Shadow Men Part 7

"Yeah?" I was trying to get the rhythm of the conversational rules here.

"They wanted to know who you were talkin' to and whether you were a regular." She was wiping her hands with the gray bar rag, looking first at my face and then at the untouched beer bottle like I'd sinned by leaving it there alone.

"And you told them what?"

"To f.u.c.k off," she said.

The cribbage boys sn.i.g.g.e.red down at the end, nodding their recollection of the conversation and their approval.

"Can you tell me what these two men looked like, other than ugly?"

"No, sir. Just that they didn't belong out here. They were from the city."

"Do you happen to know what they were driving?" I said, this time reaching into my shirt pocket and pulling out a fold of bills.

"A new, dark-colored Buick sedan when they come in. And a dark-colored Buick sedan with a busted out back window when they left," she said, and the boys chuckled their approval again. Rag woman knew I understood the distinction. I had experienced the parking lot etiquette myself in the past. I stayed quiet and put a ten- dollar bill next to the bottle and lifted it to my lips.

"We don't like visitors round here, Mr. Freeman. Y'all are here cause you got a friend," she said, this time tipping her head to the back of the room. I turned and the adjustment of my eyes allowed me to see the shape of Nate Brown sitting alone at a table in the corner.

"Thank you," I said to her, but she had already turned away with my money and was not bringing back change. I picked up the bottle and joined Brown. The old man stood when I approached and I shook his leathery hand.

"Nice girl, eh?" he said, nodding at the bar.

"A true charmer," I said, pulling out a wooden chair. The table was a polished raw mahogany like the bar. The wood was native to the hardwood hammocks of the Glades, but the early loggers had recognized its beauty and sales potential, so little of it was left in the wild these days. A fat, cut-gla.s.s tumbler of whiskey sat before Brown, soaking up the yellow light from a nearby wall fixture and holding the glow. Another sat next to it, empty.

"How much you wanna poke round in this here look at Mr. Mayes, Freeman?" he said after a few quiet seconds.

"Depends on what the poking tells me," I answered. "Why?"

I had forgotten Brown's penchant for abruptness. He was not a man who had survived in a rough wilderness for eighty years by being subtle. He had also not survived by being stupid. He reached down beside his chair and came up with a bottle and half-filled my gla.s.s. I thanked him and sipped some of the smoothest whiskey I had ever tasted.

"I'm trying to find the truth, Mr. Brown," I finally said.

My answer seemed to stop him, and an amus.e.m.e.nt came to his eye.

"The truth," he repeated. "The onliest truth is the sun comin' up and the ocean moving, son. I know y'all are smart enough to know that."

I let him watch me drink. I knew he was right, but such philosophy was not on my timetable yet.

"Do you think Cyrus Mayes and his boys died out here, Nate?" I said instead.

"More'n possible."

"Do you think they were killed?"

"They's a lot of scar out here, Mr. Freeman. Some of them deserve to be healed and some don't." It was not a question and I knew he did not expect an answer. I waited while he sipped his own drink. "That's why I asked you how much you want to find out."

The skin on his face was nearly as dark as the whiskey and had captured some of the same glow.

"I consider what you done before with me was an honest collaboration. An' that might be the onliest way to do this one," he said. "I believe maybe I owe you. But it ain't just for you neither, just like before."

"So what do you suggest?" I said.

"Let's go."

As we walked to the door, the bartender called out, "Good afternoon, Mr. Brown," with more politeness than I would have thought she possessed. He waved and got the same response from the card players. As I pa.s.sed the bar I looked for the old construction photograph but it was missing from the wall. When I turned and asked the bartender about it she looked past me at the clean, empty rectangle its removal had left on the wall and shrugged her shoulders. "I hadn't noticed," she said.

Outside we got into the truck and Brown directed me south. I had never seen the old Gladesman in anything other than a boat and he looked small and uncomfortable in the pa.s.senger seat. He rolled his window the rest of the way down and I half expected him to thrust his head out like a retriever. He was not a man for closed- in places. He soon had me pull off onto a dirt track and we bounced a quarter mile west into a thick stand of rimrock pines. When we ran out of trail I stopped and he simply said, "You might want to slip right there under them boughs. Keep her out of the sun some." I did as instructed and we got out. I could see no path or obvious opening beyond the trees, and when Brown started to move off I said, "Should I lock it up?"

"Suit yerself," he said, and kept walking. I had learned in my last encounter with Nate that in his world, you were best off just to trust him. I locked the truck and followed.

He slipped into the trees, moving with a slow and steady grace that I could not match. I stepped where he did, ducked under the same limbs and avoided the same ankle-breaking ruts and holes, but with only some success. About fifty yards in, the pines thinned and the ground turned moist. We skirted a patch of cabbage palms and in seconds were calf-deep in standing water. I was about to break my silence when I spotted the white fibergla.s.s of a boat hull. Nate had left his center console runabout floating along a wall of cattails in crotch-deep water. He clambered up over the stern and I followed. I watched as he wordlessly pulled in the anchor line and then used a pole to push the boat backward into some kind of natural channel. When he seemed satisfied with the depth, he stood at the console, cranked the starter, and at idle speed began to guide us along the snaking ribbon of water. Soaked to my waist and now completely lost I finally checked my patience.

"If you don't mind my asking, Nate, where the h.e.l.l are we going?"

"We's headin' over to Everglades City, son," he said, not taking his eyes off the water, studying, I a.s.sumed, its depth and direction. "I got you a man you need to talk with."

I could tell from the sun's position that we were moving generally to the southwest, even though the serpentine route of the water sometimes spun us in near circles before turning and heading again toward the end of the Florida peninsula. The cattails soon gave way to sawgra.s.s that often sprouted six feet tall from the water. Tucked down in the brownish green maze it was airless and hot. The only breeze was from our own movement, and the air held the sweet, earthy odor of wet decay and new growth like some freshly cut vegetable just dug from a rain-soaked row.

At times the water became so shallow that both of us would have to pole the boat forward. Other times Brown was able to use the electric motor tilt to raise the propeller blades until they were barely churning and spitting the water. When it deepened again he would lower them back and we would gain speed, and the breeze it created was a luxury.

Above, a bowl of blue sky covered us from horizon to horizon, and while the sun traveled across it, Brown told me the story of John Dawkins.

"He was the colored man that was in them letters," he said. "The one that trucked the dynamite out there on the trail 'cause there weren't another man alive out here could have done it."

John Dawkins might have been from the Caribbean Islands or from New Orleans, but he and his family's blackness made them unique. But there were few enough families living in the Glades in the early 1900s, and those who had made it their home and braved its harshness knew one another as community.

"My daddy and John Dawkins was friends 'cause they needed to be. Out here, the onliest way a man got judged was by his work, and Mr. Dawkins was judged high on that account," Brown said.

Slope-shouldered and thick in the chest, with legs "like a full growth oak," Dawkins never turned down a job for which he would be paid with money or trade and was often called when the strength of other men flagged.

"Onliest time the man wouldn't work was on the Lord's day, and Daddy said everbody knowed that. Said Mr. Dawkins had a contract with G.o.d."

I waited for the story to continue as Brown pushed up the throttle in the now widening creek. The sawgra.s.s fields were beginning to change.

"We're comin' on to Lost Man's River," he said as the stands of spidery-legged mangroves began to appear. With his own bearings set, he continued.

"I remember Daddy's stories 'bout John Dawkins bein' the man that hauled dynamite. He knowed the country as well as any and he had them oxen. I member ridin' in that there cart with his kids and ours comin' up with loads of mullet from the docks."

"So this Mr. Dawkins has relatives who are still living?" I said, hoping he was finally getting to his point.

"He got a son still livin'."

"And this son might have some recollection of his father transporting mail for Cyrus Mayes?"

"Don't know," Brown answered. "You gon' have to ask him yourself."

Now the river had widened and so had the sky. Brown pushed up the throttle and it was impossible to talk without shouting. We cleared a point of high mangroves and the water opened up onto Florida Bay. I settled back onto the gunwales and breathed in the stiff salt wind, while Brown remained standing, guiding the boat north through what was known as the Ten Thousand Islands region along Florida's southwest coast. The name comes from the uncountable patches of mangroves. From the air or at a distance they look like thick, green lumps of land, but up close there is little if any dry soil around the ma.s.s of roots that support and feed the leaves. The semiprotected water that flows through the green islands is a perfect breeding ground for fish. But the area has no beaches, no hard sandy sh.o.r.es on which to build. It is not the stuff of Florida postcards. And the few people who have chosen to live here over the past century like it that way.

Farther north, Brown swung the boat into what he called the Chatham River and again began spinning his way through thin waterways and around piles of mangroves. Again there were times he would have to use the electric motor tilt to skirt over sandbars that were hidden to an untrained eye. The old Gladesman would look back on occasion; I thought it was to check his trailing wake until he called out to me.

"Them those enemies the gal at the hotel was warning you on?"

I instinctively looked back at the water behind us, but saw no sign of another boat. When I turned back to Brown he was pointing one finger to the sky. High behind us a helicopter hung in the sky. It kept a distance but swayed back and forth to keep its line of sight and our V-shaped wake in view. It was too far away for me to make out the number on its belly or tail.

"It ain't the park service or the sheriff," Brown yelled above the whine of the outboard.

"Some kind of tourist ride?" I said. He shook his head.

"I know 'em all."

He pushed the throttle up another notch and seemed to take a line that cut much closer to the mangrove walls.

"It ain't the DEA neither," he said, and I'd heard enough of his reputation to believe he knew what he was saying. Brown jacked the engine to a higher pitch and I squatted down and got a firmer handhold on the rail. White water was cutting deep off the prop wash. The old man banked the boat into the next turn, sending our wake surging into the mangroves, and I watched the chopper slide into the same movement. At this speed the green walls beside us were blurring and I couldn't make out the turns ahead. Suddenly Brown turned his head and yelled: "Hold on!"

I had just shifted my weight when he cut the wheel to the right and killed the engine. The instant silence might have been peaceful, but for the sleek glide that was sending us into a ma.s.s of mangrove. Brown leaned his weight hard into the starboard gunwale and said "Duck," and the boat seemed to buck against its own wake then slide to the right onto a partial water path and plow into the outcrop. When she hit the thick roots the bow made a fingernails-on- chalkboard screech and I tumbled forward. Brown kept his feet.

I lay still for several seconds, not as stunned by the crash as by the change. One minute we'd been just short of flying across sunlit water in front of a screaming, full-bore outboard, and the next we were stock-still in a dark, silent coc.o.o.n of tangled leaves and roots.

"Y'all OK?" Brown said, still crouched on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet.

"Yeah," I said, sitting up and pushing my back against the console.

The old man looked up and specks of sunlight danced on his face.

"Let's just see if they was trackin' us or not."

We waited without speaking. I watched a family of spiders shaken from the mangrove branches scurry across the deck. Any birds or nearby gators would be long gone, scared the h.e.l.l away. It took a few minutes, and then I could hear the patterned woofing of the helicopter blades. The sound grew but I couldn't see through the ceiling of green. The pilot had circled back but kept his alt.i.tude and never came close enough to stir the leaves with his downdraft. I swatted at a gang of mosquitoes on my face and checked my fingers for the smear of blood. We listened to the chopper circle and hover for maybe ten minutes, until it finally flew off to the northeast and did not return.

"Ain't nothin' bothers me more'n to have somebody follerin' me," Brown finally said.

He shifted his weight but could not stand up, and when I saw him slide one leg over the side to get out I copied him and went out the other side into the water and warm muck. It took us a few minutes of pushing and rocking to get the boat floated back out in deep water. We climbed back in, again soaked to the waist. I could see now that Brown had made a calculated turn into a pa.s.sage that broke off the main river and looped around a small mangrove stand. From back out in the main channel the turn was nearly impossible to see. It had been a firsthand example of Browns legendary knowledge and ability to slip the park rangers and anti-drug agents who had tried to catch him poaching gators and off-loading marijuana trawlers from the Gulf to make deliveries inland. He'd done it for years. I was used to being the law, not running from it, and I knew if the chopper had been tracking us, it wasn't the law doing it this time.

"Slick move, Nate," I said, truly impressed.

He restarted the engine and turned us south onto what he called the Lopez River.

"Them boys in the helicopter got anything to do with what you're lookin' for?"

As he pushed up the throttle and we eased farther out into the channel, I told him about my discovery of the tracking devices on my truck.

"If any of this bothers you, you don't owe me, Nate. I don't want to get you involved in something you would rather stay out of."

He did not answer at first. His eyes, eyes, hard-creased from years of squinting into the sun, stayed focused ahead. hard-creased from years of squinting into the sun, stayed focused ahead.

"You ain't," he finally said.

CHAPTER 11.

We motored up Chokoloskee Bay and for the first time since leaving the loop, other boats came into sight. We pa.s.sed some low-slung utility buildings, and as the ground elevation got higher, some warehouses and marinas. Tall, invasive Australian pines rose up in spots along the water where the sh.o.r.e had been dug out for dockage or access ramps, but it was essentially a low, flat land and I wondered about its ability to take a heavy storm out of the Gulf. The Calusa Indians had created most of the land that was high enough to be habitable in the Ten Thousand Islands. The indigenous tribe had, by hand, piled up acre after acre of sh.e.l.ls. For hundreds of years the habitual toil had built the sh.e.l.l middens that were the foundation. Gradually, the dirt and detritus carried by the wind and tides and trapped by the sh.e.l.ls became its soil. Seeds eventually took root, plants grew, and the Calusa farmed. A civilization thrived where before had only been water. No matter how many times I'd read about it and seen its proof, it was an accomplishment that was hard to conceive.

Brown cut back the engine and idled up to a series of docks set against a bulkhead. Two commercial fishing trawlers were tied up against the wall. Old and steel-hulled, with similar cabins built forward, they were each fifty feet long and had a large, motor-driven winch mounted on the stern deck. Brown eased up to the dock ladder and slipped the engine into neutral, and a young boy jogged up and caught a line the old man tossed him. Brown tipped his hat and the boy did the same; then he cleated the line and left without a word.

When the boat was tied off we climbed up onto the dock. On a broad crescent of land stood a bare, tire-worn lot that served the two fishing boats and that buzzed with activity. Two men were aboard each vessel and another worked with the boy on the small wharf. A sixth man was driving a forklift from a corrugated shack nearby, moving pallets loaded with wooden crab traps. When he set the pile next to the near boat, the men jumped to and began a brigade line, pa.s.sing the big, awkward traps down to a hand in the open aft deck, who would then stack it forward. While they worked the pile, the fork driver went back for another.

They were all similarly dressed in high rubber boots, faded jeans and either T-shirts or flannel rolled up at the sleeves, and they paid no attention to us as we approached. That is, all but one on the deck of the near boat. He was a black man with skin so dark that at a distance, I thought he was wearing a black T-shirt under his yellow bib overalls. When we got closer I could see he was shirtless. He also seemed to be the only one speaking, giving directions and keeping the work moving. When we got close enough, he stopped moving, tilted the bill of his cap up and smiled.

"Afternoon, Mr. Nate," he said, slipping off a thick canvas glove.

"Captain Dawkins," Brown said, and reached out over the water to shake the big man's hand. I noticed that the younger men had all stopped at the mention of Brown's name. Even the crew at the next boat was staring. It was like Ted Williams had stopped in for a visit. I saw one man lean down to whisper in the boy's ear and the kid's eyes went big.

"This here's the feller I was tellin' you about," Brown said, and I stepped forward.

"Max Freeman," I said. When I took his hand I could see four distinct lines of raised scar that lay nearly parallel across his forearm. They were smooth and pink and wrapped like pale worms over his black and nearly hairless skin.

"Johnny Dawkins the third," he said with a smoothness that let me know he always introduced himself that way.

"I'll leave you to it," Brown suddenly said. "I'm a walk up to the cafe for some coffee."

I swallowed, and when he turned to go I swear the old coot winked at me.

"So, Mr. Nate says you wanted to talk about my grandfather," Dawkins said, pulling my attention back, getting straight to it.

I lost a beat, now realizing who the old man had brought me to.

"Yes. I, uh, I've come across some letters written in the 1920s by the relative of a client. Mr. Brown said your grandfather might have had something to do with delivering them," I said, not knowing how much Brown might have told him.

"Client, huh?" Dawkins said, pulling his glove back on. "But you ain't a lawyer?"

He moved his eyes over me, my mud-caked boots, the white streaks of salt stain on my now-dried jeans.

"No, sir. Just a private investigator, looking for some truth."

"Well, Mr. Freeman, I don't mind talkin' 'bout my granddaddy's stories. And G.o.d above knows they're true. But I'm down a man here an' we got traps to load. So if y'all want to listen an' work, we got an extra pair of gloves."