Acts of Nature Read online

  Now here was Eden. The low buildings, three in all, were joined together by a dock, wide porch, and walkways. One building held a great room with a fold-out couch that made up into a full bed facing big windows and a freestanding fireplace. The kitchen was against one wall; the cooking and living spaces were separated by a standing island. The next building was a sort of bunkhouse for guests with bathrooms attached. The third was a small equipment shack for the generator and water storage and tools and such for on-site repairs. Most of the encampments out here were so constructed, Jeff told me, so that if a lightning strike or other accidental fire started, the flames would not automatically take out everything at once. This place had only been built in the last few years and the honey blond glow of the new wood in the late sun made it look warm, inviting, and almost magical sitting the midst of the low grasses and shimmering water.

  “Wow,” Sherry said as we got close. I was pleased to have brought her on a venture that coaxed such pleasure from her twice in one day.

  We were about fifty yards out when we both saw the resident horned owl appear from his nesting spot under the bunkhouse eaves and soar out over the Glades with our interruption of his personal space.

  “Look. We chased the mousetrap away,” Sherry said. She had not been pleased after spotting a mouse in my riverside shack but I had promised that there were no such mammals out here. Too wet. Too lacking in food source. The animals in the Glades, even on the isolated land islands, lived a curious existence out here where a totally different environment shaped them. During a visit to an island on the edge of the Glades in Florida Bay, a friend showed me the knee-high osprey nests that the legendary fishing birds had built in wide- open fields. “They don’t build them in trees out there because there aren’t any four- or two-legged carnivores to threaten them.”

  Sherry was quiet for a few beats when I finished the story. Maybe she thought I was making it up to mollify her. Then she turned, interrupting her stroke.

  “But he’ll be back, right? The owl?”

  “Yeah. It’s close to hunting time for him anyway. He’ll be back by morning.”

  With the high water we were able to paddle right up to the dock and tied off. I used the Snows’ hidden key and opened the great room and unloaded our gear and the cooler and food. I showed Sherry the gravity shower and she didn’t hesitate. While she was busy I made up a dinner of cheese and stone wheat bread with sweet butter and sliced tomato we’d brought and then stole a bottle of wine from the Snows’ counter collection and chilled it in our iced cooler.

  By the time I’d taken my own shower Sherry was sitting back in one of the Adirondack chairs on the open deck. Jeff had set up a half-dozen chairs in a semicircle facing west. There is no theater like it and the falling sun was already spreading crimson rays into the tops of the far sawgrass and into Sherry’s blond hair.

  “Is that Wally out there?” she said to me and nodded out to the east. The question threw me and I looked out in search of a boat or a plane or anything that might contain a man.

  “There. On that mound.”

  I looked again and in the low light could make out the hump and curled tail of a good-size alligator taking in the last warmth of the day. Sherry then quietly whistled the opening stanzas of a television cartoon from both our childhoods I recognized as Wally Gator, “the swingin’est alligator in the swamp. See ya later, Wally Gator.”

  “You do have a memory, girl,” I said.

  “For frivolity.”

  “No. Not always.”

  “Then sit with me here, Max, and we’ll get serious,” she said, and in her voice was more than just an invitation for sitting.

  While the sky turned shades of pink and then deepened to orange and finally a purple shade of plush velvet, we sat and ate and let the wine leak into our abused backs and sun-soaked heads and when the air finally started to chill I got out the sleeping bags and covered Sherry’s legs with the flannel side.

  “Very gentlemanly, Max,” she said. But when I crouched to kiss her she hooked her wrist around the back of my neck and she, the flannel-lined bag, and I slid slowly to the deck.

  “Well, I guess I don’t have to be quite so gentlemanly,” I said and rolled over on top of her. Even in the darkness I could see the flicker of green in her eyes. And tucked in a depression next to her collarbone, the sparkle of the necklace she always wore, the two jewels, an opal and a diamond, joined together. I knew it was a present from her husband. I had ignored the reminder in the past, and despite the way it picked up the light this night, I ignored it again.

  We made love under the stars, a canopy of glitter that out here in darkness spread incomparably from horizon to horizon with no city lights or building corners or even high tree lines to obscure it. The sight was so stunning and rare I was fooled that first night: when I looked down into Sherry’s eyes I thought that glorious look on her face was my doing. Then, on a whim of suspicion I looked up behind my shoulder and beheld the real reason for her radiance.

  “Oh, I see,” I said. “The real stars in your eyes.”

  She laughed, caught, at least partially, by the truth.

  “Oh, all right,” she said, reaching up and pulling my face down to the crook of her shoulder and neck where she could still see the sky past my head. “Tomorrow night, we can switch places.”

  FIVE

  “Shut the fuck up, Wayne.”

  “Oh, you got a better idea? We’re sittin’ here with no smoke, no cash, and no chance of scoring any more deals. What? What else we got, dawg?”

  Christ, thought Buck, tipping the sweating bottle of Budweiser up and taking a long slow drink off the beer. Even out here these guys are picking up somebody else’s bullshit lingo, watching some MTV shit or listening to the hip-hop radio crap out of Miami.

  Dog. Hell, he could still hear his daddy’s voice saying if you had a good dog and some shotgun shells you could eat forever out in the Glades for free. But that didn’t last, did it? Didn’t even last for the old man, did it?

  “You tell him, Buck. Tell him he’s full of shit,” said Marcus, the younger one.

  Buck took another pull off the beer and the two watched him, each waiting for a yea or nay from the man. He took his time at it.

  “Wayne might have hisself an idea,” Buck finally said. “He ain’t thought it out yet, but there might be some possibilities there.”

  Wayne sat back in his wooden, straight-backed chair, balancing on the back legs, smirk on his face that made him look even more like a cartoon balloon with his features drawn on with a marker, his face all pudgy and white and hairless with his baseball cap turned backward so it yanked his eyebrows up and out of shape. Marcus kept his eyes down toward the tabletop.

  There’s your dog, son, Buck thought, slapped on his snout and chastised like some mutt.

  “We’re gonna have to get somethin’ goin’ soon unless you boys want to go on up the road and get a job at the Wendy’s,” Buck said.

  “Shit. Ain’t doin’ nothin’ at no Wendy’s but a ten up,” Wayne said. The reference to an armed stick-up raised Marcus’s head, floating on a smile. He and Wayne snickered and both reached out and tapped knuckles.

  Buck shook his head. His father had warned him about getting involved with chuckleheads like these two. But it wasn’t like Buck had a lot of choices these days. After his last stint up at Avon Park Correctional for burglary and possession of stolen property he was looking at a three-strike rule and after he was released he’d come home to the Ten Thousand Islands thinking he might try to live straight for a while, stay the hell out of trouble. But none of his old running buddies had stuck around to ride with. The place was still a shithole if you wanted to do anything but scrape boat bottoms or hire on with a commercial fishing crew or work in the stone crab warehouse. You could try to make some extra cash by catching gators and selling the skins that, yeah, was illegal but really hadn’t been considered that by anyone who grew up here because their daddies and their daddies’ daddies
had always done it. You could pilot an airboat around the Glades and the islands, taking tourists from New York or the Midwest out on the water trails and point out the hyacinths and gator holes and give tutorials on the flora and fauna. But someone was always askin’ some stupid-assed question and you couldn’t just yell at ’em to shut up, or if you did, you got fired by the tour operator.

  Buck had called Bobby the Fence about the electronics and such that they’d got the other night over in the suburbs but Bobby was working a deal with a guy he said had hijacked an entire eighteen-wheeler full of big-screen televisions and would have to get back with him. Or maybe that was just bullshit to set him up for the lowball price that Buck was already expecting. Things were tight, but this wasn’t a place where ingenuity let a man down. Buck was only a kid when things were tighter and they were doing a lot of surviving in the Ten Thousands on what seasonal stone crabs you could catch and living on the fish you pulled for your own consumption. But then the state of Florida put a couple of brains together in Tallahassee and came up with a cap on the amount of fish each commercial rig could catch. They called it conservation but the locals here in the southwest corner of the peninsula called it money out of their pockets. It was during these slow 1980s that the best cash crop coming off the Gulf of Mexico was in the form of bales. Marijuana suppliers bringing product up from South America were constantly trying to find a new pipeline to avoid federal authorities. Buck’s father, one of the best guides in the Everglades, had already come across a few lonely bales out near some access roads where the small plane pilots either got scared and dumped their loads or simply missed the dirt strip by a few hundred yards with the last one out the door. He had also come upon some water-soaked packages out on the fishing grounds and the scuttlebutt would be that boaters trying to bring in loads to land had dumped them while being chased by the Coast Guard. Buck’s father was never one to waste, no sir. Knowing people, he got the word out and was able to conceal his finds until someone contacted him. He didn’t get full price, but the cash was American and he didn’t want to smoke the shit anyway.

  Soon after, what had once been occasional found money became a business. The suppliers were looking for boat-handling middlemen to unload the pot off the big smuggling ships offshore and then use their native knowledge of the hundreds of small inlets and rivers through the thick and unmapped mangroves to get the product to land-based drivers. Buck’s father was one of the best and was recruited. His mistake, as he told Buck later, had been bringing on the chuckleheads when the demand became high and when the word, as it always does in a small community, started getting passed around on the docks and down at the Rod & Gun Club. Where Buck’s father was careful, hoarding his newfound money, planning a retirement, the chuckleheads were spending. They’d taken trips up to Tampa and over to Miami to buy four-by-four pickups, projection TVs, jewelry for their wives and girlfriends, and new outboards for their boats. They paid cash, but sometimes the businesses that sold the goods still kept records. One hot, muggy August afternoon more than three dozen DEA and IRS agents backed up by the Collier County Sheriff’s Department and the State Forestry Division swooped in with their hands full of arrest and search warrants and probable cause statements and a fistful of plastic flex cuffs.

  Nearly every man in town over the age of eighteen was taken by Department of Corrections buses to the county courthouse. Those who turned state’s evidence and helped the feds make a tighter case cut themselves deals and got county jail time. Others, who simply refused to talk, did eight to ten in the federal penitentiary. Those identified as the leaders, including Buck’s father, weren’t offered much of a choice: lead us to the suppliers or do twenty-five years.

  Buck remembers the three men in sweat-stained, button- down shirts coming down to the dock. All of them had holsters tucked up under their arms, the butts of 9mm handguns sticking out where a stitched nameplate might normally show on a man’s work shirt.

  His father was sitting in his boat, a fishing line flung out the back where Buck knew you couldn’t catch nothin’ but a lazy longnose garfish at best. But his father’s eyes watched out over the gunwale, focused placidly on the glimmer of early sun on the water. The men asked him several questions to all of which he simply replied, “I’m just a fisherman, boys. I ain’t got the slightest notion what you’re talkin’ about.”

  Eight years later Buck’s mother would receive a piece of mail in a long brown envelope with a Department of Justice seal stamped in one corner. She signed for it and slit it open with a kitchen knife, read a few seconds, and then crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash with a look so cold and stoic it even made Buck shiver. He fetched the letter out after she left the room and read the line where “Ernest T. Morris has been pronounced dead of injuries sustained during an inmate- related altercation at the Federal Penitentiary in Hibbsville, Georgia.”

  By the time Buck got busted for his own forays into the drug business, then the sale of stolen property business, which mostly involved boats and boat parts, and then the flat-out stupid business of hijacking and delivering semi truck containers of everything from stereos to microwave ovens to, once, a thousand boxes of MP3 players, his name and state records were far too well distributed along the west coast of the state from Orlando south.

  Only thing to do was to make some occasional raids on the other side of the state off the Tamiami Trail where those new suburbs had sprouted up like weed pines. But them folks did have some money and did buy some awful nice merchandise to put in them pink box houses that were easy to get into. Making some contacts with inmates who knew people on the outside was probably the only good thing that happened to Buck up in Avon Park. That was how he met Bobby the Fence and even though he knew Bobby was getting too big of a cut on the stuff that Buck stole, he was a line to fast cash. But even with all of the precautions Buck took, he was smart enough to know that the new neighborhoods would eventually get their shit together and hire extra security to patrol and supplement the regular cops. He had to look for other ways to make a living.

  “OK, give it to me again, Wayne,” he said, snapping open another beer, this time pushing it over to the kid, not offering any to the other one.

  “Yeah, well, like I said,” Wayne started, now not as bold as when he’d just been throwing the idea out there, “this guy I know, a guy who does a bunch of dock work and sinking foundation poles and such to build fishin’ camps out in the Glades, he done a bunch of jobs up in the north round Palm Beach County and Broward.

  “There are folks up there spending big dinero on these camps just to come out and stay in because they’re sick of the city or somethin’. Anyways, he says they got all kind of fancy shit they bring out to their places so that on the weekends they can party and have their families with them and fish and shoot.”

  “Fancy shit?” Buck said, looking at the boy, trying to catch his eyes, which were avoiding his. The kid, Wayne, looked up quick at the question and then over at his buddy, hoping maybe he’d get bailed out with an answer.

  “Well, tell him,” Marcus said and then answered the question himself, earning his way back in.

  “Says they got stereos and TVs and radio systems and such. Bunch of generators for power and brand-new tools that ain’t hardly been used.” Both boys were now nodding their heads, making a case.

  Buck had not let down the front legs of his chair while he listened. Wayne was determined to make that happen, force Buck to be interested.

  “And the guy says he once seen a computer. A laptop,” he added and thought some more. “And guns.”

  Buck’s hooded eyes came ever so slightly more open, exposing the tint of yellow in their corners caused by years of sleepless nights and bad prison food.

  “Guns?” Buck asked. Just the vision of them made him nervous. He could well remember the tower guards at Avon Park, always looking down on the inmates in the yard, their faces dark in shadow but the long muzzles of their rifles in clear sight, intimidating, just daring someone
to screw up big enough.

  “Yeah,” Wayne stammered on. “Says one day he’s out there workin’ on a roof when the owner comes out with some friend and they got some new shotguns and they ask this guy does he want to take a look. Guy says sure and takes a break and the owner shows him this brand new sixteen-gauge over- an’under. He’s tellin’ ’em about shootin’ curlew back in the olden days and then these two, the owner an’ his friend, take turns firing out at some squawk that come flyin’ overhead. Guy says they can’t shoot for shit but them guns is real nice and he never seen ’em pack them back to the city when they leave for the next week or two.”

  Buck moved forward, setting the front legs of the chair down with a thunk. He reached down and brought up another beer, opened it and pushed it across to Marcus. Now all three drank together. Guns, Buck thought. Bobby the Fence had just asked him last night if he’d had any guns to turn over. Much as Buck hated them, they were cash money these days.

  “So does this friend of yours know where these fishing camps are?” he said, raising his eyebrows, being conspiratorial with them, which he knew got them going.

  Wayne crossed his arms in front of him, turned his head in a playful way, like he was holding good cards in a game and wanted to savor the feeling for as long as he could without pissing Buck off.

  “He got a map,” he finally said. “The boy ain’t got the balls to do a job himself. But he’ll sell us the map with all the locations. GPS and everything.”

  At that moment a wind came up and pressed against Buck’s stilt house and a shutter rattled and swung open on the kitchen window. He got up without a word and went to the sink and looked out. He’d heard some of the boat captains talking about a ’cane stirrin’ up things south near Mexico. He’d have to check the forecast later. Right now he was concentrating on a possible score. The boys’ eyes followed him and Marcus gave Wayne a “what the fuck you doin’” look. Finally Buck came back and looped his leg over the back of the chair and sat back down.