The Man Who Ivented Florida df-3

by Randy Wayne White

  Dr. Ford hardly said a word, but there was an intensity in the way he did it. His way of holding back.

  Walker's own grandfather had been like that; he'd had that reserve. A blue-eyed Belgian who didn't speak the language well enough to understand it was wrong to marry the woman he married, so he just went ahead and did it, anyway.

  To Ford, on the phone, Walker had said, "I see what you mean about if all three boats looked alike. Somebody could have been laying for them and taken Bambridge by mistake. Or taken the two state guys by mistake. But Bambridge's boat was different. A flats boat? Says here a Hewe's Redfisher. So the whole thing falls apart. The state guys, Herbott and Fleet, they were in state-owned Boston Whalers."

  Telling him a little bit so that he might tell her more in return. What she wanted to know about was his uncle.

  Ford had said, "That's assuming one, two, or all of the disappearances aren't accidental."

  "Of course-"

  "It doesn't necessarily follow that if you find one, you find them all."

  "I know. But what are the odds of at least two of the three being connected? Probably all three."

  "Then you're talking about abduction. Isn't that an FBI matter? The infrared surveillance hasn't turned up anything? That's what surprises me."

  Not asking her whether the Coast Guard helicopters had been using their infrared tracking system, or even inventing a reason why he knew about the systems.

  So she had replied, "A couple dozen small brushfires or camp fires, a few boats fishing the park illegally and one cocaine bust, a sailboat crossing from Cancun. What, it would take the systems eighty-seven consecutive working nights to graph the whole area? That's what they told me, the Glades and those islands. It's the biggest single uninhabited and roadless landmass in the United States. That's the stat that really surprised me. I always thought of south Florida as crowded. Two choppers working different grids six hours a night still couldn't check it all." Being frank with him.

  National Security Agency field-service people were familiar with the options. Same thing: She knew that Ford knew that she knew that he knew…

  The second time she'd spoken with him, she'd said, "When they were doing the coordinated searches-" The logged searches had been called after seven days, which was policy."-they did those searches going just about everywhere their boats could go. I think they should have looked where their boats couldn't go."

  Ford had answered, "Everywhere they could go south of Mango."

  "Well, of course. The boundary of Everglades National Park is south of Mango, and that's where Fleet and Herbott were both headed. They wouldn't drive their boats north to reach a place that was south, for God's sake."

  "Of course," Ford had replied. "Why would they turn north to go south? I guess I haven't checked a chart of the Ten Thousand Islands lately."

  Something about the way he said that.

  But she had pressed on: "Maybe that's what I should do. Try south and look at places where boats can't go."

  She could picture Ford with the phone to his ear, standing in his wobbly house with all the books and vials and those pretty fish in the tank outside. She had left the observation vague enough so that he was a little confused. "What are you saying? That you plan to get hold of an airboat?"

  "No, I plan to talk to your uncle again." Said that just as frankly. Then added, "You know, I'd hate to see him get into trouble. There's something about him… he's just got this likable way about him."

  To which Dr. Ford had said, "Yes, but you can't allow that to interfere with'your work."

  Walker was thinking about the way Ford had said it, a CIA kind of flatness in his voice, maybe telling her he didn't care about his uncle, or maybe telling her that she couldn't sweet talk her way into his confidence. Replaying it as she stood in the mosquitoes watching the strange-looking woman waddle back to her car with its Lantana plates.

  Lantana on Florida's east coast, that's where the National Enquirer was?

  Behind her, she heard trooper Cribbs creaking toward her. Heard him say, "Just like I thought. We can't touch him." Like he'd known all along.

  Walker said, "You mean the stuff about open range, the old man was right?"

  "No. Well, I don't think so. The lieutenant, he agreed with me. Looked it up, and all it says is horses and things. Bikes and wagons, that sort of transportation? They have to go by the same laws cars and trucks do." Cribbs tried to say something with his expression, one of those macho beer-commercial smiles. "So I just warn the old dude it'll probably be horse versus semi, he keeps it up. Then maybe I can follow you along to where ever you're going and buy you lunch. Professional courtesy."

  Walker said, "Next time, maybe," walking toward the horses, where Gatrell was waiting for her, watching her with his hat off, smile fixed, calling out, "You got more questions for me, Miz Walker?"

  She did, but Cribbs was at her elbow, listening. So she just said, "No, I happened to be passing by. Quite a coincidence." Playing it cool.

  "Surely is at that. Wouldn't you say so, Joe?"

  The other man was standing beside the cow now, messing with the ropes that held the packs it carried. As if she wasn't even there, the Indian man said, "Steers ain't made for this, but you wouldn't listen to me. We shoulda took two horses-" Then he seemed to notice her and abruptly stopped talking.

  "You must be going on a trip."

  Gatrell said, "We both was, but only one of us might make it," giving the Indian man an odd look. Then he said, "But if you need to talk, you can find us down off the Loop Road-'bout forty miles east of here?-or we'll be back home in 'bout three, four days. We got a friend down there, Ervin T. Rouse."

  Walker thought, If Cribbs wasn't here, I'd ask him right now. Just come out and say it, see how he reacts. The old man likes games so much. Look him right in the eyes and say, "Where are they?"

  But instead, she said, "The trooper here says you're absolutely right. Riding horses on the highway, there's nothing he can do-"

  "It's not very smart. I need to advise these gentlemen that." Cribbs had to throw that in. Show everyone he was the one in control.

  Gatrell gave her that innocent grin, said, "One thing about being my age. You remember all kinds of old laws."

  Walker said, "I bet you do… I bet you do. I'll keep that in mind." Then got in her car, out of the bugs, and sat watching until Gatrell and the Indian rode away.

  TEN

  In 1938, Ervin T. Rouse and his lyric-writing collaborator, Earl, took a train all the way to New York City and recorded a song Ervin'd written, the "Orange Blossom Special," for RCA records. They'd stayed in a hotel that had menus in French and a drinking fountain in the bathroom that Earl liked but Ervin never trusted.

  "I might get down'n my knees to drink whiskey, but not water," Ervin had told Earl. "Lord knows, somethin' ain't natural about that."

  Staying in the hotel was a big deal because, since childhood, they'd been traveling with a flimflam preacher, playing music at minstrel shows, playing at tobacco warehouses and country bars, going by a variety of names. The Three White Ducks, The Redhot Smokin' Tarheels: The names changed as often as their numbers did, but it was always Ervin on fiddle, Earl on the single snare drum. They collected money in a hat. They slept in many a barn.

  But in 1937, riding around Lake Okeechobee in an open white roadster, sobering up on beer after a long night of whiskey, Ervin came up with the tune and lyrics (Earl had passed out) of a song he would later say "just kept bangin' around in my head till it come out whole." That song was the "Orange Blossom Special," a fast fiddle piece so haunting, so demanding of the artist, it has been called the greatest train song in the history of bluegrass music.

  Looky yonder comin', coming down the railroad track.

  It's the Orange Blossom Special, bringin' my baby back…

  At the time, though, Ervin didn't think the song was anything unusual. He and Earl had written hundreds of the damn things and nothing had ever come of any of them. But o
ne afternoon, playing the song outside a Kissimmee barbershop, passing the hat, an Atlanta musical agent heard them, and the next thing they knew, they were on a train for New York, a recording session at RCA, and a stay at the hotel that had menus they couldn't read and a drinking fountain that Ervin, at least, refused to use.

  They made the record, Ervin signed some papers, Earl pocketed a check for three hundred dollars, and it was mostly all downhill after that.

  In the decades that followed, Ervin heard his song played on every late-night talk show by nearly every American country band. He heard it played on the radio. In bars, he heard it played on the jukebox. Once he turned on the public television station and a big orchestra was playing it, up there in that goddamn city, New York. The sheet music was easy to find, too. All the music stores in Miami carried it, and that meant every music store in the country probably had it. Miami was such a modern place.

  Whenever Ervin got the chance, he would thumb through the bins of sheet music, or flip open the books until he found it: the "Orange Blossom Special"; music and lyrics, Ervin T. Rouse."

  His name was always right up there at the top, plain to read. Trouble was, nobody in the music stores believed it was him when he tried to tell them. Same with the country-music stars, when he wrote them letters, putting on plenty of postage so the envelopes would make it clear to Nashville. Same with the country radio stations when he'd call the special phone-in lines.

  "You want to request the "Orange Blossom Special'?"

  "Nope, I wrote it. Just wanted you to know."

  "Sure you did, partner, sure. That song's been around forever," they'd always say.

  And Ervin would reply, "Man, I started young! What was I, seventeen, eighteen when I did it?" But they'd hang up before he had a chance to play the song for them over the phone. By the time he got the phone cradled so he could mount his fiddle under his chin and raise the bow, he'd hear click.

  That song was just so famous, nobody'd believe it was him that wrote it. But if they'd heard him play it, they'd've known. Nobody could play the "Orange Blossom Special" like Ervin T. Rouse.

  It was his old white liquor-making buddy, Tucker Gatrell, who pointed out that not being famous was the least of Ervin's worries. "You supposed to be getting paid, you dumb shit. Every time some big star makes a record of your song, you supposed to get a little somethin'."

  Well, Ervin knew that. In fact, had always felt the three hundred dollars he had been paid was a little thin to cover a song that had become so popular. But it took Tuck, who didn't lack for gall or brains, to go to Miami and convince a fancy Coconut Grove lawyer to look into the matter. A few months later, Ervin received a Manhattan check for one thousand dollars. On the phone, the lawyer told him, "You don't need to thank me, Mr. Rouse. You just sign some papers, turn the royalties over to me. I'll make sure you get a nice check once, maybe twice a year."

  He got those checks, too-sometimes for as much as five hundred dollars.

  Ervin used the money to buy a piece of land in Pinecrest, a little lumber and gator-poaching settlement south of the Tamiami Trail, way back in the Glades, about midway between Miami and Naples. Him and Earl built a plywood shack up on blocks because of the rainy season, trucked in a stove and a generator, and lived pretty well. Pinecrest had a store that sold dry beans and canned goods, and there was a bar there, too. The Gatorhook, where everyone believed Ervin wrote the song because they heard him play it so often.

  The one person who didn't care whether he'd written a famous song or not was the woman he married. His best friend, that's the way Ervin thought of her. A woman so smart and funny and bawdy that he could say any stupid thing that came into his head and she'd make sense of it. Got so he hated being in the house if she wasn't around. Hated coming around the corner, fearing her truck wouldn't be there because she was out shopping or doing some damn thing. When she left the house, it was as if she took the air with her and he couldn't breathe right until she returned. That's how much life that woman had in her.

  But one day she left and didn't come back, and Ervin waited and waited, until he finally went looking, and he found her beyond the fence at the little Midway Airport, where she worked. Her truck was still running, but her heart wasn't.

  That woman had a heart too big for just one person-that's what Ervin always said. But even it couldn't handle the strain of all that caring.

  He wrote a song about that. He wrote a lot of songs for his wife.

  When she left, she took his life with her, and then Earl died, and Ervin figured his career as a songwriter was finished, too-he hadn't been doing much with it anyway, what with so much time spent drinking and mourning and reading the Bible. But then Tucker Gatrell said he wanted to give it a try, become his new collaborator. If Ervin could make so much money on a single song, they ought to make a whole bunch more, Tuck said, once he got involved.

  Tuck was always like that, real bossy. He wouldn't put up with anyone moping around when there was work to be done.

  Tuck had spent a week with him in Pinecrest-too long by the standards of peace-loving Gatorhook patrons-and the two of them turned out seventeen songs, music and lyrics. A few of the songs were pretty good, Ervin thought. "If Jesus Rode the Range, I'd Saddle My Horse Right Now." "Hog Dogs Got My Girl by the Ear!" "Redfish Ain't Roses to My Darlin'." They'd have written more, too, if one night Ervin hadn't fallen off the roof of the shack and landed on his Jim Beam bottle wrong. He almost bled to death by the time Tuck sobered up enough to drive him to the hospital in Miami.

  But when those songs didn't do anything, Tucker lost interest- the man didn't have a long attention span. And that left Ervin T. Rouse to live with the knowledge that, for him, there would be only the "Orange Blossom Special"-a song that dominated him, dwarfed him, and now had a life of its own.

  This tragic knowledge might have driven lesser men into deadly or debilitating extremes: strong drink, religious fanaticism, depraved excesses. But fortunately for Ervin, his early lifestyle had hardened him. He had always liked strong drink, and his early years with the flimflam preacher left him cold on organized religion. There were no interesting alternatives left, so he contented himself with living alone in the Glades, hunting and fishing, and sometimes flying around stone lonely in his wife's beat-up old plane.

  And almost every Saturday night, Ervin T. Rouse would stagger with great dignity to The Gatorhook, where he would play fiddle in return for free drinks, sawing out the "Orange Blossom Special" until the tears streamed down his face..

  The day after leaving Mango, late in the afternoon, Tuck and Joe rode into Monroe Station, an old mess camp back in the late twenties when the Tamiami Trail was being built, but which was now a diner and fuel stop. Monroe Station was a solitary place with its two gas pumps and hand-painted signs: WILD HOG SANDWICHES! That stiff white house sitting alone on the highway, like an island, set among cypress trees at the edge of the asphalt and a whole horizon of saw-grass prairie beyond.

  Tuck reigned to a stop in front of the station and looked up at one of the upstairs windows. As a boy, he'd bunked in that room a couple of nights, traveling with the crews as the dredge pumped its way through the swamp. Later, the house had been used as an outpost for state troopers. Then it became a little bar and dance place, a place Tuck liked.

  He pointed to the window and said to Joseph, "Remember what happened up there that one night?"

  Joseph grinned for the first time all day. "Yep, I sure do 'member that."

  Thirty years past, but Joseph could still look at the window glass and see the images of him and Tuck, both young men then, moving back and forth across the blank frame, dancing with the same friendly lady.

  "Guess the restaurant's already closed. The gawldang television people was probably waiting on us but left."

  Joseph patted Buster and looked away. Tuck had been talking about the television people all day. They had camped just east of Ochopee, and Tuck said the reporters would surely find them there, but they hadn't.
Then he said the entrance to Collier-Seminole State Park was the place, but again no cameras.

  By noon, Tuck was fuming. "I just don't understand it. Best news story in the state and not a sign of them muck thumpers. Maybe they got lost-I bet that's it."

  Joseph thought, Lost on eighty miles of two-lane highway? But he didn't say anything. Back at the picnic place, if Tuck had only closed his mouth for a moment, he would have heard the reporters laughing at him. But he hadn't. Never noticed the looks they gave him-the kind of swervy-eyed look people gave drunks. There would be no more reporters. Joseph was pretty sure of that.

  "Hey, I know what." Tuck couldn't stop thinking about it. "I bet they went straight to Ervin's place."

  Joseph said, "Maybe so."

  "You notice how some of them pretended not to know 'bout the song, like they'd never heard it? That was their way of bein' sneaky, trying to throw the others off the track."

  "You'd know about that."

  "Wanting to get to Ervin first."

  Joseph shrugged.

  Tuck said, "They'll show up, don't you worry."

  "They do, I'll tell them about the water, just like you said." Trying to make Tucker feel better.

  "There you go. Now you're using your noggin, Joe."

  Monroe Station looked abandoned. At least, no one seemed to be around, so they found a spigot out back, where all the swamp buggies and airboats were kept fenced. They watered their horses.

  "I was gonna have me a roast pork sandwich and a beer once we got here."

  Joseph said, "Yeah, and some Vienna sausages. I like to drink the juice."

  "Well, it's a hell of a disappointment."

  "I don't care, just long as we don't have to ride on the highway no more. Them fast trucks gives me the spooks."

  They remounted and set off down the Loop Road, Roscoe's and Buster's hooves clip-clopping on the dirt road. The trees moved in, forming a cool tunnel above them. Some had butterfly orchids growing in the shade. Within an hour, they came to the first of Pinecrest's few houses: simple one-story places, none built close to the other.