The Swamp Killers

by Sarah M. Chen

  Twenties gave way to thirties, gave way to mid-thirties, when Javier woke up one morning with a mental itch—a whispering desire that his life as a writer wouldn’t be complete until he had written a book. An ambitious book. Not a novel, like he had wanted to write in high school—he didn’t want to waste time on a made up story—but rather he wanted to write an important book, a thick doorstop of nonfiction, a story of true people, human drama, a book that would reach toward the condition of America, a definitive snapshot of his times, a Pulitzer-prize-winning work of journalism.

  Strawberry-blonde Astrid left him within the week. Not because of Javier’s book idea, which obsessed him, but because the itch he felt, the desire to write, was merely a symptom of a larger midlife crisis they both were reeling from. As they engaged each other in those long painful conversations in the still-dark afternoons of very early spring, conversations that lasted through fitful nights, tearfully hashing out everything that was right and wrong about themselves and each other, they each realized they wanted similar things, but just not together. Javier needed a spiritual quest of some sort, a great soul journey to find parts of himself he hadn’t realized he had lost; Astrid needed greater immersion in an art scene she had felt on the fringes of for far too long. Amicable. They even kissed when Javier left his keys on the counter and walked out of their apartment forever.

  He sold his record collection, quit reporting, boxed up his books to store in his parents’ garage, and at the Greyhound station bought a ticket for the next bus leaving, to wherever it was heading. He set out in search of the Great American Story. This had been an early ambition of his, to set out on a Greyhound with nothing more than a backpack and notebook, to observe, to experience, to live, to write.

  Greyhound routes aren’t nearly as romantic as Javier imagined, however, and rather than find the meaty details of the American Condition, he found himself merely killing long hours while watching distractedly the farmlands and strip malls scroll past in endless repetition. Many fellow passengers had rank body odor or ate fast food near him, causing him to breathe through the fabric of his collar for long stretches of road, improvising a gas-mask effect. Thinking of Astrid, realizing he’d given everything away. Just given everything away. What am I doing? he more than once wondered. Astrid, pure happiness, pure happy Astrid, a great beauty and already seeing someone else, he saw on Facebook.

  It was during this time, however, these long weeks of blowing through money at Holiday Inns and Courtyard Marriotts before realizing he could sleep on the Greyhounds during the day to save money on hotels by staying up all night, that he began to immerse himself in movies. He needed to kill hours and hours through the night, and so he caught whatever was playing at whatever cheap Cineplex in whatever dust fringed town he happened to end up in. A weird life: all night diners lingering over pie and coffee, late show movie theaters, walking miles down unfamiliar streets in the nighttime illumination of streetlamps, a hotel stay every third night or so to shower, long naps on the bus as he wound coast to coast and back again.

  His first screenplay was called Intent to Deceive, written in a spiral notebook in between New Mexico and Alabama, about a courageous journalist bringing down the corrupt governor of Minnesota, the names of characters thinly veiled references to people he knew from the State Capitol, the screenplay chockablock with nervy heroism and poor dialogue and wistful pages-long sex scenes with a strawberry-blonde lawyer named Ingrid. From Alabama to Florida, he wrote a second screenplay, No Higher Power, about a strawberry-blonde legislator named Brigitte, who, trapped in the corridors of the Minnesota State Capitol during a hostage crisis, uncovers and then single-handedly fights off an alien invasion in the form of shape-shifting senators.

  Taking a little armpit wash and rinse-off at the bathroom sinks in the Bradham Brooks Library in Jacksonville, Javier used a guest pass library card to log onto a public computer. Browsing meanderingly, he came across a series of news articles about court trials concerning a killing spree from years before, mob action about a crime boss named Duplass and the local legend of buried cash.

  The feeling of reading this news story was at once tingly and terrifying. The story called to him, the nearly forgotten ghosts of the mentioned dead seemed to whisper his name.

  Javier splurged several dollars to print out as many articles about the Duplass killings and subsequent trials as he could find and then splurged for an extended-stay suite in the city, more or less a shithole motel with a pool. Over the past fourteen months of his life, Javier had seen every movie that had been released to larger theaters, and even a few foreign films when he was lucky enough to find himself in a place like Chicago or New York, cities still with thriving art house theaters. Movies, Javier reflected, were formulaic. A “based on a true story” crime film would appease several of his interests. There was a Shakespearian element to an Atlanta businesswoman named Olivia Duplass, he thought. And a further Shakespearian echo in the love affair between Olivia’s daughter Melody and an FBI agent. Was this all true? He wondered. The real treasure in this story, he realized, was the part about the buried treasure itself, rather than the flashier stuff about mob killings. A true-crime story about buried treasure…

  To prepare for the seriousness of the task ahead, of writing a screenplay he was sure would be his first artistic triumph, Javier took an Uber to the Office Depot on Baymeadows Road, where he bought a fresh spiral notebook and a set of fine-tipped pens. He walked to Taco Bell. He neatly stored his library printouts in the notebook’s front folder, each sheet covered in notes about Timmy Milici and Melody Duplass, the connections to Atlanta organized crime. Romeo and Juliet meets the Godfather meets Treasure Island, he giddily elevator-pitched to the producers in his imagination.

  He wrote in his hotel room starting at six a.m., drinking the room-brewed coffee and smoking on a balcony that overlooked the motel’s parking lot. He walked the surprisingly park-like roads of the little industrial park he found himself in, past small ponds with fountain features spraying, to eat brunch at a Cracker Barrel and revise what he had written. He sat by the pool to write through the afternoons and walked again to find dinner. Occasionally he took cabs to public libraries, or to places mentioned in the articles, to get a sense of realism in his imagination. He wrote in Starbucks after dinner. He wrote in the half-dim of movie theaters during the forty-five minutes or so of commercials and trailers preceding whatever feature he was about to enjoy.

  His first title for the new film was Buried Intent, liking that he used the word intent in titles, imagining a future film or literary critic would notice this habit of his and write an essay about it, but as he progressed and focused his story on the buried treasure in the swamps of Florida, he changed the title to Kobultana after the secret location of the crown jewels hidden in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

  One afternoon, Javier counted out his remaining cash in a measly few piles of twenties and one pile of fives and ones, figuring he could afford another two nights in the motel before becoming homeless. Over eggs at the Cracker Barrel he decided he should pony up for an alligator tour of the nearby swamplands. He saw signs for the tours everywhere, a tourist trap activity, and was eager to see the swamps firsthand because he had read in one of the court testimonies that a man involved in the buried cash scheme had apparently been killed and eaten by an alligator, a Floridian fate both hilarious and cruel. His usual waitress tipped him off about a friend of her boyfriend’s cousin, a swamp psychic and gator guide named Hickory Sweeney who could take him out on his fan boat.

  “You should have written that character into the screenplay,” said Donora.

  “Hickory Sweeney, the gator guide?” said Javier. “I did write him into the story, but…that other screenwriter removed him. Rewrites.”

  Donora rolled her eyes. “I like the idea of a swamp psychic, whatever that is.”

  “Anyway, the choreography. Or, training,” continued Javier. “About the alligators…”

  Javier
took an Uber to the bait shop/souvenir shop/office for Swamp Tours just outside of Jacksonville called Hickory’s Chomp and Bait. He stepped from the car and shaded his eyes from the sun, taking in the clapboard signs and the fishy stink and swirls of dust from the gravel lot. He opened the creaking screen door and noticed strips of flypaper bejeweled with the fat emeralds of fly bodies. Hickory Sweeney waited behind a counter, watching Fox News. He was a thin presence with greasy hair and leathery, oily skin, wrinkled and ridged with veins. Javier was the only tourist that afternoon, maybe even that week or month. Hickory Sweeney played up the danger of gators on their short walk from the office to the edge of the Swamp, where Hickory tore in half the paper movie-like ticket he had sold Javier moments before.

  Hickory Sweeney took him out on the fan boat and, almost immediately, several smallish alligators approached the boat and waited like puppy dogs for Hickory Sweeney to toss out nuggets of raw chicken.

  “I read a news article once where people trained alligators to protect a house out in the swamp. Like, way out in the swamp. Trained them up just like you’ve done with these alligators, here. Is that sort of thing easy, or common?” asked Javier, watching the feckless gators.

  “These are dangerous beasts,” growled Hickory Sweeney. “One wrong move and they’ll eat you alive. Alive! They don’t care, they’ll eat you while you scream.”

  Sweeney tossed out a chicken and the toothless half-blind runt he later called “Muchacho” snapped and nearly wagged his tail.

  “Could you train them to guard a house or something?” asked Javier.

  “Oh, you can’t train these creatures, they’re the most savage on the planet Earth, holdovers from the terrible days of dinosaurs,” said Hickory Sweeney, tossing a nugget to “Hulk Hogan,” another toothless wonder.

  “Listen,” said Javier nearing the tour’s end. “I was reading about this story, about a…”

  “Hidden treasure?” said Hickory, scratching and pulling at the flappy skin of his neck.

  “Yes,” said Javier, spooked by Hickory’s prescience, wondering if he might be a swamp psychic after all. “I’m writing about it—I’m wondering if you know of any place like where the treasure is buried, just someplace similar. I want to know what one of these houses looks like, old abandoned houses half covered in swamp. Are those real?”

  “Oh, they’re real,” said Hickory, as if communing with spirits. “The bones of houses like skeletons of the dead, the swamp eats their souls.”

  “Eats…whose souls?” asked Javier.

  “I can do you one better,” said Hickory Sweeney. “I can take you to the very house where them kids buried those jewels.”

  “Cash, wasn’t it?”

  “You been lied to,” said Hickory Sweeney. “But, speaking of cash.”

  A hundred dollars bought Hickory Sweeney’s time to take Javier to the Swamp House, the very Swamp House used by Timmy Milici and Melody Duplass, Hickory Sweeney relentlessly assured him. The last of his hotel money. Double the hundred, Hickory said, and he would wait around to take Javier back. Javier was only good for $176.54, total, and they had a deal. Hickory turned his fan boat abruptly away from the route he had been taking and they plunged through low hanging branches, through into a sort of canal that ran behind a shopping mall and smelled like rotten French fries and sewage. Few words were spoken between the two men, Javier occasionally checking his watch: twenty minutes, a half hour. He wrote down details of his surroundings, hoping for a chance to sketch out a ghost orchid or describe the way the light hit the water or find the right words to describe the specific shade of green, but was disappointed by how many buildings he could see all around them. The disappointment didn’t last, however, because the scenery eventually changed, obliging many of Javier’s preconceptions—they plunged into a wider swatch of water, much of the sunlight blocked out by the canopy of trees. Yes, this is a swamp, thought Javier, looking above him for dangling snakes. He was too admiring of the weird beauty of the place to keep track of details.

  “Where are we?” he asked. “Can you point this out on a map?”

  “No amount of money in the world would get me to spill where we are,” said Hickory Sweeney, his voice tensing. “This place don’t even exist on most maps, son.”

  “Ok…” said Javier, shrugging his shoulders.

  Soon they arrived at a structure that Javier, in his later research, would uncover as a “shotgun house,” a boxy board and batten building, one room right after another in a straight line, front door to back door. The color was charcoal, the moss was green and brown, the wood sagged, and fat birds lazily flew away as Hickory Sweeney pulled up near the mud-soaked front stoop.

  “I just gave you all my money, so killing and robbing me out here wouldn’t serve a purpose,” said Javier, an attempt at humor, and Hickory Sweeney laughed a chesty throaty cough that reverberated against the trees until the sound suddenly died in the moist air.

  “Right,” said Javier.

  He stepped off the fan boat gingerly and entered the trash-strewn house. Someone once lived here. There was a broken stereo, a framed poster of Elle Macpherson in a mid-eighties’ bikini. Javier found the place creepy, wondered if this was actually Hickory Sweeney’s house, but when he made it to the back stoop, Javier sensed a great beauty in the surrounding swamp. He heard all the swamp sounds singing to him, and was reminded again of Pale Fire, of spirits communicating with the living, and he thought of Will-o’-the-wisps, fools’ fire, and imagined the young frightened Melody Duplass here alone through the night. He gazed deep into the swamp below the stoop and thought for a moment, but then reconsidered, about actually trying to dig up treasure. This surely wasn’t where Timmy and Melody really were, thought Javier. Hickory Sweeney tried to extort him for another dose of cash, but Javier leveled with him, actually showing his empty wallet and turning out his pockets, offering him a ten-punch card for coffees before Hickory agreed that Javier was tapped out. Hickory did, however, accept the coffee card once they were back at the parking lot, Javier waiting for his Uber.

  I’m aggrieved knowing Javier’s story, I’m aggrieved knowing these details of my conception, I’m aggrieved because the scene as it was written, the original swamp scene in Kobultana, as it was photographed by Donora Kovic in those early days of filming, is beautiful. I could have been beautiful. Beautiful Melody Duplass alone in the shotgun house in the Florida swamp, on the run from her mother, from the mob, in love with Timmy but frightened, too, lit with only the trembling candle she carried with her room to room. Timmy Milici had left her alone that night, in the shotgun house in the Florida swamp, with stolen jewels that gleamed like shattered rainbow fragments. Donora’s photography of this scene is tranquil, her images are beautiful, the will-o’-the-wisps ghostly as they communicate to Melody in supernatural code, warning her that Timmy, her beloved Timmy, is at that moment murdering her mother Olivia, that Timmy can’t be trusted, that she should run, run now, with the jewels…The ghosts warned her of what was to come, the ghosts wanted to protect her, and Melody listened to their mournful messages.

  But I am not beautiful. In my final version, my version released to theaters and cell phone screens and televisions, long after rewrites, long after Donora was fired in a pique of rage by the Director, long after the new Director of Photography was hired, long after the editing and the reshoots. I am not beautiful. Melody Duplass undresses slowly while a swamp hillbilly, playing no part in the story, perhaps the last vestige of Hickory Sweeney’s swamp psychic, leers through the window, while the camera leers at the young actress’s sweat-glistening body, as the audience leers, as she, inexplicably, decides to skinny-dip in the swamp water, massage herself with handfuls of mud before rinsing, before dressing in skimpy cutoff shorts and a T-shirt knotted just beneath her breasts, a sort of Jacksonville-inflected softcore fantasia on a country music video.

  Nursing their third drinks, each a little tipsy, Donora asked Javier what else he had written. Sh
e was close enough now that Javier was mesmerized by her pearly pink lip gloss and the scent of her hair.

  “Well, I have this character,” said Javier, “who for years—years—has been sending in hilarious, but really raunchy, captions to the New Yorker cartoon contests, one after the next. And in his mind, he sort of thinks that maybe the editorial staff have noticed him, that they could never use his captions because they’re too X-Rated, too truthful, but he imagines they all secretly admire him, like a true artist, and then one day, he’s in a position to meet some of the editors, at a party in New York, and—”

  “What captions do you use? What are the dirty captions?” asked Donora, a light in her eyes.

  Javier’s chest thrummed, his face flushed. “Oh,” he said, “I guess—I guess I haven’t written in any of the actual captions. I don’t have any.”

  And at that moment, Javier realized that Donora was out of his league, and all chemistry between them snapped as quickly as a pricked bubble. He offered to buy her another drink, but Donora bought her own, and mentioned there were others at the party she should say hello too, and they agreed to see each other on set the next morning but Javier, only belatedly, only after he was back at his hotel room, realized that the producers hadn’t invited him back to set the next day, being only the original screenwriter. His flight home to Duluth left early, and there was no way for him to reach Donora, to let her know that he wouldn’t be around to see her.