The door crashed open and another blue-eyed man in khakis came in, but this one was younger than the first and swaggered shamelessly as he moved toward us. “Hi, ladies,” he said, helping himself to the fourth chair at the table. “I’m Black Hawk. I’ll be your storyteller tonight.”
I about gagged on my pie.
Faye leaned onto her elbows and grinned serenely. “Fly me, big fellah.”
Black Hawk looked somewhat disconcerted, but he recovered quickly. “Okay, well, I’m a friend of the Seminole. I went away and did my service for my country and now I’m back. Seminoles are very private people. But they trust me, and have told me a few of their stories.” He bunched up his arms and leaned onto the table, his big, well-muscled shoulders heaving up like summits on a mountain range. I guess we were supposed to be impressed. “Okay. Well, so what do you know about Seminole storytelling?”
“Nothing,” Faye said. “We got lost out there on Alligator Alley and we thought we’d drop in for some pie.”
Black Hawk glanced at the door as if planning his escape.
I felt like escaping myself. Since getting in the car that afternoon, life had felt like it was slowing down, everything grinding to a crunch even as we sped along the highway, as if the scale of our surroundings dwarfed the passage of time. My muscles felt like they were moving in thick glue. I said, “Don’t mind her. We were just out looking for a
man who got thrown off a cruise ship, and we took a wrong turn at St. Petersburg.”
Black Hawk glanced back and forth between us. He wrinkled his brow importantly. “I just got out of the marines, myself. We ride on Navy ships. We don’t have all that cushy life the cruise ships have. I don’t trust them anyway. They’re all registered in Panama or Libya, and where do they get all that money? They buy whole islands out there in the Bahamas and take all those tourists out there and run them ashore and turn them on little spits until they’re brown. Here in the Everglades we have natural history. We have gators and lots of birds, other animals. Raccoon. Possum. I grew up nearby, been coming out here since I was in high school.”
I said, “Tell me that again about the cruise ships.”
“The part about the Libyan registration?”
“Yes … but also the part about the private islands.”
“Oh, they have these private islands. Cays, we call them. There’s thousands of islands in the Bahamian banks, and these guys buy up whole little islands so they can run their cruise ships in there, and the paying passengers think it’s all a big deal.”
“And you could hide all kinds of operations in that sort of place.”
Black Hawk looked at me out of the corner of one eye, like a cow who’s certain it’s about to get hit with a prod. “Hey, I don’t know what you’re into, but …”
Just then a third man in khakis came into the restaurant and hurried up to the table. This one was short and swarthy. “I’m Gator,” he said. “Your swamp-buggy tour is ready and waiting for you. Come on, Black Hawk, give the ladies a break. You’ll make them late with all your nonsense.” He gave us a merry wink and waved us toward the door.
“Are you a Seminole?” Faye asked.
I was ready to kick her. Maybe I should have.
Gator said, “No, I’m Cuban.”
“Oye,”
I said.
“Sí,”
he said, giving me a look of appraisal. “This way, please.”
We were met at the door by the first man, Bill. “Let me show them where they’ll be sleeping,” he told Gator, “Then they’re all yours.”
Bill led us out past a low wall that enclosed a shallow pool. Inside, I saw some long, dark shapes. “What are those?” I asked.
“Alligators,” said Gator. “I ought to know.” He held out his arms, twisting them this way and that under the fluorescent light that illuminated the pool, showing us some nasty scars. “This one’s from the first time I got bit, before I knew better than to yank it free. This is the second. See? Just bite holes here. No rips. Healed lots faster.”
Bill said, “Quit scarin’ them, Gator.”
I found myself hustling along to keep up with Bill. The path grew darker and darker, the light from the distant spotlights near the restaurant a waning memory. Our only light now came from an electric lantern Bill was carrying. A couple hundred yards down the path, with the unseen mosquitoes zeroing in on us in a symphony of whines, he pulled briskly up by one in a string of huts about ten feet on a side. Like all the other huts, it had a steep-pitched roof thatched with densely packed palm fronds. These smaller huts had undressed log frames enclosed by some sort of siding. Bill set the lantern down and quickly opened a combination padlock and showed us in. I was quickly getting the idea that when there were mosquitoes about, folks didn’t tarry much.
Inside the hut, we found two primitive cots made up with army blankets and a drapery of mosquito netting. Bill showed us how to light a kerosene lantern that rested on a low, rough-cut table. The light danced drowsily about the space, faintly illuminating the inside of the thatching. Outside, I could hear the odd twittering of night birds and some deep, more guttural animal calls, a kind of booming. Inside, I could hear mosquitoes. One landed, stung. I slapped it.
Bill said, “I hope you don’t mind that this chickee is haunted.”
Faye said, “All the comforts of home.”
“You ladies have any insect repellant with you?” Gator asked.
Faye laughed ironically.
Gator produced a tube and passed it to her. She passed it to me.
I said, “Faye’s being very particular about her pregnancy.”
“It’s natural stuff,” Gator said encouragingly.
Faye mashed a mosquito on her arm and swung out her hand to retrieve the repellant all in one motion. “Forgot about this little detail,” she muttered, swatting her other arm, then her neck. “Welcome to the Everglades, Em.”
I was so tired I wanted to just fall over onto a bed and sleep, but Faye wanted to experience the full night package, whatever that was. So swamp buggying we did go.
The buggy turned out to be a giant platform with rows of benches and four balloon tires on each side. Gator helped Faye up onto a loading dock from which she could climb the last steps up onto the thing. We settled ourselves in the second bench and Gator fired up the engine. On the only other occupied bench were yet another man in khakis and the waitress from the cafeé, all cuddled up as if they were parked in a convertible above the city lights. Gator said, “This here’s Emilio, and you already met Glenda.”
Faye said, “You all have a sort of military air to you around here.”
I looked at her. I couldn’t tell if she was joking about the khakis, or if she was serious. Fatigue seemed to press me into the seat.
Emilio said, “We all been in the marines. Bill was in the marines, so he knows he’s got good men if he hires one of us. Right, Glenda?” He gave her a macho one-armed squeeze and a kiss to her forehead. She tittered.
The big buggy rocked and swayed as Gator maneuvered it about the parking lot and headed out into the darkness,
breaking the relative tranquility of the night with the rumble of the engine and the sweeping play of the headlights. The guy who was now bussing the waitress sat up and switched on a spotlight and began to pan it across the darkness; it picked out a high-wire fence and a big automatic gate that was just opening. I saw water and the dense crush of vegetation. We splashed into the water and continued, the buggy rolling ponderously and the spotlight dodging this way and that.
“There’s one,” said the waitress.
The man with the spotlight riveted it on a small deer. The thing looked attentive, but not concerned. It chewed. We stared.
“What is it?” I asked, ready to totally swoon over the rare Everglades deer, or whatever it was.
“Fallow deer, from India,” Emilio said.
Gator turned off the headlights and Emilio switched off the spotlight and handed Faye what looked like a strange-looking pair of binoculars. She put them to my eyes and gasped. “Night-vision goggles,” she said. “This is wonderful! Oh, my God! It’s … fantastic!”
It was a long time before I could get the goggles away from her, but when I put them to my own eyes, I popped into a world of electric-green wraiths. The goggles gathered light like a fiend, and anything that reflected any light was intensified. A deer lifted its head and looked at me, a tracery of monochromatic green. It shifted and walked away, its silent movement stolen from the darkness by the miracle of technology. The stars were bright, and the atmosphere all around was charged with false lights that looked like fireflies. It intensified my growing suspicion that I was dreaming this whole experience.
We drove on with the headlights off, wallowing over the irregular bottom of the swamp, which at this location proved to be a lacework of stagnant streams winding through stands of palms and cypress. In the next five minutes we snagged ten massive spiders and their webs from as many overhanging trees, listened to the waitress
scream, and saw five different species of deer exotic to North America, each a different pattern of electric green in the night-vision goggles. “What’s the gig with the exotic deer?” I whispered to Faye.
Faye snorted. “I offered you a nice B-and-B in Everglades City. A canoe ride. A land of sunshine. But no, we follow your nose into the darkness. Into something downright strange.”
“Chief Billie wanted a wild game park,” Gator informed us. “He went down to Texas and went shooting on a friend’s game park, and thought it would be nice to have one here, too. Except the tourists complained. So now instead of shooting, he has us take people out for swamp tours. In the daytime, you’ll get your fan-boat ride and a reptile show, too.”
Faye said, “Bring on them alligators.”
I wondered why life had thrown me into a swamp full of lunatics while my lover was off chasing terrorists.
“So what brings you ladies down our way?” Gator asked.
“The spirit of adventure,” Faye said sweetly.
I said, “I’m looking for someone named Winifred Egret.”
Gator stamped on the brakes. The buggy jolted to a stop. He turned around. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” he asked. “But she doesn’t take visitors.”
Faye grabbed the goggles back.
Shit
. I leaned back in the seat and stared at the few fuzzy stars that had managed to send their light through the humid air.
“Em has a letter of introduction,” said Faye.
The other guy picked up a two-way radio and spoke into it. “Hey Rolfe, Miz Egret to home in her chickee?”
I heard an unintelligible crackling in return.
The man with the radio made a gesture to Gator. “Let’s get moving again before the skeeters suck my last pint of blood, okay?”
Gator put the machinery back in gear, and we lurched
forward. “Aw heck,” he said. “I was looking forward to telling you ladies some Seminole stories. You can’t get nothing good from Black Hawk there, he don’t know anything, he just wants you to think he’s real buff. He takes steroids. Wears three T-shirts under that khaki. And did anyone tell you that chickee you rented is haunted?”
The radio crackled into life again. I could make out, “Say who’s coming.”
The man with the radio said, “She’s got a letter.”
“Who from?”
Faye said, “Jack Sampler.”
The man with the radio relayed the name.
I wasn’t liking this. I grabbed the goggles back from Faye and stared through them, trying to convince myself I was somewhere other than where I was. I was dead tired, pissed off, and jangled from the strong coffee and sugar in the pie. I wanted to be in a bed, no matter how rustic. I wanted to roll over in it and find Jack there. I wanted to go home to Utah, or Wyoming, or wherever it was I was from. I wanted to be on a high Rocky Mountain lake at dusk with a fly rod in my hands listening to Townsend’s solitaires singing, not slopping around on a tourist buggy swatting mosquitoes in an unfamiliar terrain I could not see.
The radio said, “Okay. Take ’em on in.”
Gator cranked a hard left and headed into the trees.
We exited through a back gate from the game preserve. Beyond it lay a grove of orange trees and a dirt road, and on that road a Jeep was waiting. At the wheel of that Jeep was Leah Sampler.
I stood there staring at her for quite some time, mosquitoes be damned.
“Hello,” she said, managing to make it sound as if we’d just bumped into each other at the market. “Who’s your friend?”
I couldn’t find it in myself to take things that coolly. I said, “There are a few things you’ll have to explain to me.”
“I imagine so. But get in, will you? The insects are getting bad.”
Faye slipped Gator and Emilio each a tip. I think she slipped a little cake to the waitress, too, even though she’d already looked after her at a handsome rate back in the Swamp Water Cafeé. We both climbed into the Jeep and buckled up. It was an open model, the late descendant of the World War II item, all nicely done up with a roll bar and big tires for the swamp, and she got it rolling at a good clip very quickly.
“So where are we going?” I asked.
“To see Winifred Egret,” she replied. She managed to leave sarcasm out of her tone. I give her credit for that.
“And you obviously know Winifred Egret,” I said.
“Very well. It shouldn’t be too great a stretch that I, as Jack’s mother, should know her, too. In fact, I introduced Jack to Winifred.”
“Oh.” Now I felt kind of stupid. “It was just a shock is all.”
“No, a shock is a shock. You’re entitled.”
“So then you probably know whomever it is he wanted me to meet. His note said I should look Winifred up to meet someone else who was important to him.”
“Yes,” she said, to herself as much as to me.
Somewhere in there, Faye introduced herself to Leah, because I had not, and Leah said, “Ah, Tom’s wife. I’m so delighted to meet you.” We rumbled along the road in the dark with the motion of the Jeep blowing the insects off of us. After a while we turned off the dry land that bordered the citrus groves and headed back into the swamp. Leah gave a scant travelogue. “The higher, drier parts of the Everglades are called hammocks,” she said. “Win’s hammock is a bit remote. I daresay the directions Jack gave you would have taken you as far as her daughter’s house, and she would have screened you to see if you should be allowed to go farther.”
“Is there some reason things are secret here?” I asked pointedly.
“No. And yes. The Florida Seminole are the only American Indian tribe never conquered by the white man. They are very private people. But being able to win at war does not mean you can win as a culture. As a sovereign nation, the Seminole tribe has been giving way steadily to the pressures of white so-called civilization. The Seminole are falling faster from slot machines and alcohol than from bullets.”
“Someone back at the cafeé said each member of the tribe gets
X
thousand a month just for being alive.”
“That’s true. The tribe shares and shares alike, the pie gets split evenly, every man, woman, and child. Some blow the money on whatever our consumer society can serve up. Other, more traditional Seminoles like Winifred Egret prefer
to bank the money and live farther from such influences.”
We splashed down through a narrow ford between two hammocks and rolled up onto the other side. We had turned enough times now that I had pretty much lost my sense of which way we were heading. That’s a hard thing for a geologist to admit, but it was totally dark under the spreading canopy of the swamp. I tried to identify the trees that tangled around us, but everything was new and alien to me.
Presently we pulled up in front of a small cluster of chickees that were standing on slightly higher land. Some were closed in. One was wide open, little more than just four tree trunks with the bark removed, supporting a thatched roof. A fire burned on the bare earth beneath it. An elderly woman sat by the fire. As I stepped down out of the Jeep and approached her, I saw that she was wearing the traditional dress of the Seminole woman, a long skirt and blouse made up of horizontal bands of delicate patchwork. She said, “You’re Jack’s friend Em, hm?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Welcome. He came to visit a couple months ago. Told me about you.”
He told you but not his mother,
I noted. I took out Jack’s note and handed it to her.
“I can’t read,” she said. “I’m almost blind. Funny Jack, he knows that. That’s for the others. I don’t get so confused by people.”
I put the note away and waited.
Winifred Egret turned her ancient face toward Leah. “Take her inside and tell her what she wants to know. The pregnant one can stay with me a while. I like babies.”
Inside the chickee to the left, Leah offered me something to drink, which I refused. I was too tired to observe the social graces. We both sat down on low chairs carved out of stumps and looked at each other over the soft light of the kerosene lantern that hung from a wire hook above our heads. There was little else in the hut but two simple cots and Leah’s ancient suitcase.
Leah’s brows and nose threw deep shadows over the rest of her face. “You’re wondering why I’m here,” she suggested.
“I’m wondering why
I’m
here,” I parried.
She took in a deep breath, let it out. “I used to bring Jack here when he was little,” she said shyly.
It was my turn to sigh. “I’m sure that’s just a tiny little bit of a very big story,” I said. “We probably don’t have much time. Why don’t I just ask a few questions.”
“Okay.”
“Are you hiding here?”
“Yes.”
“Because of what Jack’s doing?”
She shook her head. “I hide whenever things get … like this.”
“Ah. Who did Jack want me to meet here? Was it Winifred ?”
“No.”
I turned my palms up, as if to ask,
Then who?
“I think you’d better ask some other questions first.”
I felt a deep fatigue settling about me, weighing me down into the hard-packed earth beneath my feet. “Alright, then. Who is Jack’s father, and where is he?”
Leah’s eyes closed. She became very still. It was a long time before she spoke, but when she did, her voice was faint, and yet hard as ice. “He was someone I barely knew. He … we … I became pregnant with Jack. He … Jack’s father was away when I found out, and I thought it better that he … stay away.”
“He was unkind to you?”
Leah drew her breath in sharply, an expression of deep emotional pain. “He was not a well person. He came back later—when Jack was three—and he realized that Jack was his. That he was the father. I was very young. I let him see Jack. He’d take him places. I thought it would be okay, or good, even. I didn’t
know
.” The last word twisted in agony.
“Know what?” I asked, keeping my voice as soft as possible.
Her eyes were still closed, and yet in the light of the lantern, I could see tears sliding down her cheeks. “He … hurt Jack. Not physically,” she said hastily. “There were never any marks …”
My mind raced, filling in voids in the mystery of Jack Sampler. “The abuse was emotional?”
“Yes.” The word was a gasp.
“I’m so sorry.”
Leah’s words suddenly came in a flood. “He would put him in a closet and leave him there, tell him he would only let him out if he played the game correctly. Then he put him in a deep, damp hole in the ground, in the dark. You get it? He was torturing him. Methodically. He was—”
“This was sexual?”
“No, it was worse than that. This was ritualized abuse. He was training Jack, training him to be just like him. He was … teaching him to lie, to split off, to become a … a …”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying, Leah. Was his father a—what did his father do? For a living.”
“He said he was in sales. God knows what he was selling,” she said, her voice suddenly stronger, anger breaking through the pain. “Do you understand what I’m saying? There is a network of people out there, and they are sick. Terribly, terribly sick. They train little children to be like them. They t-torture them until they learn to dissociate, to split their personalities into two, or three, or however many. And they give them nasty little jobs to do. They train them to become activated by a tap on the shoulder, or a phrase. Then they go and do whatever it is that’s asked of them.”
“Jack is a
multiple personality
?” I could not keep the shock from my voice.
Leah’s eyes shot open. “No! I caught it before that. No, he learned to split, but not into fragments. Haven’t you noticed? He’s a wonderful actor, our Jack.” She was speaking now with a fury, her hands wringing each other like battling dogs.
“Leah,” I said. “You must have been terrified.”
Her eyes focused on me for the first time since we came into the hut. “Yes. I was.”
“You ran.”
“Yes.”
“You got Jack away from him before his personality collapsed.”
“Yes.”
“You raised him well, Leah. He’s a fine man. I love that fine man you raised, all by yourself, from an infant.”
She lowered her gaze.
I said, “This man terrified you.”
Her voice came as a wraith. “Oh, yes. The threats were … when I told him to leave us alone, it started in earnest. He’d follow me through the town, always watching me. People would say it was because he loved me, or because a man needed to be with his son. He could be very charming, you see, and people believed him. Didn’t believe me. People want their world to make sense.” She drew in a ragged breath. “They told me I should marry him and do right for the child. But I said no. He—”
“You went to the police.”
“Oh, God yes, everybody always asks me that!”
“I’m sorry, I’m trying to understand—”
“The chief of police was his cousin. Do you get it? He was probably another … I told him to go away or I would. He told me he’d get the government to take Jack away from me.”
“You mean the courts.”
“I mean the
government
. That’s who he worked for, don’t you see?
“No, wait—”
“Our precious United States government! They—”
“No, wait, this is insane! I’ve heard of ritual abuse, but it’s Satan worshipers, crazy religious cults that—”
“Some of them are in cults, but not all. But the government is right in there harvesting a crop of smashed-up personalities to put to their dirty little purposes! Jack’s father was a p-professional k-k-killer.”
“No! He made that up to scare you, he—”
“How I wish that were true! He took us in the car one night and
showed
us!”
“So you ran away.”
“We left town and I changed our names, and we moved all over the place, looking for a town where we could live. Finally, we came here. Worked in Everglade City for a while. It has a long tradition of being a way station for people who have escaped from somewhere else. I got to know Winifred when her granddaughter … ran away once, and I helped. So we settled here in Florida. Moved to Orlando when Jack was twelve.”
“Sampler’s not your name?”
“No. It’s my grandmother’s maiden name. When Jack came of age, I figured he had a right to his birth name, but he’d learned to answer to Jack, so …”
“You never married.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t trust myself.”
“And you always worried that the man might come back, so you kept a bag packed, ready to leave at any moment.”
“I heard finally that he had died—or been killed—but I had no way of knowing how deep it all went. Maybe they’d come for Jack at some time. I had to be on the ready. I learned how to drive so I wouldn’t be followed. And no one comes to this hammock without Winifred’s knowledge, or the whole tribe’s, for that matter.”
My stomach was tight as a fist. “You did a great job with Jack. He’s an honorable, faithful man … .” Words began to evaporate in my mouth. Did I truly know this about Jack? I had trusted him originally because Tom Latimer trusted him, and until ten days ago, Jack had never wavered from Tom’s model of trustworthiness, so I had assumed … what?
As I sat there, hearing this horrible tale, bits of my world began to get up and float, like dust on the air. If there were people out there who would put small children into damp holes in the ground to force them into mental illness, then were any of us truly safe?
I thought again of the terrible instrument of destruction I had found buried in the sand a scant twenty-four hours before, and wondered:
Did Jack go off to track that monster, or is he the monster himself? What frail membrane lies between the two?
Leah was speaking rapidly. “I took him to specialists, had him cared for as best I could. There was no one then who knew what to do. Nowadays at least I could take him to some kind of deprogrammer, or a specialist in posttraumatic stress. They’re getting better every day at dealing with these things. They know now that the nervous system holds a charge from trauma, a deep nervous energy that gets locked into our very fibers. It’s there in case we get a chance to run away. Lower animals know how to switch it off when the danger’s passed, but we have the cerebral cortex—the highest part of the human brain—and it can override that protocol. So the trauma hangs in us like a bomb. That’s the stress, all locked in there, banging around … . Jack did amazingly well. I think it was because he always took a part in helping us escape. They say that’s essential, that the victim take part in saving himself.”