflected sun rays bouncing off open water.

  “This ’un here is in an awful pretty spot up in Palm Beach County. Ain’t much to fish ’cause the river over this way draws ’em all, but there’s some gators in a old hole we used to take ever season near there. Big, nasty sumbitches too, pardon the cussin’, son.”

  “I’ve heard worse, sir,” Buck said, like he was back in his teenage years and his father was alive and Brown was back in his seventies.

  “Yep, I know,” Brown said without looking up. “Prison’ll learn you that.”

  They both sat in silence for a moment. Buck knew what the old man thought of him and his arrests. Even though prison was familiar to them both, Brown’s and Buck’s father’s incarcerations had been considered a different breed.

  “But you ain’t goin’ to these places to do no huntin’ or fishin’, are you, boy?”

  It was an accusation, not a question and Buck hesitated in his response. He could try to make up a story, something with a taste of civilization that the old man might not be familiar with.

  “No, sir,” he finally said, eschewing a lie in the face of a man he begrudgingly revered. “It’s a salvage operation.”

  Brown did not look up but Buck could see the lines of a sneer start at the bridge of his nose like he was beginning to smell something foul.

  “You mean like when them boys found that there Caddy Escalade out of gas on the highway up to Naples and salvaged the wheels and electronics?” Brown said, this time looking u
p at Buck with a single eye. Buck was mildly surprised that the old man had heard of that incident with Wayne and Marcus. The fancy wheel rims had sold for a nice price. He avoided the old man’s look, shifting his own back to the map.

  “You know them boys is headin’ for trouble. Don’tcha, son?”

  Buck was not going to get into a philosophical debate with the old man.

  For some men in Florida, trouble had been a natural way for a long time. He thought of the stories his own father had told of citizens in the early 1800s who often “salvaged” the broken holds of ships carrying goods from New Orleans around the tip of the Florida Keys and up the east coast to New York on the tide of the Gulf Stream. When those ships ran aground on the sharp- edged coral reefs, it was considered a Floridian holiday and pillaging was nearly a civic duty. Near the turn of the twentieth century, land owners selling useless deeds to Florida swampland created millionaires overnight who fled with the cash and left the losers behind. Nate Brown himself had poached gators out of his favorite hunting holes even though they were considered off limits after the federal government created the Everglades National Park in the 1940s and the practice was deemed illegal. Those men all used the excuse that what they did, they did to survive. Buck had heard that rationalization a thousand times coming in late-night conversation from the darkened bunks of men up in Avon Park Correctional.