Everglades Assault (11 page)

“I'm sure—and sometimes I'm not even very good at that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But my fee for advice remains the same. One cold beer. In advance.”

She wiped at her eyes and stood up. “God,” she said, “I must look a mess.”

“And the other part of the fee is that you stop knocking yourself.”

“Because I'm very attractive, right?”

“You can bank on it.”

Subtly, her face was changing. The confusion was gone, replaced by a look that was unmistakable. It was the soft-eyed, arched-thigh bedroom look. Somehow, through a combination of the fight and my dimestore psychoanalysis, I had slipped through her guard. I had made my way past the sterile perimeter of this stranger, Stella Catharine Cross, and was being offered the intimacy of her body in the same way she had offered me her fears.

There were no words exchanged.

No words were necessary.

Between all men and all women there is an endless exchange of communication going on that is far more complex than our surface exchange of vowels and verbs and adjectives.

We are so accustomed to it that we are rarely even aware it is going on.

But it is.

We never meet the eye of a stranger without the minimum question-and-answer session: “I might be interested; I'm definitely
not
interested; maybe, if things were different . . .”

Those are the basic answers to the most basic of questions.

And now, this lady was saying yes; saying yes not in an obvious way, but in a way unmistakable nonetheless.

I watched her move to the kitchen to get my beer. I hadn't been lying—she was attractive. Very attractive. Her face held its share of pain and wear, and her breasts were no longer the gravity-free breasts of the cheerleader. But, strangely, that seemed to make her all the more desirable.

So why did I feel the urge to make my excuses and get the hell out of there?

Maybe it was because I was thinking of the lovely April Yarbrough; or maybe it was because I don't subscribe to the convenient
Playboy
philosophy that all sex is good sex—however desperate, however brief, however empty.

Maybe hell. It was neither of those things, and I knew it.

This lady, Stella Catharine Cross, was one of the injured ones; one of life's cripples, and sitting there waiting to sweep her off her feet and into bed made me feel just a tad too much like a cat waiting for the fledglings to try their wings.

And thinking
that
made me feel like the pompous, pious son of a bitch that I occasionally am.

I did have the urge to leave. But I wouldn't.

The fact was, I hadn't been with a woman for almost a month. It's called H-O-R-N-Y. And it's also called H-U-M-A-N.

You couldn't have blasted me out of there with plastic explosives. For all my virtuous slavering, I was going to grab the opportunity and run.

No matter how much we lie to ourselves, there's a little bit of Hefner in us all.

She brought me the beer, eyes locked into mine. There was that brief vacuous moment before the first kiss. Her lips were soft and shy.

She moaned low as my hands slid down the curve of her back to her buttocks.

“I lied to you, Stell. I do want to hustle you into bed.”

She moaned again, her mouth opening, her tongue tracing the tip of my tongue. “Well, you've certainly taken your damn sweet time about it.”

“Sometimes I think I was a Baptist preacher in another life.”

“You've already been a white knight and a psychiatrist. Now I'd just like it if . . . if you were a man. I think that might be half my problem. A man hasn't had me in so long. I feel like there's a dam in me that needs to be burst. And I want it to burst again and again and again and again. . . .”

“Let's not get carried away, lady.”

She turned her face up to me sleepily. There was a light smile on her face, and her lips were wet and swollen with kissing. “Let's do,” she said. “Let's do get carried away. . . .”

I lifted her in my arms and carried her into the little bedroom. I positioned her belly first on the bed and found a little bottle of body oil on the nightstand. She stretched and moaned like a cat while I stripped the terry-cloth robe away and poured drops of oil down her back.

“A back rub?” she purred.

“For now.”

“Does that mean I can return the favor?”

“It does.”

“Ummm . . . that feels nice.”

“And how does that feel?”

“Oh God . . . that feels wonderful . . . oh, don't stop!”

“I thought I was rubbing your back.”

Quickly, she rolled over and began pulling at my buttons and belt feverishly. Her breasts flattened against her chest beneath their own weight, and the fine feminine curve of her hips veed into long silken curls which testified that she was indeed a natural blonde.

I spread the oil across her stomach and thighs as she worked to strip away my clothes. Beneath the touch of my fingers, I felt her nipples rouse and elongate.

“Stand up,” she said softly. “Please . . . stand up and turn on the light. I want to see you. I want to look at you.”

So I did the lady's bidding—but kept my good side toward her so the scar from a long-ago shark attack would not turn her attention from the matters at hand.

Her hands traced the outline of her own body as she looked at me. “God,” she said, “you look so good.”

“And you're not so bad yourself, Stell.”

“Really? Do you really mean that?”

“If you're done looking, slide over and I'll prove it to you.”

She touched herself harder now, massaging her own body. “Yes, Dusky. Now. Prove it to me right now. Prove it to me and be as rough and as fast as you like the first time. We'll have time later for gentleness. I'll give you all the time you want . . . and everything you need. . . .”

By the fresh light of a September morning, the mangrove trees were eighty feet tall, cliffing abruptly at the water's edge, and the current of the Shark River pressed us onward toward the open Gulf.

The water of the river was deep and dark—but clear. Birds chattered from the depths of the swamp, raccoons foraged in the shallows, and there was the oppressive silence of a wilderness never conquered.

In the depths of that eerie quiet, with no other boats or towns around, it seemed as if the Shark River had transported us through space and time to some South American tributary hellhole that was as beautiful as it was ominous.

That morning I had left Stella Cross asleep, her legs curled against her stomach like a sleeping child.

Lying there in the predawn darkness, she looked confident and unburdened.

And contented.

God knows I had done everything I could do to make her feel content. And it hadn't been easy.

Stella had spent a long lonely year in Flamingo, and we had loved the night away—she trying to make up for lost time, I just trying to survive.

All her uncertainty had fallen away with her terry-cloth bathrobe, and in the soft bedroom light she had become a tigress. I couldn't release her enough. And she couldn't get enough of me.

After our first three times together, she had cradled my head on her naked breasts, stroking my temple gently.

“Poor Dusky. You didn't know what you were getting yourself into, did you?” she mused.

“No. Guess I'm just lucky.”

“And tired?”

“About half and half.”

“Can I guess which half?”

“If you can find it.”

And she had pressed her lips against my chest, then maneuvered herself over me so that she could trace the line of my stomach and abdomen with her tongue.

“I'm searching,” she had said dreamily.

“So I see. Like a needle in a haystack.”

And she had laughed. “More like a crowbar in the grass.”

And when her mouth found me, she said, “Am I getting warm?”

“One of us is.”

“I thought you were tired.”

“Maybe this will be my last stand.”

“Oh no,” she had giggled. “I don't think so. You're so easily . . . discovered. I think you've only just begun to fight. . . .”

And that's the way the whole night went. We had explored and measured and discovered, getting each other's wants and rhythms down until, for a time, it seemed as if we two strangers were one; a joining of all lovers, past, present, and future.

And at long last, when she had finally spent herself, she had drifted off into sleep. Tired as I was, I had studied her face by the soft glow of the nightstand light, trying to fix the particulars of her in my mind. Maybe it was a form of penitence, but I wanted her to stand out in memory as a living, breathing human being rather than just a one-night bout of climax.

In sleep, the lines disappeared from her face, and she looked very young again. There was a tiny fragment of scar by her left eye—maybe she had been hit by a ball or something when she was a kid. Her lips were a pale brown, thinner than they felt, and her soft white breasts showed a network of blue veins beneath the tissue-paper skin.

How many men had touched those breasts?

How many men had been with this woman?

Too few, that was for sure. And those that had been with her, it seemed, had come only to rob rather than bear gifts.

I had slipped away from her just before dawn, dressed, and written her a note.

I left the note on the pillow beside her:

“Stell, I don't know if I'll ever see you again. But I hope I do. I mean that. Dusky.”

So I had walked back to
Sniper
through the sleeping government settlement of Flamingo. White egrets and spoonbills—an Easter-egg pink—hunted the mangrove flats beyond the motel on the low tide. Tree rats rattled in the palms, mosquitoes still swarmed, and Florida Bay was a sheen of micacolored light in the secret morning darkness.

Surprisingly, Hervey was awake when I arrived.

The cabin of my sportfisherman smelled of coffee and bacon.

“Got plenty of sleep last night, I hope,” Hervey had said, giving me an evil grin.

“Don't I look like I got plenty of sleep?”

“Oh, sure, sure. Plenty of sleep in a washing machine, maybe.”

So we had gotten an early start, cruising through the dawn stillness of Flamingo Canal to Coot Bay, then through the twisting, turning tributary that we followed to the expanse of Whitewater Bay, where bottlenosed dolphin played before the boat in the shallow water.

In that wilderness maze at the base of Florida, humans and our frail history seem temporary and unimportant. There is a sinister light about the mangrove swamps, as if they are patiently waiting to claim again cities and roads and homes when we have finally blown ourselves into oblivion.

It is a wild giant land of dark water, forbidding islands, and haunting beauty.

I love it.

And so did Hervey.

He stood with me on the flybridge as we snaked our way through a tributary to the broadening Shark River, where the current boiled at glassy intersections. These were the tallest mangrove trees of all now—eighty feet high. The forest along the river was ornate with bromeliads and sea birds, and the only noise was the burble of
Sniper
's engines and the wind in the high trees.

“This used to be great country,” Hervey said. He wore the same jeans and western shirt, and there was a big chew of Red Man in his cheek.

“Used to be?”

“Florida, I mean. You get down in here and you see the way it used to be. Wild, pure—and not just because there ain't any people around. Men used to live here—right on this river, as a matter of fact.”

We were midway up the river, and I hadn't seen a single scar of human habitation. “Where in the hell did they live here?”

Hervey motioned toward the south bank. “There. All along here. My daddy brought me up here when I was a boy. Had a tannic-acid plant right down yonder. Built their houses on stilts. That's my point. People lived here as short as forty years ago—and the Indians for a thousand years before them. But they didn't hurt it none. It's natural for man to live on this earth—but it ain't natural for man to dig deep and dredge it up, change this and alter that just so they can go to their graves rich.”

He spit and thought for a moment. “You see, these developers think—no, they damn well
believe
—that Florida ain't nothin' but a property. Something they can buy and sell and own. Well, that's just plain bullshit. No matter what their deeds say or their lawyers tell 'em, they don't
own
no land. They don't own it no more than the Indians did, or we do—or the people a thousand years from now will. We're just tenants. We're renters with a lifetime lease. But they've taken Florida and acted like there ain't gonna be no future. And the way they've treated this state, they might be right.”

“I have a feeling you're getting at something.”

“You're damn right I am.” He paused, working at his chew of tobacco. “You ever been to a development town near Fort Myers called Cape Coral?”

“Flew over it once. About a million miles of deadend roads and canals, all in nice neat squares. And hardly any trees. From the air, it looks like a big scar.”

“Right! And then there's a place like it called Golden Gate, and a couple more just as bad on the east coast. Can't you see? The developers keep pushing right on southward, toward the 'glades. They keep chopping away at Florida, gettin' rich, measurin' how successful they are by the amount of shit they can pile in their own backyard. And they ain't gonna be satisfied until it's all gone.” Hervey spit bitterly. “Take my Indian folks, where we're going. Lived there happy as clams for as long as they can remember, and for as long as my granddaddy can remember. Now someone's tryin' to push them off. Tryin' to ruin even that.”