Leah took Faye and me back to the chickee we had rented at the Swamp Safari, and we slept there that night, deeply exhausted and oblivious to the whining of mosquitoes outside the netting that draped over our cots. In the morning, the overhanging thatch and shuttered sides of the chickee kept us unaware of the daylight until Faye’s bladder moved her toward the bathroom. When she opened the door, we awakened to a world of sunshine so bright and cheerful that I was certain we had dreamt the entire experience of the deep swamp, the elderly Seminole woman, and the unexpected and gut-wrenching meeting with Leah Sampler. Surely her part of it had been exactly that, a bad dream.
It was barely ten in the morning but already sweltering hot, at least eighty-five degrees and ninety-nine percent humidity, even inside the deep shade of the chickee with the shutters open to catch the nonexistent breeze. Faye returned and handed me a bottle of water and an orange. “Eat, drink,” she said. “I want to go for a walk.”
I combed my hair and pulled it back into a ponytail to get it off the furnace of my neck. My hair had curled wildly in the humidity, spinning into corkscrews at the cowlicks along my hairline. I sat on the edge of my cot and peeled the orange and ate it, wondering if this meant I was truly in Florida. Because that was where oranges were grown, right? My mind was a muddle. I could no longer recall how
many days it had been since we left Utah, or since Jack had left me sitting just like this, at the edge of a bed. I realized with sadness that I no longer felt the wave of sensuosity pull at me at the thought of him. I decided that, even with this fairly heavy night’s sleep, I was still too tired, and certainly too disoriented, to feel much of anything.
I got dressed, and we went outside to greet the day and get a first good look at where in blazes we were.
It was a crush of green. Faye led me away from the Safari headquarters toward a path that led into the vegetation. As we walked along the row of chickees, I realized that they were all built on stilts right over shallow water. The water was dark with tannic acid. Everything around us was a passionate crowding of green in every imaginable tint and shape and texture.
We turned off the path onto a boardwalk that led over the water and into the deep, hushed shade of the swamp itself. Here, all was a dappled green as spots of light filtered down through the canopy of lush vegetation. Green grew on green as epiphytic plants—bromeliads and orchids—sprouted off trees, and ferns lavished their fronds to the humid air. Even the water was green, covered to every last inch with dots of tiny floating ferns. A heron picked through the shallows, making her way with measured, careful steps. Songbirds twittered. Frogs charrummed.
The world of the swamp was complete, entire, and compelling, our narrow path of wood a jealous glimpse of its depth and power.
“There,” whispered Faye. She was pointing at what looked at first to me like a stretch of tire tread cast off a tractor-trailer rig, except that it was floating in the water and dotted with clusters of fern plucked up from the water’s surface. I slowly realized that the tread had eyes, and, a foot or more closer to me, a pair of nostrils. It blinked, its dark reptilian eyelids clapping side-to-side instead of toward me. “Alligator,” she sighed. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
Beautiful? I was not certain what word I would have
chosen to describe this dark, reptilian presence, but she did possess the splendor of being integral to her surroundings, floating there serene and unhurried; here, I was the ugly intruder. It was my kind who had brought the wallowing swamp buggies and the roaring fan boats and the lust to drain her homeland to a pathetic, dying vestige of itself.
She and I observed each other for long minutes. She was there for the duration; I, for just a blink in time, a sojourner passing through. With respect, I turned and left her to her domain.
Breaking back into the bright light at the end of the boardwalk, I felt suddenly exposed, my soft hide prey to the harshness of the sun. We walked along the gravel path back toward the cluster of chickees around the cafeé.
As we approached this outpost of human civilization, our buggy driver from the evening before converged from another path. He was carrying a gunny sack with something heavy in it. “Morning, ladies, you sleep okay with all those ghosts?” He pulled out a key and unlocked the door to the nearest hut, which was about three times the size of our chickee.
“I slept like a log,” I said. “Those deep croaking sounds were like a lullaby.”
Gator grinned. “Alligators,” he said. “They’re so sweet and cuddly.”
“Pays to advertise,” Faye commented.
“
Verdad
. Would you like to see our little museum?”
I said, “What do you have to show us?”
“Something very special,” he said. “Come on in and meet my friends.”
Inside, the air was cold, almost like stepping into a walk-in refrigerator. Gator flicked on an overhead light and a second switch that turned on an array of lights in glass-fronted terrariums, and suddenly I was in the presence of an array of snakes and lizards, each coiled or reclining in its own private world. CORN SNAKE, read the sign over a spectacular orange serpent. INDIGO SNAKE, read the one
over a creature scaled in a deep, glossy blue. Their beauty was beginning to grow on me.
Gator stepped past a small set of bleacher seats and over a low barrier. Opening another set of locks, he reached down into a wooden cage and set down his burlap sack. He closed that cage and opened another. “Come over here, Em,” he said. “Sit down. Close your eyes and hold out your hands.”
With misgivings, I did as he asked. The small hairs began to stand up on the back of my neck. Then something very cool and dry touched my skin. It was an odd texture, leathery yet soft. It was heavy and rounded. It felt … nice.
I opened my eyes. I was holding a small black alligator, less than three feet long. A very torpid one, thanks to a low body temperature produced by the extreme air-conditioning. She was barely moving her claws, as if slowly swimming in her sleep.
“Thank you,” I whispered, more to the alligator than to the man.
From the reptile display, Faye and I moved on to the cafeé and ordered a big, midday breakfast of eggs and bacon and grits and toast. I put ice in my coffee and swilled it down, still trying to convince myself that I was awake and not dreaming. We ate out on the deck on the far side of the cafeé, watching the airboat drivers load up stacks of tourists from Miami and whang them around the near parts of the swamp. Scrub jays took off and landed on the wire fence that enclosed the exotic deer. I thought about Jack, and his mother.
By my second cup of coffee, it occurred to me that I had left Winifred Egret’s camp without meeting the special person Jack had wanted me to meet. Leah had never answered my first questions. How had she managed that? I pondered the delicacy of her evasions, realizing that in the process of telling me the frightening tale of Jack’s father, all other questions had dropped from my consciousness.
Had she played this trump card to steer me around an even darker secret?
I looked out across the tapestry of vegetation and water, letting the hypnosis of its deep, feminine wiles slow my thoughts and motions even further. There seemed to be a halo of light over the Everglades, an insubstantial yet powerful energy, like connective waves of heat. The scene was lush and ecstatic and yet wounded, a woman in pain, just like Leah. Like Faye. Like me. Florida was a land of sex, but its sexuality was vulnerable, a target of rape in the eyes of all who wished to dominate it.
Jack had come to manhood here. In the passion of its fecundity, he had learned to love and honor all things feminine. At last, I began to understand the man I had come to love.
As I was munching down on my last strip of bacon, Gator hove into view with a cup of coffee of his own.
Faye said, “Have a seat, Gator-man.”
“Thank you,” he said. Settling in to my right, he went after the sugar packets, draining about three into his java and giving it a good stir.
Glenda wandered over and sat down across from me with coffee and a bowl of grits, humming cheerfully. “You have a nice visit with your people last night?” she inquired.
Faye said, “Yes, thank you. You and what’s-his-name enjoy yourselves?”
Glenda laughed amiably. “Emilio? Oh yeah, once we got away from them spiders. I hate spiders. Yeah, Emilio’s fun, but we’s just pals. Y’know. You work out here, y’all get to know each other.”
Faye said, “You know Winifred Egret then?” She didn’t even try to make the question sound casual. She tapped her fingers on the table restlessly. She hadn’t said much since waking up, and seemed even more irascible and out of sorts than even a summer pregnancy, a night in the swamps, and a renegade husband might explain.
Glenda said, “Well, not like we’s family or nothin’, but yeah, you get to sort of know what’s going on.”
I said, “So who lives out there with her?”
Gator said, “Miz Egret?”
“Yeah. She’s not all alone out there, is she?”
Glenda replied, “Oh, no. There’s always someone looks after her. She can’t but hardly see, y’know, so’s they can’t leave her all alone, though if anyone could handle it, it would be her. She’s got her great-granddaughter Lily there most of the time, although she needs lookin’ after, too, but then there’s others in the family as comes by.”
Faye said, “Oh, so she’s got a great-granddaughter there. How old is she?”
“Well into her teens. Older maybe, but you wouldn’t know it. She’s funny in the brain.”
“How sad. What happened? Was she injured?”
“No, born that way. They say her brain didn’t form right. She can’t think as good as other folks.”
Gator said, “The way I hear it, the frontal lobes of her brain never formed. The part we use for reason.” He pointed at his own forehead. “They say the reptiles have a primitive brain that reacts to situations mechanically, the mammals have a second one stacked on top of it that gives it emotions, and we humans have also an upper brain, which gives us the capacity to reason. But sometimes we reason our way right into trouble. Evolution. You tell me who’s smartest.”
Faye glanced at her belly like she was sorry she’d asked.
Oblivious to Faye’s sudden discomfort, Glenda continued. “’Course the tribe’s got a place for Lily, and what with the money each member gets from the gambling, she’s looked after. And her dad sends money just in case. They give her little jobs to do so she don’t feel left out.”
With that comment, Faye looked like she was about to burst into tears, so I changed the subject, hoping to get some answers into the bargain for the questions Leah had steered me around asking. Such as, why did Leah come here? And whom did Jack want me to meet? I said, “You
guys know if a man named Jack Sampler ever visits out there? Big guy, kind of burly, and blond?”
“Oh, sure, Jack. Yeah, he comes down here all the time.” Glenda looked at me kind of funny. “He’s the one that sent you down here, right?”
“Right.”
She tipped her head at me, puzzling with something. “Then don’t you know?” she asked.
“Know what?”
“He’s Lily’s father.”
A bomb detonated deep in my heart. Shreds of reality flew every which way. I opened my mouth, tried to repeat the words, test them, see if they might come down out of the sky where they seemed to be floating, like so much dust on the wind. “He’s—”
Faye’s cell phone rang. She dug the thing out of her pocket, switched it on, talked to it, listened to it. Said, “No! Damn it, speak to
me
! Where are you? Are you alright?” Tears began to spring from her eyes. She handed the phone to me.
I put it to my ear. Heard Tom’s voice. It crackled with the weak connection. It seemed to belong in the clouds, with the dust and the disclosure that my lover had a child. Tom said, “Em? You get anything out of Miles Guffey?”
At first the words made no sense to me. My ears rang like hollow pipes. All sounds around me were far away.
“Em?”
I took a deep breath. “Why didn’t he tell me, Tom?”
“Who? Tell you what?”
“Jack. Tell me about Lily.”
Tom went into one of his silences. Then he said, “It’s a painful topic, Em. Especially now. Where are you?”
“In the Everglades. At the Big Cypress Reservation.”
“Leah’s there?”
“She was last night.”
“I’m surprised they let you through. Leah will have tightened security by now.”
“Security? What is this need of security, Tom?”
Tom availed himself of a deep breath. “Lily is a secondary target. We still don’t know where the stalker is.”
“So the primary target is Lucy. Jack’s old girlfriend. Ms. Egret’s granddaughter. The astronaut is a Seminole.”
“One-quarter. Leah told you?”
“No. She didn’t have to. I’m a goddamned detective, remember?”